Page 5 of Chaos

Any smatterings of guilt or revulsion I feel at seeing him breaking, I push aside. He was there the day Bensmashed Shane’s hand. He’s a grown man, and he just stood by.

“Keep going,” I say.

“I don’t know anything more,” he says from his chair. “Some forest with a president’s name. Washington, I think. Maybe Hamilton. It was a long time ago, man. Months. Just a stray mention of a bug out spot there. Just … quit hurting him.”

I back away from his friend, who’s unconscious on the floor in front of me.

My stomach rebels at the sight of him, of the slick coat of blood on my hands, of my bruised knuckles.

It doesn’t work to hurt the guy with information, any interrogator can tell you that—he’ll say anything to make the pain quit. But hurting someone he cares about ...

I storm into the hallway, leaving them behind, the metal door slamming shut in my wake. I promised I’d let them go, and I will, if the info actually leads to Frankie.

Wendell, his face twisted with apprehension, joins me in the hall and hands over a wet towel. “You good?”

I don’t answer. Just wipe my bloody hands as we climb the back steps up to the lobby into what used to be the apothecary bar.

People took to calling it the War Room, and it stuck.

I stalk to the back of the room. The drapes are pulled back. Weak, wintry light fills the room, and the bar, instead of holding alcohol, is now stocked with every military, strategy, and warfare book we’ve found.

The rest of the space is overtaken by the massive map we created in the center on a mass of tables pushed together, which I’m staring at now. More than a hundred taped-up pages that together form the best representation we have of the area. Thornewood Resort is at the center, Sulfur Springs Town to the east, and roads stretching a hundred miles in each direction, large and small, like blue arteries, representingan infinity of places she could be, blurring in front of my eyes like a pit of writhing vipers.

I’ve seen it a hundred times, but our search radius hasn’t extended that far, past Marvin’s Glenn, almost into Tennessee.

And there it is, just at the edge.

Jefferson National Park.

I point at it, and Wendell tugs out a road Atlas, and spreads it across the table beside it. “Nearly two million acres,” he murmurs.

The hobgoblin of a mindfuck that settled into my chest the day they took her gains power, hissingshe’s dead, and she died in pain, and they dumped her somewhere in the forest.

My fault.

Two million acres. How fast can we search it? Even if we have a thousand guys doing an acre every hour each, that’s a thousand hours.

Church saunters closer to cock a hip against the table beside me. “Rey’s team just got back.”

I don’t look up, knowing damned fucking well he’d have led with ‘we found her’ if that’s where this was going.

“Clear.” He dips a paintbrush into a water jar resting on the bar, then gathers red paint from a watercolor pad beside it, crosses to the map table, and trails it across the latest swath Rey and her team just searched and confirmed empty. A translucent reddish smear of failure. “And we got word from the emissary we sent to Roanoke. Negative. She’s not there either. They say they don’t know anything.”

I breathe through the urge to rip up the map and throw the tables it sits on out the window. “Any word from the other emissaries?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing from the ones sent to Fort Campbell, New York, Charleston. Yet. But they’ll get back to us.”

I nod numbly. We can’t expect word back yet. We sent them in pairs, one to go in and gain access, the other to relay information.

“Ochoa, Polowoski, and Ebundi radioed in, too.” He paints more red. “They had a roadside tussle with the Caps outside a town called Hebron. Took heavy fire. We lost one guy, and another got shot. Fuckers don’t seem to be struggling for ammo. They just keep on firing until we overwhelm them. The one that got shot is in with the doc now getting stitched up.” He paints their search zone, too. So much fucking red. “I’m giving them the day off.”

“Fine.”

“I thought everyone fucking died, where the hell do they keep coming from?” he mutters.

“There were nearly four hundred million Americans before the plague hit. If two percent survived, that still leaves eight million alive,” Wendell says slowly. “And about sixty percent live east of these mountains. About five or six million people, and all of them started gathering into cities. It’s a big country, but most people learn fast they can’t do it alone, so they gather up.”

“Reassign everyone here,” I say as soon as he’s done, touching the map.

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