The next morning marked the first day of their work camp experience. Tori tore her covers off and slid to the edge of the bed, simultaneously looking forward to seeing how the new town worked and trying to come to terms with how fast the world had all but ended.

She shook Diana awake gently, smiling when Diana opened her sleepy eyes. After making sure she was awake Tori hit the bathroom and got everything she needed done out of the way and waited in the living room for Diana to do the same. Since they didn't tell Del directly what they wanted to do their jobs were chosen for them for the first day. Notes wedged between each door marked where each person was supposed to go, with Matthew and Dom on field duty and the girls on produce stands and general cleanup.

They walked down to the street and found Marie smoking a cigarette, waiting for them to come out. Tori would be working the stand that they had stopped at the day before while Diana and Marie would be dispatched to different parts of the city to aide in the cleanup effort. Sweeping glass out of the streets and off the sidewalks, cleaning up trash and helping to remove derelict cars if possible. The produce stand jobs consisted of unloading the delivery trucks and restocking the stands and keeping track of the chips.

"Morning."

"Hey Marie" said Tori, leaning against the wall upwind from the smoke. "Do you know where you guys are supposed to go?"

"Yeah. I'm heading to Saltson Ave and Diana is heading to Main."

"OK, better head out before we're late. I'll see you later?"

"Sure thing" said Marie, throwing her cigarette down and stomping on the butt. She reached forward and gave Tori a hug then smiled at Diana before walking away.

Tori grabbed Diana's hand and pulled her close, leaning her forehead on Diana's hoodie-clad shoulder. She yawned and stood there with her eyes closed for a second, her arms wrapped around Diana's waist. After feeling like she would fall asleep any second she opened her eyes back up and stepped off the wall, angled towards the produce stand two blocks north.

"Have a good day, OK?" said Tori.

"I'll try. You too."

Tori leaned in and gave Diana a soft peck on the lips. "I'll see you when I get home."

The weather was pretty warm for so early in the morning, and Tori wondered what temps the town got up to during the day. She was wearing a turquoise cardigan and dark blue skinny jeans with her trusty converses. Everyone seemed to be in a better mood after getting to take a hot shower the night before. Tori was so excited she ran in before anyone else even had a chance to work out an order, and Diana was almost brave enough to go in there after her.

Almost.

The shops on the strip across from the apartment building were starting to open as well. A woman in a bright colored t-shirt flipped the sign from close to open in her laundry shop. She had signs on the windows that advertised her services, which included wash-dry-fold for a certain amount per pound and all kinds of small tasks, like hemming and sewing buttons. Tori waved as she passed by and the woman waved back. It was strange how people just seemed to be going about life as if nothing ever happened. Going to work, shopping at stores, hanging out in their apartments. Of course, they weren't actually their apartments. But hey, someone's loss, their gain.

The next street over was still being cleaned out and Tori could see a small group of two or three people cleaning out the bottom floor of a two story building. It looked like a storefront on the bottom and maybe some offices up top. A pile of trash bags and some burnt furniture sat out front by the doors, presumably waiting to be picked up by a truck and driven to another part of the city, or wherever the trash was kept. There was still quite a bit they didn't know about the city but she figured that knowledge would come in time. Hopefully it wasn't knowledge that would want to make them leave. The produce stand was in sight but no one was in sight yet. Tori crossed the road towards the stand and when she reached the corner a little boy scooted out from under the table, his arms filled with apples and bananas. He didn't turn around to look at Tori but she caught a glimpse of his face as he stood up and turned to run. She wasn't sure what to do and telling on the boy didn't seem right, so she let it go and headed up to the stand.

An older man with gray hair came out a couple minutes later with a lock box and a pad of paper and pen. He looked down his nose, through his glasses that were perched at the end, and smiled when he laid eyes on Tori.

"Well hello there. I see we have someone new today."

"Yes sir, my name is Tori."

"Pleasure to meet you, Tori. I'm Ralph. I used to own a fruit market a couple of miles from here but it was destroyed in the early riots. Del and the Honovi Tribe came to me a few days ago when I was trying to salvage what was left of my store and told me that I could start new with them, get my own produce stand and everything."

"Looks like you're back to normal. Almost, anyway" said Tori. "Are you going to be here with me or am I watching the place alone?"

