Alexis flipped her book open and dove in. The story was a welcome distraction, even if it wasn't the most original. It had magic and adventures in faraway places, and it was all very far removed from her own unpalatable reality. She always found it easy to get lost in a good book and was pleased to find that even today refused to be an exception.
After a while, though, she realized that, aside from the occasional odd noise, the house was eerily quiet. She still wasn't used to the distinct lack of background noise normally provided by modern technology. It was starting to make Alexis nervous and maybe even a little jumpy.
She gave the closed door a worried look as a sudden desire to go out and make sure Corey and Sara were still there came over her. She shook her head and scolded herself for being so needy. She'd already tried playing nice with them once today, and it hadn't exactly worked out well. She'd made Sara cry (or at least close to it) and made Corey mad (nothing new there).
Alexis perked up at a sudden noise. Was that the wind again? It was a fairly windy day, and the wind had disturbed her reading many times already. It didn't sound like the previous times, though…and there it was again. Then she realized what it was – the back door opening and closing. It must be Aunt Rachel.
Abandoning her self-enforced exile, she shoved the bookmark in her book and dropped it on the bed, going downstairs as quickly as she could without running. She needed to see right now that her aunt was okay. As soon as she opened the bedroom door, she noticed the smells, but when she rounded the corner into the kitchen downstairs, it hit her like a wall, reminding her of big family dinners. Glancing around the room, Alexis saw a few covered dishes on various counters and wondered where all the food had come from – then she breathed a sigh of relief as she caught sight of her aunt rifling through a backpack sitting on one of the chairs. She looked all right, at least.
"Hey," she called out, not really sure what to say now. She suddenly felt silly for worrying so much earlier.
Her aunt looked up and smiled at her, but she seemed distracted. "Alex, hi. How are you?" And wasn't that a loaded question.
"I'm fine," she said, not wanting to open any more cans of worms today. "Where did all this food come from?" she asked, looking at the half dozen dishes littering the counters. "And how did it get cooked? Is the power back on?"
"No, I asked Corey to cook some of the things in the freezer." Alexis looked sharply at Corey to ask him about that, but her aunt continued before she could say anything and started taking things out of her backpack. "After today we can't eat anything left in there. It's been warming up for too long now and won't be safe. We'll have to clean it out later. Don't want spoiled food in the house."
Alexis looked at the items her aunt was putting on the table. Packs of AAAs, AAs, and 9V batteries. Three large Maglite flashlights. Four smaller flashlights. Boxes and bottles of various medications. A box of gauze. Several boxes of different sized bandages. A pack of X Acto knives.
"Aunt Rachel, what's all this for?" Alexis asked, bewildered. "And where did you get it? Where did you go?"
"I went to the store," she replied casually. "We don't know how long all of this is going to last, so I figured we should stay on top of things, keep things around that we might need."
"There are stores open right now?" Alexis asked incredulously.
"No," her aunt said, pausing for a second as she finished unloading the backpack. "I left an IOU."
"Wait, you broke in and stole this stuff?" Alexis said, horrified.
"I have every intention of paying for all these things, with interest if needed, after all this is over – but until then we may need some of these things to get by," her aunt replied firmly. "Now, I've known the store owner for years – he's a good friend of mine – and I know he'd be okay with me borrowing these things as long as I pay for them later. And before you ask, he wasn't there or I would have asked him myself. Here," she said, handing Alexis one of the packs of batteries. "I need you to open this and load them into the flashlights. I have to put these other things away." Scooping up everything but the flashlights and the batteries, Rachel left the room and headed upstairs.
Alexis stared after her, a look of disbelief on her face. The aunt she had looked up to for her entire life had just stolen things from a closed store. She could dress it up however she wanted, but it was still theft to Alexis.
She looked at Corey, who was uncovering one of the dishes – some kind of kabob. "Did you know she was going to steal all that stuff?" It came out a little harsher than she'd meant it, but she couldn't bring herself to redact the question.
Corey shrugged without looking at her. "I didn't ask. Doesn't matter anyway as long as she pays it back later."
"How could you not ask?" Alexis said, exasperated. "Don't you care at all? She just stole that stuff!"
Corey finally turned to her, the look of anger on his face surprising her. "Alex, I just spent the last few hours cooking the only stuff I could salvage from the freezer – the only stuff I was fairly certain wouldn't kill us or make us really sick if we ate it – while you just moped in your room, doing god knows what, while Aunt Rachel possibly risked her life going out and getting stuff for us to make all of this a little bit easier. From where I'm standing, I'm not the one who doesn't care."
He turned back to the counter, crumpling up the tin foil that had been covering the kabob and chucking it blindly at the trash can in the corner. Alexis half expected it to go in, it was that close, but at the last second it bounced off the edge and onto the floor. He glanced over at it, made a little disgusted noise, and turned back to the food.
