Page 117 of Chaos

So why do I feel like something is about to happen?

His face says he’s thinking the same thing I am.

Toosmooth.

There's another thump inside, and a series of clapping from inside, and the doors slide open. “Last piece!” a soldier calls out, a grin on a face that makes him barely look older than Shane.

More flood out behind them, pushing parts on dollies toward the waiting trucks

They’re all smiling, laughing, victorious as they load up, fist bumping and shoulder jostling and shit-talking.

Ebundi screws the top back on his own thermos, a hollow, sloshing clink, and sighs. “Why do I feel old? I’m thirty-six.”

“Because nothing ever goes this right.”

He scans the roof, the treeline, the sky above. “You see anything wrong?”

“No.”

“Could be a trap,” he muses. “Would take a cold heart to sacrifice all these people.”

He means the fifteen Gray Cap soldiers we found in town.

“It would.”

Not to mention putting their bullet factory at risk.

And Kelly said there are no secrets for Gray Caps. Shesaidthat.They share everything,she said.But that in itself suddenly feels problematic. It doesn’t work. There’s always a Duane. There’s always a drunk. There’s always someone who doesn’t want to participate, and it stirs everyone else up, because it isn’t fair, and everyone always wants things to be fair. Sometimesmore fair.

I check in with our other crews. We have five groups patrolling the roads between us and Thornwood.

They all radio back the same thing. “All clear.”

I radio Rey. “Come in.”

The feed opens with a beep, background noise of people calling out, loud, but her voice is calm when she says, “All clear here.”

Ebundi and I lock eyes.

He shrugs. “All clear. You heard her.”

I help the soldiers move the felled tree from our path and put it back when the trucks are through.

I load in beside Jacquetta, and we leave the factory and the neighborhood behind, the wind buffeting the car, and sending the leafless trees waving due west, down the road, toward home.

“Looks like snow,” she says.

It does.

The skies look almost bloated, and the smell in the air is thick with it.

We roll over the train tracks, the truck lurching, front axel, then rear, just like the last time I came home after a mission, Frankie in my arms. I was sure then that nothing else mattered in the whole world, and again when I’d been shot with Kelly and Rey.

I keep thinking someday we’ll hit a point where we’ll be strong enough to stay above the fray.

But we keep getting sucked back in.

No matter how hard we try.

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