"Can't get rid of me that easy" said Ralph. He laughed as he slowly made his way to a solid wood rocking chair and sat down. "I'll be here with you. We don't like to have people working the food jobs by themselves, in case we get scavengers that come through town."

"Does that happen a lot?" asked Tori.

"It's only happened once in the five days we've been working on setting everything up. About three or so weeks ago when the first explosions happened in the downtown area they came around and took what they could from the stores. Expensive things like jewelry and televisions. After that they disappeared and didn't show up again until a few days ago."

"Three weeks ago? I thought this whole thing only started about a week ago."

Ralph laughed again, a hoarse smoker's laugh. "That's the media for you. They tried to cover it all up in the beginning, thinking the military would be able to get a hold on things. But I'll tell you, I've never seen anything go downhill as fast as this country did. Never."

Tori was flabbergasted. Apparently, this had been happening for weeks and they didn't even know it. It explained how Del and the Honovi had gotten everything set up here at least. The thought that the government had tried to cover everything up wasn't that much of a shocker, but it was something entirely different to think how the people on this side of the country had been doing what they'd been doing for literally weeks longer, and they already felt tired. It made her head hurt thinking that if ideas like this town didn't work out that they all could continue living how they were living for a long time into the future.

"My friends and I came here from Chicago. We tried going north to Canada but they weren't allowing people entrance. We figured since the damage had been done this way if we went up around we'd get behind the wave and be a little safer." Tori walked around to the other side of the stand and made sure all of the fruit was nestled in the baskets securely and wouldn't fall.

"Makes sense" said Ralph. He packed an old wooden Sherlock Holmes style pipe with tobacco and lit it with a match. "How'd you find this place?"

"We were in Omaha, heard Del's speech on the radio. We were thinking of going to Alaska to be far removed from all of this but we were also running low on gas, and had trouble finding some around the area we were in."

"Gas is gettin' scarce around here too" said Ralph, puffing his pipe until it cherried. "People are gonna learn real soon what the old days were like, and I don't think they're gonna enjoy it too much."

The morning went pretty quickly as Tori got to know Ralph better and learned more about how the conflict had started. Apparently when the market bottomed out, most of the CEOs of the bigger companies had already liquidated their assets and were preparing to leave the country. Ralph told her about a story that was told on a local public access radio station by a journalist for the L.A. Times stating that it looked as if a lot of the beginning things were orchestrated. None of the bigger media outlets wanted to even touch that story for fear of backlash so it wasn't very widely reported. It made sense though, and corresponded with the video clips she had seen days ago about the bank owners fleeing with their families. Suddenly Tori was feeling a little bitter.

"I've seen that look before kid, let it go."

"It's not fair though" said Tori, turning her chair to face Ralph. "They can't just take all of their stuff and bail and leave us to deal with the aftermath. The real world doesn't work that way."

"You'd be surprised how many things you see in movies are actually possible" said Ralph. "At one point robots were impossible, then we had them. At another point cloning was impossible, and then we had that, too. What's so impossible about rich people buying their way to safety?"

A woman and her two children came up to the produce stand and started looking around at what was available. The kids each grabbed an apple and then the one on the left went for an orange while the one on the right grabbed a kiwi. The mother put them all in a bag she'd ripped off the metal bag stand, which was clearly liberated from a supermarket, and handed it to Tori. She turned and showed Ralph what was in the bag and he held up his last three fingers, signaling the total.

"Is that all?" asked Tori.

"Yes, thanks."

"That'll be three dollars."

The woman gave Tori three white plastic poker chips and continued down the street with her sons in tow. Tori put the chips in the lock box that Ralph had brought out and sat back down in her chair to write what the woman had bought on the notepad. Ralph stared off towards the other end of the street, and Tori suddenly wondered what things this man had seen in his life. She'd always been curious about people. Where they had been, what they had done and seen, who they had met in their travels. But life was usually too busy to really sit down with a stranger and ask them about theirs before the conflict. Now, it seemed like they had all the time in the world to ask the questions they could never ask. Go places they had always wanted to visit but never had time to. The joke was that it didn't matter anymore.

