A Single Light

by Tosca Lee

  “How could we do this?” I cry as we jog toward the road. “How could we sleep through the day?”

  What’s happening at the silo? How many are preparing to leave—have already gone?

  Is Julie one of them, having shed her body as Otto did last night?

  I won’t forgive myself. I can’t. I accepted that Julie might die out of our sheer inability to find the medicine she needs.

  But not my own negligence.

  “We’d been awake for two days straight,” Chase says. “That’s how.”

  But that’s no excuse, even as a part of my mind says: Is that all?

  It seems like a week ago that the silo door unexpectedly opened. Days since we scouted the ranch. Since my literal crash course in bike riding after meeting Otto in Gurley.

  Impossible that he was in our lives for mere hours.

  He deserved better. He deserved laughter. An audience for his snarky wit. To be filled with wonder at all that those around him took for granted. To be loved as he loved others.

  And what did he get?

  Not even a pair of shoes.

  This last thought breaks me.

  Chase takes my hand, but the tears won’t stop. The memory of his grief, so raw as he roared at the moon, shatters me all over again.

  I’m a mess by the time we pass an old farmhouse with an X on it. Have seen so many by now that I don’t need to look twice to decipher the number in the lower quadrant:

  Two dead.

  There’s another mark beside it, too: an E.

  “Evacuated?” I hazard. “Empty?”

  The trash bags piled around the bin have been scavenged many times over by animals, their contents scattered across the yard. Whatever’s in them has been out so long it no longer even smells.

  When we go around back, we find what we’re looking for: an old-fashioned water pump. The same rusty red, even, as the two in the Enclave.

  I set the sketchbook out of the way as Chase takes the handle, works it up and down, the hinges squeaking. The pipe gurgles, and a few seconds later water rushes from the spigot.

  It’s cold and clean—the best water I’ve ever tasted.

  We splash our faces and hands, and I take over the pump as Chase rubs the dried blood from his torso until we’re both shivering in the afternoon heat, wet pants sticking to our legs.

  “Ready?” I say, and then stop. Take in the man standing there, half naked, hair wild, his jeans stained with Otto’s blood.

  Anyone, at first glance, would assume he was deranged.

  I know I don’t look much better.

  I scan the house. Consider the flimsy door on the old screened-in porch.

  And then I’m crossing the yard and running up the stairs.

  “What are you doing?” Chase calls after me.

  I try the door and, finding it latched, put a foot through the screen. Cross to the glass storm door and try the handle. Glance around me when it doesn’t give and grab a large terra-cotta pot.

  Bash it through the glass. Kick in the shards.

  Chase comes through the screened-in porch, takes me by the shoulder. “Wynter, stop. It’s not safe!”

  “Not for you,” I say, gently pulling away. “Stay here.”

  “Wynter—”

  I step through the door into the kitchen and am instantly transported back to my grandma’s house where Jackie and I used to spend a week every summer before we joined New Earth. Pictures and business cards on the refrigerator. Yellow Formica counter. A one-thousand-piece puzzle on the dining room table with its edges completed.

  Everything but the smell.

  It comes from the La-Z-Boy recliners in the living room, each one draped with a blanket.

  The cabinet doors hang open, plates dashed to the floor. The pantry empty.

  The place has been looted.

  I make my way down the hall, take the stairs two at a time past at least three decades’ worth of wedding, baby, school, and graduation photos.

  Up to the master bedroom, where the drawers have already been pulled from both dressers. I rifle through the clothing on the floor. Grab a navy top, a pair of women’s overalls from one end of the bedroom. A black Dodge RAM T-shirt, torn work jeans from the other.

  “Guns?” Chase says when I reemerge.

  I go back and search the house, including the earth-floor basement lit by half windows near the ceiling. I find the gun safe—open. Everything gone, an empty shell box lying on the floor.

  Upstairs, I scan the living room, eyes averted from the draped figures. See something glint from the carpet beneath one of the recliners.

  A bullet casing.

  I move to the La-Z-Boy and steel myself.

  Julie. Lauren. Truly.

  I twitch the edge of the blanket away just enough to look at the corpse’s arm—his hand, more specifically.

  The last two fingers are crooked, as though holding something. The first two bent back at an impossible angle.

  I drop the blanket back into place.

  “Gone,” I say, reemerging onto the porch.

  6 P.M.

  * * *

  We stop at the nearest gas station, which was looted so long ago there’s dirt on the shelves.

  Including a fine layer on the phone book beneath the counter.

  It’s a thing I remember having in Chicago but have never used—except to sit on when I got too big for a booster seat at the dining room table.

  Chase flips past the white pages to the yellow ones in back.

  “Visiting Nurse Association,” he says, and reads off an address on Jeffers Street—before flipping to a local map in the back.

  “This book’s amazing,” I say.

  “Yes, it is.”

  I slide it back beneath the counter—along with Otto’s sketchbook.

  Just for now.

  We spend the next twenty minutes walking down A Street, past shattered storefronts and peering through residential neighborhoods, Xs and Es on half the doors. I note more than one business called Cornhusker something-or-other. An abandoned car with a Go Big Red license plate holder and a front yard with a Huskers football helmet painted on a decorative flagstone.

