A little after dawn the next day, just as we were making breakfast, we heard a single gunshot reverberate around the hills to the south. Birds took flight in the distance under the hazy yellow light of the early morning sun. A few tense seconds went by as we listened for the two follow up shots that would indicate a distress call. They didn’t come. We both let out a sigh of relief.

 

“I hope he got something.” Gabe said.

 

“If he did, I hope he gets to it before the dead show up.” I replied. A shot that loud was bound to attract the infected.

 

We spent the rest of the morning taking stock of what we needed to raid from Marion. Medical supplies were at the top of the list, as well as clothes, new boots, and toilet paper. I never realized until the collapse of civilization how much I took the little things for in life for granted, like toilet paper. The stuff is like gold if you can find it. I think there is a certain amount of irony in the fact that at the end of the world, one of the most valuable and treasured commodities a person can hope to come across is a roll of ass-wipe. Maybe that says something about the human race in general.

 

By ten in the morning we were finished taking inventory, and our stocks of food were down to just a couple of week’s worth. After that, we would have to delve into one of the four plastic buckets of freeze-dried provisions that Gabe had stockpiled a few months before the Outbreak. The desiccated food lasts damn near forever if kept in its original packaging, and one bucket would be enough feed us both for fifty-five days. We would not have to go hungry anytime soon, but the freeze-dried stuff constituted our emergency rations. We wanted to save it for the trip to Colorado. As for water, our rain cisterns were full, which gave us a little over four-hundred gallons of fresh drinking water. That would keep us stocked for a good long while if we were careful with it.

 

Most of the rest of the day saw us doing mundane work around the cabin. We rotated out the repetitive day-to-day tasks so that we didn’t get too tired of having to do one thing or another. It was my week to clean the cabin and do laundry. Gabe had wood chopping, water hauling, and dishwashing duty. Bringing water up from the stream at the base of the mountain was the most important of these tasks. We only used the water from our cisterns for drinking and cooking. Any other use and we got it from the stream.

 

There was nothing difficult about cleaning the cabin. Running a broom across the floor and giving the smooth concrete a once-over with a mop was usually enough to keep it livable.