She pulls away. In the darkness, the twosome stare at each other, breathing hard, like wild animals that would kill each other if they weren’t the same species.
* * *
Megan and Scott find a place to consummate their lust only moments after Josh issues the all clear.
The two stoners don’t fool anybody, in spite of their perfunctory attempts to be discreet: Megan feigns exhaustion and Scott suggests that he fix her a place to sleep on the floor of the storeroom in the rear of the retail shop. The cramped storage area—two hundred square feet of mildewed tile and exposed plumbing—reeks of dead fish and cheese bait. Josh tells them to be careful and rolls his eyes as he walks away, disgusted, and maybe, just maybe, a little jealous.
The thumping sounds start up almost immediately, even before Josh returns to the office, where Lilly and Bob are unpacking a knapsack full of supplies for the night. “What the hell is that?” Lilly asks the big man when he returns.
Josh shakes his head. The muffled thudding noises of two bodies going at it in the other room reverberate through the tight quarters of the filling station. Every few moments, a gasp or a moan swells above the rhythmic fucking sounds. “Young love,” he says with exasperation.
“You gotta be kidding me.” Lilly stands shivering in the dark front office as Bob Stookey nervously unpacks bottled water and blankets from a crate, pretending not to hear the carnal noises. Lilly holds herself as though she might disintegrate at any moment. “So this is what we have to look forward to?”
The power at Fortnoy’s is down, the fuel reservoirs empty, and the air in the building as cold as a walk-in refrigerator. The retail shop appears to be picked clean. Even the filthy refrigerator is emptied of earthworms and minnows. The front office features a dusty rack of magazines, a single vending machine running low on stale candy bars and bags of chips, rolls of toilet paper, a few overturned plastic contour chairs, a shelf of antifreeze and car deodorizers, and a scarred wooden counter on which sits a cash register that looks like it belongs in the Smithsonian. The register’s drawer is open and empty.
“Maybe they’ll get it out of their systems.” Josh checks his last cigar, which sits partially burned down in his jacket pocket. He glances around the office for a smoke rack. The place looks ransacked. “Looks like the Fortnoy boys left in a hurry.”
Lilly touches her bruised eye. “Yeah, I guess the looters got here before we did.”
“How you holdin’ up?” Josh asks her.
“I’ll live.”
Bob glances up from his crate of supplies. “Have a seat, Lillygirl.” He positions one of the contour chairs against the window. The light of the harvest moon shines in and stripes the floor in silver dusty shadows as Bob cleans his hands with a sterile wipe. “Let’s check them bandages.”
Josh watches as Lilly takes a seat and Bob opens a first-aid kit.
“Hold still now,” Bob admonishes softly as he carefully dabs an alcohol wipe around the crusty edges of Lilly’s injured eye. The skin under her brow has swollen to the size of a hardboiled egg. Lilly keeps flinching, and that bothers Josh. He bites back the urge to go to her, to hold her, to stroke her downy soft hair. The sight of those wavy mahogany tendrils dangling down across her narrow, delicate, bruised face is killing the big man.
“Ouch!” Lilly cringes. “Go easy, Bob.”
“Got a nasty shiner there, but if we can keep it clean, you oughtta be good to go.”
“Go where?”
“That’s a damn good question.” Bob carefully unhooks the Ace bandage around her ribs, gently palpates the bruised areas with his fingertips. Lilly flinches again. “Ribs ought to heal on their own, as long as you don’t get into any wrestling matches or marathon races.”
Bob replaces the elastic bandage around her midriff, then puts a fresh butterfly bandage on her eye. Lilly gazes up at the big man. “What are you thinking, Josh?”
Josh looks around the place. “We’ll spend the night here, take turns keeping watch.”
Bob tears off a piece of surgical tape. “Gonna get colder than a witch’s boob in here.”
Josh sighs. “Saw a generator in the garage, and we got blankets. Place is pretty secure and we’re up high enough on this ridge to see any large numbers of them things forming out there before they get to us.”
Bob finishes up and closes the first-aid kit. The muffled sounds of fornication dwindle in the other room, a momentary break in the action. In that brief stretch of silence, over the sound of the wind rattling the signage out front, Josh hears the distant a cappella of the dead—that faint telltale throb of dead vocal cords—like a broken pipe organ, moaning and gurgling in atonal unison. The noise stiffens the tiny hairs on the back of his neck.
Lilly listens to the distant chorus. “They’re multiplying, aren’t they?”
Josh shrugs. “Who knows.”
Bob reaches into the pocket of his tattered down coat. He roots out his flask, thumbs off the cap, and takes a healthy swig. “You think they smell us?”
Josh goes over to the grimy front window and gazes out at the night. “I think all the activity at Camp Bingham’s been drawing ’em out of the woodwork for weeks now.”
“How far from base camp
“Not much more than a mile or so, as the crow flies.” Josh gazes out over the pinnacles of distant pines, their swaying ocean of boughs as dense as black lace. The sky has cleared, and now the heavens are spangled with a riot of icy-cold stars.
Across the needlework of constellations rise wisps of wood smoke from the tent city.
“Been thinking about something…” Josh turns and looks at his companions. “This place ain’t the Ritz but if we can do a little scavenging, maybe find some more ammunition for the guns … we might be better off staying put for a while.”
The notion hangs in the silent office for a moment, sinking in.
* * *
The next morning, after a long, restless night sleeping on the cold cement floor of the service bay—making do with threadbare blankets and taking shifts standing guard—they have a group meeting to decide what to do. Over cups of instant coffee prepared on Bob’s Coleman stove, Josh convinces them that the best thing to do is stay holed up there for the time being. Lilly can heal up, and if necessary, they can steal provisions from the nearby tent city.
By this point, nobody puts up much of a fight. Bob has discovered a stash of whiskey under a counter in the bait shop, and Megan and Scott alternate between getting high and “spending quality time” in the back room for hours on end. They work hard that first day to secure the place. Josh decides against running the generator indoors for fear of gassing them to death with the fumes, and worries about running it outdoors for fear of drawing unwanted attention. He finds a wood-burning stove in the storeroom and a pile of lumber scraps out behind one of the Dumpsters.
Their second night at Fortnoy’s Fuel and Bait, they get the temperature up to tolerable levels in the service area by keeping the stove going full blast, and Megan and Scott noisily keep each other warm in the back room under layers of blankets. Bob gets drunk enough not to notice the cold, but he seems disturbed by the muffled bumping sounds coming from the storeroom. Eventually, the older man gets so loaded he can barely move. Lilly helps him into his bedroll as though putting a child down for the night. She even sings a lullaby to him—a Joni Mitchell song, “The Circle Game”—as she tucks the mildewed blanket around his aging, wattled neck. Oddly, she feels responsible for Bob Stookey, even though
* * *
Over the next few days, they reinforce the doors and windows, and they wash themselves in the big galvanized sinks in the rear of the garage. They settle into a sort of grudging routine. Bob winterizes his truck, cannibalizing parts off some of the wrecks, and Josh supervises regular reconnaissance missions to the outer edges of the tent city a mile to the west. Under the campers’ noses, Josh and Scott are able to steal firewood, fresh water, a few discarded tent rolls, some canned vegetables, a box of shotgun shells, and a case of Sterno. Josh notices the fabric of civilized behavior straining at the seams in the tent city. He hears more and more arguments. He sees fistfights among some of the men, and heavy drinking going on. The stress is taking its toll on the settlers.
During the darkness of night, Josh keeps a tight lid on Fortnoy’s Fuel and Bait. He and the others stay inside,
