They hadn’t. And Tony wasn’t really a commander in it, as far as I knew, but whatever. The man had played his hand and now we had to play along.
Keller looked us over once more. “Welcome to Hastings. We’ll be keeping your guns.”
I hoped that meant my leather jacket was intact. I liked that jacket.
Wait, did he just say they’re keeping our guns?
I liked my gun. I’d grown attached to it.
“Come on,” Tony said, undoubtedly to keep me from protesting aloud.
He left the room. Dax and I swiftly followed him down a narrow, brick-walled corridor. We emerged into the heavy gray skies that had become the new normal since meteors pummeled the planet a few months prior, though after the fluorescent sting of the brig lights, the relatively neutral natural light was almost welcome. I took a few seconds to try to get my bearings; Hastings had been on my ambulance run years ago when I worked as an EMT, but I’d obviously never come to this part of town. I thought I recognized a handful of larger buildings in the distance, but I had no way to be sure.
Keller brushed past us, tipped his cap to Tony, and kept walking.
I kept my mouth shut. Keller seemed just paranoid enough to have developed supersonic hearing.
Tony ushered us a block away from the brig, toward a small plaza that had probably once hosted food trucks and open-air markets. “You guys okay?” he asked. “They had a fucking revenant in there with you? Why?”
“No idea,” Dax said. “They just stuck in him in there a few days ago.”
“Maybe he committed a crime,” I said. “Like…a zombie crime. So they locked him up.”
Tony lifted a dark brow. “Considering what I’ve seen of this place, that’s not too far out of line,” he muttered. “Do me a favor, kids, and don’t ask too many questions yet. Shit’s going down and I’m not sure where it’s going to land. But we have housing, we have food, and I got you jobs.”
“Jobs?” Dax asked.
“We have to work?” I squeaked.
“Yeah. Gotta make yourselves useful. But first, decontamination.”
I stopped walking. Decontamination sounded especially ominous.
“Relax, Vibby,” Tony said, continuing his brisk pace. “It’s just a shower.”
Chapter Two
After ten minutes of brisk walking, we arrived in a residential neighborhood full of stately townhouses and single-family homes. This area seemed relatively inhabited; the ash on the street was kept to a manageable level, and there were none of the broken-down cars I had grown used to seeing during our travels.
“Here’s our new digs,” Tony said. He was still limping from the gunshot wound he’d taken before we arrived in town, though I noted he walked on it much better than he had the last time I saw him. “I had zero choice in the color scheme.”
He brought us right up to a three-story blue condo in the middle of the block. The front lawn and bushes on this entire section of street had long since died, but no one had bothered cutting them away, instead leaving them as ghastly reminders of what the world used to look like. They did seem pretty strange next to the bright yellow shutters that adorned our new home away from home. If I’d seen it in a horror movie, I might not have told the heroes to run in the other direction, but I wouldn’t have encouraged them to set up shop there, either.
I craned my neck back and took in the two houses on either side of ours. The brown house on the left seemed empty, but I saw movement in the one on the right. Someone was watching us through the third-floor windows. Kids, maybe, with one taller person—the parent?—staring along with them. I smiled.
They didn’t smile back. If anything, they seemed suspicious. The kids were moved aside, and the parent snapped the drapes shut.
If I lived next door to Tony, I’d be suspicious, too. He seemed like the type to throw random keggers.
“Are the neighbors nice?” I asked.
“They don’t try to devour my flesh, so I’d say they’re okay,” Tony replied, digging into one of his pockets. “Don’t talk much, though.”
We stood out on the front stoop while he searched for the keys. “There’s not a lot you need to know right off the bat,” he said, finally extracting a keyring and turning slightly to look at us. “We’re in the suburbs, as you can see. The city’s pretty much divided itself into two classes—the military, and the civilians. Guess who’s in charge.”
I supposed the men with the big guns were running the joint. Camp Elderwood had operated the same way, though things had begun to coalesce into a more or less unified group by the time the three of us had left. But clearly Keller was a little more rank and file.
Tony slipped his key into the lock. “Take off your shoes inside,” he said. “There’s a cabinet for them to the right.”
“Fancy,” I said. “Do you have Grey Poupon, too?”
Dax snorted.
“I don’t want you tracking in more ash than you need to.” He turned the key, looked us over, and then said, “Brace yourselves.”