WILLA, стр. 45

I stared at him for a long moment, taking in what he’d said.

“Thank you so much,” I said, pulling him to me for a hug. “I’m so tired of being in here all by myself most of the day.”

“I’d rather have you in here than out there, but I can see how this would get tiresome,” he said, pointing around at the dark stock room.

Tanner helped me bandage my arm and dress. I didn’t complain about the long-sleeved shirt, tight blue jeans, gloves, and cap that held my hair up. If that were the price I had to pay for going outside, I would take it.

The sun was bright, the air crisp, and the area was free of zombies when we stepped out of the store’s back door.

“When was the last time a horde came through?” I asked in a voice just above a whisper.

“A few days. I don’t think it sensed any humans because it moved through rather quickly. That’s a good sign for us. It means we won’t have to fight anyone for our stash.”

“Do you think someone would just steal it?” I asked, though his words didn’t surprise me. I knew how desperate people could get, but for them to outright steal from someone else was still a foreign concept to me.

“If we aren’t there to protect it, yeah. For one, the person won’t know it belongs to us. Two, if they are hungry enough, they won’t care. Despite our stuff scattered around the room, the place looks as if its occupants had left and never returned. At least, that’s how the person could justify things in their head.”

“We won’t kill them for that, will we?”

“No, but if they try to take it all or keep us from it, we might have to. The world isn’t safe enough to settle down anywhere permanently, and won’t be for a while. We have to rely on the food that’s left for sustenance.”

I didn’t ask any more questions as we left the confines of the grocery store parking lot and ventured out into the world. The few zombies we saw, we managed to dodge.

We didn’t encounter any humans.

The neighborhood that Tanner picked for us was upper-middle class. Most yards had privacy fences surrounding clubhouses and pools. We slipped in and out of the maze to avoid detection by either zombies or humans. Judging by the quiet that filled the air around us, neither were in our general area.

The bugout bags that we carried we stored in the first two houses along the lake in the section of the neighborhood that we decided were ours. The homes were empty. Most usually were aside from the dead—I mean the dead, not the undead.

Every once in a while, Tanner said he would find a zombie hiding in a room or closet, but they were so starved that they were easy to kill. I didn’t care that they would be simple kills. I did not look forward to killing any more of those creatures.

We stored the bags in whichever closet was nearest an exit in each house before heading to the river bank to see what we had to deal with in the way of bodies.

Behind the third house, we found the remnants of a massacre and what might have been a luau-themed birthday party. Twinkle lights were wrapped around tree limbs as were remains of pastel-colored pompoms. Someone had covered the tables in grass skirts and what used to be bright tablecloths scattered the yard. I found a sweet sixteen birthday card half-buried under a chair. Other party debris covered the yard and the bank.

“Someone was having a sixteenth birthday party when the zombies attacked,” I said, holding up the card.

“Fuck. That sucks,” Tanner said, righting a table.

“This had to have happened in the first days. No one would’ve had a party, let alone one out in the open like this if they’d known about the zombies.”

“Oh yeah. Almost day one early,” he said, picking up a leg that was mostly bone and dropping it onto the table.

“The poor birthday girl,” I said, picking up another card pinned between the head of a teenage girl and a chair. I didn’t know if I referred to the girl at my feet or the girl who’d most likely died on her birthday.

“There are a lot of bodies here. I don’t think very many people made it out alive,” Tanner said, picking up another body part.

“If they did, they didn’t make it very far,” I said, nodding downriver at the scattered bodies that dotted the shoreline.

“I’m not sure what to do with them all,” Tanner said, wandering off a bit down the river.

I busied myself with turning the bodies over out of morbid curiosity to find out who the birthday girl might have been. A number of the dead were teenage girls, but I’d narrowed my suspicions down to three. The one buried under a man who looked like he died trying to protect her was high on my list, though that didn’t mean she was the one.

“There’s a storage shed about three houses down,” Tanner said, returning with a wheelbarrow. “If I empty it, the bodies can go in there. Will you help me put the parts in this,” he pointed to the wheelbarrow, “it’ll make transport easier. Mind your bad arm, though.”

“I will,” I said, grabbing the nearest limb—a young girl’s arm. I almost dropped it once I realized how small the child had to have been.