Page 76 of Ash Fall

"This is not the hole I thought we were going to be living in."

Gigi laughs at her. "Did you truly believe I was going to move underground? Into the dirt?" She pats Briar's arm. "Even during the apocalypse, I have standards."

Kara looks up at the lighting with her lips twisted to one side. "A school brought children here. On purpose. To look at coal equipment."

"You'd have loved it," I tell her.

"On the contrary, I would have written a very strongly worded note to my headmistress."

The group funnels through the double doors with Milton counting heads as we pass him. He points down a long bright hallway on our right.

"Shower rooms and toilets that way," he says. "Men's and women's both, six stalls each. Couple of offices down at the end there too."

I hear Briar breathe out a thank you to God behind me and have to bite my lip to stifle my laugh.

We climb a flight of stairs and spill out into a dining room that takes up the entire front of the building. Round tables fill the floor with chairs still tucked in neat at every one of them. A buffet counter runs the whole back wall. The front of the room is the two storeys of glass I saw from outside, looking down over the parking lot and the badlands past it. Light pours in off that glass and fills the whole room.

Gigi claps her hands once, delighted.

"This will do very nicely. Look at all this room." She's already walking toward the counter, craning to see over it. "There will be a commercial kitchen back there, which means we can actually feed a group this size properly. Luna, come and look at this."

She spots Milton across the room before I get there and changes course. I watch her introduce herself and put a hand on his forearm, the way she does with every man she has ever met. His ears go pink inside of thirty seconds at the attention. By the time she asks about offices that could be converted into bedrooms, he's practically tripping over himself to show her.

Most of the group stays behind in the dining room. A few of the guys peel off with us as Gigi follows Milton down a side hallway. We take turns sticking our heads into plain little rooms with desks still in them.

I count twelve off this hallway before we hit another set of stairs.

"About the same again up top," Milton says, tipping his head at them. "Twelve, maybe fourteen. Administration and payroll used to live up there."

Twenty-six rooms. Forty-odd people. I do math in my head all the way back to the dining room and feel better than I have in days. Then I catch the frown on Jules's face.

"What's wrong with you?" I ask him. "This is incredible. There's so much more room than we thought."

"There's room." He hooks his thumbs in his pockets. "There's also only going to be a couple inches of drywall between every single person here. That's not a home, Cin, it's a dorm. You'll hear every conversation, every argument, every everything. Not a whole lot of privacy."

Gage snorts from a few feet away. "My deepest apologies that the Hilton was fully booked. Maybe try being grateful we found four walls and a roof that isn't going to collapse under the ash."

"That’s not what I mean, dickhead." Jules doesn't even turn his head. "This place is perfect. I’m thankful for that. I'm saying I'm not looking forward to all of us stacked on top of each other in shoeboxes."

"I have an idea."

Every head turns, to look at Reid. He's standing by one of the tables with his hands shoved in his jacket pockets.

"Nothing says we all have to cram into those offices, right?" He pulls one hand free to gesture back the way we came. "That bay downstairs. Every vehicle and trailer we brought is inside and only took up a corner. There's room in there to build out a whole section for living."

Jules straightens up.

"Coming around the edge of town we went past four RV dealerships in a row," Reid says. "Rows and rows of campers just sitting there. We could bring back a bunch and set them up inside. They're small houses on wheels already, insulated, with their own beds and their own doors." He shrugs one shoulder. "We couldn't get enough for every single person to have their own. But for families, couples, or just people who came here in a group, it beats splitting them up between offices."

There's a beat of silence while everybody catches up to what he just said.

Anders turns and takes in the room again with that slow look he gets, and I can see him building something behind his eyes.

"We'll want shelving back there," he gestures to the very far end furthest from the doors. "Racks going up as high as we can make them safe for growing. The livestock will need its own area with drainage. Those two things together will eat half that floor." He nods slowly. "Which still leaves us enough room to run two rows of camper trailers with a road down the middle."

Gage is already nodding along. "I was thinking about that when we pulled in and had a look at what's outside. There's that field across the service road. We could pen the cattle out there and keep the whole floor for people."

Anders shakes his head at his grandson. "They'd last a day, son. Maybe two when the ash comes down on that field and fills their lungs. Then there was no point hauling them here in the first place. They have to be under cover."