Tuck looked away, his cheeks coloring. My heart thumped. Of course he’d taught people to read while in prison. You and your damn books. I had this intense desire to hug him, to throw my arms around him and squeeze him tight. I wondered what he’d do if I did. “Man, I was bored,” Tuck muttered. “What else was I gonna do?”

Hosea chuckled. “Still full of shit, I see.”

“What’s the plan here, going forward?” Tuck asked, obviously changing the subject.

“For now, without communication, the units here are acting outside any official capacity. These warehouses are food facilities. Got a whole stock of canned and boxed food. They secured this location right away. They’re problem-solvers, man. They’ve been out gathering whatever they believe might come in handy, they moved in the portable toilets from the baseball field and fencing too. Others have been out siphoning gas from otherwise useless cars so we can keep powering working generators for as long as possible. It’s been a bona fide operation for the past week.”

“Why are some generators working and some not?” I asked.

“Most aren’t working, even with fuel,” Hosea said. “The electronics inside are fried like everything else. But we’ve found a few that were in basements or other storage locations that seemed to have protected them from the surge. They’ll work as long as we have gasoline and then those will be useless hunks of metal too.”

We were all quiet for a moment before Tuck asked, “What’s the long-term goal?”

“That changes day to day. It’s a fluid situation. But for now, other than collecting necessities, we’re focused on picking up kids who were left behind for one reason or another—parents never came home from work, got separated… You know how it goes. There are already predators out trolling. Hell, some of them escaped the same place I did.”

Oh, we knew about predators. We’d learned plenty about them in the past week. But we’d also learned how many generous people there were too. I stuck the last bite of bread in my mouth and then licked my fingers.

“We’re getting a medical tent set up too, but right now, don’t have any medical staff. Like I said, it’s fluid.”