“All right?” I asked, my voice sounding squeaky even to me. “Can we go now?”
“There’s more,” Alex said. “Can’t you sense it? He was protecting more than two cans of dog food.”
“But he’s dead,” I said. “Maybe he killed himself when he ran out of food.”
“Maybe,” Alex said. “But we should look around anyway. For toilet paper and diapers.”
We both knew there weren’t going to be any diapers, but I was just as happy to get out of the kitchen. We went through the house thoroughly, taking anything we could use, which wasn’t very much. Alex even went down to the cellar but came back empty-handed.
“I guess your hunch was wrong,” I said.
“I still feel it,” he said. “He would have shot his dog first if he was going to kill himself. He loved that dog.”
I knew Alex was right, because if it came to that for us, we would have killed Horton or at least let him loose. “There’s a garage,” I said. “Maybe there’s something out there.”
“Then he would have been sitting in the garage with his shotgun,” Alex said. “It’s in the house somewhere. We’re overlooking something.”
“It could be money,” I said. “Or jewelry. Things he thought were valuable.”
Alex shook his head. “The dog just died,” he said for the third time, like he was Sherlock Holmes and I was the world’s stupidest Dr. Watson. “He ate off the man for a few days and then went a few days without eating. This guy, whoever he is, died fairly recently. He knew what was valuable.”
“All right,” I said. “Where, then? We’ve looked everywhere.”
“Not in the attic,” Alex said. “Wouldn’t this house have an attic?”
“At least a crawlspace,” I said. “But I didn’t see a staircase. Maybe there’s a trapdoor.”
We went upstairs and looked through three closets before finding the trapdoor to the attic. Alex pulled on the cord, and I climbed the stairs.
There were cartons everywhere. But cartons in an attic mean nothing. Even cartons that had the names of products mean nothing. Even cartons still sealed mean nothing.
Alex followed me up. The roof was so low neither one of us could stand upright. There wasn’t much space to walk anyway, but we could move around well enough for him to pull out a penknife and cut open a Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup carton.
Inside it were twenty-four cans of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup.
“He didn’t starve to death,” I said. “How could he with all this food?”
“He was a miser,” Alex said. “You’d hear about guys like that, but I always thought they were folktales. People who stocked up when it first happened and then were so afraid of not having enough, they stopped eating what they had. You stay here. I’ll be back up in a moment.”
I had no idea why he was leaving but I didn’t care. I looked at box after glorious box. Some of the food, I knew, had gone rotten. But there was still so much. Even with ten of us there was enough food for weeks.
When Alex came back up, he had the man’s shotgun. “Just in case we need it,” he said.
“How can we get all this back home?” I asked, hoping Alex knew how to handle a shotgun. “Maybe we should move here until the food runs out.”
“The house is too small,” Alex said. “Besides, a guy like that had to have some way of getting out. He’ll have a van in the garage, or a pickup, with a little gas in the tank. Enough to get the food back to your house. I bet he has some containers as well. He was prepared. Crazy but prepared.”
“What if the garage is locked?” I asked.
“It probably is,” Alex said. “But there was a key ring on the guy’s belt.”
I remembered what the man looked like and shuddered. Not a cute, little horror movie shiver, either.
“It’s okay,” Alex said. “It’s a lot to take in. I’ll get the key and check out the garage. You stay here. It’ll be all right.” He took the shotgun with him and climbed down the stairs.
I forced myself to read the cartons, to concentrate on the miracle of black beans and beef jerky. The sight of four 20-pound bags of rice thrilled me. But I was never more relieved than when I heard Alex enter the closet.
“It’s a van,” he said. “With a quarter tank of gas. I found a couple cans of gas, too.” He shook his head. “He could have gone anywhere with two cans of gas,” he said. “He and the dog both.”
“Is it stick shift?” I asked. “I don’t know how to drive stick shift.”
“I know how,” Alex said. “You learn things on the road. How to drive. How to hot-wire. How to defend yourself.” He paused for a moment. “You’d be amazed how many cars there are with a little bit of gas left in them. You hot-wire a car and you can go twenty-five miles on fumes.”
“That’s how you got here?” I asked. “Dad and Lisa and Charlie, too? By car?”
“Some,” Alex said. “Some we biked and some we walked. Julie and I got a lift partway to Tulsa in February. That was a big help. Then we left Tulsa to find Carlos in Texas. His Marine regiment is stationed there. By the time we located him, we knew everything we needed to survive.”
I knew I’d ask about Tulsa later, but the important thing was getting all the food back home. “I had an idea,” I said. “See that window? I could toss the cartons to the ground. They’re cans and boxes, so nothing would break.”
“Great idea,” Alex said. “You stay here and do the tossing. I’ll go down, and when you’re through, we’ll load the van.”
At first I resented the idea that I’d do all the heavy lifting, but then I realized Alex would be outside with the shotgun. He and Julie knew how to defend themselves, but no one had bothered to teach me. “Fair enough,” I said.
We shattered open the window, and Alex watched as I threw a box down. “Good work,” he said. He picked up one of the bags of rice and carried it down while I kept tossing the boxes out the window. A couple of them flew open, but mostly they held.
It took a while for me to get them all down, and I was exhausted by the time I’d finished, but the job was only partly done. We still had to get three bags of rice outside, and we couldn’t toss them. Alex came back, and we each took one. I had no idea how heavy twenty pounds could be. Alex handed me the shotgun, then went to the attic and got the final bag.
The van looked really old, and its windows had been whitewashed so you couldn’t see in. But it held everything, except our bikes. Those Alex and I strapped to the top with rope he’d found.
The sound of the engine turning over was just amazing. The sensation of being in a van that actually moved was beyond description.
“Do you know how to get back?” I asked. “Or should I direct?”
“I’ll need your directions,” Alex said. “I try to remember landmarks, but this country all looks the same to me.”
So I told him where to turn. There were no other cars on the road, and no one came out at the sound of ours. I was relieved, since Alex had given me the shotgun and I was terrified I’d be expected to use it.
“Who was in Tulsa?” I asked. “Or did you just pass through there?” It was easier to ask Alex questions with us both facing forward with no danger of eye contact.
“We thought we’d find our aunt and uncle,” Alex said. “They set out for there last June. We spent a few days looking but no luck.”
“It’s hard to picture cities,” I said. “Cities with people.”
“They’re not like before,” Alex said. “There are bodies, mostly skeletons now, piled up. Even the rats have died. And only some buildings have heat, so you share apartments.”
“Are there schools?” I asked, remembering my idea about places for politicians and millionaires to live. “Hospitals? Could you and Julie have stayed there?”
Alex held on to the steering wheel a little tighter. “The plan was for me to leave Julie with our aunt and uncle. I was going to get to Texas, find Carlos, let him know where we were, and then go back and work at the oil fields. But I couldn’t leave Julie alone, so we went to Texas together.”
“But you didn’t stay,” I said. “Couldn’t you have worked in the Texas oil fields instead?”
“I could have,” Alex replied. “But there was no one to look after Julie.”
“Julie’s a good kid,” I said. “She wouldn’t have gotten into trouble.”
“Trouble would have found her,” Alex said. “We couldn’t take that risk.”
I considered asking him about the convent, but I didn’t want to remind Alex that he’d caught me
