Batteryville

Compound

Once inside the fence they lined us up against a wall and a guy in a gas mask said, "Don't move." He had his rifle in his hand but he didn't point it at us.

I looked down the row of people and saw Erin near the other end. I tried to get her attention but she was looking around and didn't see me. I leaned out further and as I raised my hand to wave something shoved me in the chest and pushed me back against the metal of the shipping container wall.

"Stay in line."

I said, "Okay, sure."

We stood there not moving for a few minutes and then I saw an older woman wearing a white face mask that looked like a piece of cloth over her mouth and nose coming towards us. There was another guy with a rifle walking with her and I figured he was her bodyguard.

I couldn't really see what was going on at the other end of the line of people I was in but it looked like the older woman grabbed Erin's arm and stabbed it with something. Erin didn't react much and the woman moved on to the next person in line. By the time she got halfway through the line I could see she had an ink pad in one hand and a stamp in the other and she was stamping everyone's forearm.

She grabbed my hand and stamped my forearm.

Then she stepped back and looked up and down the line and said, "All right, release them."

One of the guys wearing a gas mask went down the row unlocking handcuffs and as soon as each person was released they took off into the crowd. When he unlocked my cuff Erin was standing beside me.

"So this is Two Bridges."

I said, "You knew about this place?"

"I thought we were far enough out that we wouldn't go through the territory." She looked around at all the people crammed into the open compound. "I guess when we left the New Pinery so early we got onto the wrong road."

"So, what do you know about this place? Other than you were planning on avoiding it?"

"Nothing really." She started walking, pushing her bike and I followed. "We should find a place to hide out."

"What do you mean?"

"That's all I know, someone said if I ended up in here to just stay low and wait it out."

"Wait what out?"

A man's voice said, "Three days."

He was beside me. He was old, had wispy gray hair and a straggly beard and walked with a limp.

Erin said, "What happens in three days?"

We pushed our way through most of the crowd and were coming into a kind of clearing as far away from the bridges and the building beside it as we could be. There were still a lot of people around but many of them were sitting down on the ground and I noticed that the shipping containers used to make the wall were open on this side and people were camping out in them.

The old man said, "If you survive they'll let you go. When your symbol comes up."

I put my bike against a part of the wall that was concrete and looked like it had been there long before the containers had been set up.

Erin said, "What symbol?"

The old man pointed the building under the bridge. It was a couple stories high, mostly steel it looked like but with some windows. There was a big white board on the side of it that had some kind of symbol and said, "Today is spades. Then it'll be diamonds, clubs and then," he looked at our arms and said, "look at you two, both hearts isn't that cute?"