“What do you mean? I thought the shot was an inoculation.”
She looks me over. “Now, you don’t look like the kind of girl who believes everything you’re told. Did you let Doc give you a shot?”
I shake my head and she nods in approval. “It will be hard to stay away from Doc, Jacks being who he is and all, but you should try. I don’t trust him.”
“You think Doc had something to do with the women dying?”
“I can’t say for sure,” Pam tells me, stopping on the stairs, “but there’s something off about him. Mike told me he makes the Scrappers give him almost all the drugs that they find. A lot of them have a second stash they keep hidden to bring in for the rest of us.”
“Um . . . he is a doctor,” I say. “Doesn’t he need those drugs?”
“Well . . .” She shuffles around, muttering. “I think he self-medicates.”
I nod. Everyone has to deal with the After in their own way.
“I see him sometimes,” Pam continues, “talking to himself like there’s someone else there.”
“I’ve heard him do that too,” I admit. “When I first got here, I heard him rattling off about who needed flu shots, like he was talking to someone. But a lot of people talk to themselves. He didn’t seem sinister to me, just a little strange.” Although he did give me the creeps when I first met him. I try to fight off my paranoia. Doc doesn’t have to be evil—he could just be incompetent.
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if he loses it one day.”
Pam pauses at the railing, looking down at the rows of cells. “There’s another thing,” she whispers. “My friend Anna, who used to live on the first floor, told me that after the birth of her child, he tried to convince her to leave Fort Black, go to some place up north. Some kind of colony.”
“What?” I grip the railing in surprise. New Hope?
“Did she go?”
Pam shakes her head. “She didn’t get the chance. The next week Anna and her child were both dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her.
“It’s okay,” Pam says, starting up the stairs again. “You learn to live with loss.” I pause before joining her, wondering. What is going on here? Is Doc working with Dr. Reynolds?
I turn and quickly follow Pam through the door onto the third floor, where she stops at a darkened cell and softly calls in, “Sewing!”
Inside are two sets of bunk beds with barely room to walk between them. A figure rests in each bed. A young man in one of the bottom bunks sits up.
“Hey, Pam,” he calls, getting sleepily out of bed and shuffling to the door. Pam hands him a small, neatly folded pile of shirts. The young man takes them, staring at me. I wait, uncomfortably.
Finally Pam speaks up. “So we agreed on a can of corn and two cans of peas . . . ,” she gently reminds him.
“Right.” He goes to the foot of his bed and grabs a backpack. He puts the laundry inside and takes out the cans, returns to the doorway, and hands them to Pam, who puts them in her basket. “Who’s your friend?” he asks, staring intently at my face. His eyes flit to my arm, covered by my synth-suit.
“She belongs to Jacks.”
“Oh,” he says, his face falling. Then a scared look comes over his face. “I—I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay. I won’t tell him.” Without another glance in my direction, he heads back to his bed and flops down.
When we’ve moved on, I ask, “Is he that scared of Jacks?”
“Yes and no. He’s more scared of Jacks’s connections.” I’m starting to wonder if people will think I belong to Jacks, or to the Warden. “Poor kid,” Pam is saying. “There aren’t enough women to go around, and he’s one of the nice guys. He and his roommates are the ones who remove garbage from Fort Black and dump it outside.”
“So there are four people living in that one room?” A cell seems hardly big enough for one person, much less four.
She shakes her head. “Not four, twelve. They sleep in eight-hour shifts.”
“And Jacks has his room all to himself, all the time?” I hadn’t realized how well off Jacks was due to his relation to the Warden.
“Like I said, he’s a catch.” Pam winks at me.
Our footsteps rattle on the iron-grid walkway. Our next stop is a cell down the hall, a man with two older boys. One sits in the corner, playing with a deck of cards. The other lies in bed, a wet washcloth across his eyes. I stay in the doorway while Pam steps inside.
“Do you know what it is?” Pam asks the man.
The man shakes his head sadly. “Doc said it could be some new form of pink eye. He might not be able to see again.”
Pam hands him a bundle of clothes. “On the house,” Pam tells him.
The man steps over to her and hugs her. “Thanks, Pammy.”
“They’ve had some hard times,” Pam tells me when we resume walking down the hall. “He was a prison pencil pusher. That man managed to leave Fort Black, get his boys, and make it back without a scratch on either of them. . . . His wife wasn’t so lucky.”
We next stop at a cell with a red curtain covering the bars, blocking our view of inside. A handbell is attached to the door with a wire, and Pam rings it. A woman appears, sweeping the curtain aside dramatically. She wears a pink bathrobe and way too much eye shadow.
“How’s business?” Pam asks her with a smile.
“Slow.” The woman yawns. “It’ll pick up after first shift.”
Pam hands her a bundle. On top is a lacy black bra. She takes her clothes and gives Pam a small package. “There’s Vicodin there, for your man’s back. I asked the Scrappers specifically to look out for more and make sure Doc doesn’t snatch it all up.”
“Thanks.” Pam puts the medication in her basket. As we walk away, Pam tells me, “She’s always bringing me ripped clothes.”
“So she’s a . . .”
“Yep. She practices the oldest profession.”
I shake my head at how Pam just tosses this off. “How can you be so comfortable here? It’s remarkable. You seem to be thriving, not stuck pining for your life as an attorney Before. Doesn’t it bother you to throw aside all your training and experience?”
She shrugs. “I used to be a lawyer and now I mend clothing for a prostitute. I know it sounds so weird. And I have lost a lot that I’m sad about. But here, well, at least I’m alive,” she tells me with a smile. “My grandma taught me to sew and I always thought it was so pointless, since I could just buy anything new I needed. Now there isn’t a day that goes by I’m not grateful she took the time to teach—” She stops dead in her tracks, her face full of fear. “Let’s go,” she tells me, wheeling around and heading back the way we came.
“Why?” I have to trot to keep up with her. “What’s wrong?”
She motions back to a black sheet hanging on the door of a cell. “Black Pox. That’s a new infection. We don’t want to get too close.”
“Could we catch it from out here?”
“Probably not, but I don’t want to take any chances.” We’re most of the way back down the hall. “There are people who already have had the Pox who deal with the infected. Someone will come later and remove them to the back wall.”
“What about until then?” I ask. “Are they getting food and water?”
“Don’t worry about it,” she tells me. “They’ll get better or they won’t. We can’t do anything.”
We walk back to Jacks’s cell in silence. I wonder how Pam can be so kind to that man with the sick son and so cold to someone else, alone and dying. But by now, I know the answer: People do what they have to in order to survive.