At that point, the plan was for Bart and Jimmy to return the following day, park the truck closer, and this time pack it full of supplies. On his way out the door, Jimmy stopped and shook my hand.
“Aiden, what you did today was incredible. You’re either one tough son-of-a-bitch or batshit crazy.”
“Maybe both,” I said.
Then Jimmy and Bart took their boxes and disappeared into the darkness, promising to return the following afternoon.
But I didn’t see Jimmy again for four days, and by then Bart and Marie were both dead.
TWENTY-NINE
As Ed and I sat on the floor and shoveled canned chicken into our mouths (oh how heavenly it tasted), Anthony explained the layout of the DC.
The entire campus, he said, totaled a million square feet, though three hundred thousand of that had been sealed off by the time we arrived. The restricted area was the Perishables building, which stood three stories high and was the first building we’d seen from the road. On Friday, when the first families arrived, they harvested as much fresh fruit and vegetables as they could and then locked the doors. No one had been over there since. Anthony spoke of the place in hushed tones, as if the building were haunted, but his fear was well-founded. Before the power went out, the Perishables building had functioned as a giant refrigerator, its interior held at a constant 37 degrees Fahrenheit. A hundred thousand pounds of rotting meat, ill-contained, was an ecological disaster waiting to happen. No one was allowed near the doors.
Paige’s shift on the roof ended when it was too dark to see, and in her place a couple of men were assigned to ground-level positions. When Anthony asked one of us to volunteer, Ed and I glared at each other until he finally relented. A little while later, Paige offered to give me a tour of the dry goods warehouse, which was my new home.
She led us by Tiki torch into the darkness, turning first right and then left. She was wearing a purple TCU T-shirt and a snug pair of jeans. In the flickering light I could see she was very fit but curvy at the hips, which is the most important place to be curvy.
Paige explained the DC’s design, how much of the building ran on automation, but that wasn’t why I had asked for the tour.
“Is there somewhere we could sit down? I could use time to digest all that chicken.”
We were walking between two rows of giant shelving units whose gridlike skeletons disappeared into the darkness above us. When we reached the end of one, Paige balanced the torch inside a corner support column. Then we sat down on the concrete floor, our knees mere inches apart.
“So your name is Aiden?”
“Yes,” I said and extended my hand to her.
“I should thank you for before,” she said as we shook. “For being friendly after what I did.”
“They were pals of Jimmy’s. I didn’t really know them.”
“Still,” she said. “I killed three men and I feel awful. It’s hard to believe this is the world now.”
I liked the intense way she looked at me.
“Do you regret shooting them?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course I regret it.”
She stared at me and I stared back at her.
“Because I wouldn’t.”
She looked away from me, at something in the darkness, and the flickering torch lit her face in amber hues.
“It’s true I had no choice. Our defense couldn’t match those weapons.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“I’m talking about how it felt.”
“It felt like my life was in danger,” she barked. “That’s how it felt. I couldn’t let your guy set up the grenade launcher and take shots at us.”
The conversation did not proceed the way I expected. Others had probably heard us.
But I was convinced Paige was hiding her real feelings about the matter from me.
And maybe from herself.
That first night I slept on a couple of cheap, fuzzy blankets that barely cushioned me from the concrete floor. At some unknown hour I woke with an emergency need to have a bowel movement and was directed to an employee bathroom so far away from our campsite that I nearly didn’t make it. Imagine sitting on a cheap commercial toilet in a tiny stall while holding a bug torch to keep the darkness at bay. Certainly the experience was a far cry from what I was accustomed to in my own home, where I had installed a heated toilet seat and could use my phone to browse Tinder profiles to my heart’s content. At least someone had thought to grab a case of wet wipes from the warehouse floor. The wipes were individually wrapped, and printed on the label of each were these instructions: TEAR, UNFOLD AND WIPE, DUDE. ALSO SWEET FOR FACE, HANDS, PITS & DUDE REGIONS. Leaving aside the missing Oxford commas, which already was a crime against humanity, I wondered how the losers behind Dude Wipes felt about their super hip labeling now that flushing the toilet meant pouring a gallon of water into the tank. Because the world would no longer tolerate bad taste and frivolous marketing. It was a serious, deadly place where only the strongest were meant to survive.
In the morning, Ed and the others returned from overnight guard duty and found themselves a place to sleep. I spoke to Anthony about how much fresh water was being wasted in the toilets, so he asked Deion and Mike to dig a latrine on the back lawn. Then he took me outside, where we walked in the direction of Perishables. Layers of sunrise smoke hovered near the ground like fog. The murmuring of the crowd floated above us, disembodied and restless, mixing with the screech in my ears to produce a vivid sense of being observed. As if I had stepped onto the stage in front of a studio audience.
Even though the Perishables building was locked, there was an entrance road nearby that had drawn a crowd on the other side of the chain link fence. The lookout point, instead of a fuel tank, was the check-in station for arriving tractor-trailers. People in the crowd began to shout as we approached.
“Come on, now. Some of us have been waiting here for two days. Have some mercy, man!”
“My baby hasn’t eaten since Friday and we have nowhere else to go!”
“This is America. We don’t turn our backs on the needy!”
Anthony looked at the ground and spoke to me in a low voice.
“Don’t acknowledge them. We engaged a few yesterday and it went poorly.”
“What did you say?”
“That our duty was to Walmart. That we can’t hand out inventory without a directive from Bentonville.”
“Bet that went over like a load of bricks.”
When we reached the check-in station, a tired-looking man met us at the bottom of the steps. He eyed my gun and extended his hand to shake.
“I’m Emmitt,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Aiden. So what’s it like out here at night? Do the people go home?”
“Some do, some don’t. But there’s more coming all the time. Yesterday they was all down at the east end, but now we got people over here, too. I keep telling them Perishables is locked down, but it’s like they don’t believe me. Like we got magic cooling units that run on fairy dust.”
“That building wasn’t refrigerated!” someone at the fence line yelled.
I looked over and spotted the man, who was wearing jean shorts, penny loafers, and a button-down shirt meant to look like the U.S. flag. Perched upon his head was a red cap with the words MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN embroidered in white. His fingers were hooked through the fence and his face hovered between his hands.
“You don’t refrigerate a warehouse three stories tall!” he crowed. “Think about the power bill. It don’t make no sense!”