Eli was barely staying afloat before the apocalypse. Working long shifts, taking care of his younger brother, and just trying to figure out what to do with his life.
When he finds his mom trying to take a chunk out of her youngest son though, Eli...
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"You can't be naïve enough to think that this will actually work." My words were hollow and harsh as I spoke them.
"The snows piling up. We have no other option we need the food. When we were scouting, we found a Walmart down the road." Wolfe own voice was tired as he spoke. We were all exhausted. Ember sat situated in my lap as Sarina sat beside Javier.
Shaking my head, I scoffed. "Do you know the first place Eli went when the world went up in flames. Walmart. He said it was packed with people. It's why we stayed so far away."
"We're going to starve in here if we don't. It's our only option." Javier's words were hard as well. No one liked the differences in being a small group compared to the large group that we were in.
Nothing was the same, we were all missing our respective loved ones. Javier didn't know what to do without Eli by his side. We were all lacking in some way, and if we wanted to survive, we were going to have to find a way to make up for the leadership we were missing.
How we were going to do it, I'm still not too sure about that.
"So, we go, and then what?" I was drowning in the clothes that would have once fit me. Something that Eli was adamant on fixing. We couldn't live healthy lives with how we were living. We needed stable lives but with the limited carbohydrates we are putting in our bodies, it was nearly impossible to achieve any variation of normal.
We needed to gain weight.
Funnily enough before shit went down, I was trying to lose weight. I was always self-conscious about the little pouch on my stomach that seemed like it would never go away no matter how many crunches I did.
I finally got my wish.
It's interesting how fast your body decimates when you are eating a fraction of the portion sizes you were before the apocalypse happened.
It puts into perspective how spoiled we were.
It also put into perspective how I would never let myself get comfortable again. I would never fall into the old routine I once did. There was no getting comfortable in this life, there was only being prepared for the inevitable.
We had to constantly be on our toes.
Breathing in deeply, I had to focus on what Eli would do. The way he would glance over at me, hiding the scared part of his face from the group yet revealing his most vulnerable part of him to me. He would talk to me about the decision, and I would see what he really wanted to do through his eyes.
I had to be a leader in this moment because Eli wasn't our only leader in the group. We worked together, its been like that for nearly three years, that isn't going to change just because were separated for the winter.
