The moustache took the last turn before the one that would bring us into view.
He was going to reach us first.
We stared at the sealed door, then at each other, and Norman took my left hand and squeezed it. I stuck Suprbat in my bag and reached for Rory with my right.
Then something inside moved. It sounded like a box tipping over.
Norman’s hand was halfway to the door once more, but Rory pushed him aside and pounded on it with both fists, the crowbar shifted to the crook of her elbow, her face positioned right in front of the peephole.
“Please!” she cried out. “Please, don’t let them—”
The door opened inward so suddenly that Rory stumbled forward through it and almost fell.
Norman and I scrambled in after her, dragging the Vespa, fighting the wind resistance to get the door latched behind us as quickly as possible.
The loading dock was stacked to the ceiling with crates and roughly disassembled metal shelving arranged as a barricade a few feet in from the entrance. As quickly as we’d made it inside, whoever had opened the door for us had already disappeared into the structure, roosting somewhere like a squirrel in a tree before we could get a close look.
“Um, thank you?” Norman called to the many dark corners in front of us. The few battery lanterns glowing from somewhere inside made the shadows look deep, sharp, and spiky, even more so than in the parking lot.
“Stay where you are!” someone shouted from inside. It was a male voice, mature and well-used, like a teacher’s or a salesperson’s. “Hands where I can see them!”
Rory hung the crowbar from the strap of her bag, and we all raised our hands in the same confused, placating way.
“It’s okay,” said Norman, “We’re not—”
“Step away slowly!”
None of us moved. “Away from what?” Norman asked.
“Not you, just her!”
Norman’s voice was enough to identify his gender, but between our helmets, our jackets, and the awkward vantage point of the man talking, it would have been hard for him to guess any of our other qualities. Only Rory’s face was exposed, so she had to be the “her” he meant. She took a tentative step forward, squinting into the dark. Norman held her back by the shoulder.
“Why?” he asked warily.
Deeper parts of the barricade were creaking with shifts of weight, and as my eyes adjusted to the level of the light, I could make out the outline of the man and several others perched above us in the structure.
“We don’t want to fight,” the man said. “So just hand her over and get out. Easy, now.”
He reached a hand out of the dark in Rory’s direction, inviting her closer. He was old with an impressive silver beard. He was the sturdy kind of old that doesn’t look like it’ll stop someone from climbing mountains and generally kicking ass. Other figures came further into the light around him, and before I could see their faces, I could see that they all had weapons, no real guns and nothing very useful for zombie-fighting, but lots of knives and broken glass and a couple of what I was pretty sure were police-issue Tasers. They were all pointed at us. Suddenly, I wished all three of us were still out in the parking structure, holding hands and waiting to see if it would be lead or teeth that got us in the end. I wished we could just have been cornered by the psychos and never had to know that there were more on the other side.
After the thrill and relief of believing we’d won, it wasn’t fair to have to come to terms with being completely screwed all over again. It definitely wasn’t fair to be left with just enough time to consider the possibility that none of the psychos had a mysterious, psychotic reason for wanting us dead. Maybe in whatever New York had become after the riots, having one of the last faces as pretty as Rory’s was all the reason people needed to kill off your friends and invite you into abandoned warehouses.
“Now,” the man repeated.
Pointless as it seemed, I started to reach for Suprbat and for the clasp of my helmet, to finally wipe some of the sweat out of my eyes and give this whole surviving thing one last solid try, but Norman signaled for me to leave it, and after a moment of thought, I did. I’d never be pretty the way Rory was— the dazzling, undeniable, natural way that keeps working whether you’re trying to be charming or not—but it seemed possible lately that even adequate good looks might be more dangerous than a little sweat.
Rory’s mouth was open in shock, and it sounded like she was trying to find the breath to say something. She took another tentative half-step forward. Before she could get any further, Norman lifted the crowbar from her bag, stepped firmly in front of both of us, ripped off his own helmet and jacket, and threw them down with force equal to the frustration and disappointment built up in the back of my own throat.
I would have advised him against it, too, if I’d had time to think about it, giving up that non-descript look and showing off the small, gawky sixteen-year-old underneath.
His pronounced, angular features had only ever marked him as something separate from the beautiful people of Oakwood High, for better or worse, but with a look of pure determination, they aged him about ten years instead. Add in the complete mess of hair, stubble, and harlequin paint that had run wild over the course of two days of neglect, exertion, and awkward scooter gear, and he looked absolutely terrifying.
His voice echoed fiercely off the concrete walls. “If you want something from us, you come down here and take—”
One of the Tasers went off with an electric pop, hitting him just under the collarbone and knocking him off his feet. He and the crowbar hit the ground with an earsplitting clang, a crackle, and another noise, like he was trying to scream through closed teeth.
I raised Suprbat, not sure exactly what I was going to do with it except make sure that nothing more could happen until he got up again, and then, finally, Rory spoke up.
“Dr. Defoe?”
I heard the words, but I still couldn’t put together why Rory would be moving toward the man with the outstretched hand, the one whose associate had fired the first Taser and was aiming the second one at me, so I held her back and tried to keep her behind me.
