Page 40 of Chaos

They give me tiny sips of water from plastic cups but no food, and the light hurts my eyes, and all I can think is what the hell happens when they’re done with me?

Time has spun into mud when the big man arrives. Yorke himself. He taps my interrogator on her shoulder, and after a long, thoroughly disgusted look at me, she leaves us alone.

Up close, he’s bigger than I remember. He’s clearly had time to shower because he no longer looks homeless. Just unhinged.

I find myself cringing away from his eyes. They remind me of Frankie in that cellar screaming as Ben held her down and checked between her legs for weapons he knew she didn’t have, of an old woman dying under a snowy sky, and a hammer swinging under a bright sun.

They say it’s my fault all that happened, and a tiny half-empty tube of antibiotic ointment isn’t enough to make it all right, and maybe it’s not.

All I want is to get out of here, get Ben, find a car, and never look back.

He slides into the seat across from me and toys idly with a folder that sits there. “You’re loyal, yeah?”

I don’t know what to say to that.

“That’s a defining value of yours?” he adds. “Being loyal, and you’ve locked in on Ben as someone worth being loyal to?”

“Never thought about it.” I tuck my feet under my ass and pick at my nails.

Do I have a defining value?

The main character of my favorite show, Monroe, ripped the flag off a pole in her principal’s office and used it to kill him when he turned into a zombie and tried to eat her friend. I always admired that about her. “Does defending yourself count as one?”

“Yes. And if you think protecting Ben is defending yourself, think again.”

I roll my eyes.

He taps the folder on the table in front of him with a thumb that’s massive—three times the size of mine—the nail clean but jagged, like he’s been chewing on it all month while his girlfriend, or whatever the hell she is, was gone. “Why so loyal to some guy you barely know?”

I don’t answer.

“Is it fear?”

I blink to convey my boredom.

He scratches the back of his head. “You over sixteen?”

He knows I am.

He sniffs displeasure at my silence.

I sniff back.

“We’ve let people from town stay before. We’d consider letting you stay after a trial period. Would you want to?”

“Is that a serious question?”

He leans back in his chair and folds his arms over his chest. “It’s a genuine one, yes.”

“Where else would I go? You took my gun and my coat and boots. You burned my town and everything in it. I’m all alone. I’ve got no food. It’s the middle of winter. You locked up my onlyfamily.”

I stress the last word to make it ironic and catch a stray half-smile.

“It would be on a probationary period. As long as we don’t catch you working against us, you could have a place here.”

I’m about to ask him to define ‘working against’, but the metal door of the interrogation room opens, and the redheaded kid comes in.

And as always, I flinch when I see him. Not just because his busted hand is still in a sling and every time I see it my tongue gets dry because I saw a hammer smash those bones flat, but because his face. He looks so much like Cyrus, Monroe’s love interest on the TV show, the cool to her fire, the soft to her hard, a guy who nearly gave up his life to keep her alive, a guy she’d have died to save.

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