Behind the town home, Jamie sat in a swing. It squeaked lightly as she slumped forward and wrote in a notebook on her lap.
Keats took the swing next to her. "What are you writing?"
She didn't respond right away, which made Keats feel more like an annoying parent than a rebel leader in a post-apocalyptic zombie stronghold. He regretted invading her privacy, but he needed to let her know about their plans.
"Diary?" he guessed.
"God no," she said. "Like it or not, I won't ever need help remembering this place. It's fiction. I've had ideas in my head for as long as I can remember."
"And now you've finally got time to write them down."
She shrugged. "We could get eaten tomorrow. I wanted to leave something in case things ever get back to normal."
Keats realized that she'd grown a few inches taller since he rescued her a month ago. Her jeans now stopped above her ankle, so he made a note to rummage through the upstairs rooms for some clothes, which once again made him feel like an overbearing parent.
"Can I read some?" he said.
He expected her to decline but she was eager to share it. The opening scene featured a police officer driving his car underwater.
"It's good," he said, "but you know they couldn't do that, right?"
"Really?"
"But it's a story, so you can make it do what you want."
"I want it to be realistic, though," she said, suddenly angry. "There was this idiot at the shelter where I was raised. I knew he was full of shit."
Keats watched her scribble some angry notes about her story. "You know we have to leave here," he said.
"No kidding. I don't want to get passed around like a toy and I don't want to worship that freak."
"Can you pretend to, though?"
She looked down and kicked the dirt as she swung over it. "Are you going to make me hang out with him?"
Keats hesitated. "Not by yourself," he said. "But if you can manage to hide your disgust a little bit..."
She jumped off the swing and held her hand out impatiently. Keats realized she wanted her notebook, sohe gave it to her, then she stormed off.
Yes, thought Keats. Just like a parent, only with less authority.
It was going to be Pike's job to talk to Katie and Duck and see if they could be saved from the savior.
She had her doubts about Katie, who looked eager to peel her jeans off for Marco already. But Duck's case was tougher. He was intelligent, but he didn't turn away from the horror inflicted upon Flak in the Church. Should she write them both off as lost causes, or did she have a moral obligation to tell them what Bart had revealed about the town's leader?
For now, she was going to train. She stood in the yard, no birds in the trees as the cool wind portended a change in weather. The clouds looked sick and congested as she snapped her spearhead from her sleeve into her palm while at the same time slipping a wooden pole from a sling on her back.
In less than a second she'd attached the spearhead to the pole. She swung, jabbed, and slashed her spear at invisible enemies around her. She backflipped onto a low-slung tree branch. Improvising her routine, she believed, was key to staying sharp.
But sharp she wasn't. She slipped and fell to the ground. She was lying on top of her spear when she heard the crunching of twigs as something moved through the brush. She tried to spring to her feet but it was too late. A large silhouette appeared above her.
It was Cochise, his bald head slick with early rain, his smile a showcase of ruinous teeth. "Those are some moves you got," he said. "You do more than just fight?"