A rumbling started from behind them and grew louder by the second. Tori turned to Ralph who looked up at the sky, standing up from his chair to look towards the roof. Seconds later two F-18 Jets screamed by low enough to the ground that the numbers on their bellies could be read. The boom echoed all throughout the street between the buildings, leaving Tori wondering where they had come from, but more importantly where they were going. She hadn't seen any planes at all in the last week, not even military ones. Ralph watched the tails of the jets disappear over the buildings in the distance as he puffed his pipe.

The early afternoon lunch break hit and the streets filled up with the people from the cleaning and construction crews. Tori learned that the people that worked the fields brought food with them since they were a ways outside of the town. A bunch of people poured into the open market area, checking out the produce stands and the fresh meat market around the corner from Tori's stand. The men in the construction crews pushed their way up front, not out of rudeness, but out of routine. They were on a tighter schedule than the other crews since the Honovi wanted to get some houses ready for the more wealthy people in the town as quickly as possible. Everyone knew they were worked to the bone so they moved out of the way when lunch time came.

Tori shoveled out fruit into the hungry hands of construction workers and cleanup crews for a solid twenty minutes. She fumbled the chips a few times as the people were in a hurry to pay and get gone so they could go back to work. It wasn't until almost the end of the break when she saw Marie and Diana tucked off to the side, waiting for the crowd to clear so they could talk.

"Hey" said Diana, giving Tori a hug. "How's it going?"

"Good" said Tori. "I've been talking with my new friend Ralph here," Tori turned a little and gestured to Ralph who smiled back in kind, "and selling some produce. How about you guys? Is the cleanup hard?"

"It's work, I know that" said Marie, picking up an apple and shining it on her shirt. "We'll be sore tonight." She took a bite of the apple and caught eyes with Ralph, who was waiting for her to pay up. "We just got here yesterday, we don't have any money yet. But I'll pay you back, I promise."

"Any friend of Tori's is a friend of mine" said Ralph, knocking the ash out of his pipe on the side of his rocking chair. "I trust you."

Marie smiled and continued eating her apple, nodding to Diana for her to get something as well. Diana looked through the stand and picked out a nice ripe orange, pulling her pocket knife out to peel it. She looked up at Ralph for approval and he nodded again.

"Have you guys heard anything about what happened out here?" asked Tori.

"Not much." Diana walked around to the other side of the stand and tossed her rind in the trash. "We heard that this area lucked out compared to some of the bigger cities that are close. Denver is completely obliterated and more than half of the city is on fire."

"Well Ralph here told me that this whole situation started three whole weeks ago."

"What?" said both Marie and Diana in unison.

"True story" said Ralph. "We've been out here setting this place up for over a week now. You wouldn't think what we have so far would pop up in a couple days, would you?"

"But then that means-"

"They were covering it up" said Tori. "They tried to keep it quiet thinking the military would fix everything before it got too far out of hand. Problem was they couldn't get a handle on it, and when it spread the media had no choice but to start airing some stories."

"We gotta get back to work" said Diana. "We can continue this conversation with the boys when we all get back later on."

"OK. Don't work too hard" said Tori.

"You know me, I have my ways." Diana smiled and gave Tori a big hug, laughing softly into her ear. Tori didn't want to let go of the source of warmth and angelic laughter in her arms.

Diana and Marie took off to the end of the street and split ways when they reached the corner. Tori returned behind the stand and retreated inside the storefront to where Ralph was standing, looking over the refrigerators that held the extra stock. She made note of what was low outside and carried out supplementary items, stacking them with their like items to fill out the stand once again. The woman across the street diagonally that ran the vegetable produce stand was doing the same thing, and Tori realized the woman must have gotten slammed just as bad during the lunch rush but she was too busy to notice.

The work day ended and Ralph gave Tori a red chip that had a $5 on the front of it. Five dollars for an entire eight hour day of work. She nearly made that in half an hour at the record store in Chicago. That said, they were all going to have to get used to some big changes to resettle into society. Tori took her chip and flipped it over in her fingers, looking at it closely to see what the designs were around the edges.

"Some vendors can make change but if you want you can take it to City Hall and they can exchange it for whites" said Ralph.

"OK, thanks Ralph. You were a big help today."

"You too, Tori. Hopefully you can come back and maybe get a permanent spot here, if you want."

"I'd like that."

