A/N

Sorry you guys! I know that its been 5ever since we've updated, but we haven't forgotten about you, I promise. It just took a while to circulate this chapter for us writers here at JustForTheGloryOfIt. School, am I right? It takes all day then they give you homework to take more of your time. ANYWAY I'm rambling. Here's the chapter, I hope it was worth the wait, if so, tell us! If it wasnt, tell us that too, we can work through whatevers been bothering you. We're willing to change some things around if need be.

I woke up to Cyrus's bag falling on my gut. She was in the tree directly above me and she must have forgotten to tie it down when we set up camp. It was for the best, I guess, it was just a bit before daybreak and we hadn't gone very far the day before. Cyrus was still asleep and I let her stay that way, she had stayed up for quite a while last night, I think she was doing a lot of thinking about what had happened with the guy at our camp yesterday, I don't think that she knows all I do about what went down. I wasn't going to bring it up again, though. If she was going to tell me, she would do it on her terms. With all the moving around we did, a good nights sleep was crucial, not like sleeping on the ground was a particularly restful experience, but if you needed it, it would work out fine.

I took a thick stick and carved into the ground something that sort of resembled "BRB -SUNRISE" the "s"s made it hard to read, but it didn't look like "he found me send help" so I let it be. I grabbed my hunting knife and machete and set out to find the snare had set. The sun had just finished rising when I found the darn thing, it was my first snare since the camping trip when I was eight, just after Oliver had read a book on hunting and fishing in excitement for our three day excursion in the woods. I made him show me one, but it never caught anything. My latest attempt was a glorified jumble of wires. That is, a glorifies jumble of wires with a rabbit hanging by the neck about three feet in the air. I couldn't believe my luck, the universe had punched me in the face with this blackout, but if all of my snares turned out like this one, I could almost forgive it.

The poor bunny, though. I wasn't torn up by the fact that I had killed it, that's just the way of the world, but there it was, trying to eat the most bruised of our apples that I had sliced up, when out of no where it was snapped up, killed and slightly mangled. And now it was all gross and sad looking on a branch. Ew. Well, I cut it down, forcing to look it in an evolutionary food chain sort of way, thereby making my day not ruined.

I didn't know where to put it, so I left the wire around its neck and carried that. Not wanting to waste any of the wire that I didn't know if I would be able to get more of, I put aside the rabbit and collected all of the wire, tying it with itself into a bundle thingy around my forearm. I undid my belt, and put the wire on so that when I re-clipped it, it hung next to my thigh.

I hurried back to camp, and Cyrus was just coming down from her nest in the tree. She looked like she could sleep for another five hours, we both could but that wasn't gonna happen. When she was finally awake and part of the real world and saw the dead rabbit, she gave out a little "Aww, poor little guy" but still seemed a little too out of it to care.

There was a stump about ten yards from where our stuff was, and I sat on it, bunny in one hand, hunting knife in the other, and wire at the ready in case things got really gross. Almost everything I knew about skinning I learned Star Trek into Darkness, that one scene at the beginning when the ship flies overhead some barbarians or whatever and they have a squirrel or something hanging from a tree and they just ripped the skin right off. I missed fandoms. I all wanted in the world was some Doctor Who or Buffy or something. Damn you, blackout.

I flipped open the knife and cut down the torso of the rabbit. I've gotta say, there was less blood than I had expected, but there was still blood. Plenty of it. I realized that it was because I had punctured the layer of (I'll say tissue because second skin is considered gross) tissue that keeps all of the innards in place and from leaking through the fur (maybe second skin wasn't the problem). I took a mental note not to that again. Cyrus had been leaning over my shoulder, a for a mix of educational, gross, and badass purposes.

Cyrus circled around the area looking for some dead leaves and branches, when she gathered enough she cleared an area a few yards away from me, threw all the branches and such down into what could be perceived as a shape and used a match on it, starting a small blaze that wouldn't last long without being tended to.

We decided to just put the thing over the fire. We kept the fire small so we could get going when we were done, and we fashioned it hog-roast style nice and close to the fire. We had no spices or anything, so we knew that it would taste bland and sort of bad but I figured it was worth it. Fresh meat. It sounds barbaric but I was really excited to not eat jerky and apples again. The rabbit slowly began to brown, and at one point I thought that it was ready, but a slash to the gut and the respective juices that spilled out told me otherwise. Finally, when the sun was about an hour and 45 minutes into the sky, the bunny was cooked enough to be eaten without risk of catching Ebola or something terrible. At this point I had passed the point of grossed out, and didn't really care about touching Jeffery the rabbit I had killed skinned and cooked (Cyrus named him), so I took my knife and dragged it almost all the way down the rib cage and snapped it, so Cyrus could have one half and I could have the other. The two pieces weren't close to being even, but I didn't care. I tried to give Cyrus the bigger half, but she was so appalled by the whole ordeal that she just couldn't.

