Aly disappeared around the back of the house.
“I had to shoot a looter,” said Jim. “Don’t be alarmed when you see the body.”
“Already saw it,” said Rob.
“I know you did, Rob. I was speaking to Jessica.”
Jessica just nodded stiffly.
To her own surprise, shooting dead a man not long ago hadn’t had as much of an effect on her as she would have thought. In fact, she felt nothing except relief that they’d gotten out of the situation alive.
And, if she was being honest, she felt proud of herself. Proud of what she’d done. Proud of being useful. Proud of keeping a cool head in a tough situation.
Aly reappeared a moment later with the key. It worked, and Aly swung the door open and rushed inside.
A second later, there was a scream.
“Mom!” screamed Aly.
Jim pushed Rob back roughly and rushed into the house.
Rob followed, and Jessica followed him.
A woman who must have been Aly’s mother lay on the floor. Her eyes were open, and it didn’t appear that she was breathing.
Aly was already on her knees, shaking her mother’s body. Tears poured from her eyes, and her voice was frantic. “Mom, Mom, Mom! Come on!” Now she turned to Jim, and screamed, “Do something!”
Jim was there by Aly’s side, on his knees, his fingers against the woman’s neck. He shook his head.
But he wasn’t giving up.
He motioned for Aly to move out of the way, and he put his hands flat against the woman’s heart and began pumping.
Rob and Jessica exchanged a look.
“Mom! Can’t you do something, Jim? Mouth to mouth. Out of the way.”
Aly tried to push Jim aside to get to her mother’s head. Instead, her feet got tangled together and she lost her balance and collapsed to the floor.
Jim grabbed her and pulled her up again.
“Mouth to mouth isn’t going to do any good,” he said. “I’m sorry, Aly. She’s dead.”
“What? You just saw her.”
Jessica was still standing by the front door, observing, along with Rob.
Aly’s mother body was in the room to the left, and to the right, in another room, there was the blood-stained body of a young man. Must have been the one Jim had shot earlier.
“Come on,” muttered Rob, almost under his breath. “Let’s get to work.”
Jessica didn’t move immediately, and Rob elbowed her slightly and indicated with his head that they should head to the kitchen.
Jessica followed him, registering her surprise. He’d seemed like a big lump of nothing, just some kind of useless dud. But it turned out he had some practical impulses of his own.
Neither one of them said anything about Aly’s mother. There was obviously nothing they could do.
Except prepare. Gather supplies.
“You work on the food,” said Rob, gesturing to the cabinets. “I’ll head to the basement.”
“All right,” said Jessica. “You’ll check for tools, right?”
He nodded.
Jessica threw open the cabinets underneath the sink, expecting to find bleach. But there was nothing there except for some large black trash bags.
“If there’s any bleach down there, grab it.”
“Bleach?”
“For purifying water.”
Rob gave her a stiff nod and disappeared down the basement stairs.
Jessica assumed that Rob would have enough sense to grab anything else he thought was useful.
She didn’t know exactly what they’d need, but she figured she’d do a check of the basement after he was done.
She figured that anything in a bottle, anything from a store whatsoever, might be useful.
Who knew how long it’d be until they could get their hands on more products. If ever.
Without any lights, it was fairly dark in the kitchen. The sky outside was still grey, and not much light came in through the windows.
But it was enough. Enough to see by, and her eyes slowly adjusted to the interior.
From the other room, Aly’s sobs could clearly be heard.
Jim was talking to his wife in a low voice, presumably comforting her. But Jessica couldn’t make out what he was saying.
Jessica concentrated hard at the task at hand.
She took the trash bags from under the sink, shook them out, and began stuffing everything on the shelves into them that she could.
There were boxes of crackers, cookies, and a lot of snack foods in general. She filled one whole bag with those, tied it up, and let it drop to the ground.
Next, she started emptying the freezer and the fridge.
There wasn’t much of anything in the fridge except for a gallon of milk.
The freezer wasn’t what she’d been hoping for. Ideally, it would have been packed full of meat. Lots of protein, plenty of fat, and generally calorie dense.
Instead, the freezer was packed full of frozen dinners from the grocery store. Jessica knew the type. They were marketed towards women who wanted to lose weight, even though they had no real reason to lose any weight whatsoever.
It was a good business practice, in a sense. Sell people less calories for more money. They could charge more because it was a specialty product.
The frozen dinners wouldn’t do them much good. Jessica grabbed one of the boxes almost savagely and flipped it around to check the nutrition label. Five hundred calories in one box. That wasn’t a lot.
But it would be something.
She threw three boxes into the bag, tied it up. She grabbed both bags now, and started making her way back out to the car.
Her body still hurt from the accident. It rebelled against the heavy load of the trash bags.
Her knee didn’t seem to be working quite right, and her shoulder was making a clicking sound.
But she ignored it all.
She ignored the strange hole in her memory, the odd feeling that there was part of her brain she just couldn’t access.
She remembered enough, she figured, to be able to survive. What difference did it make if she couldn’t remember the accident, or exactly what she’d been doing or thinking in that moment?
It simply wasn’t as important as the task at hand.
This wasn’t the time to worry about minor inconveniences like that. There were two people dead in the house, and two more had died not long ago on the road.
This was life or death now.
Jim appeared by the door just as she was opening it up. He nodded approvingly at the trash bags.
“Get everything,” he said. “I’ll help you in a minute.”
“What happened to her?”
“Not sure. Heart attack or stroke most likely. Probably the stress of the situation.”
“I’m sorry, Jim.”
“It was my fault,” said Jim. “I did everything the wrong way. I should have never left her here by herself. I should have taken her with us…”
Jessica stared at his face, which was normally so impassive, so calm. It didn’t show much now either, but she saw something underneath the surface. It looked almost as if he might break.
He needed some words that cut right to the point.
And telling him that he’d done the best he could wasn’t going to be enough.
“She would have died anyway,” said Jessica. “If it was the stress that killed her, she would have died when those guys in the truck attacked us.”
Jim said nothing, just stared at her.
But something in his face was changing.
Aly was still sobbing in the other room, only just slightly out of view.
“I’m taking these out to the car. Rob’s in the basement. Head upstairs and grab what you can.”
“OK,” said Jim, apparently surprised to receive orders from her.
Jessica didn’t bother looking to see if he was heading upstairs or not. She knew what she’d said had worked, and that Jim was practical enough to not fall apart.
They’d do what they had to do. Aly could grieve later, once they were in safety. For now, she obviously wasn’t going to be of any help, and there wasn’t any point in trying to get her to do something physical like gathering supplies.