"Are you shitting me?" Frank exclaimed when Allison directed him into the dog pen.

"I'm sorry," she responded with a sincere but serious tone. "I don't want to do this to you and, in particular, to your child. But..."

Frank complied, though, even closing the gate behind him himself. Allison stepped up to the pen as he reiterated about the supplies she'd promised and added some more. When he asked if the two of them would be in the pen overnight, Allison hesitated before saying, "Yes. But I'll make you very comfortable. Tomorrow ... well, tomorrow we'll figure this all out, I promise."

Allison locked the pen's door, told Frank she'd returned shortly, and headed away without looking back. She went into the house to gather what she'd promised and more, putting the items together on the home's front porch. When she was done with that, she headed for the garage, dragged a small two wheeled trailer over to an electric vehicle. It looked like an oversized golf cart with a small cargo area where a normal golf cart's back seat and bag carriers should have been.

Transferring all of what she'd gathered to the trailer, she drove back to the pen, parked, flipped down the trailer's tripod stand to give it a [i]third leg[/i] (the other two being the tires, of course), and unhooked the trailer. Unlocking the trailer from the cart and then unlocking the pen, Allison stepped back and told Frank, "This is for you. I think it'll make the night comfortable."

In addition to what they'd already talked about, there was a heavy duty plastic tarp that was large enough to fully cover the doghouse and keep any draft out; extra blankets, sheets, and two pillows; a thick foam pad that had served as one of her relative's mattresses before dying from I-55; a second small propane heater with one-use tanks; and some battery operated lanterns that, like the golf cart, were recharged as necessary by the solar panels attached to the home's roof.

"If you use the propane heater to heat the house, you have to let some fresh air in," Allison warned. "Carbon monoxide. You probably know that."

After Frank had moved all of this and more into the pen, Allison locked him inside again, mounted the cart, and headed off down the driveway without another word. She felt horrible about locking an infant inside a dog cage -- Frank, too -- but what was she supposed to do? If she hadn't seen the child in the now-dead woman's arms in the first place, she might have let the gunfight play out without intervention.

Night had come earlier, yet Allison made the trip to and into the woods without the cart's headlights. She knew the driveway and the property around it like the back of her hand and rarely had to use flashlights or lanterns to get around. At the far side of the woods, she stopped and simply listened for several minutes for anything that might seem out of the ordinary. The pickup truck had nearly burned out by now with only some of the interior's seat and three of the four melted tires still flickering with flames.

Allison wondered what to do about the 5 dead men laying in various locations about their former vehicle. She knew the bodies should be burned, but she wasn't eager to handle them all, even while dressed in protective gear. She could leave them where they were for the animals and bugs. There were plenty of now-feral dogs and other natural scavengers in this area, from insects and rodents to Turkey Vultures and Bald Eagles. 

She finally chose pushing them off into the ditch on the far side of the road. She was initially concerned with the bodies fouling the water in the ditch and possibly causing disease, but she knew that that wouldn't affect the farm which was on a slightly higher elevation than the land south of the property.

She donned her protective gear -- it had begun life as dress for slaughtering animals -- and crossed the ditch on her side of the road. One after another, Allison dragged or rolled the dead men off the road and down the embankment. She'd considered searching them for things of value -- not money or gold or whatnot, but papers with information or maps and such. She decided instead not to spend that additional time in proximity to them.

Done with that, she checked Frank's car for anything more that he might have taken earlier had he been able to carry it. There wasn't much. Allison found a stuffed animal in the backseat, a raggedy old giraffe, that surely belonged to little Robert. She gathered it up and dropped it into one of the large plastic garbage bags she'd brought with her, along with some baby clothes and other items she found inside the car or in its trunk.

Next came dealing with Jennifer. The woman was small in stature, and Allison found lifting and carrying her to the cart easier than she'd expected. The phrase [i]dead weight[/i] came to mind as she handled the woman's corpse. Allison laid her on one edge of a bed sheet spread across the ground, rolled her up inside it, and taped it securely clothes with duct tape at each end and in the middle. It wasn't the most respectful way to handle a body, but it was the best way she could muster on a dark, cold night.

