Page 6 of Chaos

“Yeah, okay.” He takes his time finishing up with the brush and dumps it into the water cup. “We need to talk about ammo. We’re running dangerously low.”

“Stop.” It comes out a whisper.

“We’re down to less than a hundred thousand eight-mill rounds—”

“Stop.”

He doesn’t. “It feels deliberate at this point. Like he’s drawing us out on purpose. He had nothing before. We traded him a few guns for pigs when we were there, sure, but no ammo, and they’re fucking blasting us. Where the hell are they getting the ammo from?”

I don’t answer.

“The soldiers are starting to grumble,” he bites out. “They don’t even know her, and now Rey’s unit just took a hit.”

I don’t look at him, won’t, can’t. My whole world is red with that map.

If she’s not in any of those places, she’s somewhere else. I just need to find her. Once she’s back, I’ll be able to think and fix all this, the deteriorating supply of bullets, the angry soldiers, but I need her back.

The door behind him scrapes on the carpet, and when he doesn’t look back, it becomes clear this was preplanned. He expected someone to come in. And sure enough, Wendell, Colleen, and Jacquetta enter, faces somber, or worse, pitying.

I shove away from the table, turning my back on all of them. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“We’re not saying we should stop looking,” Colleen says softly. “But we need to talk about prepping fields for planting, composting the gardens, building the wall, working on cisterns and pipes. And the bullet situation has become a serious problem.”

“I know all this.”

“Then act like it,” Colleen says sharply. “People are dying. We’ve lost nearly twenty people to this. The others are complaining, and it’s getting harder to explain. It’s a lot of resources to keep allocated to one person.”

“Oneperson. This isFrankie, Colleen. That garden you just mentioned is hers. That field you just mentioned is fucking hers.”

“I know that. She wouldn’t want—”

Breathing hard, fighting to get control of my voice back, I pace to the window, scrub my hands along my scalp, glare down at the winter-brown gardens, the echo of my shouting fades away, leaving a silence that burns in my eardrums. I don’t care if we use every last bullet or burn every last town. I don’t care about anything.

Except her.

Below the window stretches her garden, barren for winter, the soil frosted over. The burned shell of the pro shop, and the statue of an angel Colleen put there last summer to honor the dead, the squash bed, the edge of the herb garden all visible beyond the edge of the kitchen. All Frankie’s doing. All of it. She left her fingerprints all over this place.

And outside is a frozen wasteland. She could be anywhere. Cold. Dying.

“You have no idea what she would say or what she would want.”

My voice cracks on the word want, and a knot of unbridled panic hitches in my shoulders at the vacuum of the world without her. What if we never know what she’d say or want again?

“People are angry,” Colleen says. “Not just the army, but the people who joined Thornewood after they left town when Ben hurt Shane. They outnumber us. They’re pushing for a vote.”

“Ex ex-townees? Let them leave.”

“They have nowhere to go.” She catches her voice rising and pauses to control it. “You burned down their town.”

I did.

We ran interrogations on every man, woman, and child who lived in that town. They knew what would happen if they didn’t talk.

They made their choice, and I made mine.

I don’t regret it. There was never enough room for that town and Thornewood. Ben and Renata saw to that.

“Everyone is afraid of you. It wasn’t just the fire. It was those men you …” She breaks off, glances at the dark red smears still coating my knuckles. I don’t regret that either. “You’re losing it, Yorke.”

---