WILLA, стр. 7
Mom immediately panics.
I think I’m somewhere in the middle. Some would say my boxing of our food was an overreaction, considering I’d never seen a zombie. For all I knew, the images on the television were a prank. My gut had told me it wasn’t. Mom’s utter panic over it all told me it wasn’t, and my conversation with Lilly that first morning told me the event was real.
Deep inside, I was fighting the urge to scream, cry, shut down—die even. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where any of us could survive. If those creatures were anything like their counterparts in the movies, we were doomed. We were the walking dead, as the T.V. show suggested.
Stop, Willa. Stop thinking that. You do what you have to do to live for as long as you can, I mentally chastised myself.
“Rest a bit,” Grandma said to break our silence. “When you’re ready, I’ll give you something to do.”
She hugged me, kissed my forehead, and moved off to talk to one of my uncles.
5.
Organizing our belongings under the cots didn’t take long. Afterward, I wandered around the cellar to see who had come to Grandma’s house. Both of Mom’s brothers and their families had arrived that morning. Grandma’s baby brother, his wife, their only son, and his wife and two girls were there. Her youngest sister was there, but only one of her children, his spouse, and children were there. A few of Grandpa’s, God rest his soul, nieces and nephews, and their spouses, and children milled about the area. Others either refused to leave their homes or lived too far away to get to us safely.
Once I made my rounds, I went looking for my grandmother. She and one of my second cousins, Stella, were unloading the totes of food we’d brought from my house and making notes of what we had on a clipboard.
“Need any help?” I asked.
“Sure,” Grandma said. “You can take the totes of medicine and first aid stuff over to that back shelf. Divvy it up into its appropriate place. There’s a clipboard on the top shelf. List all the items you put on the shelf on it. I doubt we’ll be able to keep perfect records on everything, but we need to try. This stuff might have to last a long time.”
“Okay. I can do that. It’s a good thing you had a nearly full cellar when this started,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” Stella said, looking around at the shelves of food.
“Well, your Aunt Carol’s stash helped,” Grandma said.
“I can’t believe she had the patience to shop for all of this,” Stella said, pointing at the shelves of food.
I left the two women discussing my aunt and her coupon addiction. Carol is Uncle Jamie’s wife, and she’s obsessed over digging through coupons. She spent most of her time either looking through ads or store hopping to cash in on the deals she found. The only problem was that my aunt and uncle didn’t have a large basement or walk-in pantry, but what storage areas they did have stayed stocked with supplies.
Fortunately, over the years, anything that couldn’t fit at their house went to Grandma’s cellar, giving us plenty of food for family gatherings or for any family member who was struggling and needed a little extra help. My family didn’t horde the items for ourselves either. Once a month, Grandma and Aunt Carol would take loads of it to local shelters and food banks.
One of my family’s saving graces was that the end of the world fell midmonth, so both Grandma’s cellar and my aunt and uncle’s house was stocked almost to overflowing. All of the food at Uncle Jamie’s home went to Grandma’s basement in the hours after my uncle had heard about the outbreak.
Grandma lived on a large farm that my Uncle Jamie, Uncle Carlson, and a few farmhands helped her tend. My grandmother had loved to can. She canned or froze everything my uncles could grow in the fields behind her house. Couple Aunt Carol’s coupon obsession with Grandma’s love of canning, and we should have food for a year if we rationed appropriately and if no more of our family came. I couldn’t see how we’d be able to fit any more people in the cellar, let alone many more supplies.
The medical items from our house only filled one tote. I carried it over to the shelf that Grandma pointed out and grabbed the clipboard off the top shelf. Sitting on the floor, I opened the tote and inventoried everything in it before placing the stuff on the shelves.
Taking note of how bare that section of shelving was in comparison to the rest of the cellar, I feared we’d run out of medical supplies before we would run out of food.
Once I finished, I took the tote to the bottom of the stairs, where Uncle Carson carried it up to the kitchen and wherever he was storing them. No new people had arrived since we had, and I couldn’t think of anyone who would.
For the second time, I wandered around the cellar, listening to stories about the zombies. Very few people had seen one, and those that described what they saw, honestly couldn’t say that what they saw was a zombie. Most didn’t want to believe that what Uncle Carson saw were zombies. The lack of valid evidence of the creatures made our entire situation surreal.
What if the outbreak was a hoax? What if we woke up tomorrow with China or Korea or Russia laughing at us for believing the prank they pulled on us?
That could happen, but my gut told me it wouldn’t. The news footage had been real, graphic, and believable, and from all