Page 81 of Hunted By Fae

Carlos leads us deeper into the city, east-bound.

The highway has turned into a four-lane main road, running down the centre of the city. We walk it a while, bordered by scorched remains on the northside.

The safehouse is in the untouched east end, a hospital we picked out on the map before we even left the last town to come here.

It’s the better part of an hour before we reach it, a journey lengthened by unrelenting winds and thick snow. The reprieve of shoving through the push doors is slight, an escape from the battering winds only—but it’s just as cold inside.

The chill follows us all the way to the ICU on the top floor.

We have been banded together for long enough that no one needs to say what they are doing or bark an order, because we all know now.

It’s ingrained in us.

Emily goes with the twins to the patient rooms to loot the mattresses, then drag them behind the nurse station. That’s where we rest. Together, in one huge sleeping area behind the desk, because all of those stations are the same in every hospital. Each has at least two exit points, and a desk low enough that we can shoot over it if we need to. We also have cover from the entrance doors—but are close enough to the stairwells for an easy escape.

I don’t help set up our nest.

Just moments after arriving in the ICU, I leave with Aaliyah for the stairwell and we search for the cafeteria. We stop to check the maps on the walls a couple of times before we find it.

Hospitals are always such fucking labyrinths.

I don’t expect to find a lot in the cafeteria, but it’s always worth a shot.

The fridges and freezers are left untouched as we rummage through the cupboards.

There isn’t much.

Might have been raided before. Might have been eaten down to the bare minimum by the last of the patients and nurses that stuck around for quarantine.

But we find some jars of baby food,gross, packets of barley, which I guess was for soups—and a lot of teabags, coffee and powdered milk.

We take it all.

By the time we’re back at the nurse’s station, all the corpses have been moved to one room, and the door shut tight.

The dead in the world don’t stink much anymore. But not all of them are total skeletons yet. The winter came, the cold froze them, and I guess it takes a while in these conditions.

Either way, we hide the bodies for one reason.

Comfort.

Plain and simple, it’s the comfort of not tripping over them, of looking at ghoulish corpses.

The little things, you know?

Mike and Michelle, siblings, set up a gas cookstove, the kind that reminds me of the Winnebago—and that then reminds me of Ramona, and Ruby, and Louise…

I flinch at the thought of them. A twist of nausea tightens in my chest.

I scoot by Carlos at the edge of the nurse’s station as he gathers his backpack, some tarp, and blankets, loads of blankets.

Guess he’ll be taking first shift on watch, up on the roof.

It’s a brutal job, but someone has to do it. Actually, a lot of us do. I’m one of them, since I avoid cooking and corpse clearing.

It gets baltic up there, so I don’t blame Carlos for taking a bunch of blankets to the roof with him. And it still might not be enough to ease the freezing cold.

I step over the row of backpacks, grab my own, then slide onto the mattress that Emily is sat on. Her knees are hiked, arms draped over them, and her head leaned back on the hard bite of the shelf.