“You didn’t let her in?”
“No, no. I begged her to come inside the walls, but she wouldn’t. Not without her kid.”
“You’re shitting me.” The words slipped out before she realized it made perfect sense that the mother wouldn’t abandon her child.
“I can’t say I blame her. She traveled all this way only to find out we don’t have a cure. I don’t know if she believes us when we tell her we don’t have one.”
Again, Emma thought of Billy and his light-up shoes. When she’d seen those shoes glowing in the darkness of the grocery store, she would have done everything in her power to save him. Instead, she had fired her rifle and put him to rest. “That makes sense. Hope is hard to give up.”
“We aren’t complete assholes. Nerit gave her a weapon and one of the bugout bags we keep along the wall. The mom is holing up across the street from the Fort in one of the office buildings.”
“So what are you going to do about her?”
Juan sighed wearily and shrugged again. “Leave her be until she comes to her senses.”
Emma pondered the last year of her life and let out a bitter chuckle. “That might not happen. Hope is hard to give up if you’re lucky—or unlucky—enough to still have it. I hoped for months that I would find Billy alive. The night I accepted I wouldn’t have a happy ending, I was inconsolable. It took days for me to sober up.”
With a weary look, Juan adjusted his cowboy hat on his curls. “We can’t force her inside, Emma.”
“I agree.”
“There’s a big ‘but’ hanging on the end of your comment.”
“Not really. I agree with you. You can’t force her inside. It’s just that the thought of her holed up in an abandoned building with her dead child is heartbreaking. Coming all this way hoping for a cure and there’s not one. Shit. That would have destroyed me.”
Juan pressed his lips together, nodded, and gazed off past Emma.
“This world is shit,” Emma declared. “Absolute shit.”
“I can’t argue with you, but we are trying to make things better for everyone within these walls.”
Emma understood the complexity of the situation. “Why did she think there’s a cure here? Did she say?”
“No. She freaked out when we told her we couldn’t save her kid.”
“I can imagine.”
“Nerit is talking with the others we saved. She wants to find out where the disinformation came from. That group was nearly a hundred people when they started out from outside of Atlanta. They split apart on the way here, but a lot of them died.”
“I can’t even imagine.”
“It’s got me worried that maybe there are more on the way from other locations.”
Emma thought this was a definite possibility if word of the Fort had spread as far as Atlanta. “What if there are?”
Perplexed, Juan lifted his shoulders, hands splayed. “Hell, I don’t know. We got resources for the people we got now in the Fort. Those will last us for a while. We don’t mind taking in people, but...” With a sigh, Juan fell silent.
“You can’t save everyone.”
“Maybe we can. I don’t fuckin’ know. We might be the best chance for people out there.”
“We have to save ourselves in the end. You can’t feel responsible for everyone stuck out there.”
“You’re probably right, Em.”
“Juan, I kept waiting for the military to swoop in and rescue me, or show up with a cure. Of course, that never happened. I eventually realized I had to save myself. Hell, the U.S. government probably isn’t even around anymore.”
Juan glanced off to one side as though measuring his next words. “Did you know that what’s left of the federal government is in Galveston, Texas?”