by C. Gockel
Getting it all to fit was a challenge, although leaving out the anorak helped. I could always lay it down in the back of the SUV. When my gaze traveled back to the closet, where all my “fun” clothes still hung, looking a bit forlorn and abandoned, it lingered on the black dress I’d worn out for drinks on my birthday. All right, I knew there was no reason I’d ever need to wear that dress again, but I loved the way it fit, the way it seemed to follow all the curves of my body without clinging too much. But it was made of knit fabric and wouldn’t take up that much room.
Off the hanger, it did roll up into a surprisingly small ball. I tucked the dress into a corner of the suitcase and then zipped the thing closed. A sound outside on the landing made me start, but it was only Dutchie, coming up to investigate what I was doing.
“Just about done,” I told her, lugging the suitcase off the bed and picking up the lighter of the two duffle bags, the one with my underthings in it. I’d come back for the other duffle bag and my coat.
The dog ran ahead of me down the stairs, tail wagging. It seemed she knew what these preparations meant — that I’d be going in the Cherokee soon, and that meant she’d be going along as well.
I set the luggage down by the breakfast bar, then returned to my apartment and gathered up the rest of my things. Sitting on the small side table next to the couch was a wedding photo of my parents, my mother with impossible big ’80s hair but looking beautiful even so, and next to it a snapshot taken last year of the whole family at a football game, Devin wearing his shoulder pads, sweaty and grinning proudly. My heart clenched when I looked at their faces, and yet I knew I couldn’t leave them behind. What if I began to forget what they looked like?
Fighting back tears, I shoved the pictures, frames and all, into my oversized purple purse; I wasn’t sure why I was bringing it, since the backpack I was taking with the rest of the camping equipment was a lot more practical. But that purse seemed to be the last reminder of the “old” me I had — the cell phone, useless now, although a few days earlier I would have said I couldn’t have lasted more than a few hours without it; the tube of lip gloss; my wallet; stubs from movies I’d seen over the last few months; a pen and some tissue, because my mother told me I should always carry a pen and Kleenex.
And my keys. I went out onto the landing, closed the door behind me, and then locked it. I couldn’t really say why, as I doubted any survivors — if there were more besides me and the late Chris Bowman — would bother coming all the way back here to loot the apartment. Our house was one of the more modest ones on the street; there were plenty of better pickings elsewhere.
But that thought only served to depress me, as if the things my parents had worked so hard for had turned out to be worth very little in the end. The first stinging pinpricks of tears told me I’d better abandon that line of thought, as I still had a lot to do.
And maybe, just maybe, I’d feel better once I was gone and away from the place that now only served to remind me of everything I’d lost.
In the end, the Cherokee was full but not filled. I put two bottles of water in the cup holders, patted the passenger seat so Dutchie would know it was time to get in, and shut the door behind her. After that, I climbed in behind the wheel and closed my own door.
All the exertion had made my wrists start to ache again, but only slightly, which just proved some sort of supernatural healing must be going on. Not that I was going to argue. Heading out into the world while even partly incapacitated wasn’t a very good idea.
So…had my unseen guardian speeded up my healing process so my injuries wouldn’t slow down my departure?
I didn’t know how I should feel about that.
No point in brooding over it now, though. I was just glad that I was able to back out of the driveway without my wrists or hands hurting too much. Today, although the sky was mainly blue, I could see clouds beginning to drift in from the northeast. I hoped they didn’t indicate some kind of weather was on the way; bad enough that the voice expected me to head out of town in a direction of his choosing without having to handle driving in heavy rain as well.
He — or it — had been conspicuously silent so far this morning. It could simply be that he had no reason to intervene while I was packing, since I was already doing his bidding by prepping to get out of Albuquerque.
The local Walgreens was around a half mile from my house. Its parking lot backed up to a middle school, and it felt stranger than strange to get out of the SUV and not see a bunch of kids running around on the soccer field and the track. At least it was far enough away that I couldn’t tell if those fields had little piles of gray dust scattered around on them. No, I realized they probably wouldn’t, as the schools had been closed down fairly quickly…not that it had made much of a difference in the end.
As I approached the drugstore, I saw that the front doors had been smashed in. Glass was strewn everywhere. My hackles went up, and I almost reached back and pulled out the Glock, which I’d tucked into my waistband. The whole incident with Chris Bowman had put me more than a little on edge, and I’d decided to drive with the gun on me. The S&W was way too big for that, though, so I’d gone with the Glock. It would still flatten someone, especially if I hit them with multiple rounds.
But as I entered the store, glass crunching under my hiking boots, it seemed the place was deserted enough. Dark, too — I supposed I should have been expecting that, but in my mind’s eye the Walgreens was always brightly lit, blazing with fluorescent illumination. I paused by the checkout counter, which was close enough to the door that I could see what I was doing, and plucked one of the keychain flashlights off the display there. Not as good as my father’s Maglite, which was buried deep in the cargo area of the car, but it would do.