  We see exactly three people. One, watching us through the window of a house. When I stare back, she gives me the finger. The second, guarding a garden patch from a lawn chair, camouflage hat on his head, shotgun across his lap. The earth around his tomato plants smells like feces.

  The third, walking past a Kentucky Fried Chicken with WE HAVE NO FOOD in its front window, holding a cell phone that can’t possibly work to his ear, in a heated conversation with no one.

  We stop before the two-story brick building with the brown awning at 210 Jeffers Street. Stare at the recessed entrance set between the doors to the accounting and law offices on either side, their front windows broken, the ones upstairs barred and intact.

  I tell myself not to take it as a sign. Don’t dare to hope.

  And then do, anyway.

  It’s also right next door to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office and Detention Center—a location I assume might have discouraged early looting. Even if the corner windows of the sheriff’s office are broken.

  There’s a guard posted outside.

  Movement in the distance; a black truck coming over the viaduct from the direction of the bypass.

  Chase tugs me into the recessed cove, presses me to the wall.

  “Was that—”

  I feel him nod against me.

  We wait, but the truck never passes.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Must’ve turned.”

  Now I notice where a wide decal has been scraped from the metal door, as though whatever business was here before has closed. There’s no VNA sign at all.

  No.

  It has to be here. We have nowhere else to go, and no time to get there.

  I try the door, but of course it doesn’t move.

  “Where’s a sledgehammer when you need one?” I say, try
ing to remember which of the houses we passed had outbuildings. Wondering what we were thinking coming here empty-handed, expecting to just walk in.

  “There’s more than one way into a building,” Chase says.

  He steps out and goes to the end of the building. Peers around the corner. Holds his arm out for me to stay put. Comes back and grabs me by the hand.

  “They pulled into the sheriff’s department,” he says as we hurry the other direction past the front of the adjoining print shop.

  We skirt the side of the building to the back. From here, we have a clear view of the detention center, the service bays in back.

  Voices from out front. The slam of a truck door.

  “Which way did he go?” I ask—and then hear the truck’s engine revving down the street beside us.

  We step around the corner out of sight—crouch behind a half wall meant to obscure a garbage bin as the truck turns up the street behind us.

  “I’m really curious what he’s got in there,” Chase says as the truck rumbles back toward the bypass.

  Meanwhile, he’s staring at a stack of wood pallets on top of a green commercial Dumpster.

  He tilts his head and now I see why: the Dumpster’s been moved against the back of the office building, which is only one story and looks like it’d make a neat patio area for the second story rising up from it as long as someone was willing to climb through the window.

  Which they could do, because the ones in back have no bars.

  Chase looks around us. Goes toward the curb out front. Bends and retrieves something from it.

  Comes back with a chunk of concrete.

  “Ready?” he says.

  He gives me a foot up onto the Dumpster. I take the concrete rock from him. Toss it up onto the roof.

  If anyone would have told me ten months ago that I’d be searching for guns in dead people’s homes and trying to steal drugs by bashing in windows, I’d never have even been able to picture it, let alone believe it. Didn’t know what drugs were. Would never willingly have touched a gun.

  Of course, I’d never have imagined myself as an accessory to Magnus’s death, either.

  I climb onto the pallets, haul myself up onto the roof. Retrieve the piece of concrete as Chase comes up.

  My heart skips a beat as I peer through the window. I see a desk and what looks like a locked closet at the end of the room.

  And then I see the blue logo on the back wall.

  VNA.

  “This is it,” I say, hushed.

  Not only that, but the door and windows are intact.

  Which means the medicine should be, too.

  I’m wondering how much we can transport home. Am already imagining the food and fuel we’ll be able to buy.

  “You want to do the honors?” he says.

  I grab the thicker end of the concrete chunk with both hands and go stand beside the window. Swing around hard, the concrete connecting with a dull crack.

  The glass spiderwebs all the way to the frame, only a tiny hole in the middle.

  Chase turns away, spewing a laugh. Comes back and abruptly walks off as he cracks up again.

  “That’s not how I saw that happening,” I mutter, before kicking the glass in as Chase leans his hands on his knees, his torso shaking.

  He comes over and offers me his hand.

  “Sorry, I just—” He bites his lips together and looks away. I take his hand with a scowl. Step up onto the windowsill, and leap down to the floor.

  As I move toward the closet, a metallic click and slide sounds from the other end of the room. A distinct sound I’ve come to know well.

  Of a round being chambered.

  7 P.M.

  * * *

  The woman holding the gun is the kind of thin fashion models eat nothing but lettuce and egg whites to achieve—or too many laxatives, in the case of Lauren’s friends. She’s pretty, or would be, if not for the acne on her face and the drawn-on brows that look like sideways commas.

  She’s also sweating.

  But what I’m most concerned about at the moment isn’t the gun.

  It’s the fact that her hands are shaking as she swings toward Chase, who has just dropped down beside me.

  “Hey,” I say, lifting my palms. The office smells like smoke and air freshener with a portable toilet thrown in.

