“I never knew your aunt. Sorry.” I looked over in time to see him shrug.
“I didn’t know her very well either. She was really an uncle who became an aunt. My parents didn’t really get along with her.”
“An uncle who became an aunt? How so?”
“Transvestite.”
My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. “A transvestite was living behind me this whole time and I didn’t even know it?”
Peter shook his head at me again, this time more in disgust. “She was a person, Bryn. Not a transvestite. You say it like she was a creature.”
I instantly felt like an ignorant ass. “Oh, yeah. Of course she was. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“My parents weren’t the most tolerant people in the world.”
There was a world of meaning wrapped up in that simple sentence, and I wondered if I dared to ask for clarification. He was stirring the beans around in his can, but not eating them. It was as if he were waiting for me to say something. So I did.
“Was your uncle gay?”
He shrugged, mumbling, “I don’t know. Maybe. Is that a problem?”
“No. Not for me. Was it for you?” My ears burned for some reason. I wasn’t sure if I was embarrassed for having asked or just uncomfortable putting him in this position of having to explain himself to me.
He cleared his throat. “No. I’m gay myself, so I don’t have a problem with it at all.”
I went back to stirring the noodles. “Well, that’s good. I didn’t want to have to be forced into fending off your advances on my person. A guy could get hurt that way.”
Peter laughed. “Nothing to worry about there.”
“Hey!” I said, in mock outrage, throwing a dishtowel at him.
He caught it with a surprisingly quick move, pulling it out of the air and tossing it carelessly to the counter.
“Nice reflexes,” I said, nodding in appreciation. Maybe he wouldn’t be hopeless to train after all.
“I used to play a lot of ping pong.”
I started laughing so hard, I snorted .
***
After Peter had eaten his fill of noodles and beans, and I had joined him, indulging in another jar of sauce to boot, we sat down in the living room and took stock of our stuff.
He held up each book from his suitcase in turn. “First, I have a gardening book. My aunt said this one is specifically for Florida.”
“Awesome,” I said, holding out my hand to take it from him. “This goes in the keeper pile.”
“Then, she left me this one. It’s an encyclopedia of natural remedies that you can make using herbs and plants and stuff from the things growing in South Florida.”
“No way!” I said, taking it from him to read the back. “Wow, this is amazing.” My dad and I had talked about me being injured, but not much about me being sick. I guess he’d figured with all the people dying off, there’d probably not be a lot of everyday diseases going around. “I wonder if this has a cure for whatever killed all the adults in it,” I said jokingly.
“It doesn’t. I already looked.”
“Not sure how you could expect to find something when you don’t even know what it is,” I said sarcastically.
“I have my theories,” he said, looking arrogant.
I could totally tell in that moment that he was one of those kids who won the science fair every year with some radical experiment he’d done, looking for cancer cures or whatever. In my old life I would have scoffed at the stupidity of wasting so much time. In my new life, I decided, this guy could be valuable to have around. At least when I got sick. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to give him a hard time about it.
“Oh, you’re going to cure the disease that killed ten billion people, when the smartest minds in the world working together weren’t enough?”
“No. I don’t think I’ll need to. The disease died with them.”
“You don’t think we’re all going to die when we reach twenty?” That seemed to be the cut-off age for most of the living.
“No. There are no more hosts. We’re all resistant, for whatever reason.”
“Our hormones.”
“So they said. But no one ever proved it. And people taking hormones at teen levels weren’t able to survive.”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me. Either I live or I die. I’ll do what I can to keep the death part from coming, but when it’s my time to go, I’ll just go.”
“Easy to say when you’re healthy.”
“Yeah. I know.” It was a sobering thought. My dad was the coolest guy I’d ever known, and even he had freaked out in the end when faced with his own mortality. I decided to push those thoughts out of my head and get back to our planning.
“What else do you have?”
“Book on first-aid,” he said, handing me a smaller one.
“I have one of those already.” I quickly flipped through a few pages. “It’s better than this one.”
Peter shrugged. “Just toss it then, I don’t care.”
I threw it into the abandon pile - the stuff we would leave in my house for the raiders to take if they wanted it.
“This is a good one: solar power. It shows how to make an oven and heat water and stuff.”
I snatched it from his hand. “This one is definitely coming.”
I’d been taking infrequent, cold sponge baths without soap for way too long now. The idea that I might actually be able to take a real, and possibly warm shower, sounded like heaven to me - soap or not. A quick flip through the book showed me that we could probably put a list together of things to find along our journey that would make a lot of the items in the book buildable.
“Our load is going to be heavy,” he said, looking at the keeper-pile. It was much bigger than the abandon-pile.
