“Give it a chance,” I begged her. “You’ll love it. I promise.”
She grabbed the corner of the towel. “Here’s what I feel.” I saw it coming, but still flinched when she flung the towel and the coins exploded into the air. A nickel popped her in the forehead and she didn’t even blink.
“Ha!” Teacup shouted. “I guess that’s checkmate, bitch!”
Reacting without thinking, I slapped her. “Don’t ever call me that. Ever.”
The cold made the slap more painful. Her bottom lip poked out, her eyes welled up, but she didn’t cry.
“I hate you,” she said.
“I don’t care.”
“No, I hate you, Ringer. I hate your fucking guts.”
“Cussing doesn’t make you grown-up, you know.”
“Then I guess I’m a baby. Shit, shit, shit! Fuck, fuck, fuck!” She started to touch her cheek. She stopped herself. “I don’t have to listen to you. You aren’t my mother or my sister or anybody.”
“Then why have you been latched on to me like a pilot fish since we left camp?”
Now a tear did fall, a single drop that trailed down her scarlet cheek. She was so pale and thin, her skin as luminescent as one of my father’s chess pieces. I was surprised the slap hadn’t shattered her into a thousand bits. I didn’t know what to say or how to unsay what had been said, so I said nothing. Instead, I laid a hand on her knee. She pushed my hand away.
“I want my gun back,” she said.
“Why do you want your gun back?”
“So I can shoot you.”
“Then you’re definitely not getting your gun back.”
“Can I have it back to shoot all the rats?”
I sighed. “We don’t have enough bullets.”
“Then we poison them.”
“With what?”
She threw up her hands. “Okay, so we set the hotel on fire and burn them all up!”
“That’s a great idea, only we happen to be living here, too.”
“Then they’re gonna win. Against us. A bunch of rats.”
I shook my head. I didn’t follow her. “Win—how?”
Her eyes widened in disbelief. Ringer the moron. “Listen to them! They’re eating it. And pretty soon we won’t be living here because there won’t be any here to live in!”
“That’s not winning,” I pointed out. “They wouldn’t have a home, either.”
“They’re rats, Ringer. They can’t think that far ahead.”
Not just the rats, I thought that night after she finally fell asleep next to me. I listened to them inside the walls, chewing, scratching, screeching. Eventually, with the help of weather, insects, and time, the old hotel would collapse. In another hundred years, only the foundation would remain. In a thousand, nothing at all. Here or anywhere. It would be as if we had never existed. Who needs the kind of bombs used at Camp Haven when they can turn the elements themselves against us?
Teacup was pressed tight against me. Even under mounds of
covers, the cold squeezed hard. Winter: a wave they didn’t have to engineer. The cold would kill off thousands more.