The road extended beyond their house, up into the hills. Annie didn’t know where it ended: possibly Narnia. She never tried finding out.
To get to the grocery store meant going back down the dirt road to a left on Liberty, then a trip through farmland—staying north of the traffic on Patience and Spaceship Road—until reaching Durgin Ave. Durgin went east-west across the northern part of Sorrow Falls, hooking up (indirectly) with the north end of Main. It would have been a viable route for Annie to take on her bike if she wanted to avoid the mess caused by Shippie, but Durgin was a narrow, shoulderless road people treated like a highway. Legally, she could have biked on it. Intellectually, it seemed a foolish idea.
At the western edge of Sorrow Falls, right off of Durgin, was a shopping plaza that had a Super Shopper; a chain pizza place everyone despised and still ate at; a home goods store; and an empty storefront that used to have a steak house, and still had a lot of the signage up for it.
The plaza was kind of typical for the region, which was to say it was a pavement-heavy consumer oasis that made everyone a little sad about capitalism. The Super Shopper was the largest grocer in the area, though, and while the locals had a lot of good things to say about farm stand produce—of which there was a lot—most of them got the bulk of their goods (food and otherwise) at the Super.
Annie knew it well. Carol hadn’t been strong enough to make a proper meal more than a couple of times a week for a year or two, but she was strong enough to shop at least one Saturday a month, so on that Saturday she and Annie stocked up on frozen food, canned food, food that came in kits requiring only water and perhaps the addition of ground beef, and so on. It was all processed foods all the time: the anti-macrobiotic diet.
Violet and Annie ended up filling a shopping cart with the kind of goods that only made sense for a frat house freezer, and then Violet paid for all of it, which was incredibly embarrassing. There was cash sitting in a box in Carol’s bedroom, and that money was for exactly this situation, but Annie forgot all about getting it before leaving. She still couldn’t believe she wasn’t going to be spending the night in her own bed, which may have been part of the problem.
Annie didn’t recognize Dougie at all until he said hello while bagging their one-week supply of tater tots.
“How’s it going?” he said, with that half-nod guys their age thought was cool and affecting. It was almost a shrug, almost a nod, almost nothing at all, as if to say I do not wish to expend the effort to fully acknowledge you but I can do this.
“Oh, hey!” Annie said. “I didn’t recognize you, sorry!”
He smiled and rubbed his hand over his head. It was not, as claimed by the gossipers of the Oakdale Experience, a completely shaven head. He had stubble up there. It was army-standard crew cut, more or less. Still, it was a very different look.
Doug Kozinsky—Dougie—was the same age as Annie, and in a lot of ways was a kindred spirit, in that he was a town kid of limited means, eclectic tastes and above-average intellect. But where Annie could merge with just about any clique, Dougie could barely handle eye contact. She knew him pretty well because his dad was a long-haul trucker for Hollis, and worked either with or under Annie’s father. Growing up, when her dad and Carol and Annie did things together like going to family barbecues and whatnot, they usually ended up with Dougie’s family. That made them bona fide ‘childhood friends’.
They no longer hung out, which was more of a reflection of the change in Annie’s family dynamic than in anything Dougie did or didn’t do. She was pretty sure he saw it differently, but there was little she could do about that. She always said hi, and took the time to chat with him when he was around, and that was a lot more than most.
“What do you think?” he asked, regarding the haircut.
She thought he was spending too much time idolizing the local army men.
Rude, she wrote in her imaginary sociology field notes.
“Looks good!”
“Thanks.”
He blushed. Dougie was an extremely white young man, and with his light brown hair no longer fully disguising his scalp it was possible to answer the question: does blushing happen over the whole head or just the face? (The answer: yes, the whole head can blush.)
Violet finished paying, and Dougie finished bagging and placing the bags in the cart. Annie was struggling with the question as to whether or not she should introduce him to Vi, when he grabbed Annie’s elbow.
“Hey, you have a second?” he asked.
“Sure, what’s up?” Annie’s eyes darted to the register and then along the bank of registers; communicating the obvious don’t you have work?
“I’m on break in a minute, meet me out front?”
She looked at Vi, who shrugged.
“Sure thing, Doug.”
They loaded the food in the trunk of the car and reconnoitered at the entrance. A few seconds later, Dougie appeared and quick-walked them around the corner, as he pulled out a cigarette.
“You smoke?” Annie asked.
“Yeah, you want one?” He extended the pack. Annie shook him off. He offered one to Violet, who also declined.
“So I, uh, I don’t know how up to date you are on things, but something’s definitely up with the base,” he said.
Annie considered herself remarkably up-to-date in that regard, but didn’t share.
“Yeah, how so?”
“Well here’s what I heard. I guess there was an attack the last night.”
“An… attack? What, did the Russians arrive?”
“No, no, no. On the base. Some grunt went nuts, and now he’s dead, and I think they’re covering it up.”
“How do you know this?” Violet asked.
“I know,” he said. He addressed Violet as if she had been a part of the conversation from the outset. “She knows how.”
“Doug’s house is near the base,” Annie said.
This wasn’t a fully adequate explanation, but it was okay for the moment. A more complete version of the story would be to say that Dougie’s back yard terminated at the army base fence on one side and at the fence to the Winterhill graveyard on the other side. According to some of the more reputable gossip, Dougie also spent an unreasonable amount of time hijacking army radio frequencies and taking notes about what he heard. A couple of years ago he got in a little trouble for marching along the perimeter of the base and pretending he was a soldier too. It would have been cute if he was still eight—they’d both played “army” when they were eight, coincidentally in the same field that now housed the base—but he was doing this at fourteen.
“So what do you think’s going on?” Annie asked. She did not, truly, think anything was, but he did, and that was what counted for the moment.
“Space flu,” he said.
“I’m sorry, space… flu?” Vi asked.
“It’s what they call it when… never mind, I’ll explain later,” Annie said.
“Yeah, I think it’s starting to affect them, like, badly. What I hear, this guy went nutso in the barracks, and they ended up choking him or something. He was trying to kill people with his bare hands.”
“So we should be thankful the space flu hasn’t inspired anybody to use their service revolver, you’re thinking.”
“I’m dead serious, Annie, you should be careful. They’re already talking about a change in their training protocols. They’re also tightening things. Altering shifts and stuff. This morning they were running drills on the base I haven’t seen them run since the base went up. The bad kind of drills, like, suppression fire, crowd control, those sorts of things. I think things’ve been changing for a while only we didn’t really notice. Do you know Tina?”