I turned on the flashlight, grabbed a cart, and made my way to the back of the store where the pharmacy was located. All around me, I could see evidence of looting — empty shelves, racks overturned, aisles filled with discarded bags of Doritos, rolls of toilet paper, kids’ toys. My heart sank. If so much had been taken, what would be left for me to collect?
As it turned out, not a heck of a lot.
There were still some generic medications left in the first aid aisle — ibuprofen, allergy remedies, sore throat lozenges. I grabbed boxes haphazardly and threw them into the cart I’d picked up at the front of the store, figuring something was better than nothing. All was chaos behind the pharmacy counter. I didn’t know if all those items had been taken by people who were sick and trying desperately to alleviate their symptoms, or whether any survivors had realized there was a lot of heavy-duty stuff here just ripe for the picking.
Pretty much anything with an opiate in it was gone, I realized as I ran the flashlight’s beam over the shelves. I could forget about easing the pain of armageddon with a little Oxycontin. All of the high-powered stuff was gone, except for one bottle of codeine-laced cough syrup high on a shelf. I took that, figuring it might come in handy.
The antibiotics were also ransacked, although I found a couple of bottles of tetracycline. Old school, but it would still work just fine for an infected wound or a bout of bronchitis. They got added to the growing pile in the cart.
A lot of the medications had names I didn’t even recognize, so I passed all those by. What I really wanted was the birth control pills, and I found those when I went around a corner, on a set of shelves that were a little disorganized but mainly intact. It made sense; most people probably weren’t thinking of family planning when they were being beaten down by the modern-day equivalent of a Biblical plague.
A small sigh of relief escaped my lips when I found the Ortho-Novum, and I gathered up every little packet they had. Enough to last me for a year, from the looks of it. After that, well…I’d worry about that then.
Like you’re really going to be alive a year from now.
I pushed that thought out of my head. Two days ago, I was sure I’d be dead along with everyone else, and yet here I still was. Never say die.
Mouth tightening, I moved the flashlight I carried over the shelves once more to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. The problem was, I didn’t get sick all that often, and even when I did, regular over-the-counter stuff worked just fine for me. I could be leaving something valuable behind here and wouldn’t even know it.
You can’t take everything, I told myself. Anyway, it was creepy in here, blundering around in the dark with only a single small flashlight to relieve the gloom. Better for me to just cut my losses and get out. It wasn’t as if there wouldn’t be more drugstores between here and…wherever I was going.
That thought reassured me somewhat, so I stepped out from behind the counter and made my way two aisles over, where the feminine products were located. I didn’t pay attention to brand or type, but just tossed boxes of tampons and packages of maxi pads into the cart until I was almost out of room. That should do me for a while, and I still needed to see if anything edible had been left behind.
I began walking toward the far left of the store, where I knew the food was located. Anything in the refrigerated case would be spoiled — and I was glad the doors were all shut, as otherwise the smell probably would have been nasty as hell — but there could still be chips and crackers and cookies, probably some beef jerky and other things of that ilk as well.
Not the healthiest of diets, but sometimes you had to take what you could get.
Figuring I should try to pick up some food for Dutchie as well, I stopped at the aisle where the drugstore usually stocked dog treats and a few brands of dry and canned food — not the stuff I would have chosen to feed her under ideal circumstances, but it would have been better than nothing. However, for some strange reason, those shelves were completely picked over. I even skidded on some scattered pellets of dry food before I regained my balance and glanced down to see that a big bag of Purina had been torn open, its contents scattered across the floor.
Muttering a curse, I left that aisle and went to the snack food section, which was in slightly better shape, and started gathering up what I could. By the time I’d dropped a couple of packets of beef jerky and a box of Ritz crackers on top of the pile in my basket, it was full, and I figured I needed to get going. It was almost noon, according to the watch I’d fished out of my nightstand and strapped on my wrist. A while back I’d almost stopped wearing watches, since I could just look at my phone, but now the watch was the only thing telling me what time it actually was. Yes, I had the clock in the Cherokee, but that only helped when I was driving.
I’d just passed the checkout counter — trying to quash my very real sensation of guilt over walking out with a bunch of stuff I hadn’t paid for — when a shadow filled the doorway. Almost without thinking, I reached back for the Glock tucked into my waistband. Yes, Chris Bowman was still dead and gone, but all sorts of predators could still be out there. Or at least as many as the Heat had allowed to survive.
Then my eyes adjusted, and I saw the shadow was that of a man, probably in his late forties, smiling at me nervously.
“I’m sorry I startled you,” he said, seeming to take note of how I remained rooted in the spot where I’d stopped by the checkout. “It’s just — I haven’t seen anyone else alive for two days. I thought I was the only one.”
“There are a couple of us, I think,” I responded. He looked pretty harmless, with his thinning dark hair and worried eyes, but I was still wary. “I never heard anything about the mortality rate. Everything went so…fast.”
He nodded, his gaze traveling to the cart in front of me and then back up to my face. I stiffened, worried I’d see the same sort of predatory stare that Chris Bowman had given me, but this stranger only seemed relieved that he wasn’t the only living person left in Albuquerque. “It was 99.8 percent. Or at least that was what the reports said.”
