Hollowland

“You’ll want a room to yourself, won’t you?” Lazlo asked with a lopsided smile.

“We can figure out sleeping arrangements later.” I didn’t want to get into it right now. I could feel Lazlo watching me, but I refused to look back. “Why don’t you go see if you can get anything on the TV?”

“You can’t get anything on TV.” Harlow rolled her eyes. “Everything in the world is down.”

I might’ve tried to convince her to go do something, but a knock at the front door interrupted me. Harlow looked back over her shoulder. I turned to Lazlo to see if he knew anything, but he just shrugged.

“Should I answer it?” Harlow asked, and I couldn’t tell if she was excited or nervous about the prospect of visitors.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice called, and the front door creaked open. “Is anyone here?”

“Um, yeah, we are,” I said and tried to push past Harlow.

As I squeezed by her, I smacked my injured hip on the narrow doorway. Wincing as discreetly as I could manage, I glanced down. The bite had already started bleeding through the tee shirt and sweats, and I didn’t want anybody to know about it. I didn’t know how to cover it up without anybody noticing, so I decided to lag behind, letting Harlow and Lazlo go ahead of me to greet our visitor.

“Oh, good,” the woman said brightly. “I was afraid they’d given me the wrong address again. It’s so hard to find a place when they all look alike here.” She gave a small, warm laugh after that, and it made me not dislike her.

I walked behind Lazlo, keeping my body angled so the blood on my clothes would face away from her. She looked about fifty-ish, with graying blond hair pulled back with a bandana around her head. Her pants were a durable Dickies type khaki, but she wore a weird flowy brown smock over them. She looked like a hippie flower child meets Rosie the Riveter.

“I’m Sara Bishop, but everyone just calls me Bishop. I’ll help you get settled in,” she smiled reassuringly at us. Harlow crossed her arms and tried to look skeptical, but Lazlo returned it with his 100 watt smile. “I know just about everything you need to know about this place.”

“Great,” Harlow said.

“Now, are you all a family?” Bishop asked, eyeing us.

“Not exactly,” I said, leaning my shoulder and side against wall in the hallway. It killed, pressing my open wound against the wall like that, but it kept it hidden.

“Ah, I see,” Bishop nodded knowingly. “The one good thing about all of this is that it’s really brought people together. Strangers helping strangers, getting to know one another.” She finished her thought, then cocked her head, narrowing her eyes at Lazlo. “I’m sorry, but do I know you from somewhere? You seem so familiar to me.”

“Um… I used to be famous,” Lazlo said sheepishly.

“He was in a band, Emeriso,” Harlow said, which only made Lazlo squirm with embarrassment.

“Oh, yes.” Bishop kept smiling, but her expression faded. Her eyes got faraway, thinking of something else. “My granddaughter listens to them, to you. Well, she used to. She would be so excited that you were here.”

The statement hung in the air for a moment, a familiar sentiment I’d heard before. Everybody who’d survived this long had lost someone, if not everyone, who mattered to them.

“Anyway,” Bishop clapped her hands together once, breaking herself out of her funk. “They took all your clothes from you, yes?”

“We only had the clothes on our backs anyway,” Harlow shrugged.

“We have clothing here that you’re welcome to, things we’ve picked up along the way and some things we’ve made,” Bishop said, and Harlow’s face lit up. “I’ll take you down there to get some. All the towels and blankets in here are all you have, so treat them well. We do our laundry in the sink, and hang them up to dry. Unfortunately, we don’t have laundry soap, but we make all our own bar soap here. That’s something you might end up doing yourself.

“All the meals are served down at the mess hall.” Bishop gestured somewhere off to her right. “All the food has to be rationed here. We have some canned goods and dried goods, but we’re trying to be more self-sufficient with gardening and hunting.” She wagged her head, as if the idea only seemed so-so to her. “It’s still a work in progress but we’re getting there.

“You’ll all be assigned work detail, once you get settled in, but we give you a day or two to get rest up from what you’ve been through.” She looked at me then, meaning I looked worse than I thought I did. “It’s mostly basic things like gardening, cooking, cleaning, etc. So far, the government and the soldiers handle the more difficult tasks. But we’re working together, and everyone is being taken care of. That’s what counts.”

“Do you know if my little brother is here?” I asked, returning to my mission. “His name is Max King, and I think he’s in the medical ward.”

“I don’t know of a Max King out here, no,” Bishop shook her head. “But if he’s in the building, then I wouldn’t know. They keep most of that separate from us. You’d have to talk to the soldiers about that.”

“I understand,” I sighed.

“Why don’t I take you to get some clothes, and show you around the place?” Bishop rubbed her hands together and looked at us.