“We should go,” he said, looking into the gloom.
“Why?”
“We just need to go. Now.”
“Johnny, they’re gone. They’re just kids.”
He turned his head slowly to me, up to meet my face. “Okay.” His voice told me he wasn’t convinced but that he’d follow my lead anyway.
He flung the rock by the baggie knot down the corridor of boxes and pallets. It landed with a crack on the cement and rested there in the murk. We both looked at it as we might bait tossed into calm water we knew teemed under the surface.
A car horn blared. Its bursts came uneven. Not a car alarm. We realized the coordinates: outside, out front, our car.
As we ran, I thought I heard a rush of feet in the store running with us, in other parts of the store, as if we were in a footrace to get there. It could have been blood moving through my ears, my breath tearing through my throat hot with panic.
I was way ahead of Johnny when I got to the door to find my car not surrounded by people with mouthfuls of crystal-spit, but dogs. About ten of them. They were in a group and all wore collars. Domesticated dogs on a grand lark. A mélange of labs and shepherds and pit mixes, save for one little lap dog with long, well-coifed hair. When I bounded out the door, they spazzed and scattered with their tails tucked. They regrouped out in the parking lot and looked at us. The coifed dog yapped. The rest deferred to it, seeming content to let it do the talking.
I went to the car. “What happened? Why’d you honk?”
“The dogs,” Kodie said, still leaning over the front seat. She got out, again holding her bat at its middle with one hand. “Dammit, that scared me.”
“They’re just lost, running around. You scared of dogs?”
Johnny’s slapping footsteps came to a halt behind me. Kodie’s head snapped to him.
“No. No, I…” Eyes on Johnny, then me, drawing the connection. “I love dogs, grew up with them…”
“So?”
“So. That,” she pointed to them. The dogs mingled, panted and watched us discuss them. “That is a pack. A pack of dogs is different. Packs… of anything are dangerous. Of anything.” Do you follow my meaning? her look said.
“Packs of gum aren’t,” I said.
“Shut up,” she said as she stepped up and hugged me, looking at Johnny over my shoulder. “I freaked. Sorry. They came careening around that end of the strip straight at me. That’s what was so weird. Just straight as an arrow.”
“Did they Cujo the car?” I thought of the little dog in the car in front of the coffee shop, its gnashing and spittle on the glass.
“They got to the car and then kind of sniffed around. One of them went up to the store door and when it slid open it jumped back. I honked to get rid of them, not to call you. Sorry.”
“We’re jumpy,” I said. “All nerves, fight or flight. And hungry. Bad combo.”
I understood her. And it was more than just being jumpy. It’s different now, I thought. Everything takes on a different cast, because the context is radically different. Common things, things we used to associate with good feelings, can seem a threat—children grouped in a room like in any preschool; dogs running with happy tongues flapping—and all the fears we used to experience have been replaced with the terror of the mundane, the things we took for granted, the not-scary things, like one’s brother coming up behind you.
There are no more serial killers or fatal car crashes to fear, and any virus moving between people has its work cut out for it now. But there’s the wind, the children, tall empty buildings with elevators cruising up and down empty. And the night. That primordial fear embedded in the DNA. The great world will spin and the dark would come soon enough.
“This is your brother?” Kodie asked. “Johnny, is it?” she asked, looking at him and trying to smile.
“Yeah. And he’s going to stay with us now, aren’t you?” I lifted my eyebrows at him. He nodded sheepishly and waved at Kodie.
Trying to cheer her up, I said, “Hey, let’s go back in and shop. Get some beers? One of those little kegs?”
“You think it’s wise to be boozing it up tonight?”
“Beer’s not booze. How can it hurt? It’ll just be us.”
“And Johnny.”
“And Johnny.”
Kodie said, “And everyone still alive out there, with no police, no army.”
“You know there’s nobody,” I said.
“We don’t know this. Let’s go with what we know which is we need to get food, drop it off at your place, and then figure out a way to contact people. Get a CB radio. Go to a radio station and figure out how to broadcast. Something. We need to drive around to see what’s what. We need to try to make contact. We’re alive, so there must be others. We’re just really spread apart.”
“All right.” I agreed we had to try to establish contact. I couldn’t yet say out loud that reconstructing the old world would be futile. The dark smiling teeth of my summerdreams had such power over me. Whatever they communicated, I believed, though I didn’t want to.
“What we need to do is settle down,” I continued, “get back and take a breath, eat and think. Let the shock wear off a little. I’m not sure time is of the essence here. What we don’t want to do is make a false move out of panic.”
Kodie nodded at this. “You’re right.”
I continued, “Now… I hate to say this, but we do need to get weapons after we get the food here. We can go right up here to McBride’s.” Kodie’s one of the most peaceful and kind people I’d ever known, but she nodded at the concept of acquiring weapons. I wondered if McBride’s had already been raided and stripped bare. I hoped that it had been because that would be evidence of life, of a will to survive existing in others.
The dogs still hung out, looking at us look at them. The fear of the pack lingered in Kodie’s eyes.
“Hey, Johnny, see if can you get those dogs to take off. They’re bugging Kodie.”
Pleased to be of use, Johnny started walking in the direction of the dogs. The sitting dogs stood. All watched him with their ears perked, frozen, and they stayed that way until Johnny had claimed half the distance to them and put his hands up in the air like a monster coming to get them. He lifted his hands and he roared and they ducked and bolted across Lamar, which on any other day would have plowed them all to pieces. They sprinted down the street toward Medical Parkway. I could still see them as they veered left like track dogs, heads bobbing, neck and neck toward the hospital.
There were bodies at McBride’s Guns. My guess is that when the smartphones resting on nightstands in pitch-black rooms concussed with texts and calls, lots of people ran down to the gun store to stock up, and then whatever was to befall them—the white stuff, suicide—befell them.
These piles over the bodies, these cairns, were the same shape and size as the others we’d seen. Just enough stone and debris to cover the corpse, forming a pyramidal shape. Johnny walked up to the suicide. I could tell he wanted to remove a rock to see, but he thought better of it. They had come, they had piled on the stones but didn’t take the gun away, just an artifact of the old world to be left alone.
Inside was different. Ron, by the name tag, lay on his back between displays, the white hardened into something that looked like crystal. If it wasn’t issuing from a man’s throat, and if Ron didn’t have his eyes locked on the ceiling as if his doom resided there, I’d even say it was beautiful, something you’d see behind glass in a dark room with a single spot on it. We found four more, all men. Over in knives, one had knocked over a display and a few switchblades had sprung open upon impact. He had died of the white. So had another, also an employee, lying behind the long counter with racks of guns lining the wall. Bullets were all around him on the floor and up on the glass counter.