I take as deep a breath as I can, and then I run. Through the living room, toward the kitchen. I have my backpack open and I open cabinets, shoving in what I can. I stay far, far away from the fridge, because I can’t imagine that’ll be in a much better state than the rest of the house.

When my lungs feel like bursting, I dash out again, retch, and repeat.

Eventually, over the next week, even raiding dead people’s houses becomes easier. We keep the food as cold as possible and as far away from the kitchen as possible until it smells edible. Dry food is better than fresh. Canned and bottled is best of all. We take everything we can find. We run and hide when we see other humans, but that’s rare. Some days, the food we find offers us a reprieve from worrying about our inventory. Some days it’s barely enough to keep us fed.

But while it’s possible to grow used to almost anything, I can’t grow used to the smell. It’s everywhere. It’s worse in houses that haven’t been cleared at all—and we do avoid those. It clings to me, like ghosts. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get it off.

No one else notices it.

* * *

The days are easier than the nights.

In the morning, before I go see Isaiah, I spend time with Casey. We both stay on either side of the hallway, but spending time together matters. We take every precaution we can, though it seems to me that if he were going to get infected, it would have happened already.

Maybe Logan is right. Maybe we’re all safe now. Maybe we’re the lucky ones.

No one else has fallen ill since Josie and Saoirse came here. We’re all painfully aware of it, but no one has dared to mark the days yet. We’re too scared to jinx it.

Isaiah’s tiny little snippets of information, those few things he manages to scrape off the internet, tell us that the world is falling to pieces. But Casey tells me Isabella is recovering. It’s slow, and she would be our first recovery. It would mean everything.

The world may be ending; we find ways to live.

“She sat up independently today,” he says with a smile that’s never quite as wide anymore, but it’s still genuine. “She was still coughing, and she couldn’t say much, but it’s progress. I didn’t think, after a whole month…”

“Me neither.”

He licks his teeth, like he’s embarrassed. “You know, I started carving the days into the small nurse’s desk in the infirmary, to keep track of how long it’s been. It feels like every day is a week, and every week is at least a month.”

I nod. Time seems to pass differently here. I forgot about Christmas entirely until Isaiah reminded me, and even so, I didn’t celebrate beyond going into town to steal food. I lit a candle in one of the empty houses.