Firehouse Oasis 118

4. Hen

Hen's day had been going perfectly normally, thank you very much. Or at least as normally as things were going to be in this fucked up dystopian universe they all now lived in. That was, until the intruder.

They'd been staying in the firehouse for about two months now, and it was honestly so great of a find that she didn't want to leave unless they had to.

'They' being her, Chim, and Denny. It'd started with just her, she'd been left behind when the school bus came for them. They'd been at school, and she'd gone to the bathroom when all the kids were suddenly led out of the classrooms and onto a school bus. She never saw any of them again. She hadn't known what was going on and was about to find a teacher to ask when she heard two men talking inside one of the classrooms.

They'd said something about using dogs to scare the kids and 'keep them in line', at least until they were 'locked away for good'. Obviously that'd sounded like a huge red flag, so she'd made a run for it. She'd run until she found the big storm drain behind the school yard and climbed into it.

She'd kept hearing people and busses so she'd stayed down there for a whole day before she tried going back home, but even then she never made it. A police officer had spotted her walking down the street and tried to get her to go with him. Instead she'd run, not knowing who to trust, and she'd kept running until she was very lost in the woods. Eventually she found a river though, and followed it until she found a cottage, like in some sort of fairy tale.

There she'd found Denny. Only three at the time, and completely alone. Denny had been too young to really explain what'd happened, but Hen was smart enough to figure out that his parents had abandoned him there. It was a good house though, at the least, and in the middle of nowhere. They were safe there for a while, and there was an old radio that Hen had used to get information about the outside world. It was how she learned that the outside world wasn't safe for kids anymore, that they were being hunted and sent to 'rehabilitation centers'. She didn't trust that though, she remembered what those men had said, and the fear in the police officer's eyes when he'd tried to get her into his car.

There was food and other supplies though, and a nearby town that she could go on supply runs to in the middle of the night. So they stayed in the cottage for a little more than a year, until the supplies ran out even at the abandoned convenience store she'd been raiding.

She followed the river again, this time with Denny holding her hand and stumbling along with her. They'd kept bouncing from structure to structure, Hen finding someplace safe for Denny to sleep while she went to the nearest abandoned civilization to pillage for supplies in the dead of night.

That was how she met Chim, she'd been freshly fourteen at the time, three years after she'd found Denny. She was raiding a gas station on the side of the highway, a risky move seeing as the highway was still used occasionally, though the gas station itself had been abandoned. She'd been desperate though, she was out of options and out of supplies. Chimney had apparently been desperate too, cause she'd run right into him, crouched in one of the aisles as he was devouring a Twinkie right then and there.

After that it'd been the three of them bouncing around together, and Hen had to admit, it was easier with someone else her age. Plus they worked well together, true best friends from day one. Then they'd found the jackpot, the firehouse, and had holed up there for a couple months now, and it'd been safe.

Until this guy climbed in their freaking window.

His name was Bobby apparently, they found out once Chim had pinned the guy, and he claimed to be a Psi too.

Which was possible, he seemed to be in that ambiguous age range where he could have been one of the older ones affected, or he could have been just old enough to avoid the disease. Avoiding the disease didn't mean avoiding the fallout though, and everyone was desperate. Which meant that not many adults were above turning into skip-tracers and catching some runaway kids to sell to the government.