Astrid looked at me and sighed.
Okay, it’s hard to read expressions through the plastic visor of an industrial face mask, but what I read in her expression went something like:
Ah, this dumb kid feels like he’s getting pushed around so he’s taking a stand on a small, insignificant detail. But I guess if he needs to win this little victory for the sake of his pride, then I will give in.
Then she said, ‘Fine, but let’s hurry.’
We had eight different models of air purifiers in the Greenway and four to six units of each. Astrid and I set up the larger ones, and Caroline and Henry were in charge of putting the smaller ones around the store.
We used a lot of extension cords, as most of the outlets were on the walls.
I headed to the Pizza Shack. We had moved all the food into the big refrigerators there when we realized we’d be staying for a while.
I grabbed some EZ cans of tuna and a bunch of old bread and some fibre breakfast bars no one liked and some horrible Popsicles not even the least discriminating of our kids would eat. And a couple gallons of store- brand lemonade.
I threw the stuff into an empty plastic storage bin that was sitting around from before and carried it back to the storeroom.
We’d been alone in the store for all of two hours and already she was bossing me around as if I were some little kid or something. Not good.
Holding the tub in my arms, I entered the storeroom backward, nudging the doors open with my back.
I turned and nearly dropped the tub.
I was so wrapped up in thinking about Astrid I had forgotten about the bodies.
It was bloody back there. Robbie’s body lay half off the air mattress. The air had mostly gone out of the mattress, so his bloody corpse was just lying on a flattish rubber mat. The blanket we’d thrown over top of him was saturated with blood in a couple of places.
Just beyond him lay Mr Appleton, who had died in his sleep. A more peaceful way to go, to be sure. As if to prove it, his air mattress was still pleasantly inflated.
The outsiders who had come and torn our group apart were now dead in the storeroom.
I hadn’t had time to really think about Robbie and the way he betrayed us.
He and Mr Appleton had come to the store and we had let them in. But when it came time for them to leave, Robbie hadn’t wanted to. Mr Appleton fell ill and then, later that night, we had found Robbie with Sahalia.
In the scuffle, Brayden had been shot and Robbie had been killed.
Mr Appleton died later in the night. There wasn’t much we could have done to change that, I don’t think.
But Robbie…
I could have looked at Robbie there and been angry. As far as I understood it, he had tried to get Sahalia to sleep with him. Whether by force or by manipulation, I’m not sure. But he showed his true colours and they were disgusting. A, like, fifty-year-old man with a thirteen-year-old? Disgusting. We thought he was a loving father-type guy and he turned out to be a letch.
And if Robbie hadn’t assaulted Sahalia, Brayden would still be okay. Niko and Alex and the rest wouldn’t have had to try to make it to Denver.
But I just felt sad.
Robbie and Mr Appleton were just two more people dead from this chain of disasters.
The little kids knew nothing about what had happened and I had to keep it that way.
I added ‘Hide the bodies’ to my mental list of things to do.
After I fed the stupid strangers outside the store.
The hatch to the roof was easy to unlock. Niko had fixed sheeting over it with Velcro, so you could just rip it open and it would hang off to the side. And the padlock had the key right in it.
I set the bin down on the step in front of me and pushed the hatch up and open.
The last time I’d been on this roof we hadn’t known anything about the compounds. We had watched the cloud going up from NORAD, thirty miles away.
The last time I’d been on this roof I tried to kill my brother.
It was dark now. The air seemed to absorb the light seeping out from the hatch. The sky above was opaque black. No stars. No clouds. Just black mud suspended in the air.
I cursed myself for not bringing a flashlight.
I didn’t want to go all the way back for one, though, so what I did was set the box down on the roof and scooted it toward the edge, crawling behind it.
I sure as hell didn’t want to fall off the roof in the dark.
After a minute of undignified crawling and scooting, the bin came up against the edge of the roof. I tipped it up and over and listened to it come crashing down.
‘Hey!’ I heard Scott Fisher yell.
‘You’re welcome!’ I hollered.
They’d find the loot. And I’d be inside by the time they did.
They were lucky Astrid had a nice streak in her and that I was such a pushover.
I edged my way back toward the light coming from the hatch. I couldn’t wait to take the air mask off.
The whole mask/glasses combo was driving me crazy. The mask was large enough to fit over my glasses, but it made them cut into the bridge of my nose. And my nose was still battered from when Jake had beat me up, so that hurt. A lot.
And I wanted to get my layers off. The layers were starting to bunch up under my arms and behind my knees.
Again, I tried not to think about Alex and Niko and the rest.
They had sixty miles to cover, wearing their layers and air masks, on a half-fixed school bus on a dangerous and dark highway. And I was whining to myself about a couple of hours in layers and a mask.
I got to my feet and started to make my way, slowly, back toward the hatch. In a dark world, that leaked light looked really bright, I tell you.
But I went slowly, because the roof was uneven and dented in places from the hailstorm a million years ago that had landed us safely in the Greenway.
I was thinking about the hailstorm and about how lucky we were that the grade-school bus driver, Mrs Wooly, had not only thought to drive the bus into the store to get the little kids out of the hail, but had then returned to rescue us high school kids. I was thinking about Mrs Wooly and wondering what had happened to her in the end. Had she made it to safety? Had she even thought about returning for us, as she promised, or had she just decided to fend for herself?
I was thinking about Mrs Wooly when the light from the hatch went out.
I was alone, on the roof, in the dark.
2 ALEX
THIS IS SLOW GOING.
In 3 hours, we have gone approximately 8 miles.
Denver International Airport is more than 60 miles away.
This is going to take longer than I had hoped. It took us 20 minutes just to get from the Greenway parking lot onto I-25.
It’s hard to see out of the windows because of the Plexiglas, which is not clear like regular glass. It’s like driving through fog.