Jeffrey tasted different than normal meat. Not better or worse, just different. Maybe it was because he was wild, maybe because I did everything myself, I'm not sure. I doubt I'll ever know.

When I finished I put out the fire and cleaned up all of my junk. My knife was caked the with blood and other grody bodily substances of Jeffrey. I wiped it off with a bandana, and clipped it to my pocket, just to the left of my sheath. I noticed just how many knives I had. I knew that it was a lot, but I literally had a machete, hunting knife, bushcraft knife, full tang utility, and a multi tool. That's a ridiculous amount of knives. I knew that I wouldn't need all of them, too but I kept them just in case. I took a mental note to find a spring and clean it properly when I got the chance. I needed some more water too.

We put in a full day after that, we must have made it a long way because we didn't stop long for lunch, we just took enough of a rest at a spring Cyrus found to refill our waters, clean my knife, and grab and apple each for the road.

We did our best to stay out for sight when we passed a town, we weren't still trying to hide, but neither of us were eager to get into anymore trouble. As we had found, people usually bring such things, and vise versa.

People suck.

We did, however see some people. I mean, it's not like everyone died. This whole thing was pretty much one big purge, and the ones who made it were the strong, the prepared, and the good at hiding. There were some exceptions to that rule, but by and large it was surprisingly accurate. You could sometimes tell who was who by their houses. The strong usually had a flagpole outside, emptied after the blackout, probably, and a well trafficked front yard, despite being overgrown. The prepared had a big yard near the highway, close to the property there is a door in the ground that goes into their bunker. A normal person would have a hard time finding it, but given my parents' obsession with prepping, I wasn't a normal person. The good at hiding were hard to spot, for obvious reasons. They never lit any candles at night, covered their windows, and they kept their yards clean and free of too much debris. Sometimes, sometimes you could see a light coming from a basement in the middle of the night.

When we stopped for the night, Cyrus went off to set a trap, and I set a fire just as the sun was going down. I climbed Cyrus's sleeping tree so I could see around our camp. I was looking to take some mental record of what houses had people in them and what houses didn't. I figured it would be useful to do so for looting purposes. Bored, I jabbed a stick into an apple and roasted it. Surprisingly, it wasn't disgusting. Mushy, very mushy, but not disgusting. It reminded me of the crust pockets filled with warm apple sauce that the cafeteria at school passed off for apple pie. Cyrus came back and saw what I was doing, out of curiosity, she asked for a bite. When she took one she showed a bit of a grimace, but didn't say anything else. She didn't roast her apple. I was fucking sick of apples. They weren't filling, and they tasted like, well, apples. I left the fire to Cyrus. I was tired to the point of feeling stupid. Pulling my sleeping bag out of my pack, we both muttered our respective goodnights, and soon after that, I was asleep.

I woke up earlier than I had expected. I thought I heard something, but maybe I didn't. I really couldn't tell. It was probably a half hour before sunrise, meaning that trying to get extra sleep would be useless. I threw a stick at Cyrus. "Rise and shine, motherfucker." I nearly shouted. I was fucking TIRED, but we had ground to cover and if I didn't make the both of us rally, neither of us would. It was gonna be a hot one, I could feel it, but the sun wasn't up yet, so it wasn't bad. I left to go check the trap Cyrus had set, despite my attempts to make her go. "You set the thing, you have to empty it". She wouldn't though, something about "the grossest thing ever". Anyway, she was charged with the task of cleaning up camp while I checked the trap.

The trap wasn't far away, so I made it there in a few minutes. when I got there, I looked to see how the thing worked, and, honestly, she did a pretty good job. I would have to give her kudos when I next saw her. I looked for the animal. I knew the trap hadn't looked as it did now, so something must have set it off, but I couldn't find what it had meant to catch. I checked with her when I ran back to camp, and she said that she had set it up correctly, she knew that much. Apparently she had thought to take me on a surprise camping trip for my birthday at the beginning of August. I guess this wasn't what she had imagined. Anyway, she had started studying up on camping things.

She said that she knew a thing or two about snares, and that she hadn't messed that one up. So, she lead me to it and she looked it over, and she did confirm that it had been set off, but, and I'm paraphrasing here, the type of trap she built was specifically made to be, once triggered, virtually inescapable. I can't say I totally understood how it all worked, as it was moderately complicated, and I was so overtired that almost everything was going right over my head. So, having total faith in her, I wondered aloud how it was set off if it was empty. She didn't know, and I think that she was a bit perturbed that it hadn't worked out quite as she had planned.

