It’s Warner and a bunch of soldiers!  Yay!

I probably shouldn’t be celebrating the fact that these two have been captured and Adam is shot, but they’re idiots and I’m just glad for some action.

I want to shriek through the sky, I want to fall to my knees and sob into the earth. I don’t understand why the agony isn’t finding escape in my screams. Why my mouth is covered with someone else’s hand.

…do you not realize you can still scream?  It’ll be muffled, but you can still produce a noise, especially since you’re not trying to signal for help you’re just trying to release frustration.

Warner realizes he can touch Juliette, too, and drags her into a random convenient room so they can chat.  He goes on about how this means they can ‘really be together’ and how he wants her to ‘chose’ him and fuck it, you know what?  For all the characters go on about Juliette being “crazy,” Warner here is the one that has a tenuous grasp on reality.

His lips come too close. “But I love you.”

“No you don’t.”

His eyes close. He leans his forehead against mine. “You have no idea what you do to me.”

“I hate you.”

He shakes his head very slowly. Dips down. His nose brushes the nape of my neck and I stifle a horrified shiver that he misunderstands. His lips touch my skin and I actually whimper. “God I’d love to just take a bite out of you.”

Disturbing.

Juliette lets him kiss her because she saw a gun in his jacket and wants to grab it.  She shoots him and runs out to find Adam.  She ends up running through a bunch of streets, despite the fact that Warner simply dragged her into the closest convenient doorway, and therefore Adam and the other soldiers should be right outside.

Now that I’ve actually fired a gun, I feel more confident with it in my hands, more aware of what to expect, how it functions. But I don’t know if I should be happy or horrified that I’m so comfortable so quickly with something so lethal.

Horrified, because one shot at point-blank range does not make you an expert and you’ve still got a good chance of blowing your own foot off.

She eventually finds the spot where he was shot and follows the blood trail over to a building, but she can’t get in the locked door.  Turns out her superstrength is Hulk-y, because she has to get herself mad amounts of angry before she can punch the door in.

Naturally, this isn’t intentional or thought about.  She just thinks about all the things that make her angry and then punches.  I guess planning is for other characters, Juliette is going to just do stuff and it’ll happen to be the right stuff.

This is a really common problem with main characters of every type.  What do authors have against making plans and figuring things out?

This must be how I broke through the concrete in Warner’s torture chamber. Which means I still have no idea how I broke through the concrete in Warner’s torture chamber.

You got mad and it gave you superstrength. 

I can see you not knowing how getting mad is the key, but you know what you’re doing at this point.

When she finds Adam, for some godforsaken reason he’s strung up and hanging by his wrists in the middle of a room.  Why?  Fuck you, that’s why.

“They said Warner wanted to kill me himself,” he explains. “That he shot me in the leg on purpose, just to disable me. It gave him a chance to drag you away and come back for me later. Apparently his plan was to torture me to death.”

Since his leg wounds bleed out and hanging by the wrists is a form of torture, that’s stupid.  See, hanging in that position puts a great deal of pressure on the chest and can cause asphyxiation, so the person has to use their muscles to take some of the strain and let them breathe.  If Adam loses consciousness from blood loss, or even just loses enough strength to be weakened, then to bad for your torture plans, he’s dead.

Juliette cuts him down and they take the time out to snog before escaping.

When they get outside, Juliette finds an unlocked car with keys in the ignition and groceries in the backseat.

Wow.  Could that line possibly get any more convenient?

Also, THE FUCK?  They have grocery stores in this world?  A world where people routinely starve to death because there isn’t enough food?  Either that place is getting robbed six times a day, or…nope, that’s all I’ve got.  And in this world of routine starvation, who leaves their food behind just because of some alarm telling them to go inside?  It only takes a few extra seconds to grab the bag and then go inside.  This is not how starving people act, this is how middle-class Americans act.  (And maybe not even then; if I don’t see the gunman coming down my street at me, then I want my damn Cheezits while I’m holed up in my home.)

I reach into the back and rummage through the grocery bags. There’s real food inside. Not just strange bouillon cubes designed to go into Automats, but fruit and vegetables. Even Warner never gave us bananas.

So then where did it come from?

NO, REALLY, THIS IS AN IMPORTANT QUESTION, WHERE DID IT COME FROM,WHY AREN’T YOU EVEN CURIOUS, FUCK YOU JULIETTE.

Well, enough of that incredibly forced contrivance, they drive over and pick up Kenji and James.  She makes Kenji drive because she doesn’t actually know how and just sort of pedal-stomped her way over to them.

While driving, they wonder why no one is following them.  They conclude that Kenji’s tracking thing isn’t working because he also went through that nuclear field. 

The contrivances are piling up, aren’t they?

“Or,” Adam interrupts, “maybe they bought out Benny.”

“No.” I gasp.

“It’s possible.”

Why are you gasping, Juliette, you’ve never met Benny.  Neither have we.  All we know about her is that she sometimes looks in on James.

They also have some sort of ‘so are we dating’ conversation in the backseat, which really has no place as Adam is bleeding out and they are all fleeing.  Just…seriously, why care?

They arrive at the place they’re going to which is apparently an underground parking lot.  Hopefully it’s attached to a building somewhere.

“They have a medical wing?” My heart is parasailing in the springtime.

Kenji grins. “This place has everything. It will blow your goddamn mind.”

Sigh.  Did this book just forget that its premise is “post-apocalypse/dystopian DUE TO A LACK OF RESOURCES?”  You can’t throw that out there without then justifying every use of resources that comes up after it. 

Also, it turns out James slept through the whole car ride because Kenji gave him sleeping pills.  Which he…carries around in his pocket?

4 people run out toward the car. 2 older than me, 2 older than them.

…

Fuck it, I don’t care.

Kenji is apparently some sort of authority figure, and these new people start doing first aid on Adam.  They take Adam away to get medical care, and Juliette loses it.  Goes into full-on, “what is this what’s going on” disassociation and panic and Kenji has to sedate her.  She was fine while being shot at, chased, kidnapped, sexually assaulted, punching through doors, all of that, BUT OMG DON’T TAKE MY BOYFRIEND AWAY WHAT WILL I DOOOOOOOOOOO?

Fuck this book so hard. I realize the book probably just wanted to take the easy out do a cheap transition to the next scene, but it’s not like Juliette couldn’t have just been exhausted or something, no, she had to go into full-on, boy-induced hysteria.