"Don't touch your face at all for now. It spreads that way," he muttered. Wearily, and feeling drained of all strength emotionally and physically, Nicholas grabbed his mother's hands and dragged her past Mattie and out into the street. Then, he followed the same procedure with his sister. He went back into the warehouse and retrieved a bottle of lighter fluid and a box of matches. Without hesitation, mostly because he didn't want to look at their lifeless bodies, he threw a lit match onto them and backed away when they burst into flames. He stared for only a minute before he turned around.

"Fire's what completely kills them," he told her. "Smashing their heads in and even shooting them in the head doesn't work, it only knocks them out. They get right back up within a few hours. Only if you take their heads off or burn them."

He nodded and walked past her, back into the building. He gathered the four backpacks that he, his mother, and his sister had been carrying (he carried two) and emptied them. His two machetes and a combat knife that he'd forgotten about clinked onto the floor. He put them in one of the bags, along with his rifle (which obviously stuck out of the top of the bag) and a small pile of remaining ammunition. He wasn't a big gun person so he had no idea what to do when he ran out of bullets.

Nicholas stuffed two of the blankets into another bag, careful not to put his mother's in with them. He managed to fit three bottles of water into the bag along with the blankets, then moved onto the next one. He crammed as many cans of Spam and black-eye peas out of two of the boxes he'd taken from the warehouse's shelves. In the next bag, he carefully put a few loafs of bread on top of a couple of boxes of macaroni and cheese (because he wasn't sure if they were ever going to have the opportunity to make the macaroni and cheese.)

He put the backpack with the canned foods on his back, and carried the one with the weapons in his hand. He looked at Mattie and said, "You can carry the other two. They're the lightest."