Race to Refuge by Liz Craig

I could figure out how to get us more food and water.
    She took this in and then glanced back in the back of the van again. “So … food, camping equipment, water.”
    “That’s right.” I was glad Ginny was taking this as well as she was.
    “Toilet paper?” she asked in a worried voice.
    I shook my head. “I was in a hurry.”
    “Clothes?” Her voice was even more anxious.
    Obviously, Ginny would have focused on different things.
    “Ginny, I just didn’t have time. I wanted to throw stuff in the van and then pick you up from school.”
    She was quiet again for a few minutes and there was a quiver in her voice this time. “My retainer? Did you remember my retainer?”
    At first I felt this tired anger bubbling up. Then I took a deep breath. She was scared. She didn’t understand. She thought things were going to be the same. Or she hoped they were.
    This time, instead of sounding strong and confident, I went with gentle. “Ginny, it doesn’t matter. Your retainer. It’s going to be okay.”
    “But Mom is going to be so mad,” she said, eyes moist.
    “Ginny, Mom didn’t make it.” My voice broke a little on the words, even though my voice had finished changing a while back.
    “Dad?” she whispered.
    I shook my head again. And this time I felt a prickle of tears behind my eyes, too.
    “So it’s just you and me?” she asked quietly.
    I nodded. “But Ginny, I’m going to do a good job taking care of you. I promise.”
    “You’ve done a good job so far,” she whispered, her voice breaking a little. “You got me out of there. There were sick people heading to the school, weren’t there?”
    “And we called to warn them,” I pointed out. But she knew and I knew that those kids and teachers could only stay in the school for so long before food ran out. The cafeteria didn’t exactly plan for an Armageddon when it ordered supplies.
    I fished around in the center console until I found the iPod that Ginny had left in Mom’s car. “Here. It’s a lot to take in, right? Just listen to music for a few minutes while I sit here and think about what our next move is, okay?”
    Ginny looked sad. “It’s going to run out of battery. And I didn’t have a charger in Mom’s car.”
    “Enjoy it while you can. This has been a bad day, right? This is a good day to listen to it.”
    She fished out her headphones from the backseat somewhere and reclined the passenger seat a little. She looked out the window while I took out a pen and some sticky notes from Mom’s glove box to figure things out.
    Mom had gassed up the car recently, so that was good. But we were going to need gas, and sooner than later. The van wasn’t the perfect car to take because it did use up a lot of gasoline. But I didn’t exactly have a choice at the time. I wrote gas on the paper.
    The food and water wasn’t going to last too long, either. I added them to the list. Although the water purification sticks were really going to help long-term. I could use some more of those. I put Ginny’s toilet paper on the list although that was a little more of a luxury item, considering. A better weapon than the ax, shovel, and baseball bat would be good, too.
    But if I went to a big store like Walmart, would they know about what was going on in our town? How far had the news spread? I didn’t have money with me … not enough, anyway. If I just walked out with the stuff then security would probably stop me. And if the Walmart had already been deserted by panicking people, then there might be zombies around. Everybody knew you weren’t supposed to go to malls or places like Walmart in a zombie outbreak. At least on my game that was something you didn’t want to do.
    I remembered that there was a sort of country store that was out a ways that Dad and I usually stopped by on our way out to go fishing or camping or whatever. Dad knew the guy who ran it because he’d been there for years. Maybe he could do us a favor and give us some supplies. If I