Allison Hewitt Is Trapped (2 page)

September 18, 2009 at 2:01 pm

I understand. Don’t give yourselves away: stay safe and stay smart. SNet has had a pretty stable connection so far. Let’s hope that doesn’t stop anytime soon! Update me when you can.

September 19, 2009—Hatchet

For the most part we’re not what you would call athletes. I’m not certain “survival of the fittest” really applies in this case, but only time will tell I suppose.

First there’s Phil Horst. Phil takes the definition of meat and potatoes to the lumpy, Green Bay Packers–loving extreme. He’s not just the manager, ho no, he’s very much a gleeful retail sort of fellow. Most of us work here without complaint, going about our menial tasks with competence, but Phil is the only one who seems to really enjoy it. He loves this place. There is no limit to his enthusiasm for inane mystery novels and bestsellers. He’s gulped down the Kool-Aid and can’t wait to hand out free samples.

Phil, Philsky, is a big guy, tall and solid, but not particularly fast or agile. Imagine the captain of your baseball team, and now imagine him fifteen years down the line with kids, living on a steady diet of cheeseburgers and soda. Now imagine he believes himself to be the lovable papa bear and best chum of everyone he employs.

He has a habit of yanking up his pants by the belt, shimmying the hem up under his belly while drawing himself up like a Kodiak getting ready to attack. Primarily he does this when he’s faced with an unpleasant request or annoying customer.

Phil’s our own roly-poly spokesperson for Midwestern living. He’s the type of guy you expect to see tailgating every weekend, the type of guy who says things like “drawring” instead of drawing and “donesky” instead of done. This has earned him the secret nickname of Philsky.

Sometimes I’m certain he and I speak different languages. Teach me your customs and your traditions, Oh Great Philsky, teach me the way of the domestic beer.

Believe it or not this man was a philosophy major.

It’s good to know that if things ever return to normal, Brooks & Peabody will emerge with its managing staff completely intact. The two assistant managers are here with us too, spending most of their time huddled together over the same
Newsweek
we’ve all been reading over and over again. They too haven’t had a hard time adjusting to our bizarre diet of junk food and diet sodas. It’s familiar territory for them.

Janette is probably my favorite person to work with. She’s laid back; she sipped the Kool-Aid and dumped the rest out in the trash. She and the other assistant manager, Matt, are nerds in arms. They’re the only employees that actually see each other outside of work and although they’re both married, I’ve always had this secret inkling that, were things otherwise, they would date. They give off that “You bother me so much but oh God take me” vibe that so many odd couples exude like an awkward, fumbling, sexually charged musk.

Matt is our resident discerning snob when it comes to books. Miraculously, he’s never realized that having expertise in only one area of literature pretty much makes you ineligible for that position. But he’s nominated and voted himself into the role and none of us have the energy or perseverance to pick a fight. He never outright sneers at other people’s taste in books, he just has this one tendon that works in his jaw; he thinks you’re a plebeian. It means he is secretly spitting all over the cover of whatever book you mentioned.

Neither Matt nor Janette is particularly out of shape, but I’d wager most of their adventures take place safely in their minds. I’m not sure if any of Janette’s cosplay outfits involved a katana, but if so we could really use it now.

Holly and Ted are here too but they’re not employees. They hang around in the store so often that I recognize them whenever they show up. I’ve helped them order enough stuff that I know their names and the kind of books they like to read, but otherwise we’re strangers. Holly is a petite redhead, very quiet and mousy, with a little pattern of stars tattooed on the top of her right hand. She looks like a lot of the girls I grew up with as a child, the girls next door, but Holly is clearly going through her undergraduate rebellion phase. She and Ted dress almost identically and both of them have innocuous tattoos that aren’t quite hard enough to be considered badass.

These two are dating, or are—more accurately—in a state of symbiosis. And so Janette and I have taken to calling them Hollianted. They are never apart. They are one word. We now call them this to their face, which they find a little insulting I think because they want desperately to be individuals and have meaningful identities. I’ve told them that when and if they can tear themselves apart for ten minutes we will consider assigning separate names.

“Until then,” I told them over a meager lunch of salted peanuts and Crystal Light, “you’re Hollianted.”

