The backyard of that Brigantine house wasn't much to look at. A stretch of cracked concrete hemmed in by a sagging wooden fence, a few patches of dead grass that had given up somewhere around the time the world did. But it was where they gathered every day around this hour, the usual faces filing out one by one with the kind of slow, mechanical routine that came from having nowhere else to be.
A handful of Callighan's men moved around the edges, not really watching but watching all the same. A folding table had been set up near the back wall with a large pot and a stack of mismatched plates, and one of the older women from the group was already ladling out rations with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd long since stopped caring about portion fairness.
