Colin stepped back and raised his hands when Taron tore into his personal space. “But why would any of that happen? And what has the Yellowstone National Park have to do with disease?”
Oh no.
Colin rubbed his face. “So you’re spending your life in solitude because you’re afraid of something that might not even happen in your lifetime?”
Taron’s expression hardened.
Colin took a deep breath, watching Taron rub snot from his nose with annoyance. “Okay, I get that, but don’t you think all this,” he gestured around him to indicate the entirety of the bunker system, “is excessive? And if you really believe this catastrophe will happen and have so much supplies and space, why do you want to waste it on one person?”
Taron crossed his arms on his chest.
“But you’re still keeping it to yourself, even though you think it could save people if the volcano blew?”
Taron’s hair bristled when he signed, staring at Colin with wild eyes. Understanding him became possible only after he repeated it all much slower.
Colin frowned, stilling in a room that housed some mechanical equipment and was likely meant to serve as a workshop of sorts. “People are a liability? You have how many cats?”
Taron’s face darkened. In the pulsing light of the lamp above, his skin had a bluish hue, a sharp contrast to the reddish whites of his eyes.
“They also don’t work for their keep and you can’t really get much meat out of them when in a pinch. And you can hardly repopulate with them. I think that out of the two, people are less of a liability.”
Old McGraw sounded like a good people-reader.
Colin put his hand against Taron’s forehead, sighing when he felt it burn, but Taron shook off his touch, aggravating Colin further. “You can’t make blanket statements like that. People can contribute, make a community.”
Colin shook his head. “Oh, so everyone is a liability for you? Would you call me that too?”
Just seeing Taron ponder it for endless seconds was infuriating enough, but what followed was even worse.
Colin’s blood boiled, as if it wanted to evaporate any trace of Taron from Colin’s body. “Did you really just call me a liability to my face?”
Taron spread his arms as if there was nothing wrong with any of it. But with his stern expression, it looked very much like ‘not sorry’.
Colin took a deep gulp of air and poked his index finger hard against Taron’s breastbone. “What the actual fuck is wrong with you? Who would take care of you if you got ill?”
Instead of being cowed, Taron seemed to have built a new wall since the beginning of this conversation.
Colin rolled his eyes, breathing through his nose as he paced around the room. “Oh, sure, they’re gonna nurse you to health if you needed surgery or broke your back!”
He was shocked when Taron grabbed his arm to enforce eye contact.
Colin wanted to laugh, but the collar around his neck seemed to tighten. He couldn’t believe it. Taron was literally telling him he had gay prepper friends over the radio, and that they were better than a partner in the flesh.
“Do you radio-fuck them too?” he asked, pushing at Taron’s chest. The whole thing made him unreasonably angry, but once fury struck, he couldn’t stop it.
Taron growled with a frown, but his cheeks got as red as the tomatoes in his garden. Maybe he’d just listened. Of course he fucking did.
“That is so not on! You have a real-life human here, who actually doesn’t mind your weird-ass ideas, and who helps you out with everything, and you dare to call me a liability?” Colin shouted at the top of his lungs while his brain boiled in the pressure cooker of his skull. “I actually have medical knowledge. If anything I’m an asset on so many levels, but you can’t even recognize this?”