Artificial Intelligence (actual copy)

chapter 4

That night, I studied him. He seemed nice enough and his dog cuddled up against him lovingly as he slept-probably warm for the first time since the bombings. I didn’t sleep that night. I was afraid to let my guard down with a stranger so close to me.
The next morning, when Latin woke up, I took him on a ‘tour’ of my Walmart. I told him that he should probably make a bag like I had so that if we ever had to make a quick escape, we could. He got a bag and filled it with jars of peanut butter I had overlooked, a gun, bullets, water bottles, and a baby sling. When I questioned him about the baby sling, he gestured toward Sasha who was wandering around the dog food bags a few aisles away.
We found some walkie-talkies that said we could talk through them from a distance of about two miles. It was a major find and we were both super excited about them. We also found a weird radio that you have to crank for a few minutes to get sound out of. We didn’t think that we would get any reception at all so we just tossed it in the bag for later.
I know it sounds horrible, but we took all of the cash out of the registers in the front. We cracked them open and shoved all of it into our bags.
“Nobody’s gonna use it but us. Theres no one to use it. Besides, it’s only for vending machines.” Latin said after I protested.
When we sat down for lunch, Latin asked me about how I had ended up living in a Walmart after the whole apocalypse instead of with my family. I told him that I didn't make it to the pod on time, that my Mom had fought trying to get me there, how it was my sister's birthday, and that my mom never bought any AI because my dad had been killed by one.
His story was a little more involved.


Lydia Rose