Chosen by Christine Pope (free children's ebooks pdf txt) 📕

But somehow, strangely, that cooperation did continue. We fell into a sort of pattern after a few days — rising early, eating breakfast, which was toast or oatmeal most of the time, taking turns with our showers, getting dressed, then doing whatever needed to be done around the place. Jace was full of plans, abetted by some of the books and manuals he found in the office.

“We really should build a henhouse,” he said one morning, about a week after he showed up. “I know people in the area had to have kept chickens. Eggs are a good, steady source of protein.”

“So are rabbits,” I replied, not bothering to point out that we’d been eating rabbit at least every other day. Wile E. Coyote would have been jealous.

“Now they are,” he said. “In the dead of winter, it might be more difficult. But those plans I found for a henhouse look dead easy. We just need to get some supplies.”

“What, you’re a carpenter and a web designer?” I asked, teasing. Sort of. What I knew about building henhouses was roughly the same as what I knew about brain surgery — that is, nothing. I didn’t think I was going to be much help.

He shrugged. “I picked up a few things here and there. It’ll be fine.”

And so, later that morning, we headed down into Santa Fe in search of a Home Depot, which wasn’t as easy as it might seem, considering we couldn’t exactly Google its location. But we found a yellow pages inside an abandoned dentist’s office, and tracked down the store from there. It was a good ways outside the city center, so I was doubly glad that we’d looked it up instead of driving aimlessly all over the place.

Jace had a list of everything he needed, and we “liberated” one of the trailers you used to be able to rent to haul your building supplies home. Thank God my father had invested in a tow package for the Cherokee, even though we’d never actually had any reason to use it. There just never seemed to be quite enough in the family budget to buy a trailer or an ATV.

It took a while to locate and then load all the necessary supplies — partly because we both kept finding things we thought would be useful and figured we might as well add them to the haul. But after the back of the SUV was packed to the rafters, and the trailer similarly loaded down, we drove off, moving slowly through the streets, since I had to keep zigging and zagging to avoid abandoned cars and trucks. We’d left Dutchie at home, much to her dismay, since we’d known we would need all the available cargo space in the Cherokee.

“It’s kind of strange, don’t you think?” I asked Jace after we’d cut back up on Cerrillo and were heading to Alameda.

“What’s strange?” he replied, his attention still on the list he held. Maybe he was worried that we’d forgotten something.

“That we haven’t seen anybody. I mean, even with a 99.8% mortality rate, there should still be a couple hundred people wandering around Santa Fe, right? Where are they?”

He did look up at that question, his gaze drifting to the empty sidewalks and dark windows of the businesses on either side of the street. “Lying low?”

“Maybe,” I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. By that point, it had been almost a month since the Heat first began to spread across the country. Anyone who was going to die was long dead. You’d think the survivors would be out foraging in earnest, getting ready for winter. “It’s just weird that we haven’t seen a single person.”

“Do you want to find more people?” His tone was almost sharp as he asked that question, as if he thought I wasn’t satisfied with his company, that I needed something more.

“I don’t know,” I replied. It was only the truth. Part of me wanted to know what had happened to everyone, but after my experiences in Albuquerque, I wasn’t sure being around other people was such a good thing. Yes, Jace had turned out to be all right — more than all right, really — but could I count on being that lucky a second time?

“They could be hiding,” he said, his tone thoughtful. “Or gone to Albuquerque, thinking that maybe if any center of government still existed, it would be there, in a place where there would be more survivors. There are probably a lot of reasons why we’re not seeing anybody.”

That explanation sounded logical enough. If it hadn’t been for the voice urging me to get out, would I have left my hometown, or would I have stayed there in the hope that people might gather in what had been the state’s most populous area?

I wouldn’t second-guess myself, not now. I really didn’t know. Then again, my run-ins with Chris Bowman and the man outside Walgreens might have been enough to convince me that it was time to get out of Dodge.

“You’re right, of course,” I said, and he smiled.

“It’s okay, Jess. We’re okay. That’s all we have to worry about right now.”

Oh, how I wanted to believe him. I just wasn’t sure if I did.