Camp Romeo turned out to be the civilian sector of Olympia. The only place in town where soldiers weren’t in the majority. The jeep rumbled to a stop on a road lined with quaint little houses, their lawns perfectly maintained and slickly green with the light rain. There were no lights on in those houses, but there was no need for them, since there were people everywhere. Normal looking people going about their business, looking unafraid. It was like Tim had fallen backwards in time, to before everything went to shit. There was a coffee shop where people were sitting eating soup. There was a bookstore full of people looking for something to read. There were people talking on cell phones and others driving cars and even a couple holding hands.

Suddenly it was not okay to be wearing nothing but a damp blanket. People stared at Tim and whispered amongst themselves, some turned away with red cheeks. “I need to get some dry clothes. Horne could have given me a set of fatigues to wear,” Tim said.

Buzzard nodded amiably. “Yeah, he could have. But you gotta understand. That’s a man who likes to leave a firm impression on you. He wanted you ashamed and feeling vulnerable, huh?”

Tim looked at the older man. “You sound like you’re not a fan.”

Buzzard spat in the street. “Hate the guy. We all do, and that’s just how he wants it. If we hate him he knows he can’t trust us. If we pretended to like him he’d never know if it was real or not. Now I’m not saying I’m not grateful. He keeps us alive, right? And clean. He could be less of a dick about it, though.”

Tim said nothing. He imagined that everything Horne had done to him—giving him an overly-vigorous health inspection, burning his clothes, injecting him with the RFID chip—had come straight out of some FEMA or US Army manual on how to deal with survivors in the aftermath of a lethal viral outbreak. Horne had a tough job, to keep all these civilians alive in a place trapped between multiple PZs, and Tim could find some respect inside him for anyone who had the willpower to make that happen. Yet already he was starting to think of the Colonel as his enemy.

Did Buzzard, and maybe the other civilians in Camp Romeo, hate Horne enough to be allies? He had no idea who he could trust.

Buzzard took him to a shop that sold sportswear. Tim picked out a black windbreaker, some t-shirts and a couple pair of jeans, socks, underwear. A pair of Timberland hiking boots. He reached into his pack to get money to pay for everything but the store clerk shook his head. “Dude, it’s on the Colonel. He called over like ten minutes ago and said you’d be coming in”

Tim thanked the sales clerk and went to the dressing room to, well, dress. He left his less-than-fresh blanket on a hook. Feeling about ninety per cent more human, he let Buzzard lead him across the street to a boarding house where he could get a room.

“You’ll love Helena. She used to be a professor at the college. Lead the students when they said they wouldn’t be evacuated. General Forbes had her kids taken away by force, but she was chained to a lamp post so they just left her. Not,” Buzzard said, leaning in close, “a huge fan of the military.”

They walked up a short flight of steps onto a tidy porch lined with rocking chairs. At the side door an enormous woman met them. She had silver hair falling in ringlets down to her waist, which was wrapped with a bright purple skirt. Its fringe draped across the floorboards. She smiled so broadly and warmly that he was stopped dead in his tracks. He hadn’t imagined anyone would ever look at him like that again. “You must be Tim,” she said.

“Um, yes,” Tim admitted.

“Hello, Tim. And welcome. Will you come in and have some lunch with us?”

He nodded agreeably. He was starving.

“Are you a vegetarian, Tim? Or a vegan? We can accommodate that if you are. Do you keep kosher or halal?” She lead him through a front room and into a broad dining area where a dozen or so people were seated around a massive oak table. They were sharing loaves of bread and some kind of stew. “I suppose the only real problem would be if you ate gluten-free. You don’t have celiac disease, do you, Tim? Because if you do we’ll find a way. There must be some spelt still in one of the specialty grocery stores, if someone just bothers to go look for it. Are you sensitive to gluten?”

“No, no, I’m not. You were a professor, Helena?” he asked.

“In a past life,” she said, and flashed him the big smile again. “Ethology. Doesn’t mean what you think it does, by the sound of it. Please, now, both of you, sit. Eat! It’s good food, I made half of it myself. I’ll see about sorting out a room for you, Tim, while you meet everyone, that’s Carl, and Bobby, and Franke. Don’t be shy, introduce yourself. That’s grapefruit juice in that pitcher. I’ll be right back.” She swept out of the room with a twirl of a pashmina and left the two of them to find their own seats.

Tim shook some hands, introduced himself around. He sat down at an empty place and helped himself to a corn muffin. The main course was a clam stew, the white meat flaky and delicate, not very chewy at all. “Geoducks,” one of the diners told him, when he remarked on it. “You don’t want to know what they look like before they go in the pot, but they taste fine cooked.”

Tim smiled and started piling food onto a plate. Yellow sunlight leaked in through the broad windows at the back of the room and lit up the bowls and trays full of good, healthy food. The people around the table laughed and gossiped amongst themselves. Warmth, food, companionship. It had been a long time. Tim’s body sagged into his chair, a wound-up tension inside him coming loose.

“Almost makes you forget there’s half a million droolers just up the road, huh?” Buzzard asked, crumbs of cornbread stuck in his beard.