Chapter 364: Anxious Mei and Keith
More than a week in Brigantine, and it hadn’t gotten any easier to be there.
Mei didn’t think it would. Some places had an ambiance to them that time didn’t soften, you didn’t acclimatize to them so much as develop a higher tolerance for the discomfort they produced. Brigantine was that kind of place. Every day she spent inside it she understood it a little better, and understanding it didn’t make it more bearable. If anything it made it worse.
From the outside it had the shape of a functioning community. Walls, structure, assigned roles, meals distributed at regular intervals. Callighan maintained the surface of order with a consistency that was almost impressive given what he was actually working with. Because underneath that surface, Brigantine wasn’t a community at all. There were no real bonds here, no genuine solidarity between the people living inside it. What held them together wasn’t trust or shared purpose, it was authority, and fear of what happened when you stepped outside it. Strip Callighan’s control away and what remained was a collection of people who would turn on each other before the day was out.
Criminals, most of them. People who had worked outside every social contract long before the world collapsed, for whom the apocalypse had simply removed the last remaining consequences. Callighan had found them, corralled them, and pointed them in a direction. That was the whole of it.
What surprised Mei, and she didn’t impress easily was that it worked. That he’d taken people like that and made them functional, made them follow orders and hold a line and not simply consume everything around them until nothing was left. She didn’t know how he’d done it. She suspected Gaspar had less to do with it than people assumed, that this piece of the operation was Callighan’s alone.
But the seams showed if you looked long enough. There were moments, small ones, a look exchanged across a courtyard, a dispute held just barely below the threshold of violence, a rule followed resentfully rather than willingly ,where you could see the thread it was all hanging from. One clean cut and Brigantine would revert to something that didn’t have a polite name.
Mei caught herself thinking, not for the first time, about how fortunate her path had been before this. Ryan’s group, then Margaret’s community, people who were trying to build something worth building, where the worst personality in the room was someone like Brad who confined his awfulness to words and sideways comments. She’d found laughable enough at the time.
She felt almost embarrassed by that now.
The only reason she was eating regular meals and sleeping without one eye open in a place like this was because the man running it had decided she was more useful intact. That thought provided exactly zero comfort, but it was honest, and Mei preferred honest things even when they were unpleasant.
She needed to get out. Not eventually. Soon. Every instinct she had was telling her that the window she was in had a limit she couldn’t see but could feel, and she’d learned over the last few months not to ignore what her instincts told her.
"What are you brooding about?"
Keith’s voice pulled her back. She looked down and realized she’d been staring at the bowl of food in her lap without touching it, completely still, lost in the loop of her own thinking.
They were sitting on one of the house courtyard benches where meals were usually distributed, open air, the sound of Brigantine’s daily routines carrying around them. Keith was working through his bowl with considerable focus, eating hungrily.
"You seem remarkably comfortable," Mei said, a dry edge to her voice.
He glanced up without slowing. "What are you talking about?" He lowered his voice, leaning slightly toward her. "We need to be in good shape. Strong. If things move fast we can’t afford to be running on empty." He nodded pointedly at her untouched bowl.
"The plan only moves if Tommy decides to cooperate," she replied. "Which he hasn’t."
Keith’s spoon paused.
That was the thing neither of them had said directly in the last four days, though both of them had been thinking it. It had been that long since they’d approached Tommy with what they were proposing, four days of watching him from across courtyards, four days of finding him occupied, unavailable, moving in different directions, giving them nothing.
"Has he spoken to you?" Keith asked carefully.
"Not once," Mei said.
"Same." He set his spoon down for a moment, looking at the middle distance. "You think he went to Callighan? Told him what we said?"
Mei considered it properly rather than dismissing it quickly. "If he had, we’d know already. Callighan wouldn’t sit on information like that, he’d move on it immediately. We’d be in a room somewhere, not on this bench." She picked up her spoon. "Tommy hasn’t betrayed us. He’s avoiding us, which is a different thing."
"So why is he avoiding us?" Keith asked, frustration edging into his voice.
"I don’t know," she said simply.
Which was true and also the most unsettling part of it. She could work with known problems. Unknown ones were harder.
Keith picked his spoon back up and resumed eating, though with slightly less enthusiasm than before.
He was right though, and she knew it. Sitting here refusing to eat properly, letting her energy run down, getting wound up over things she couldn’t immediately resolve, all of that was just burning through reserves she was going to need. Whatever was coming, she needed to be ready for it when it arrived.
