That was all normal. What wasn't normal was the body lying on the chipped gray cement just inside the aluminum roll-up loading door.
“What the hell is that?” Harrison breathed. He rushed over and dropped beside the body. It was a young woman with tangled blonde hair and a dark green haltertop, lying on her side. Her face, chest, and forearms were covered in shallow scratches, and her left arm was draped over her midsection. Beside her head was a loose pile of bandages, an iodine bottle, and a roll of medical tape.
“I found her in here like that this morning,” Jason said from behind Harrison. “She was...she was breathing then, just a little. By the time I got back with some bandages, she was gone.”
“Gone?” Harrison said. His stomach rolled like a breaking wave, threating to send up what was left of last night's chicken and biscuits. He turned away from the body and covered his face with a hand.
“Dead,” Jason clarified softly.
Harrison took a few deep breaths and willed his stomach to settle, then turned back and gave the body another glance. The woman's green shirt was dark and wet beneath her draped arm, and when Harrison gingerly lifted up the arm, the wrist was sticky and red, and it separated from her shirt with a quiet slurp.
That did it. Harrison crawled on all fours to the corner of the loading bay and heaved, sending a thin splash of apricot and chicken splattering on the cement floor. He stayed like that for a few more seconds, hunched over on hands and knees like a dog, eyes closed, breathing shallowly.
“How'd she get in?” he finally asked, sitting down heavily and wiping his mouth.
“She must have crawled under the loading door. You can see the blood stains on the floor there, at the far edge, and a couple hand prints on the bottom.”
“No way,” Harrison protested weakly. He got to his feet with a groan and went to look at the door. “The padlock is still on it.”
But he saw what Jason had seen – dark red fingerprints along the bottom edge where someone had forced their fingers under the door and pried it up. A smear of red led from the base of the door to the body. It was unlikely, but there it was. He couldn't deny the evidence.
“Can you lift that?” Harrison asked Jason.
His brother nodded. “It has a little wiggle room on the sides. Last summer, Harve, that temp guy we had for a few months, got his foot stuck under it. Don't ask me how. It was already locked down, so I just tried to lift it up for him. Got it bent up maybe eight inches off the floor, I guess. Pulling as hard as I could.” He looked down at the body. “She was thin; she could have squeezed through that.”
“Eight inches,” Harrison whistled softly. In her condition, it might as well have been a mile. “What do you think happened to her?”
Jason's voice grew solemn, “I think she was attacked. All those scratches. I think she fought off someone – or several someones – and made it down the alley outside. She must have had nowhere to go, so she tries this door. It moves a little, and even though she's hurt bad, she's got enough adrenaline and fear driving her that she's able to pull the door up enough and slide under.”
“What's going on out there, Jason?” Harrison asked.
Jason fixed Harrison with a look, then glanced up at the open ceiling hatch and said, “I'm going to find out.”
Chapter 10
As respectfully as they could, Harrison and Jason wrapped the young woman's body in a cheap picnic tablecloth and carried her to the side of the room, out of the way. It was the best they could do, but it didn't seem like enough. In the tablecloth, she looked like a gaudy, green-and-white checkered cocoon, some kind of elementary school stage prop.
Jason used a pair of thick yellow ratchet straps to secure the aluminum roll-up door – no more surprises from that would be nice – and Harrison went back into the storefront. He returned a few minutes later with a boquet of nylon flowers, which he laid on top of the cheap oilcloth. He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Who do you think she was?” Harrison asked quietly. They hadn't found a wallet in her pockets.
“No way to know. It wasn't our fault,” Jason replied.
“I know that.”
“Let's get going. I don't like leaving that hatch open. There's nothing else we can do for her. Come on.”
Harrison lingered a second longer, then turned and followed Jason up the rigid steel ladder and into the sunlight above.
After the dim storage room, the outside world was blinding. Harrison turned his face up to the sky and squinted. The angle of the sun suggested that it was still morning, maybe 10 A.M., and the heat already pounded down with physical force. The store wasn't cool by any means – not with the air conditioner off – but standing under the direct sun was like being in the Sahara.
The roof of Craft General was flat and layered with black rubber EPDM roofing that soaked up heat like a sponge. It ran the length and breadth of the store, about thirty feet on its streetside edge and forty-five feet deep, the flat explanse broken only by the squat, gray, rectangular air conditioner. A low wall about the height of Harrison's kneecaps ran along the outer edge.
Jason was already trudging to the edge of the roof to get a look out over the street, and Harrison trotted to catch up. He could already tell that things out here were fundamentally different than they had been twenty-four hours ago. Voices rose up from seemingly all across the city – shouts, cries, even a few snippets of laughter that felt oddly jarring against the apparent destruction. A distant pop rang out from somewhere in the direction of downtown. It sounded like a gunshot.
Ahead, a thin pillar of smoke still rose from the the direction where the plane had crashed the day before. From this high up, Harrison could actually see a gleaming white wingtip rising into the air six or seven blocks away. He shuddered, thinking again how close it had come to hitting them. It had landed nearly half a mile away, sure, but a minute change in course a thousand feet up was all it would have taken to send the plane screaming down on top of them, burning them alive in an eruption of jet fuel.
