Gray (Book 1) (14 page)

She had never thought of Walmart as the height of civilization, but in fact, that’s just what it was. A gathering of goods from all over the world, competently made, stacked in neat rows. People politely queuing up to buy them. Paper money, a symbol of work done elsewhere. Trade, order, rules, and exchange of money for goods: that was civilization. How she missed it.

“Someone else may be in there,” Benjamin said. “Let’s be careful.”

A pick-up truck with oversized tires at the edge of the parking lot provided the perfect hiding place for reconnoitering. They dug out enough snow to crawl underneath.

“We’ll stay here a couple hours. Just in case.”

Coral almost moaned with frustration. She wanted to get inside. She wanted to
eat
. But she did what Benjamin asked.

They watched the building’s entrance all morning. Nothing moved outside, and Coral was willing not to move either. It had been too long without sufficient food, and she was starting to have thoughts of just lying down and letting death come to her. Here, under the truck, might be as good a place as any to die.

But that’d be stupid, with the possibility of food so close by.

“I’m going to go around back,” said Benjamin, startling her out of a doze. “You stay here.”

“K,” she said, trying to wake up. She pushed her rifle out ahead of her, ready to shoot her one bullet if need be. It struck her that there could be ammunition in the building, too. If there was, she’d have all the bullets she needed. But what she wanted even more was food.

Benjamin came back, using exactly the path he had used, backing up the last twenty yards, brushing the snow to disguise his footprints.

He crawled in next to her. “Let’s give it a try.”

“I was thinking maybe there were more bullets for my rifle in there.”

“It was my
first
thought.”

“Mine was food,” she said.

“That too. We’ll be careful. And why don’t you leave your rifle here?”

“Why?”

“Just in case something goes wrong in there. I’d like to have one weapon stashed elsewhere. Take your bow and arrows along.”

She hoped she wouldn’t have to use them to shoot people. She doubted she could hit a moving target yet. She hadn’t been practicing much while they’d been pulling the sled. From now on, she’d try and remember to get a few shots in every day.

If there was a “from now on” to be had. There had better be food in that store.

At the front doors, the glass had melted, not into a puddle, but into sagging freeform art sculptures, tinted a light green, decorated with black scorch marks. A couple panes had fallen out. If she had an Internet connection, she could look up how hot the firestorm had to be to melt this kind of glass. Damn hot, she was sure. The building—concrete—was still standing, mostly unhurt by the fire.

Benjamin spoke softly to her. “Keep low. Once inside, stay back to back, and keep a sharp eye out.”

He was right. If the two of them saw the potential value in the Wal-Mart, so would any other survivors still in the area.

There were no other tracks leading in, so no one had come in this way for at least a day. That was a small comfort.

At the entrance, Benjamin leaned inside, and she could hear him hold his breath while he listened. As she strained to listen, she could hear the whisper of snow sliding down a surface. Nothing more. Some of the ceiling inside had collapsed, illuminating sections of the store. Other parts of the store were shrouded in darkness. Gray snow was visible under those roof holes, covering shelving and floors.

Benjamin stepped into the entryway. She followed him through and into the bizarre landscape of the store. It was both familiar and unfamiliar, the aisles and stacks rendered surrealistic by the catastrophe. Some shelves were down, products scattered out from the fall. Rather than the blackened streaks of an active fire, she saw the stranger signs of ambient heat that had reshaped household objects. They passed a display of what she thought were CDs, or maybe DVD jewel boxes, no longer neat rectangles but akin to drooping Dali clocks.

“The heat,” he said, his voice just above a whisper.

Coral nodded. The fire had done its work in here, even without the flames reaching inside. She whispered back. “How hot do you think it was?” she asked.

“A few hundred, I’m sure. Maybe worse.”

Days of it. She remembered trying to get out of the cave, that wall of searing heat. “It’s a miracle you made it.”

He leaned closer “I made it the same way you did. Insulation of being underground and, for me, the tank of water for extra insulation.”

If you had to be underground to survive, then damned few people would have. She tried to think of who else has been so lucky. Again, she wondered how far the fire had gone. What if it did stretch ocean to ocean? There might only be a few thousand people left in North America. “We were awfully lucky.”

“Smart and lucky, both.”

She stared around herself. “Well,” she finally said, “CDs wouldn’t have done us any good, anyway.” But her hopes of an intact cache of limitless goods evaporated. They’d have to explore every aisle to see if anything at all was left that they could use.

Though they took care to keep their voices quiet, they seemed to be alone. At least, no one jumped out shouting at them and waving a gun. She wasn’t sure what was worse, the fear of attack by crazed strangers, or the fear there were no more strangers left alive, anywhere.

The two of them walked into a patch of diffuse light, a missing chunk of roof letting in the dim daylight. A metal beam crossed their path that had knocked down shelving to one side. Snow had fallen through the breach. No human tracks. No animal tracks.

“No one has been here lately,” she said. “Not since the last snowfall.”

“I don’t want to stay long.” They continued quartering the main aisles, until Benjamin was confident they were alone. “Let’s divide up and work quickly,” he said. “We can always come back another day. I’ll start in sporting goods—ammo for the rifles, more fishing gear so we can both fish, and knives. And then I’ll go to hardware. You look to see if any food made it through.” He took off down a side aisle while Coral aimed toward the grocery section.

She couldn’t help but stop here and there to stare at the sights. Stacks of cardboard boxes had been turned to gray ash where they sat. She approached one shelf and could still read the brands of tissues—the words “Kleenex” and “Puffs” still visible on the sides in shades of gray. When she reached out to touch one, it disintegrated under her touch into blackened flakes. The cascade of tissue ash created a domino effect, boxes disintegrating before her eyes, one after the next, a ghostly apparition.

