“You speak as if you know everything, yet you woke up in a drafty, cold room, tied to a chair,” he says. “You’re not in a position to dictate to me.”
“Neither are you,” I say. “So let’s be through with this. Either be the raider and shoot me, rape me, whatever you want to do, or be the regular surviving townsperson and let me go, or kill me to make you and your people feel safer.”
“Why were you looking for Jessi Paxton?” he asks.
“I wasn’t…just pulled a random file from the maternity ward, hoping for a good read.”
“If you want to be released, you’re going to talk,” he says. “So, maybe I’m not a bandit, maybe I’m not going to kill you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t leave you in this room until you’re ready to talk.”
“Good,” I say, barely above a whisper. “At least I will be safe.”
Stephen leans forward and rests his hands on the table. He’s wearing a gold wedding band, so he’s either still married or can’t let go of the fact that his wife has long since died. “You will talk to us eventually,” he says. “Why not save yourself the trouble?”
“What would your wife think about you tying me up and leaving me in here?” I ask. “What if it was her sitting in this chair?”
He looks slightly confused.
“You wouldn’t want her sitting here with rope so tight against her wrists that she’s lost feeling in her fingers, would you? Wouldn’t you want to kill the man that did that to her? The man that hit her in the head, tied her up and stole her shoes? The man that left her in the dark until she told him something useful?”
Stephen sat back in his chair, studying me. “You make a good point, Bill. I would want to kill whoever did that to her. I would probably tie him down and cut off each of his fingers and toes. I would cut him open and make him bleed for hours. I would rip his scalp, cut out his tongue.” He speaks with such calm ferocity as though he has planned this out long before he met me.
For the first time, I have no reply.
“What is your name?” he asks again but with the same calm voice that just described a man’s torture.
“Remi,” I say.
“Now that’s more believable. Why do you have a file on Jessi Paxton?”
“She is someone that I met in college,” I say.
“Sure, but what good does this file do for you? I highly doubt you would go into a hospital full of greyskins alone because you were hit with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia.”
“I’m from a place called Crestwood,” I tell him.
“I’ve heard of Crestwood.”
“The leader there is Robert Paxton. His daughter’s name is Jessi. He sent me to look for her.” Of course, I purposefully leave out the fact that I was banished from Crestwood and that the only way I could come back is to give him some information about his missing daughter.
“Alone?”
I nod. “He hasn’t seen her in four years. I knew she was pregnant because I knew her in college. The hospital was a shot in the dark, but it’s a lead. And apparently you know her.”
“I’ve never met her,” he says. I don’t expect it, but I feel disappointed that he doesn’t know her. How much more would have Paxton welcomed me if I were to bring him his daughter in the flesh rather than just some paper that said she had a baby?
“Then why are you so curious about what I’m doing?” I ask.
Stephen scoots his chair back and stands, walking around the table and behind me. I hear him pull out a knife and I close my eyes. Maybe he is psycho enough to do something to me. He doesn’t cut me; rather he cuts the ropes at my wrist and I feel an instant relief in my hands. I pull them up and rub at them, trying to get blood flowing to my fingers again. Stephen then walks to the door on the other side of the room and whispers to one of the guards.
“Get her shoes and coat,” he says, thinking that he speaks softly enough that I can’t hear him.
He closes the door and sits back down in the chair across from me. “You were right about us being in a town. Elkhorn, to be specific. However, we have isolated ourselves to a much smaller part of the city away from the University.”
“Isn’t it a bit dangerous to have a town or village in the Epicenter?”
Stephen smiles at me. “Some might think so, but we have our ways of coping. The danger may have started here, but there are much more dangerous places to be. And since so many people think the way you do, many don’t even think to loot for supplies around here, so we get, or got, most of the supplies for ourselves.”
“I see you haven’t cleared the hospital yet,” I say.
“We go in as needed,” he says. “We are a small group. We are tactical…smart.”
“How many people?” I ask.
“Just over fifty.”
“Are you their leader?”
“We don’t really have a leader.”
“Do they look to you for leadership?”
A pause. “Yes.”
The door opens and the man that hit me in the head comes in with my coat and shoes. He places them on the table in front me and then leaves the room without a word.
“Are we going somewhere?”
Stephen nods. “We’re taking a walk.”
“I want my guns,” I say.
“You mean the ones without any bullets?”
“There was one left.”
He lets out a laugh and stands. “And why do you think I’m going to let you have that?”
I don’t say anything as I pull on my shoes and coat. He leads me out of the room and into a hallway with brown wood paneling, cracked and water-damaged. The place looks to be an old office building. I glance into one of the rooms and see a bunch of old computers in their cubicles. I shake my head as I think about the people that might have worked here long ago — how everything used to be about work. It was a fight for survival, just not in the same way we face it today.
We reach the end of the hallway and walk out a door that leads into a wide open parking lot. It’s not raining as I expected, but the clouds are dark and heavy. To my left are barriers of trucks, tires and wooden pallets that make up the perimeter wall. To my right I see a group of children playing some version of tag. I can’t help but smile, not because of the children, but because my unique ability had given me the upper hand once again.
Stephen leads me through an alley, past another building until we come to another parking lot. This one has a protective wall at the other end and people are spread all about, talking with each other, laughing. Some are playing games, others have made fires and they sit hunched over a warm cup of coffee.
“These are my people,” Stephen says. A few of them look up at me and when they notice that I’m a newcomer, they stop what they are doing and stare.
I try not to look at them, and instead, I turn to Stephen. “What do you want with me?” I ask. “Why are you showing me these people?”
There is someone I would like you to meet,” he says.
We walk across the parking lot, with all eyes seemingly on me as we cross. He leads me to another building and opens the door for me. We walk down a hallway until we reach a room. Inside there is a woman sitting at a desk. She wears a headset connected to a radio transceiver. Every couple of seconds she relays a call.
“Red Falcon this is Home Base, do you copy? Red Falcon, please respond.” She looks up at us and smiles, but then her face turns suddenly serious.
“Still unable to reach them?” Stephen asks.
She nods. “I don’t know what could have happened.” I can sense the fear in her voice.
“I want you to keep trying,” Stephen says.
“I didn’t plan on stopping,” she says. She looks at me for a moment. “Who is this?”
“I wanted to introduce to you our newest friend,” Stephen says looking at me, his eyes warning me not to contradict him.