FORT OF BORROWED STRENGTH

The first thing I heard was Blake's breathing, thin and fast, the way it gets when she's holding a knife and trying not to show it. The second thing was the dog.

It came through the ferns low and quiet, which is worse than barking. A barking dog is a warning. A quiet one is already hunting. I had my hand on Blake's wrist before I knew I'd moved, my thumb pressed to the cord of her pulse, and she didn't pull away. That was how we worked. I ran, she read the ground, and neither of us said the obvious thing out loud.

Three months in the woods teaches you what quiet costs. The camp was behind us, the tarp and the fire ring and the two cans we'd been saving, and none of it mattered because the dog meant men, and men in these woods meant the kind who take.

"Johnny." Blake's voice barely moved her lips. "Left. There's a deer trail."

"I don't see it."

"You don't have to see it. Go."

I went.

The trail wasn't a trail. It was a seam between two ridges, choked with bramble, and I took it at a dead run because running is the one thing my body does without asking permission. Branches whipped my arms. My hoodie caught and tore and I left a piece of it behind like a shed skin. Behind me Blake crashed through the undergrowth with less grace and more noise, and behind her came the dog, and behind the dog came voices. Two of them. Maybe three.

"Split them off!" a man shouted. "Take the girl, she's the one with the pack!"

I stopped so fast my knees locked.

That's the thing nobody tells you about being fast. It's useless if you're fast in the wrong direction. I turned around and ran back toward the sound, and the look on Blake's face when she saw me coming was the closest thing to fear I'd seen from her since the day we met.

"Don't you dare," she said.

I grabbed her hand and yanked her sideways off the trail, into a stand of dead pines where the ground was a mat of needles and the trunks stood like bars. We went down flat. The dog hit the trail and lost our scent in the pine rot, circling, whining. One of the men called it back. Boots crunched past us, close enough that I could smell the smoke in their clothes.

"Where'd they go?"

"Doesn't matter. They'll circle back to the camp. We'll be waiting."

They moved off. I lay in the needles with my face half-buried and my heart going like something trapped in a jar, and Blake's hand found mine in the dark and squeezed once. That was all. That was everything.

We waited until the woods went back to their normal noise. Birds first, then the small stuff, then nothing, which in the woods means something. I sat up and picked pine needles out of my hair and tried to think.

"The camp's gone," I said.

"The camp was already gone the second they found it."

"Our stuff."

"Stuff." She said it like it was a word for children. "Johnny, they're going to wait for us. They know we're out here and they know we don't have anywhere to go. That's what they do. They find people like us and they wait."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to say we could go back for the cans, for the tarp, for the little book she carried that told her which plants wouldn't kill us. But she was right, and being right is the only weapon Blake has ever needed.

So we walked. North, because north was away from the camp and away from the men, and because I didn't have a better idea. We walked until the light went gray and the ground started to climb, and somewhere in the middle of that climb I heard something that stopped me cold.

A generator.

You don't forget that sound. It's the sound of before, of streetlights and refrigerators and a world that had power. Out here it meant walls. It meant people who'd decided to stay put and defend something.

It meant Jerome, though I didn't know his name yet.

The fort sat in a fold of the hills like it had grown there, a palisade of stripped logs and sheet metal and one concrete wall that must have been part of an old pump station. A watchtower stood at the corner with a rifle barrel poking out of it, and the barrel tracked us the whole way up the last slope. I kept my hands where they could see them. Blake kept hers near her knife, which is a different kind of honesty.

A gate opened before we reached it. Not because we knocked. Because someone up top had already made the call.

The man who came out filled the doorway. Tall, shoulders like a doorframe, dark skin, a face that had been broken and put back together by somebody who wasn't a doctor. He wore a plate carrier over a flannel shirt and carried no weapon that I could see, which scared me more than the rifle did.

"Stop there," he said. His voice was low and even, the voice of a man who'd never once had to raise it to be heard. "You're bleeding."

I looked down. My forearm was open from the bramble, a long red line soaking into my sleeve. I hadn't felt it.

"We're not sick," Blake said. Fast, flat. "Neither of us. No bites, no fever. We got chased out of our camp two ridges south. Three men, a dog. They're still out there."

The man studied her. Then he studied me, and I did what I always do when a man like that looks at me. I looked at the ground.

"You did the talking," he said to Blake. "Why?"

"He's shy."

"He's armed?"

"He's not." I found my voice somewhere down in my chest and it came out thin. "I don't carry. I run."

Something moved across the man's face. Not a smile. The ghost of one, maybe, the way you'd remember a smile from a long time ago.

"Running's a skill," he said. "Most people out here die because they can't. What's your name?"

"Johnny. This is Blake."

"Johnny." He said it like he was weighing it. "I'm Jerome. This is my fort. There's a rule here. You pull your weight or you leave. You lie to me once and you leave. You bring trouble to my gate and I'll hand you back to it myself. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Blake said.

"Yes," I said, a half second behind her.

Jerome looked at the treeline behind us, where the dark was settling in and somewhere out there three men and a dog were waiting for two people who weren't coming back. Then he looked at me again, and there was something in it I couldn't read. Assessment, sure. But something else underneath. Interest, maybe. The kind a man has when he sees a tool he might need.

"Come inside," he said. "Before they find you standing here."

We followed him through the gate. It closed behind us with a sound like a sentence being passed.