I shook my head. “Whatever.” I had to get back to going through his stuff, to figure out if we were going to take any of it. I found a jar of pickles wedged in between some books.
“I wasn’t an only child, you know. I had a sister.”
The words sent chills up my spine. It wasn’t so much the words themselves, but the way he said them. I looked up at him slowly, shifting back now to balance on the balls of my feet, but still squatting down near the suitcase. I was so friggin’ confused at that point, I was considering running - and usually in a fight or flight situation, I was all about the fight. But I was coming to the quick realization that Peter was a seriously disturbed individual. And he was standing in my living room.
“They killed my sister, Bryn. I couldn’t stop them!” He crumpled into a heap on the floor, crying his eyes out. “She was small and couldn’t run fast!” he sobbed. “They took her down like an animal! She screamed and screamed and then she didn’t make any sounds at all.”
I froze in place, no longer thinking about running, as I began to fully understand what he was all about. The kid wasn’t a psycho - he’d been traumatized. And if I was hearing him right, he’d actually seen his sister murdered by a group of kids.
“Why would they kill her?” I asked. It didn’t make any sense. Nobody was killing anybody - unless maybe they refused to give up their food. I hadn’t seen that happen, but I could imagine people being hungry enough to get so angry that they might use too much force to take what they wanted. But to kill someone? And besides, it wasn’t worth it, losing your life over a jar of spaghetti sauce. “Why didn’t she just give them what they wanted?”
“She did!” he screeched.
“Well, why’d they kill her then? Just to be mean?”
He looked at me like I was the biggest idiot left on Earth. “What are you not understanding? Are you a complete dimwit?! They killed her because they wanted her. They took her. She gave them exactly what they wanted. Meat.”
“What the …?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding his head in quick up and down jerking motions. “Believe me now? They killed her and they ate her, Bryn. They ate my little sister!”
He was telling the truth. No one could lie this convincingly. As realization set in, I felt the bile rising in my throat. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop this freight train, so I ran to the back door in time to barf out in the weeds, narrowly missing the slate step just by the entrance.
What he was saying couldn’t be possible. Rational, normal, sane people did not eat other people. That was just ridiculous. The only problem was, my stomach obviously believed Peter’s story. And I knew that this meant a part of my brain did too.
I had already been thinking it was time to leave my neighborhood … and that the resources in my town and all the others probably were getting to very low levels. This story convinced me that the time had definitely come to find a less-populated place to live.
No one had bothered to grow gardens so they could support themselves, especially in the last six months of the time period when all the adults died. Everyone was too busy freaking out. All of the teens in our country had been raised to eat processed foods, put in pretty packages and delivered to our pantries and shelves, courtesy of grocery stores and our parents. They had no clue how to support themselves using the land. At least, none of the kids in this area did. Maybe out in the farmlands it was different. But here? No way. They were desperate and going crazier with the hunger every day.
My dad had shown me the basics of growing tomatoes and beans and stuff, but refused to put a garden in at our house. He’d said hundreds of times before he left that I would need to move away to be safe, and he didn’t want me stuck here out of a false sense of comfort. I was starting to suspect in this moment, as I wiped my mouth off with the back of my hand, that my dad had foreseen this problem of savagery taking over the minds of the formerly sane, but had never wanted to speak the actual words to me. Lots of little things he’d said and did took on new meaning for me, telling me he had come to the same conclusion that was now a permanent part of Peter’s life: people, when hungry and desperate enough, and without the means or smarts to come up with a better way, would go for the easy kill to survive. Even if it meant eating their own kind.
I vomited again at the idea of a gang chasing down and taking out a child for their dinner meal.
The door opened and Peter came out, a tissue in his hand. “Here,” he said, handing it to me dispassionately.
I took it and stared at it for a second. I hadn’t seen a tissue in months. I’d been wiping my butt with leaves and weeds, after doing my business in a hole in the ground in the yard. A week after my dad left, I no longer had running water. It wasn’t worth it to waste precious rain or pool water on flushes, so I’d made myself an old-fashioned outhouse out of tarps.
“Thanks,” I said, using it to wipe my mouth. “Sorry about that. Lost it a little, I guess.”
“Good. Now I know you’re not a canner and still human.”
“I was kind of worried about you, actually,” I admitted. “You seemed a little … off your rocker for a while there. But now I understand.”
“Yeah. I guess I have gone a little nuts.”
“I would have, too. Probably worse than you.” I reached out and punched him lightly on the arm. I meant it as a gesture of friendship, but I felt my fist make contact with bone. He had no body fat on him anywhere.
“Ow!” he said, massaging his arm.
“Dude, why are you so skinny?”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “Maybe because I’m slowly starving to death?”
“What have you been eating?”
“Spaghetti sauce!” he yelled, his face going red with anger and his arms held stiffly at his side.
