The soft glow of Tiffany’s lantern casts yellow hues over the cobblestones, and soon weakly illuminates the face of a thatched house.
The iron gate hangs off its hinges. I slip up to the path after Tiffany, following her light up to the thick, blackwood door. She tries the handle. It clicks unlocked, then she pushes the door all the way open. Just as I expected, blackness greets us. The inside is as dark as the outside.
We’re careful to tread softly as we slip inside the house. For all either of us know, there could be survivors hiding out in one of the rooms spearing off from the main corridor facing us. Neither of us fancy being cornered or robbed of our supplies.
I stick close to Tiffany as she spears off left, into the room closest to us. The door hangs open. Inside, the lantern gives off a faint glow to what looks like a living room, with an old boxy television collecting dust by the windows. The curtains are drawn, hiding our faint light from the street outside.
Tiffany wanders over to the open door by the fireplace. She peers through the gap, lifting her lantern to illuminate the darkness, leaving me blind.
“A kitchen,” she says softly, her whispered words bound by the fear hammering at both of our insides. “These are apartments,” she adds and peels back from the door. She gestures for me to join her.
I shadow her into the kitchen.
She sets the lantern down on the round table in the middle of the room. The light is weak, but it’s enough to work with, and we both set to sifting through the cabinets.
I find a tin box that rattles when I push it aside. Interest piqued, I slide the box out of the cabinet and gently settle it on the counter. It’s a medical kit. Filled with bandages—that might come in handy with my morbid habit—and some pill bottles.
I swing off my bag and rest it on the counter, then lift up the pill bottles. Bringing them closer to the lantern light, I try to read the labels.
“You’re from Switzerland, right?” I ask her. That’s where we picked her up.
She looks over her shoulder at me, then slowly draws away from the boxed pasta she found. Pasta is useless. We need boiling water to cook it, and that means starting a fire. A fire is a good way to shout your location to anyone around, by smell or light, and end up dead. We have a strong no-fire rule.
“Yes,” she says and comes up to my side.
“So you speak French,” I assume and angle the pill bottles her way.
Her mouth sets into a thin line, her narrow lips nearly swallowed whole, and she shakes her head. Greasy, dark hair swings with the gesture. “No, my language is German,” she says. “I speak some Italian too.”
And English, apparently. It’s the only language I speak.
Tiffany goes back to her boxed pastas and continues looking through the cabinets, but I keep my attention focused on the pill bottles. They might be something we could use, something that might fight off infection or numb pain or even—for me—dull the eternal ache that comes with the end of the world. But no matter how hard and long I stare at the labels, no amount of high school French lessons comes back to me, and I’m left as stupefied as when I first tried to understand Greta—a definite gypsy woman in my opinion—attempt to trade with me in her thick German accent, and she spoke barely a lick of English. She’s better now, though.
I bag the pill bottles just in case, and make a mental note to ask around the group later for someone who speaks French. I stuff some of the bandages in my bag too, but mostly leave the medical kit untouched.
I rummage through the kitchen for a while.
Tiffany and I work in silence, making our way around, then back to each other. Under the sink, I shove aside the cleaning product and feel around for torches. It’s always in a cabinet around the sink that I find those little weak torches and their batteries. This time, I come up short.
I let out a sigh and my shoulders slump.
Without light, I’m chained to Tiffany for the rest of the raid. And this is the kind of thing I like to do alone. I’m a slow worker, but it’s more than that. I like to redress my wounds in peace, snoop through diaries, sneak a few extra books (more than what I should be carrying with me), and change clothes.
I need light. So I don’t give up.
After the kitchen is clear, I leave Tiffany to raid the bathroom, and feel my way around for a bedroom.
Bedside tables often have matches at least, for candles and whatnot.
I don’t find any matches in this bedroom. I find a torch, and my heart skips a beat of joy. I slide down the switch and on-flicks a wispy white light. My smile feels unnatural, since it’s not the kind of world that deserves a lot of grins.
I don’t find any more batteries, none that will fit my bigger torch, so I move on to the wardrobe. It’s an aged, orange-wood structure that gives me a hint about the people who used to live here. Old and stiff.
Still, my cardigan sleeve is starting to dry crisp with my blood, and I’ve been wearing these sweatpants for too long. I
