Chapter 322: First Day in the Boardwalk

Morning had already broken by the time my eyes opened.

Light was pressing in through the gaps in the storefront window, thin, pale strips of it cutting across the floor at low angles, the kind that told you the sun had been up for a while and hadn’t waited around for you. I hadn’t moved. I was still on the makeshift bed on the ground, flat on my back, one arm folded across my forehead, staring up at the water-stained ceiling of the cramped little store they’d given me on the Boardwalk.

My body was in that room. My thoughts weren’t anywhere close.

They were back there. Back at the exchange. Back at Mei’s face.

I’d been lying there turning it over since before the light came in, picking at it the way you pick at something that won’t stop hurting, not because it helps, but because you can’t seem to leave it alone. The anger at myself was quiet but it had weight to it.

I’d left her there.

She’d told me to go, yes. She’d said the words. But that wasn’t the part that sat wrong, people said things in hard moments that weren’t the whole truth of what they felt. What sat wrong was that I’d gone without saying anything real back to her. I’d stood there and I hadn’t found the words, and then I’d walked away, and now there was a whole night of distance between that moment and me, and the words still hadn’t come.

I wasn’t the one behind those walls. That much was true. It was easy to stand on the outside and tell yourself you understood what it felt like on the inside, but I didn’t, not really. I could imagine it, could try to, but that wasn’t the same thing.

I could have explained it to her. The circumstances. Why we couldn’t pull her out right then, why the exchange had gone the way it did. I’d had the chance to lay it out, to tell her it wasn’t indifference, that there were pieces moving around her that made it more complicated than it looked from where she was standing.

But it would have sounded hollow. Excuses dressed up as reasons. And given what she’d said, that I was treating her differently, that Sydney and Rachel and Cindy would have gotten a different version of me, the last thing I wanted was to hand her more ammunition for that thought.

The question had burrowed into me since she’d said it, though.

Would I have?

If it had been Sydney in there, or Rachel, or Cindy, would I have just handed Lucy over without a second thought? Walked straight through it?

I stared at the ceiling.

No. Probably not. There would have been other considerations. There always were.

But the circumstances around Mei were what they were. She wasn’t broken. She wasn’t in direct danger, at least not the kind I couldn’t still get ahead of. When I’d seen her yesterday, she was standing on her own two feet and still herself. If I’d walked in and found her shattered, wounded, hollowed out, I wouldn’t have walked away empty-handed. I would have thrown the whole plan out and pulled her out on the spot, consequences be dealt with later.

But she wasn’t. She was still okay. Which meant I could still do this the right way. The way that didn’t risk Gaspar turning on her the moment things went sideways.

I could still get to her.

This had nothing to do with her meaning less than anyone else. Sydney, Rachel, Cindy, they had a place inside me that was unique and irreplaceable. But Mei did too. Different in shape, different in how it had grown, but no less real. The thought of her sitting in there thinking I’d weighed her against someone else and found her wanting, it tightened something in my chest I didn’t have a name for.

"Just hold on, Mei."

I pressed my fist against my forehead, fingers curled.

"We’re getting the intel from Lucy. We’re coming for you. Just give me a little more time...."

The glass door swung open with a short, sharp sound.

"What are you still doing on the floor?"

Maribel stood in the doorway, one hand on the doorframe, the morning light sitting at her back. She looked at me tired.

"Ever heard of knocking?" I asked, pushing myself up slowly.

"It’s not like you were sleeping naked," she said, arms crossing.

"...Fair enough," I muttered, mostly to myself.

She watched me drag myself upright with a narrowed gaze.

"What’s with the face?"

"I’m fine."

"You don’t look fine. You look like you didn’t sleep." She tilted her head slightly. "Is this about you girl couldn’t get back from Callighan?"

"She’s not my girlfriend," I said, before she’d even finished the sentence.

"I didn’t say girlfriend." Maribel raised an eyebrow. "But now you’ve said it, so."

I let that one go.

"Is it wrong to be worried about a friend?" I asked instead, reaching for my shirt.

She was quiet for a second, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read, somewhere between skeptical and something more thoughtful underneath it.

"You’re just weird," she said finally, with a small shrug that seemed to settle the matter for her. "Alright, get moving. We’ve got a lot to get through this morning and I’m not waiting around while you brood."

"Right." I pulled the shirt on. "You’re supposed to be keeping an eye on me while I’m here, yeah?"

"Babysitting you, yeah." She turned toward the door. "Unfortunately. Try not to make it harder than it has to be."

I looked at her and I felt something loosen in my chest. Just a little. Just enough.

