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me. When I mentioned something to Gabe about it, he just shrugged it off and said that it was probably because they hadn’t felt so welcomed by a village before.  
    It is odd how welcoming everyone is here. Though there doesn’t seem to be a lot of danger, it does feel like their naiveté will be their undoing someday. A couple of men like these could have assault weapons in their truck and before anyone could run back into their houses, the strangers would have wiped out half the village just to steal some food.
    I guess I should be glad that they have been so helpful. If it weren’t for Ray and Nancy, I might be dead right now. Everyday I think about how we came to be here and I just have to shake my head.
    I remember Gabe had tried to make me as comfortable as possible, but lying in the back of a truck for six hours while trying to stop the bleeding in my side was taking its toll.  
    I was tired, and I had resorted to closing my eyes. I had fallen asleep a few times, but Gabe had taken notice and made sure to yell at me when I slipped out of consciousness.
    When we were far enough away from Paxton and his men to feel comfortable enough to stop, Gabe had tried to move me to the front, but sitting wasn’t going to happen. I had to lie down. He would stop about every twenty minutes to check on me until I finally yelled at him to just keep going. He had tried to tie off the wound, and I had been keeping pressure on it, but the bullet had dug into my side and blood was flowing freely no matter what I did. And I had never known much about anatomy so I couldn’t be sure about the state of any vital organs that may or may not have been punctured. Gabe finally quit stopping and resorted to craning his neck around to get a good look at me while he was driving.
    For the first few minutes, I didn’t feel pain. It was as if I had been bleeding from a phantom wound. But after those few minutes passed, the rest of the night felt like someone was driving a stake through my ribs with a sledgehammer.
    Gabe had finally stopped again and started talking to two people in the road. My eyes were closed, but I tried to listen to everything.
    “How are we supposed to know this isn’t a ploy for you to rob us?”
    “If I wanted to rob you, I would have already done it,” Gabe said. “Just have a look at her, you’ll see.”
    There was a pause. When I opened my eyes again there were three figures standing over me, staring. “This is interesting,” I remember saying, trying to play it cool.  
    I must have sounded worse than I meant to, because the old man and woman looked at each other with worried glances. “You can follow us,” the man said. “We’re a small group, and we’ve survived because of that fact. But we also don’t want to turn away someone in need.”
    “Thank you,” Gabe said.
    The man and the woman walked to their vehicle and started it. “We’re almost to a safe place, Remi,” Gabe said. “How are you feeling?”
    “Like a million bucks.” I hated the sound of my own voice. I sounded like I was about to die. I lift an eyebrow at the thought. Was I close to death and didn’t even know it? I felt so drained and weak, but I didn’t think death was near.
    Apparently death and I were starting to become close buddies because at some point between following the older couple and getting proper medical attention, I passed out. I didn’t wake up for two days.  
    “You lost a lot of blood,” Gabe told me the morning my body decided to stir. “Finding Ray and Nancy was the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to us. You, really.”
    “Who?” I said.  
    “Ray and Nancy,” he repeated. “They are the couple we came up on in the road. “I thought Ray was going to blow my head off with the double-barrel shotgun he was carrying, but instead they gave us shelter. We’re in a small town called Orick.”
    “We’re welcome here?” I asked.  
    “Surprisingly yes.”
    I looked down at my side and could see