When Joe looked back, his eyes were hard. His voice was the same patient rasp it had been all day, though. “Did you hear what I said about why we’re going into this hospital?”
“‘Out of options,’” Flix whispered. He wanted to sink into the ground.
Joe rolled his eyes, the movement obvious even under the vision shields. He resumed course for the building. “Close enough. Some huge buildings had private water supplies. A hospital this size is a pretty safe bet.”
Flix resisted the urge to grab Joe’s arm — God, one unwanted groping event was mortifying enough — and fell into step next to him. “Why didn’t we start here first?”
“Hospitals would’ve been prime targets for scavengers: lots of medicines, food, first aid supplies, vaccines. Who knows how long ago this place shut down? I don’t want to bump into bad guys with us unable to quickly run away if necessary.”
Flix hadn’t worried about people; he was with Joe. But now, the thought of going into that big dark building with its shattered window-teeth... Someone had broken all those windows, maybe claimed this place for their own. They wouldn’t want to share. Flix shivered. “You have that gun thingy.”
Joe stopped walking. “That’s a last resort, not a first defense.”
“You used it on Mr. Boggs. And on those men on the highway the night we ran in to you.”
Joe’s mouth pinched, and a vein throbbed near his temple. After a moment, he shook his head and started walking again. Flix got the message: Conversation finished.
At the back of the hospital, six access doors had been blown off their hinges. Whatever had destroyed the doors seemed like one more reason to steer clear. Joe stepped over broken glass, and Flix followed him into the dank building. Their footsteps on the brown and beige tile echoed throughout what appeared to have been a large waiting room. Tipped-over chairs littered most of the space. A wide, dusty desk ran along the wall on the right. Was that a —
“Look, Joe. An old entertainment console. Did you have one?” Flix ran his fingers over the corners of the flat wall-length monitor. He and Marcus had wasted hours at Abuela Carmen’s, playing enough VR Retro Skater Pro that he was sure he’d know how to use a skateboard if he ever came across one. The little kids had used it, too, for math and reading games, mainly. Carmen dreamed of making the little ones smart and sending them off to New America. For a while, Flix thought she dreamed of sending him and Marcus away, too. She had sent them away eventually, only not where he’d thought they’d go. Flix swallowed the resentment that always surfaced when he thought about what Carmen had done. Understand? Sure. Forgive? Not so fast.
“Ours flashed green around the edges.” Joe’s quiet, broken voice echoed almost as much as their footsteps. He was exploring the area behind the desk, his head dropping below the surface then poking back up again as he spoke. “Dumb thing couldn’t remember when it was supposed to wake us up in the morning. Always went off in the middle of the night instead. My dad was late to work so often his coworkers started calling him ‘Easy’s bitch,’ all because of the EC. It was almost a relief when the electricity finally went off just so the EC didn’t start squawking in the middle of the night.”
Flix chuckled along with Joe, but the end of electricity hadn’t been a laughing matter in his house. Four kids and Carmen stuffed in a one-bedroom box with no entertainment, no working stove, no air conditioning? It hadn’t been fun.
“We need to find a bathroom or a cafeteria, someplace with plumbing.” Joe jerked his head toward a dark hallway and headed in that direction.
Flix scurried to catch up. Joe flicked on some sort of handheld light box he’d pulled from his pocket. The thing spread light all over the space, illuminating the dusty floor tile and the spattered, stained walls. Eerie shadows danced behind carts and poles lining the hall. Everything seemed to move and menace, and Flix drifted close enough to Joe that he felt Joe’s body heat.
Joe swept the beam of light upward. It lit a faded blue sign that said the cafeteria was straight ahead. Thank God, because Flix’d had about enough of the place. He curled his pinky into the edge of Joe’s front pants pocket.
“You don’t have to be scared,” Joe said.
Flix inhaled so sharply the space between his shoulder blades hurt and the scabbed cuts across his back sang their displeasure. “I’m really inappropriately hitting on you again. That’s all. Not scared. Being gropey. And gross. It’s a little gross, probably, or creepy, how fascinated I am by your —”
“Flix?”
“Mhm?”
“Shut up.”
Flix snapped his mouth closed and dropped another finger into Joe’s pocket. Up ahead, a set of double doors dangled from their lower hinges. They bowed outward from the frame, their knobs pointing toward the floor. How did they get like that? Why would people have been trying that hard to get out?
Joe pressed himself between the doors, leaned over one, and slithered across it like a snake. Flix took a deep breath and followed.
Far to the right, light spilled into the cafeteria from huge windows. In front of the windows, scorch marks smeared across the floor. The ceiling above them was black and eaten away.
“Bomb, most likely,” Joe said, rubbing his toe over the black on the floor. “Someone probably lobbed it up through the window from outside.” He glanced back at the door. “The people inside panicked, pushed against the door they’d probably chained shut to keep the bombers out.”
Flix leaned against the wall to keep his shaky legs from giving out. “Shit.”
Joe looked at him. “They’re gone, Flix. This all probably happened years
