“We’ll get there, you’ll see.”
She looked at him, and the light played off the angles of her face, her eyes unmoving from his. His skin warmed, and he finally looked away, setting his plate on the floor.
“We didn’t find another car for us,” Alice said.
“No.”
“And you didn’t ask to be brought back to your house.”
“No.”
She opened her mouth to say something more but then a smile played upon her lips and she gestured to the corner of the room. “We have a visitor.”
A mouse watched them from beside the couch. It balanced on its hind legs, sniffing the air, its beaded, black eyes studying them before scurrying to Ty’s uneaten food. It looked at them again and then began to nibble at a piece of corn.
“I wonder if that will be us in a decade,” Quinn murmured, watching the rodent’s tiny paws grip the kernel and turn it.
“What do you mean?”
“If we’ll be searching out scraps of what’s left of the world.”
“You mean if we lose.”
He glanced at her and then out the window. The deer were gone and the meadow was empty with the settling night.
“You make it sound like a war.”
“Isn’t it?”
“The stilts are just an aftereffect of the disease. We’ve already lost, don’t you think?”
Alice didn’t reply. She moved to the fire and dumped her meal into the flames, quickly pulling her hands away before stepping back.
“They don’t seem to be territorial, do they?”
“No. They almost have a pack mentality from what I’ve seen.”
“What would you guess their numbers are? Roughly.”
“There’s no way of knowing really, but if I had to guess, well, let me think about it.” Quinn shifted on the floor, leaning back on one hand. “If we go by how many people we saw in Portland to how many stilts we saw, we’d have a three to eleven ratio.”
“But we don’t know that some of the ones we saw today weren’t from last night either. They’re so damn alike I have trouble telling if they’re male or female.”
“That’s true, but I don’t think the ones from today were the same that…” He cleared his throat. “…that were near the development.”
“Okay, so we have what type of percentage of the population dead from the plague?” Alice asked, returning to her sleeping bag that was spread open on the floor.
“They were saying seventy to seventy-five percent death rate the last time I watched TV.”
“Bullshit. I didn’t see anyone alive in town when we left, but there were several of those things meandering around.”
Quinn shrugged. “Let’s say ninety-five percent death rate then.”
“Sounds closer to reality. You can’t trust the news anyway. They’re a bunch of lying bastards.”
Quinn laughed. “That’s true. So we have three hundred and seventeen million people alive after the last census and ninety-five percent of that is,” he closed his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck, “approximately three-hundred million people give or take a million. That leaves seventeen million people alive. And for every three that are still human, there are eleven that aren’t so…” He scrunched up his brow again, carrying numbers and shifting figures. “There’s four and a half million of us and—”
“Over twelve million of them,” Alice finished.
They sat in the heavy silence that pervaded the room like some oppressive fog.
“Four million of us left in the entire country. Doesn’t feel like that many.” She sighed and drew her legs up to her chest. “Damn it, I need a drink.”
“Yeah. That would be welcome,” he said, staring into the fire.
“They can’t even feed on the dead since the people who got the plague turned into that stinking jelly. They’ll only have live food to go after.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Quinn said.