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“Wait,” Kan’n said.
I paused, my finger hovering over the power button.
He hesitated for a moment before clearing his throat, then saying, in a very official tone,“I’m sorry for not believing that you were special, Pip. I was wrong. Thank you for being my companion for all these years.”
Pip made a sniffing sound. “That’s the first time you’ve called me Pip. You’re forgiven.”
So Kan’n did care about his shuttle. That was kind of sweet. Now if only he’d apologize for being a dick to me and everyone else at the camp, we’d be all set.
“I promise,” he continued, “that I’ll get you back inside the best shuttle. Then we’ll go shoot flyers together.”
“I can’t wait!” The words were accompanied by a widely smiling emoji. “Pew! Pew! Pew!”
Kan’n scowled. “That is not the sound your blasters make.”
I said goodbye to Pip and turned off the laptop, instantly plunging the room into darkness.
Shit! I’d forgotten our only natural light source came from the windows in the hallway. The storm was in full force now, and that light was gone. How was I going to disconnect Pip from the laptop safely? Currently, the two were connected with several repurposed wires I’d managed to scavenge in the office. It was a hack job, and one I was glad no one else was here to witness, but hey, it worked.
Unfortunately, the whole setup was anything but portable. I’d had to open up the laptop to make the connection work. Pip was perched precariously next to it, his metal housing completely unprotected.
If we had to leave in an emergency, the plan was to pull the cord from the laptop, leaving Pip intact, and sacrificing the “inferior” device. Boy, Kan’n would have a field day with that. The cords and laptop I could replace. But that would be hard to do in the dark. I felt around, looking for where the cords connected to the laptop, but realized that there simply wasn’t enough light for me to do jack all.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s too dark. I can’t see anything, and I won’t be able to grab Pip if there’s an emergency.
“I will do it.”
“The whole thing is Frankensteined together,” I said, ignoring his scowl at the unknown word. “You can’t just rip the two apart; you could damage him. If it comes to it, pull the cords from the laptop. We can sacrifice that.”
He grunted, in what I took to be a yes.
“But we can leave it for now, I guess.” I slid off the edge of the stage where I’d been sitting.
Shit! My ankle was really complaining. I shouldn’t have run all over the building on it when it was so sore already, but I had gotten an extra burst of adrenaline after finding the community center and that had masked the injury. I was regretting it now.
I was still feeling my way around, trying to find the lantern I’d charged up with the generator, when giant arms wrapped around me and lifted me clean off my feet. I yelped and threwmy arms around whatever I could find to hold onto, which happened to be Kan’n’s neck.
His masculine scent filled my nostrils as the rumbling of his chest vibrated through my body. He was so warm, I wanted to bury my face against his skin.
“Your hands are cold. These clothes are not doing their job.” He placed me down on the tumbling mats we’d laid out earlier; we’d found them tucked under the stage and they provided welcome relief from the hard, icy cold floor.
“It’s still freaking cold in here. It must be below freezing, since the snow that we brought in in those buckets never melted. We need to start a fire to warm up.” I limped toward the door and the tiny source of light in the form of the hallway windows.
Kan’n grumbled and pulled me back, forcing me to sit on the mat, which while softer than the floor, was no warmer. “Sit. Stay. You cannot see in the dark and you are injured. I will find what we need.”
My initial reaction was to protest that he was treating me like an invalid, or a pet, but it was ridiculously dark out there, and Iwasinjured. I threw my hands up in surrender. “Fine. If your survival skills are so much better than mine, you do it.”
While he was out retrieving everything we needed, I felt around and finally found that damned lantern. It was one of those LED ones and should last us a while on one charge. Technically, I’d found an electric heater too, but that needed the generator to be on, and even if I had more fuel for the generator, I wouldn’t keep it on in here unless I was literally dying of hypothermia. It stank, and even now the exhaust filled the air, even though we had all the doors to the space open.
I grabbed my bag and dumped the contents out onto the mat before organizing everything into proper piles. All the food in one area, separated by type. Cans in one pile. Bars in another. Coffee and tea in another. I made a pile of the useful electronic parts I found. And another that was miscellaneous items.
I knew I wasn’t really accomplishing anything, but it made me feel like I was being productive. This was what I always did to my workspace every time I was stuck on a project. Or before a project. Or after a project.
It took Kan’n several trips to bring in enough fuel to last the rest of the day and overnight. Despite how dark it was in here, I knew that it couldn’t be any later than mid-afternoon. After he left to bring back some cinder blocks so we could safely build a fire without burning the gym floor, I went through the library books, putting those in piles too. I set aside any I thought might be useful and with great regret put the rest in the fuel pile.
He’d also grabbed several children’s books. I movedThe Very Hungry Caterpillarinto the bring home pile. Little Mina would love that when she was old enough to read, and I wanted her to know there were good bugs out there too. Franklin had a decent library now, but nothing beats having it right at home.
