WILLA, стр. 40
“I hated allowing the looters to destroy my home, but I had no way of defending myself, and I couldn’t bear the thought of dying over mac and cheese, crackers, canned soup, and toilet paper.
“I stayed home another week, living off what food we had and what little I found in neighboring houses. At that point, I knew my moms were never coming home. A big part of me wanted to go into Nashville to find them, but the city was too large, and I had no idea where they would have gone, so I headed south. Momma Sarah’s dad lived here in Alabama, so I thought maybe I could find him.”
“You didn’t join any other groups?”
“Not for long. Most of the groups were heading to Florida or up north. I wanted to stay around here. Momma Kat doesn’t have any family. She was an orphan, so if my mothers survived and didn’t find me at home, they’d come south.”
“I’m assuming your grandfather didn’t make it.”
“No, but he lived here, so that’s why I’m staying.”
“Where is here?”
“Florence.”
“Alabama?”
“Yep. You’re welcome to stay with me if you like.”
28.
I looked around at the building in which we resided. The stock room belonged to a grocery store. There were crates of food, water, soap, and medicine. Tanner had moved some of the shelves against the double doors leading into the store in a makeshift barricade. No light showed through the door, so he must’ve covered the windows. The place was a dream despite its lack of lighting.
“How long have you been here?” I asked, nodding at my surroundings.
Tanner had to have been in the store some time to have fortified it the way he had.
“About a week or two. It’s a small grocery store on the outskirts of a middle-class neighborhood. I found it while searching for my grandfather. I brought you here after the horde passed. It’s the first place I found that I’ve been able to get into that’s fully stocked. The bigger stores are empty, full of zombies, or locked up tighter than Fort Knox.”
“We could stay here for a year or more, living off this stuff,” I said and hoped he didn’t hear my slip.
“Or at least until some group of assholes tries to kill us for it. That’ll probably come sooner than you think. At first, I thought about making the store my home, but then grew paranoid that if someone saw me coming in and out, they’d know it hadn’t been looted and come for the supplies. I’m sure it’s happened at least once. Someone had already started fortifying the place before I got here. I don’t know what happened to them.”
At the look of uncertainty in my eyes, he said, “I promise it wasn’t me. When I got here, no one was here. No one has come near the place since I arrived. At least not that I know of, but someone will.”
“If you think someone might be out to steal it, then we should probably move this stuff somewhere more secure as soon as possible.”
That time, I said the word “we” on purpose.
“We? Like as in you and me?” Tanner asked.
“Yeah. I mean, if you’re sure you want me around, that is.”
“I do. Do you trust me not to hurt you?”
“You saved my life. If I can’t trust you, then I can’t trust anyone. We don’t have anybody else. As you said, there are a lot of assholes out there. I don’t think either one of us is one of them, at least not yet. We should probably stick together for a while. If you don’t want to, I understand,” I said, backtracking, fearing that I’d made the wrong assumption and that he was going to kick me out as soon as I was well enough to travel on my own.”
“No, I want to. I just thought that you’d want to keep looking for your family,” he said, his face flushing red.
“A part of me does. I know the name of the military base they were heading to, but my gut says they didn’t make it there. If they didn’t, I’ll never find them. They could be dead for all I know. We didn’t have much of a plan. We should’ve had one—a destination nearby that we could meet so that if we separated, we knew where to go, but by that point, we were wandering blind. I think my Uncle Jamie had finally given up or was on the verge of it.”
“Maybe not. Perhaps your uncle didn’t know his surroundings enough to tell you guys where to meet. Or maybe it never occurred to him to need a rendezvous point. Most people I’ve met don’t know where they are, let alone where they’re going, not really. They’re merely picking a direction and moving that way until something shifts their plans. I think that’s about all you can do in this new world. You can hope to find safety for a little while, but nothing’s permanent.”
“If that’s so, then why bother? Why run when the zombies come? Why fight when another human tries to take what we have? Why not roll over and die?”
“Because, for the most part, humans have an instinctual need to live. Even when logically, our minds or maybe it’s our hearts—I don’t know—have given up all hope, our bodies will fight until we have nothing left in us. If we didn’t, our species would have died out a millennia ago. We also can adapt. We are kind of slow at it, but we do learn, we do change, and therefore, we survive. What we will be when this is over, I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want