The doctor took the shard of glass from me and dropped it on a tray at the foot of the kid’s bed. She turned and said something to the man climbing out of the camouflage suit and then turned back to me. “You can call me Doctor P, okay?” I nodded. “Let’s let your little brother rest while you and I take a walk. I want to show you something.”
I didn’t correct her on the little brother thing. But I also wasn’t going to leave him alone while we went who knows where. The camouflage guy might not really look like a monster, but most monsters don’t. She must’ve seen that on my face because she walked out of the room and came back with a wheelchair. I hadn’t seen one since I was little, but there it was, a real wheelchair.
The doctor led us out of the building to another one next door. They were the same shitty, no-color wooden barracks like we lived in back in Fema Town. Back with mom and dad. Except these hadn’t been torn apart by bulldozers. As I pushed the chair through the doorway, the kid jostled awake. I heard him suck in a fast breath as he took it all in at once. But he couldn’t have been any more surprised than me. Teenagers and kids, from as little as five to almost my age, were sitting at long wooden tables. They were talking and laughing and eating. They were reading and writing like at a school. Under the light of an electric bulb.
