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Bloom and I always waited until the brightest part of the day to do our foraging. The dead shied from direct sunlight, and that gave us our only advantage. While they were uncoordinated and easy to kill, there were at least twenty Rotters for each living person, and the dead liked to roam in packs.
“Find anything?” Bloom asked as she searched the storeroom of a little Italian restaurant we had discovered miles away from the Savings and Loan. We’d never needed to go so far for supplies before.
“I found some crackers.” Crumbs sputtered from my lips as I exited the kitchen.
“What else?” Bloom peered into the dining room and glanced out the restaurant’s front windows. In one hand, she clutched her Colt Walker, a .44 caliber revolving pistol. In the other, she carried a .22 Bloomington rifle. Both guns had once belonged to our father, who had spent most of his life working as an engineer with the Bloomington Arms Company. If you haven’t caught on by now, Bloom’s name was no coincidence. Neither was my affinity for firearms.
I remembered how Father’s slim, calloused hands had guided my smaller, paler ones as, together, we broke apart one of his many, many rifles. We oiled and swabbed the chamber and pin and polished the barrel until it shined blue. “Always wipe off the excess polish, Sera,” he’d said. “Don’t gum up the works.”
He would watch me buff the walnut stock to a warm, rich gleam. I reloaded the cartridges and raised the stock to my shoulder as if to fire, finger resting beside the trigger. Peering down the sight, I admired my handiwork. Then we broke the rifle apart and did it again.
“Unless we’re practicing, never fire it unless you mean to kill someone,” Father had said. “And, darling, I hope you never have to...”
Bloom wasn’t the only one packing heat. I carried the sister to her Colt, and my trusty stiletto rested in the pocket of my leather apron. I kept the knife as backup only. Despite my mistakes the day before, my number-one goal was to never get close enough to one of the rotting Bone Bags to have the need to use it.
We might’ve had a hard time finding food, but guns and ammunition were plentiful enough. People had hoarded them when their neighbors started falling to the Dead Disease. Not many of those people had managed to survive since then, but their guns and bullets sure had.
“Got some more tea,” I said as I crammed another stack of crackers between my teeth.
Bloom scowled. “Quit stuffing your face, and let’s go. You know I don’t like standing around in one place too long.”
I shoved five boxes of saltines into my canvas duffel and buttoned it closed before joining my sister in the dining room. “Let’s go on a little bit farther.” She kept her attention on the plate windows framing the empty street outside. “I’d kill for a tin of sardines.”
We searched for a few more hours and found several more boxes of tea in a basement apartment. Then, with delirious relief, we stumbled upon a tin of dried fruit almost entirely free of mold. I inhaled the sweet perfume of shriveled apricots and currants and longed for the summer, when we would keep a container garden on the Savings and Loan’s roof. We grew tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, and whatever else we could convince to take root in buckets and empty wine casks.
Occasionally, Bloom and I braved the lengthy walk to the river to fish. We resorted to roasting squirrel and pigeon when we were hungry enough, but I longed for a nice beef rib roast. Bloom was wrong. We wouldn’t starve to death if we stayed in the city, but the question came down to what we were willing to do, or eat, in order to survive.
The sun was sliding fast from the sky, slinking toward the horizon. If we stayed out much longer, we risked walking home in the dim light of dusk. We’d seen no signs of Flesh Eaters so far, and that made it a good day. But I didn’t want to foul our good luck with unnecessary risk-taking.
“What I wouldn’t do for a hot cherry pie.” Bloom licked her lips as she stuffed a dried apricot between gum and cheek. She held it there like a plug of tobacco.
“I’d like a meatloaf,” I said, holding out my hand. She plied it with an apricot, and I followed her lead, packing the fruit against my gum to slowly dissolve.
“Meatloaf?” Bloom pursed her lips. “Why not a rib eye? Or a lamb chop?”
“With mint jelly?”
“And little green peas.”
“And whipped potatoes?” My mouth watered, and the apricot turned to mush. Most days, I missed real food more than I missed people.
“And gravy,” she said. “Don’t forget the gravy.”
“What about dessert?”
We played this game frequently, and it never grew old. You might say we were torturing ourselves. You might be right.
“Lemon meringue pie,” Bloom said. “With a glass of cold milk.”
I suspected the memories of what used to be were harder for my sister because she’d had five more years to collect them than I had. She remembered our mother better than I did as well, but she never talked about her, and I never pressed.
“Well, we’ve got crackers and tea,” Bloom said. “We’ll have to use our imagination.”
“At least we won’t go to bed hungry.”
“My stomach might not growl, but I wouldn’t call that being satisfied.”
“Maybe tomorrow we should try shooting pigeons again.” I adjusted the straps of my rucksack and steadied my grip on my guns as we stepped onto the sidewalk, heading for home.
Bloom scrunched her nose. “They’re just rats with wings.”
“When you’re hungry enough, even rat tastes like prime rib.”
Once we reached our building, Bloom laced her fingers together and waited for me to give her my foot. She hoisted me into the air, and I caught the bottom rung of the fire escape. I hung there until my weight pulled the ladder down. She and I had practiced this routine so many times, we could’ve performed an acrobatics show. So far, the undead hadn’t managed to figure out this trick. Cooperation was not a concept that lingered in their putrefying brains.
“To the roof?” I asked.
Nodding, Bloom motioned for me to lead the way. I climbed the ladder, and Bloom followed, our boots softly clanging on the wrought iron stairs.
We kept cisterns on the roof to collect rainwater, and over the past few weeks of spring, we’d managed to save up a lot. Bloom had also built us a cookstove that ran off firewood. The city provided plenty of wood as long as we didn’t mind busting up some disappeared family’s bedroom suite. And trust me—we didn’t mind.
“Get some water boiling, would you?” Bloom said as she packed fuel into our stove.
My sister had made our cookstove out of industrial parts we’d hauled to the roof one piece at a time. I had never understood quite how she made it or what the bits and pieces used to do before they became a stove, but I was thankful to have it. I filled a dipper with water from one of the rain barrels and poured it into a pan covered with cheesecloth to filter out small bits of trash.
When the water finally boiled, Bloom poured us both a cup, dunked in our newfound teabags, and sat down beside me to wait while it steeped. I wished we had sugar, but we had run out a few days before. The search for sugar was what had kept me out later than usual when that ravenous horde had trapped me. Thinking of my mysterious rescuer again, I opened my mouth to mention him to Bloom, but a desperate shout from the street below cut me off.
“Oy, Bliters, let us in. Quick!”
That shout was answered by a distant cacophony of undead shrieks and roars. After a relatively uneventful day of scrounging and foraging, it seemed our evening was about to get a lot more interesting.