Newt didn’t grasp their surroundings until after the truck had left, as if his senses didn’t fully kick in until they knew they’d been freed from the soldiers and their potential for harm. Without saying much at all, with Dante—asleep now—in her arms, Keisha and he walked around and took stock of the area in which they’d been dumped.
It was a dry, dusty place, although the trees provided enough shade and fallen leaves to dampen the effect. Almost everywhere you looked, signs of habitation filled the spaces and gaps. Small, hastily built cabins, some without windows, some with broken windows. Tents of all sizes that appeared to have been erected weeks or months ago, with old couches or chairs plopped next to their entrance flaps, lines—draped with towels and clothing left to dry—hung from the trees above them, old shoes and bags of trash and small tables scattered hither and thither. Newt once again flashed back to the early days of the Maze, could almost picture the towering stone walls looming somewhere just out of sight.
Several habitations looked less occupied than others, some having been obviously abandoned or never used. Newt took a turn holding Dante—the kid was absolutely zonked after all that adventure and mayhem—and the three of them found a small cabin nestled between two large oak trees. They stood inside of it, taking a tour that lasted about 20 seconds. It was one room, no kitchen, no bathroom, completely empty of possessions or furniture. The lone window, facing east based on the position of the setting sun, had once held glass. Now it held three nasty-looking shards the size of Newt’s thumb.
“It’s perfect,” Keisha pronounced, voice dripping with sarcasm. “And we’ll have a nice draft through that busted window. I can’t think of anything else I’ve ever wanted in a home.”
Newt realized he was patting Dante’s back as if he were a baby. “A couch would be nice. Maybe some food.” The whole situation was absurd, and they both knew it. Here they were, acting like a nice little family, settling down in their new home. Maybe a neighbor would drop by soon with a plate of biscuits and a bloody teapot.
“I’m gonna go check things out,” Newt said, not even sure what he meant until the words came out. But he couldn’t just stand there anymore. No matter how nice it seemed, these people weren’t his family and he’d be a fool to throw his lot in with them completely. At least not yet. He needed to explore, see what this Crank Palace was all about.
Keisha gave him a hard glare. “Don’t even think about it.”
“What?”
“Abandoning us. You’re the only friend we’ve got in this world. And I think you need us as badly as we need you. We literally have crazy people for neighbors. You saw all the lived-in places before we found this one. I don’t know if they’re at a party or what, but they’ll be back. Probably carrying torches and pitchforks.”
Her words touched him, he had to admit. But he also felt uneasy, fidgety, like something wasn’t quite right. He had an inexplicable and sudden urge to yell at her, to tell her to leave him alone, that he could do whatever he wanted. Like a child. Thankfully he resisted.
“I just wanna know what’s out there,” he said, trying to keep the defensiveness out of his voice. “Sun’s almost down, but I’ll be quick about it. For one thing, we need something to eat. When’s the last time Dante had any food?”
Keisha let out a monstrous sigh of frustration and stepped over to a wall, then turned around, put her back to the cheap wood and slid to the floor. She gently dropped Dante into her lap, where he continued to sleep like he planned to do it straight through the end of days.
“Please wait until morning,” Keisha said, as quiet as he’d heard her speak yet. “I can’t… Life is hard enough, Newt. I can’t bear the thought of being here alone in the dark, terrified out of my wits at what may come walking by, knocking on our door, peeking through our broken window. Breaking through that flimsy door. All that on top of worrying about what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into out there? Please don’t do that to me. I barely know you from a lump of rock, but I can see the goodness in your eyes. We need you. Call me mama, call me mum, call me grandma for all I care. But we need you.”
Newt almost shook with confusion. Confusion turning into an anger that made no sense. He closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe. This bloody virus , he thought. He’d never know how much was paranoia and how much was the true effect of the thing on his mind. But in that moment he just wanted to scream and pound his chest like a damn gorilla.
“Newt?” Keisha asked, looking up at him from the floor. “You forget how to talk?”
A sudden calm washed over him. A calm he hadn’t felt in a long time. The extremes were getting to him, but for the short term he’d take that peace and take it happily. He took the few steps to where Keisha sat and sunk to the floor, trying his hardest to fake a genteel smile.
“You’re right,” he said. “Walking around the bloody Crank Palace without a map and with the sun about to set sounds like something only a crazy person would do.”
A brief moment of silence stretched out, the two of them looking at each other, waiting for the other to react. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, they burst into laughter, a rollicking giddiness that made no sense, which just increased the giggles exponentially. They laughed and they chortled and they even threw in a few snorts. Newt couldn’t remember the last time something had struck him as so funny as saying what he’d said. The layers and vicious cycles of irony weren’t even worth thinking about.
Crazy person. He was a crazy person, all right. She was a crazy person. And they’d just scratched the surface. The crazy person level would just keep going up and up, and they’d be there to laugh like crazy people as it did.
“Who needs food, anyway?” he said through the hysterics. “You can’t feed crazy.”
“Right?” Keisha managed to respond. She was laughing so hard that Dante had fallen off her lap and lay sprawled across the floor, snoring like a little bear. This made both her and Newt’s laughter reach something that could only be called guffaws. He had tears in his eyes and couldn’t remember any of the horrors they’d experienced that day.
God help him, going insane wasn’t so bad after all.
