Page 72 of Chaos

Jacquetta shrugs. “If it’s too hard for us, it's too hard forthemto keep it, too.”

I suppress another yawn. I’m not bored. I’m exhausted.

Frankie woke me up from a sound sleep, crawling on top of me in the night, like she’s done every night since I got shot.

We barely talk, busy all day, with kids all evening, but slides into bed at night where she pushes me into sex that always feels just a shade too rough, like we’re running from something instead of moving together. We talked about Colleen’s decision to hand Ben over to Roanoke but didn’t find any solutions, beyond a grim certainty that I’ll hunt him down on my own someday, and maybe we can stop it in time. I told her that Lavinia Hope is looking for me, and I asked if she’d consider leaving Thornewood, and she said she hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

I didn’t tell her I killed Scraggle, but she knows. I can see it in her eyes when she looks at me.

“We 1 even know what’s in it,” Rey says. She’s been less rigid around me since I got shot, less suspicious.

“They want it that bad, it must be good,” Church says. “And the only thing that’sthatgood right now is bullets.”

“In a neighborhood?” Jacquetta murmurs, but her finger touches that purple rail line. “It would be a good cover, a small factory in an out-of-the-way town, right on a rail line surrounded by houses. That’s not a place China or Russia would have thought to target during the war.”

“You’re thinking it’s part of some wartime production effort?” Wendell asks, thumbing through one of the road atlas maps he took from a gas station long ago. “That rail line goes from Lynchburg to Richmond to Virginia Beach.”

Church straightens up from the map and crosses his arms over his chest. “Big base there.”

“Big ports,” Wendell adds. “Easy to get raw materials in. Easy to send finished products out.”

“It makes more sense than anything else,” Jacquetta says. “Name something you’d risk everything for right now, something you can make in a factory.”

“Bullets,” Church grunts immediately. “Only thing.”

“It’s not food,” she says. “They’d move a garden if the solar panels were for grow lights. It’s got to be something too big to move.”

“We need to confirm it,” Church says. “Ephie talking?”

“No. Go tell Colleen we have a beat in ammunition.” It’s time for me to talk to Ben. Maybe it’ll be enough to convince Colleen not to trade him off.

I scrub my hand over my face, dreading seeing him, knowing that he has information I want, and I can’t touch him.

AN HOUR LATER,in the basement holding cell under the clocktower, Ben’s prison for the last week, I slide into a chair, nothing but an old scuffed-up table and a bar light in a steel cage hanging from the ceiling between us.

It’s the first time I’ve seen him since before he took Frankie.

His week down here hasn’t been kind.

His clothes are stained and rumpled. His hair clings limply to his scalp and his skin has taken on an unhealthy gray color. He’s grown a horrible patchy beard. His handcuffed hands rest on his belly, fingernails dark.

“Wondered when you’d get around to dropping by,” he says, tapping his fingers on the table, rattling his cuffs. “Guess you probably had to get used to the sudden shift in your family status.”

I’d like to take a hammer to those fingers. He touched Frankie with them, swung a hammer with them. But that won’t tell me where he got those bullets. It won’t tell me who those pigeons belong to. And won’t tell me what he knows about Lavinia Hope or whoever else is looking for me.

“You look like shit,” I say, since normally interrogation requires the building of trust and there’s no hope for that. I can’t make him like me, but maybe I can antagonize him into revealing something in anger.

“Alas, I have no mirror in this dump.” He makes a bland face. “How’s your lady? My wife was so sick.”

I don't know what he’s talking about, so I ignore it, instead looking pointedly at the mattress on the floor with a clean blanket. A plastic bowl in the corner holds the uneaten remains of Plumberger’s lunch, a mysterious concoction of squash and pasta sauce no one enjoyed.

“Nice room,” I say.

He curls his upper lip. “I could come up with some complaints. The food is shit.”

“It’s a better room than you gave Frankie.”

“We were in hiding. Space was tight. Resources were scarce, Yorke. Water was a challenge.”

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