Page 56 of One Adult, Please

Beck grins. "He learns fast."

Grant glances toward the glass front doors. "I don't want to leave them here overnight. The barricade held because nothing found us, but it won't hold if those things gather outside."

"The crime boat has a retractable gangplank," Beck says. "Nothing gets onto the deck unless we let it."

"Then we move the vulnerable ones," Joel says. "I'll sweep the route again. Beck, find transport crates. We use the service corridor and lock every door behind us."

It takes the rest of the afternoon. Grant feeds everyone before we leave. Beck finds a rolling animal cart and discovers that pushing them at high speed is "apparently discouraged." Joel checks the route twice. I'm assigned to hold Pepper's formula and not test the carts recreationally, which feels targeted.

Grant packs formula for Pepper and feed for the round friends. Captain goes into a hooded travel crate because Captain’s authentic self-expression can summon the dead. Cornelius gets a blanket-lined wheelbarrow because he walks at the speed of continental drift.

We leave the rescue center in a procession that looks, from a distance, like the world’s most chaotic evacuation. Joel leads. Beck pushes the cart carrying Captain’s crate. Grant carries Pepper and leads Fernando and Diego in their ambassador harnesses. I bring up the rear with Cornelius, with Pepper’s formula tucked beside him, the friendship paddle laid across the wheelbarrow handles, and approximately half a pond still in my shoes.

Kevin follows at a distance. Kevin wasn’t invited. Kevin doesn’t recognize invitations.

We're going to need more crayons because the plan is getting bigger and the park is getting smaller and we're winning.

We're actually winning.

15

THE SLEEPY STICK HAS BRANDING PROBLEMS

GRANT

Grace defies categorization. I keep trying. It's what I do: I watch, I note the patterns, I create a framework of known behaviors and predict what comes next.

Grace doesn't have a behavioral vocabulary. Grace has a behavioral jazz improvisation. She talks in a continuous stream of language that replaces approximately thirty percent of standard English with a dialect that makes perfect sense if you stop expecting words to mean what they've always meant and start expecting them to mean what they look like.

I've known her for less than twenty-four hours and I don't know what to do with her. I do know that my attention drops to her mouth every time she looks at me. That behavior is much easier to categorize. Attraction. Immediate, inconvenient, and getting worse.

So I'm watching.

I slept on the crime boat last night. The captain's quarters, which Grace calls the thinking box, has a desk, a bench, and a floor, and the four of us divided the space the way animals divide a shared enclosure: by instinct, each body finding its position relative to the others.

At two in the morning, when Pepper needed formula, Beck was on watch beside the porthole. Joel was asleep against the wall, one hand still resting near his wrench. Grace had somehow migrated across the bench until one foot was pressed against Beck’s shoulder. He hadn’t moved it.

I fed Pepper in the quiet while Beck watched the lagoon.

Once everyone is awake, Grace unfolds the crayon plan on the desk and adds a new section: GARDEN PART CLEARING - TODAY. She draws an arrow pointing to the green section of her map, and underneath it she writes a list in seafoam green crayon:

Clear all buildings.

Seal perimeter.

Don't let Kevin kill me.

Round friend safety (PRIORITY).

I offer a different approach.

"They move in patterns," I say. The other three look at me. "The infected behave like sick herd animals. Disoriented, stimulus-responsive, gravitating toward movement and sound. I've been watching them from the rescue center windows and they cluster. They move toward noise. They follow each other. If one turns, the others turn."

"Like fish," Joel says.

"Like ungulates. Wildebeest, caribou. Herd animals that move as a group because each individual is responding to the one next to it. It's a cascade. They look organized but they're not. Each movement triggers the next."

Grace stares at me with an expression I'm still trying to classify. "You've been herding them."