Nick started selecting different meats by the handful, two or three at a time. Then, as if he became conscious of their situation, he liberally scooped them into his buggy by the dozens. It would have been unadulterated fun if it wasn’t for the noise. The metal cans clanged and chattered against the wire buggy like poorly tuned tines. He cringed hoping it didn’t attract unwanted attention.

  Nick heard Jimmy’s buggy pull up behind him. Of course, Jimmy had picked the one with a squeaky wheel.

  “I think we’re good on cereal,” Jimmy said proudly.

  Nick turned and shined his light on Jimmy’s buggy. It was at the point of overflowing, falling into the floor if they weren’t careful.

  Nick pointed his light at his own buggy. “I figure between spam and cereal—we ought to be able to live a long time.”

  “So, what’s left?”

  “I need to find a siphoning hose…”

  “A what?”

  “A hose to suck gas out of other cars for when we run out. Plus a gas tank. We need more batteries. Maybe oil lamps if they still have some.”

  “Do you think they even sell stuff like that?” Jimmy asked. “I mean, the hoses and stuff.”

  Their recent success finding food—two mountains of midnight snacks, actually—had rebuilt Nick’s patience a little. He was only mildly irritated by his brother now.

  “Yeah, they have ‘em. Or they got something I can turn into one. Remember the commercial? At Wally’s…”

  Jimmy joined in, “if we don’t have it, you don’t need it.”

  They laughed for the first time in days.

  “Alright, come on. Let’s get this over with,” Nick said as he wheeled his cart toward the end of the aisle.

  “Let’s split up. It’ll take half as long,” Jimmy suggested.

  Nick turned and looked at his brother with suspicion. The face he saw was one of a bright-eyed, clear thinking sixteen-year-old. Not the Nancy he’d come to expect.

  “You sure?” Nick wanted to trust him.

  “I said I could handle it, didn’t I?” Jimmy had an almost giddy expression.

  “Sure. Fine. We’ll meet back right here…” Nick shined his light up at the sign, “in front of check-out number six. You know where to look?”

  “Yep,” Jimmy answered quickly, already with his back turned squeaking away toward the aisle that had the flashlights, fire starters, charcoal, and other assorted goodies that boys sometimes went looking at when they got bored tagging along with their parents.

  Nick hoped he wasn’t making a mistake, but it was too late to recall Jimmy. The sooner he found what he needed, the sooner he could keep an eye on his little brother.

  Nick hurried out of the grocery section of the store, past the clothing, and toward the automotive and gardening department. He knew where he was going and what he was looking for, but his mind raced as he tried to think of anything they were missing, anything he’d forgotten. This was their last real chance to stock up. He knew the road to Deadhorse wouldn’t have any stores like this one.

  Water, he realized in a flash. Of course, how could he be so stupid? They would need something to drink. He told himself to calm down, that it was no big deal. And it wasn’t. All the check-out registers had those refrigerated cabinets with racks full of soft drinks and waters. It didn’t matter they wouldn’t be cold anymore. They were wet, and they’d last forever.

  Toilet paper—another flash of insight. Luckily, he was close by that aisle. He took a detour and grabbed a small pack. “Ought to do until Deadhorse,” he said to no one.

  In the auto department, Nick spotted the red gas tanks with little trouble. He could have his pick. He could take two, three, six; it didn’t matter. He decided on one. He only needed something to carry gas from one stranded car to their van. The savings in time of getting two so they could relay their efforts wasn’t worth the space it took up in his buggy. He needed the extra room for sodas, he told himself.

  One down, one to go, he thought as he wheeled out of the aisle. There had been no siphon hoses next to the gas cans, which was the obvious place to find them if he was going to. But he had anticipated this. He made a cursory check of the two remaining aisles in automotive, just to be sure they didn’t have hoses somewhere else. Then he headed toward the gardening section.

  He shined his light toward the corner of the store. As bright as the little light seemed, especially in such abject darkness, it couldn’t penetrate the distance. He hoped Jimmy was lucky and had found some big beam flashlights, maybe even those that take the lantern six-volt batteries. They could come in handy, especially out on the highway.