“Reports?” I asked. “What reports?”
“Not on the news,” he said. “I worked in the emergency-management bureau downtown. Those were the latest figures we got before everything just…stopped. By then there were only two of us left out of a team of twenty-seven, and Lydia died soon afterward. There was no way to let anyone know…not that there was anyone left to know, I suppose.”
“There were a few of us.” I had to stop then, the enormity of it threatening to overwhelm me. With a mortality rate like that, it meant there were maybe two thousand people left in Albuquerque. That sounded like a lot, until you realized there used to be almost a million people living in and around the city center. “But you’re right — I suppose it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. It’s not as if we could have stopped it.”
“No,” he agreed, his features drooping even more.
“So….” I went on, not sure where I was supposed to go from here. It was pretty clear that the voice meant for me to leave Albuquerque alone, but now that I’d met a survivor, could I simply leave him behind? He appeared to be harmless. “Do you live around here?”
The man gave a vague gesture over his shoulder, toward the west. “Off Chavez Road.”
That wasn’t too far from where we stood. No wonder he’d come foraging over here. “Your first time out and around…after?”
A nod. “I didn’t know if it would be safe, but I started to run out of things, and this was the closest store….”
“There’s plenty left,” I assured him. “The looters kind of tore the place up, but they didn’t steal all the Doritos. I’d probably go to a grocery store if you really want something decent to eat, though.”
“That was my plan after this, but I could walk here, so I figured I’d come here first.” For the first time his eyes took on a certain glint, one I wasn’t sure I liked. “That your Cherokee out there?”
There wasn’t any point in denying it. For all I knew, he’d seen me pull up and get out of the SUV. “Yes.”
“Leaving town?”
A flicker of unease went over me. “I was thinking about it,” I hedged.
To my surprise, he didn’t seem that put off by my reply. “That might be a good idea. It might be safer where there aren’t as many survivors. People are going to get desperate.”
They already have, I thought, recalling the way Chris Bowman had broken into my house. Then again, that was a special case of one highly obsessed nut job. The survivors in Albuquerque would probably be a lot more interested in getting supplies than getting into my pants.
“So what are you going to do?” I asked, trying to shift the conversation away from me and my plans.
“I’m not sure. I figured food was the first step. After that?” He shrugged, then offered me a faint smile. “Right now, it’s just kind of good to hear another voice.”
I almost agreed with him, except I had been hearing a man’s voice in my head for the past few days. So what if the jury was still out as to whether that voice was real or not?
“Well, I don’t want to leave my dog sitting in the car too long,” I said, since it seemed to me that the man wouldn’t mind standing here and chatting all day, if it meant he didn’t have to be by himself.
He looked startled by the non sequitur, but then nodded. “Oh, of course. It is starting to warm up. You have a good day.” The way he said it made it sound as if he wasn’t sure such a thing was possible anymore.
Since there wasn’t much else I could do, I smiled slightly, then moved toward the exit. For a second or two, I was worried he might put out an arm to stop me, but he only stepped out of the way and headed into the store.
I allowed myself a small sigh of relief before going to the Cherokee and unlocking it, then quickly unloading the loot from my cart into the rear cargo area. From the front seat, Dutchie whined, but I wasn’t sure why. It was a little warm in the car, but nothing too bad — I’d made sure to crack the windows before I locked up the vehicle.
When I turned around, though, I almost dropped the car key. The stranger was standing there, holding a pisto
l pointed straight at me. His expression was no longer mild, but greedy. Not the kind of greed I’d seen in Chris Bowman, though. This man’s gaze wasn’t fixed on me, but the SUV I’d just closed up.
Without blinking, he said, “Give me the key. Now.”
Chapter 8
At first I could only stand there, gaping at him. From the way he held the gun, a small .22, I could tell he didn’t have much experience. One part of my mind began to coolly calculate whether I was fast enough to get that Glock out of my waistband before he fired on me. My father had taken me to the indoor range many times, and shooting up in the hills around town even more, and he’d made me practice pulling the gun from a holster as well as the waistband of my pants. I knew I had far more experience than the man who faced me. But…was it enough?
Stalling for time, I stammered, “W-what?”
“You heard me.” He waved the pistol in what he probably thought was a threatening manner. “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want the car.”
“But — ” I kept my hands out where he could see them, knowing that he was probably nervous enough just handling the gun that he might do something really stupid if I made any sudden movements. “There are plenty of abandoned vehicles all over the city. You don’t need mine.”
“Yes, I do.” His gaze shifted from the rear door of the Cherokee to my face, and I could see the desperation in his watery brown eyes. “I don’t have to hunt for the key, and it’s a four-wheel drive loaded with supplies. I doubt I’m going to find anything better.”
Well, when he put it that way…. “It needs gas, though. Do you know how to siphon gas?”
His bemused expression told me he didn’t.
“Look,” I went on, knowing there was no way in hell I was going to let him have my dad’s SUV, “it’s been a horrible week. I get that you feel desperate. But you don’t need to do this. There are plenty of alterna — ”
