“We’re going to need to go back and visit sometimes, you know. These eggs we’re eating for breakfast and this fruit all came from your friends back at the farm. They gave us a care package of perishable food on our way out the door,” Kati said.

“That was nice of them,” Rebel answered softly. Luckily her morning sickness seemed to have subsided temporarily. She picked at her food, eating slowly, but without worrying whether it would come up or not. This was an improvement.

Kati fixed breakfast while Tiana served coffee. Krissy and Justin sat at the kitchen table with her. She’d been in this kitchen many times now, but this morning she actually saw it, noticing it was large, well-lit with morning light, and comfortable. The house wasn’t brand new, but the kitchen seemed to have been recently remodeled with dark granite countertops and cream cabinets and white subway-tile backsplash. The kitchen table was situated in front of a large window that let in the morning light and offered a view of a backyard with a green pool and yellowed landscaping sorely in need of attention.

“So.” Justin swallowed a bite of egg. “Are you ladies coming back with Rebel and me to Carmel?”

Krissy shrugged and picked up a cup of coffee. “Wasn’t sure if we were invited.”

Rebel rolled her eyes. “Don’t start. Of course you’re invited, all of you are. Wait a sec, you don’t want to stay there, do you? That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

“Well…while you were sick, the others at the farm showed me the measures they were taking in case of acid rain,” Krissy said.

Justin raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Rebel confirmed. “They said it was a matter of time before all the nuclear power plants worldwide melted down, like Chernobyl. Trevor said…” She stumbled to a halt. Everyone stared at her. “Um, they said that out in Carmel we should be safe, that it might be far enough away, but he wasn’t sure. They thought it might be a good idea for us to rethink where we were living and move farther away.”

“Yeah, they told me the same thing,” Tiana said from the kitchen. “I was going to say something to you two, advise you not to go back. I’m happy you brought it up first. They were really nice and gave us a tour of what they’re doing to stay safe too. Adam said that all the nuclear power plants in the world are dangerous, not just the ones near us, because the radioactive clouds will drift into the atmosphere and float wherever and come down randomly as acid rain. We won’t know it’s happening either until it’s too late. We can’t ever go back to LA, you know. We need to keep the exclusion zone wider than in Chernobyl or Fukushima because you have to remember that there are no humans there doing clean-up. There won’t be a sarcophagus around the reactor core keeping the worst of it contained. It will just spew like an open wound. When they blow, radioactive debris can float into the atmosphere and land who knows where.”

“That freaks me out,” said Krissy.

“Sounds like I missed a lot while I was out.” Justin looked out the window, quiet for a second. “I knew about the nuclear plants on the coast and I thought we were far enough away, but yeah, maybe we weren’t. No need to risk our lives by staying too close. There are plenty of places to live that are safer.”

“Like here,” Kati offered as she walked to the table and sat down with her own plate of food. “You could always stay here, with us.”

Rebel locked her gaze with Krissy. Her jaw clenched. “This was your plan all along, wasn’t it?”

Krissy shrugged.

“Well, it is a good idea,” Tiana offered. “We could all live here. Why not? We could go looking for more survivors but use this house as our base and return here eventually.”

Rebel looked down at her plate. Why not? Well, because…

“No,” Justin answered for her. “It’s too close, to the others.”

Kati sighed. “It’s only”—she lowered her voice—“Trevor,” she whispered. “The rest of them at the farm are really nice. I liked them, and Josie is there…”

Tiana gestured at Justin, waving her fork in the air. “You didn’t get a chance to know them, Justin, because you were out of it, you were only awake at the end to see the drama. We were there for four days and I’m telling you, they were nice.”

“No, I know,” he said. “They took care of me, remember? I got to know Christian. He was there in the RV when Rebel wasn’t. And Sebastian too. I appreciate that. It’s just, I’m worried if we’re so close and easily reachable that Trevor will try something.”

Rebel’s brow furrowed. “What? Try what?”

“I don’t know, but he looked desperate.”

“He’ll probably end up here, under your window, holding a boombox,” Krissy muttered.

“What is she talking about?” Kati said contrarily.

“Probably some eighties movie,” Tiana answered. “It’s all she talks about.”

Krissy bumped a slice of peach around on her plate with her fork. “I miss that new girl, Rachel. Now she knows her movies. She understood me.”

Justin snorted. “Let’s not romanticize this situation.” He looked at Rebel. “Remember, you’ve only known Trevor for a short time, and you didn’t know him before the end. The ten days you spent together were probably like a honeymoon where he showed you the good side of himself and hid his other side. You need to know this, all of you need to know this…the men in those Aryan prison gangs are more animal than men. They’ve lost their humanity. They spent all of their time trying to find ways to kill members of rival gangs in and out of the prison walls. They worked on ways to send coded messages to the outside and on how to receive small stashes of drugs through the mail. If they could hurt or humiliate a guard in the process, all the better. I’m telling you, Rebel, that was all those men did. Trevor was in for murder, so he was a lifer. He spent his time behind bars scheming on how to hurt other people, and he lifted weights and worked out. That’s it. That was his life. Before that, he was doing the same thing, but on the streets and on a larger scale.”

“I can’t believe I stood there and listened to him us out that day when we first met. He called us out.” Tiana snorted. “What a joke.”

“You’re saying you think he’s still dangerous? He didn’t seem like that at the farm, he—” Krissy offered.

“He was lying to all of you. Like Kati said, members of the Aryan Brotherhood only accept heterosexual Caucasians into their little world. Everyone else is the enemy. If he didn’t tip his hand and let you see that yet, it was only a matter of time until he did.”

This was the man she had trusted? The man she had started to love? The man she’d told her secrets to and had been intimate with?

Rebel felt the bile rise in her throat. She raced to the bathroom and made it just in time to lose her breakfast in the toilet.

She sat on the tile floor in the bathroom, taking deep breaths, the door partially open. She could hear them whispering in the hallway.

“We can’t go back to Carmel, we can’t stay here, what should we do?” Tiana’s distinctive voice said.

“I think we still need to travel some more, scout out new areas. We can do what they’re doing, staying close to the mountains, but we can go north. Maybe we’ll luck out and find more men,” Krissy said.

“Okay, that sounds like a decent plan.”

“I think we should put a timeline on it though,” Justin said. “I don’t want us to end up nomads. We travel for, say, a week or two, and then we find a place to settle. Can we all agree on that?”

She could hear Krissy take a deep breath. “Yeah, okay.”

“Kati, Tiana. Are you in on that? Not more than two weeks?”

“That’s perfect,” a soft female voice said.

“Yeah, that’s good. I like it,” Tiana answered. “This one here will go hog wild if you let her. I mean, I want to find a man too, but I get tired, you know? So yes, two weeks, we travel north, and then we find a place. Sounds good.”

“Rebel?” Krissy raised her voice from the hall. “What do you think of that? Are you okay with that plan?”

“Yeah,” she answered flatly. Tears ran down her cheeks. “That’s fine. Whatever.”