“No, we won’t,” I said.
“So what are we going to do?” Tori asked, changing the subject.
“What do you mean?” Chris said.
“I mean we’ve got to take charge of our lives. Our futures. We’ve got to end this.”
“How can we end this?” Chris asked skeptically. “We don’t even know what this is. You say it’s a civil war, but nobody has declared anything. If the president is controlling SYLO, who’s controlling the Air Force? Some foreign power? A rebel group of soldiers trying to overthrow the government?”
“Aliens?” Kent threw in.
Nobody acknowledged that comment.
“That’s exactly the point,” Tori exclaimed. “We need to know why this happened and who’s behind it.”
Chris took a deep breath and rubbed his face, buying time to think.
“Look,” he finally said, “we’re all angry and scared. But we’re just regular people. What else can we do but focus on survival?”
Tori jumped to her feet. “I know. I get it,” she shouted. “We have to eat and we need shelter, and you guys have that covered. Nice job. But we’re the lucky ones. We could just as easily be dead. This happened for a reason, and if we just sit around and feed our faces and get comfortable, then eventually our luck is going to run out. Whether you think so or not, we’re living on death row, and the executioner is still out there. If I’m going to die, at least I want to know why.”
She grabbed her bag and stormed out of the room.
The rest of us sat there in awkward silence for a few long moments.
“She’s had a tough time,” I finally said. “She saw her father gunned down by SYLO just a few days ago and then took a bullet herself.”
“Hey, my father was killed too,” Kent said. “But I’m keeping it together.”
“Then I guess you’re a better person than she is,” I snapped. “But if not for her, you wouldn’t be here. Don’t forget that.”
That shut Kent up.
Chris stood. “It’s okay,” he said. “She’s not the only one who feels that way. But we’re not here to stage some kind of counterrevolution. All we want to do is get by. If you want to take off and tilt against windmills, that’s your choice. But if you stay here, you’ve got to be cool. We’re all on edge, and I can’t have somebody stirring things up, or this whole thing will come tumbling down.”
“I hear you,” I said. “I’ll talk to her.”
“Great. If you want to leave, just let us know. No harm, no foul.”
He went for the door along with the rest of his people.
“We’d like you to stay,” Chris said as an afterthought. “We need your energy.”
He left, and the others followed.
Kent, Olivia, Jon, and I stayed in our chairs, waiting for somebody to say something.
“She’s going to get us kicked out of here,” was Kent’s first comment.
“What does she want to do?” Jon asked. “Fight back? With two pistols?”
“I don’t want to leave,” Olivia added quickly. “I feel safe here. Maybe he’s right. Maybe my mother will come looking for me here. It’s possible. I mean, anything’s possible, right?”
Kent put his arm around her and said, “Wherever we go, you’ll be safe as long as you’re with me.”
She didn’t pull away from him, but she kept her eyes on me. They all had their eyes on me, expecting some words of wisdom that I was having trouble finding. I was getting tired of being the one they all looked to for answers. Or explanations. Or assurances that everything was going to be fine when I knew it wasn’t.
“I’ll try to calm Tori down,” I said. “But she’s right. Whatever this war is, it’s just beginning.”
I got up and left the building to search for Tori. I found her sitting alone on a park bench between the two main buildings, clutching her bag.
“I don’t trust him,” she said as I walked up.
“Who?”
“That Campbell guy. There’s something off. With him, with this place. Everything is just too… easy.”
I glanced around the grounds to see people raking leaves, washing windows, or just strolling along and chatting.
“It does seem strangely normal,” I commented.
“Exactly!” she exclaimed. “That’s not normal. We all just had our lives wiped out. Millions of people have been killed, and all they care about is that there’s bacon for breakfast.”
“I hear you,” I said. “I think maybe everyone’s in denial. It’s a lot easier to worry about an empty belly than to stress over the downfall of civilization.”
“Then they’ve given up,” Tori said with spite.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Let’s ride this out for a while. At least until your shoulder gets better. We’ll do whatever they ask while you get stronger. Once you’re back up to speed, we’ll make a decision.”
“Would you go to Nevada with me?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I replied. “I don’t know what the right thing to do is.”
“And you think you’ll know any better after living here in Camp Oblivious?”
“Maybe not, but I wouldn’t mind being well fed and safe in their basement for a while as we try to figure it out… and heal.”
Tori looked at the ground and frowned. She wasn’t buying it.
“You have to trust somebody, Tori. It might as well be me.”
She kicked at the dirt absently.
“The leaves are starting to turn,” she said. “It’ll be cold soon. Fall was my dad’s favorite time of year.”
“He seemed like a great guy.”
“He’d want me to fight back,” she said.
“I know. But he’d want you to be smart about it.”
She nodded thoughtfully.
“All right, Tucker, I’ll try it your way. But as soon I’m strong enough to travel, I’m gone.”
Tori was true to her word. Over the next several days she didn’t rock the boat and did her best to fit in. We all did.
Jon volunteered to help keep the rechargeable batteries topped off. Every day he’d gather lamps from all over Faneuil Hall and bring them to the solar charging station, replacing them with fully charged units.
Olivia did what she did best… shop. She got together with the people who scavenged the city for clothes and went out with them every day to pillage the abandoned stores. Her choices tended to be more fashionable than practical, but nobody complained.
Tori was limited by her injury, so there wasn’t much she could do that was physical, but she found a perfect job anyway. The cowboys had scrounged up gas-powered generators from around the city, and not all of them were in great shape. Using her knowledge of engines, Tori tuned them up and had them humming perfectly. Their main function, now that it was getting colder, was to power the heaters that pumped warm air into the buildings. Thanks to Tori, the people at the Hall would be warm throughout the long winter.
Though she was going along with the program, her gym bag was never far from her side.
I did what I did best: garden. In this case it was a vegetable garden. Winter was coming, so planting anything outside would have been a waste. Instead, I cleared an unused section of one of the buildings that had a skylight and set up rows of planters that we scrounged from a nearby gardening center. In no time I had several rows of tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, and onions growing in the improvised greenhouse. If all went well, there would be enough plants to provide fresh vegetables throughout the winter.
The only one of us who didn’t do much to fit in was Kent—no big surprise. At first he was asked to wash windows, but that job didn’t last more than a minute. Kent didn’t do menial chores that were more suited to the lower classes—which in his opinion was everybody but him. Once he blew off that job, he would disappear for hours on end. Nobody knew where he went or what he was doing.