Read Surviving The Evacuation (Book 4): Unsafe Haven for Free Online

the beer runs out. And I can’t see them touching the barley. We’ll go back in a week.” And hope Rob didn’t set fire to the place in the meantime.
    It was frustrating. During their search for supplies, they had come across quite a few places that had been looted. Those Rob had been to were easy enough to spot, even if it hadn’t been for the ubiquitous black-papered roll-ups he’d left behind. Jay said it was Rob’s calling card. Nilda thought it was more like a dog marking its territory. Those places had been turned over and trashed; windows broken, furniture slashed, electronics taken or smashed. But there had been other houses, ones she was sure had been looted by someone else, someone who knew what to look for. There the food and some other supplies would be missing but only from one or two select properties on a street. Who that was, she didn’t know. Not that she wanted company, but she’d seen no women at the barricade nor at the pub. She knew with someone like Rob, it wouldn’t be long before he decided to come looking for her.
    She had planned on going to the pub first thing that morning. Had she done so they would have been there when he and his lot arrived. That probably wouldn’t have ended well. Instead, on Jay’s insistence, they had taken a trip to the two nearest farms. He’d been the one to realise that without anyone to take care of them, any livestock left behind after the evacuation would be dead in a few days’ time. The animals had gone. So had the farmers, and they had managed to take every scrap of food with them. All that remained was one half of a formal requisition order.
    “We’ll have some dinner, then we’ll have another think about where we’ll try tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe we could try one of the other pubs. There’s another microbrewery a few miles down the road, although I think they made their beer with hops. I’m not sure whether you can eat those. We’ll have to find a book on it. We could go to some more farms on the way.” Maybe. It had been over a week. She doubted any livestock left behind would still be alive, and she couldn’t imagine many farmers would have just abandoned their animals to die of neglect. Of course, what they would have done if they actually found some animals, she wasn’t sure.
    She turned back to the stove. In a saucepan, a mixture of tinned tomatoes, herbs, and stinging nettles bubbled away. The nettles had been another of Jay’s ideas. He’d spotted them as they’d crept away from the pub. He’d seen some reality show about living off the land in which they’d been prominently featured. Perhaps, she thought, his summer spent doing nothing but watching TV wasn’t as big a waste of time as she’d thought.
    His satisfied superiority in knowing something his mother didn’t faded when she’d stopped to pick them, announcing that they would be eating them for dinner.
    “Now,” she asked. “Do you want rabbit or beef?”
    “Look, I get that we’ll have to eat it sooner or later, but why can’t it be later?”
    “Later we might be eating it cold from the tin.”
    “You said, right, that when we’re hungry we’re not going to mind what we eat. So let’s wait until we’re hungry. Here. This one’s a ham.”
    “I thought we’d keep that for your birthday. Let’s try the beef. Here, look at the ingredients. There’s nothing in it you wouldn’t eat normally, not if it came in a curry. In fact, you’ve probably eaten something just like it from that take-away down on—” She was interrupted by a knock at the door.
    “Stay here,” she hissed, as she grabbed the cricket bat and headed to the front of the house. Jay, ignoring her, grabbed the other bat and followed close behind.
    “Who’s there?” she called out.
    “It’s me, Nilda. Sebastian.”
    She glanced at her son, opened the door, and then took a step back in shock. Sebastian was almost unrecognisable. His hair was matted, his clothing was torn, and his