  Nick looked over toward the other end of the store where Jimmy should be. He watched the ceiling and could see a flicker of light occasionally bounce off. Jimmy was still there, he thought.

  As Nick approached the gardening section, he saw what he was after. There were water hoses out in the middle aisle, apparently on sale. He examined them, not knowing what difference the price made. Most of it seemed to come down to length of hose and the material the hose was made from.

  He eliminated the long hoses and compared the vinyl hoses to the more expensive rubber ones. Which would handle the gasoline better? It was a guess, because he had no idea. He placed the smallest vinyl hose in his buggy, but he wasn’t sure. His rationale was that the gas can was plastic, so maybe the artificial hose would work better.

  Just as he started to change his mind, he heard the distinct sound of glass shattering followed by Jimmy yelling his name.

  CHAPTER 11

  PANIC WASN’T STRONG enough a word for what Nick felt. It was worse than when he’d heard from the basement the van running in the garage. That had been the sound of potential danger. What he just heard was the sound of someone trying to kill his brother.

  His legs didn’t want to work, and he had to will himself to drop the garden hose. But then some sort of automatic impulse took over. He grabbed the nine-millimeter off the buggy and pulled the action back, cocking it as he ran toward Jimmy’s location.

  Like the time he’d made a dash to the end-zone in last year’s championship game, he wasn’t conscious of time or distance. He saw tunnel vision—the darkness added to the effect—until he suddenly stopped and realized he was where he expected Jimmy to be.

  He shined his light frantically up and down the aisle where the lights and charcoal were. Then he heard more yelling further down toward the pharmacy.

  He was close enough now that he had to keep his cool. He had to make sure he was ready to shoot but cautious enough he didn’t shoot his brother by accident. He moved closer and heard the sounds of footsteps and heavy breathing.

  A voice shouted, “I’m the king! Come back here.”

  “Jimmy, where are you?” Nick yelled.

  “Over here,” Jimmy said, sounding like he was in the next aisle over.

  Nick jumped around the corner and shined his light to see Jimmy sprinting toward him. A large man wearing white ran ten paces behind him.

  “You’re not king of the mountain!” shouted the man in white.

  “Shoot him,” Jimmy yelled as he spun past Nick and kept on going.

  Nick swallowed hard and tried not to think, not to second guess himself. This would be hard enough as it was.

  Two rounds peeled off. Nick could see the man get hit, but it didn’t look like he felt it. He kept coming, yelling, “Only the king gets on top!”

  Nick backed up and fired. Backed up again and fired. The man was coming for him despite the obvious kinetic damage he was causing.

  Nick backed into something. Realizing he had nowhere to go, he unloaded his magazine into the now staggering aggressor.

  Before all his rounds were spent, Nick had the presence of mind to raise his aim. The effects from the shots to the crazy’s neck and forehead were enough to spin the man sideways. He tottered, losing his balance, but still tried to run. He then fell sideways, made one final flop on the floor, and went silent, still.

  Nick stood there, unsure what had just happened. A practical impulse had him pull out his second magazine from his pocket and exchange it with the empty. He racked it, and the snap made a surprisingly loud sound in the now quiet market.

  Footsteps to his right. Nick shifted with his light under his pistol and spotted the source: it was Jimmy.

  “Don’t shoot me,” he said.

  Nick pointed the gun down and aimed his light back at the white and red blob in the floor. “Where’d he come from?”

  “You don’t want to know.” Jimmy was still panting, but Nick didn’t think it was from running. He sounded spasmodic, like he’d heard him when his fear got the best of him and he was holding back tears.

  Nick didn’t shine his light in Jimmy’s face to see. He felt a bit of sympathy for his brother. His poor defenseless brother. Then it hit him: “Where’s your gun?”

  “Dropped it with the buggy. Over there.”

  Jimmy shined his light toward the pharmacy and Jimmy started walking. Nick followed.

