Wayne got the Jeep between himself and Zach. From all sides, the dead closed in.

You knew it was a real shit day when killing the class cat was the high point.

That was the first thing Sue did in the morning, and her mood had not improved. Mr. Stripestuff had been pretty sickly for a while, was probably fifteen years old and going blind, and there was no way anybody in the warehouse would take adequate care of him after she left. She hoped they’d have a little more compassion for the kids she’d be leaving behind, but deep down she doubted it.

She let him lick the scraps from a can of tuna mixed with a packet of old government-issue powdered creamer and a couple of crushed Tylenol PMs. Then she laid him in her lap and petted his head for a while, then she put a towel over his face, and a plastic bag over that. She thought not about how she should just set him free, but how slim his odds were out there. She was doing him a favor, but it wasn’t easy for either of them. She was gentle, gentle as she could be while getting the job done, and she laid him in his bed for the class to find.

They were on lockdown and Sue couldn’t get downstairs to the trash in the night. She had no place to stash Stripestuff in the couple of upstairs offices where the orphans lived every minute. In the daytime, the kids-the non-orphans at least-got into everything, even downstairs where they were supposedly not allowed. Might as well make the discovery foreseeable and respectful. Educational, too, she thought, wondering if maybe she was getting a little teacher in her after all. Then again, each and every one of these kids had already seen death firsthand in unimaginable manners and quantities. What could they learn from a cat? Her smile evaporated.

The class-such as it was, twenty kids spread over ages three to ten, being overseen by a clerk and a dental assistant, whose only qualifications were that they looked like teachers, both being middle-aged females-found him in his bed, having passed peacefully in the night when they assembled at eight. After a little death-lesson-cum-ceremony by Sue, they interred him by wrapping him in plastic sheeting and throwing him out one of the second-story windows into the piles of red earth of the unfinished construction site next door. The plastic came partly unraveled and the cat fell a little short of the dirt, landing on the warehouse’s own blacktop. What could you do but pull the shades? The kids mostly cried or moped, but not Jayson, which just confirmed everything Sue felt about him.

He was just lucky he wasn’t an orphan.

“I’m hungry!” the little animal yelled, and Sue nearly lost it right there. Everyone in the warehouse had eaten carefully meted crackers and peanuts for lunch, for Christ, and this little fatty was the only one bitching about it. One of the oldest kids in the group but stupider than the youngest by half.

Sue took a breath and, clutching it inside her, strode past the other children to grab Jayson by his filthy collar and hiss in his face, “You. Are. Not. A good. Child.” That made her smile a little bit, and she set him down.

“I hate you!” he shrieked, with his horrible little nubby teeth and his filthy face. “I’m telling my dad!”

That made her smile even more. She reached down and pinched his cheek hard, harder, keeping in the thing that she wanted to growl, that Jayson’s father was part of the reason Jayson was hungry. Every time that asshole went out on runs, the truck came back half-stuffed with liquor, and all the guys cheered, not considering that a few cases of saltines and applesauce only went so far.

Another child said it. “I’m hungry.”

Sue turned, feeling revived. “I told you, Leticia, there’s no food yet. We’re waiting for the supply run to come back.”

“When are they gonna be here?”

Sue looked to Patty, the dental assistant, the other woman who passed for an elementary-grade teacher in the upper-level conference room of this welding and steam-fitting warehouse. In truth they were babysitters at best. Patty was at least slightly more experienced, having had a daughter until the outbreak. She had a dozen new lines on her face this week and seemed a little stoned, with her eyelids not quite reaching the tops of her broad pupils.

“Well,” Sue said, leaving Patty staring at the wall, “they were supposed to have been back a little while ago. For lunch.” It was quarter past one. “My guess is, they found a really nice grocery store or something, and they took their time, and they’re almost back now with a truck full of cookies and spaghetti and tuna. How does that sound?”

Some of the younger kids gave out a little “yay” chorus. Then they were all back to doodling on their math sheets or punching at their board games.

Sue hated them. Most of them. Wayne said there was only room for eight people on the Jeep, a couple more if the kids were little.

Sue had eight orphans in her class and eleven children of other adults holed up in the warehouse. She didn’t have to worry about the eleven, but with her and Patty not minding them during the day or sleeping on pissy mattresses with them in the classroom at night, the orphans were as good as dead.

Pushing it, pushing it, she and Patty could maybe bring five kids. That meant she had to eliminate three.

Obviously, she should have done this before noon but her hangover was still wearing off then.

She scanned the pitiful crowd. It was easy enough to gravitate toward the younger students, the kindergarteners whom life hadn’t yet broken, but that just made them a liability. It meant Sue would have to be the one to watch or assist the breaking.

Devon, a four-year-old black kid, gave out a horrible snorking cough, the apparent culmination of some symptoms that had been dribbling out of him all day and a validation ticket for some thoughts Sue had been having on the subject. She sighed thanks. Goodbye, Devon.

Sue sidled over to Patty and whispered. “I’m thinking we take Leticia, Morgan, Shawn, and Greg. They’re all over six…for the last one, it’s between Sophia, Sarah, and Avery. What do you think? Sarah’s youngest but she’s got it together, listens well.”

Patty grunted.

“That’s all we can take. Five is a lot even for two of us to wrangle, out…on the road. Christ, Patty, say something, we have to-”

“Wha?”

“You have to pick: Do you want Sophia, Sarah, or Avery? Devon’s got that horrible cough. It seems serious. All we need is for the kids to all get sick.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Yes, you can, Wayne and Ian have it all planned out. We can’t stay here forever.”

“I can’t pick them, I’m not going.”

“You’re not making sense. We’ve been talking about it for a week. Christ, we’ve all been thinking about it for a month, ever since Ian said Seth wanted to quit doing rescue runs and stick to supplies. You can do this. We have to do it. The warehouse is a dead-end situation. Picking the kids-that’s all hypothetical anyway, if Wayne can come back with hard proof that Zach and Ted are murderers, then maybe Seth will see that we all have to go.”

“Of course I’ll go if we all go. But if he doesn’t, if Seth wants to stay, I’m not just…I’m not just going to leave, it’s too dangerous. I’ll stay here with the kids. There’s food-”

“No there isn’t!”

“Usually, usually there is. There’s protection…” Patty said. “Seth keeps things running here pretty well.”

Sue rubbed her face. “Ohhh, my god. You really believe that, you’d really rather stay.”

“It doesn’t matter, I can’t leave any kids. None of them… none of them deserve that.”

“Shhh!” So that was it. It was a goddamned mother thing. Sue stole a look out the window; no Jeep yet. “Sweetie, Brandy’s gone, you can’t help her. Let me put it to you this way: What would Brandy want you to do? She’d want you to do the thing that was best for everyone, right? Well, staying isn’t good for anyone. This is a place for dying. Think about Plaquemines Parish. Did you ever take Brandy down to Port Sulphur? Did she like it? Well, it’s great, that area, you can grow just about anything, fish, shrimp, it’s breezy… Think about the kids that are here.”