***

At first I was really resistant to the idea, even though I had suggested it as an alternative. I hated mosquitoes, snakes, and gators … and probably about a thousand other nasties that made their homes there. But Peter made a very convincing point: everyone else hated that stuff too.

“We need to go somewhere no one else wants to go; a place where life would be too hard for most people. And we need a place that has food and water sources.”

I nodded my head in resignation. “And nothing beats the Everglades for all of the above.”

“Exactly. Sure, the mountains have what we need to survive. But they’re also beautiful, hospitable, and very well-known. That’s where other people will be going. That’s where the canners will be going,” said Peter, shifting his voice lower to finish. “It’ll be their hunting grounds.”

I shivered at the idea of going to live in a place where I would be the prey instead of being the guy at the top of the food chain, hoping in the back of my mind that I would never be okay or blasé about the idea of a person eating another person. I swallowed the sick feeling down, moving my brain to other, less disgusting topics.

“I guess you’re right,” I said, sighing. “I’ll get the map.” I went over to our pile of books as we were talking and pulled out the spiral-bound roadmap book. I sat back down next to Peter and flipped through the pages. “Should we stick to highways or back roads?”

“I have no idea.”

“Okaaaayyy. Through the middle or down the coast?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

I smiled, scanning the pages that showed the roads near my house. “We make quite the team, don’t we?”

I could hear a smile in Peter’s voice when he responded. “The best.”

CHAPTER THREE

PETER AND I TOOK TURNS sleeping and staying awake the first night. It was the first time I’d actually been able to sleep deeply and have a dream I remembered. It was of my dad, telling me how to pack my bag, and me complaining about having to play survivor. It made me both happy and sad, glad to re-live the moment but wishing I had appreciated the time spent with him more.

I woke up to relieve Peter on guard duty and spent the next couple of hours kicking myself mentally for not trying harder with my krav maga training and asking my dad to teach me more things about survival. I should have spent my last few months of his life with him in the library, absorbing information that I could use to rebuild my world into one I could feel happy and safe in. Now that I knew some kids had gone insane - in groups - I didn’t feel comfortable at all in my house and in this neighborhood. Peter and I were way too easy to catch here and then … well … be their next meal.

At four in the morning I nudged Peter awake. “Come on. We need to go see what we can find at the neighbors’ houses for food before we leave.”

“What if someone comes while we’re gone?”

“Only one of us is going at a time. The other stays here and guards the house.”

“Isn’t that dangerous? Being alone?”

“Yes. But we can’t risk leaving our books and things for raiders to take.”

Peter nodded his head slowly, wiping his face and hair with his hands. “Okay. Who’s going out first?”

“I’ll go while you wake up.” I held out my finger as I stood, warning him, “But no going back to sleep.”

Peter slowly got on his feet. “No, I won’t. I’m gonna go … pee.”

“Out in the back yard. Far right corner. I have a hole in the ground. Just move the board away from it first, please.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to start at the corner there, across the street and to the right, and I’ll do the first five houses in a row, going that way.”

“Okay. Just wait for me to come back, first.”

I busied myself with checking my gun and finding more bullets to put in my pocket. I had several boxes of them, but I’d spread them out all over the house, thinking at the time I’d done it that if someone came breaking in, I’d be prepared for a re-load no matter where I was.

Peter came back inside and picked up his gun. “Ready whenever you are.”

“I’m taking a potty break and then leaving from the side yard, so just watch for me out the front window. Don’t come out though, no matter what, okay?”

“What if someone comes after you?”

“Warn me by ringing that bell on my front porch.”

“Bell? Where?”

I brought him to the front door and opened it a crack, showing him the brass decorative bell that had hung in the same place for as long as we’d owned the house.

“What should I ring it with?”

“I don’t know. Your gun? A pan? Something metal.”

He stepped out on the front porch and raised his gun, ready to bring it crashing down, but I reached out and grabbed his elbow to stop him.

“What the hell are you doing?” I whisper-yelled.

“Testing it,” he said, innocently.

“Oh, so you can wake up the raiders and let them know we’re open for business?”

Peter grimaced and then whispered, “Oh. Yeah. That was dumb.”

I shook my head. “Get back inside, ding-a-ling.”

After taking a pee break and brushing my teeth with the tiniest speck of toothpaste I could manage, I left the house, sticking to the edges of abandoned cars and bushes as much as possible. I made it over to the Brown’s place without being seen.

I went through their house and the four next to it, checking every cupboard and under every bed and couch I could find. I even went up into their attics, already stiflingly hot. They would have been impossible to go in later in the day when the raiders were normally active, so there was a chance I could find something there that had not yet been discovered.

When I returned to my house a little over an hour later, I had less than half a backpack full of stuff.

