I looked around the room at the other people assembled with us, many of whom we’d found back at the shelter. Some of them I had seen there, like the woman who had grabbed all the extra slurree for her children, Drusilla. Others had been hidden off in corners, trying to survive just as we had. And they’d still been waiting there for help or something when we came along. I wondered what had lead them to believe, after the lives they had lived, which had to be not too far off from our own, that help would ever come. That they wouldn’t have to make it themselves. But there they had been, waiting for FEMA or the Red Cross or whoever people had told them to wait for. In the end, it had been us who came to the rescue.

Kristen was still talking.

“Floors are fucked, though. All this carpet. We’ll have to rip it up and take it out of the building. If there’s wood underneath, we’ll treat it the same way we’re treating the walls. If there’s concrete we don’t have to do shit.”

I looked once again at the people gathered in the lobby. There were about twenty of them. Most of them were darkskinned, some had faces lined with age and stress and the terror of what we’d all been going through. Their clothes were dirty. Some had children with them, little ones looking around in wonder and fear. But these people were listening to Kristen talk, and some of them looked hopeful. They looked like they had looked when I touched their shoulders at the shelter, or in the street where we had found them amid garbage and not too far from bodies. Something had come into their eyes then, as I leaned down and rapidly explained the building we had, how it had everything we needed, and how we were squatting it. Some of them had closed their eyes, and a few had cried.

Drusilla stepped forward toward where Kristen and I were standing.

“You mean my children won’t get sick here?” she asked. She looked hard, not hopeful. She reminded me of a lion, how fierce she was, and how that fierceness faded when she touched her children’s cheeks, or looked down at them. The children were up in one of the apartments, one that I wished we had picked when I saw the antique oak furniture and rows of old books.