My Guild Threw Me to the Monsters, So I Woke Up Three Days Before the End novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Director

Marta set her mug down on the step very carefully.

"I'm not going anywhere, Shane."

"Marty, he's a mover who got lucky with a pry bar."

"He held up a church roof so I could get eleven kids out from under it." She came down the steps to him. "And I've got five kids with no parent tonight. Are they getting rooms at Ray's?"

Shane opened his mouth and closed it again.

"Ray said bring them," he said.

"Ray said bring me." She fixed his collar, the way an older sister does. "Tell him thanks. Tell him I'm staying."

Shane looked over her shoulder at me.

"You're making her pick," he said.

"She picked," I said. "I just sat here."

He got back in the truck and drove off without his headlights.

Marta stood in the yard until the engine was gone.

"He was the one kid on our street who never got in trouble," she said. "Then he came home from the Marines, and nobody would hire him for anything."

"Except Ray."

"Except Ray." She picked up her mug. "That's why this is going to be hard."

In the morning a county truck drove down Peckham Street with a loudspeaker on its roof.

"By order of the county's emergency director, every marked person will register at Niagara Square by noon today. Unregistered marks will receive no rations."

Lou drove me downtown in the moving truck.

Downtown was a building site.

Ironworks trucks were dragging city buses and shipping containers into a ring around City Hall and Niagara Square.

I'd walked that wall for twelve years.

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