Pam leans in. “Sometimes it’s better just to get out of their way,” she tells me. “Some men are just plain mean.” She takes in my apprehension and adds, “But not all. Not my Mike. Not Jacks. You’ll learn how it is here.” She resumes her walk and motions for me to follow.
“You’ve been here the whole time,” I ask, catching up.
“I was here when the infection broke out,” she says, “meeting another client. The prison went on lockdown and by the time the guards told me I could leave, the news was so grim. I couldn’t get ahold of my husband, so it was obvious that he—well. So I decided to stay.” She shifts her load onto her other hip.
“When they let the prisoners out, Mike came and found me. He protected me from a lot of bad things that could have happened.” She looks at me, a soft expression on her face. “I love him for that.”
“So . . . was he innocent?”
She laughs. “Hell no. Even when I was his attorney, I knew he’d done it. I guess holding up a liquor store doesn’t automatically make you a bad person.”
I smile. “I guess not.”
I like how talkative Pam is being. I’m sure I can get a lot of information out of her if I just let her ramble on. She’s paused in her story. I see my opportunity to ask her what I really want to know.
“Do you ever do sewing for a man named Ken?”
“Ken Gibbons?” Pam asks. “Big Hispanic guy who goes by Yaya?”
“Um, no . . . this Ken is Asian.”
“There’s an Asian family who lives in the Yard. Actually, I don’t know if they’re a family. There are five guys who share a tent. . . . They’re all Filipino, and they have complicated foreign names, but one might use Ken for short.”
Ken isn’t Filipino, and I doubt he’d be living in a tent in the exercise yard.
“I have a picture.” I yank the sketch out, holding it up.
Pam looks for a moment, then shakes her head. “You sure he’s alive?”
“No,” I admit. “But if he is alive, I really need to find him.”
“I can keep my eye out. But people die here like that.” She snaps her fingers. “I came close last year. Mike saved me.” We walk up the stairs toward the third floor as Pam continues. “Doc was telling some BS story about how the women needed an extra shot, a vitamin shot or something. I told Mike that I’d seen enough people perjure themselves to tell when something was fishy. Mike stood up for me when I refused, made sure Doc didn’t give me a hard time. I’m one of the few women who made it through.”
“What do you mean? I thought the shot was an inoculation.”
She looks me over. “Now, you don’t look like the kind of girl who believes everything you’re told. Did you let Doc give you a shot?”
I shake my head and she nods in approval. “It will be hard to stay away from Doc, Jacks being who he is and all, but you should try. I don’t trust him.”
“You think Doc had something to do with the women dying?”
“I can’t say for sure,” Pam tells me, stopping on the stairs, “but there’s something off about him. Mike told me he makes the Scrappers give him almost all the drugs that they find. A lot of them have a second stash they keep hidden to bring in for the rest of us.”
“Um . . . he is a doctor,” I say. “Doesn’t he need those drugs?”
“Well . . .” She shuffles around, muttering. “I think he self-medicates.”
I nod. Everyone has to deal with the After in their own way.
“I see him sometimes,” Pam continues, “talking to himself like there’s someone else there.”
“I’ve heard him do that too,” I admit. “When I first got here, I heard him rattling off about who needed flu shots, like he was talking to someone. But a lot of people talk to themselves. He didn’t seem sinister to me, just a little strange.” Although he did give me the creeps when I first met him. I try to fight off my paranoia. Doc doesn’t have to be evil—he could just be incompetent.
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if he loses it one day.”
Pam pauses at the railing, looking down at the rows of cells. “There’s another thing,” she whispers. “My friend Anna, who used to live on the first floor, told me that after the birth of her child, he tried to convince her to leave Fort Black, go to some place up north. Some kind of colony.”
“What?” I grip the railing in surprise. New Hope?
“Did she go?”
Pam shakes her head. “She didn’t get the chance. The next week Anna and her child were both dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her.
“It’s okay,” Pam says, starting up the stairs again. “You learn to live with loss.” I pause before joining her, wondering. What is going on here? Is Doc working with Dr. Reynolds?
I turn and quickly follow Pam through the door onto the third floor, where she stops at a darkened cell and softly calls in, “Sewing!”
Inside are two sets of bunk beds with barely room to walk between them. A figure rests in each bed. A young man in one of the bottom bunks sits up.