Page 38 of Chaos

People comply instantly, flinching away.

Duane shakes his head chillingly at Colleen, dragging his thumb along the side of his nose. “Got you a big thorny army now, don’t you? You’re going to what? Tell them to open fire on your unarmed civilians? How long will that work? ’Til the ammo runs dry?”

Her shoulders lift in a steadying breath as the soldiers force people to move along. One of them snags Duane by the forearm and forces him to back away from Colleen.

Tension still ripples as people disperse, muttering and shuffling, and there’s a single fever-pitch second where I’m sure Duane might throw a fist, but he doesn’t.

I catch Colleen’s gaze from across the way.

This is more of the fallout.

I nod so Colleen will know I concede her point. She was right in the truck on the way back here. I can’t shoot Ben in the head, not without having to answer to this mob and possibly destroying Thornewood.

Her shoulders relax.

There are other ways he can die.

“I feel so much safer knowing you’re here.” Misty blinks up at me, her hand curling back around my upper arm again. With her other hand, she reaches into her bag, and holds up a water bottle. “Are you drinking enough water? You look thirsty.”

I shrug off her arm. “No.”

I’m saved from having to respond further, because Shane shoulders in beside me.

“Are we going down there now?” A glance at his face tells me he means down to the basement hallway we converted into a series of interrogation cells.

In my peripheral vision, Misty moves off with a huff.

“Yeah,” I say. “They’ve got it covered here.”

“What’s her deal with you?” Shane asks.

“I don’t know.”

A trio of soldiers stand in our path, glaring at me and forcing us to step around them, making it clear the ex-townees aren’t the only ones sympathetic to Duane’s claims. More problems to deal with. Finding bullets, killing Ben in a way that won’t draw suspicion, assuaging the angry soldiers and the disgruntled civilians, dealing with the Gray Caps and the pigeons, figuring out how to convince Frankie not to make sacrifices for my fucking feelings.

Shane falls in with me as we jog down the main steps toward the basement.

One of the landings has a massive mullioned window overlooking the rear lawn.

“What about Ben?” he asks, and I stop in the landing. “We’re going to kill him, right? I thought we’d go straight there after we got Frankie home. But something Rey said made me think ...”

There’s a note of panic underlying his words like he gleaned my thoughts somehow.

“We can’t,” I say, more calmly and resignedly than I feel. “Not yet.”

His face shifts to his uniquely teenage outrage, like somehow, despite everything, he’s still surprised that the world isn’t fair. “That’s shit.”

He’s gotten even taller this year. If he grows anymore, he’ll be taller than me. His beard is thickening out, his shoulders filling in. He’s right on the cusp of adulthood. Thisis probably where I should give him a nice long speech about higher values and how vengeance isn’t the answer, and reprimand him for being blood-thirsty.

But I’m not going to. I’ve been to war. I hate war. Violence isn’talwaysthe answer, but sometimes it very much is.

In fact, maybe the problem is that I haven’t been violent enough, maybe if we’d been more violent, everything would have played out differently.

“I want him dead too. And he will die.” I tug Shane aside as a pair of soldiers jog up the stairs past us. Begrudgingly, I explain Colleen’s logic, and as he listens the scar-lined fingertips of his right hand curl inward.

The knuckles closest to his nails bend mostly normally, the second one in a little less so. It’s the knuckles closest to his palm that took the brunt of Ben’s hammer, and they’re still stiff despite diligently performing the exercises Sheila and Misty prescribed.

He looks down at his hand when I’m done. “I was there when he killed Ruby, and Frankie pushed me down that hill to save me. That’s why she got taken. I care about her, too. And it’smyhand.”

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