Tony ushered the two of them back into the house, toward a spacious kitchen with a gleaming stainless steel island. A pair of middle-aged women were cooking an enormous feast back there—pots of macaroni and cheese, trays of lasagna and piles of microwave burritos. When they saw Tony they hurriedly wiped their hands on their aprons and scurried from the room, one of them stopping long enough to whisper something in the looter’s ear. “You go on, Mom,” he said, when he’d heard what she had to say. “We’ll just be a minute.”

Tim sat down at a long table and Buzzard took a chair after a second. The reporter’s eyes were very wide and Tim wondered if he was trying to gather as many details were possible for his story. Very little of the strangeness in the looters’ “clubhouse” mattered to Tim. He just wanted to get this over with.

“You guys want a Coke? Or maybe a beer?” Tony asked. “Anything you want, just ask, we probably got it. I’ve got like this killer liquor cabinet going. Only the finest stuff, you know? I’ve got like everything. Unless you want fresh milk or something.” He laughed. “Not a lot of fresh stuff on this side. We’ve been eating out of cans and boxes, you know, dried stuff like noodles. It’s okay if you don’t think about what you’re missing.”

Tim asked for a can of soda and sipped it quietly while Tony stirred a pot of macaroni. He wondered how old Tony could be—maybe in his twenties? Certainly not his late twenties. Yet it was clear he held the looters together with his bare hands.

“We’re gonna have dinner soon, and you both can totally stay,” he told them.

Tim thanked him for the offer, planning on turning him down. Buzzard stopped him with a hand on his foil-wrapped arm. “Mind if I ask you a few questions while we wait?” the reporter asked.

Tony smiled. “Shoot.”

“How did you end up here? I mean, how did you get to Vashon?”

The looter pursed his lips in thought. “When the droolers came I was at my house, in West Seattle. They started talking on the tv about how we needed to line up for evacuation at the high school and my Mom wanted to but I knew it was going to be a bad scene. I headed down to where I kept my boat but Mikey and Pat were already there, trying to steal it. I guess they had the same idea I did. I mean, so did about a million other people—every boat was headed out that day, and there weren’t enough cops around to stop us from just making a run for it. We came here because we figured the big houses here would make good places to fortify, and we were right about that. There was some fighting in the first couple of days, and we had to move a couple of times but that was alright. It was kind of exciting, actually. The ways things are now I’m starting to get bored.” He laughed as if he’d told a joke.

“How long have you been here at this location?”

“About two weeks now.” Tony squinted. “Maybe a little less. We kind of trashed our last place. We thought we could make some modifications, make it like a real fortress, but I guess we didn’t know what we were doing. We ended up burning part of it down while we did our modifications. Mikey’s Dad got burnt up. That wasn’t cool.”

“How many families are there in your group?” Tim asked.

“Just three, mine, Sasha and her Mom, and then Pat and his sisters—that stupid bitch who keeps bugging my brother is one of his sisters. Some of the others we just found and they decided to work with us. There were some more guys before but they split off, they didn’t like the way I ran things. I don’t know what happened to them. They headed south and maybe your soldiers got them. I don’t know.” He shrugged and poured hot sauce into his pot. “We figured we’d be safer if we stayed up here, you know? Nobody bugs us here, except sometimes droolers. And we can handle them. Everything we need is in the houses here, or almost. The rest is what we trade for.”

“Have you cleared out Vashon Island yet, or are you still going house to house?” Buzzard asked.

Tony shrugged and ate some noodles off a spoon. “This is where the richie riches lived. There’s all kinds of great stuff to find in their houses.”

“Do you ever go farther afield?” Tim asked. “To Seattle, maybe?”

Tony looked straight at him as if he’d asked something forbidden. “No. I mean, um, we haven’t yet. Maybe we will eventually. There’s a lot of them over there.”

“Droolers,” Buzzard suggested.

“Yeah. What do you want to know all this stuff for?”

“I’m just curious,” Buzzard explained. “By nature.”

“He’s going to write a book about you,” Tim said. Buzzard glared at him but he went on, “When this is all over, you know? When they clean everything up and life goes back to how it was before.”

Tony froze in place. His eyes went wide and he slowly put down his wooden spoon. “You mean this might be temporary?”