Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [12]
In any case, Cheney was important enough to their safety that it didn’t matter what Panther thought. Hawk had realized that from the beginning. Nothing got close to their underground hideout without Cheney knowing. He could hear or smell anything approaching when it was still five minutes away. Even the Freaks had learned to stay clear. Although the Ghosts had come to accept him, they were wary of him, too. Cheney was just too big and scary with all that bristling hair and those strange patchwork markings. A junkyard dog made out of thrown-away parts. But a very large junkyard dog. Only Hawk was completely unafraid of him, the two of them so close that sometimes she thought they were extensions of each other. Hawk had taken Cheney’s name from one of Owl’s history books. The name had belonged to some long-dead politician who’d been around when the seeds for the Great Wars had been planted. Owl’s book described him as a bulldog spoiling for a fight. Hawk had liked the image.
She rolled the wheelchair up the ramp Fixit had built for her and eased herself into the mostly darkened bedroom. Squirrel lay tangled in his blankets on his mattress, but he was sleeping. She glanced at Sparrow, who was reading by candlelight in the far corner, keeping watch over the little boy. Sparrow looked up from her book, blue eyes peeking out from under a mop of straw-colored hair.
“I think he’s doing better,” she said quietly.
Owl wheeled over to where she could reach down and feel the boy’s forehead. Warm, but no longer hot. The fever was burning itself out. She exhaled softly, relief washing through her. She had been worried about him. Two days ago, the thermometer had registered his temperature at 106, dangerous for a tenyear-old. They had so few medicines to treat anything and so little knowledge of how to use them. The plagues struck without warning, and any one of them could be fatal if you lacked the necessary medicines. There were vaccines to protect against contracting most of the plagues, and Hawk had gotten a few from Tessa, but mostly the street kids had to rely on luck and strength of constitution to stay healthy.
The danger of sickness or poisoning was the primary reason that people lived in the compounds. In the compounds, you could minimize the risk of infection and exposure. But the compounds held their own dangers, as Owl had found out firsthand. In her mind, if not in Tessa’s, the dangers of living inside the compounds clearly outweighed the dangers of living outside.
Which was why she had decided five years ago to take her chances with the Ghosts.
Before that, she had been living in the Safeco Field compound along with two thousand other people. When the Great Wars had escalated to a point where half the cities in the nation had been wiped out and the remainder were under siege from terrorist attacks and plagues and chemical poisonings of all sorts, much of the population began to occupy the compounds. Most were established within existing structures like Safeco, which had been a baseball park decades ago. Sports complexes offered several advantages. First, their walls were thick and strong, and provided good protection, once the entrances were properly fortified. Second, they could hold thousands of people and provide adequate storage space for supplies and equipment. Third, all contained a playing surface, which could be converted to gardens for growing food and raising livestock.
At first, the strategy worked well. The measure of protection the compounds offered was undeniable. There was safety in numbers. A form of government could be established