“I think she’s alone,” Jake said. “But Niko’s right. We couldn’t get the door open if we wanted.”
“Please!” she said, pleading. “Please hurry!”
She removed the material from around her face, maybe so we could see she was honest. There were dark circles under her eyes and they were rimmed red. She looked like someone’s mom.
“Please! I am begging you!”
Niko grabbed his hair and pulled. He was in agony.
“What about the hatch?” I said. “We open the hatch and throw a ladder down!”
“Yes!” Niko said. “Yes!”
But then the woman screamed. And her face disappeared from the monitor.
And we heard a voice that was low and menacing. A voice that was familiar.
“You. Get. Away. From. My. Store.”
He was talking to the woman and his speech was interrupted by heavy sounds. The sounds, I think, of him hitting her.
“This. Is. MY. STORE.”
It was the monster from the front gate.
He was “guarding” our store.
Which explained why we hadn’t had more people trying to get in, to get food and water.
I looked at the screen in shock, expecting at any moment to see the face of the monster, but it did not appear.
I guess he was too deranged to notice the camera.
We could hear what was going on outside, the last sounds of a scuffle, and then it was quiet. Then we heard what I imagined to be the sound of the man dragging the woman’s body away.
After a few moments of inactivity, the intercom shut off automatically.
We were frozen in a moment of horror, I think is the best way to describe it.
There had been a woman there. Right outside the door. And now she was dead.
And then Niko roared.
He balled his hands into fists and started striking his own head.
“Niko, stop!” I shouted.
He turned to the nearest shelving unit and started pummeling the boxes.
I stepped forward to try to help him. To restrain him, somehow, so he wouldn’t hurt himself.
“Let him be,” Jake said. “He’s just working stuff out.”
Niko destroyed the aisle, ripping, punching, tearing, throwing, cursing, spitting, shouting. Crying.
Slowly, he started winding down.
“All right, man,” came Jake’s drawl. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“It’s not okay,” Niko shouted. “She’s dead and if I’d just thought faster, I could have saved her!”
He drove his head into a heavy, wooden crate.
“You’re pissed!” I shouted. “You’re so angry you want to burst!”
My volume and intensity surprised him (and me), and he stopped what he was doing.
“We could’ve saved her and we failed! You could have saved her and you failed!” I shouted.
It seemed like he needed me to push back at him with the same weight of his own anger and despair.
“She’d dead! They’re all dead and we can do nothing to save them!”
Niko crumpled to his knees and rested his forehead on the linoleum. Now I could stop yelling. He could hear me.
“It’s not your fault, Niko,” I said.
“But I could have helped her.”
“It’s not your fault,” I repeated.
“You didn’t cause the tsunami, man,” Jake said quietly.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” Brayden said.
Niko’s body relaxed.
Jake, Brayden, and I just watched him for a while as his chest heaved and he regained his usual composure.
Niko drew his sleeve across his face.
He sat up and looked around.
“Shoot,” he said. “Look at this mess.”
We laughed a little when he said that.
“Come on, man,” Jake said. “Let’s go get a drink.”
Jake hauled Niko to his feet and we left the storeroom.
But I gave a backward glance at the monitor.
It was black and silent.
One more lady was dead. Add her to the millions dead outside and she figured pretty small. But to us, she was big.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
RUM
We gathered in the kitchen. Jake had a bottle of rum and was pouring liberal shots into Dixie cups.
Jake held his cup aloft. “To Niko, a really good guy, even if he is a Boy Scout.”
“Here, here,” I said, tapping my cup with them.
I took a sip. Straight rum. It burned. But it felt good to feel something strong besides failure.
Brayden knocked his down without a grimace.
“You know,” Jake said, after he drained his cup. “I love Boy Scouts. You know why?”
“Why?” Niko asked.
“They give a real good hand job.”
We cracked up.
“No, really. All that time up in the mountains with nothing to do. They always come prepared, too, with little lotion bottles.”
“Ha-ha,” Niko said. But he didn’t seem mad at all. “We get a lot of those jokes. But back in Buffalo—”
“You’re from Buffalo? New York?” Brayden interrupted him. “I have an aunt from there.”
All this time we’d been surviving the end of the world together and I’d never even asked Niko where he was from.
“Yeah. Back in Buffalo there were ninety-eight guys in my troop. And you know why I joined? Because it was fun. I mean, I learned so much. But mostly I just did it because we were laughing all the time.”
“You must have really missed them, when you moved here,” I said. He shrugged.
“I will tell you guys something you’re probably not going to believe, but back in Buffalo, I had a lot of friends. I really did,” Niko continued. He brushed his hair out of his eyes. “I know it will strain your imaginations, but I even had a girlfriend.”
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Is she hot?” Jake said at the same time.
“Lina and… yeah,” Niko said.
We all laughed again.
“She’s very pretty. She was a senior last year. Now she’s at Sarah Lawrence.”
“Wait a minute, you’re telling me last year, when you were a sophomore, you were dating a senior?”
Niko shrugged. “Yeah.”
After a moment, Jake said, “Cool.”