“What’d you get?” asked Peter, his eyes gleaming. I couldn’t blame him for his excitement - it was kind of like a treasure hunt. Except for the danger of possibly being discovered and attacked, it was fun.

“Well, I got a camping lantern, the oil kind - found it up in an attic. There’s lots of oil in it still, plus there was an extra can too.”

“Cool.”

“I got four cans of mini-ham from the back corner of a cupboard someone had missed.”

“Nice,” he said, turning one of the cans around to read the ingredients.

I shook my head silently - as if ingredients even matter anymore.

“Don’t shake your head at me,” he said.

“Why not? You’re being goofy.”

“How do you know it wasn’t some weird bio-engineered food that killed all the adults off?”

“Because we ate the same things as them and we’re all still here, maybe?” I said in a way that suggested he was the dummy, not me.

“Maybe it’s an ingredient that kids are resistant to but adults aren’t.”

“Whatever. It’s only a few cans and we’re not likely to find many more of them. Even Costco and Walmart have been cleaned out at this point.”

“How do you know?”

I shrugged. “I don’t. It’s just an educated guess. If I lived closer to one, it’s where I would have gone first.”

“What else did you get?”

I pulled out a bag of rice and a box of spaghetti. “This is it.”

Peter smiled. “A spaghetti dinner.”

“I’m so sick of pasta I could puke,” I grumbled.

“Well, that’s too bad. It’s good carbs for when we’re riding bikes, and it’s easy to make. If we could ever figure out how to make flour, we’d be able to make pasta ourselves. Or something that looked kind of like it.”

“I prefer tortillas.”

“Whatever. We’ll worry about that when we get settled. Now it’s my turn to go out.” Peter stood up straighter and tucked his gun down the front of his baggy pants. The huge handle hanging over the edge was the only thing keeping it from falling down his pant leg; but it was so heavy, it was pulling his pants down partway.

“You need a holster. Start with the house just on the west side of this one, plus the four next ones. The guy two doors down was a cop. Maybe he has a holster in his bedroom somewhere.”

“Okay. Who else lived in those houses? Maybe I can focus on finding certain things.”

“I don’t know. An old man lived next to him. I never talked to him. He was a little strange. The others? I have no clue. I wasn’t the most social of neighbors. Neither was my dad.”

Peter said nothing until he got to the front door. “I bet you wish you were more social back then, when you had neighbors to be social with.” And then he walked out.

I thought about what he said, moving towards my kitchen window to watch him walk over to the next door neighbor’s house. He wasn’t trying at all not to be seen. That gun was giving him a false sense of security. I was going to have to remedy that when he got back.

As I waited for him to return, I tried to decide if I was feeling regret over not being more social in the past. Would my outcome be any different now if I’d been friendlier to the neighbors? If I’d gone down and talked to the crazy old guy who was always out in his yard, talking to his fluffy, white toy poodle, Buster, all the time? No. They would have been just more people to say goodbye to.

Socializing brought on friendships, and friends were too easily lost to death’s whims now. It wasn’t worth it. I had to conserve what little sanity I had by making the conscious decision not to drown in misery over the loss of people I’d never get back.

I puttered around the house, nervously checking the windows every five minutes, until I heard a noise at the front door. I ran over and put my ear to the wood, listening for signs that it was Peter.

“Bryn?” he whispered.

“Yeah,” I said, getting ready to open the door. But then I hesitated. “Are you alone?” I don’t know what I was expecting to hear him say, but it wasn’t this.

“Not exactly.”

My hand hesitated on the lock, not sure now if I should open it. If there was a canner with him, would he tell me? Or would they somehow force him to get me to open the door without him being able to warn me. Or would he even want to warn me? Maybe he was a canner himself, and all of this poor-me routine was just a ruse to get me to lower my guard.

I laughed at my paranoia. As if my one remaining bag of noodles and my starving hundred-pound-body were anything to get excited about. There were much easier meals to find around here. Everyone from this neighborhood knew I wouldn’t go down without a fight. But then again … Peter wasn’t from this area.

“Is it safe to open up?”

Peter huffed out a breath of frustrated air. “Of course it is, you idiot. And hurry up. This guy is heavy.”

Guy? I wished like hell I had a peephole. Instead, I got my gun ready, flicking the safety off and bringing it level with the edge of the opening. I unlocked the door and flung it open, holding the gun out in front of me with stiff arms.

“Don’t shoot,” said Peter in a tired voice, standing on the front stoop holding a dirty, gray-brown mass of tangled cotton that looked like a badly used mop head.

The mop head moved.

It squirmed a little.

And then it barked.

***

“Oh, hell no, you are not bringing that thing in here,” I said, as Peter brushed past me to move into the front hall.

“Be quiet and shut the door. You’ll wake up the raiders.”

I shut the door as I yelled at him in a low tone. “What the hell were you thinking, Peter? We can’t take this dog with us! He’ll bark his head off!”