WILLA, стр. 25

17.

“How much further to our house,” Chase asked, sounding as tired as the rest of us felt.

“Probably another half an hours’ walk,” Uncle Jamie said, not looking back at his nephew.

“Thank God, I don’t know if I can walk much longer,” Chase said.

“You’ve got this, little brother,” Sam said, coming up to clap his brother on the shoulder.

“Don’t call me your little brother. I’m not a kid,” Chase said, shaking off his brother’s hand.

Sam laughed.

I had a feeling that Sam was purposely goading his brother to take his mind off his exhaustion. I was grateful for it. Their banter distracted me, as well.

Uncle Jamie was sure that he and his brother had picked Uncle Carson’s home clean, but the place had a finished basement. I couldn’t wait to crawl into the fold-out sofa and sleep for a week.

I hadn’t stayed the night at Uncle Carson’s that much since he didn’t have any girls. When I had, I’d slept on the pullout in the basement. The mattress hadn’t been comfortable, I remember. Right then, though, it would be better than the hard-ass ground.

“If the basement is in-tact, we could stay there a while,” I told Uncle Jamie. “It doesn’t have an outside door or any windows. It could be a perfect place for us to hide. Like Grandma’s cellar.”

“We aren’t staying long. It isn’t safe. It’s too close to town,” Uncle Jamie replied before spearing a zombie in the head.

I didn’t have time to argue as three more came from behind a fence.

Despite wanting to settle down somewhere for longer than a week, I could see his point. The closer we got to the city, as Grandma called it, the more dead bodies we saw and zombies we had to fight. Still, I was tired, and my head was spinning from what he’d had to do to Kaylie. The end of the world was starting to wear on my sanity.

After we’d fought off our second small horde a block or so from Uncle Carson’s house, Uncle Jamie reminded us again that no matter how safe we thought Uncle Carson’s house was, we wouldn’t stay there for long. We would spend a week maybe two so that he could search the town for supplies and food, and to see if he could get an idea of what the government and military were doing about the outbreak before heading back into the countryside in search of a better place to wait out the apocalypse.

Upon seeing the still closed and locked front door of Uncle Carson’s house, we took a breath of relief. All of the other doors and windows were intact as well.

“No one has been here since we left,” Sam said, pulling a key from his pocket and unlocking the door.

“It doesn’t look like it, no,” Uncle Jamie said.

The second the door opened, Chase rushed inside and up to his room. Uncle Jamie called for him to wait, to stay with us, to let us make sure the place was safe before he went off on his own, but Chase ignored him.

As soon as we knew that the downstairs was zombie-free, Sam split from my Uncle and me to go to his room as well. We couldn’t blame them. I bet neither boy thought they would ever see their home again. They’d packed a fair bit of things and carried them with them to Grandma’s house, but there were still clothes in their closets and favorite memorabilia that they’d left behind. For a brief second, I almost asked Uncle Jamie if we could go to my house next, but I knew doing so would be pointless.

Once we decided that the house was secure, Uncle Jamie ordered my cousins to join us in the living room.

“Boys, I know this is your house, and you feel safe here. However, I think we should stay down in the basement until we leave. We need to confine ourselves to one place, and with only one door, it’ll be easier to defend. You can take an hour to bring all of the things you want to the basement. After that, you don’t leave, none of you,” he said, turning to look at me then back to my cousins.

“Get all the clothes you need, anything that looks like a weapon, and any other supplies your dad and I might have left behind, and take it to the basement. Willa,” he said, getting my attention again, “you raid your aunt’s closet. You’ll need some extra clothes. And see if she left a pair of tennis shoes. Yours look a bit worn. When we leave here, I have a feeling that we’ll be doing a lot of walking.”

I nodded and followed Sam and Chase upstairs. Their mom was taller than me. She was also a size or two broader in the waist and chest than me, but I was able to make two pairs of jeans, four shirts, two pairs of shoes, all of the socks, and a few other odds and ends work for me. She and Uncle Carson also left behind a large backpack that I shoved the items into and carried them downstairs. The boys came along shortly after.

Once we were in the basement, Uncle Jamie handed out a supper, consisting of a spoon full of peanut butter and a spoonful of jelly with a few Fig Newtons, and a bottle of water.

We ate in silence.

We cleaned up for the night in silence.

We took shifts throughout the night in silence.

My cousins’ excitement at seeing their house again had worn off, and the two