Enough to make a difference. And a surprise.

The room is neat, well-ordered, and mostly bare. Jim had not spent much time here in the last several years. He'd mainly lived on base in another state, and been deployed for two tours on top of that. After leaving the regular army, he'd been working with a reserves unit nearby, but ended up doing more and more full time work with them until eventually he moved out to live on that base. You'd barely seen him in all this time, being at college up in NY. The few personal items scattered about the room hit you hard. Jim had been mobilised early on when the virus appeared, and you'd heard nothing since. Most likely he'd caught it, and died just like everyone else. Maybe it had been delayed by military infection controls, but you'd heard of outbreaks within the armed forces from a couple of months in. Initially some army units had been brought in to maintain order, but gradually when centralised authority had crumbled further and further, they disappeared too. Now there's nobody in charge; almost everyone is dead, and any survivors from the forces are likely to be just more dangerous versions of the other dangerous people out there.

Aside from anything else, if Jim was alive, he'd have come home to check in on the family. This more than anything tells you that he must be dead.

Fighting through your tears, you **** yourself to focus on looking through the room for any useful items. In the closet you find a couple of pairs of older boots, in good shape despite their age, and take them out for Todd to try. You also find some lightweight hiking pants that will be long but you can easily cut a few inches off the bottom thanks to the ripstop material. There's also a couple of duty uniforms with Jim's old regular unit insignia on, and you take some of these items to flesh out a more practical wardrobe for Todd.

Finally, you notice a hard black plastic case on the top shelf. You silently thank your brother for his habits when you open it and find a well-kept, H&K USP compact semi automatic pistol, with two magazines and 25 rounds of .45 ammunition. This enlarges your armoury in a significant way: most crucially, this weapon will be easier for Todd to handle.

All this takes up a fairly small amount of space in an old daysack that lies at the foot of Jim's closet, and gives you a good deal more confidence about striking out to look for a new home.