Emmit was speaking before he could stop himself, his glasses sliding in a fresh glaze of nervous sweat.
"Was his leg broken?" He asked, and although he knew he wasn't yelling, it sure as hell felt like he was. His voice felt brassier than Roy's. It gave him the same sensation one might feel if he suddenly stood up in a crowded movie theater, cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled "fire".
"Excuse me?" Roy replied, narrowing his eyes. "By the way, go ahead and speak, Papa."
"Shut the fuck up," Poke said under his breath, relying on vulgar commands in his usual unintelligent form. Emmit ignored him.
"His leg. Was it broken, or had it been stabbed?"
Roy knelt, resting his massive weight on one knee, and still he towered above Emmit. Emmit fought the urge to scoot back away from him. He was defending himself, fighting for validity— that meant not backing down.
"You know, somewhere between chopping his head off, even as he smiled at me, and digging a grave for a man you killed, I didn't notice," he said, his bearded lips curling away from his teeth. They looked long and sharp in the dim firelight, the yellowed points interlocking like a sabretooth tiger's jaws. Roy's face resembled a swimming shark's pointed maw, emotionless and predatory at the same time. "Now. How about you stop talking out of turn and listen, before I move you to the vacant apartment beside his?"
Emmit could feel the raw emotion seething out of him, and he couldn't keep the hatred from materializing on his face. It was like trying to clothe his naked body with a single square of toilet paper. He could feel the muscles tightening and moving, sending bolts of pain radiating out from his mark. His eyes squinted and twitched behind his smeary frames. By some means, unbelievably, he was able to keep his mouth shut until Roy was satisfied that the point had been driven home.
"The bad news," Roy suddenly bellowed, scaring the shit of all of them as he pretended he needed to speak up to be heard over all the interruption, "is that Muddy was tailing a massive horde of Links. I've been calling it a Megahorde. I know we all fought a couple of big groups that had broken off from the main swarm, but this big bastard... I'll be honest boys; it scared the Christ out of me. And I do not scare easily."
He tapped his finger against the shelf to emphasize each word. I. Do. Not. Scare. Easily.
"We have some options," he continued, gesturing with his hands. "I don't particularly like them but seeing a Megahorde like that has me convinced. I think we need to move. We could try to build fences around our perimeter, maybe engineer some traps, punji pits, something along those lines. But if a pack of Links that size hit this place all at once, it would be like a bulldozer. Just the weight of all those bodies alone would be enough to flatten this cabin. Now, I built this cabin from nothing, while I was here alone and starving. If we all work together, we can relocate somewhere farther away and start fresh. Maybe even build a bigger, better camp, with separate rooms and fences, pikes, guard towers..."
Emmit tranced out as Roy was constructing imaginary buildings with his hands, only half listening to Roy's plans to organize expeditions and caravans, build collapsible tents for temporary shelter, create reinforced axes for felling trees. None of it mattered. Emmit didn't plan to stick around for any of these big ambitions. His life was elsewhere, his estranged wife and son were elsewhere. He wouldn't be committing to any long-term projects to civilize the frozen wasteland, especially projects that might take him farther away from where the Rev had allegedly seen the light.
Never mind the fact that you haven't seen it for yourself yet.
That didn't matter, couldn't matter, because it was the only lead and the only hope of escape he had. His entire world had come to a screeching halt, pitching him into a strange timeline where the moon didn't exist, animals and germs didn't exist, and dead men walked. Was it really so insane to believe that there might be a portal, a time warp of some sort, glowing out there in the perilous dark that might send him hurtling back across time and space to pick up where he had left off?
He made up his mind as Roy was finishing a detailed explanation of how to build the framework for a tower, crisscrossing his fingers as he spoke while the other men listened quietly. He decided he would leave the very first time he saw the light, without hesitation.
If you're not the next Provider.
Well, that was a possibility. But that's what the secret spearhead was for. Let them try to kill him. Let them just fucking try.
"It's a daunting task, for sure," Roy was saying as Emmit focused on him again. "And we can't start a plan this huge on empty stomachs. Which brings me to the really bad news."
"Oh no," Pup whimpered, and hugged his knees to his chest. He buried his pimply face between them, his hair hanging over his kneecaps in greasy tangles. He began to rock slowly back and forth.
"We haven't had any new arrivals since Papa here. Poke and I haven't heard so much as a peep out there, not from anything still human. What you just ate represents the last of our food supply."
He turned, lifted the small wooden cup of toothpicks, and
