Red Rover | gxg | Wattys 2023 Winner | ✔

(14) Seven

It doesn't stop tapping, and I want to know what it says.

Some powerful instinct makes me snap the notebook shut. Ditzy behind me whirls around, her weapon tinkling.

"Well, then," says a voice in the doorway. "Looks like you beat us to our runaway."

Ditzy's light is turned away from me. I switch mine off and slip the notebook under my sweater before standing. Then I click my headlamp back on—to red light mode, like that was what I meant to do all along. When I turn around, there's a man in the doorway. He's older than us by a long shot: late thirties, if I had to guess. Beneath a black t-shirt and torn pair of jeans, he's whiter than Ditzy, with dark—even black—hair and a scruff of a beard that doesn't suit him. He leans in the doorway with arms crossed. I take a too-long moment to realize he doesn't have a light of his own.

"Who are you?" I say.

"You guys the Chesnet gang? We saw your friends in the car out there. Nice car, by the way. Real weapon of the apocalypse. I like it."

"You'd better not have touched them."

He holds up both hands. "Not a finger. We're as glad to see you guys as you seemed to be when we talked." He raises an eyebrow at me. "Unless that was my misinterpretation."

"You'll excuse me for not trusting someone who sneaks into a room behind us after stalking our friends in the parking lot. Also, I don't trust most survivors in general these days. Tell me who you are if you want a civil conversation."

He keeps both hands and his eyebrow raised. I hate how nonchalant he's being. Like I'm being a kid for suspecting him.

"Name's Oreo," he says, and all the hairs on the back of my neck rise. "Co-leader of the Anport Rescues, biggest survivor group anywhere around Cape Morgan. At least that we've found. And if I might turn your request for civil conversation back to you, I asked the same question. Are you the group from Chesnet? We were talking with one of you just yesterday. Was that you? Or one of you?"

"One of us," I say tersely.

"Which of you's the leader?"

"She is," says Ditzy, speaking for the first time.

Oreo's eyes skip to her. He takes in everything: her stance, her flail, and—with another twitch of his eyebrow—the spotless and obviously expensive clothes she still insists on wearing. I already hate him. And because he's looking at her and there's a part of me that hates that, too, and because Ditzy's starting to look at him like some kind of foreign excreta, I step in front of her and cross my arms. I'm trying to look tougher than I feel. I'm sure I look ridiculous, but I don't move. "Why are you here?"

At least that gets his eyes on me again. His face remains impassive. "We're not allowed to patrol our own territory?"

"What, after a 'runaway' like you said we beat you to?" I throw a pointed look at Vix's body. "Try again."

Oreo doesn't reply. He's still leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, and in the silence that follows, I find myself pinned by his dark, too-sharp eyes. This is another survivor. The kind who made it through the apocalypse with quick learning, response, and acclimation, rather than by hiding in a basement while the world fell apart. He knows what we do about the Redding, and probably more—he has to, if he's co-leader of a group so much bigger than ours. Sixteen people, he said in an early text, if it was him we were texting.

He's wearing a belt not dissimilar to Vix's. I can't see well enough to tell if there's a knife in the back of it, but I doubt he's unarmed. Not while walking alone, outside, after dark, in the middle of the forest south of Wakewater.