Even after everything that happened, Trout was aghast at the thought of such cold-blooded murder. He kept shaking his head, but he wasn’t sure he actually disagreed.
“We have a window, Billy,” said Dez as she turned, hurried to the desk and began shoving the guns and ammunition back into the duffel bag. “We need to get the fuck out of here while there’s still a here to get out of.”
“What are you doing?” asked Trout.
She nodded to the windows. “Neither of us believe this is over, right? Not with the way they left. And maybe they’re not going to bomb us, but where does that leave us?”
“In a nice, safe building that we’re reinforcing,” he said. “With lots of food and supplies.”
“For a week, Billy. Now, think it through. If this is as big a disaster as Zetter said, as big as what Volker told you, then are you telling me that we might only be stuck here for a week?”
“No, but they said they’d airdrop supplies to us.”
“You want me to punch some stupid off of you?”
He rubbed his chest. “No thanks. What am I missing?”
“If the Guard had to run out of here like their dicks were on fire, then this thing is spreading. Which also means that there are so many of those dead fuckers out there that they had to take everyone including the cook. Does that sound like anything’s under control?”
“No,” he admitted sheepishly.
“No,” s
he agreed. “It sounds like big trouble. So, go big picture for a minute. Pull back and look at it. If you’re General Zetter and things are going to shit, do you give a crap about, as I said, inconvenient people trapped in a school, or do you go fight the fight?”
“You go fight the fight.”
“Right, now look at it from where we stand. Sure, we have a secure building and, yes, I think we could hold it against a million of those things.”
“Exactly.”
“Until we run out of bullets and bread. Until there’s no more gas for the generator, no more fresh water, and no more cans of Spam. Tell me, Billy, what happens then? And before you say something stupid like ‘but they’ll come for us by then,’ take a moment and think about how long people waited after Katrina. Weeks, in some cases. And that was without a bunch of dead sonsabitches trying to eat everyone.”
Trout used her words as a lens to stare into the future, and the things he saw were ugly and wrong.
“Jesus,” he murmured.
“We’ve got our window. No one’s watching us and, for the moment, no living dead assholes are trying to bite us. I say we load all our supplies and all of us into those buses. We have more than enough of them. We load up and we get the hell out of Dodge.”
“And go where?”
She shrugged. “Pittsburgh’s nice this time of year. So’s Harrisburg. So’s Philly.” Then she paused. “Actually, if things are really hitting the fan, there’s Sapphire Distributors in Fayette.”
“What’s that?”
Dez smiled. “A food distribution warehouse. Big-ass brick building. No windows on the ground floor, truck bays where we can backup the buses, its own generator with probably a lot more fuel than we have here, plus enough food to replenish a dozen full supermarkets. We could survive there for months.”
“How do you know about it?”
Dez’s eyes slid away for a moment and she focused on packing the bag.
“Dez—?”
“I, um, dated a guy who works there. Head of security.”
“Who? Do I know him?”
“Maybe.”