“By all accounts you’re fitting in nicely,” Helena said. She made it sound like she hadn’t expected that to be the case. “Buzzard tells me you’re a hard worker, and we can certainly use all of those we can scratch up.”

“It’s either work or starve, right?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Some people have a hard time adjusting. Some of them function just fine but you can see a blankness in their eyes—they’ll never stop seeing the horrors. Other people just curl up in bed and can’t seem to get up again.”

Tim thought of Augusta, his cousin’s roommate. She’d been like that. He hadn’t known there were people like that in Camp Romeo but he supposed it made sense. These people had been right at ground zero in the first American Plague Zone. They acted happy and well-adjusted but they must all have been exposed to things no human being should ever have to see. Many of them, he knew, had lost family members, just like himself. Others had seen their sons taken away to become soldiers. There was probably a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder going around. Either he’d been blind to it or they’d hidden it from him, put on a brave face to make him think the Camp was a kind of demi-paradise.

“It’s a bad time for all of us,” he said, which sounded like it fell ludicrously short of the point. It was all he had, though. Ever since he’d watched Karen die he’d had trouble summoning much sympathy for anyone else.

“Then there are the guys who think they’re more badass than the apocalypse,” Buzzard said. “The ones who want to go over to Horne’s office and knock that chip off his shoulder. They’re the ones we watch out for.”

It took Tim a second for him to realize they included him in that category. He felt his throat grow thick and he said nothing.
“As far as you’re concerned,” Helena said, “we all know you didn’t see yourself ending up here. I’m of the mind that you can settle down, if we show you how good a life we’ve made here. Buzzard has a different opinion.”

“Oh?” Tim asked, swallowing hard.

The reporter leaned forward in his chair, struggling against the giant cushion. “I think you’re just biding your time. That you’re going to pull a runner the first chance you get.”

Tim could feel his cheeks flushing.

“You’ve been asking a lot of questions,” Buzzard said. “About stuff that maybe you should just forget about. You know, if you want to be one of us.”

He hadn’t thought he’d been so obvious.

“You lost a great deal,” Helena said, looking sympathetic. “Now you want revenge. It’s only natural to want to punish the one who took it from you. That’s understandable. Being a student of animal behavior has taught me a few things about what makes people tick. I know you’re being pulled in a very dark direction right now. But you have a choice. You can turn away from that reckless path. You can make your peace with things.”

“Or you can pull some bonehead play and get us all in hot water,” Buzzard countered. “If you try to escape, that chip in your arm will send an alarm to Horne’s HQ. He’ll be on you like a rat on somebody’s thrown-away bagel. His boys’ll drag you back here and they’ll punish us all. Not that he’d beat us up or cut our food supply or anything, he’s not evil. But he’ll double the virus checks, maybe. Or they’ll post soldiers on the street down there to watch us night and day. So nobody else gets any ideas.”

“So that’s what I’m here for, tonight? For you to try to stop me?”

Helena and Buzzard shared a long look. When it was done she looked deeply into his eyes. “Let’s say we’re trying to show you that you have options.”

“Like, you can get along, or you can be moved along,” Buzzard told him. “You can convince us you’re with the program, or we can take action.”

“Like what?” Tim asked, anger welling inside him.

“Like we call Horne and tell him you’re not breakable. That you’re never going to give up. It’s happened before. We had one guy here who wanted to leave, about three weeks ago. He wouldn’t shut up about it, kept saying he had a right to go where he wanted. We tried to work with him but he thought we were just wimps.” Buzzard licked his lips. “He’s over in Horne’s stockade, now. They gave him a nice little room, right between two holding cells for droolers. We haven’t heard from him since. You getting me, son? You understanding this?”

Tim nodded and grabbed his knees with tight fingers. He stared down at the shag carpet and tried to think. He thought about the posters on Helena’s walls. She had refused to leave Olympia—she had chained herself to a tree, he’d heard. How could someone so committed to civil liberties turn around so fast?

But he knew exactly what had changed her. He had seen it on the road between San Francisco and Olympia. It was one thing to fight and protest and demonstrate when there was a free world out there, when you had options. When all that went away, when all the rules changed, you had to change your strategies as well. Something similar had happened to him, too. All the things he’d once thought were important—his mortgage, saving up to buy a new car, getting promoted to a Directorial position at the library—all of that had just evaporated like dew in the morning. All that remained was his duty to Karen and Jake.

They wanted to know if he could fit in to their fragile little bubble of a community. To make the same leap of logic and conscience they had. He didn’t have to think long to find his own answer.

“You have questions,” Helena said. “Ask them, please.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “I guess I want to know—where do you get your pot?”