"They've got guns now, and they kind of know how to use them," Tejada said. "What do you want? Revenge or to keep breathin'?"
That shut Whiteside up, and no one else raised any objections. "No. We were gonna leave anyway. We're on the road a little sooner than I wanted, but this was always the plan."
"So, what are we gonna do?" Epps asked, before hocking a gob of spit into the snow.
"We're gonna go shopping," he said.
Chapter 3: Old Wound Burning
Joan was glad she couldn't see the grave buried under all the snow. For the thousandth time, she thought, All that work, and she couldn't be saved. She felt the loss of Clara deeply, as she probably should have felt the loss of her parents and other members of her family. But she hadn't seen them. She hadn't known how they died. They could still be alive somewhere for all she knew.
She hadn't seen Clara's death, either. But she had seen the aftermath. Clara's death, after they had successfully rescued her from being buried in the ground, had hit her harder than anything so far. She thought of all those they had lost, Zeke, Lou, Blake, Clara, maybe Mort. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed the tears in her eyes to go away. She didn't want the others to see.
Their camp consisted of six people now. They held a tenuous peace at best. The only reason she was still alive was the fact that she was a doctor. Every single person in the camp besides herself was pregnant, and she would be needed during the births. Those were still a month or two away, but she would be needed. The only thing was, she didn't know how many of them would still be alive in a month or two.
Besides herself, the camp consisted of four pregnant ladies she knew next to nothing about, and Katie, another pregnant lady that she had been with since near the beginning. Tammy sat in a lawn chair, her naturally curly blonde hair forming a wild afro around her head. Bits of grass bobbed in her hair, giving it the appearance of a bird's nest. Tammy had said next to nothing to Joan since the whole compound had gone to shit. Joan knew that she and Katie were to blame for that blank look on her face. With their men gone, Tammy and the other women had sunk into a depression.
Liz, the woman to Tammy's left, held a spear in her hands and stared off into space. The wood at the end of the spear had been stained red from killing the dead. Every day, she climbed on top of the trailers and killed the dead. When one of the dead would come calling, banging on the thin metal walls of the trailers, she was the first one to waddle to one of the ladders. Her belly was swollen with child, and she said she would be due in a month. Joan watched her absentmindedly scratch a large brown mole on her cheek.
Joan had lost track of time, but these ladies seemed to do nothing but talk about it. They had target dates and calendars on their minds. Every day for them was another day closer to giving birth. Then they wouldn't need her anymore. After the children were delivered, she would be expendable.
She knew this was the case, mostly because Theresa was still alive. Out of all the women that could have died the night they took over the compound and rescued Clara, temporarily, Theresa was the one that Joan would have volunteered. Theresa wore her emotions on her sleeve. She was a livewire, a white-trash timebomb without a filter. Over the last month, Theresa had threatened to kill her no less than a dozen times. These threats seemed to come out of nowhere.
One time, they had all been eating a meal of creamed green beans, straight from a can, when Theresa had paused in her meal and looked across the fire, locking eyes with Joan. "I should kill you right now," she said.
"Then why don't you?" Joan had asked. She would not let Theresa bully her. The others around the campfire didn't stand up for her, didn't say a word. This included Katie and Dez, the two crazies of their group.
Theresa had thought long and hard, the fire dancing off her eyes. "That would be too easy for you, I think." And with that, they had all gone back to eating, each of them lost in their own thoughts.
A touch on her shoulder broke her out of her thoughts. It was Katie, one of the two crazies. "You, ok?" she asked.
"What? Oh, yeah. I was just thinking." Truth was, that's all Joan really did these days. Her leg prevented her from doing much else. "Can you help me up? I wanna go inside. I'm freezing." Katie, without a smile or any reaction at all, held out her arm. Joan propped her spear on the ground and pushed herself up, gasping in pain.
She tried to keep still for much of the day; her leg had healed badly after being broken. She feared it would never be a hundred percent. Back in her doctor days, if she had seen a case like hers, she would have recommended re-breaking the leg and setting it properly. But that was not how the world worked anymore. Now, she took what she got. She would most likely have a limp for the rest of her days, and if she wanted to walk any more than a few dozen feet, she would need a cane.
With Katie's help, she was able to hobble to the abandoned ranger station that she temporarily called home. The inside of the station was a wreck, and
