“Say,” Emmitt said to me. “That’s a nice weapon you have. Think I could use it at night? Beats the hell out of this hunting rifle.”
I’d resented my semi-automatic weapon since it had been assigned to me, but suddenly I was possessive of it. Still, being able to loan the rifle to someone else made me feel important.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
After Emmitt left, Anthony and I climbed into the check-in station. It was about the size of a kid’s tree house and windowed on three sides. Since we could talk without being heard, I asked Anthony how he planned to control the crowd as it grew larger.
“Would you ever hand out food, at least to the especially needy?”
“Aren’t all of them especially needy?”
Maybe they were. I couldn’t have cared less. The only reason to give them anything was as a defense strategy.
“What about children only? Or some kind of lottery?”
“All that would do,” Anthony said, “is create a situation of Haves and Have Nots. Where that discrepancy lives, violence follows.”
“But this whole scenario is one giant Have versus a thousand Have Nots.”
“Sure, but the DC represents order. The old way of things. They won’t attack until they’ve lost hope the world will go back to the way it was.”
Anthony was an intelligent man. You could see it in his fastidious manner and the careful way he considered his words. But he was also a hopeful man. A dreamer. Despite reality staring him in the face, he wanted to believe order would return.
“Yesterday,” he said, “I heard a helicopter in the distance. I believe it may have been a Black Hawk, the type of chopper used by the U.S. Army. Hearing this machine gave me hope the government has a plan to restore order. That they will come here to gather supplies and distribute them in a fair manner.”
“But what if that doesn’t happen?”
“Did you know Walmart owns over twenty-five percent of the entire U.S. grocery market? We run nearly 5,000 retail locations serviced by 44 grocery distribution centers. If you want to feed hungry people right away, wouldn’t this be a great place to start?”
“Or maybe if Walmart and factory farms hadn’t devoured local grocers and growers, the food supply would live closer to the people who consume it.”
“Anyway,” Anthony finally said, “Good luck. Someone will relieve you at lunchtime.”
Do you ever get the feeling you don’t exist? That the words you speak aren’t heard by others?
Eventually, I turned toward the crowd. The new star had just emerged from the horizon of trees in the east. It was no longer a discrete point of light but smeared by striated layers of smoke. Also, I noticed a light dusting of ash on the ground, as if snow had fallen the night before.
I opened the front window of my perch to let in air, and so I could point my rifle through it if needed. It wasn’t long before people began to approach the fence and lob questions in my direction.
“Sir,” a woman said. She was young and thin and disordered. Her two weepy children were under the age of five. “It’s my fault I let the grocery shopping slide. My husband and I had been fighting for three days, and after he left for Phoenix I fed my kids out of the freezer. Now I’ve got nothing, and the stores are empty, and we walked three miles to get here. My two-year-old daughter just walked three miles, and this is not even her fault. It’s my fault! Won’t you please help us?”
And it wasn’t just these two kids who were upset. Sporadic crying and yelling were common across the crowd. A few groups had put down blankets on the grass, as if digging in for the long haul. Someone opened a case I hadn’t noticed before and began to strum a guitar. All this noise was awful. My mind reeled with the chaos of it.
To focus myself, I picked out obese humans in the crowd and imagined how it would feel to point my rifle at their fat bellies.
For once in your life you deserve to be hungry! I might yell at the enormous middle-aged woman wearing a bright red T-shirt that read I’M A LUCKY DEVIL! How wonderful it would feel to shoulder my rifle and fire rounds into her sickening, bloated carcass of a body. The mewling sound of her pleas would be like musical harmonies I could punctuate with the thundering drum of my weapons fire. I imagined pumping breakbeats into her shapeless figure until she was nothing but a cooling blob of fat and meat.
Eventually, Deion came along to replace me while I went inside to get a snack. Eating in front of the crowd, as you might imagine, was strictly prohibited.
By then two of the dock doors were partially open, and visibility inside the DC was much better. I could see, in addition to the shelving units, a network of miniature elevated highways, which someone explained were conveyors that had been used to move merchandise across the warehouse. When I asked about the open dock door, and the risk of attack from someone in the trees, Mike said this:
“When Paige is on the roof, no one is worried.”
That made me think of Aaron’s stricken face, how she had killed him with a single shot from three hundred yards. With trees in the way.
“Why don’t you take her some lunch?” Mike said.
In the common area I found a jar of crunchy peanut butter and a loaf of wheat bread. I prepared sandwiches, grabbed two cans of soda, and found my way to the ladder again. It was no easy feat to climb while carrying the box of food.
“Coming up,” I yelled. “Don’t shoot.”
“I listened to you struggle the whole way,” said Paige. “You must be part turtle.”
“Good thing I brought two sandwiches because this turtle is hungry.”
Paige smirked and grabbed at her food.
“I hope this isn’t crunchy,” she said, taking a huge bite. “I hate all that gravel in my peanut butter.”
“You know that’s what it’s made from, right? Peanuts?”
“So? Coffee is made of beans, but I don’t want them rattling around my cup.”
The flirty banter was a good start, but I wanted more from her.
“Sorry about yesterday,” I said. “I was just curious—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay. But I want you to know that I would never tell anyone if—”
“You should probably head back down,” she said. “Mike could use help with that latrine.”
Paige finished the sandwich and resumed her position behind the rifle. In the distance we heard a couple of gunshots, followed by a few more.
“Imagine having to hunt for food,” she said, “after being able to buy it under cellophane your entire life. Most people have no chance. They can’t shoot well enough.”
“How did you become such a good shot?”
Paige sipped on her soda and didn’t look at me. Her father would be at the center of any answer, I guessed, and his death was still a fresh wound. But I hoped it was a wound she wished to dress.
“I was an only child,” she finally said. “And my dad obviously wanted a son. He taught me to play golf and throw a football and how to shoot. For some reason I happened to be good with a gun. In competition, I beat the shit out of dudes all over the country, so at eighteen I decided to join the Army. Being a paper puncher gets old because the targets don’t shoot back.”
Paige looked at me as if she expected judgment, but this is exactly what I wanted to hear.
“Then my dad wouldn’t let me enlist. He was an officer during the Iraq war, and what he saw over there soured him on government. We’re talking about the most conservative, grounded man I’ve ever met who came home calling George Bush a puppet and Dick Cheney a traitor. He said going to war was like pouring gasoline on a fire America was pretending to put out. That it was never about liberation or fighting terror. It was a money grab. It was a video game the Pentagon had been waiting years to play.”