  “Sorry,” Chase says, laughter gone. “We didn’t know anyone was in here.”

  “You weren’t supposed to,” she spits. “That’s the point. I got ’em!” she shouts over her shoulder toward the hallway.

  Crap.

  A male peers around the doorjamb. He’s got a short beard, and in his plaid shirt and glasses, he looks like someone’s science teacher.

  “Now what’re we gonna do?” she says, glancing at him. “Huh? They’re gonna notice that the window’s broken. They’ll know we’re here!”

  “We’ll have to move,” the man says, coming in to stand be-

  hind her.

  “I don’t wanna move! I like it here!” she says, and even though I put her at maybe thirty, she sounds like an angry teenager.

  “Sorry about the window,” I say. “We’re just desperate—”

  “There’s nothing here!” she says.

  The man tilts his head. “What are you looking for?”

  “Our friend has blood poisoning,” Chase says. “She needs IV antibiotics or she won’t make it. That’s all we’re here for. Nothing else.”

  “Please,” I say, and don’t even have to pretend to beg. “We’re just trying to save a life.”

  The woman shakes her head like there’s a fly buzzing around inside it and then curses. “What do we do now?”

  They have it.

  The pistol visibly trembles in the woman’s grip. I shift my weight away from the closet, toward Chase and the window. The pistol dips a fraction of an inch.

  “So are we,” the man says, gesturing to the hall behind him. “We’ve got a friend who’s sick, too.”

  “You got anything?” the woman says, hurling her words like darts.

  I shake my head, stomach sinking. Because we literally have nothing to trade, let alone medication.

  “There’s supposed to be stuff here,” Chase says. “If you want, we could look together. Both get what we need.”

  “Nah,” the man says, chewing the inside of his lip. “What we need is all gone. Someone must’ve took it. But I—I think what you’re looking for might be here.”

  “Oh, man, thank you,” Chase says, hand going to his chest. “You don’t know how—”

  “But we need something, too. Sorry. That’s just how this has to work.”

  “Like I said, we don’t have any drugs,” Chase says.

  “We know where they are,” the man says as the woman glances at him. “We just need someone to go get them.”

  “Okay,” Chase says, stuffing his hands in his front pockets. “Sounds easy enough.”

  We don’t have time. We need the antibiotics I am certain are in the closet behind me—now.

  And knowing they’re locked just eight feet away is making me nearly as jittery as the chick at the other end of the room.

  “Can we, uh, sit down and talk about it?” I say. “You can write out the details?”

  If she’d come closer, Chase could disarm her. I could disarm her. But right now I’m seriously worried about one of us getting shot just by accident.

  “We have it. Hold on,” he says, and walks out into the hallway. A few seconds later I hear him in conversation with someone else.

  How many people are in here?

  “Where is it?” I hear Plaid Man say. The reply is mumbled, followed by a door closing farther down the hall.

  “So those guys,” Chase says. “The ones at the bypass. What’s uh—what’s their story? I saw one of them pull into the sheriff’s office a few minutes ago. Is the Warden . . . a sheriff?”

  The woman snorts.

  “There’s no sheriff. No ‘law enforcement,’ �
�� she says, with a sharp laugh. “No Easter Bunny neither! Just James Elcannon and his friends doing what he’s always wanted to do ever since he got a job in the Municipal Department and tried to run for City Council and got laughed off the ballot. No one wanted the guy from sewer services.”

  Sewer services?

  “Though it probably had more to do with him getting kicked out of some militia. Too psycho for the three percent.” She snorts, and then flicks a nervous glance toward the window as though worried who heard it.

  “What do you mean doing what he always wanted to do?” Chase asks.

  “Take over the city. Duh.” She wags her head as she says it: duh. My sister used to do that.

  When she was ten.

  “He and his ‘orderlies’ ”—she air quotes—“hijacked the last fuel tanker to go through here from the Love’s truck stop almost six months ago. Moved it over to the self-storage place they operate out of on the north side of town. Probably dance around it at night. When the hospital generators started running out of fuel, they had to go to him and he became real important real fast. Especially cuz he provided security. When he got tired of supplying fuel, he closed the hospital down.”

  I’m still trying to comprehend something she just said. “He killed our friend over a gallon and a half of fuel—and you’re telling me they have an entire tanker?” I say, my hands starting to shake.

  She lifts her brows till they become apostrophes. “Rumor has it it’s running low. Not that it matters. Everything goes through him now.”

  “What’s he doing in there?” Chase nods toward the sheriff’s office.

  “They been stocking stuff there ever since they ran out of room at the Store-More. He stops by every day when he’s making his rounds. Has a habit of paying surprise visits to his orderlies at the city entrances and hospital and wells where people line up for water every day at eight and five.”

  “The Es on the houses,” I say with slow revelation. “They’re for Elcannon. His men have gone through them.”

  “Ye-eah,” she says, waving the gun. “He runs. The city. Like I said.”

  “How’d you know about this place?” I ask.

  She looks away like she’s not sure whether to answer that question. Lifts a shoulder toward her ear as though it itches.