  As they passed Jimmy’s buggy, Nick smelled something like the rotten soup and meatballs from the hot bar.

  “What’s that smell?” Nick demanded.

  “You really don’t want to know,” was the response from Jimmy.

  Soon Nick realized the source of the stench came from behind the counter somewhere.

  Nick opened the door beside the counter and walked into a small hallway.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Jimmy said behind him. As if he realized Nick was about to leave him, he moved closer and followed his older brother.

  Nick turned and opened the first door on the left, the one that went behind the pharmacy counter. When he did, he almost fell down from the nauseating wave of stink that enveloped him. But he persisted in trying to open the door. It was stuck like something behind it was blocking his way.

  Nick pushed, and he heard a dull thump. The door opened three-fourths of the way.

  What he saw in front of him caused his jaw to drop, except the smell hit him again, forcing him to cover his mouth and nostrils with his shirt sleeve.

  “I said you didn’t want to know,” Jimmy said. It wasn’t a taunt but a sincere, regrettable tone.

  Stacked systematically like the beginnings of a new Great Pyramid were more than twenty decomposing bodies. “That guy was a pharmacist?” Nick asked pointing his thumb toward the crazy he had shot. He now recognized the white lab coat he had been wearing.

  Jimmy didn’t answer directly. “He was the king of the mountain.”

  Nick couldn’t tell if Jimmy was trying to be funny or what, but no one was laughing. They walked back toward Jimmy’s buggy. An unstacked body slid from behind the door, helping to close it. It made Nick shudder, the heebie-jeebies all over him. He’d had enough for one day. Heck, for one life-time.

  “What were you doing over here?” Nick asked when they reached the buggy again.

  “Just seeing what we might have forgotten.”

  “Forgotten?”

  “Yeah, you know, stuff like instant coffee or paper towels.” He pointed at those items in his buggy.

  “That wasn’t the plan,” Nick said. “We were supposed to meet back at check-out six when we got done. Not go on a tour of the store. This is serious.”

  “I know. I thought I could handle it. I didn’t think anyone else was around.”

  “And why didn’t you shoot that crazy?” Nick looked at the Stevens single-shot. Jimmy hadn’t dropped it. It was neatly placed across the top of the buggy. And Jimmy’s silence was incriminating.

  “I just got scared and ran,” Jimmy said unconvincingly.

  “No, that’s not it. You didn’t even have your shotgun up. What were you really doing?”

  Nick’s mind searched for all the possible explanations, and then it hit him.

  “Empty your pockets.”

  “What?” Jimmy’s voice rose.

  “Empty them. Right now.”

  Jimmy had the scowl on his face, the same one he wore when Nick first shot down his idea about going to Deadhorse. But he begrudgingly emptied one pants pocket and held out its contents for Nick to inspect. Nick saw a small package of candles and slapped them out of his hands and onto the floor.

  “What’s that crap? I sent you to get lights, not aroma therapy, you big Nancy.”

  Jimmy flinched as if Nick was going to hit him.

  “Aw, come on,” Nick said. “Stop being a pansy and hiding from what you were really doing. Empty your other pocket.”

  Jimmy slowly pulled out a bottle of pills. Nick snatched them out of his hand and shined his light on them so he could read. It was labeled HYDROCODONE.

  “I knew it,” Nick said. “You were going to pull your junky-routine, weren’t you?”

  Jimmy didn’t answer.

  “I asked you a question. You were going to disappear on me, weren’t you? Take these, get high, and check out while I drove us to Deadhorse?”

  Jimmy seemed to struggle to break his silence. “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Nick didn’t like what he heard. He could always tell when Jimmy was lying. But why would he lie about this? What else could he be doing with them?

  “You were going to overdose,” Nick asked when it hit him.

  “Probably not,” Jimmy said more quickly.

  Nick gave the gesture with his face and hands that said what is that supposed to mean? and I give up all at once.

  “I didn’t plan on taking them. Well, I was going to take them to get to sleep. But I wasn’t going to overdose unless I felt like there was no alternative.”