She soon wished her mind had not come up with that thought. It was far too easy to imagine ghosts, faint outlines of people pushing carts through the aisles, clerks in their blue uniform shirts pushing carts of supplies, the loudspeaker playing Musak and ads. Crying babies. Old people riding in electric carts.

The eerie vision was broken by a practical thought. Old people took lots of medicine. There would be a pharmacy nearby. She detoured away from the food aisles and made her way to the front of the building where she thought the pharmacy most likely to be—weren’t they usually on exterior walls? She had passed it before she recognized a open half-wall must have been it.

She stepped over a pile of ceiling rubble and into the dim space. There were two bodies here, their flesh shriveled by the heat—or by time, maybe. She stepped over them. Metal shelves held bottles—or what had once been medicine bottles, in most cases. The melting that she had seen on the CDs had also hit here, making rows of medicine containers sag. On one high shelf, some glass bottles had exploded, leaving a few jagged bases stuck to the shelves. In a closed cabinet, she found a few intact plastic bottles whose labels had flaked off. She picked one up and tried to open it but the cap-locking mechanism was frozen in place. She drew her knife out of her pocket, hacking her way into the bottle. A mass of melted capsules lay in the bottom—useless now. Frustrated, she tossed the bottle down.

Coral realized that if any drugs had survived intact, the heat would have gotten to them anyway. Days of heat hot enough to melt a CD jewel box or a store window were also hot enough to render drugs useless—or to turn them into something too dangerous to swallow. She wondered if she should chance taking any drug she found now. Her mind sped through a list of useful drugs—painkillers, antibiotics. If she ever decided to have sex again, birth control pills—pregnancy in these circumstances would be a terrible idea. Condoms would have probably melted, too.

It would have been good to have enough drugs to kill herself painlessly. There might come a time when death would be preferable to any alternative she or Benjamin might have left to them. An open fracture, an infection, no way to get it treated, a bear attack, a broken back...it’d be better to end it quickly than be ground down over awful days by the pain and disease.

But the comfort of a good death, as well as the comfort of painkillers or antibiotics, all those were lost to her.

The food aisles were next. In the first row, an empty wall of shelves held nothing but melted soda pop bottles stuck in a dried pool of ash-coated syrup. Opposite them were cans of the same, some burst at the seams, but a few still intact. Coral rooted through shelves searching for the intact ones. Empty calories—the phrase leapt to mind. Hell, they could use some “empty” calories. Calories were life. When she found intact cans of diet drink, she rolled her eyes at them and shoved them aside. She cracked open a real root beer, smelled it, and took a sip. Metallic root beer—not a beverage choice she’d have made in the old days. It was food, though, and she kept drinking, her mouth puckering at the sweetness after so many weeks without that taste. If this can didn’t kill her, she’d pick up a six-pack on the way out. They could drink it before they hiked back to the sled. Heavy stuff, but calorie-dense, and as good as water for hydration.

She left the soda for now and explored the next aisle. Until today, she hadn’t realized how many foods were packaged in plastic. Among the melted puddles of plastic and food, she was unable to identify contents. Down that same aisle, she found a few cans of food.

It had been picked over, she thought. Either it was the day before restocking day at Walmart when The Event had come, or someone might have been here after the fire but long before today. Probably the latter.

She thought about running to find Benjamin to tell him but stopped herself. She wasn’t sure, after all, and he knew as well as she did that it was dangerous being here, that others might have passed through. First, she’d reconnoiter and pile up supplies at the end of every aisle so they could grab them quickly.

What was here in this next aisle? Spam. She’d never had it before, but she welcomed it now. Little sausages—perfect. Tuna and tuna-shaped cans, which might also be salmon or chicken. Though she’d never thought about it before, she realized almost all the cans of meat had labels printed right into the metal, which she could still read, while veggies had paper labels. She piled up a bunch of these small cans at the end of the aisle.

Though the labels on the next aisle were charred, she could still read a few of them, just as she had been able to read the tissue boxes before they disintegrated. All veggies. But when she touched the cans, the labels flaked off, and she was back to having mystery foods. That there were vegetables was good news after a month of an all-meat diet.

For now, she passed over the cans with bulging seams. Her next criterion had to be judging calories against weight. The fatty meat was good—decent calories and protein for not much weight. The vegetables and fruit were useful for nutrients—but bad on weight, packed with water. Still, it was sterile water, and grit-free, good to have to drink when they next moved away from a water source. Over half of the fruits had been packaged in plastic. She recognized cans of tomato sauce only by their proximity to browned remains of pasta. She found soup—again noticing that the few cans of stock had information printed right onto the metal where the soup cans had paper labels. Who had decided that was the way to label things? Yet the unspoken law reigned through every brand.

At the ends of aisles, short stacks of cans continued to accumulate her choices. She worried what sort of weight could they pull? How much space was on the sled? Enough for thirty cans, forty? A hundred? Maybe she could convince Benjamin to move into the Walmart for a few days while they re-fed.

She rejected the soup—too much water weight. She prioritized the meat, picked a dozen cans of vegetables, two of tomato sauce, five of fruits. She would have picked ones with pop-top rings, but all those had burst in the heat. She still had her knife with the can opener, though. They could get into the cans.

The rest of the food she left for the next trip, or the next. The fifty cans she pulled to the center of the side aisle would see them through—what?—a week of survival levels of eating, three days of the sort of eating they
should
be doing.

Standing there, examining her choices, she realized she had just become a looter. The automatic fear of the wrath of the Walmart Corporation swept through her, and she shook her head, amused at the feeling. She wondered if Benjamin would see the humor in it, too. He didn’t have a great sense of humor.