What Befalls the Children: Book 4 in the Troop of Shadows Series, стр. 38
He stood in the corridor outside Lizzy’s enclosure, head tilted, looking for the fiftieth time at the twelve-inch by twelve-inch opening. Squeezing through that opening was more than merely remarkable. It was side-show creepy. He imagined those bony shoulders popping out of their sockets, then Lizzy — wearing that ghoulish grin — slithering through the hatch like a black mamba.
Twelve thumb screws. Twelve freaking thumb screws had to be twisted off from the outside. How had she gotten her fingers through the mesh? He pulled a small ruler from his shirt pocket and held it against the steel wire. The bands ran horizontally and vertically, leaving small square openings of exactly three-eighths inch in size.
Closing his eyes, he forced himself to refresh the most recent mental images of Lizzy. He let his mind’s eye travel from those bony shoulders down to her fingers. Fingers that were slender, but not thin enough to slip through the wire. Those fingers somehow still managed to telegraph a subliminal message, like the retracted claws of a predatory cat.
With his free hand, he smacked himself in the forehead.
The fingernails. She must have been growing them out for months. She’d asked for an emery board shortly after her incarceration. The pretext had been to keep her fingernails and toenails neat and tidy. She didn’t expect him to provide her with metal clippers or small scissors, of course. Those could be repurposed into weapons. What harm was there in a small piece of cardboard glued to some mildly abrasive sand paper? She must have been filing her pointed nails down to slightly narrower than three-eighths of an inch.
No more emery boards for Lizzy in the future.
He blew out a disgusted breath, then headed toward the section of the warehouse that contained construction materials used for DRCs — Disaster Recovery Centers — during emergencies. Instead of steel mesh fencing, he would use solid panels made with a titanium alloy. On his way, he traversed the food corridor and surveyed the pallets stacked on metal shelving three stories high. He wondered if he would ever need to use the hydraulic warehouse crane to get to them. So far, everything he’d needed had been accessible with the smaller order-picking forklift. Fortunately, the Jolly Ranchers and Smarties had been stored on one of the lower-level shelves.
The candy reminded him of the children. Fergus had told him little about them, so his mind had to fill in the blanks. What kind of lives were they living? Had people reverted to brutal bare-bones survival? Were children used as slave labor? Fergus said they were being cared for, but what did that mean in terms of quality of life? Kids should be allowed to be kids. They needed to be educated, and not just in the ways of staying alive. They needed to feel safe. They needed to feel loved. They needed to feel treasured. If the children growing up in a post-apocalyptic world were denied these necessities, they might turn into monsters as adults.
He had never been in a long-term relationship, had never fathered children of his own. Maybe that was for the best. He couldn’t begin to imagine the suffering of parents seeing their children succumb to the ravages of Chicxulub. It would be even worse to watch children who had survived the plague die of something as treatable as an infection, dysentery, or malnutrition.
Walking past the pharmaceutical facility prompted him to refresh the mental inventory lists. Just about everything a small community would need to fight disease or heal injuries lay in his warehouse. Should he try to find these mountain people? Share his embarrassment of riches with them? He could even bring them into the warehouse during the cold months. How much easier their existence would be with electricity, ready food, and clean water, rather than out there battling the elements, wild animals, and violent people.
He stepped inside the formerly secured area, contemplating what that scenario would look like. It wouldn’t be an easy adjustment for a hard-core introvert to house strangers, but it would be the right thing to do. Helping people in an emergency situation was precisely what this place and his job had been created for. Now, finally, there might be an opportunity to actually implement the protocols for which he had been trained.
The notion was profoundly appealing. But there was still the Lizzy situation to contend with. What if she were captured and returned here? It would be a relief to have help with the figurative and literal burden of restraining her. But wouldn’t that also put the children at risk? Were they at an even greater risk out there with her lurking about?
Damn it. He knew what he should be doing, and instead he was creating busy work to avoid doing it. With a surge of determination and clarity, he changed course and headed toward the weapons sector of the warehouse.
Chapter 12
Willadean
Life sucked like a giant Hoover. Willadean, Harlan, and Cricket were basically under house arrest, or maybe village arrest would be more accurate. The shortest leash she’d been tethered to since their arrival in the holler was siphoning all the joy from her existence. And there was nothing to be done about it. Yet.
Wriggle room normally presented itself in these situations, but Mama knew how to close all possible loopholes. She hadn’t simply said, Don’t stray outside the village. She had said, Don’t go beyond the privies to the north, the clotheslines to the south, the schoolhouse to the east, and Pops’ cabin to the west. Not