  Nick stared at the bottle again. He’d heard the name of the drug before. It was fairly common, but he was trying to grasp a connection; he recognized it from somewhere.

  Jimmy seemed to anticipate Nick’s thought. “Mom used to take them back before DataMind. For her back. At least, at first they were for her back.”

  It came back to Nick in a flash. He remembered shortly after his dad and Jimmy’s mom were married how she had fallen on the icy drive way outside their home that winter and had badly busted her back. He remembered seeing a similar bottle in the medicine cabinet above the sink and then later beside her bedroom table.

  “Your mom used them. Not mine,” Nick said impulsively.

  He didn’t know why it mattered, but it did. He wasn’t blood kin to her. It hadn’t occurred to him until now why she’d had those pills for so long, for so much time after her back seemed to have healed. She must have gotten hooked, another statistic like the ones he heard on the news. She’d seemed normal. She hadn’t seemed like an addict, but now he knew she had been. Until DataMind came along. That was one of its startling claims: that there were thousands of documented cases where people had overcome substance abuse through DataMind’s guided mindfulness techniques. She must have been one of the undocumented cases.

  He took the bottle, squeezed it tight and chucked it as hard as he could toward the outer aisle.

  “Come on. Let’s get our stuff and get out of here.

  DALTON

  CHAPTER 12

  IT DIDN’T TAKE the boys long to get their buggies out of the Wally’s Supa-center. Nick continued to feel surprised by the lack of crazies surrounding the area. Their wheels squeaked loudly, and the buggies shook like miniature freight-trains. But no one came. No one seemed to hear them as they loaded up the van with their supplies.

  When they finished, Jimmy said, “Watch this.” He rolled his cart a few feet away and kicked it, causing it to vault over onto its side.

  “Real mature,” Nick said. He thought about putting away his cart somewhere. But then he realized how ridiculous his habituated thinking was. Jimmy was right. “It’s the small things in life, isn’t it?” he said as he ran his cart towards the parked bus nearby. It rolled fast, its wheels wobbling from the uneven pavement. Nick slammed the cart into the side of the bus. It bounced off, and he found himself doing it again and again trying to make the initial dent larger.

  “Nick, there’s somebody,” Jimmy said.

  Instantly, Nick jolted out of his juvenile destructive mode and looked back at Jimmy who was pointing to the bus. He heard a quick swish sound behind him. When Nick looked back at the bus, he didn’t focus on the dented fender but up toward the side windows. An unmistakable blue-black barrel extended from one of them where the curtain inside had been drawn back.

  “You care to explain why you’re defacing private property?” asked a voice.

  Nick instinctively threw his hands up and backed away several steps.

  “Sorry, we didn’t know anyone was home.” He almost choked on the silliness of calling the bus a home. But this was no laughing matter.

  “So, you can talk. Maybe you’re not a crazy after all,” said the man. The barrel withdrew, and the window closed.

  Nick turned to Jimmy and shrugged his shoulders. He wondered if that was the end of their encounter, but then a different squeaky mechanical sound drew his attention back to the bus.

  An older man, maybe in his seventies—Nick couldn’t tell—descended out the side door. He held his little carbine rifle to his side unthreateningly.

  “I heard shooting from inside the store. You must have encountered the King.” The old man wore a knit cap despite the mild summer temperatures, and his gums puckered in from not having a full set of teeth.

  “Yeah, we met the King,” Jimmy answered from beside the van. Nick turned and saw Jimmy walking toward them. He wanted to warn him, to tell him to stay at the van. But he knew vocalizing the idea would make the situation tenser.

  “So, he’s dead?” the old guy asked.

  Nick didn’t want to answer. He didn’t trust the geezer. Not yet, anyway. But he knew his brother would talk for both of them. Jimmy was enamored by colorful people, couldn’t seem to understand that they could be a threat. Couldn’t understand that maybe they’d made bad choices in life the reason they lived in a bus or the reason they didn’t have teeth.

 

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