We huddled together in a dark basement room, me, the kid, and about twenty others between his age and mine. What had it been, a few hours?  A few hours of a real bed, a hot shower and cooked food. And then we were back to hiding in the dark. Dr. P hustled us into the basement and all the others sat down with their backs to the wall in an orderly row, totally quiet, totally practiced. Dr. P stepped out and closed the door. I could hear her still arguing with the man from upstairs.

“Why won’t you listen?” the man kept saying. “We have to get out of here.”

“They’ll come, they’ll scavenge, they’ll leave,” Dr. P said.  “If you’ve locked down properly they won’t find anything of value.”

“Not this time,” the man said. “That’s not a bunch of toothless scavvies out there looking for some mythical vault.  It’s the Hunters.  They’re back and they mean to stay.”

There was a moment of dead quiet, and then Dr. P said, “We’re on lock down.  We’re not going anywhere.”

“People are going to die, Pam.”

“Some of us will,” she said. “But what we’ve rebuilt here will not.”

The man barked a laugh that kinda sounded like he was crying. “You’d rather see all of us die than see your goddamned new society go out like the old one?”

In the silence that followed, we both understood her answer.