"Maybe it's time to cool it with Cheryl." If I cooled it any more, there would be frostbite issues," I said with a laugh. "The problem is Cheryl want'... in on our little venture. If it all goes south, we could all go down, not just me. She might get her parole revoked, That would be a terrible thing. I don't know, if I could live with myself, if that happened." I said."You know, that might be what the social worker is counting on. If it is purely personal, she might be playing you." Gwen. ”I smiled and tapped the rounded point of my number two pencil on my half-filled pad of paper. Lead and cedar were my tools for taking minutes. I liked the effortless feel of graphite sliding across the yellow legal pad.“Our mission,” I said, “is to figure out how to survive this disaster and we can’t even agree on something easy like what to call ourselves.” I rubbed my forehead as I stretched and tried to return circulation to my restless legs.“Sheila has a sick sense of humor,” I said with a. Danny Kidd is the third member. They force a bunch of us to give them our lunch money.”“WHAT! That sounds like something out of a movie.”“Yep, but that’s what they do. We get hit up at least once a week. They expect Earl, Beth, me and some others to give them $10 each.”“You guys need to stand up for yourselves. It may be tough for a while, but they’ll give up eventually.”Earl decided to chime in. “They’ll beat us up.”“Look, y’all are safe here at the table while I’m around but you don’t stand. The town was never very large, and we didn't expect to find that it had grown much in the mean time. Man, were we in for a surprise!As we got close, we began to hear gunfire spaced out the way one would expect the noise to come from a shooting range. That was our first clue as to what Honey Bee had become. We topped a small rise and gazed upon a sea of tents. The tents were laid out in a symmetrical pattern, so it was easy to get a count. There were 30 tents of the size that the Army used to.