Apocalypsis 01 - Kahayatle

to read the ingredients.
    I shook my head silently - as if ingredients even matter anymore.
    “Don’t shake your head at me,” he said.
    “Why not?   You’re being goofy.”
    “How do you know it wasn’t some weird bio-engineered food that killed all the adults off?”
    “Because we ate the same things as them and we’re all still here, maybe?” I said in a way that suggested he was the dummy, not me.
    “Maybe it’s an ingredient that kids are resistant to but adults aren’t.”
    “Whatever.   It’s only a few cans and we’re not likely to find many more of them.   Even Costco and Walmart have been cleaned out at this point.”
    “How do you know?”
    I shrugged.   “I don’t.   It’s just an educated guess.   If I lived closer to one, it’s where I would have gone first.”
    “What else did you get?”
    I pulled out a bag of rice and a box of spaghetti.   “This is it.”
    Peter smiled.   “A spaghetti dinner.”
    “I’m so sick of pasta I could puke,” I grumbled.
    “Well, that’s too bad.   It’s good carbs for when we’re riding bikes, and it’s easy to make.   If we could ever figure out how to make flour, we’d be able to make pasta ourselves.   Or something that looked kind of like it.”
    “I prefer tortillas.”
    “Whatever.   We’ll worry about that when we get settled.   Now it’s my turn to go out.”   Peter stood up straighter and tucked his gun down the front of his baggy pants.   The huge handle hanging over the edge was the only thing keeping it from falling down his pant leg; but it was so heavy, it was pulling his pants down partway.
    “You need a holster.   Start with the house just on the west side of this one, plus the four next ones.   The guy two doors down was a cop.   Maybe he has a holster in his bedroom somewhere.”
    “Okay.   Who else lived in those houses?   Maybe I can focus on finding certain things.”
    “I don’t know.   An old man lived next to him.   I never talked to him.   He was a little strange.   The others?   I have no clue.   I wasn’t the most social of neighbors.   Neither was my dad.”
    Peter said nothing until he got to the front door.   “I bet you wish you were more social back then, when you had neighbors to be social with.”   And then he walked out.
    I thought about what he said, moving towards my kitchen window to watch him walk over to the next door neighbor’s house.   He wasn’t trying at all not to be seen.   That gun was giving him a false sense of security.   I was going to have to remedy that when he got back.
    As I waited for him to return, I tried to decide if I was feeling regret over not being more social in the past.   Would my outcome be any different now if I’d been friendlier to the neighbors?   If I’d gone down and talked to the crazy old guy who was always out in his yard, talking to his fluffy, white toy poodle, Buster, all the time?   No.   They would have been just more people to say goodbye to.  
    Socializing brought on friendships, and friends were too easily lost to death’s whims now.   It wasn’t worth it.   I had to conserve what little sanity I had by making the conscious decision not to drown in misery over the loss of people I’d never get back.
    I puttered around the house, nervously checking the windows every five minutes, until I heard a noise at the front door.   I ran over and put my ear to the wood, listening for signs that it was Peter.
    “Bryn?” he whispered.
    “Yeah,” I said, getting ready to open the door.   But then I hesitated.   “Are you alone?”   I don’t know what I was expecting to hear him say, but it wasn’t this.
    “Not exactly.”
    My hand hesitated on the lock, not sure now if I should open it.   If there was a canner with him, would he tell me?   Or would they somehow force him to get me to open the door without him being able to warn me.   Or would he even want to warn me?   Maybe he was a canner himself, and all of this poor-me routine was just a ruse to get me to lower my guard.
    I laughed at my paranoia.   As if my one remaining bag of noodles and my starving hundred-pound-body were anything to get excited about.   There were much easier meals to find around here.   Everyone from this neighborhood knew I wouldn’t go down without a fight.   But then again … Peter wasn’t from this area.
    “Is it safe to open up?”
    Peter huffed out a breath of frustrated air.   “Of course it is, you