WILLA, стр. 14
“This is a working farm. There’s no reason we can’t survive. No, realistically, we won’t all survive the next year, let alone the next five, but most of us will if we all pitch in.”
“Surely, this won’t last that long,” Mom said.
“Those creatures could live a hundred years for all we know. If we’re lucky, they’ll die out in the next ten, but the chances of that happening are slim. We have to plan for the worst,” Uncle Carson said.
The argument between my uncle and those still in the basement went on for a while. Eventually, nearly half of the group agreed to learn to fight and to hunt. So another shift occurred among our people, and a new routine went into planning that supplied us with better food and saw our stores leveling for a while.
As you can guess, Mom wouldn’t allow me to do either. She’d volunteered me for laundry duty day two after the power went out, and that seemed to be all I did.
As a whole, we tried to wear the same clothes for two or three days in a row. We waited that long to bathe to conserve water and cleaning supplies, but with so many people and, considering myself and those helping me had to hand wash the clothes, we seemed always to be behind.
The one thing none of us thought of during our discussions on how to adjust to living in fear and living without the things that made life easy was living without meds.
That reality hit home when I noticed a third cousin of mine, who was helping me with laundry and dishes, acting oddly. Her name was Claire. When she met me that morning with a basket of dirty clothes, I could tell that she was having a hard time carrying the basket. She looked pale, shaky, and clammy.
I asked Claire a few times if she was all right, but she merely nodded and attempted to do her job. When it was clear she was too sick to help, I tried sending her to bed, but she wouldn’t go.
By the time I went to Grandma for help, it was too late. To be honest, the second the zombie apocalypse hit, it was too late for Claire. She had diabetes and was out of insulin.
Uncle Jamie was in the middle of setting up a scouting party to go into town to get her insulin when she died. How none of us had known before that morning that she had diabetes, I didn’t know. Why none of us had thought to ask about medical conditions, I didn’t know. None of it would matter in the end. If what little we heard on the radio was right, there was no one alive to create more meds.
Getting stuff from a pharmacy would only prolong a person’s life for so long.
10.
Uncle Ray died from congestive heart failure a few weeks after Claire passed. Grandma and a few others had known about his condition, but the rest of us hadn’t. At eighty-two, we should’ve assumed he would have some medical issues. Grandma was in pretty good health for her age, but she was nearly fifteen years younger than her brother.
Ray had made those that knew about his heart failure promise to keep it a secret. He hadn’t wanted anyone risking their lives to get medicine for an eighty-year-old man who—in his words—was useless in our new world. And my uncles would have risked us all for Uncle Ray. And I wouldn’t have blamed them. Despite his age, Ray was cool. He never treated anyone like a child.
Also, the man was far from useless. He was worth more than half the people in our family. His knowledge, his pragmatism, and his determination made him the perfect person to be our de facto leader.
Yeah, my uncles and Grandma made most of the decisions, but they ran many of their ideas by Uncle Ray first. He was able to make choices on matters with both his heart and his head. Uncle Ray was also good at talking people down from their hysteria. Due to his age, he was the head of the family. People listened to him...sometimes reluctantly, but they heard him.
A part of me had linked our survival with his. And I wasn’t the only one.
No one started talking about leaving until Stella died, though. She was stung by a swarm of bees while out hunting a few weeks after Uncle Ray passed. Even if we’d had access to the appropriate medication, we’d have been too late considering the number of stings she received.
I, of course, hadn’t been with her, so I didn’t see what happened, but my cousin Chad had been there. Mom hadn’t let me go upstairs to hear the story, so I’d pulled Chad aside later that day and asked him.
“Dad said your mom wouldn’t want you to know this. He’ll kill me if he finds out that I said anything,” Chad said.
“Screw them both. I can’t live in the dark forever. Now tell me,” I demanded.
“Okay. As you know, we were out hunting, looking for another deer. The meat from the last one we caught is nearly gone. Anyway, Stella spotted the hive. She thought it would be nice to have fresh honey for the bread. She approached it to see if it was a live hive or an abandoned one.
“She was just about to tap it with a branch when two zombies came out of nowhere. One ran right into her, causing her to hit the hive hard enough to aggravate the bees inside. They swarmed out and attacked both Stella and the zombie.
“I screamed for help while fighting off the second creature. If it hadn’t been for Kris, I might have died. He killed the zombie that was trying to pin me as a few others tried to kill the zombie after Stella and dodge the bees. A couple of people were stung, but not like Stella.
“She died quickly. I didn’t even