I really don’t think it’s so mean. It sounds like a religious holiday to me. Janette agrees. We like to tease them by asking each other things like, “What are you getting your dad this year for Hollianted?” or “What are you giving up for Hollianted? I think I’ll give up chocolate.”

Ted is a Chinese exchange student. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he chose Ted as his American name. Then he tells me his mother gave him teddy bears every year for his birthday, and that he has a huge collection of bears from all over the world at his parents’ house in Hong Kong. Suddenly I see why he chose it. Alone in the U.S., starting college and living with a complete stranger in a ten-by-ten closet … I would choose a name with a warm association too.

Huh. I guess that would leave me with the name Emma or Hermione.

Ted is an undergrad studying biochemistry at the university. He has that look about him—the studious, terrifyingly intelligent look that we literature majors, even the grad student–level ones, fear. Like Phil, Ted seems to me like he’s come from another planet. He mumbles formulas in his sleep. He says it helps him drown out the banging and groaning outside the door.

C-six, H-six benzene, A-G-two-O silver oxide, C-U-Fe-S-two copper iron sulfide …

Iron. That reminds me: we only have two weapons.

Two doesn’t sound like much, but I’m actually impressed that we managed to find that many in this store. We don’t even leave the box cutters in easy-to-reach places. Someone held up a bakery down the street with a pair of garden shears last year and ever since, Phil has been paranoid about keeping sharp objects hidden. This paranoia may have cost a few people their lives the other day. Thankfully, in the back storeroom I found a little treasure I had walked by and ignored for months and months. A fire alarm and a glass case with a bright red ax become part of the landscape after a while.

You just don’t notice these things until there’s screaming from every direction and windows shattering and blood creeping down the green and ivory–tiled aisles …

Well, I noticed it. I noticed it just in time. Phil put me on one of the most unpleasant tasks in the store: cleaning the storeroom shelves. The shelves go right up to the ceiling with about a foot-and-a-half gap between each one and they get unbelievably dusty after weeks of neglect. I have no clue where all the dust comes from, but 90 percent of it settles on these fucking shelves. Phil doesn’t care that I have dust allergies; he won’t make the assistant managers do the chore so it’s me, only me.

Sending me to the back room probably saved my life. It put me by that fire alarm and just a few feet away from an old, forgotten ax.

*   *   *

When I sit and watch the monitors there’s an infected creature I recognize. I recognize her for three reasons:

1) Her name is Susan. Because she was—
is
—a regular. She bought six copies of
The Shack
. Six. I shit you not. She is shaped like an old, bruised pear and she wears the ugliest pair of glasses I’ve ever seen; these babies would look more at home on the Hubble than a human face.

2) The Thing-Formerly-Called-Susan was in the Christian section when it all started. The floor-to-ceiling window behind her imploded, sending shards of glass the size of stalactites crashing onto the floor. I watched her try to run toward me, through Biography and Home & Garden. She didn’t get very far. Some of the glass had hit her ankle and she was bleeding all over and limping. A gnarled, dripping gray thing came in the window and caught up to her, limping harder than Susan, propelled forward with a terrible kind of hungry speed. It draped itself over her neck and they fell to the floor. I saw clumps of her hair flying between the bookshelves and her blood seeping fast toward me across the grout in the tiles. The blood overtook the book she had been carrying and it tumbled out of her arms and landed with the spine mangled and open.

The Longest Trip Home.

3) Susan should have been dead. You don’t lose that much blood, and that much of your neck, and walk it off. But she did exactly that. She just sort of shrugged off the decaying person on her back and got to her feet. Shuddering, she inflated like an accordion pulled up off the floor by its handle. Her legs straightened unnaturally and then she slumped down, hunched over with a big, raw hole torn down the side of her neck.

