“She’s in love with the idea of corn pellets,” Alex says as they get into the truck, a large extended cab that fits them all with room to spare.
“Lana thought we should get one. A couple years back. She got caught up at the mall by some guy who was super into them.”
The big diesel grumbles in the way only a truck like that can. Dee stares out the windows at the quiet city, watching for them, waiting for one to struggle to its feet. The residents of the Complex have done a good job of clearing them out. There are a few, but none of the crowds just a few blocks away.
Have they learned, she wonders, to keep away from this place where the humans have dug in?
It’s a scary thought, one she ponders on long, lonely nights.
The store is only a few blocks away. The small commercial square with a few beauty stores, a vitamin shop, and an accountant’s office all look mournful in their stillness. The driver, a guy named Peter, shuts off the engine and they listen to it tick as they watch out the windows for them.
A siren blasts in the distance. It’s loud even here, though it sounds like it’s moving away from them, its blasts of sound almost sacrilegious in all this silence.
Silence of the dead.
Except, they aren’t silent, are they?
When five minutes pass, we get out, our weapons at the ready. Pete and his wife Gloria grab the dollies and we go to the door of the store. It’s unlocked. The apocalypse happened here during business hours, she guesses.
The store is weird. Fireplaces are supposed to be dirty, functional things and they’re displayed like gold toilets under now-dark spotlights. We find Mel’s corn pellet stove. Two of them. They get loaded onto the truck. We grab a few fire pits and a rocket stove too, a contraption Dee once read about in a zombie apocalypse book of all things.
They search the back offices and employee lockers but find nothing of interest. It’s okay, though, because Alex is fun to be around, her outlook on the reduced state of humanity humorous. Light. Dee can tell Alex, wherever she survived before finding the Complex, didn’t have it so bad. Surely she wouldn’t be so happy if she’d lost what Dee had lost. Right?
Dee feels ashamed for thinking that way about this woman who is doing her best to make things suck less. Ashamed, yes, because she doesn’t have a monopoly on despair even though she’s lost so many.
Lost Lana.
“Hey, you’re gone again.” Alex bumps her, shoulder to shoulder. They are riding back now, Gloria driving while Peter sings a song about boat rowing. Jim, their fifth, sits staring out the window on Alex’s right. He doesn’t talk. Not anymore.
“Yeah.” Dee nods. Considers. “Who was it? That you lost?”
The question doesn’t take Alex by surprise. She doesn’t freeze up or get that lost, sad look other people get. “My girlfriend. My mom and dad. My brother and his wife and kids maybe.” She shrugs. “I’ve been here two months and I still haven’t gone to look for them.”
She looks closer at Alex, at the way she smiles a bit too sharply, gestures a bit too wildly. She isn’t calm or okay with things at all. She’s just found a way to stuff everything down and down and down until it was too deep to erupt. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too. So, you know, I meant what I said. I’ll go with you. I have to.” She tucks hair behind her ear, and smiles, though it’s melancholy, and not filled with her usual brightness.
Dee gave Alex her address the second night she’d been at the Complex, and they looked at a map together to see where Dee’s house was in relation to Alex’s brother’s home. It turned out they were only two cul-de-sacs away from each other. A small world, that was what Lana always said when she saw someone she knew in a store across town. A small world, she said when they ran into a colleague on their vacation to the Great Salt Lakes.
“A small world,” Dee murmurs.
“Yes it is.”
Dee digs through her coat pocket, the inner one, and pulls Will’s wallet free. She flips it open and hands it to Alex. “His name was Will. Met him on the way here, after I … lost everyone else.” She taps his picture, willing herself not to cry, not to remember. “I promised him I would find his family. They’re all the way in Kirkland.”
Alex swallows a few times, then rubs a finger across Will’s face. “There’s a lot of them between here and there.” She doesn’t have to ask what happened. She knows. We all know what it means when someone is not around to tell their own story. “Twenty-two years old.”
Yeah. Not much older than her boys. Schrödinger’s boys. Both alive and dead until she opens the front door and fixes their fate with her observation.
“Gloria and Pete are from Kirkland. Tried to get back several times. Haven’t found a way in yet.” Alex passes the wallet back.
Dee folds it up without looking at Will’s face and tucks it away. “Everyone is dead. My wife. Dan. His son. So many.”
Alex studies her, her brown eyes searching. “Are you saying you don’t want me to come?”
“I’m saying everyone is dead.”
There’s a corpse flopped over the rooftop of a sandwich shop. A spray-painted sign hangs by a corner under the man’s dangling hands. ‘Survivors inside! Please help!’
Alex eyes flick up and away. She nods. “Duly noted.”
32
Then
The next few weeks we spent searching for Lana, Owen, Ivy, and Evan and Jean’s girls. Isaac was glad for it. He used the time to kill as many of them as he could. We’d go out, search house by house, building by building and we’d come home tired, sore, and bloody, him