Alexis watched him for a moment, unsure if that meant the conversation was over. She looked around the room, not sure what to do, her eyes finally coming to rest on the ball of tin foil. Walking over to it, she picked it up and dropped it easily into the trash can. "Two points," she said lightly, looking at Corey to gauge his reaction.
He rolled his eyes, but his expression was softer than before. "Only way you were gonna make it is if I helped you out by getting it so close. You know I own you on the court if we play fair."
Alexis knew that, but she wasn't going to admit it. "Yeah, right," she snorted. Then, doing a 180 and continuing before she could change her mind, she said, "You know I would have helped you out with all of this, right? I mean, I'm not exactly Rachael Ray, but you're not exactly Gordon Ramsay either. It's not like you couldn't have used the help." She made a face as he uncovered something that she thought was supposed to be grilled cheese.
He saw the look on her face. "Hey, you don't have to eat it. More for the rest of us," he shrugged.
Now it was her turn to roll her eyes. "I should be able to survive one meal from you. It might send me in the ER, but I'll survive," she teased back. She paused, realizing that she actually was hungry. "So…when are we eating?"
"As soon as we're all settled down," Aunt Rachel said, entering the kitchen with empty arms. "Alex, can you set the table, and Corey, can you move these dishes to the table? I'm going to go get Sara."
Without a word Alexis moved to the cupboard with the plates and started getting them out, and when they sat down in the dining room a few minutes later, Alexis did her best to play nice and not bring up the larceny her aunt had committed earlier that day.
It was easy to avoid the subject at first – in fact it was easy to avoid pretty much everything that had happened over the past few days. All Sara wanted to do was show them the things she'd been drawing and coloring, and while Alexis didn't really care about a six-year-old's drawings, she did appreciate the excuse not to discuss her aunt's criminal activities.
Alexis bit into her grilled cheese and made a face at the taste of slightly burnt bread as Sara shoved yet another piece of paper at their aunt. "It's the cyberman from the mall," she said, her voice abruptly losing the enthusiasm it had held when she explained her other drawings.
Alexis looked at her cousin as she explained the picture. "All the people are running, but they're not running fast enough. It's going to kill them." Suddenly Sara was crying and Alexis couldn't do anything but watch as their aunt got up and knelt down beside Sara's chair, pulling Sara into a tight hug and murmuring words of comfort.
"Can one of you get the tissues," their aunt said after a few seconds, and Corey, who was closer to the living room, got them and set them on the table beside Sara. Aunt Rachel took a few and helped Sara clean herself up – not that it did much good, Alexis thought, as the tears seemed to just keep coming.
"Hey," Corey called to Alexis in a low voice, clearly not wanting to disturb their aunt and cousin. He nodded to the dishes on the table. "Let's start cleaning this up, they might be a while."
Alexis reluctantly and started taking dishes out to the kitchen, starting with her own plate and silverware. She knew she wasn't being helpful, just sitting there at the table, but she wanted to be there for Sara somehow. She might be annoying sometimes, but she certainly didn't deserve any of this. She didn't deserve to be crying in the next room. She didn't deserve to have seen people murdered.
She shuddered, remembering the terror she had felt when the cyberman had chased them through the mall. Of course, it hadn't been after them specifically, or Alexis was certain it would have killed them. It had just been coming after the crowd, but that was close enough.
By the time they were done clearing the table, Aunt Rachel had gotten Sara calmed down enough to take her upstairs, where Alexis assumed Sara would be going to sleep. It was still early, but the youngster had looked downright exhausted, cradled in Aunt Rachel's arms as they went upstairs. It wasn't surprising, considering how hard she had been crying. Alexis thought she might still be crying, too, but it was hard to tell.
Sitting down at the now-clear dining room table, Alexis rested her head in her hands, wondered what was next. She wondered when all of this was going to end, when they'd see their family again, when they'd be allowed to properly go outside again, when they'd be able to go home.
Corey sat down across from her, looking a little lost as well. When he caught sight of her looking at him, his face took on a lighter expression and he gave her a little smile. If she hadn't seen his face just a few seconds before, she would have thought the smile was genuine. She suddenly wondered how many times in all of this he had smiled when he wasn't really okay.
She looked up as her aunt came back down the stairs, sans niece, and sat down in one of the chairs with a heavy sigh. She looked at the two of them, holding each of their gazes for a moment before looking down at the table. Alexis wondered what she was thinking. Finally she looked up at them again.
"We need to talk."
A/N: This ended up being one of the shorter chapters, for which I apologize, especially considering how long ago the last chapter was posted, but I am already working on the next one, so hopefully the wait for the next one won't be nearly as long. As always, please review if you have anything to say (as long as it's not flames), and thanks for reading!