He isn't the sort of man who becomes a vegetarian, not if he's been able to cut off the bird's head, hold the body snug and still while the blood drains into the bucket, and still want to eat. The outbreak could account for two and a half years of no chicken dinners; that much is the same for everyone, and is how she can manage to hold onto her own appetite even as she carefully makes her way down the slapdash stairs that were constructed to get in and out of the vintage trailer with ease, improvised scalding tank in her oven-mitt-clad hands.
The biggest of the pots inside the tiny kitchen sizzles as she sets it on the dusty ground, and Willa uses a set of salad utensils to push the bird down into the meager depths, boiling water spilling over from displacement until most of the chicken is submerged. Three and a half years. Either he's prone to hyperbole - she knows it to be true, even from their limited interactions - or something had kept him from something as simple as walking into a grocery store, or any fast food restaurant, or...
Hawkins.
Click, goes Willa's memory.
Her skin prickles, and it doesn't have anything to do with the dusk that is creeping up from the horizon around them.
"Did Bode tell you what I did, before all of this?" she asks, heart struggling to settle down as she looks at him, listens to him lie. Green at least had been off-duty; it had been spoken of often during her lunchbreaks, back in the Academy. "For a living I mean, back in Harlan? I was a vet." Once a minute's passed she upends the pot slowly, pouring the pink-tinged water away from her dinner companion. Steam rises up wherever the trickle travels, like the dry earth is being coaxed into a freshly-drawn tub; quenched and sated by water and blood both. "Large animal. I started out hating whenever I had to put something down; you feel like you're playing God or taking away life, and most of the time it's from someone who took care of them, and loved them, maybe raised them even. But then after a while -" Willa pushes her own hair back from her face with the back of her forearm not covered by the quilted mitt, "after a while I could see how it was better, how I was taking away their pain, giving them an end to what was going to be a long time suffering."
Her toe nudges the pot, and a guilty grin just barely toys with the corners of her mouth. "S'why I made you do it. She wasn't suffering any, I just wanted a good dinner."