Apocalypsis 01 - Kahayatle

I decided not to give him a hard time about it.   He’d stopped crying and I didn’t want to start him up again.
    “Did you bring all this stuff with you?”
    “No, just the shoes.   I got the spaghetti sauce and books here.”
    “Wow, you got lucky.”
    “Yes and no,” he said, giving me a measuring look.
    I sighed.   “Okay, I’ll bite.   I can see you want to tell me something.   Spit it out.”
    “It was awful!” he said loudly; then he quickly looked side to side, obviously worried he’d been heard by the wrong sort.
    “What was awful?”
    “The canners!” he whisper-yelled.   “Kids were roaming the streets, attacking other kids and eating them!”
    I laughed at the outrageousness.   I couldn’t help it.   “Jesus, Peter.   Did you eat some mushrooms you found growing on cow pies out in Sanford or what?”
    “There are no cows left out there.   They’ve all been eaten too.”
    I shook my head.   “Whatever.”   I had to get back to going through his stuff, to figure out if we were going to take any of it.   I found a jar of pickles wedged in between some books.  
    “I wasn’t an only child, you know.   I had a sister.”
    The words sent chills up my spine.   It wasn’t so much the words themselves, but the way he said them.   I looked up at him slowly, shifting back now to balance on the balls of my feet, but still squatting down near the suitcase.   I was so friggin’ confused at that point, I was considering running - and usually in a fight or flight situation, I was all about the fight.   But I was coming to the quick realization that Peter was a seriously disturbed individual.   And he was standing in my living room.
    “They killed my sister , Bryn.   I couldn’t stop them!”   He crumpled into a heap on the floor, crying his eyes out.   “She was small and couldn’t run fast!” he sobbed.   “They took her down like an animal!   She screamed and screamed and then she didn’t make any sounds at all.”
    I froze in place, no longer thinking about running, as I began to fully understand what he was all about.   The kid wasn’t a psycho - he’d been traumatized.   And if I was hearing him right, he’d actually seen his sister murdered by a group of kids.  
    “Why would they kill her?” I asked.   It didn’t make any sense.   Nobody was killing anybody - unless maybe they refused to give up their food.   I hadn’t seen that happen, but I could imagine people being hungry enough to get so angry that they might use too much force to take what they wanted.   But to kill someone?   And besides, it wasn’t worth it, losing your life over a jar of spaghetti sauce.   “Why didn’t she just give them what they wanted?”
    “She did!” he screeched.
    “Well, why’d they kill her then?   Just to be mean?”
    He looked at me like I was the biggest idiot left on Earth.   “What are you not understanding?   Are you a complete dimwit?!   They killed her because they wanted her .   They took her .   She gave them exactly what they wanted.   Meat.”
    “What the …?”
    “Yeah,” he said, nodding his head in quick up and down jerking motions. “Believe me now?   They killed her and they ate her, Bryn.   They ate my little sister!”
    He was telling the truth.   No one could lie this convincingly.   As realization set in, I felt the bile rising in my throat.   I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop this freight train, so I ran to the back door in time to barf out in the weeds, narrowly missing the slate step just by the entrance.
    What he was saying couldn’t be possible.   Rational, normal, sane people did not eat other people.   That was just ridiculous.   The only problem was, my stomach obviously believed Peter’s story.   And I knew that this meant a part of my brain did too.
    I had already been thinking it was time to leave my neighborhood … and that the resources in my town and all the others probably were getting to very low levels.   This story convinced me that the time had definitely come to find a less-populated place to live.
    No one had bothered to grow gardens so they could support themselves, especially in the last six months of the time period when all the adults died.   Everyone was too busy freaking out.   All of the teens in our country had been raised to eat processed foods, put in pretty packages and delivered to our pantries and shelves, courtesy of grocery stores and our parents.   They had