Miranda

I had feared from the beginning that at some point I would prove to be a major hindrance to the group. My fear had been realized, and it couldn’t have been realized at a worse time. Our bounty of meat that could have lasted us over a week was all eaten in a matter of seconds by wolves we happened to be in the vicinity of while taking a rest that my injury forced upon us. I didn’t speak following the incident as we continued to make our way forward and I made sure to remain behind Kevin and Hannah. My guilt was punishing me, were it not for Lisa being there to comfort me I don’t know if I would have made it through that episode.

We walked for one and a half days without finding any food. Fortunately we had eaten our fill before the wolves attacked us and were able to cope without eating. The pain in my leg from the injury I’d sustained was still there and was actually getting worse but I ignored it and walked on at the same brisk pace as the others to allow us to quickly get to where we were going.

The evening of the day after we’d come face to face with the wolves we reached the end of the river. It ended at a lake, on the shore of which was a log cabin. We were looking down on the lake and the cabin from an elevated position. There didn’t appear to be any activity in the cabin, nevertheless Kevin advised that we should monitor it from a distance for a while to be absolutely sure that it was deserted. We were thrilled to have made it to where we were but we were also apprehensive. The people of the outside world were a complete mystery to us and we couldn’t be sure how they would react to us. To be safe we remained at the top of the hill into the night and kept watch over the cabin for any signs of activity. Long after it had gotten dark we still hadn’t seen any and decided to go down and inspect it. Our hope was that we’d be able to find some food in the cabin. After one and a half days the meat that we had eaten had long since been digested by our bodies; we were starving and running on empty. Kevin led the way as we approached the cabin armed with the knife; Hannah followed right behind him armed with the hatchet. We walked without using the lantern to light our way to remain as undetectable as possible and made it to the side of the cabin without noticing anything around us that was cause for concern. The cabin was perfectly still, as was the forest and the lake. Kevin walked alone from the side of the cabin onto the porch where the door was located. He peered into the cabin through the window next to the door, saw nobody inside, and entered the cabin. For about two minutes we waited for him while he went through the cabin checking to see if there was anybody inside. He emerged and signalled to us that it was safe for us to enter the cabin, it was empty.

The room we entered when we walked through the door appeared to be the living room. It was dark but we were able to make out what looked like sofas and a table. Lisa got the lantern out of the bag, took the hatchet from Hannah and lit it with the flint. When she brought it back in we were able to get a proper look around the place. The room we were in was the living room; there were two sofas, a coffee table and a fireplace in the wall. Lisa, Hannah and I walked through the cabin with the lantern and found a kitchen, a dining room complete with table and chairs, two bedrooms with two single beds in each one and a bathroom. The cabin was extremely dusty; no one had been there for a long time. A pervasive feeling of eeriness engulfed us after we’d been in the cabin for a few minutes. It was a building that had been constructed by the people of the outside world whose world the people of Prospera had fled. We shared a connection with these people that no amount of separation would ever be enough to sever. Being in that cabin and getting that feeling made it feel like we were doing the right thing by trying to make contact with the outside world, like we were completing a circle that had long been broken.

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While we were looking through the cabin Kevin had gone through the kitchen cupboards looking for food and found some cans. In the cutlery drawer he found a can opener. The labels on all of the cans were completely faded making it impossible for us to know what was inside them. Kevin opened one of the cans with the can opener and showed us the contents of it. It was beans. He took a spoon out of the cutlery drawer, wiped it on his shirt and ate some of them to test their edibleness.

“They’re fine, the cans have preserved them perfectly,” he said.

There were five other cans. Hannah took each of them and shook them close to her ear.

“They sound like they’ve all got beans in them,” she said.

“There should be enough here to fill us up, for a little while at least,” Kevin said, “there’s some wood next to the fireplace, we can build a fire and put all of the beans in a pot and heat them up, that’ll make them taste better.”

I opened the cans—which were all beans—Lisa got a pot out of one of the cupboards and rinsed it clean with water from the canteen, Hannah worked on getting a fire going in the fireplace and Kevin took the empty canteen from Miranda when she was done rinsing the pot and took it to the lake to fill it with water. There were several strange things in the kitchen around me. On top of the countertop was a white box with a door, another white box with two openings at the top and a white jug that I assumed was a kettle. There were also two large freestanding white boxes, one that was tall and rectangular with a door in front that opened outward and a square shaped one that had a door on top that opened upward. The vertical box, I discovered upon closer inspection, was a refrigerator, the square box was a freezer. The refrigerators that we had in Prospera were concrete boxes that were kept cool by water that flowed over the top of it. We had nothing like any of this in Prospera; my first thought upon seeing all of it and not being familiar with any of it was that if the technology of the outside world that we encountered in an abandoned cabin was enough to confuse me, how were we going to adapt to the outside world when we reached it?

The wood by the side of the fireplace was old and extremely dry; Hannah had no trouble getting the fire started and as soon as she did we put the pot of beans on it. The cabin was growing on us; in the short time that we had been there it had started to feel like home. Having rinsed the pot Lisa had taken the lantern and gone to the bedrooms to shake the dust off the linen on the beds while Kevin rinsed four bowls and spoons in the kitchen sink for us to eat with. Each of us had a full bowl of beans that we ate on the sofas in the living room before the fire that was burning ferociously courtesy of the dry wood. The beans weren’t enough to completely satisfy our appetites that had been growing for two days but it was enough for us to go to bed without stomach pains.

We were all tired and went to bed soon after we’d finished eating. Hannah and Kevin slept in one room and Lisa and I slept in the other room. Lisa pushed the two single beds together and we slept as if we were in one big bed. That night we didn’t make love even though it was our first opportunity to do so in days. We were so relieved to have made it to a safe place after wandering through the woods for days that we went straight to sleep, looking forward to waking up in the morning and starting the next phase of our journey.