“Let go and step away,” the man ordered. “All we want is Lis.”
“Lis?” I repeated.
“I’m . . . I’m not Lis,” Rory choked out.
One of the figures in the back climbed a few shelves closer, and this one I recognized, too, from the background of a few major school functions. Rory slipped out of my grip and ran for the barricade at the sight of him.
“Dad!”
Rory’s father was speechless for a moment. Then, with a tearful, giddy, disbelieving grin, he confirmed, “That’s not Lis.”
The others lowered their weapons as he climbed down to meet her, and they were both crying by the time he was close enough to hug her. I was beginning to consider letting my guard down enough to check Norman over properly when the crash of one of the overhead vents swinging open made me jump and try to defend us against the shadow of one of the supporting concrete pillars below it.
A second effortlessly pretty girl climbed out of the vent and down onto the barricade easily enough to make it clear that she did this every day. She scanned the scene below like she was looking for hints to make sense of the last few snippets of overheard conversation, and cut in.
“I’m Lis.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
So What Did You Do This Week?
“You found her!”
“I can’t believe it! You found her!”
Funny, it had never occurred to me to think of Rory as the one who was lost, not until the Costco survivors all descended on Norman and me in a downright hero’s welcome for bringing her home. And since Lis is the one who spent their separation with other family, I guess they were right. It started with the strangers, but after a long reunion group hug, the Harts gathered around us as well.
Lis squeezed me the way you do in elementary school when you really believe that if you
just hold on tightly enough, the world will never be able to pull you apart. She smelled different, and I could have sworn she’d gotten stronger in the week we’d spent apart, but it was her.
“I’m so sorry I bailed on you for killing him!” she said, and I couldn’t figure out if the spasm in my lungs was from laughing or crying.
“My girls,” Mr. Hart kept repeating. “Both my girls.” He spent a few moments trying to remember my name.
That’s okay. I didn’t know his either, except for the one he shared with his daughters. I did pick it up after a few hours of listening. It’s David. Kind of a boring, dad-ish name for someone who’s got the beautiful genes stamped all over him, in a past-prime way, but it probably gave him less trouble as a kid than Aurora and Borealis, so what do I know?
“Cassandra?” He snapped his fingers when it came to him. “That was you on the news, wasn’t it? Ground Zero?”
“Cassie,” I corrected.
“Cassie. Always knew you were good company for them. And you, that was a very brave thing you did for her!”
“Uh, yeah, just give me a sec,” Norman said from the ground. He was shaking pretty badly, and his knee had started to swell slightly where the crowbar had hit it when he fell.
“I am so sorry,” a woman who had climbed out of the shadows right next to Dr. Defoe, the one with the tasers, gushed over him. “We thought you were more of them.” She looked at the loading door we’d come in from. “We couldn’t find Lis, and then we thought we saw her out there, so—”
“I was checking the rain buckets!” Lis said, exasperated, still clutching Rory and sniffling. “I’m gone for twenty minutes, and this is what happens?”
“We thought they had you!”
I thought back to the way the undershirts had first looked at Rory, like they knew her personally. “I think they thought so, too,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” the woman said. “Oh! Maria, by the way,” she introduced herself. She was curvy, maybe seven or eight years older than we were, and almost as many inches shorter. Her eyes were made up in a style that looked like she had been aiming for Goth but then decided it was too much trouble. I instantly pictured myself sitting next to her in some college classroom if I’d ever had the chance to get to one.
“And this is Chris.” She pointed out a man about her age who was a few feet up the barricade behind her and having a much harder time getting down. I couldn’t tell if he was waving at us or trying to block the dim light out of his eyes. I did recognize the symptoms of crippling nicotine withdrawal from my mother’s many flirtations with it.
Dr. Defoe pulled back the leg of Norman’s jeans to examine the bump. It looked painful, but everything was still where it was supposed to be.
“Tylenol,” he prescribed in a much more comforting tone than the whole hard-ass thing he’d been trying for when we’d still been a possible threat. “It would be better if we had ice, but it’ll be—Get down!”
Everyone else in the room responded to the sudden hail of bullets against the door so automatically that they were all flat against the floor before I was even aware of hearing it. Maria was even quick enough to pin both Norman and me under her in the process.
When the noise stopped, I looked back at the door for the first time from the inside and saw all the little, circular, raised dents, some old, some new, from the impacts. It didn’t look like anything had gotten through it yet, but it was only a matter of time.
“So, uh,” Norman was the first to speak. “Did we interrupt something here?”
“Kind of,” said Maria. “Let’s walk and talk.”
She helped me get Norman steady on his feet and then led the way up into the barricade through the few strategically placed gaps and footholds, and back down the other side into a cramped little access staircase next to a dead freight elevator. She was a remarkably quick climber for her build.
Everyone started the climb up into the Costco itself. The undershirts would probably figure out what level we’d moved to soon enough, but it might at least give us a few minutes of peace.
“Okay, we got the part where there are a lot more zombies than people, so you’re sheltering in here,” I prompted, “and somehow you got those psychos really, really pissed off at you. So you can start there.”
