“Are you hungry?” Shannon asked, staring at John.
Barry and Jared exchanged quick and knowing glances as John answered, “No, I’m good, thanks.” John wished Barry and Jared hadn’t been so quick to recognize the extra attention Shannon was giving him.
John turned back to Jared and Barry, catching the tail end of their silent communication, and gave Jared a glare, causing both men to stare down at their hands, Barry picking at a nail while Jared just drummed his fingers lightly on the tabletop. Shannon went back to helping Essie with her studies as the men sat in an uncommunicative stalemate for several agonizing minutes. John was the first to break the silence.
“So, the way I see it is we find your friend…what’s his name?”
“Dwight Ellsworth,” Barry answered while looking John directly in the eye.
“Okay, so we go convince Dwight to come back here and start rebuilding in the form of our little community, and then what?”
“We have to see what Dwight has to say about the batteries,” Barry reminded him.
John pantomimed his doubt at this approach, wanting a more long-term plan if they were going down into the belly of the beast. “If we’re going to come off the relative safety of this mountain and go down into a possible hornet’s nest to get your friend, we should have a list of things we can accomplish before we come home. I don’t want to fight my way in, then out, only to find myself back at this table in a month, chatting about what we should have brought back. We need a fucking shopping list before we go and a plan on how to get everything back up here.”
Jared flashed John a look, then flipped his chin towards Essie, by way of telling the other man to watch the profanity.
“Sorry,” John muttered under his breath.
“I guess we could plan on collecting the solar panels along with whatever components are needed to operate them. We do that on our way back, and Dwight can give us some insight.” Barry paused for a moment. “Wait, who is in charge here?” he asked, glancing back and forth between John and Jared.
Shannon looked up from her teaching at the three men at the table. No one spoke for a full ten seconds.
“Well, you can’t be,” Barry said, nodding toward John. “You haven’t the slightest idea what’s going on when it comes to getting power going out here.”
John’s mouth twitched, but he remained mute as he stared at what he considered a twerp of a human sitting across from him. Barry hadn’t meant to be disrespectful; he was simply stating facts and lacked the social and survival skills needed to understand there might have been a safer manner in which he could have worded his proclamation.
“No one is in charge; we work together here for a common goal, which is our survival,” Jared soothed, sensing John’s disdain for the socially inept buffoon sitting across from them.
John got up, walked over to a drawer in the kitchen, and pulled out a small pad of paper and a pen. He stepped back to the table and dropped it in front of Barry. “Write what you think we should pick up while we’re out there, and we—as a group—will collectively decide what we’re going to do,” John finished, stepped to the door, grabbed his rifle, and walked out of the house into the front yard.
Shannon hesitated a moment before getting to her feet. “Jared, can you help her?”
Jared nodded, and Shannon followed John out of the house.
Essie watched Shannon go, then turned to Jared. “She has a crush on him,” Essie said as innocently as only a child can say something like that.
Jared’s mouth dropped slightly open at first before he got to his feet and plopped down on the couch next to the insightful little waif. “What makes you say that, Essie?”
“I just know.”
Jared looked up at Barry, who was watching the two with a blank look painted on his face. “Well, let’s not talk about it when they’re around, okay? Might embarrass them,” Jared cajoled.
Essie looked up at Jared. “Okay.”
Jared was about to pick up Essie’s math and direct her back to her studies when she piped up again. “You’re going back down to where I used to live?”
“Not exactly, but yes, we are planning on going back to the city.”
“Can you go to my old house and get my lovey and my pony box?”
Jared was taken aback by Essie’s request. After what she’d been through, he never wanted to say no to her even though Bart had assured him Essie still needed discipline in her life. Jared felt trapped; this was one of those things he had to give a straight answer on. If he lied and said yes, she would know when he returned empty-handed, and if he said no, well, he was sure she would demand an explanation. After what he’d done to the villains who murdered her family, Jared felt confident Essie viewed him as invincible, which he felt far from. Before answering, Jared forced himself not to make eye contact with Barry.
“I’m not sure we’re going by your old house, Essie. With no cars—”
She cut him off. “We have a car,” Essie announced as if Jared hadn’t been aware of the VW’s existence.
“Well, we can’t use it to go into town right now because it’s loud, and the bad people will hear it and come make trouble for us.”
The girl pressed him further. “Will you try if you go that way?”
Jared smiled and used his voice inflections in an effort to convince Barry and the girl of two very different answers. “Of course I’ll try. We’ll all try,” Jared finished, smiling at the little human seated next to him. His true intentions were