I smiled.

She caught it in her peripheral vision somehow.

"What?" She turned back, eyes narrowing, already suspicious before she even knew what she was suspicious of.

"Nothing," I said. "Just, you never used to call it babysitting. Usually you made a point of not calling it that. Looks like you don’t hate it that much anymore."

She stared at me. Something moved behind her eyes, and a flicker of realization later....

"W...what?!*" The word came out louder than she probably meant it to, her fists clenching slightly at her sides, a faint heat rising along the edge of her jaw.

"My bad," I said quickly, turning away so she wouldn’t catch the smile still on my face.

I grabbed the rest of my things and followed her out into the morning.

"You better make yourself useful while you’re here," Maribel said, stopping just outside the door and turning to fix me with a look that made it clear this wasn’t a suggestion. "I mean it. You’re not a guest."

"Yes, ma’am," I said.

She stared at me.

"Don’t call me that."

"Yes, Maribel."

"That’s... also a bit weird," she muttered, glancing away briefly.

I looked at her, at a loss. "What do you want me to call you then?"

"Maribel is fine," she said quickly. "Whatever. Forget it." She started walking. "Maribel is fine."

I fell into step beside her, deciding not to push it further. Some things were better left where they landed.

"Alright, Maribel," I said. "What do I actually need to do?"

She didn’t answer immediately. We walked through the Boardwalk’s outer stretch, past a row of boarded-up storefronts and around a cluster of barricade posts someone had reinforced with salvaged metal plating overnight. The morning air still had that low, damp chill to it, the kind that clung to the coast and didn’t burn off until well past noon. A few people were already moving around, heads down, hands busy. Nobody was idle here. That much was obvious.

Maribel stopped near the edge of a wide lot that backed up against one of the larger buildings, what looked like it had once been a mid-sized retail space, now gutted and repurposed into something resembling a storage depot. Out front, two trucks sat with their rear doors hanging open, and beside them were crates. A lot of crates. Boxes sealed with tape, duffel bags stuffed to their limits, loose containers of various sizes stacked in uneven towers on a pair of folding tables.

"Scavenging run came back late last night," Maribel said, nodding toward the pile. "Everything needs to go inside and get sorted into the right sections. Canned goods and dry food on the left wall. Medical supplies, anything that looks like it came from a pharmacy or clinic, goes to the back room, separate shelf, don’t mix it in with anything else. Tools, hardware, batteries go to the right side." She paused, then added, "The heavy stuff first. There are boxes of canned goods at the bottom of that second truck that have been sitting there since last night and they need to move before the sorting can even start."

I looked at the trucks.

They weren’t joking about it, weren’t they?

We looked ridiculous in comparison with how we scavenged around carrying bags, at beast we he had cars but we refrained.

I looked back at her.

"On my own?" I asked.

"Molly’s sending two others to help in about twenty minutes. Until then—" she gestured at me with two fingers, "—yes. On your own. Consider it a warm-up."

"Right," I said, and moved toward the first truck.

The crates were heavy, a bit I mean. The kind of heavy that told you the people who’d packed them had been efficient and completely unbothered by whoever was going to have to unload them. I got my arms underneath the first one, felt the weight shift and settle, and carried it inside at a pace that I decided was respectable given the circumstances.

The inside of the storage depot was organized. Chalk markings on the floor indicated zones. Someone had even labeled the shelving with hand-written signs, the letters straight and careful. There was a logic to the place that felt reassuring, like evidence that people here were thinking past just surviving the next twenty-four hours.

I went back and forth. Crates, boxes, bags. The rhythm of it was almost meditative in a bleak sort of way, lift, carry, place, return, repeat.

Somewhere behind me I could hear the Boardwalk waking up further, voices picking up, the distant sound of something being hammered, someone calling out instructions across the lot.

Maribel checked in twice, standing at the entrance with her arms folded, watching me.

"If you’d help me instead, it might go faster, Maribel," I called out then.

"Yeah, it might go faster," she nodded but didn’t step forward to help out right.

"Right..."

I continued.

By the time the two others Molly had sent arrived, a lean, quiet guy named Deshawn and a woman with a shaved undercut who introduced herself only as Petra, we’d gotten through most of the heavy load. The three of us fell into a working rhythm without much discussion, the way people do when the task is clear enough that words just slow things down. Deshawn turned out to have a methodical streak that matched the chalk-marked floor almost perfectly, sorting as he went, never putting something down somewhere it’d have to be moved again. Petra was fast, less precise, but she compensated with the kind of relentless energy that covered the gap.

