CHAPTER 48

Ed had warned him not to do this in the daylight, but Billy Kline needed a better look at that door to the supply room. After their last midnight raid on the supply room, the Yale lock had been bolstered with two additional locks, one of them a dead bolt. It was going to be much harder to get in there now. Not impossible, but certainly harder.

He scanned the communal area. A cold front had rolled in during the early-morning hours and an icy sleet had started to fall. Already, the ground was slushy and the air bitingly cold. Most of the people moving through the communal area were more interested in getting inside as fast as they could than in milling around and talking, and that was a good thing.

With his hands in his pockets, walking as slowly and as casually as he could, Billy approached the supply room door. He stopped in front of it and glanced around. Aaron, Jasper’s number-one guy, was coming out of the radio room off to Billy’s right, not sixty feet away. Billy knelt down and started pretending to tie his bootlaces as Aaron walked by.

But Aaron seemed preoccupied, maybe even troubled. He didn’t look up at Billy as he walked by. He was muttering to himself, the words indistinct, and a moment later, he was gone.

Billy looked around, didn’t see anybody else, and went back to examining the locks. He would need tools, he realized. He could get in and out without making it look like the locks had been tampered with, but it would take time.

A few days earlier, he’d met a guy named Tom Wilder from Bowling Green, Ohio. The guy had done some time for burglary and forgery before the outbreak, and like Billy and Ed, he’d also been on edge about some of the things that were happening around the Grasslands. He’d become part of their growing group at the midnight meetings and, the night before, he’d volunteered to go get additional radios and maybe a TV if he could from the supply shed.

Now, looking at the added security, the freshly installed locks, Billy wondered if Wilder’s group hadn’t screwed up somehow. They must have done something to tip off Jasper’s people, something careless.

They both had the early dinner. He’d ask him then.

“Hello? Is somebody there?”

Billy nearly jumped out of his boots. He spun around, half ready to fight, half ready to run away, and saw Kyra Talbot standing there.

He let out a sigh of relief.

Then he smiled. Kyra was wearing a white heavy coat over blue jeans and brown snow boots with blond fur around the tops. Her brown hair was tied back with a black velvet band and it hung between her shoulder blades in a ponytail. She was smiling, her sightless eyes looking in his general direction, but not at him.

He said, “Kyra, here. It’s me, Billy Kline.”

She straightened. The smile wavered a bit.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello, Billy.”

He stepped away from the door and walked over to her. “You delivering a message?” he asked.

She nodded. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, I just stopped to tie my shoes. I’m on my way down to the laundry.”

She nodded again. For a moment, he thought she was about to turn away and head off to the office without saying anything else, but then she surprised him.

“Is that what you’re doing, working in the laundry?”

He smiled, thinking of something Jeff Stavers had told him. What have they got you working at? was the question on everyone’s lips around the camp. It was a conversation starter.

“In the mornings, I work in the kitchen. After lunch, I work in the laundry.”

“Oh,” she said, brightening a little more. “Do you know how to cook?”

“Sort of,” he said. “Not like you’re thinking of, though.” He hesitated here, because he hadn’t really wanted to admit this, not to her. “I was in jail for a while before the outbreak. That’s where I learned to work in a big kitchen. That first day, while we were in quarantine, Jasper came up to me and asked me if I’d ever been in jail. The way he looked at me, I couldn’t lie to him. He asked me if I’d ever worked in the kitchen or the laundry and I told him yeah, I’d done both. He just clapped his hands and said he had a job for me.”

“He’s pretty good at reading people that way.”

He’d frightened her with his talk of jail, and he mentally kicked himself. Her lips were pressed tightly together and she looked nervous, like she wanted to leave.

“Look,” he said. “Don’t let the whole jail thing frighten you about me. I mean, yeah, I’ve been in jail. Several times, actually. Oh, man, that sounds bad. But I’m not a bad guy. That sounds stupid, I know, but I’m really not a bad guy.”

“I don’t think you’re a bad guy,” she said.

“You don’t?” The way she said it, he wasn’t sure if she was being honest with him, or merely appeasing him so that he wouldn’t hurt her.

And then she smiled, and it was a beautiful smile. An honest smile. “I believe you because of Ed Moore.”

“Because of Ed?” He shook his head. “Why Ed?”

“Ed likes you. He’s taken you under his wing. Billy, I grew up around men like Ed Moore. Cowboys like him, I know the importance they place on a man’s character. If he thought you were bad news, he would have dropped you already.”

Billy liked that. He liked talking to this girl, too. There was something about her, the twang in her voice, the mixture of vulnerability and solid, inner strength, that turned him on.

She said, “Billy, what’s prison like?”

He was caught off guard. “Uh,” he said. “Well, I was never in prison. I was in the county jail. Prison is for state or federal prisoners. Those are the guys who go in for the big-time felonies. Me, I was strictly small-time.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s reassuring, I guess.”

He chuckled. “One jail is pretty much like another. There’s a lot of waiting around for nothing to happen. There’s this feeling that your life is slipping away, like you’re stuck in the weeds in the side of a river while the rest of the world floats on by you, and you’re powerless to stop it. It drives some men crazy.”

“I’ve heard stories from the guys in the town where I grew up. A few of them have been in prison. Or jail. Actually, I don’t really know which they were in. But none of them described it like you did. They were just angry, you know? Kind of mean about it. You, though, you don’t sound angry.”

“Jail will make you angry,” he said. “It’s easy to be that way. You can’t help it when you’re locked up like that. Part of you resents the system for controlling everything you do, but another part of you kind of likes not having to take responsibility for yourself. I think those guys who let the anger eat them up are aware of that, at least on some level. They can’t decide who they hate more, the system or themselves. That’s a hard nut to crack. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”

“I’ve never been in jail, Billy.”

“No, I know that. But you’ve been blind most of your life. You’re asking me about jail because you’re wondering if feels the same way as being blind. That’s it, isn’t it?”

She didn’t answer him, but she didn’t look away, either. That’s it, he thought. I put my finger on it.

Neither of them spoke. A gust of wind shook the awning roof over their heads and Billy felt a chill across his skin. He’d already felt several wet, icy raindrops fall on his face.

He said, “Are you cold? I’m cold.”

“A little.”

“Would you like me to walk you to the office? It’s on my way.”

Colin watched them slip into the office.

He felt so incredibly angry. He’d been betrayed by a skinny, blind, dark-haired fashion victim. What in the hell was she thinking being with him? He’d heard only the end of their conversation, but that was enough. That piece of shit was trying to use his time in jail to hit on his girlfriend. And the disgusting little whore had bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

Jeff’s words echoed in his mind. You’ve lost more than anybody. You lost all that, and it left a vacuum inside you.

“Yeah, well, fuck that,” he said aloud. “Fuck that.”

Sure, he’d lost a lot, but fuck it all. Fuck them. Yeah, that was it. Fuck all of them. Jeff had thought he’d lost it all. Well, he was wrong. He hadn’t lost it all. He still had Kyra, no matter what that piece of shit Billy Kline thought. He had her, and he wasn’t going to lose her. She was his, damn it. She was his right now, his alone, and nobody was going to take her away from him.

Nobody.