The manor house was perfect. It used to be the brilliant alabaster of southern royalty but cruel winds and the neglect of men made it a grayish beige. Rotting wood falling around Corinthian columns. The evidence of at least one fire streaking along the north corner. But Eve saw the four solid walls to keep the wind away and the roof, still standing, to keep the rain off her body and the boy's. Doors that could be barricaded. The boy lingered in the empty forest, kicking leaves and snapping what bare branches he could reach. The last leafless limbs hung within his reach now, and this excited him more than what the house meant to Eve.
She hissed over her shoulder into the ravaged forest. The boy came running to the torn hem of her windbreaker, pushing his smudgy face into her hip.
"Hush, boy," she breathed, holding the back of his head. "Don't shuffle through the leaves like that."
He looked up at her with wide eyes, pale green swimming in a windburned face, angular and harsh from hunger but not yet fully freed of his baby fat. She pointed up the hill, towards the house, before her criticism could sink its teeth into him. "Look, Adam-- home."
She told him to move quickly, stay close and low through the tall grass. "We're not safe until we get into the house." She ran with one hand on the ground for balance and one hand in her hip satchel for strength. Her fingers brushed past shards of sea-glass, gripping the sandalwood stock of the gun.
On the big porch now, one hand on the doorknob. The other hand still in the satchel. Before turning the door open she told the boy, "Go 'round the porch, count how many chairs are sittable. And how many chairs we can burn." The boy gone, she counted three deep breaths, hoping her heart couldn't be heard on the inside of the door. She twisted the knob and shouldered the door open, clenching her eyes tight and swinging the gun around the foyer. Empty. Quiet, save for her own heartbeat and the protestations from the old, rotted wood. Warm, despite several shattered windows. Welcoming, in spite of the broken and burned portraits on the wall that no one thought to take down. Or had the chance to.
The porch wound around all four sides of the house. Adam kicked through rotten blankets and rubble from the ceiling, counting chairs and staring at the gray horizon. He wanted to get in out of the cold. Eleven chairs total, three of which still stood, but one was wobbly. The rest were shattered, incomplete, and he counted them all as burnable because he couldn't tell the difference between rotted wood and wood that was just dead. He rounded the third corner before he heard the door slam open. He crouched at a broken window, jagged glass teeth gnashing, pissed off probably that it was stuck here with nothing but the dead ash-forest to look out at and no one to look in on. Maybe because it was left behind. Or it wanted to look scary like a gargoyle, defending his ruined castle. He didn't wonder if it was mourning what would inevitably come at the end of this cold twilight. Instead, he stared at Eve, swinging a gun in her hand and panting. He memorized the sound of her excited. The look in her eyes when she was terrified. He took his time rounding the fourth corner. When he finally peered around the door Eve had already hung her coat over a slumping, tired recliner chair. She still had the satchel on her hip. She spun around slowly, hands raised up like a real estate agent selling a couple her dreamhouse. "Welcome home, Adam."
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