It was probably more words than he had ever said at once in his life, but they felt right, and he was glad to get them out. He had made his decision, and there wasn't anything that anyone could say that would change his mind.
Katie sat up on the bed and put her feet on the floor. "Then I'm going with you."
"No," Joan said. "I don't know what's wrong with you, but clearly, overexertion has something to do with it. You go out there with Mort, and you're liable to get both of yourselves killed or worse."
"I'll go with you," a voice said from the doorway.
It was the woman whom he thought might have been pretty at one point. Her eyes were two dark pools of crazy. He'd seen those eyes before, under the bridges where ex-soldiers sometimes lived, trapped in the memories of their past, operating the only way they could, in survival mode. He didn't want the woman going along with him. His past experience told him she would be dangerous, unreliable. "I can do it by myself. And besides, you're pregnant. There's no sense in you risking the baby."
The woman looked at him, and he couldn't tell if she was laughing at him or just picturing him dead. "This old thing?" she asked, patting roughly on her pregnant stomach. "I don't give a shit if it lives or dies. And besides, you ever gutted a bear before?"
Mort shook his head. "No, but I can figure it out."
"You ever carried the meat from a bear? It's hundreds of pounds of meat if you do it right. That means multiple trips out there. And from the way you're carrying that shoulder, I know you can't carry all of that yourself."
Mort didn't have any smart answers for that. He was not one for smart answers.
"So you're not stupid," she said in response to his tacit silence. "That's good. So don't be stubborn. I'll go with you."
"Maybe we should all go," Katie said.
Joan shook her head. "We can't. We leave here, and we're never getting back in."
"Why is that?" Mort said, though he had an inkling of the answer.
"Those ladies out there aren't the biggest fans of ours. The only reason we're not dead or out on our own is that they need me, and I can't go walking out in the woods right now," she said, pointing to her leg.
Mort sighed. He wished Katie was well enough to go with him. He knew her and trusted her. But that's not the way it was meant to be. "Okay. It is what it is."
He walked over to the crazy woman and held out his hand. "My name's Mort."
She shook his hand, and he was surprised at the strength in her grip. "Name's Dez." She smiled at him as they let their hands drop. "I never shook hands with death before."
"Huh?" Mort asked.
"Your name. It's Latin for dead."
He'd heard it before, from maudlin old-timers underneath the freeway bridges. Deep in their wine, they would tell him that he was dead. Truth be told, he had always felt that way, like a ghost walking through the world trying never to be seen. But he didn't feel that way now. He knew he had friends to come back to. He knew that he was seen and appreciated. "Well, I'm not dead, and I hope to keep it that way," he said, putting on his best smile.
Dez nodded at him at smiled.
He didn't know what that smile meant. You never did with crazy people.
****
Before they could go, Mort helped the ladies he didn't know clear out the dead from around the trailers. He didn't enjoy the feeling of killing the dead. He thought it was undignified, but it was something that had to be done.
The snow had continued to fall overnight, and the dead stood mid-thigh in the snow, banging on the chain-link fence or pounding on the walls of the trailers. He jabbed the spear downward, careful not to overbalance and tumble off the top of the slick trailer roof. The snow on top of the trailers was thick. At the bottom of that snow, there was a thin layer of ice that made the roof slippery. This, in turn, made plunging the spear downward a dangerous proposition.
But they were able to clear the dead in no time with no accidents. The bird-like woman, Tammy, opened the gate for him and Dez, and they strode out into the snow, dragging the bodies of the dead away from the trailers.
Tammy slammed the gate shut behind them, and he heard the chain rattle as she locked it up tight. Throughout the whole process of clearing the compound, the two groups had shared hardly a word. Dez didn't say a single thing, and from the way she glared at the other women, he assumed she probably wanted to kill them. Maybe he'd ask her about it once they got away from camp, or maybe he'd just leave it alone.
With the bodies dragged away, they began to move towards the road. Mort was armed with a spear now, but his hammer hung at his waist. The spear was better for his shoulder, but he wasn't practiced with it. "You have any practice with these things?" he asked Dez.
"Things?" she asked.
"The dead."
She shook her head. "I've mostly been tied to a bed for this entire thing. I didn't get free until a month ago."
"Tied to a bed? Why was you tied to a bed?"
"You sure you want