It took the better part of an hour and a half to clear the trucks and get everything roughly into position. The detailed sorting, cross-checking expiry dates on canned goods, separating medical supplies into categories, logging what came in against the inventory sheet pinned to the back wall, took another stretch on top of that.

By the time we were mostly done, the noon had fully arrived and the chill had burned off, replaced by the flat, grey warmth that passed for sunshine on the coast.

I stepped outside, rolled my shoulders back, and found Maribel leaning against the wall near the entrance, checking something off on a battered clipboard.

"Done," I said.

She looked up, glanced past me into the storage room, and gave it a few seconds of assessment.

"Medical supplies are in the back room?"

"Separate shelf. Nothing mixed in."

"Heavy hardware?"

"Right side, far wall. Batteries are grouped by size on the lower shelf."

She looked back down at the clipboard and made a mark. "Not bad." She said.

"Not bad?" Deshawn came through the depot entrance behind me, eyes wide, his expression caught somewhere between amused and impressed. "Maribel, this guy is amazing."

"Right?" Petra followed a step behind him, arms crossed, looking at me. "He was lifting those crates like they were stuffed with paper. And it’s not like he’s walking around with massive arms either." Her eyes moved over me in a way that was more analytical than anything else. "What’s the deal with that?"

"He’s not entirely regular human," Maribel said simply. "Think of him as something closer to a superhuman. Leave it at that."

Deshawn’s smile held, but something behind it shifted into something a little more careful. "Yeah, I’d heard something like that going around." He glanced at me. "He’s not going to flip on us at some point, right? Like, we’re good?"

I looked at him flatly. "Why would I be here helping you move boxes if I was planning on flipping on you?"

Deshawn considered that for a half second, then broke into a grin. "Yeah, okay. Fair."

"Fair," Petra agreed, the corner of her mouth pulling upward.

I turned back to Maribel. "What’s next?"

"You wait," she said, checking something on her clipboard. "That was only half the load. Another run is coming in soon, shouldn’t be long."

I blinked. "Another one? How much are you guys pulling in? Are you scraping Atlantic City down to the foundations?"

"We have to move fast," Maribel said with a shrug. "Things have changed. The situation has changed, now that we have rival group nearby."

I watched her face for a moment. "Are we the rival group you’re referring to?"

"I never said that."

She had definitely meant us.

I let it sit without pushing. She wasn’t wrong, strictly speaking, two groups working in proximity, both trying to consolidate resources before the other could. That was just the math of survival. Didn’t make us enemies. Didn’t make it uncomplicated either.

"Well," I said, "for what it’s worth, we’re holding up fine on our end. And we’ll soon have a solid garden going. Once it’s fully established there’ll be enough to cover what we can’t scavenge."

Petra’s eyebrows went up slightly. "Seriously? We’ve been trying to get something growing on our side for weeks. Can’t seem to get it to take right."

"We’ve got people who actually know what they’re doing," I said. Margaret and Clara, mostly, though even Daisy had picked up enough by now to pull her weight in the rows without being asked twice. "It makes a difference having someone who understands the soil and the timing rather than just hoping things grow."

"Think they’d be willing to show us how to set it up properly?" Deshawn asked, leaning forward slightly. "Like, the actual method? Because we’ve been going about it wrong somewhere and I cannot figure out where."

"I’ll ask," I said. "No guarantees, but I’ll ask."

They would definitely help actually but we had to play our cards well.

"Alright, that’s enough," Maribel said, her voice cutting cleanly through the conversation. "We’re not doing a community bonding session right now. Stay focused."

"There’s literally nothing to focus on at this exact moment," I pointed out. "You just told us to wait."

Petra and Deshawn grinned hearing that.

"Then here—"

Something came flying at my face. I caught it on instinct, a broom handle, slightly worn at the grip end, the bristles on the lower half flattened from use.

"Now you have something to focus on!" Maribel said, pointing at the floor of the depot with a look of complete satisfaction. "The whole floor. Every corner. Don’t miss the back room."

I stood there holding the broom. Deshawn made a very point of looking somewhere else. Petra turned away, but her shoulders were shaking.

I looked at Maribel.

She looked back at me with her arms crossed and her chin slightly raised, daring me to say something.

I swept the floor.

I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of a complaint but as I worked the broom through the first corner of the depot, I was becoming increasingly aware that she was enjoying this particular arrangement a great deal more than she would ever openly admit....

I kept that observation exactly where it was, tucked away, private, nowhere near my mouth.

Some things you just let a person have.