“Okay, chill, Chef-Boy-R-Dee. Come on inside. I’ll make you some beans and noodles. We need to get some meat on your bones before we head out of here.” I tried not to think about the image of meat on a person’s bones, but the vision kept assailing my mind. It was awful. I decided then and there that becoming a vegetarian might be a very good idea. I didn’t ever want to get so hungry that I’d consider eating my new friend, never mind the fact that he’d make a pretty pitiful meal.
“When are we leaving?”
“I don’t know. A few days? We have to make our plan.”
Peter followed me inside and then stood at the edge of the kitchen while I added water to the pan from the plastic bottle that stood on the counter. The noodles went in next.
“Where’s the water from?”
“It’s rainwater. I catch it in a food-safe container outside. A bucket, actually.”
“Is it okay to drink?”
“The stuff in this container hasn’t been treated, but since I’m heating it to boiling, it doesn’t matter. That’ll kill any bacteria.”
“Yeah. I know that.”
I looked at him sideways, not sure why he felt the need to clarify what he knew. Then I continued. “I have another bottle in the cabinet that has water I’ve treated. I usually just boil it, but I also have bleach.”
“Smart.”
“My dad’s idea. I have enough to last me for years. I hope by the time it runs out, the rain and stream water will be pure enough to drink without it.”
“You’re thinking without all the factories and other places polluting the atmosphere, there’s a chance that the Earth will regenerate itself?”
“That’s my hope anyway.”
“Mine too. So what about the gas? How do you still have gas working at your house?”
I pulled open the cabinet doors under the stovetop and showed him the propane tanks that sat underneath. “Voilà.”
“Wow. Cool. Smart. So where are we going to go? The mountains? I hear there’s good fishing there. And streams for water, too.”
“I’m not sure. We’ll vote.”
Peter smiled vaguely. “We’re two people. It’ll always be a tie or unanimous.”
“Until you get above a hundred pounds, you only get half a vote.”
Peter looked at me with the most pitiful expression on his face I couldn’t stand it.
“I’m just kidding, geez, lighten up.” I didn’t realize how callous I sounded until he looked down at the ground, overcome by sadness again.
“Shit, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to act like I don’t care, okay? It’s just … I’m not used to such heavy duty emotions.”
“You’ve never lost anyone you cared about? What about your parents?”
“My mom left when I was just a baby. And, yeah, my dad died. But I was prepared for it. And he did it at the hospital. I didn’t have to go through … anything like you did.” I couldn’t even say the words - I didn’t have to see my dad get eaten. My stomach churned again, but I needed to know more, so I forced the feelings down and continued.
“Tell me about your sister. About Sanford.”
“Later. Let me eat and digest before we go there again. It’s too upsetting for me right now.”
I nodded my head, stirring the pasta that would cook another ten minutes before it was ready. I reached over and pulled a can of beans from the cabinet. “Do you need your beans hot? Or can I give them to you out of the can?”
“Well, I prefer them hot, but I’ve learned not to be picky anymore.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. I can heat them up real quick in the microwave.”
I opened up the can and then pushed the button to open up the microwave above my head. I put the can inside, closed the door, and turned the dial to the right, setting it on three minutes.
I turned to look at Peter causally, but he just stood there watching me, saying nothing, his face expressionless.
I waited a few seconds, looking around the kitchen, tapping my foot and humming a little, before turning the dial back to the left, causing the appliance to let out a loud ding! I pulled the can out and handed it to Peter with a spoon.
“There you go. Hot beans, served up nice and cold.”
“Thanks,” he said, giving me a half-smile before he dug in hungrily, shoving beans into his mouth. He talked around the food and not very prettily. “I thought for a second there you either didn’t realize microwaves ran on electricity or that you had some kind of solar power thing going on.”
“Slow down, dude. The beans aren’t going anywhere.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled, a bean stuck to the corner of his mouth. “I’m starving.”
“I can see that,” I said, mostly to myself, as I stirred the pasta some more. I acted like I was checking out the water, but I was really just thinking hard to myself, trying to figure everything out.
Peter was a bit of a mystery. He wasn’t from here, but had somehow made it about fifteen miles on his bike without having all his stuff stolen or being attacked by crazy people. And where had he gotten the books and sauce? Why hadn’t the sauce, at least, already been taken? I hadn’t looked at the titles of any of the books yet, but none of them were light reading; they were more like encyclopedias. But in spite of all the things he’d been through, and the fact that apparently there are monsters living in Sanford, he’d made it to my neighbor’s house. Why that particular house?
“Why did you pick the house behind mine?” I asked, not looking at him so he’d feel more comfortable answering my questions. I was planning on giving him the third degree, but I wanted to try and be sly about it.
“My aunt lived there. She had these books I needed that she hid in her house and the sauce. She told me where to find them the last time I talked to her.”
Well, that explains why this place and the sauce - must have been hidden well.