End of the Line (Book 2): Stuck in the Middle by Lara Frater Page B

myself. Ironically the best relationship I had was with Mindy. I enjoyed her strength and her willingness to survive. Her death hit me harder than Jake and Harlan. I wished she was here now. Instead her body was nothing but ash on top of the Costking.
                  “When we’re better, do you want me to go? I can ask Jim to switch things around. I’ll even bunk with Grace.”
                  “Nah, you shouldn’t torture yourself,” he said and laughed. “You stay here until we’re off the boat.” He took my hand. “It’s better to keep warm unless you want me to go.”
                  “No,” That made me feel even worse. I didn’t pull my hand away.             
     
    It took a week before everyone fully recovered. In the interim nothing got done. It snowed and no one cleared the deck. No one took watch except for Grace who took her normal hours and Dena kept a look out during the day. At least we saved food by not eating.
                  No one knew the source of the food poisoning.
                  I sat with the others in the Salon along with Tanya, Mike, Dave, Jim and Hannah as we discussed what happened. The rest either didn’t want to come or weren’t up to it.
                  Mike and Dave both liked to fish and had fried up a bunch for dinner the night before along with rice and beans. The left over fish had be left outside to keep cold. I thought it was the fish, the most likely culprit and the preferred one. It meant that we could keep all our food, but Grace had it and not any of the rice and beans and Henry had the rice and beans but no fish.
                  “It could have been one can,” Jim said. “Or something got left out too long. The rice, maybe.”
                  “You wanna risk it?”
                  “Risk or not,” Mike said. “If we have to toss the rice and beans from the same manufacturer, we’re talking about a pretty major amount of supplies. We may not have enough canned food to last for the winter. We may settle with nothing but emergency food. We don’t know how long it will be before we get farming right. We need a good amount of supplies saved up. Maybe we should make another supply run.”
                  I thought about all the food that we had left at Costking.
    “I wouldn’t recommend it,” Hannah said. “The boat is only slightly warmer than outside. Anyone who gets too chilled may have issues warming up. Look what happened with Henry.” She was right. Henry still hadn’t fully recovered from the food poisoning and his cold water sponge bath. It was unseasonably cold. The temperatures always remained around freezing. Walking to the bridge, you got hit by the icy biting winds of the sea. Ice had formed everywhere on the boat. Mike used the extra kerosene and used the engine to run the heaters, despite that this ship wasn’t meant to be in a Long Island winter. I knew because I read the manifest. It wintered in Bermuda.
                  “If we toss the rice and cans, how long we got food?” Tanya asked.
                  “If we stretch and open up some of emergency rations maybe to March. But I don’t want to open the emergency rations. When it gets warmer we need to go on raids gather food. I don’t know what the weather will be like. It could be cold until April. I don’t think it was the cans. I think it was the rice.”
                  “Do we wanna risk going now or hope we gotta enough to last us till spring.”
                  “We still don’t know if all the cans or rice were contaminated. It could have been the cans and not the rice,” this came from Jim.
                  “Judging by the illness, it was probably in more than one can,” Hannah said, “Or in one bag of rice. We can’t risk it. We were lucky this time. Maybe not as much next