Tori was the first one to get home and noticed that a radio had been placed on the coffee table in the living room. A note that rested on top of it read "Leave this turned on with the volume up at all times. Do not tune." A red light peeked out from the back indicating that it was already on, and at closer listen a faint hum could be heard. Tori went into the bedroom she shared with Diana and grabbed a fresh shirt to change into, then headed into the kitchen to stock the fridge with their portion of the food they had split up. She loaded bottles of water into the bottom shelf and set the few fruits they had left onto the top shelf. As she was stocking the door opened and Marie came in, kicking her shoes off and immediately flopping onto the couch.

"That job is going to kill me" she said.

"I think you'll be fine, princess" said Tori.

"Easy for you to say. You get to sit at a stand all day."

"Jealous are we?"

"Maybe a little."

Marie leaned forward and looked at the radio, picking up the note and reading it just as Tori had done. She cast the note aside and noted the frequency before spinning the tuner, seeing if any other stations existed within range. When nothing was found she adjusted it back to where it was. Tori finished up in the kitchen and made her way into the living room as well, slumming into the other side of the couch. There wasn't a whole lot to do in post-crisis America, even with electricity. Tori wondered if maybe there was a shop around that sold any kind of board games or decks of cards so they could have something to do during their time off from work.

They lounged on the couch for a bit until the door opened once more and Diana filed in with Matthew and Dom behind her. They sat on the floor and and stretched, cracking and popping their joints to get comfortable. Diana made her way over to the couch and snuggled in beside Tori.

"How were the fields?" asked Marie.

"Not bad" said Matthew. "It's tough work, but it goes quick since you're always busy. We each got a blue and red chip, equals fifteen dollars."

"I got a blue chip" said Marie, with a nod from Diana on the other side of the couch as she held up her own blue chip."

Tori held up her red chip. "I guess manual labor earns you more."

The end of the day brought some exhaustion as none of them had had a proper meal in almost a week, and the manual labor had taken a lot out of them. Everyone except Diana. She leaned against Tori's side and traced little patterns on the top of her thigh, turning her head this way and that as if she could actually see what she was drawing. Tori watched her with curiosity, wondering how she wasn't lolling her head like the rest of them. But then she remembered: I have my ways. She smiled at the thought of Diana peeking around to see if anyone was watching before using her ability to make the job easier. It was still hard to get her head around the whole concept of magic, though. Where it came from, how it worked, anything really. And then there was her own supposed magic. How did she suddenly become able to feel other people's feelings? What did it all mean? There were a lot of questions but not a lot of time for answers. They had been on the go for days trying to find some sort of purpose, constantly sidetracked with finding food or gasoline or somewhere safe to stay. There weren't really any opportunities for Tori to really sit down with Diana alone and discuss these things, but she made a point to find a way to do that soon.

"Did you hear anything about this place when you were out at the fields?" asked Tori.

"No, we don't really talk out there" said Dom. "Everyone's busy doing their own thing in their own part, and it's kind of spread out."

"I was telling the girls at lunchtime that my boss said this has been going on for a lot longer than we thought. He said about three weeks now."

"Makes sense" said Matthew. "Dom and I were talking last night about how this place is put together, and we were saying how either they had a jump start on everything or the media was late to the party. Either way we don't know the full story."

"Do you guys have guards at your jobs?" asked Dom, getting up off the floor to grab a bottle of water from the fridge.

"We do" said Marie, pointing her thumb to Diana. "They don't really do much though, and most of the time they're even hard to spot."

"Yeah they don't wear uniforms like cops so they blend in easy" said Diana.

"Well we have a lot of guards. And when I say a lot, I mean like fifteen." Matthew felt a bump on his shoulder and looked up, accepting water from Dom. "There's a truck specifically for them at each end of the field. They sit in the backs with rifles and just watch us all day long. If we do something wrong they rush in immediately and correct it, and I even saw a guy get hit in the face with the butt of a gun."

"Sounds like they're really protective of the food supply" said Tori.

As the sun continued to lower in the sky the radio crackled to life, making Diana and Matthew both jump as they were closest to it. A man cleared his throat and started speaking and they instantly recognized the voice of Del.

"We're having a town meeting tonight at the YMCA Auditorium. We would like for everyone to join us in thirty minutes. Thank you." The radio went silent again.

"Think we should go?" asked Diana.

"Might as well. We're new and he'll know if we aren't there" said Dom. "Let's head out."

