“What?” I prodded.
Nick’s posture crumbled. He hunched over like he was about to pass out, and then leaned against the wall. No answer came from him, but Lee, in a low voice, told me. “They hit a couple of generators, those crazy assholes. But that ain’t all. They also hit the garage where we keep the fuel. Spilled damn near everything.”
Nick rubbed and kneaded his chest. He was looking down at his feet and shaking his head.
“We probably got a month, maybe two, of fuel left before we run out,” Lee continued.
I was at a loss for words. Not only had my bubble of safety been popped that night, but it didn’t look like it’d ever inflate again.
“What do we do? Can we get more?” I asked.
Lee turned to Nick. Nick raised a hand as if to say it was all right, but his face told another story. “We’ll be okay.” And that was the end of that conversation. Nick straightened, placed a bony hand on one of my shoulders, and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “But sitting around and waiting isn’t gonna help us. Getting the power back on will. Two sectors need attending to. The north end got hit pretty hard. A fire broke out. Nothing catastrophic, I put it out with an extinguisher, but the generator needs a thorough checking. And right now, we’re spread pretty thin. Everyone’s scared as hell. I hate to ask you, Grady, but you don’t seem to fear much of anything.”
This was wrong, of course. I feared a lot. I guessed I just did a better job of hiding it. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? I wondered.
“Can you lend us a hand?” Nick’s eyes were pleading.
I looked back over my shoulder at the hospital door. I could hear the frantic conversation behind the walls, the rushed orders, the words I couldn’t understand.
“He’ll be okay,” Nick said again. “Trust me.”
I nodded. “Okay, I’ll help.”
Because I needed to get my mind off all of this.
Wendy also agreed to help us. Her and Nick went down to the south end generators, while Lee and I went north to the generators housed just outside the kitchen/cafeteria area. You got to it via an access tunnel, which was accessible from the outside, where a trench had been dug in the snow.
The outer walls were charred black, and the smell of smoke was strong enough to sting the insides of my nostrils and make me momentarily forget I was trudging through a winter hellscape.
At the entrance, Lee stopped and looked at me. I raised my eyebrows, wondering what he was waiting for.
“Uh, yeah, ladies first, Miller.” He motioned a hand toward the tunnel.
I rolled my eyes. “Seriously?”
“Hey, you don’t fear nothin’, right?”
I rolled my eyes again, and then stepped over the threshold. My ears strained for any slight sound. Outside, the wind whistled but the sound was dull and barely audible, as if far in the distance. Other than that, I heard nothing. This was both good and a bit unsettling. I had gotten used to the low thrumming that the generators made. Those sounds meant we would be warm, we would have light, we would have safety. They were sounds of comfort. Now that they were gone, their silence nearly burst my eardrums, which had already taken a heck of a lot of damage from the gunfight.
“How far ahead is it?” I asked, turning toward Lee.
The white glow from the lantern accentuated the lines on his face. He looked ghostly, eerie, almost sick. Early wrinkles, because Lee was barely in his mid-thirties, and although I didn’t know too much about him, I knew he liked the bottle. He wasn’t a drunk—not the slobbering, violent type, at least—but he was rarely without his booze. A shot of Baileys in his morning coffee, beer at lunch, a bit of gin at dinner. I imagined the apocalypse might’ve slowed him down, but not by much. I’m not knocking him, believe me. We all have our vices.
“Should be just about a hundred feet or so down,” Lee said. “At the end of the corridor.”
“You coming?”
“Uh…” Lee hesitated. “Yeah, I am.” Then I heard him mumbling, “Where’s my goddamn flask?” This brought a slight grin to my own face. If ever there was time for a nip of Jack, it was now.
We went down the hall. Our footsteps shuffled across the painted concrete floor. The scuffing of our soles echoed off the walls, grating like forks down a chalkboard.
At the generator, Lee leaned over me and peered at it. “Easy fix,” he said. “All you gotta do is—”
A soft rattling cut him off. He stepped back quickly and almost tripped over his feet. At the time I wasn’t concerned about the noise. In fact, I had barely heard it, and thought if it was anything, it was the dying whir of the generator’s internal machinery. It sounded natural, not sinister. I was more concerned with Lee possibly busting his skull open, which he very well might have done had I not caught him by one shoulder.
You have to remember I wasn’t in my right mind. I know I say that a lot, but it’s true. Rarely were we ever in our right minds. How could we be? The world had ended, and we were constantly fighting battles we had no business winning.
My lack of concern over this strange sound didn’t last long, however.
“You okay?” I asked Lee, still gripping his shoulder. His legs gave out on him. Unprepared, he slid from my grip and sat on the floor, his bony body clattering against the concrete. Not exactly as bad as busting your head open, but it couldn’t have felt very nice, that was for sure.
His whole body was shaking. His face had completely drained of all color, so his cheeks looked almost translucent. Still trembling, he raised his arm and
