Facility

Being walked through Laramie at the point of a gun put her in mind, for the first time in a long time, of the facility, because the facility was the last place anyone had walked her anywhere, and because it too had been a place run on the logic of the gun in service of keeping people alive, and she had never been able to make those two things sit still together in her head.

They had lived there some months, after the house in Aurora and before the truck to camp. It had been a government building of some kind, brick and flat-roofed and ringed with soldiers, and her mother had a badge that opened doors in it that other people's badges did not. Families slept in the big rooms on cots, dozens to a room, and the air went thick and sour when the power failed in the heat, and there was a basement where the children were allowed to play until the day the basement became a place for the sick and then the dead and the children were not allowed down there anymore.