WILLA, стр. 43
I let myself cry out my fear, frustration, and stupidity before getting up and shining the light around in search of the lanterns he had scattered throughout the room. I only flipped on two, not wanting Tanner’s efforts to make the place look unoccupied go to waste.
In all fairness, he probably should’ve waited until I woke to leave or got me up to tell me he was going. I was a stranger to the place, after all.
Using the bit of illumination in the room, I made my way to the bathroom. After relieving myself and using water from the bucket beside the toilet to make the commode flush, I did my best to wash my face, pull back my hair, and brush my teeth in the dim room.
I’d only just made it back to my pallet on the floor with a protein bar and a bottle of water when Tanner returned. He slipped in through a door in the back of the stock room, not through the front of the store. He looked flushed and out of breath, but not as if he’d been in a fight with anyone.
“Good, you found it,” he said, nodding at the food he’d left out for me.
“I did. Thank you. I’m sorry. I feel like the world’s biggest idiot for freaking out like that.”
“Stop. You woke in pitch black in a new place. Very few people wouldn’t have been scared. I should’ve waited until you woke or put the radio and flashlight in your hands before I left. Hell, for that matter, I could’ve told you what I thought I might do this morning before we fell asleep last night. Any decent person wouldn’t have left you alone so soon anyway.”
“This isn’t your fault. It’s mine for being a baby. Just because I’ve come along doesn’t mean your daily routine has to stop. You told me you’d been scouting your grandfather’s neighborhood. If I’d been thinking straight, I’d have understood that’s what you were doing. It was waking in the dark. That’s all. I didn’t give myself time to adjust to it before freaking out. The panicking didn’t help the situation in the slightest. I’m trying. I am. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I am. Nothing about my life before prepared me for this world.”
“Willa, no one was prepared for this. Most of us alive right now have made it this far by sheer dumb luck. I’ve met prepper groups who spent their entire lives planning and preparing for all types of end of the world situations who’ve fallen. I’m sure some are still holding strong. A few might even hold out until the end, but most will fall. The sad and worst part about that fact is that their end will come because of something a fellow human does and not one of those things.”
“You are mad at me,” I said, thinking he was hinting that I would be his downfall.
“I’m not. The situation just got me thinking. We have to be more mindful of what we’re doing. We have to think and stop reacting. Having you here made me want to rush to find us a place. That caused me to leave you alone when I shouldn’t have, which in turn left you to wake in a panic. We have to start thinking things through more. It might not matter in the end, but it may buy us a bit more time.”
“I’m sorry,” was all I could think to say. I understood what Tanner was saying. I still felt like an idiot.
“Stop apologizing. Eat your breakfast?”
I held up my half-empty water bottle and protein bar package.
“Good,” he said in acknowledgment that I was eating, but not offering me more.
Good? I was still hungry. I’d showed him my empty pack again, thinking he would give me another one. I knew there was more. We were in a stock room full of more, but...
You have to ration, idiot. This food will have to last a long time.
“I think I’ve figured out what streets in Grandpa’s neighborhood would be best for us to stay in for a while. While your arm heals, I’ll scout the neighborhood to make sure. I think a horde came through in the night. The south side of town is a wreck, but those homes near Grandpa’s look fine,” he said, cutting through my thoughts.
It still hadn’t occurred to him that I was asking for more food. That was probably for the best.
“What can I do to help?” I asked before finishing my water.
“Let’s see,” he said, making himself comfortable at a desk and pulling out a notebook. “On Grandpa’s street, there were five houses on one side of the road and six on the other. There are five houses on one side and four that line the river on the block behind him, which sits on the river. I’m just going from stop sign to stop sign here, not the entire length of the road or river’s edge. If we’re there more than a month and no one shows, we could start settling. For now, we don’t want it to look like anyone is making a home in the neighborhood. We can’t take the chance of anyone stealing our supplies.”
Tanner was speaking aloud, but he was talking more to himself than he was to me. That didn’t hurt my feelings. I didn’t know the area, and he seemed to have a half-decent plan in his head already.
“That gives us twenty houses in all.” He continued. “We could start splitting up the supplies between each house. We’ll stay in one until what we have there runs out, then move to the next, although we could just