The World Never Ended novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Warehouse

Shane's warehouse sat behind a tire shop on the east side, and it was full of my prison.

I stopped in the doorway.

The quarantine barrier stood against one wall.

Gray bunk beds were stacked to the roof, and two hazmat suits hung on a rack by the door, empty and swaying.

The metal camera rigs lay stacked on pallets along the back wall.

"We got all of it back this morning," Shane said. "I told the crew to strip the compound the minute Gordon paid us. I should have burned it."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because it's the only proof there is."

I walked down the row of bunks and touched the third from the end.

The mattress was the same blue.

I knew the burn mark on the post.

"Where are they?" I asked.

"Coming."

They came at noon, one at a time.

First a thick man in a leather jacket, who took one look at me and tried to leave.

I knew him from the cigarette outside my window.

He had worn a hazmat suit for five years and, I learned, was the man who handed me my ration trays.

"No," he said to Shane. "No, no. You said she was fine."

"She's right here," Shane said.

"I did a job." His voice shook. "We all did. We signed. Nobody told us she didn't know."

"I told you in the second year," said a quiet woman in scrubs, coming through the side door. "I told all of you, and you said it was too late to go to the police."

"She's the medic," Shane said to me, low. "She checked the children."

I looked at the woman.

She had short gray hair and cold hands, and I knew them.

She had been in the room for every birth.

She had carried each of my babies out the door, wrapped, before I could lift my head.

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