At the House
“Well, here he is. You can ask him yourself.” Sam told Gabriel as Stephen came into the house.
“Ask me what?”
“I was just looking at all the food you had her by, and what kind of food. Don’t they have food stores up north?” Gabriel asked.
“Yeah, they have food stores, but if we show up with plenty, then it’s not a rush to get it. Besides, some of this stuff is a lot cheaper and easier to find around here.” Stephen said as he looked at the stuff piled on the dining room table.
“They had most of the stuff on your priority list, and even some of the ‘extra’ list, not that I understand some of the choices.” Sam said, her tone shifting as she watched Stephen. “OK, Stephen. What’s going on? You are barely paying attention to what we are asking.”
“I’m trying to figure out if we want to repack it here before we leave, or instead worry about the repack once we get north and just pile it higher on the truck and throw the tarp over it so we get out of here sooner.” Stephen looked over at his siblings. “This place is coming apart, fast. The block with Hadley’s in it? The whole block burned down, a couple more two. And it seemed like nobody cared. No firetrucks, no cops, no anything. Well, that’s not true. There were a bunch of empty shell casings, like the gangs just cut loose on each other, or people were just taking what they wanted. We need to get out of here.”
Sam was the first to react. “We were talking about leaving tomorrow night or Monday morning if we got everything packed. Gabe and I have most of our stuff we were taking with us in the garage already. We just need the rest of the house stuff, like pots, pans, this pile of food and supplies you had us buy,” she waved her hands at the stacks and stacks on the table and the plastic totes on the floor under it. “If we push hard tonight, we can get a lot loaded into the truck, then back the truck into the garage, get some sleep and leave maybe mid-morning tomorrow?”
Stephen looked from Sam to Gabe and back.
“I wish we could get out of here even faster, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense, to push too hard and screw up because we are exhausted.”
“You know what Mom and Dad always said. ‘if you go so fast you make a mistake and have to redo something…”
“…it wasn’t that fast.” The other two chimed in.
“OK, Let’s get as much of the food stuff into the bins. If it’s something like the granola bars where they are in packages inside a box, we ditch the box and cram them into smaller spaces, but we don’t do more than that for now. We will worry about it when we get north. We take the full bins out to the garage, have some dinner, then finish packing as much as we can by midnight. We all get some sleep, then first thing in the morning, we pack all the bins, bags and boxes into the truck. When it’s full, we roll out.”
“I’ve been listening to the radio. Fifteen north is all shut down because of the bridges and 18 through Arrowhead is restricted. How are we going to get north?” Sam asked Stephen.
“Hell.” Stephen thought for a moment, trying to see the map in his head. “With Arrowhead out of the picture, that means everyone is going to use three-thirty through Running Springs then head west to one-thirty-eight that way. That leaves us either going all the way out to Palm Springs before we turn north, or we go up the thirty-eight through Big Bear.”
“Thirty-eight to Big Bear is a long, twisty route with nothing on it.” Gabriel said right away.
“Yeah, at least going the other way…” Sam started to say but Stephen cut her off.
“Yeah, the other way has a whole lot of nothing too, but it’s flatter and will be easier on us and the truck. We will try to tank up before we turn north at Palm Springs. There’s a whole lot of nothing till we get to Barstow.”
“Well, this food isn’t going to pack itself. I still have some sewing and packing to do tonight.” Gabriel said.
“OK, we have a plan.” Stephen said as they started working.