More lines of smoke had joined it since yesterday, spread out all over the city. In the windless day, the smoke trails rose pencil-straight into the blue sky, all the way to space it seemed.
Closer than the gunshot, a window shattered somewhere in the sprawl. Then another one, this one maybe even on Burke Street. Harrison caught up to Jason and looked down over the same street they'd seen for years, and couldn't believe how different it looked.
At the intersection of Burke and Main, the white Chevrolet was still dead on arrival, its nose crunched snugly into a dark Jeep. In the other direction, a green sedan had crashed straight through the picture window of McChase and Co. Law Firm. The car was old, maybe an '87 Chrysler, or something like that – it was hard to tell with the front half buried in old Gordon McChase's law office. Harrison wondered how the car had started – it hadn't been there the day before. As Harrison watched, a young man with a hooded sweatshirt pulled over his head clambered over the broken windowsill and took off down the street with a box in his arms.
A third window shattered, and this time Harrison saw it happen. Two men and a woman had just bashed in the window of another building with a crowbar, some business way up the street past the intersection, and they took turns crawling through and out of sight.
“Jesus, it's bad,” Harrison said.
“Worse than I thought it'd be,” Jason said. He was watching the woman's leg disappear into the freshly broken window. “And it hasn't even been a full day yet.” He turned to Harrison, his eyes dark. “What's going to happen tomorrow? What's going to happen when the food really does run out? How many people live in this city? A couple million? How many of them do you think planned for something like this? Harrison, this is just the start. And we're going to be a target very soon. Wait, what am I saying?” He laughed, but there was no mirth in the sound. “We already were a target. But that was just the start. What happens when people realize how bad it really is? When they actually understand how tr
uly, impossibly fucked they are?”
“They'll kill each other,” Harrison said. “Like someone killed the woman who crawled under our door. Two hundred years into the past...” he trailed off.
“What was that?” Jason asked, then coughed.
“Just something I was thinking last night, about how losing electricity would plunge this country back two hundred years in time. But it's not true, is it? Not really. Back then, that was normal. Nobody knew what electricity was anyway. This...this is more like that story about that rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes mountains.”
“I remember that,” Jason said, frowning. “Only a few of them survived.”
“Twenty-eight survived the crash. Sixteen were eventually rescued. Do you remember what happened up in those mountains, Jason? Do you remember why those sixteen survived?”
Jason shook his head. He coughed into his hand again, then wiped his hand on his pants.
“They ate each other,” Harrison said.
Jason coughed again, but he couldn't bring his hand up to cover his mouth soon enough. Harrison saw a dark red globule fly out of Jason's mouth and tumble through the air as it dropped to the pavement below. Harrison watched it fall, watched it splatter the cement sidewalk like a fat red raindrop. Watched a man who had walked up below them stop and look down at it, then peer up at them, standing on the rooftop.
Harrison saw the sun flash on a pair of thin rimless eyeglasses. Saw a scarred lip twist into a wry smile.
“They're on the roof!” the man shouted, startling both Harrison and Jason. “They're out of the store!”
An answering call drew Harrison's eyes down the street to the right. Coming up the hill where Burke Street sloped down toward tree-lined houses was a group of seven or eight men, all running.
Chapter 11
A gunshot boomed across the street, and something small and angry whined past Jason's face.
“Come on!” he shouted, grabbing Harrison's arm and practically dragging him across the hot EPDM roofing. They loped across the roof toward the access hatch, and Jason started to climb down before Harrison pushed him aside and climbed down himself.
“In case you fall,” he shouted back up.
Harrison felt like he was about to faint in the heat, but he managed to get down the dozen or so ladder rungs without tripping up. The air in the storage bay was still hot, but it felt mercifully cool compared to the raging heat uptop. Jason reached the bottom of the ladder, then looked up and realized that he'd left the hatch open. He climbed back up, his heart already hammering from the short run across the rooftop. His right hand was starting to go numb, but Jason grit his teeth and climbed faster. He poked his head through the hatch and saw a man clamber over the short retaining wall and start sprinting toward him. The man's teeth were bared, and he was carrying a heavy splitting axe in one hand. Jason fumbled for the handle of the hatch door, unable to take his eyes off the charging man. Finally, his throbbing fingers found the handle and he ducked down, swinging the hatch closed over his head. Almost at the same instant, a sharp clang of metal on metal rang out.
Jason twisted the lock shut and slid down the ladder. Harrison caught him at the bottom and held him until his rubber knees let him stand again.
Another clang sounded overhead, where the man was swinging at the hatch door with his axe.
“Oh my God,” Jason whispered, breathing hard.
“I saw him,” Harrison said. “Can you stand?”
Jason nodded, but Harrison still draped one of Jason's arms over his shoulders and helped him into the storefront. He laid Jason up against the counter in a sitting position. Multiple people were banging at the thick wooden sign over the front window, trying to break it in.
“Are you okay?” Harrison shouted at Jason over the noise. Jason nodded. “Do you have your pills?” Harrison yelled. Jason pulled the little orange bottle from his shirt pocket and shook it to show that it was full. He was wheezing too hard to talk.
