Seeing that there was little more that she could do, she headed for the mess hall. Having spent all afternoon in the cockpit of the Black Hawk had made her quite hungry. Grabbing a generous helping of spaghetti with Italian sausage, a Caesar salad, and some iced tea, she took a seat at the back of the room.

Only a couple of minutes passed before RJ entered and settled into a chair across from her. “What happened out there? How did you find them? Who beat them?” She sounded flustered.

“If you stop asking questions for a minute, I'll tell you the whole story, RJ,” Amy announced. She popped a slice of Italian sausage into her mouth and groaned in appreciation.

RJ smiled weakly. “Okay, tell me the story.”

When Amy finished her rundown of the events, RJ nodded in appreciation. “Sounds like you did a great job.”

“Did you learn anything from the kid?”

“Not yet. He's a bit of a mess right now. He's in pain and he's been given morphine, which makes it trickier to get any useful information from him. He's never seen an aircraft, let alone ridden in one, and he's terrified the two women will die. Unfortunately, there's a good chance one of them will die. Only thing we know for sure is that one of them is his mother. One of the med techs is primarily a child psychologist. She'll be staying with him for now. As soon as his arm is fixed, she'll give him a short tour of the facility. Hopefully, that will loosen him up a bit.”

“You know, we just found five people. There must be more. I think this will make everyone feel a whole lot better.”

Chapter Forty-Two

Mike and Wade had experienced better evenings. They'd been busy all day on a foraging trip, and now they were being sent out to the generator shed. Neither of them particularly minded working in the generator shed, but the storm was intensifying and at least one of them would have to sit by the ancient machine and fight to keep it running for as long as it was needed.

The crazy part about this whole situation was that the generator was usually started every Saturday morning and they kept it running for twelve hours, once every week. It was a schedule which had been in place ever since they'd arrived here almost ten years before. The schedule never changed.

Now, they were about to go out into some of the nastiest weather imaginable to start the blasted thing on a Thursday evening. It made no sense. But from what they'd heard, these orders had come directly from the old man. No one would consider arguing with him, not after all he'd done for them. If it weren't for the old man, most of them wouldn't be alive.