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food.
    “Hungry?” I grinned at him.
    He shoveled in a forkful of pasta by way of reply.
    Like our senses, wild card appetites were revved a few notches above normal. Luckily our metabolisms were equally hyperactive so we wouldn’t, as Tony put it, “do a Kilmer.”
    Mack looked around.
    “Where’s Lil?”
    “She’s eating in our room,” I answered. “Spending some quality time with the cats. She’s not in the mood for socializing about now.”
    Mack nodded. He understood, and worried about Lil as much as I did. Her mother hadn’t been with the survivors we’d rescued from the basement of a local church, or among the far too many corpses scattered around town. By the time we’d returned to Big Red, her killing glee had dissipated into quiet depression. It was just as well she’d opted out of communal dinner. Sitting across from the man who might be responsible for her mother’s death wouldn’t have helped her already fragile emotional state.
    Gabriel was MIA, too. He’d vanished right after the debriefing in Room 217.
    I had no idea how he felt about Dr. Albert. On one hand, the man was responsible for almost turning Gabriel into a mindless zombie, or at very least a sentient flesh-eater. On the other hand, Dr. Albert had also synthesized the antiserum that kept Gabriel’s condition in check.
    I was distracted from my dark thoughts as Nathan and Jamie joined us at our table. Nathan Smith—I was still convinced that was an alias. Tall, dark and perpetually cranky, he had some sort of secret past with Simone, back when he was a member of a Special Forces unit. He never elaborated on which unit, and I guess it didn’t really matter. There was still a Moonlighting level of sexual tension between them—enough to make Kate and Sawyer look like kindergarten playmates.
    A badass with a ton of weapons—some legal, and others not so much—Nathan’s house could have been featured in Survivalists’ Homes and Gardens. He’d saved Lil and me when we’d broken protocol and gone after Lil’s cats, and then saved all of the wild cards when we’d been on the run from a shitload of hungry zombies.
    Good times.
    Jamie had been Simone’s teacher’s assistant in “Pandemics in History,” before the zombie shit had hit the fan. She was a veritable gothic Tinkerbell, with her Hot Topic clothes, petite build, and screaming pink hair. The torch Jamie carried for Simone lit her up like a solar flare whenever they were in the same room. Until she realized I didn’t want to be teacher’s pet, so to speak, she’d tried more than once to eliminate me with her laser stares of death. For whatever reason, though, she seemed to take Nathan’s presence in her stride. Go figure.
    Jamie sat down across from me, next to Simone, while Nathan took the “dad’s” seat at the head of the table. I smiled at them both. Simone, on the other hand, made a point of smiling at Jamie and ignoring Nathan. It was fascinating to watch two adults behave with all the finesse of hormonal high school students. I gave them a week before they either did the deed or killed each other.
    I looked down at my plate, which was sadly empty. Time for a refill.
    There were five soldiers ahead of me in the serving line. I recognized two of them from the fight against the swarm. We exchanged friendly and respectful nods. The other three were new faces. One of the newbies gave his buddy a nudge when he saw me. His friend, a burly twenty-something with “bad attitude” written all over him, whispered something back, including the words “prime,” “ass,” “pussy,” and “get me some of that.”
    Guess no one had warned them about wild card hearing. I smiled a not too nice smile, and took a step forward.
    “Would you like to say that a little louder?” I asked cheerfully.
    Bad Attitude looked at me, his grin getting wider.
    “Don’t think I was talking to you,” he said, tossing his friend a glance.
    “Yes, but you were talking about me.” I