Page 66 of Chaos

But I swear I see everyone else.

Duane, by far my least favorite of the once-townees, finds me and asks, “You want a job, Ephie girl?”

“Don’t call me that.” I shove an extra apple and a handful of pecans into my pocket to eat later since there don’t seem to be any rules about how much we can eat.

“Everybody at Thornewood’s gotta work. Course, you can go for laundry duty or dishwashing if you prefer.” He tosses a pecan into his mouth. “Just thought you’d like to stretch your legs outside Thornewood.”

“They’d allow it?”

“They send a soldier to keep tabs on us.”

“Okay. Yeah.”

I guess now I have a job.

Six of us go out in a three-car convoy, racing down the road, free of Thornewood, a soldier with a rifle sitting sideways in the passenger seat.

He doesn’t need to bother.

I’m not going to leave.

Why would any of us leave?

We have free food, a warm place to sleep, and, thanks to Shane, I even have a lock on my door.

So, I eat their food. I wear their clothes. I sleep in the supply closet. I squirrel away whatever supplies I can. Shane’s often there when I wake up. I join their work crew and search for supplies, submitting to irritating pat downs upon entry at Thornewood’s gate.

And I watch.

I listen. I learn.

“I’d lay down money it was Yorke,” Duane says as we haul bins full of cleaning supplies out of a house and into one of our trucks. “Bastard killed him. I’m sure of it.”

“Shut up,” says the soldier assigned to us, but he doesn’t say it with much feeling.

“I hold that bitch Frankie responsible,” says a man with a fat face.

“I resent that,” a woman quips. “You wouldn’t blame her if she were a man.”

It descends to discord after that.

“People who cross Yorke got a way of ending up dead,” Duane says ominously, and no one seems to have any retort to that.

Late that day, when the sun has just dipped behind the trees, I open a closet on the upstairs of a real shitty house, and find nine large bottles of lighter fluid, a stack of cigarette cartons, and a shoebox full of lighters.

I squat down to get a closer look, lifting a lighter off the crate. There must be a hundred of them. Maybe a hundred and fifty. I flick the edge to check if it works.

The heat of the flame as it bursts to life burns my thumb.

People are weird. Why store these up here? Who hoards lighters? Why? They weren’t hiding these from kids. Maybe they just collected lighters? I guess I’ll never know, and it doesn’t matter.

My impulse is to shove them into the back of the closet and tell no one.

A “Tsk tsk tsk,”behind me, has me blasting to stand up fully.

It’s Duane. “Didn’t take you for a smoker.”

“I’m not.” I slide the lighter in my hand into my pocket. “They’ll want it all.”

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