Good,” Harrison said. He wheeled away and came back with a bottle of water. Jason's side was burning, and he felt extraordinarily weak, but he managed to shake two pills into his hand and swallow them with a sip of water. He leaned his head back against the stone counter and took several deep, shaking breaths.
“Are you okay?” Harrison asked again.
“I'm fine,” Jason finally gasped.
“Here,” Harrison shoved the shotgun into his quivering arms. “Anybody comes in, you blow their head off.”
“What are...what are you going to do?”
“I'm going to give them a peace offering,” Harrison said. He looked scared, but determined.
“You can't...give in to anyone. Not an inch.”
“Don't worry, it's not what you think.”
Jason blinked a long, slow blink, and when he opened his eyes, Harrison was gone.
Chapter 12
The banging stopped about an hour later. A few people shouted unintelligible words out on the street, maybe even screamed, and then the store was quiet. Harrison came back ten minutes after that, looking grim. He didn't say anything, just started lighting candles and placing them around the store.
Jason tried to asked what had happened, but Harrison ignored him. He began sorting through the fallen shelves and goods, tossing some things into big, empty cardboard boxes, stacking others along the wall. Soon, Jason realized what he was doing. He was sorting their supplies, going through what was useful and what wasn't. Every now and then, Harrison would stop and walk over to the sign at the front of the store, then stand there, staring through a small slit in the wood.
The cold, quiet determination with which Harrison worked sent a chill up Jason's spine. He'd never seen his brother like this. He was a serious man, sure, but always quick to grin, or tell a joke while he was working. This man, however, was a machine, an automaton who worked with ruthless efficiency. What else about a man could change in twenty-four short hours?
Over the next few hours, Harrison effectively cleared out the store. Along the long wall opposite the counter, he stacked their food by type: canned vegetables, canned meat, dry goods, bottled liquids, and various supplies such as paper plates, plastic utensils, and toilet paper. Both of them had used the store bathroom exactly once since the event, but then had decided that it would be a waste to keep putting bottled water in the toilet tank to make it flush. The next time one of them had to go, it would probably be in a bucket out in the storage bay. Right beside the corpse.
Jason lifted himself to his feet and was pleasantly surprised to find that he didn't get lightheaded. Harrison, now sitting in the back corner puzzling over a small pile of flashlights, didn't seem to notice Jason walk up and sit beside him. He wasn't actually working on the flashlights, Jason saw now. He had pried open half a dozen AA batteries and had their guts spread over a cheap plastic cutting board on the floor in front of him. He'd scooped all the soft powder inside the batteries into a red Solo cup, and he was currently using a small tube of super glue to secure small black sticks inside an empty plastic spice container. Jason caught the label on the container. Oregano.
Without looking up from his work, Harrison said, “How do you feel?”
“A lot better. Thanks.”
They sat in silence for a few more minutes.
“How'd you make those people go away?” Jason asked.
Harrison ignored the question. After a few more minutes, he held up the spice container. It had half a dozen sticks glued to its base, with a wire coming off the bottom of each one.
“Carbon rods,” Harrison said, indicating the black sticks. “From the inside of those batteries. Even though the batteries weren't connected to anything, they weren't grounded, either. The EMP drained them like a leaky tub.” Harrison wasn't looking at Jason. He was practically talking to himself.
“Technically, though, any battery is rechargeable; you just have to replace the electrolyte. These cheap AAs use ammonium chloride as an electrolyte. We don't sell any of that,
so I can't replace that. But we do sell this.” Harrison held up a bottle of No-Salt sodium free salt substitute. “More or less pure potassium chloride. It's not as strong, but it works in a...pinch.” Dramatically, he pinched a clump of the white powder and dropped it into the spice bottle. Jason laughed out loud. That was his brother. Dumb jokes and home-brewed science.
Harrison then proceeded to fill the entire spice bottle with No-Salt, then dampened it into a mush with a few drops from a bottle of water. Finally, he picked up the spice bottle's lid, and Jason saw that it had slivers of metal poking through it, hanging down like icicles. Harrison carefully threaded the wires from inside the bottle through a small hole he'd poked in the lid, then screwed the lid onto the bottle, poking the silvery slivers into the No-Salt slush.
Finally, he bent the protruding wires out to the side, laid a flattened disk of thin metal on top of the lid, and tightened the whole thing together with a plastic carpenter's clamp.
“Those metal pieces were slivers of zinc from the battery casing,” Harrison explained, taping a wire to the metal disk. He twisted the ends of the other wires together and twisted yet another wire to that tangle of metal strands. Finally, he held up his contraption. Jason laughed again. He couldn't help himself; it looked ridiculous.
Harrison plucked one of the cheap flashlights from the floor in front of him, a bright red plastic cylinder. He threaded the wire that came off the zinc plate into the flashlight's body and hooked it around the spring that normally held the batteries in place, then he used his index finger to press the other wire to a metal band that ran up the inside of the flashlight.
“And just like that...” Harrison began. He flicked the flashlight's switch and a bright golden beam of light shot into Jason's face. “...we have light.”
The Killing Days Page 4