Thomas never actually goes to breakfast or lunch or dinner, despite promising Sonya- is her name Sonya, or was she Brenda?- that he would make an appearance. He has managed to avoid social interaction entirely for a solid three months- maybe longer, considering he forgot to track the moon cycle when he was bawling his eyes out. He is not willing surrendering his solitude; the Gladers- or whatever the people are calling themselves now- are going to have to drag him out of hut and force him to interact, which he might not do even at that point. He rather loves the solitude.
There are no people running by spitting out derogatory slurs and harsh orders. There are no whines and moans coming from the Cranks that Thomas failed to save, nor is there anyone there to remind him of his failures. No Cranks means no futile attempts at making a cure that not even W.I.C.K.E.D's most renounced scientist could make. There is nothing in his home, in his safest place, that Thomas can't control. Everything in his hut is controlled, set perfectly so that it never bothers Thomas. Thomas thinks he is safe he has ever been, which really says something about his life- not that Thomas really thinks anything about that particular fact. He is far from people who want to hurt him- well, sort of. Thomas is far from the people looking to brutally murder him and the people who wished to violate him. If any of the Gladers shared that impulse, they thankfully never acted upon it. Thomas is safe, even if he is surrounded by twenty goats.
The goats are what keeps Thomas sane, so he doesn't mind their company. Even the additional five kids amuse him more than anything. He even took the liberty of naming the kids: Ivan, Thetis, Freya, Salazar, and Sputnik. Freya and Sputnik were the only girls out of all the kids, and Thomas hates thinking about what will happen when they're older- when the boys grow older and begin to want to mate. Thomas is lucky, he supposes, that Rosie and Benjamin are Sputnik's parents, while Bean and Cocoa are Freya's parents. Thetis and Salazar are the twin brothers of Alejandro and Alexis, and Ivan is the only child of Beau and Bea. That means, thankfully, there shouldn't be any incest. And if there is... well, Thomas will have to keep the kids apart. But Thomas thinks they're good kids, so he is sure that he has nothing to worry about.
Thomas is worried, however, that he spends most of his time worrying over a bunch of tiny goats and their future love lives. People are dying- maybe not nearby, but they are still dying. People are starving to death, and Thomas... is worrying about a bunch of goats. Damn it. So much for safe thoughts. Screw his mind for betraying him like that. Maybe that is why Thomas focuses on the kids. The kids keep his mind from going to dark places.
Well, Thomas also reads some of the books in his suitcase, but he has read them so many times that they are boring. He can only read about Romeo and Juliet, quantum physics, human anatomy, and life before the Flare so many times before he'd rather stare at the wall. W.I.C.K.E.D only allowed him a certain amount of books in his room at a time- something about theft and his lack of attention. He only kept ten books in his room; the rest of the books were either in the library or Janson's personal collections. Even the ten books that Thomas was allotted were monitored carefully, as if W.I.C.K.E.D was afraid Thomas would ready anti-science propaganda or "classified" journals filled with details about things W.I.C.K.E.D wanted Thomas to know nothing about. And now, due to W.I.C.K.E.D's restrictions, Thomas has only seven books on him: F. & Fitz's 'Human Anatomy and Physiology (Edition V)', Borneo & Spinter's 'History Before the Flare (Edition III)'. Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet', Homer's 'The Iliad', some weird book on survival instincts, Lang's 'Quantum Physics for Beginners', and a book on Norse mythology. Thomas needs a different one, but there isn't a library left in the world. The thought leaves him sadder than it should; there had been one, and now there was not.
There is nothing now. All of W.I.C.K.E.D's work, the experiments and the data, is gone. Everything that Thomas knew is gone, never to ever be found again. All of the people Thomas knew, the ones he saw every day and worked with, are dead, burned alive in a building. The W.I.C.K.E.D headquarters in the Last City are nothing more than a mass grave, although Thomas reasons that the entirety of the Last City is a mass graveyard filled with people that won't be remembered by more than a handful of individuals. All those corpses will remain unnamed and buried under building chunk, unless the Cranks turn to human flesh for dinner. All of Thomas's life, the things that gave it purpose and meaning, is slowly being forgotten. Everything Thomas knows, all of it being related to science or literature, isn't important to a group that cares solely about immediate survival and starting anew.
