Waifs and Strays [Larry Stylinson]

Chapter Five

I didn't sleep well last night.

Well, Niall and I weren't supposted to sleep much, anyway. But Niall had been working a stressful day's shift and looked exausted, so I let him sleep through the night. He already left an hour ago for his next shift. And I just couldn't keep my eyes open anymore at some point, and that was okay. Our prisoner had been asleep for hours, before I finally closed my eyes.

I wish I hadn't closed them, though. Those stupid nightmares that I have been spared of in the past couple of weeks came back. Of course they did, they always come back when I'm stressed out.

I stretch my sore neck and rub it with the palm of my hand as best as I can. It really is not comfortable to sleep in this cave without the mattresses we thankfully picked up at some point and place.

After I have gulped down half a bottle of water to try and get rid of my headache, I start my morning like I always do. I make my rounds through our huge home and check in on everybody, to see if anything is amiss. Sometimes it sucks being the leader. All the responsibility is on my shoulders and if something doesn't go as planed, I am the one to blame.

I head over to the kids dorm room, as we call it, where all the children till the age of 14 are sleeping. Perrie, who is the oldest girl, and by that, has the main responsibility for the kids, hands me a never ending list of supplies that we are running out on, including diapers for Linda and a baby boy named Dax (Peter's brother). The things I have to deal with in this damned world. It's a joke.

I shake my head and continue my morning rounds over to the cooking area, before I make my way to the storage halls where I find Zayn who is just going through our ammo and weapons.

"Morning boss.", he greets me with a smile, taking a gun in his hand and pointing it right at my chest.

I roll my eyes and continue walking towards him. "You know I hate to be called that," I say and take the gun away from him to put it back into the box of guns. We don't have many, but thanks to Liam's job at the police station we were able to get a hold on some over the years. Still, we try to use them as little as possible because ammunition is rare and hard to come by, so we mainly use knifes, bow and arrow, and anything else we can find.

"That's why I do it, boss," he chuckles.

I ignore him and look around the large room with all the boxes, and racks, and random things lying around. "So, what's going on? Anything important that we are running out on back here?", I say and start opening some boxes standing infront of me.

Zayn lets out a breathy sigh, before answering. "Everything, really," he groans with a frown. "We don't even have to talk about our lack of ammo, as always. But we're also almost out of bathroom products like soap and toothpaste, we only have 53 bottles of water back here, there is almost no patrol left for the cars, and I exchanged our last gas cylinder with the empty one in the kitchen, just this morning," he says while pointing to different places in the storage hall, "and I'm sure Perrie already gave you a list of things that she needs for the dwarfs."

My shoulders slouched more and more in the past minute or so. "And the girls just told me that we're out of almost all edible things in the kitchen," I groan and shake my head. "I don't know how to get all of these things at once. Even with the money Liam earns."

"Yeah, thank God he got his hands on that job," Zayn says and scratches the back of his head, "imagine we had to steal everything we need. We'd be screwed, man."

"Well, it worked before, right?", I say dismissively. "Whatever, we need to see that we buy as much water and patrol as possible from the money we have left. The rest we can just get like that."