“We’ll find a way. I want to get a place that’s permanent. I don’t want to move around all the time. I think we’ll be safer if we just take the risk of traveling once.”
“So what … are we going to build some kind of fortress or something? Because that’s the only way to stay safe that I can think of. And it can’t be made of anything that’ll burn because the canners like to start fires.”
“Well, I’m not really sure. Let’s get this stuff sorted out and then we’ll talk about it. Maybe with our two half-brains, we can come up with one good idea.”
Peter smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”
***
We sat in the living room on the couch that was pushed up against the wall, looking at the neat, orderly piles of things in front of us. The organization was Peter’s doing. He seemed to function better when everything was just so, and I didn’t care either way.
My dad would have liked Peter. I could still remember how he’d admonish me when we did our survivor training. “Efficiency!” he’d shout, like an overly enthusiastic drill sergeant. “That’s going to save your life, Bryn!” I reached up absently to stick my finger through the ring on my necklace, letting it hang there for a second. I’d doubted him before, but I wasn’t now. We were going to have to be completely anal about using every square inch of space on our backs to haul all this crap to our final destination.
“Okay, so here’s what we’re taking; now, where are we going?” Peter asked.
“Well, as far as I can see, we have a few choices. We can go to the mountains, the plains, the desert, or the swamps.”
“Swamps? No way,” said Peter.
“Why not?”
He rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe I have to say this … snakes? Ever heard of them? Gators? I want to run away from meat-eaters, not towards them.”
I jumped up, remembering a book I’d forgotten. “Be right back.” I returned in less than a minute and handed Peter the small handbook that had been in my dad’s home office.
“Oh, great,” he said, in a not-very-happy-sounding voice. “A snake book.”
“Yes, and it tells you not only how to identify snakes, but how to treat snake bites, too.”
“I’m pretty sure the treatment these days is to bend over and kiss your own ass goodbye.”
I laughed. “Don’t be so negative. You’re a science nerd. Maybe you can figure out how to make anti-venom.”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
I looked at him suspiciously. “I think, in a sick way, I just got you to consider living in a swamp.”
Peter smiled. “I’m not going to deny it. The idea of being able to do something like that is intriguing.”
I shook my head. “You’re nuts. You do realize that to make anti-venom, you have to milk a friggin poisonous snake, right?”
“Yeah, but that’s the job for the assistant.”
“Pfft. Don’t tell me, let me guess … I’m the assistant.”
“Well you’re definitely not the scientist.”
I shoved him with my arm, causing him to tip over sideways. Then I continued, “Anyway, as I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted, we have some choices. But regardless of where we go, I think our mode of transportation should be mountain bikes.”
“Why? I mean, why not motor-scooters or something? They’re faster.”
“Too noisy. Yes, we could go faster and farther. But if there are actual … canners or whatever out there, we need to move more quietly. And we need to travel when no one’s out.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, between like four in the morning and seven.”
“That’s not a lot of traveling time each day.”
“Better safe than sorry. And maybe there will be places where we can alter those times a bit, like when we’re in the middle of nowhere.”
Peter nodded his head. “Okay. I agree to this. So we’re going to travel by bike, with backpacks, hauling all this stuff.” He looked at me. “Where are we going to go?”
My brain was moving a thousand miles an hour, calculating variables and taking everything I could think of into consideration. My dad had told me to go where no one would find me. He said to make myself safe and find a few friends who’d be there to help me re-build and to watch my back.
“I think we should go to the mountains,” I said. I could still remember the trip I’d taken with my dad several years before, up to North Carolina. It was on my list of favorite places ever.
“But it snows there.”
“That means there’s water.”
“It also means frostbite and difficulty finding food.”
“Okay, Mr. Voice of Reason, where do you think we should go?”
Peter sighed. “I don’t even want to say it.”
I quickly flashed my fist and forearms out in a move that was part of my basic warm-ups, finishing with a slow drawing out of my arms to the side. “Say it, or suffer my wrath.”
Peter looked at me, completely unimpressed. “What in the hell was that supposed to be? What are you … a Ninja Turtle?”
I shook my head at him with exaggerated disappointment. “I don’t know which is sadder - that you know about Ninja Turtles or that you don’t recognize a lethal weapon when you see it.”
Peter snorted. He sounded like a total girl. “Lethal weapon? Oh, no, whatever am I going to do?” He put his hand to his forehead like he was going to faint, rolled his eyes up into his head, and then fell back into the couch cushions.
I nudged him. “Tell me what you were going to say.”
He didn’t respond.
“Seriously. before I have to show you my stuff.”
He didn’t open his eyes, but he did speak.
“I think we need to go to the Everglades.”