Free Half Way Home by Hugh Howey Page B

to do something. We’ve been whispering about it all across the scaffolding today. Hell, I should’ve done something earlier.”
    “Then you’d be the one getting a blood transfusion,” Tarsi said, holding his arm with both her hands.
    Kelvin sniffed, his mouth tilting up at an angle. He looked to each of us in turn. “You guys can stay here if you want,” he said, “but I’m leaving. I’m gonna take a piece of magnesium from the supply store and a machete, so I can start a fire. Maybe a few strips of tarp for carrying water or to make a shelter. Not much. I don’t care if I only last a week, I’m not gonna sit here and watch us tear each other apart.”
    Before I could complain, Tarsi floored me with her reaction.
    “I’ll come with you,” she said. “I can grab a few seed packets from support in the morning. But I think we should spread the word, give others the chance to join us.”
    I shook my head at this, arguing tactics when what I should’ve been doing was dismissing their entire plan. “Tell anyone and you’ll be stopped. By force.”
    “So you’re staying,” Kelvin said.
    “I don’t think I can leave,” I told them. I immediately recognized the hurt on Tarsi’s face. “I’m sorry, it just feels suicidal to me. And I think you guys should sleep on it and reconsider. Give it a day, at least. Once you go, Hickson will know what happened. I don’t think you’ll be able to come back—”
    Saying it cemented the seriousness of what they were considering. I pictured myself sleeping in the tractor at night. Alone. I turned away and pretended to peer through the cab’s glass, but it was fogged with a billion droplets of our condensed worry.
    “I don’t want you guys to go,” I whispered. “There’s no telling what’s beyond our perimeter.”
    “We’ll give it a day,” Tarsi said. I felt her turn away from me to face Kelvin. “Is that okay with you? We could use it to gather a few things. Another day like today, and I don’t think we’ll be alone in going.”
    “Another day like today, and I won’t have any of my sanity left,” Kelvin said. “In which case, the shrink here will have to come.”
    Tarsi slapped him in my defense—which automatically got us laughing. It felt nice, even if we weren’t sure why we were doing it.
    And I don’t know that we would’ve been laughing, had we known it would be the last time the three of us enjoyed a moment like that in our small home. Because, even though Tarsi and Kelvin had agreed to wait a day, we would soon discover that the day would not wait for us.

• 12 • Missing
    For the second straight night, I hardly slept a wink. And when I did, more nightmares chased me, nightmares of waking and finding myself alone. Several times, I snuck out and sat on the hood, trying to catch the glimpse of a star through the dense canopy overhead and listening to the occasional whistle of breakfast falling, cringing in anticipation of getting whacked the way Kelvin had.
    When the others woke, we performed our morning routine, taking turns with the solar shower hanging from the cab. The water barely warmed up in the filtered sunlight, and what heat it absorbed tended to leak out over the cool evenings. Once again, I resolved to take my showers at night, even though I knew I’d be too exhausted and too eager to spend time with my friends to follow through.
    After the shower, my solitary change of clothes went back on, immediately undoing most of my hard-won freshness. The only alteration in our routine that morning was the lack of banter, each of us mulling over decisions that would be impossible to undo once decided upon. We were practicing the soft sciences, the fuzzy physics, each of us dreading a collapse into surety.
    We walked to breakfast in more silence, took our meager helpings of fruitpaste and sat around peering down at our food and at the scratched and dented surface of our table. We rarely looked at each other during the half hour