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it shored up good and tight.”
     

 
     
    CHAPTER 4: SEPARATION
     
    LaRouche stepped out of the Humvee, followed by Father Jim. Their boots crunched on gravel half-buried beneath a layer of weeds. Jeriah Wilson remained in the driver’s seat, the engine still running. His right hand rested on the wheel, the two stubs of his missing fingers twitching. He eyed the building in front of them. He seemed skeptical, as usual.
    LaRouche rubbed his grimy fingers under his nose. “Kinda looks like home, doesn’t it?”
    The old warehouse looked like it had been abandoned long before the collapse. The parking lot leading up to it was cracked through, and tall, brown weeds struggled to exist in these narrow fissures. Windows took up one side of the building and appeared to belong to the offices of whoever had worked there. Mostly, the glass was broken out, but a few panes remained, dark with dirt and mildew, creeping vines twining their way through the window frames and rooting themselves in the soft, damp carpet inside.
    It was buffered from the main road by a cluster of office suites, housing a range of businesses—an alarm company here, a catering company there. Behind those businesses, a hard-packed gravel road led back behind a fence with a rusted padlock and dead kudzu hanging on the barbed wire coils. Some quick use of the bolt cutters had opened up the fence for them and they now sat just inside the gate.
     “Little overgrown.” Wilson hung his elbow out the open window.
    “It’ll do for the night.” LaRouche nodded towards a pair of bay doors large enough for a tractor-trailer to get through. “Me and Jim will clear it and see if we can’t roll those doors open. Maybe we can get the trucks inside.”
    “Roger ‘at.”
    “Hey…” LaRouche scratched at the overgrowth of his chin and looked at the young Air Force cadet in the driver’s seat. “Give it another try.”
    Wilson sighed, the dark skin of his face twitching into a subtle grimace. “Alright,” he said quietly. “I’ll try again.”
    LaRouche tapped the hood of the Humvee, ending the conversation. Then he and Jim hefted their rifles and moved out. LaRouche led and Jim followed, just a few paces behind. They slipped in through a section of broken windows and found themselves in a spacious office. The walls were ripped apart, completely gutted of copper pipes and wiring. Jagged sections of plate glass crunched and snapped underfoot like thin sheets of ice. A ragged bird’s nest sat abandoned in the joist of a pair of two-by-fours.
    They stuck together as they moved through the maze of offices, each adjoining the other, with a common break room in the middle of it all. The light scrape of their boots across tile and carpeting were the only noises in the building.
    They exited the office area and entered a dark hallway. LaRouche stood there in the shadows for a moment, letting his eyes adjust and taking a deep whiff of the air. It smelled of a dank old building, and nothing more. No body odor and feces. No smell of recently-lit fires from other squatters.
    When his eyes had adjusted, LaRouche moved down the hallway to where it opened into a cavernous space, roughly twice as big as the interior of the Camp Ryder building. The tiny sounds of their feet on the ground and the brush of their pant legs together echoed back to them in the huge empty space. A crack in the roof exposed a sliver of daylight. Water dripped through the ceiling. Big fat drops that landed loudly into a puddle. The sound was even and rhythmic, as if it were set to a metronome.
     They worked around the entire inside of the area finding nothing to indicate that anyone or anything had taken up residence in the abandoned warehouse. When they were comfortable with the area, when every dark space, every closet, every bathroom stall in the building had been cleared at the muzzle of a rifle, they moved quickly to the bay doors. The latching mechanism keeping them in place was simple