US v THEM

Vår, Vinter, Sommar and Höst

   We  found a house. It looks empty but there might still be some useful stuff in there. We gather around the doorway and organize: Vinter and I are going to inspect the house while Sommar and Höst keep watch outside. I grab the baseball bat that is attached behind my back via a system of harness and he pulls out a gun; we are ready to enter. Vinter is the first to take a step. Although I usually prefer to lead the way, the gun allows faster reflexes and I trust that Vinter will shoot if he has to. He already had to.

  The place is not that big. The front door leads directly to a vacant living room. It would be intact if it wasn't for the blood stains on the floor and furniture. A few objects were thrown to the floor as well—or maybe it just fell?—and I notice that picture frames are turned upside down. None of us dare to touch it. Someone was here, or still is. Vinter and I decide to split up and check different rooms. On the first floor are only the living room and the kitchen which are adjoining and an empty garage. Vinter goes upstairs, which leads to two bedrooms and a bathroom. The tour is rapidly done—there is no one here. I join Vinter in one of the rooms and find him looking hard at something. On the bed, there is a white sheet covering what seem to be at least two corpses. He approaches and doesn't leave me the time to tell him not to. He removes it safely and unveils the bodies of two adults and a little boy. It's an easy guess. Next to them is a note and Vinter picks it up; before they killed themselves, they encouraged visitors to take what they needed except for some listed things. Behind the paper, someone thanked them for their offer and wished them to rest in peace. Somebody came for sure and we can only hope that they didn't take everything that was left. The family was stabbed but we guess it was postmortem—if we can still say that. Their dead bodies must have been placed this way by whoever put them out of their misery and wrote the note.

  "They were nice people," Vinter remarks.

   It is indeed generous of them to give away what they had, but with or without the note it would have still been taken.

  "We have to look for whatever we can take," I remind him.

  We call out to Sommar and Höst to let them know the place is secure and we all congregate in the living room. I draw a line on the wooden floor with a felt-tip pen I took back in the bedroom and we all brace ourselves. Finders keepers. On my mark, we all begin to run and go through the drawers, the fridge and the shelves. By chance it isn't empty but most of the remaining food is no longer eatable. Vinter found the fridge first and therefore has the priority over whatever is in it. As for me, I found three cans of peas and a bag of rice. Höst runs upstairs and I prohibited him from entering the bedroom where we found the family. Sommar comes across decayed vegetables and fruits and most of the cutlery and silverware; nothing useful on her side. Vinter retrieves from the fridge four small bottles of water and rotten cheese. We are lucky today.

  "I think we should leave some for the next people who find this place," Vinter suggests.

  "Take as much as you can, as long as it fits in the bag," I say.

  Maybe our mistake is that we only carry one bag—a small but thick knapsack—but since we are always struggling to fill it, I don't think two is preferable. Sommar is the one who lugs it around most of the time. Höst is too little, I have my baseball bat and Vinter cannot really hold anything with his amputated left arm. We care about that bag; we've had it with us since the beginning. I remember dad carrying it around whenever we went on holidays, at the beach or at the mountain. It witnessed a lot and it still accompanies us through our adventures. The memories are not as good though.

  We join Höst in the upper story and find him in the little boy's room. His priority is clearly not the food, but we remind him he cannot take any toy with him. Sommar stumbles on a flipbook in a drawer of the desk and hands it to him. This brings back a lot of memories too—we haven't seen one since we left our home. This one is a classic and shows a dancing skeleton that eventually crashes down. But it impresses Höst and it dawns on us that it is the first one he has ever seen. Sommar proposes to show him how it's done later.