* * * * * Rosie was in a feverish rush to get a lunch on the table for the newcomers.
Fresh biscuits, golden and hot, came out of the oven and made the kitchen smell wonderful. Wiping her hands off on a towel, she moved to check on the fried chicken. She had decided to break out the rest of the frozen chicken to feed the new people. They needed good food from the sight of them.
“Hey, Rosie,” Calhoun’s voice called from the doorway. He looked mummy with his head heavily bandaged.
“What is it, Ernest,” Rosie answered.
“Your Mama is out in the lobby. And, that old Amazon hit me with her cane. ”
Rosie looked up startled. “What?”
“Your Mama, Guadalupe, hit me with her derned cane,” Calhoun repeated and began to saunter not too casually toward the biscuits.
Waving metal tongs at him, her expression was one of disbelief. “My Mama can’t be alive. She went to the hospital for a checkup on the first day. Hospitals were death traps”
“Well, she’s alive,” Calhoun answered, trying to make a dive for the biscuits.
Rosie smacked him, and he grunted as he managed to snag one. She hesitated, then handed the tongs to one of her helpers. “Don’t let him get another one. ”
Calhoun shoved the entire biscuit in his mouth and grinned at her as he dove for another.
Rushing into the hallway, she made her way through the growing throng of very smelly people to the lobby. The thought of her nearly hundred year old mother being alive was too much of a long shot to even hope for, but when she entered the lobby, she saw the hunched up
old woman sitting in a wheelchair banging on the check in counter.
“I want a room with a view with no zombies!”
Rosie never made it to her mother. She passed out.
Guadalupe turned around as people cried out, surprised to see her daughter slumped in the arms of several people. “Dios mio! My baby is alive!” Motioning to the gangly teenager who was pushing her around, she began to cry.
When Rosie woke up, her mother was patting her face with a gnarled hand. “Mama!”
“Just tell me one thing,” her mother said. “Is Juan alive?”
“Yes, Mama, yes!”
The old woman grinned as she fell back in her wheelchair and clutched her hands to her chest. “Thank you, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”
Rosie wrapped her arms around her mother and together they wept with relief.
* * * * * The dining room had never been so full. People were crowded in, eating feverishly, some laughing, some still crying, but the food was good. The Reverend blessed the meal and some people wept at his words.
It was a hard morning. So much death and so much sadness.
The mother of a girl named Kimberly sat in silence staring at her food as she remembered her brave daughter kissing her goodbye before taking her own life on the side of the road. Next to her, the only member left of her family, her youngest son, began to eat with relish. Looking up, the mother saw faces both new and old and with sadness in her heart, she began to try to eat. Kimberly would have wanted her to eat and go on.
Bette sat with some of the survivors and a few fort residents. She ate the biscuit on her plate slowly, picking off pieces, relishing the flavor. Across from her, a pretty Hispanic girl kept giving her furtive glances.
Finally, Bette put out her hand and said, “Bette. ”
The younger woman looked up at her, smiling shyly. “My name is Linda. ”
There was something startling and intense in the other woman’s gaze.
Nervously, Bette continued to eat, but the heaviness inside felt a little lighter every time she caught the other woman looking at her.
Three little kids sat in silence, eating their food hungrily, at a table of strangers none of them knew. Occasionally, one of them would point at something in the room and they would all whisper together. No one really noticed the little ones; they were so quiet. But if they had listened, they would have realized the children were looking at the leftover Christmas decorations that no one had felt like climbing a ladder to get down.