There were a couple of oil lamps sitting around, and heavy curtains that were pulled open to let in the sunshine. She suspected those heavy curtains did a lot at night to help hold the heat inside.
“Want some coffee?” he asked.
She didn’t normally drink coffee this late in the day, but the warmth would be welcome, as well as something to occupy her hands. “Yes, thank you,” she said, and took the chair at the table that he indicated.
“How do you drink it?”
“Ah . . . black.” She did now, anyway.
He made two mugs of instant and brought them to the table, setting one in front of her and choosing the chair across from her for himself. Then he waited. He’d already asked once what was wrong, and evidently saw no need to repeat himself.
She took a deep breath. There was so much weighing on her, and maybe she’d be more coherent if she laid things out chronologically.
“One: Carol fell down the stairs yesterday and broke her leg. She’s out of action for a couple of months, and evidently I’m heir to be community leader, because no one else wants to do the job other than Ted Parsons, and no one wants him to do it, so I’m the patsy.
“Two: about three this morning, someone broke into the Livingstons’ house. Jim and Mary Alice heard him, got up, and”—she swallowed—“he shot at them, and Jim shot him, twice, and killed him. Jim and Mary Alice are okay, just upset. The man was from the Nashville area, according to his driver’s license. We recorded what happened and his identity as best we could, and buried him.”
At that news, Ben straightened, his green eyes turning almost feral, but he relaxed some once she said the Livingstons weren’t hurt.
“Finally, at the meeting today, I told everyone about the gasoline in my tanks. Trey Foster is going to rig a suction pump and we’ll start distributing it tomorrow morning at nine. If you need to fill up, tomorrow’s the day.”
He nodded.
She left out the part about Carlette Broward because, while it had been upsetting, in the long run that wasn’t important.
“I’m afraid the man from Nashville is just the beginning. If he could find his way here, others can. I don’t know what to do, and no one else seems willing to make any decisions. We have the community patrol, but slipping past them wouldn’t be hard at all.”
He nodded again and said impassively, “You should expect trouble, from here on out.”
She already did, and that was why she was here. “I don’t know how many people are on the move—”
“A lot. Pretty much everyone in the cities who survived the first month. I get news over my radio system, and now that the atmosphere has settled down I’m hearing transmissions from coast to coast.”
She didn’t know whether to be happy that people were getting news out, because that was a tiny bit of civilization returning, or alarmed by the phrase “survived the first month.”
“How bad is it?”
“In the big cities, it’s total disaster. The smart ones were the ones who got out right away.” He regarded her for a moment, his eyes grim. “You don’t want to know the details.”
No, she probably didn’t. If Ben said it was bad, it was bad on a level she didn’t want to know. “If a lot of people are moving out of the snowbelt . . . Ted Parsons, the one who wants to be community leader, thinks we should let them in, that there’s safety in numbers—”
His eyebrows went up. “Stupid.” The succinct answer echoed her own gut instinct, that letting in people they didn’t know was risky, and would strain their resources to the point that everyone suffered. She wanted to be humanitarian, but she also wanted to survive. This first winter would be the hardest. If the power was still out next winter, at least they would have had the summer to plant and harvest, and they’d be better prepared.
“What should we do?”
“Shoot first, ask questions later. That’s what I plan to do.”
The simple, brutal advice left her breathless. Despite the violence at the Livingston house, part of her hadn’t quite accepted that things would come to that.
“You do have a weapon, don’t you?” he asked, his eyebrows going up again as if he couldn’t conceive of not being armed.
“Yes. Carol and I both have .22 rifles. She calls them our varmint guns.”
He didn’t look impressed, but then she hadn’t expected him