They walked the two blocks to the YMCA and headed into the auditorium which was already packed with people. They weren't sure exactly how many people lived in the new town but it seemed like quite a few. Some of the guards were centered on the stage setting up a microphone and a table and chair for Del, while Del himself got ready on the side of the stage. The group went up a few rows and found some empty spots just to the left of center stage where they sat and waited for whatever was about to happen. After another five minutes the light dimmed and spotlight shone on stage directly above the microphone, to which Del stepped up to a smattering of applause.

"Thank you ladies and gentleman. First off, I want to thank you all for taking the time to come here at my request, that's very gracious of you. Secondly I want to welcome all of the new people that have showed up over the past few days. Everyone has adjusted to our little town very well. I'm excited to see a lot of smiling faces here tonight, especially since everything we knew literally crumbled around us just weeks ago, and is still crumbling now as we speak. It's not easy to lose everything you've ever worked for and revert to a lifestyle you've never known, but everyone in this room tonight has done just that, and done it very well.

"We still have a long way to go before we're fully self sufficient and running like a real town should, but we're off to a great start. Shay and her family have done a wonderful job setting up the produce stands. Marcus and his brother John are doing a fantastic job getting everyone acquainted with the fields and how to tend them correctly. We've all come together beautifully to create a safe haven in the middle of a conflict that threatened to tear our very foundation out from under out feet. We've banded together as brother and sister with our neighbors, welcomed strangers from different parts of the country that have sought refuge here and set a precedent for what any new towns that form after us will follow.

"We are the first of our kind in this new country. That said, there will be people that try to come and take what we've built here. Most people thought it would be nothing but chaos for months until the whole country was destroyed, and then another six months after that to get started what we have here. I didn't see it that way." The crowd cheered and whistled while Del smiled politely and raised his hand for silence. "I watched people change in an instant. Go from normal, happy Americans to crazed neanderthals in mere hours, torching cars and stealing, fighting each other and hoarding supplies. I knew those people would flake out quickly. Kill each other off or disappear into oblivion. But not us."

"What happened to Ron?" Someone in the back right side had stood up and was yelling out to Del. "He spoke out about you and now he's gone, what did you do with him?"

A smattering of conversation hit at once. People buzzed to their neighbors about what could have possibly happened. Did he leave? Was he forced to leave? Did something worse happen? Everyone speculated on these questions until Del waved them down, silencing the crowd once more.

"Now now, let's not get accusatory. I had a discussion with Ron about his behavior, and he questioned me about my policies and what I planned to do with Wanagi." Del crossed from one side of the stage to the other as he talked, taking his time in choosing his words. "He didn't like what I had to say. He tried to impose his ideas onto me instead of suggesting some kind of workable compromise, and when he turned violent I had him removed from my office with the sentence of banishment. He's a hot-headed man with a short fuse, and I don't feel like our residents would be safe with him here, and that's the basis of what Wanagi is all about; safety."

Tori turned around and made eye contact with Dom, who was staring intently at Del and watching his every move. She looked next to him and Matthew was doing the same, eyes full of analytical intent. Diana picked at a loose string on her shoe and Marie scanned the crowd, getting a feel for all of the different faces of the town. The woman who had stood to ask about Ron sat down and said nothing else for the rest of the assembly.

"Now, I knew that if I got the people of my tribe together and we put our resources into setting up a safe house that we would be able to save the good ones. The people that wanted to be saved, the people that understand you can't just throw everything out the window because your world changes on you. So we did just that. Then one house turned into two, into three. Before we knew it we had dozens of people looking to us to save them, to pull them out of this hell our country has become. And thus, Wanagi was born.

"Wanagi means ghost or spirit, which seemed fitting when we first came to Cheyenne. This place was a ghost town. Bombings and car fires were rampant, trash littered the streets and animals ran wild. We thought if we could clean up a small area of the town we could transport the refugees we had and start the building blocks of a new life. So we did just that. And now, look at us!" Del opened his arms up to the crowd and everyone cheered again, hooting and hollering and stamping their feet on the bleachers. "We have persevered, and we shall prosper!"

The louder the cheering got the more uncomfortable Tori became. She looked at the rest of their group, who for the most part mimicked her expression. Dom looked as if he didn't trust a word the man in the slick suit had to say and Matthew was the same. There was definitely something wrong with this picture, they just weren't sure what. Not yet anyway.