January 27th
Days I have survived: 1058
Dear Roddy,
I’m sorry that it’s been a whole week since I last wrote to you. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I haven’t felt the need to write to you this week. Maybe that’s a positive thing? Liam and I have set out on the road he’d been searching for and he was totally right about the fact that it’s going to take us a long time to get to the underground labs. Liam changes from day to day. Some days he shuts himself off completely and walks ahead without looking back very often, and other days he lets me walk right up beside him and he holds my hand and makes me feel like nothing can ever hurt me. Those days are the best days.
When we manage to have conversations, it’s mostly about how Liam has been surviving for the past few years, but never anything about his life before the snow. I still don’t know anything about him, yet I feel like I’ve got to know him so well this week. Spending every hour with him has made me feel like we’ve connected somehow. I’m still confused over my feelings towards him; I can’t work out if I’m just grateful for his protection or if it’s something deeper. All I know is that I’m not going to leave him anytime soon, even though this road is long and doesn’t seem to have an end.
I promise I’ll try to write more often.
P x
Writing to Roddy had been a comforting ritual for me back at Epsilon. I never once forgot, and I had pages and pages of letters to him in this journal. I’d bought the journal in the supermarket on the day of the storm, ready for school. It was one of the few belongings I’d had with me when we had to move in to the shelters. Part of me used to pretend that Roddy was still alive and that the letters really did get to him somehow, but I imagined he couldn’t reply and I understood. It felt like if he knew what I was going through then he could look after me from wherever he was now.
Lately, it didn’t feel so important. The first night that Liam and I set up camp just off the side of the road in the forest, I hadn’t thought about writing to Roddy. Liam made me feel safer than I’d ever felt in my whole life, and I couldn’t decide if maybe I was seeing him as a brotherly sort of figure, like a replacement for Roddy, or if I was starting to develop actual feelings for him. Whatever it was, it was freaking me out.
“What do you write about in that journal?” Liam asked that morning, watching me write sitting outside of the tent.
He was cooking our breakfast before we had to set off again.
“Just stuff, like what’s been going on and … stuff!”
We’d fallen into a system of walking for the whole day and finding a spot in the forest not too far from the road for the nights. Liam would catch our food, and I sometimes helped him prepare the animals, putting my old skills to use. Showering and toilet facilities weren’t much fun as an Outlaw. I think that’s what I missed the most about being in the Shelter, but I’d put up with anything as long as I didn’t have to go back there.
“Who else did you live with back in your shelter?”
“Just Dad.”
Liam nodded slowly and handed me a plate of meat – I had learned not to ask what it was and just appreciate the fact that he was feeding me. He looked at me like he was trying to figure something out and I could feel his eyes on me as I ate.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him, unable to stand the tension.
“Nothing.”
“I’ll tell you more stuff about me if you give me a bit about you,” I said, knowing that he was dying to ask me more questions about my family and what happened to me.
