ODDS OF SURVIVAL - TAEKOOK

CHAPTERTHIRTYTHREE

Taehyung stared at the empty doorway for nearly a full minute after she left before he tried to move. He was well and truly on his own now, injured, unarmed, and with no food or water.

Well, the honey could provide emergency calories in a pinch, but he'd rather not resort to that. Without his maps he couldn't accurately estimate how many miles from home he was, but he knew they had driven for over an hour to get here.

It would take him days to get back home traveling on foot. Maybe he should have tried to join up with Somi's group, at least temporarily. Maybe they would have helped him find Jungkook.

No, he couldn't trust them. It wouldn't have been safe.

With some difficulty he managed to climb to his feet and sling the bag of medical supplies over his left shoulder. He needed to find a weapon, and gather as much food and water as he could for his journey, but he was limited to only what he could carry.

Anything too heavy would slow him down, and with one arm injured he wouldn't be able to carry much, anyway.

He should probably see if he could find some regular painkillers for himself, too, because while the pain in his shoulder was blessedly less intense than it had been, it still hurt. And so did his head, and his face, and several other parts of him to a lesser degree.

He ducked down a bit and exited the room, staying low so as not to be seen through the massive windows in the front.

Fortunately the shelves along each aisle were fairly tall, so he didn't have to crouch too low to keep his head from sticking up above them.

There were quite a few people out in front of the pharmacy; he could hear their muffled voices and he caught glimpses of a few of them.

A short girl with black hair stood with her back to the front window, chatting with a tall and sender older woman with mid-length hair that appeared to be faded pink at the ends with several inches of dark greyish roots grown out at the scalp.

He was beginning to think this group was almost entirely women and Jungkook's long-ago comment about a pack of dystopian warrior ladies floated up from the depths of his memory.

But then he poked his head around another shelf and saw two men, one a hulking beast of a man with a long beard and shaggy hair toting a crossbow, and the other a young man who looked remarkably similar to one of his former employees from morning shift.

It couldn't be him, though. That would be far too much of a coincidence.

It was strange enough already that he, Jungkook, and Jennie had all ended up in the same area so far away from the coffee shop where they'd all worked.

He made his way carefully through the aisles, picking up any small, lightweight packages of convenience foods he found. There wasn't a lot to choose from, mostly packets of crisps and overly sweet candies.

He was bound to feel sick if those ended up being the only things he ate for the next several days, but it was better than assured starvation if he ended up lost and stuck in the wilderness for weeks on end. He found a messenger-style bag with a strap long enough to wear diagonally.

With the strap slung across his left shoulder and the bag resting against his right hip, it kept his left arm unobstructed without putting pressure on his injured right shoulder.

He filled it with all the first aid supplies and snack foods he could fit inside, and shoved the only two bottles of water he could find in convenient little pockets on either side of the bag. He tied the handles of the bag with medicine for Jungkook around the strap so he wouldn't have to carry it in his left hand.