We got back to camp, and it was just the way we had left it. The bags were next to Cyrus's tree, and the apples were, as usual, dwindling in number. I remembered the houses I had noted as empty the night before, and, doing so, we set off to loot what we could. It probably took about three hours to get through all of the houses. We were being thorough, and in being thorough took a while.

This is what we got:

* 7 soup cans (assorted)

* 5 cans of peaches

* 4 sleeves of crackers

* 2 bags of almonds

* 1 box of granola bars

We got back on the road. It took us a while, after we had escaped the labyrinth that was the town we had stumbled into to find the highway again. At any rate, we got our bearings and walked. We started passing more deserted cars, and Cyrus picked up complaints about her monstrous pack where she had left off. All seemed to be well with the world.

I started hearing things again. Nothing major, just a shuffle here, a twig there, but nothing more substantial to convince myself that I wasn't loosing it. It wouldn't have made sense for us to have been followed for that long, I mean, who would be going exactly where we were from exactly where we were? And, if it wasn't a coincidence, it would have had to have been either a pedophile or someone who wanted to mug us. But there are other vulnerable girls around that don't make you walk for miles on end, and we may be ridiculously attractive but come on, that's just ridiculous. And if they had wanted to mug us he could have quickly, when we were sleeping, or at any point on the highway, as there was no one around.

We took a break around noon, as the location of the sun told me, for lunch near a brook. It was damn hot out, and I felt as if I could just about die, but instead of doing that, I took out my balaclava and soaked it in the water. Cyrus starred at me as I tied it around my head. "Ok there has to be some story about how you found out about those things." she said.

I leaned in. "I read the label." I whispered. technically it was a shemagh, but I used it as a balaclava, so I came to use the two words interchangeably.

I ate my handful of almonds and my granola bar with happiness. It was sure nice to eat something other than an apple or a bunny named Jeffery. I heard something again, and this time I didn't doubt myself. I took a twig from the bush next to me and wrote in the soft dirt "someones here check it out?". It was messy, of course, but she seemed to get the message, and maybe she had heard the same things, and was questioning herself as well. I pointed at one of the trees, and she nodded. We scooted over in the direction of the bush, giving us cover enough to not seem intentional, but for it to still seem as if Cyrus was with me.

Cyrus, to her credit, is a hell of a climber, and she is stealthy as... well... something that's really fuckin stealthy. She reminded me of Rue in the hunger games when Katniss is in the tree with the tracker jackers and all of the careers are at the foot of the tree. She came back, maybe five minutes later with Rebecca by one hand, and Troye by the other and she was dragging them behind her, and she said "Ryanne look what I found!"

I responded with "Aw honey, you really have got to start warning me when you bring your friends over for lunch, I never know how much food to make." It wasn't funny, but if I don't laugh at my jokes, who will? I was a bit envious that she could do something like that so well when I would probably try, but end up making some noise and giving myself away. She was more of an adc, and I was more of a tank (to use league of legends lingo). We both did important stuff, but what I did seemed like more than it was, and what she did seemed unimportant to the casual observer. I felt bad about that, I really did, but that was just the way it worked with us.

Despite that, I made a point to give her as much credit as I could whenever I could, that way she wouldn't feel neglected.

We knew these people. They were the same age as us, and they were from the same place as us. I couldn't tell you why they were in the woods. Hey, who am I to judge?

Rebecca was a bit of a queen bee at our old school, and Troye? Well, he was the Ryan to her Sharpay, only with less willpower, and, up to this point, zero character development. He just followed her around and had no independent thought. I knew that one day he would be liberated in a big dance number or montage, but today was not that day. They were the last people I had expected to see in the woods.

We grilled them with questions. Apparently, both of their families had gone to stay with Rebecca's aunt, as it was less populated and therefore safer where she lived. Their parents (and aunt) disappeared just a few days prior and they didn't know what to do. They didn't know anyone around where they were, and with the food shortage, neighbors weren't all that hospitable to strangers. They had been following us since we made camp last night. I guess I had made a ruckus in the tree when I was house spotting, and the trap was near Rebecca's aunts house. They had taken the squirrel from the trap, but they couldn't bring themselves to skin the thing so they discarded it.

I could have hit them right there. I wanted that damn squirrel.

Because they were alone and incapable of providing for themselves, Cyrus and I decided to let them tag along. In doing so, we forced ourselves to slow down. You can't hurry Rebecca! We made it clear to her that we didn't like having her there. We were accepting of Troye, but we were God awful to Rebecca, and I regret that. I really do.