It’s hard to remember too many details, but I know I could smell the coppery too-sweet stench of the figure at her back. Suddenly I didn’t mind that she bought so many copies of
The Shack
. I wanted right then to take her up to the register and help her buy six more. But she slid past the book she had dropped, smearing her own blood across the floor with her feet, feet that were turned in too much. She was walking like a toy duck that had been hastily assembled by a two-year-old. Susan came at me, not fast, but my brain was still trying to compute what I had just seen. Then there was a little flash of red in the corner of my vision. It was the ax, the dear, beautiful ax with its highly polished, gleaming handle and red, curved head. It was so bright, so perfectly red, like a new coat of lipstick just before a night out. There was a hard little hammer hanging down next to the glass case—
BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.
Fucking hell, I thought, this certainly applies. Like I said, the memory is fuzzy from panic, but I think my fist did more of the breaking than the hammer. Still, my hand didn’t feel a thing, not until it was gripping the ax. And then I had both hands on the handle and I was running for the front of the store but Susan, poor, ugly Susan, was in the way. I swung, hard, a big, overhead swing that came down at her shoulder. I took off her right arm at the joint and it came away easier than I had expected. She seemed soft somehow, hollow and boneless.

I didn’t stop to see if that had finished her off. I kept hold of the ax and sprinted to the front of the store where Phil was ushering Matt, Janette and Hollianted toward the break room. I remember now that Phil had a bat. I never knew we had a bat in the store. I found out later that Phil hid it under a loose board in the cabinet beneath the cash register. Phil swung the bat wildly as he caught sight of me, beckoning me with a bloody hand. I never thought I’d be so happy to see that silly bastard waving me over. He was shouting at me; screaming, actually. I knew what he saw behind me, I knew Susan wasn’t down for good.

Now I see Susan on the monitor from time to time. We don’t call her Susan anymore, we call her Lefty.

Tomorrow I’ll have to confront Lefty again. We’re running out of food and we need to raid the refrigerators out by the register. We might even need to ransack the café if we can get that far. We’ll have to leave the safety of the door. We don’t have a choice.

September 20, 2009—In Defense of Food

“Do you think we should save him some Doritos?” Ted asks.

In unison we glanced at Phil’s office, the closed door, the quiet man hidden inside. “No,” I tell him. “He’ll come out for food when he’s good and ready.”

I’m really starting to miss Phil’s go-getter attitude.

Phil’s become suddenly vacant, as if all the goodwill and energy he had saved up from many blissful years of excellent customer service has deserted him. I was expecting him to volunteer for Recovery Duty (which is the very serious and important name I’ve given the task), but instead he’s been sulking in his office all morning, scrunched up against the cupboards, clutching a framed photo of his kids. Janette and Matt are silent on the subject but Ted can’t seem to shut up about it.

“He’s lost it.”

“You know what, Ted? How about you lay off him and get back to me when you have kids of your own to miss,” I say. He turns his head away, pushing his glasses up his nose. Ted wears tortoiseshell Oliver Peoples glasses. I can’t quite tell if they’re supposed to be an ironic statement. One of the lenses is cracked and it makes him look like a battered child. His inky black hair falls in messy shocks over the rim of his glasses, dangling like a beaded curtain over the lenses.

“Look, I just need one other person to come with me,” I go on. Janette, Matt and Hollianted were all sitting at the round conference table. I stood near the door, the trusty ax leaning against my knee.

“We can hold out for another day,” Matt says. He wears glasses too but they are definitely not an ironic statement, they are thick and bookish. Matt has all the riotous energy of a basset hound, which is to say none, and he also has the drooping eyes and downtrodden expression. I don’t doubt Matt cares about some things, but that passion is pure speculation as he never raises his voice above an indifferent mumble.

“And what about after that?” I ask.

“After that someone will come for us,” Holly says matter-of-factly, speaking without prompting for the first time in memory. Ted looks at her, a strange light in his eyes.

“Holly,” I say, “I agree that we shouldn’t give up hope but … we need food, we need to stay healthy and strong.”

I don’t want to point out to her that the streets outside the building are ominously silent. The first hour or so after the infected showed up you could hear police sirens and fire engines screaming down the street outside. After that the noises stopped except for the occasional scream and what sounded like a car accident. From what I could make out on the monitors (only one of which caught any of the world outside the store) there wasn’t much to see except a rolling pillar of smoke that filled up the space between our store and the other side of the street. It’s impossible to tell whether it’s sunny or overcast, rain or clear.