Maria waited for another wave of noise to pass downstairs before she told us, “That’s not just a psycho. That’s our boss.” She clapped Chris on the back sarcastically, like this was a great accomplishment they shared.
I probably laughed a little louder than I was supposed to, but I had just gone straight from bracing for death to seeing Lis alive and in person, so cut me some slack.
“What were you before?” I asked. “Discount hit men?”
“Cashiers,” said Chris. “Right here. That was the manager.”
“The one with the mustache?” I guessed.
“Yeah,” said Maria. “His name’s Steve, and this place is his baby. The other one is Rob. He was Steve’s favorite shift supervisor. Steve’s got a brother somewhere that he brought in after the zombies. He had two, but one of them got eaten.”
“Um, both of them, actually,” I admitted.
“Oh,” said Maria. “Good. Oh my God, are those cashews?”
We had just climbed out onto the store’s ground level, so it took me a few moments to answer her question.
I’d only been inside a Costco a couple times before, but it’s not a place you forget. I was expecting the same giant maze made of giant shelves full of giant versions of packaged goods, just without those sample-prep stations and the constant crowd of people shoving each other and yelling in five or six different languages, give or take.
Instead, it looked even bigger than I was prepared for, because it was almost empty.
Most of those giant shelves had been taken down and reassembled as more barricades around the perimeter with a few smaller structures left on the inside, placed in a way that made them look a lot like lookout towers. The meat section had been cleared out, probably dumped somewhere as a tiny addition to the stench outside.
Cheap deck chairs and cookware surrounded a charred space of concrete that looked like a designated fire pit. Sheets of packing burlap lined with underwear that had never been unfolded were laid out like sleeping bags. A single, no-name-brand scooter stood against one of the barricades. Almost all of the produce was gone, too. Just some apples, coconuts, a few bags of carrots, and some dried-up looking oranges were left. The rest of the carefully arranged piles of food were made up of things like gallon bottles of mustard and imitation maple syrup, half-pound shakers of cinnamon and chili powder, and one fifty-pound bag of rice. At least, it would have been fifty pounds when it was full.
Once I’d taken a moment to process that, it was a little easier to figure out why Maria was shutting off her flashlight so quickly even though the sunlight was barely enough to see by. She looked at my bag like it was spilling gold all over the floor instead of crumbs from the ancient can of trail mix that had burst open when I hit that minivan.
I handed it over without thinking about it. Once Norman and Rory caught up, they joined me in looking around.
“It’s not much,” David apologized.
“The looters really did a number on it,” Maria added, “but it’s more comfortable than it looks.”
“Are you kidding?” Rory laughed. “Who cares?”
She didn’t care, of course, not about little things like food and sleep, not yet, and no one could blame her. I could feel the others watching Norman and me, waiting for us to agree.
“It’s great,” I said, just like I was supposed to. “You have . . . so much space.”
“Yeah, I can see why you’re attached,” Norman added, “but under the circumstances, do you think it’s worth—”
“You know what?” Defoe asked the group in general, in his natural, handling, cheering, youth-shrink voice, “I think the occasion calls for a warm lunch. What do you say?”
No one
disagreed, but you could tell by their guilty faces that he was suggesting a special, almost reckless indulgence.
Then he called out into the massive room, “You two hear that?”
There was a creak of metal, and two kids, a boy and a girl, maybe eight or nine years old, came racing out of the barricade like it was nothing but the biggest, coolest jungle gym in the world.
The girl ran straight into Defoe’s arms the way only a daughter or maybe a granddaughter would. Based on the immediate encore of the Hart family reunion, I guessed the boy was the Hart half brother. Josh. As much as I hadn’t wanted to, I did remember his name. No one asked where his mother was. There was only one answer David or Lis wouldn’t have volunteered already, and there was no point dragging that into the moment of celebration.
Norman and I looked at the kids, the one scooter, and then each other, and I knew he was as busy as I was piecing together why these people had stayed so long in a place the undershirts wanted so badly.
Chris and Maria quickly built a conservatively sized fire, selecting pieces from a stack of broken wooden shipping crates, measuring lighter fluid out of an only slightly oversized two pack by the capful.
We pooled our resources, and by pooling our resources, I mean Lis added the trail mix to a thin rice soup, light on the carrots and heavy on the soy sauce and powdered ginger. Rory jumped in to help her mix and watch it as if they’d been doing this together every night since the end of the world. While we waited for it to simmer and then sipped our shares from a set of matching Christmas mugs, all painted with a scene of Frosty the Snowman, we ignored the occasional sounds of attack from outside. We told our story, and listened to the others, mostly Maria, tell theirs.
She and Chris had been there from the start, working their registers when the riots broke out, when the place was stripped almost bare by the survival-style looters—the kind who’d bypass the big flatscreens up front and go straight for the bottled water and the batteries. They had been there when certain other misguided survivors, including the Defoes and the Harts, had run from places like the Psychiatric Center to the ransacked warehouse that had seemed, at the time, like the closest, safest place.
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