Kenn's cadet was a bit unstable. Unhappy, Adrian corrected himself. Even the job with the vet wouldn't be enough to hold him here. Something had the teenager's mind, pulling at him, and when Kenn got back, Adrian hoped to find out what it was.
The busy leader moved a little faster, looking things over. There was a full day of activities planned - the biggest: a towing contest. Their clearing times had improved because he'd made it into a race to see who could do it fastest without breaking any safety rules. Tonight, the first crew leader would be picked by whoever won and with his Marine out of camp, more people would be willing to try. There was very little that his right-hand man wasn't good at and it sounded different without him here. The people were subdued somehow without his energetic, boisterous XO.
Adrian kept walking, sick of hearing tents flapping in the wind. It was slow going right now. He was organizing them, teaching them to survive, and the whole time, he had been moving them north, toward Montana. That had changed last week when he'd convinced them that going any further north would run them into a ground zero and probably give them lethal doses of radiation. Stories from refugees they'd picked up, backed him up. They were moving by vote now, picking a long list of places to try, but he would have headed them east even if they hadn't voted to. It was bad here. They couldn't stay in Wyoming any longer.
The packs of mutated ants were thick throughout the state, and once he got the camp a couple hundred miles further from 25 and the Slavers, he planned to head southeast for a while, toward Georgia and the miles of caves hopefully still waiting there. He hadn't thought of a better place yet, and dreaded having to confirm that going into the mountains was the only way they'd see the first year's end. There had to be somewhere else!
Comforted by the steady whoosh of footsteps guarding their perimeter, Adrian moved past Kenn's improved Mess - where coffee and food lines were now open on both sides - coming to the traveling emergency class. Tents flapping mockingly in his ear, he paused to listen to part of the lesson and was immediately assaulted with the odors of cologne, sweat, and cigar smoke. He grinned. It was the smell of people, and it beat the hell out of all the other shit they were usually inhaling.
A small group was gathered around the side of a big red van, watching Peggy Ann Kelly, the single, forty-something, redheaded mother of little Becky, change a flat tire. This class had solved the need for one crew to do all of the work, all of the time. This way, the entire camp did it.