“He wasn’t in the Air Force?”
“He might have been Air Force, but he wasn’t in communications. That was a crock of shit. He was special ops, same as Ryan. That’s how they know each other. More likely Army than Air Force.”
“How do you know?”
“The way they move, the way they talk and interact with each other. I can tell.”
I shake my head. I can’t argue with him on this one; I have no frame of reference. There is no doubt that Falk is observant. I could tell that from the moment I met him.
“Still,” I say, slowly shaking my head, “I’m not sure if ‘putting people in their place’ is going to make a lot of friends.”
“I’m not trying to make friends, Hannah. I really only have the one goal.”
“Keep me safe?”
“Keep you safe.”
“I’m not sure you have to argue with everyone around me to do that.”
“Everything is different now, Hannah,” he says. “There is no authority anymore. Survival depends on putting yourself at the top.”
“‘It’s the end of the world as we know it.’” I softly quote lyrics from the REM song. I look up at Falk as I remember more of the song. “You’re fine with this, aren’t you?”
“Chaos is my element.”
Chapter 7
“Someone has to go talk to them. We need to know what they’re doing—if they’re friendly or not.”
“Yeah? And why does that have to be me and Caesar?”
“Because Caesar’s not going alone. Not after what happened last time.”
“So why don’t you fucking go yourself?”
Falk and Beck are at it again.
It has been four weeks since Atlanta was leveled, and tensions are high. We settled in at Falk’s apartment complex despite Beck’s complaining, and things are actually going relatively smoothly. The fire pit in the grassy common area is where we get together as a group, and some of the evenings when everyone was together were quite pleasant. We’ve found bicycles that make it a little easier to gather supplies since two of them have been modified to drag a cart behind them.
We don’t have much more information than we did when it all started. The guys like to gather around in the evenings, drink scotch, and speculate, but we really have no idea. The women, children, and domestic animals are still gone, and we don’t yet know who took them. A few new people joined us, but they have more questions than answers. Two newcomers, Christine and Chuck, do a lot of the cooking for the group. They brought our number to nine.
“Do you need any help?” I ask Christine as I try to ignore Falk and Beck.
Christine, the only additional woman we have come across, and her husband, Chuck, had been in the basement of a nightclub when it all started, getting ready for Chuck’s band to perform later that night. The building had collapsed above them, and they spent hours digging themselves out. Christine is a beautiful, voluptuous woman with curly red hair and a contagious smile. No matter what happens, she manages to smile through all of it.
Chuck is a character, to say the least. His long hair is braided down his back, and he has a little, white van dyke on his chin with the tip of it dyed bright red. When we found them, he’d been armed with a compound bow, and Christine kept yelling at him to stop pretending to be Legolas.
The banter between the two of them is the best entertainment around.
“I’m good with the food,” Christine says, “but there are a shit-ton of dishes to be done before anyone can eat. You could work on those.”
“I’d be happy to.”
From the kettle on the fire, I pour some hot water over the dishes and go to work.
“What’s for dinner?” I ask.
“Well, if Chuck has anything to say about it, we’ll be eating the squirrel he shot out of a tree with that damn bow. However, he won’t know the difference between that and canned chicken, so we’ll just stick with that.”