the brothers had no food or shelter and he offered to share what was left back at his place. After it got dark inside the house, George said they could sleep on the couches. Jimmy and Chase were just never asked to leave after that. Jimmy had never worked up the nerve to ask where George’s family had gone to, or why they hadn’t taken him along with them. George was 19 years-old but, with his full beard and large frame, looked much older. Jimmy was 17 and Chase was about to turn 15.
After the food ran out at George’s house, he told the brothers that the odd group of cast-offs would have to start breaking into empty homes and businesses to look for more. At first, they would bring anything they found back to George’s house. They ate an eclectic, mixed-bag of meals during those months; Soup mix with mice one day, a box of moistened, stale bread crumbs and charred crickets the next. The task of finding meals stretched across from day to day. It was a very rare occurrence if they had more than two or three days’ worth of food at any one time. Even if a cat’s den or rat’s nest was found, the meat would only go so far, and last for so long.
Soon enough though, the combination of depleted local resources and the stench of unwashed dishes, decomposing garbage, and rotting sewage made the decision to leave the house an easy one to make. They just packed up their meager belongings and stayed inside the various places that they broke into. Most buildings didn’t have much in the way of packaged food inside them, some having been picked through several times over, and if no critters were found they could always dig worms as a last resort.
They soon found themselves searching ever more places and in ever stranger spots within those places just to scrape something together that would give them at least one partial meal. Piles of old luggage almost always produced moldy snacks within the houses and desks yielded more of the same inside businesses and office buildings. Every house that they checked in this new neighborhood, east of their old stomping grounds closer to town had already been broken into and stripped clean, but there was just enough wildlife to keep them going.
George had an old Dan Wesson Arms revolver that was chambered to hold six .22 long rifle rounds. He kept the entirety of its 4 inch barrel stuck down his disgusting pants in a cross-draw configuration. It looked more than worn and had almost no bluing left. The cracked and taped wooden grips looked monumentally filthy, speaking as to how long it had been since it had been properly cleaned. Still, it was in working order and .22 shells were prized for their reliability; rim fire ammunition gave more than one chance at going off, the priming powder was sealed inside the case and could usually be coaxed into firing.
The group was getting desperate and George was now saying that the only way to get enough food to last for a while was to hit an occupied home. This statement had an indescribable effect over the trio and it followed them around like a bad stench ever since its utterance.
Jimmy quietly exited the small room that he and his brother had slept in, creeping past a snoring George outside, who was crashed out on a raggedy looking green couch in the main space of the once beautifully finished basement. The high tide mark of the basements annual flooding could now be measured on the bar attached to the far wall. Needing to get out of the horrible basement, Jimmy winced every time that the stairs squeaked out in protest. George hated to be woken up.
He found a small nautical-themed bathroom at the top of the stairwell. With the help of a cheap lighter to spark a sealed tin of fuel, he evacuated his bowels into the empty toilet. The flickering orange light gave illusionary movement to the speckled fish, forever swimming upstream on the peeling wallpaper border.
The three had not had enough time to search around upstairs the night before. This was because they had arrived at dusk; having skipped over several streets because of a “bad feeling” George said that he was having. He would get severely pissed at the brothers if they started waving candles around where people outside might see them, giving away their sleeping