Page 54 of Them

Lane stood, a little shocked at this sudden turn. He wasn’t even sure he’d heard him right. “Tim? As in Timothy?”

He smirked. “Yeah. What else could it stand for?”

“Wiseass,” Lane said, splitting a grin of his own. “So? What does this mean? You trust me now?”

The man, Tim, walked into the room, his boots kicking up stray strands of shredded paper. “I want to trust you. Beginning to think that’s good enough.”

Lane stepped forward and extended his hand. “Okay. Then we’re on the same page, Tim. How ’bout it?”

They shook. “I’ll hear you out,” Tim said. “Whatever it is you’re selling.” He had a stronger grip than Lane expected. Maybe he was just getting old.

“Not selling anything. Just my story, and some breakfast if you’re interested.”

Tim made no protest, peering at the grill. “Where did you get that?”

“The representative from Alabama’s office,” Lane replied, rocking back on the heels of his dusty hiking boots. “Rolled it over in a shopping cart the night before you got here. Capitol Hill’s worth a field trip.”

“Yeah, I thought the same thing about the Pentagon on my way in…” Tim’s nose twitched at the air as he continued looking at the makeshift kitchen. “Are those… eggs?”

“Yessir. Don’t get too excited, though. I got ’em from a goose.”

“Is that safe?”

Lane shrugged. “Should be fine so long as we cook them all the way through.”

“And should you really have a… a portable grill in here? With so much shredded paper around?”

A wily chuckle. “What’s the worst we can do? Burn it down?”

They shared a moment of uneasy laughter, and then it was on to breakfast. Lane cracked two baseball-sized goose eggs over the pan and cast the yolky shells into the paper mountains, while Tim watched from a chair. Nothing stirred outside, though Lane noticed every time the young man looked out a window or over his shoulder. As if he were expecting someone—something—to be chasing after him.

Lane was about to ask about that when Tim broke the silence. “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” he said, genuinely puzzled.

“Helping me.”

“Helping others is helping yourself.”

“You truly believe that?”

Lane did a sweeping gesture to the room around them. The framed newspapers faded into inkblots. The forgotten photographs and nameless portraits, each crooked and askew. “We can believe whatever we want at this point. Doesn’t really matter anymore.”

“But I almost shot you.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Why’d you come out unarmed?” Tim asked. His tone was still friendly, eerily rational. “I could’ve killed you.”

“But you didn’t. Why not?”

“I asked first.” He picked up an uncracked egg and held it in his hands, gazing into it like a crystal orb.

With a fork he’d borrowed from the White House kitchen, Lane scrambled the yolks. “I suppose I thought it was worth the risk.”

“What risk? What exactly do you want from me?”

“I wanted to meet you,” Lane said, the grill’s heat pressing up against his forehead. “You. A survivor of… of all this.”