Free The Lair by Emily McKay Page A

offered to drive you back up the mountain but Carter said he’d wait. That’s Darren for you. He’s been itching to get out of town for months now. To see what else is out there, but Dad won’t let him.”
    “I know this probably shouldn’t matter, but what happened to my clothes?”
    Dawn cringed. “I had to cut your shirt off of you. Saved the jacket, though. You should be able to patch the . . . um . . .” She gestured toward the spot on her own bicep where Lily had been shot.
    Lily nodded. Well, at least there was that. She really liked that jacket.
    “Your backpack is by the door. I hope you don’t mind, but I kept my stuff that you were stealing.”
    Dawn’s voice was sarcastic, but not hard-edged.
    Yeah, she should probably be glad Dawn wasn’t being more of a bitch about the whole stealing thing, but really all Lily could do was shake her head at the irony. After all this, she hadn’t even been able to bring home the one thing she’d come for. She’d come here hoping to solve one small problem and instead she’d created a huge one.
    “Sorry,” she said to Dawn. “About everything.”
    Dawn shrugged. “Hey, no hard feelings. Just don’t be surprised if my dad isn’t as forgiving.”
    While Dawn continued to fiddle with the medical supplies, Lily’s mind flooded with questions. Before she could stop herself, they poured out. “So your whole family made it? How many are there of you?”
    “We’ve been lucky.” Dawn moved as she talked. She had a storage box, sort of like a tackle box that a fisherman might use. Instead of lures and hooks, Dawn’s was full of medical supplies. Like a first-aid kit on steroids. She opened one compartment after another, looking for things and pulling out what she found. “I was back from school when the first outbreak hit. Darren, too. Of course, Dad’s been preparing for this kind of thing for years. As soon as the virus hit Utah, we moved into the shelter. You met Danielle, who should know better than to play in the house by herself. Then there’s Darren, Derek, and Dex. Donald, my eldest brother, was on mission in Colombia when it hit.” She shrugged, and Lily didn’t press her for more information. “But there are a couple more of us now. Micah and Noah moved in early on. They’re twins who played soccer with Dex and lived up in Logan. Logan got hit pretty hard.”
    “Yeah, I know.” Logan was just north of here. It was closer to Base Camp so they’d done a lot of food raids there. In fact, they’d about picked the town clean. Almost all the supplies they had had come from Logan and they hadn’t seen any sign that people had survived at all.
    “Are there more families here in town?”
    Dawn slanted Lily an odd look as she ripped open an alcohol pad and swiped at a spot on Lily’s arm. “Yeah. Of course. It helps that we’re up in the mountains. Ticks don’t seem to like it up here.”
    “How many people live here?”
    “Oh, close to two thousand.”
    “Wow,” Lily murmured, hardly knowing what to say. Then she winced when Dawn jabbed a needle into her arm. “What the—”
    “Antibiotic. Intravenous would be better, but I don’t have the setup for it. Still, this should go a long way. I’ve got an oral you can take home with you, too. As well as some painkillers.”
    “You have antibiotics?” Lily asked, baffled. Of course, they’d looked for them on food raids. They just hadn’t found any.
    Justin, one of the Greens who’d been at camp the longest, had nominated himself camp medic. He was busy reading every book he could find on medicine. “We have a guy, Justin, who is kind of a medic. He’s always hassling people to look for antibiotics, but we’ve never found any.”
    Dawn gave a shrug that looked a little self-conscious. “Yeah, my dad used to take trips down to Mexico to stock up on stuff like that. Even in the Before we had random medicine on hand all the time.” She ripped open a second alcohol wipe and prepped