He knocked on the door to announce their presence as they entered the house, shouted through a reinforced wall and mentioned four people by name, but still he and Paige found themselves looking down a trio of shotgun barrels when the panic room door swung open.
“You guys need to come up with a secret knock,” Paige said as she helped Waggoner sit down inside the cramped secret room. “That would cut down on a lot of grief.”
“You don’t know what grief is, lady,” said a man in his late fifties with a salt and pepper beard and skin tanned to a dark bronze. “For all we know, you could turn into one of those things.”
Barely taking notice of the guns pointed at her, Paige looked at the people in the room and focused on what she could feel in her scars. “Seriously, a secret knock isn’t that hard. Two quick followed by three slow. Or what about the ol’ shave and a haircut?”
One of the people not holding a shotgun was a short woman with cropped red hair and a kind, soft face. “Shave and a haircut?” she asked with a distinct New Jersey accent.
“You know . . .” Paige stretched out a hand to strike the first part on the wall. Knock . . . knock knock-knock knock. Before she could get to the last two, something rumbled beneath their feet.
All of the shotguns were pointed at her as the man with the beard snapped, “Don’t make a goddamn sound!”
She knew it was Mongrels passing nearby, but still waited another couple of seconds before saying, “Two bits. You guys have any Tupperware?”
The panic room was roughly half the size of the adjacent bedroom. Fourteen people were crammed inside, along with boxes of food, crates of bottled water, two flashlights, three cots, four shotguns, and a small television set. There was barely enough room for anyone to move, and nobody wanted to speak loud enough to be heard over the chugging of the air circulation system. The bearded man broke the uneasy silence with a single question.
“What the hell did you just say?”
“I need Tupperware,” Paige told him. “Or any container with a sealed lid. I know that seems strange, but—”
“I have Tupperware,” the redheaded woman said. “In the kitchen. I can show you.”
“You’re not leaving this room, Ginger,” the bearded man said.
She leaned over to look around the man’s bulky frame so she could make eye contact with Paige. “Far right cabinet in the kitchen. You can’t miss it.”
“Thanks. What about some water, something to drink, maybe some food?”
Before anyone could object, the redhead held a hand out to the man and said, “These people are out there fighting those things, they can take whatever they can find.” To Paige, she said, “Anything.”
“Thanks. Is there room for one more in here?”
Waggoner looked at Paige. “You ain’t abandoning me!”
“And you aren’t about to run anywhere with that leg. If you come with us, you’ll either slow us down or die alone. If you stay here, you’ll be safe until we can get you patched up for real. Besides, it you’re going to join the big leagues, you need to stay alive and healthy through this.”
Returning her wary smile with one of his own, Waggoner looked over to the bearded man and asked, “So you got room for one more or not?”
Looking down at Waggoner’s bandaged leg, the bearded man grunted and stepped aside. “I suppose, since it’s you.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” With that, Waggoner eased back and stretched his wounded leg out in front of him. “I’ll just need a little time to heal up,” he told Paige. “Then I can be right with you again.”
“You’ve got a phone?”
“Of course. And now,” Waggoner said, and tossed his keys to her, “you’ve got a truck. Don’t bust it up too bad.”
Paige went into the kitchen to look for the Tupperware. The redhead was right, she couldn’t miss it. At least four piles of the colorful plastic containers were piled high in the far right cabinets with lids stacked neatly beneath them. After she found a piece that was just the right size to hold the pound of flesh she’d extracted from Kawosa, she popped the lid shut and said, “I’ve got to get me some of this stuff.”
Collecting some bottled water, chips, and snack cakes to stuff into her pockets, she returned to the panic room just as the bearded man was closing the door. “Here,” she said, handing the container to Waggoner.