Allison lifted Jennifer's body into the cart's tail end and drove back into the forest. She stopped to gather up Frank's hidden stash, then walked the well known trail to retrieve the backpack and weapons she'd left earlier. Back in the cart, she headed for the house and parked in the garage, closing the doors to keep night creatures away from the dead woman's corpse.

She considered returning to the pen to check on Frank but didn't. Allison didn't want to face questions about the man's lost companion right now. As the night had been passing by, the shock of what had happened this night was beginning to give way to emotions about it, and by the time Allison was in the Mud Room stripping out of her protective gear and dressing down further for a hot, soapy bath, she was trembling deep to her core. 

Once in the hot, steaming water, she began crying. She'd killed people tonight. She'd locked an infant inside a dog pen. And she'd taken in a strange man who, for all she knew, would take the first opportunity to rape and kill her before taking over her ancestral home, as well as its valuable resources.

Allison eventually made her way to her bed, laid down beneath layers of warm blankets, and passed out in no time at all...

[center]...................[/center]

She awoke before her alarm went off, not an unusual occurrence. Immediately recalling the previous night's happenings and the [i]guests[/i] outside, Allison hopped up, dressed quickly, and headed for the front door to look out upon the dog pens. She saw nothing that concerned her and turned back to the kitchen to prepare a breakfast for both her and her guests.

Twenty minutes later, she delivered a platter of food to an old picnic table a couple of dozen yards from the dog pen: bacon, link sausages, scrambled eggs, goat milk, and some of Frank's own horded coffee, which she'd taken from one of the bags he'd left in the woods the night before.

"I'm sorry again about leaving you out here last night," Allison told him as she was unlocking the cage. "It was regrettable but, I think, necessary. How's Robert? Stayed warm I hope?"

She opened the door, told Frank of the breakfast on the nearby table, then updated him, "Jennifer's body is in the garage. We have a family plot ... cemetery, out back a bit. She's very welcome there."

The closest Allison had gotten to Robert thus far was when she sat across from him at the picnic table. She indicated a bottle of warm milk and some pureed offerings for Robert: peas, pumpkin, blueberries. "I don't really know much about what infants eat. I was the oldest of the McGee grandchildren, but I don't honestly remember a lot of the detail stuff from when they were little like your Robert. I mostly remember tag and hide and go seek and fishing and working on the ranch. You know, [i]older[/i] stuff."

She went quiet, nibbling at food she'd filled her own plate with while Frank ate more energetically on the other side of the table. Allison wondered when his last good meal was. She knew, or at least suspected, that things were tough out there in the world these days. 

The United States had been one of the world's largest food producing nations prior to the pandemic, able to feed its people with ease; it exported 20% of what it produced, helping to feed the world beyond its borders as well. There were children in American who went to bed hungry at night, of course, but that was less about the country's ability to feed them and more about corporate greed and governmental failure.

But with the collapse of society, food production crashed, and despite there being so few people to feed anymore -- the estimate was that I-55 had already killed well over 90% of the US population and was still killing more -- people were still starving to death. There was no commercial food production anymore, and what had been out there in warehouses and stores had all been pillaged by now. Some individuals and communities of Immunes were producing their own food, much like Allison and her family had been doing for the past many months, but they were constantly under pressure from armed bandits and organized militias that stole their food for themselves.

When they were finished eating, Allison told Frank, "I have a room in the house for you and Robert."

She paused for his reaction, then explained with a serious tone, "I've been alone here for a while. Two months, actually. I, um ... I don't do well alone. My family and I were very close. My grandmother raised me here amongst cousins and aunts and uncles who were always dropping in for dinner and overnights or weekends and vacations. I think I already told you this, about being raised here while my folks worked overseas, didn't I?"

Allison contemplated how she wanted to continue. She went on, "I don't know you, Frank. But ... seeing you with Robert ... seeing your concern for Jennifer ... they both tell me that I can trust you. If you want, you can stay here a while: a night, a couple ... more. I think it's too early for us to be talking about you staying long term, but ... for now..."

She ended there, unsure of what else she should say. For all she knew, Frank wanted only to find another vehicle and take off for whatever destination he and Jennifer had had in mind. But honestly, Allison yearned for company, companionship even. She would be lying to herself if she hadn't considered the fact that she was a woman, Frank was a man, and -- with Jennifer now deceased -- he was without a mate, just as she had been for almost three years.