Them or Us

thinking. “Where the fuck did you get all that?”
    Fisher dropped to his knees and began examining the treasure they’d found outside. He grabbed can after can, holding each of them in turn up to the weak light from the single battery-powered lantern, struggling to read the labels. Around him, stomachs growled with hunger and mouths began to water at the prospect of food. Corned beef, canned vegetables, soup … how long had it been?
    “Where did you find it?” Sally asked again.
    “Where he said,” Winston answered, pointing at the man in the corner who’d recently arrived. Thank God he’d found them. He said he’d been following the road for days since his last hiding place had been discovered by the enemy, and he’d tried to take shelter in their hideout, not realizing it was already occupied.
    “And how did you find it?” Sally asked him, unable to make out his face in the shadows.
    “I already told you,” he answered. “I saw it just before I found you all. Couldn’t carry it all myself.”
    “Does it really matter?” Winston sighed.
    “Yes, it does.”
    “Remember that corner store by where the bus station used to be?” Fisher volunteered.
    “On Marlbrook Road?” Sally asked.
    “That’s the one.”
    “But we’ve been there before,” she said. “Christ, we’ve been there hundreds of times before.”
    “So?”
    “Well, did we just walk past this stuff all those other times? Did you find a hidden storeroom we hadn’t found before? Open a door you hadn’t seen? Someone put this stuff there for us to find, you dumb bastards. It was one of them. It’s a trap, you fucking idiots, and you walked right into it.”
    “What the hell does it matter?” Winston spat angrily, struggling with the ring pull on a can of fruit chunks, his fingers numb with cold. “No one followed us back. We only saw one of them in all the time we were out there, and that was just a kid from a distance. If this was a trap, then it didn’t work. This place is dead. Even they don’t come here anymore.”
    “ He found us,” she said, pointing at the man in the corner again.
    “That was just luck,” Winston argued. “He’s like us, Sally. He found this place the same way we did.”
    Sally shook her head in despair and walked far enough away into the shadows that no one could see her. She leaned against the wall and massaged her temples. Maybe Winston was right. She’d overreacted, and not for the first time, either. Every day the pressure of being cooped up in here was getting harder and harder to handle. A year ago, all she’d had to worry about was getting the kids to and from school and getting to work on time. Hiding in a disused highway storage depot with strangers, eating cold food from a can, shitting in a bucket in full view of the others, fearing for her safety every second of every minute of every hour of every day … if she’d known what her life was going to become, she’d probably have ended it when the troubles first began.
    *   *   *
    They tried to make the food last, but they were starving and much of it was gone within an hour, empty stomachs finally satisfied after weeks of being drip-fed scraps. It didn’t matter. Eating was a distraction that helped reduce the tension in the shelter for a precious few minutes. Sally looked around at the few faces she could see in the low light. Eight-year-old Charlotte stared back at her from the corner where she always sat, surrounded by a barricade of traffic cones she’d built around herself, her face as pale as ever. The two other children sat close by, Chloe fast asleep, eleven-year-old Jake dutifully sitting beside her, drawing shapes in the dirt with a stick. On the opposite side of the room, Jean Walker and Kerry Hayes spoke together in hushed whispers about nothing of any importance. Sally had thought Kerry beautiful when she’d first met her, but her young body had been ravaged by hunger since they’d had to lock themselves away in here. Her full figure had wasted away to nothing. She looked anorexic now: all protruding bones, stretched skin, and strawlike hair. In the opposite corner, Brian Greene did his best to disguise the fact that he was crying again …
    A packet of stale cookies (what luxury, Sally thought to herself dejectedly) was being passed around. She took one, but stopped before she ate it, distracted suddenly by a low rumbling in the distance.
    “Did anyone hear that?”
    “Hear what?” Kerry asked,