He started to say something but I interrupted him. “The only answer here is, ‘Sure, Becca.’” My voice was heavy with steely ice and he tensed as if he was about to spring out of his chair.
“They’re needed for other missions,” the Loner said.
“I will see them now.” My voice had never been so hard.
He hesitated for a moment as I calculated angles of attack, then punched a button on his desk. “Bets? Becca wants to see her squad. Can you come get her?”
When he looked back at me, his blue eyes were just as icy as mine, and his lean face had hardened into bone. “I’ll see you back here in twenty minutes.”
Bets came to get me as ordered, and we walked down several flights of winding stairs. Finally she stopped in front of a heavy wooden door. I didn’t know what to expect; didn’t know if my squad had been imprisoned, tortured, disposed of. They were probably terrified, wondering what had happened to me.
Bets opened the door and there they were: Bunny, Jolie, Mills, and Nate. They were sitting at a big, old-fashioned table that had all kinds of food on it, and they were happily stuffing their faces.
“Becca!” Bunny said, waving a drumstick at me. “Look at all this stuff!”
Bets turned to leave. “You have twenty minutes.”
81
CASSIE
I HOPED MR. MCDONALD WASN’T still down there, buried beneath all this sand. It was a creepy thought. Ahead of us we saw more shapes, more shadows in the deepening dusk, and we plodded toward them. Without my asking, Tim made sure I’d been drinking enough, to help make up for all the blood I was losing. Now I was starving, but I refused to ask to stop for food before he did.
“That’s a chimney,” he said, kicking sand at a tall stand of bricks.
“There’s another one,” I said. “This must have been a street.”
A much bigger shadow loomed in front of us and we walked steadily to it. It was dusk, I was feeling faint, and we needed shelter for the night. It had already dropped at least fifteen degrees since the sun had gone down.
It was a big, two-story building, completely dark, its wide picture windows broken, some boarded up. The roof was flat and the store’s name was still right below it in big yellow script: CABELA’s.
He pulled out his handgun and motioned me to be quiet, since I obviously had just fallen off a turnip truck and had no idea how to act in times like this. I rolled my eyes at him. Silently he stepped through one of the broken windows and did a few minutes of recon before coming back for me. I’d maneuvered my rifle into position and was ready to back him up, but he shook his head No and reached for my hand.
“Everything look okay?” I asked, stepping over the broken window.
He nodded. “Nothing here. No rats, no birds, no bats. But…” He grinned. “It has everything else you could possibly want.”
“A hot shower and then a banana split with everything on it?”
“No,” he said, frowning. “Normal things.”
“Like what?”
He waved his arms around. “Whatever a normal person would want!” He strode over to a staircase. “And look!” He shone his flashlight downward and I saw that there were two floors below the sand as well as another floor above us.
Even just standing here, I saw canoes, tents, bicycles, weird machines that looked designed for torture, where you put different weights on them.
I smiled at him for the first time in a long time. “It’s paradise,” I said, and he grinned back.
“Can you hold your flashlight?” he asked, and I nodded. It was understood that I would continue to carry my rifle. I tried to flex the fingers on my right hand and could move them a tiny bit. It was a good sign—maybe the elk’s antlers hadn’t done any permanent damage.
At first we stayed together, starting at the top and working our way down. We hadn’t seen a living creature since the formerly-living elk, but as Strepp had drilled into us a thousand times: You never know. There could be squatters hiding here, there could be wild animals—anything could happen at any time.
“Oh, my God, clothes!” I said, forgetting to keep quiet. There was a huge section of women’s clothes, annoyingly colorful but blood-free and clean, except for the dust. I carefully pulled off my blood-stiffened coat and Tim’s shirt, and he muttered something about not being into fashion, and left.
He was back sooner than I expected, when I was in front of a mirror, staring with horror at the mangled hole in my chest, right below my collarbone.
“I found a shitload of great stuff,” he said, and set up a little camping lantern that surrounded us with an almost cozy glow.