“No, Jasen,” his mother said. “You go with Clutch.”
Clutch rolled up the window and pulled away, and we could hear Jasen’s mother piteous cries for us to stop.
“He’s going to die, staying with them like that,” I said.
“Probably,” Clutch replied. “But it’s his choice. If he left with us, that regret of abandoning his parents would fester and eat him up inside. If he makes it through the day, maybe we’ll see him again.”
“Maybe,” I mused, wondering what it would be like to have to take in a kid. Clutch already complained about the amount of food I ate. A teenage boy could easily eat twice my share. If Clutch suspected there wasn’t enough to go around, would someone have to leave? The thought sat like a rock in my stomach, because I suspected if Clutch had to choose, he’d choose the son of a friend over an unskilled girl he didn’t even know four days ago.
“So everyone calls you Clutch?” I asked, forcing myself to change the subject. “I thought that was just your CB handle.”
“It came from a tractor incident back in grade school,” he replied.
My brows rose. “What happened?”
“Don’t ask.”
I smacked the leather and smirked. “You’re killing me here.”
“Well,” he drawled out. “When I was just learning how to drive the tractor, I hit the gas instead of the brakes, and drove into my dad’s shed.”
I burst out laughing. “I bet your dad wasn’t happy.”
“No. No, he wasn’t.”
I caught a movement that had been nearly hidden by a minivan, and I sobered. “Look,” I said, pointing at the blonde woman coming around the minivan.
Dark stains marred the front of her shirt and her mouth. Her arms, what was left of them, swung limply with each step. Then I saw the boy hobbling behind her, dragging his left leg. He couldn’t have been more than three or four. He was also covered in blood. He followed her like she was his mother, though according to the news, zeds retained minimal cognitive functions, let alone memories.
I shivered at the thought of a kid getting attacked. What kind of monster would go for a kid?
“You can’t think of them as people anymore,” Clutch said, and I found him watching me. “That kid would kill you the first chance he got. Any of them out there would. They’re the enemy. Out here, you either have to kill them or be killed.”
“I know,” I said as Clutch drove past a row of new houses. A garbage can sat at the end of each driveway waiting for a pickup that would never come, a stark reminder that civilization had just stopped. “But knowing it is easier than seeing it.”
“You’d better come to terms with it quick because we’re stopping up here.”
I looked out the window to see Clutch pull up to a row of old brick buildings. He stopped in front of a pharmacy, wedged between a barber shop and a clothing store. The sign overhead read Gedden’s Drug. The store was small and easy to miss. The glass window next to the door was intact. Through it, I could see decently lit aisles, and everything looked quiet and nothing appeared out of place. A Closed sign hung on the glass door, and I hoped they’d locked up before any zeds got inside.
“No telling how many are wandering around outside so we’ll have to be careful,” Clutch said, and I followed his gaze to the end of the block, where another zed limped across the street. Tires squealed, and a truck lurched around the corner, barreling right over the zed. Someone let out a whoop, and the truck tore past us.
Clutch gripped his gun. Neither of us moved until they’d turned another corner.
“Trouble?” I asked.