Mei looked down at the bowl and started eating.
"Maybe you just weren’t convincing enough," Keith said.
Mei felt her expression cool immediately. "I chose my words considerably better than you would have."
"You say that," Keith replied, "but everything about the way you carry yourself says private school, rich family, used to people falling in line." He tilted his head slightly. "Am I wrong?"
Mei didn’t answer. The small, precise scoff that escaped her probably said enough on its own.
"Right. So if you brought that same energy into the conversation with him, that brand of you’re obviously going to do what I’m suggesting — then I’m not surprised he’s been quiet." He shrugged. "People don’t like being managed."
"I’m not stupid enough to approach him like that," Mei said. "I told him plainly, if he wants any real chance of getting Emily out, he needs to work with us. That’s not management, that’s just the truth."
"His girlfriend," Keith muttered, dragging his spoon around the bottom of his bowl with thinly veiled irritation. "He wants to save his girlfriend. Meanwhile Emily’s been in a basement for weeks and if she were mine I’d have found a way to—"
"Weren’t you the one calling her a monster?" Mei turned to look at him, eyes narrowed. "Specifically and repeatedly, if I remember correctly. That it was dangerous to let her out."
"That’s completely different," Keith said, without a trace of self-awareness.
"Is it."
"Obviously. If she was my girlfriend, or my sister, it changes everything. You can’t hold that against me."
"You are a hypocrite," Mei snorted.
Keith grinned at her. "The only kind worth trusting, honestly. At least for you."
Mei made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh but wasn’t entirely not one either. Keith caught it and smiled catching her small smile.
Then he shifted, the lightness fading slightly. He turned his spoon over in his fingers and asked hesitantly.
"What are you planning to do when we get out of here? Go back to the group that left you here on your own?"
Mei’s eyes went cold.
She didn’t answer immediately. Because the honest answer was complicated, besides Keith’s version of it, however bluntly put wasn’t entirely wrong. More than a week had passed. She’d stopped expecting a rescue after the first few days, but that didn’t mean the absence of one didn’t sit somewhere tender though she knew there were complicated circumstances.
"I don’t know," she said quietly.
Keith blinked. He’d clearly expected pushback, not that.
The obvious answer was Ryan’s group, it should have been simple, should have been the only answer. But her feelings about Ryan right now were a tangled, unresolved thing she hadn’t worked through, and the thought of walking back into that before she’d sorted herself out made something in her chest resist. Margaret’s community was separate from Ryan’s people in a way that might offer something cleaner. She could contribute there, build something that was hers, and not having to be with Ryan’s group anymore.
It was probably the most isolated she’d felt since the outbreak started. Even Ivy, who had arrived alongside her, maintained a distance that was almost architectural, Mei really still could not understand how a school nurse could be that unreachable and perfectly calm about their whole ordeal. She wished she was calm as her in every circumstances.
"You don’t know." Keith stared at her. "I was joking around, you know that right? I didn’t actually think you’d—" He straightened slightly, something uncertain crossing his face. "I was counting on you to eventually drag me and Lucy into whatever you had going. That was the plan in my head."
"And what exactly made you think that was my responsibility?" Mei said.
"Well you got abandoned by your own people, so clearly your judgment in—"
He didn’t finish the sentence.
Mei’s fork connected with the back of his hand.
"Ow! What the—that actually hurt!"
"Good," she said.
a
"I was going to apologize!" He pulled his hand back.
"Apologize faster next time."
Keith opened his mouth to respond, then stopped. His eyes shifted, moving past Mei’s shoulder to something behind her. His whole posture changed in a single second, the argument dissolving out of him.
He nudged her once.
"He’s here."
Mei didn’t turn immediately. She took one breath, set her expression to neutral, then glanced back over her shoulder.
Tommy was crossing the courtyard. When his eyes found theirs he gave a single small nod.
It was clearly not a nod of acknowledgment.
Both Mei and Keith understood that nod of confirmation that he was in.
And both of them could hardly hid their relief upon seeing that though one was showing it more than the other.
"Finally—!" Keith’s fist came down against the bench hard in joy.
The bench jumped. Mei’s bowl tilted off her lap and spilled its remaining contents directly down the front of her skirt.
Mei looked down at herself. Looked up at Keith. Keith looked back at her, his mouth opened as he sweated bullets.
"Mei, I’m sorry—"
She picked up her bowl and emptied what was left of it into his face.
Keith sat there dripping, blinking slowly.
