Jamison

EMPTYING THE STORAGE TAKES MOST OF THE night into the early morning because we have to inventory everything first. I’m not sure when they came up with this emergency management system—judging by how logical it all is, I assume months ago—but the Committee wants to keep track of which supplies come from which Key so that afterward everything will go back where it was originally allotted.

The system by which everything was allotted to begin with is entirely above my paygrade.

It’s tedious work, but it feels good to be doing something, even with the air of worry hovering over everyone. When the sun comes up, the sky is still clear and blue. But the afternoon quickly worsens as dark clouds creep in, and it starts drizzling as people arrive at Marathon High School. Cots have been placed in the gym, hallways, and several classrooms. The cafeteria is set up as it would have been in the before times, but with stacks of canned and dried goods surrounding the tables.

After we finish triple-counting the Islamorada stores in the caf, the people in charge tell me I’m free to go. I’ve only seen Andrew twice since we arrived, so I head toward the gym to find him. Outside, the rain is coming down steadily, and the wind howls in gusts.

I pick up bits of information and gossip from people in the halls.

“Sandy and her husband haven’t slept in the same bed in—”

“Before, anything above a two was a mandatory evacuation for the Keys.”

“I hope Fern is okay. Do you think we haven’t heard because the radios were damaged?”

“It’s a full moon, but we’re heading toward low tide. If the storm surge hits at high, we—”

That last one almost makes me stop dead in my tracks. We have sandbags stacked on either side of every outside door, but I’m not even sure those would stop the floodwater if we’re hit with a storm surge at high tide. We had a few hurricanes in Philly over the years, but most of them had weakened to a category one or tropical storm by the time they got that far inland. It was mainly the heavy rain we had to worry about. Once, after a pretty bad one when I was younger, the main highway through Center City was completely flooded all the way up to the overpass.

Marathon High School is a three-story building. If the water gets that high here, we might need to be on the roof—and the food that isn’t canned will be ruined. I look back toward the cafeteria. The Committee people have already thought ahead, I’m sure.

It’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine. I just need Andrew to tell me he agrees, and I’ll feel a whole lot better.

“Hell no, we’re screwed,” Andrew says. But as he holds a dodgeball just out of reach while one of the kids tries to jump up to take it from him, I still can’t help but laugh.

“Can you stop torturing him?” I nod at the boy.

“This isn’t torture, it’s playing. You’re having fun, right, Frank?”

Frank is smiling and it seems like he’s about to say yes, but then he looks at me and grows solemn. All the kids in the Keys do that—well, the ones who have surviving family members don’t. But the orphans all do. And it kinda freaks me out. It’s like they can tell I’m an orphan, too. I wonder why they don’t look at Andrew that way. Maybe they sense that I already have one foot out the door. That I want to take Andrew away from here and live the rest of our lives as hermits in a cabin in the Pennsylvania woods.

Finally, Frank speaks. “How come you don’t have any scars?”

I have no clue why he’s asking me that.

“Okay!” Andrew throws the dodgeball to an empty area of the gym. “Fetch, Frank.” Frank runs off after it. “I always wanted a dog.”

“What does he mean about scars?” I touch the side of my belly where I was shot. There’s a dark pink indent that hasn’t fully lightened to normal scar tissue. Not that Frank would know about it.

Andrew waves off my question. “The kid’s obsessed with them. You should have seen him asking Rocky Horror about his top surgery scars.”

“Oh! That’s No-Filter Frank.”

“Aptly named, yes.” Andrew scans the gym, quickly counting the kids. He stops, recounts, then spins around, relaxing when he sees a kid sitting on a cot playing with a blue stuffed hippo. “But, yes, we’re going to be okay. This place was a storm shelter for the area even before the bug, so it’ll still work after.”

I nod. Once we’re past the worrying topic of a flash flood, he steps closer to me and lowers his voice.

“What about us?” he asks. “Are we going to be okay?”

My stomach clenches again and I shrug. “I don’t know. I wasn’t the one not talking to me.”

He sighs as No-Filter Frank returns with the ball and tries to hide it behind his back. Andrew quickly snatches it, then throws it again, and Frank is gone.

“Everyone has been saying we need to talk about it, but I think I just wasn’t ready at the time.”

“And are you now?”

Again Frank returns, and again Andrew makes quick work of throwing the ball.

“Yes, this absolutely seems like the most opportune moment we’ve had for the past two weeks.”

I laugh, but my stomach still tightens with nerves. If he’s about to break up with me, this might be the worst possible time, surrounded by people and No-Filter Frank, who is probably going to ask why I’m crying, and I’ll have no physical scars to show for it.

“I just need to know where you’re at,” Andrew says.

I don’t understand. “In what way?”

“In our lives. You were so quick to pivot away from the plan to get Henri. You’d really leave Cara with the boat crew, alone, just because you’d miss me?”

He’s trivializing it, making me feel childish. And that’s not what I was doing at all.

Frank returns, and I have a moment to gather my thoughts as he gets better at keeping the ball away from Andrew. When he finally runs off to chase it again, I speak.

“Of course I’d miss you. But that’s not it. Our plan was to go north, make sure Henri got on the boat, then go back to the cabin. I wasn’t going to leave you here. And, yes, I would miss you, but ‘where I’m at’ in our lives is I don’t want to be away from you. I left my home because I didn’t want to be alone again. But now I don’t care where I am. I just want to be with you.”

“This is our home now, your home and mine.” He motions to the gym around us. “These people are our family.”

That gives me pause. I don’t agree—the only person I would consider close enough to be family is Cara. Everyone else is just neighbors and friends. If Fort Caroline comes after me, these people aren’t going to protect us. They want this place to stay safe, and that means giving us up if they have to.

“I understand what you mean,” I say. “But I don’t think you’re right. You’re my family. I trust you with my life, but—”

Frank returns and I cut myself off. He looks between us—as if he senses something isn’t right—and Andrew takes the moment to steal the ball and throw it, this time aiming for the doors out to the hallway. It bounces out of sight and Frank runs after it.

“And you trust Cara, too,” Andrew says.

“Of course.” Without her, we wouldn’t have escaped from Fort Caroline. Twice.

“So what makes these people different? What makes Rocky Horror or Daphne different?”

“They haven’t lived through what we have.”

“Everyone has lived through what we have!” Andrew says, his voice rising. I glance around to see if anyone is watching, but they all seem preoccupied, except for Cara, who looks up from the book she’s reading across the room. “We all lost people we loved. There’s a handful who still have the families they had before the bug, and then there’s the rest of us, who are stuck trying to piece together new ones.”

“Like you and me.”

“And Henri and Amy. And RH and Daphne and Cara. There are plenty of people here who are becoming a family. At least to me.”

I open my mouth to again say that, yes, they are our friends, but they aren’t our family if we’re planning to go back north anyway, when it hits me.

“You don’t want to go back to the cabin.”

He looks like he’s surprised I’d say it out loud. But I’m a little pissed that I was the one who had to say it. If this was on his mind, why wouldn’t he tell me? Why would we talk about our plans to leave for so long if he was having doubts? And these past two weeks of awkwardness, he was really going to let me go north without him.

“I . . .” He’s looking at me, but Frank returns, ball in hand and a smile on his face.

A loud clap of thunder shakes the building and No-Filter Frank startles, dropping the dodgeball. Some of the adults go on with what they were doing, but all the kids have stopped, staring up at the gymnasium ceiling as though it’s about to collapse. The wind whistles through the air vents, but the next roll of thunder sounds farther away.

I look to Andrew. He doesn’t seem like he’s planning to pick up our conversation where we left it.

I nod. “Guess it’s going to be a long night.”