"How's your hand?"

I felt a stinging pain run through my burnt palm. "I'll live."

"Did one of the infected do it?" he asked. He looked nervous.

I put my right hand on the ground and pushed down on it, using it to support my weight. My body felt like lead, but I managed to get to my feet. When I stood up, I felt dizzy. Looking up, I noticed that the walls of the room were stripped down to the stone, as though someone were decorating.

 I looked at the boy. He was about fifteen years old, sixteen at a push. He looked green to me, like he'd never spent a day outside of the town in his life. Fifteen years into the apocalypse, some kids were being born into this nightmare. They didn't have to make the transition from the old, safe world to this new, dangerous one - this was the only life they knew. This kid was one of the lucky ones though; he was obviously born in town and had lived here all his life. The walls protected him from what was outside, and he didn’t have to give much of a thought to survival. I considered the question he had asked- "Did one of them do it?" - and I couldn't keep the scorn out of my voice as I spat an answer.

"Kid, if one of them did it, do you think I'd be here?"

He looked confused. "What do you mean?"

"If someone got bit, I don't imagine you'd let them back into town."

"Why not?"

"Jesus. Kid - "

He interrupted me. "My name's Justin."

"I don't care." My head was pounding and the corners of my eyes were blurry. I heaved myself onto the bed and let my body sink into it.

Justin walked over to a dresser on the far side of the room, opposite the window. He poured water from a plastic bottle into a chipped white mug. He brought it to the side of the bed and offered it to me, but I had no interest in taking a drink off him no matter how much my cracked lips begged for it. I waved him away.

"Where are you from?" asked Justin.

"Nowhere."

"Were you looking for Vasey?"

"No."

"Then where were you going?"

I felt blood rush to my head, and my face was starting to get red. I felt like giving the kid a clout behind the ears, anything to get him to stop asking me questions. "For god's sake, give me some space."

Rather than pick up on my cues, Justin grabbed a wooden-backed chair and dragged it to the side of the bed. He sat in it and stared at me with curiosity, as though I were the new animal in a zoo.

Behind him, the bedroom door opened and an old man walked through.

His face was beaten and wrinkled, like a crumpled leather purse. His hair was grey, wiry and ran down to his shoulders, though on top it was noticeably thinning toward his crown. I couldn't help but wonder why he didn't just stop pretending and shave it all off, but I guess he was too stubborn for that. He gave a wide smile when he saw me, but I didn't read anything remotely friendly behind it.

"You're a lucky man," he said. He had a thick Lancastrian accent but his pitch was higher than I expected.

I looked down at my stinging, bandaged hand. My head throbbed and my body felt so brittle that I couldn't even get out of bed without heaving. I didn't feel too lucky.

"Yeah, guess I really won the lottery here."

The man motioned at Justin to get up. He took his place in the chair beside the bed.

"Name's Moe."

"Great."

"Yours?"

I let the seconds drag out and a silence took over the room. I wasn’t going to tell him a damn thing. The only thing I wanted to do was get the hell out of here, because every second I spent here was time wasted. Every minute I didn’t spend getting closer to the farm meant someone else could find it and take it, and I couldn't let that happen. I needed to leave, and to do that, I needed to feel better. I looked over at Justin. The kid was perched awkwardly on the dresser.

"I'll take some of that water, please," I said. If I was going to leave, I needed to get hydrated.

Justin looked up at Moe, and the old man nodded. I looked at them both to see if there were any facial similarity but there didn't seem to be any, so they probably weren’t related.  What was their connection? Justin brought the cup of water over to me and offered it out. Before I sit up, Moe grabbed it from him and held it away from me.

"What do they call you?" he said.

It seemed he was going to withhold the water unless I answered him. I took a deep breath and counted to five in my head, trying to bite back on the annoyance rising in me. I looked at the cup of water in his hand, and I felt my mouth try to salivate, except that it didn't have the moisture to do it. My lips were dry and my tongue was rough and fuzzy.

"Kyle," I answered.

He offered the cup to me. I took it, and sniffed at the water. It was a little musty, and there were flecks of white powder at the bottom.

"What the hell is this?"

"I crushed up a paracetamol for you," said Justin.

“Paracetamol?” I said. “Hasn’t that stuff all gone out of date yet?”

“Still works,” said Moe.

“Drink it,” said Justin, and nodded at the glass. “You’ll feel better.”

I eyed him with suspicion. The kid had a trustworthy face, almost plain in its honesty. Moe, on the other hand, looked like a man you’d hide your cards from in a poker game. It was obvious he was a boss of some sort to Justin, and the kid seemed so naive that he'd follow any instruction.

A dagger of pain shot through my temple, and I felt another dry heave begin to rise up from my stomach. My body was crying out for the water. I looked up again at Justin's honest face, and I reminded myself that the most conniving men are brilliant at making themselves seem truthful.

 I put the water on the nightstand beside my bed. As I set the cup down, a shard of pain stabbed my skull, as though my body were admonishing me for refusing the drink.

"They said you were a suspicious one." said Moe.

"Who?"

"Faizel, one of our scouts you met last night. He said that Noah offered you shelter, but you said no."

"I don't like having to sleep with one eye open."

Anger flashed through Moe's face, and suddenly his old eyes were dark and set deep on my own.

"And I don't like losing a good man because of a stranger's stupidity."

I bolted up into a sitting position. The movement nauseated me, and I choked back on a heave that rose from my stomach. Anger flashed through me and made my chest feel tight. Who the hell was Moe to speak to me like that? I looked to Moe and Justin, and didn't like my odds; I was down two to one, and I was practically an invalid right now. If something was off about these two, and I needed to get out of here, I doubted my body could even get me to the door. I was done with this though. I didn’t like being in Vasey, and I had somewhere I needed to get.

The farm was waiting, and every second that ticked by without me making at least some progress felt wasted.

I choked back my anger and tried to keep my voice calm. "If there was some stupidity last night, it wasn't mine."

Moe snorted. "So what do you call pissing on an offer of shelter in the middle of the night when there are stalkers are prowling round? That sound wise to you?"

I had to admit that put like that, it didn't sound too clever. I looked Moe up and down. He had to be in his sixties, so he must have been around before the fall. He had to have seen how the world used to be, and how it was now, how much it had changed and definitely not for the better. God knows how long he'd lived in Vasey, tucked up behind the town’s walls, but surely he knew the laws of the wilds. You didn't trust anybody, ever. Any man could turn on you and any man could do you harm. Giving your trust to a man wasn't free - it just might cost you your life.