CHAPTER 13CHARLIE
March 31, 2090
The old pickup truck in front of me was all rusted bumpers and chipped paint coated in a layer of thick dust. Clearly no one had driven it in a long time, and I suspected it didn’t run. I was mesmerized. The thrill of fixing it up, making something old work like new, consumed me. For a minute, I forgot why I was in the garage in the first place.
“There’s a tool bench in the garage,” Kat had told me when I volunteered to work on the broken dryer. “You’ll find whatever you need out there.”
I was looking forward to working on something mechanical that would challenge my brain after a long week of helping people carry wet carpet and drywall out of their basements. Fortunately, the flooding hadn’t destroyed any homes, and after two tense nights in the shelte
