Lost in the Apocalypse by L.C. Mortimer Page B

blankets of her bed.
    She hadn’t felt this clean in a month.
    She probably wouldn’t feel this clean again for a long time.             
     
    **
     
    The house was easy enough to tidy up. It was empty, save for rotting fridge in the food, so it didn’t take much time to clear out and make it livable. Robert found a bunch of plastic trash bags and passed them out. The group got all of the crap out of the house, then burned the trash in the back yard. Unhealthy, to be sure, and it carried the risk of attracting attention, but they put the fire out quickly. It was better to burn the garbage than to simply bury it and hope wild animals didn’t come digging around.
    Where there were animals, there were Infected. The Z’s weren’t picky about their meals.
    After the first day, they realized they would have to venture out for supplies. The car had a bit under a quarter tank of gas, so they couldn’t go far, but they should be able to get the basic items they would need to survive for awhile.
    “Make a list of stuff you want,” Neil told Kari and Emily.
    “What? Because we’re the women?” Kari asked, placing a hand on her hip. She looked like a scolding mother of five: not a 27-year-old airmen.
    “Fuckin’ right you’re women,” Robert said, strolling into the room. He bit into an apple. He was obviously feeling smug after discovering an apple tree on the property. It only had a dozen good apples, but he intended to enjoy the hell out of them. “You think men can survive on their own? Come on.”
    Kari laughed and grabbed a pen. Situation diffused, she began writing down what they would need. Emily threw out suggestions on occasion. Really, Emily thought they should just go around and take as much as they could from the surrounding houses. Who knew when they would need first aid items or blankets or clothes? Wouldn’t it be best to just accumulate as much as possible?
    But Neil didn’t seem to think they’d be able to go out frequently. He was worried about running into other groups of survivors. Emily didn’t see that being a particularly big problem in this area of the country, but she went along with it. He was “the leader,” after all.
    She started writing things down.             
    She needed bleach, towels, more plastic bags, food. Any kind of food, but especially canned stuff so they could start storing up for winter. Like a group of squirrels, she thought with amusement, but kept her thoughts to herself.
    “Water bottles,” Kari said, ticking items off an invisible list with her fingers. “Nail clippers, tweezers, blankets, rope.”
    “Knives,” Neil commented. “Write that down.”
    “Anything we can use as a weapon.” Robert added.
    “Oh!” Emily said. “A bucket!”
    Everyone turned to her.
    “We’re in the country,” she said. “This place probably has well water. We should look around and see if we can find one.”
    “As in, fresh-water-we-don’t-have-to-haul-bottles-forever?”
    Em grinned. “Some of the places are connected to the city’s water tower, yeah, but most still have wells. We’ll need a bucket if we’re going to haul the water out and we’ll probably have to filter it somehow, but yeah.”
    Neil high-fived her and sent Butter and Robert out to see if they could find a well. There was no telling whether it would still be useful or not, but it gave Emily a small trickle of hope that maybe living here wouldn’t be so bad.
    She finished her list of “wants” and went off to wander the house some more. The two-story farmhouse was big and spacious: much bigger than her little cabin had been. While there wasn’t a typewriter to be seen, she found a notebook and a pen in a little roll top desk in the living room. Emily carried the supplies upstairs to the room she had claimed as hers and settled in on the bed.
    There were four bedrooms upstairs: two on each side, with a bathroom in the middle at the end of the hall. Kari and Cody claimed