Page 128 of Chaos

But first, I need to stop Duane and Ben.

I lift my gun and level it at Duane’s chest, but before I can fire, Ephie shoves away from the wall.

“I’m choosing,” she whispers as she evades Shane who tries to snatch her back and saunters brazenly into the middle of the room, shaking her hair over her shoulders.

Shane’s shoulders fall as he watches her go.

“If your plan was for him to come to my rescue so you could hold him hostage, you failed,” she says loudly. “He didn’t come. But here I am. So tell me how to help.”

I press myself back against the wall, staring at Shane as he does the same opposite me

She steps directly in my path to shoot Ben, and says, “You heard what the raiders said about him. They force women to have babies. Do you really want to go there?”She doesn’t addwith me?But it’s there in her voice, and I don’t think I’m imagining the tendril of hope that curls along the last inflection of her words. Like she’s desperately hoping the answer will be no, like she’s giving him one last chance.

And somehow, the fact that she asks, that she’d bother after all this, fills me with light I haven’t felt since before the cellar. Pure, unbridled optimism.

Times get dark.

They don’t stay dark. Not forever. They never do.

“Shut up,” Ben barks, a short two-word sentence, clipped, and from across the greenhouse, he sounds ill and weak.

“You promised,” Ephie’s voice is plaintive and painfully young.

I creep closer, peering around the edge of the doorway, seeing my fluffy green sprouts, radishes and kale, cabbage and brussels sprouts sitting on the iron tables. Shovels and trowels sit nearby. The fertilizer and soil additives and ant poison on the shelf are a mess, boxes on their sides.

“Quit looking at me like that,” Ben snarls. “Maybe I can make that part of the deal. That you don’t have to do the breeding shit or something.”

“And everyone else here? You’d really do that to all these people?”

Ephie’s dark cloud of hair is blocking my ability to see her face. Around her, I can only make out part of Ben’s face and his hand. I don’t have a clear shot of him. He’s bent over oneof the seed tray tables. The smoke is thinner in there than it is out here.

The sliver of his face I can see is twisted in pain. I hope that’s the poison hard at work and liquifying his goddamned insides. I haven’t seen him since we started adding the poison powder to his food, but he looks noticeably thinner and grayer.

He’s dying.

I’ve already killed him.

It’s just a question of when, and how much damage he does before it happens.

Duane’s beside Ben, one shoulder resting negligently against the pigeon’s cage, glaring at Ephie with suspicion, holding an ax in his left hand and a massive gun in his right, pointed straight at Ephie.

I’ve never fired this specific gun, haven’t zeroed it out for my own sights, but it’s Yorke’s, and he wouldn’t give me a gun he hadn’t zeroed himself.

I’m a good shot, but my hands are shaking.

What if I miss Duane? Will he shoot Ephie before I can fire again?

“This isn’t like other stuff though, Ben,” she adds. “Giving us all up to Charleston? Turning us into a place like that? You want that?”

Ben slams his fist on the table, a pen in one hand, and I realize he’s not doubled over in pain, or at least not doubled over only in pain, he’s writing. Or he was. His fingers clench up now. “Give me a minute, will you? I can’t fucking think.”

“Ben, please. Don’t do this.”

He doesn’t respond.

And Duane, having apparently lost patience with the conversation, says, “How’d you get out, if not the kid?”

“Frankie set me free. We dragged that gray-haired soldier you hit outside. They’re probably coming for you right now.”