Other shoppers recoiled, anxious to get away from Winnie. She swept around and glared at each and every one of them, coals of rage smoldering behind her eyes. Convinced she would not be challenged, she picked up the Quaker Oats containers and held them high, defiantly before her, for all to see. “Mine,” she screamed. “Mine!”
Winnie circled the store, a panther in the aisles, trying to cool down her boiling blood. There was little to be had on the shelves, so she slipped through a storeroom double door and wandered into the supply hub of the business. No one paid her a bit of attention. As she rambled among the three-pallet-high racking system, she got the impression that the market was suffering from chronic anemia. Such spaces were always crammed with product, but not today. The steel stock racks, standing in the cold light of a few naked light bulbs, looked like skeleton bone. Wooden pallets that foods were shipped on were empty and lay scattered about in heaps.
The agent’s cell phone jangled. Winnie jumped and chirped, the jingle startling her so. She flipped the lid on the device and uttered a flat salutation.
“Where are you, Winnie?” one of her superiors at Midlands Research Group broke through.
“I’m just off 1-29 north, at the Platte Harvest Bounty super trying to pick up a few things. It’s chaos here.”
“Never mind. Can you get home?”
“Sure, why?”
“Can you go on-line and see if you can tap into Mid-Continent Consolidated. It’s a 350,000-square-foot consolidated warehouse business. They are out near the International Airport, at Ferrelview. I don’t know if their data operations are there, but that’s immaterial.”
“What do you need?”
“Mid-Continent is a big food distribution player.”
“Are they a client of ours?”
“Yes. Mid-Continent serves major supermarket customers all over the heartland.”
“So it’s a food warehouse?”
“Yes. Meat and canned goods were commandeered from the docks at gunpoint. Men in military vehicles, we’ve been told, like troop trucks; they stormed the place. The executives are convinced it was an inside job—too clean, too big, too fast. So that’s where you come in.”
“Did they provide with anything, any code I can use to get into their system?”
“Yes, Mid-Continent gave us what you’ll need. See what you can glean from the internal scheduling data, recent shipments, inventory changes, personnel on the floor and such. I’ll give you more details when you get home.”
Winnie swept her wiry hair to one side. “A food heist. God, I can’t quite believe it”
“Well, believe it. Food’s the next big black market gig, Winnie. Food!”
Chapter Seventy
In the flat light of early dawn, the Blackfoot band crawled from their tents to find an utterly formless world beneath the trees. Most had spent a wretched night coughing, shivering to ward off the night’s chill and trying to banish demons of fear from their thoughts. Fatigue and hunger hollowed out every facial feature. Eyes ran with moisture, cutting furrows of ash mud down each cheek. Nostrils were ringed with gray crust.
White Elk saw nothing but corpses standing before him. He could imagine their misery, though they had little choice but to shunt pain aside. He had to rally the many. The key was time. It would only be a matter of hours, he calculated, before the band would reach the stranded elk. Then there would be real work to do, food to eat, and a chance to salvage their lives.
Saying nothing, the elder turned and left the tribe members, grabbed a travois, hoisted it up and fastened himself into its harness. Without looking back, he turned toward the mountain and paced out of the glade. In silence, everyone watched White Elk perform his little duties and walk away to the northwest, travois in tow. If the old man could continue on, there could be no dallying for the rest.
Two hours out from camp, the slopes of Chief Mountain turned in an arc to the west under the near-vertical north face of the peak. The Blackfoot trudged up a long incline, leaving the Otatso watershed. The band, moving in clear air, mounted a low height of land and descended into the valley of the east branch of Lee Creek. They could sense they were nearing their destination.
The Blackfoot toiled in stands of trees for several hours over the last miles until the forest trunks began to thin out. They were on the approach to the boundary of the short grass prairie when at last they reached the banks of the east branch of Lee Creek. The waters ran milky in color, saturated with volcanic residue, but the rivulet was inviting. Many slid down the ash slopes to the narrow stream and immersed their heads in the bone-jarring cold fluid to wash away the encrustation accumulated on the trek.
The party had oriented perfectly, intersecting the east branch as required rather than aiming too high up the mountain slopes, missing the stream altogether and picking up the middle branch instead. The scouts had said the elk were on the east branch at the point where the mountain’s outrun slopes vanished in the flats of the open plains. The herd, they reported, would be stranded in the last stands of trees before the grasslands commenced.
White Elk calculated that the tribe would have no more than a thousand feet or two to walk alongside the stream banks before they reached their quarry. Several of the members, eager to get to the elk, stood looking for a sign from him. White Elk simply pointed along the creek. “Leave your travois here for now. Go see what you can find.”
A few young men and women, all gaunt with hunger, dropped their burdens and hustled away on their snowshoes as fast as they could muster. White Elk and the others collected themselves and shuffled downstream. In the first sharp bend in the creek, the tribe members stopped. In the stream, the lead group was investigating the carcass of a large animal stranded on a gravel bar. It was a young elk, a female. The Blackfoot tried to raise its head, but the creature was as rigid as timber.
White Elk scrambled down the bank of the creek, groaning from the pain in his knees. He strode to the downed animal and ran his fingers along its lips and gums. They were as white as bone. Reaching into his parka, the old man fished for a small hunting knife, removed it from its sheath, and grasped it firmly in one hand. The eyes of the men and women in the stream were riveted on their elder to see what he would do with the cold dead beast.
White Elk knelt beside the stiff animal and plunged the blade into the lower belly of the creature. He pulled the blade out half way, rotated it to a shallow angle, and pulled up. The skin of the lower abdomen of the elk unzipped. White Elk continued until the entire belly was breached up to the rib cage. The man plunged his head down into the cavity and sniffed repeatedly.
“What do you see?” asked one of the young men.
White Elk nodded slowly, in thought. “This animal has been dead for some time. But it died here in the stream. The freezing nights and the cold water have done well to keep the meat fresh, I think.”
“How do you know this, old man?”
“Open the belly of any animal after it has been dead a short time and the smell will drive you away. You can’t stand it, unless it has been very cold at the time of death. In the water, the animal cooled down very quickly.”
White Elk handed the knife to a young woman kneeling at the head of the creature. He made a gesture for her to slice into the neck and to cut away a hank of meat. Without a second’s delay, the young woman did just that, craving a chuck of flesh away from the animal’s neck the size of a man’s fist. She handed it to the elder. White Elk brought it to his nose and again he sniffed. He nodded. Examining the tissues with his fingers, he nodded again.
“What, old man, what?” called out one of the men.