Crashing Down - A Post-Apocalyptic Novel (The Ravaged Land Series Book 3) by Kellee L. Greene Page B

they didn’t like HOME any more than we did. We had common ground. Hopefully, that alone would be enough, because besides that, we didn’t have anything else we would be able to bond over. I had to hope that at least some of the one hundred other people in their camp would be a little more likable.
    “Splendid,” Dominick said with no excitement in his voice what-so-ever. “We’ll head to the camp and show you around. I really think you’ll like it here. But you’ll have to earn your keep. We all work together to keep things running smoothly.”
    “Of course,” Penn said with a nod. “Now that we are staying with you, would you mind untying me?”
    Dominick nodded at Mack and he cut the rope. Penn stretched his arms forward trying to bring the life back into his arms. He reached across his body and rubbed at his shoulders.
    “Let’s go,” Dominick said nodding at the door, but he kept his eyes on Penn as if he expected him to do something.
    Mack opened the door and gestured for us to follow him. Dean and Penn walked out after him and then Sienna and I followed them side-by-side. Dezzie and Dominick were behind us, mumbling back and forth about something I couldn’t make out. It made me uneasy to have them so close behind.
    We walked up the stairs and back outside towards the truck. I took in a huge breath of fresh air. That room felt like it had been filled with a mildewy fog, and now it felt as though I could finally breathe again.
    There wasn’t anything around us. No homes. No people. It was just us and empty space. I wondered what had been here before… it could have been a school, or maybe a church. Something that would have had a big basement. But whatever had been there was gone now, and so was the whole town that it had been in.
    “Where are your people again?” I said briefly glancing at Dominick. I wondered how far away we were from his camp because there were no buildings for as far as the eye could see.
    “It’s not around here.”
    “Oh, this is just where you bring people to interrogate them,” I said trying to make it sound like it was a bad thing to do. But in reality with how things were, maybe it was a smart thing to do.
    “So what were you doing in Washington?” Dominick asked me as Dean and Penn climbed up into the bed of the truck behind Mack. Penn and Mack both reached out their hands at the same time to help Sienna up. She ignored them both as she flipped her leg up onto the tailgate awkwardly and hoisted herself up.
    I thought for a second about what I should tell him. Maybe I should just tell him the truth. Did it even matter? “We had a friend that had been bitten by one of those dog-beasts,” I said stuffing my hands into my pockets.
    “Dog-beasts!” he laughed. “I like that. But what does your friend being bitten have to do with a HOME camp in Washington?”
    “It’s a long story. We saw the signs directing people to Alaska, and we thought we could find help for him at HOME. When we stopped at their checkpoint they took him and I thought they had killed him. But it turned out what they did instead was cure him. Somehow. But then they put him into their army. So, we went to Washington to try to find him.”
    Dominick looked at me for the first time in a way I didn’t hate. It was a flash of the person who I thought maybe he had been before everything had happened. Before the end of the world had turned him into someone that thought they needed to have a spiked shell around themselves in order to survive.
    “He didn’t remember us when we found him,” I said feeling a wave of sadness at being reminded of how we had to leave Ryan behind. I still hadn’t fully processed leaving him, and I really hadn’t dealt with Owen’s death yet either. And maybe I never would.
    “That’s how it all works,” Dominick said squinting up towards the sky. He held out his palm as if he was checking to see if it was starting to rain.
    For a split second he seemed almost like a