Crank palace re-adapted

5. You can't feed crazy

Newt didn't grasp their surroundings until after the truck had left, as if his senses didn't fully kick in until they knew they'd been freed from the soldiers and their potential for harm. Without saying much at all, with Dante asleep now in his arms, Kath and he walked around and took stock of the area in which they'd been dumped.
It was a dry, dusty place, although the trees provided enough shade and fallen leaves to dampen the effect. Almost everywhere you looked, signs of habitation filled the spaces and gaps: small hastily built cabins, some without windows, some with broken windows; tents of all sizes that appeared to have been erected weeks or months ago, with old couches or chairs plopped next to their entrance flaps; lines draped with towels and clothing left to dry, hung from the trees above them; old shoes and bags of trash and small tables scattered hither and thither.
Newt once again flashed back to the early days of the Maze, could almost picture the towering stone walls looming somewhere just out of sight. Several habitations looked less occupied than others, some having been obviously abandoned or never used. Kath took a turn holding Dante. The kid was absolutely zonked after all that adventure and mayhem, and the three of them found a small cabin nestled between two large oak trees. They stood inside of it, taking a tour that lasted about twenty seconds.
It was one room, no kitchen, no bathroom, completely empty of possessions or furniture except for an old dusty couch. The lone window facing east, based on the position of the setting sun, had once held glass. Now it held three nasty-looking shards the size of Newt's thumb.

"Would you look at that. A castle" Kath pronounced, voice dripping with sarcasm. "And we'll have a nice draft through that busted window. I can't think of anything else I've ever wanted in a home."
Newt realised he was patting Dante's back as if he were a baby.

"A bed wouldn't hurt. Maybe some food." He replayed
The whole situation was absurd, and they both knew it. Here they were,
acting like a nice little family, settling down in their new home. Maybe a neighbour would drop by soon with a plate of biscuits and a bloody teapot.

"I'm gonna go check things out," Newt said while softly letting Dante down on then old couch, not even sure what he meant until the words came out, but he couldn't just stand there anymore. No matter how nice it seemed, these people weren't his family, and he'd be a fool to throw his lot in with them completely. At least, not yet. He needed to explore, see what this "Crank Palace" was all about.

Kath gave him a hard glare, panicking out of nowhere "Don't even think about it."

"What?"

"Abandoning us" she quickly responded "Please, just stay. Please. You need us as badly and we need you. We literally have crazy people for neighbours. Please Newt" she cried out loud. He realized that was the first time she would actually call him by his name "you can't leave us too. I can't do this all over again, I'm not going to make it" she was desperate. The first time Newt saw her devastated since they had met, her face almost unrecognizable.
Her words touched him, he had to admit. But he also felt uneasy, fidgety, like something wasn't quite right. He had an inexplicable and sudden urge to yell at her, to tell her to leave him alone, that he could do whatever he wanted, like a child. He was annoyed by her. They had just met. She wasn't his sister or his friend. Thankfully, he resisted.

"I just wanna know what's out there," he said, trying to keep the defensiveness out of his voice. "Sun's almost down, but I'll be quick about it. For one thing, we need something to eat. When's the last time Dante had any food?"
Kath let out a monstrous sigh of frustration followed by an incredible amount of tears, then turned around, put her back to the cheap wood, and slid to the floor.

"Please, wait until morning," Kath said, as quiet as he'd heard her speak yet. "I can't... we had it harder. Life is hard enough, Newt. I can't be left alone again, in the dark... Something may come walking by, knocking on our door, peeking through our broken window, breaking through that flimsy door. Please. Don't do that to me. We need you. Call me stupid, needy, selfish. Whatever works for you, but please just stay. You can explore tomorrow. Plus we haven't eat in a while... what's one more night..."
Newt almost shook with confusion, confusion turning into an anger that made no sense. He closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe. To calm down.
This bloody virus, he thought. He'd never know how much was paranoia and how much was the true effect of the thing on his mind. But in that moment, he just wanted to scream and pound his chest like a damn gorilla.

"Newt?" Kath asked, looking up at him from the floor with red teary eyes "Please, just get down here"
A sudden calm washed over him, a calm he hadn't felt in a long time. The extremes were getting to him, but for the short term, he'd take that piece and take it happily. He took the few steps to where Kath sat and sunk to the floor, trying his hardest to fake a genteel smile.

"You're right," he said. "Walking around the bloody Crank Palace without a map and with the sun about to set sounds like something only a crazy person would do."
A brief moment of silence stretched out, the two of them looking at each other, waiting for the other to react. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, they burst into laughter, a rollicking giddiness that made no sense, which just increased the giggles exponentially. They laughed, and they chortled, and they even threw in a few snorts. Newt couldn't remember the last time something had struck him as so funny as saying what he'd said. The layers and vicious cycles of irony weren't even worth thinking about.
Crazy person! He was a crazy person, all right. She was a crazy person, and they'd just scratched the surface. The crazy person level would just keep going up and up, and they'd be there to laugh like crazy people as it did.

"Who needs food anyway?" he said through the hysterics, while trying his best to dry her tears from her cheek "You can't feed crazy!"

"Right?!" Kath managed to respond. They were laughing so hard that Dante could have woken up ten times, but luckily he was on the couch, snoring like a little bear. This made both her and Newt's laughter reach something that could only be called, guffaws, and every time they would look in each other's eyes the laughs would only increase. He had tears in his eyes and couldn't remember any of the horrors they'd experienced that day.
God, help him. Going insane wasn't so bad after all.