Free Strangers in the Night by Raymond S Flex

limitless supply.
    Boxes and boxes of it could be found in any given maintenance cupboard.
    Once, when Mitts had been several shades of bored, he had sat down with a notepad and thought through just how many people, considering the supplies, and the space, the Restricted Area might be able to support. And for how long.
    He had come up with fifty people, more or less.
    And he estimated they would be able to survive for up to ten years.
    So, considering that there were only five of them in the Restricted Area, he drew the conclusion that they could get by for another century.
    If ‘getting by’ was all they had in mind.
    Mitts dressed himself in one of the many hand-me-down shirts his father had passed to him. He liked to wear them with a plain white t-shirt underneath, and with the sleeves rolled up to just above his elbow. Then he would leave the first few buttons undone too.
    His mother had done a good job adjusting some of his father’s jeans. Before, when his father had first passed Mitts clothes for him to wear, he had walked about the Compound dragging the cuffs of the trousers all over the floors.
    Mitts stepped into the kitchen and was, at once, overwhelmed by the sweet smell of something delicious cooking in one of the ovens.
    Already, Mitts could taste the congealing, powdered eggs and butter, the rising flour, catching at the back of his throat.
    All those smells, they reminded him of how things had been before.
    Of happier times . . .
    The air was warmed by the ovens. Mitts undid a couple more buttons of his shirt, so he further exposed the plain t-shirt he wore underneath.
    His father and Floo were sat at the large kitchen table, playing Snap with a well-thumbed deck of cards. Like always, Floo was wearing one of the dresses which their mother had sewn together from odds and ends. This one, Mitts could tell, had been salvaged from one—or several —pairs of jeans.
    Though Mitts’s mother’s earlier efforts had seemed a little shabby, she had got better with practice.
    Much better than his father , in any case.
    His father hadn’t changed his dress style in the seven years they’d been living in the Compound.
    To be fair, though, there really hadn’t been much opportunity for fashion experimentation—not for any of them.
    That all might be changing soon, though.
    If Mitts had his way.
    If everything went to plan.
    When Mitts glanced over to the oven, he saw his mother. A well-stained black apron was tied on tight about the front of her grey-blue, blouse.
    Underneath, she wore a pair of well-adjusted jeans which—Mitts couldn’t help noticing—bulged just a little at the seams.
    Over the years, all of them had seemed to embrace the Compound.
    They had all got a touch chubbier.
    It wasn’t like there was any exercise to be had, beyond running through the corridors.
    And since it was so easy to get bored, they sometimes ate as entertainment.
    Even Mitts seemed to have gained weight, though he tried to convert whatever fat stuck to him into muscle. He performed incessant press-ups, sit-ups, and those aforementioned runs through the corridors of the Restricted Area.
    Mitts’s mother looked back at him.
    She coloured a touch—blushing.
    “Oh,” she said, and then turned around to look at Mitts’s father and Floo. “We weren’t expecting you to be up and about so early.”
    Mitts guessed his family had got so used to his teenage sleeping patterns—Mitts would often sleep in the ‘daytime’—that they could plan around him.
    Without him noticing.
    What other top-secret operations might his family have planned without his knowledge?
    Whatever they were—if they did exist at all—they surely couldn’t be a patch on what he had planned . . .
    Although Mitts understood, from the books he read, that parents had a habit of calling teenagers out for sleeping in all day, his parents never did.
    He wondered if it might have something to do with his ‘condition’.
    With how he had seemingly ‘got