“Is that Greg Haggarty?” Cardo asked.
“It is,” the woman said. She looked to be in her mid-sixties, and was cut from the same coarse cloth as a thousand women Reggie had seen waiting tables and working grills at truck-stops across the country. Treat her right, she was sweet as syrup. Step on her toes, you’d be eating your balls.
“Where’s Crate?”
“Out getting a chainsaw.” She looked at the dead fat man.
“What?” Cardo asked.
“He’s too heavy for us to carry,” She said, annoyed, as if it were obvious.
“Oh,” Cardo said. He looked at Reggie, who shrugged. He was starting to wish they’d just kept going.
“What happened here?” Cardo said.
She extended a hand toward three tables. “Sit down. Want something to drink?”
“No, thank you,” Cardo said, taking her up on her offer to sit down. Reggie followed him, easing into a chair that creaked beneath his weight. Three shelves containing bagged rice and bagged beans and assorted boxes of easy-to-make meals and cake mix blocked his view of the fat guy facedown in his own brains, and he’d never been happier to see a box of Rice-A-Roni.
“You?” She asked Reggie.
“No, ma’am,” Reggie said. “I’m good. But thank you.”
“Help yourselves if you change your minds,” she said, sitting down at the table farthest away from Reggie and Cardo. She placed her gun on the table, resting her hand atop it.
“Stacy is in the back,” she said, lifting her hand from the gun and rubbing her eyes. She looked tired. Her hair was a mess, and the flesh around her eyes was dark.
“Stacy?” Cardo asked.
“Starshine,” Misty said, rolling her eyes.
“Oh,” Cardo said. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine, but they tried to rape her, and Crate killed them.”
“All of them.”
“Yeah. He shot them all,” she said, half-smiling again. She looked a little crazy, and Reggie wondered if maybe that’s the way things would be from here on. “He can be a mean son of a bitch.”
“No,” Cardo said. “They all tried to rape her? Charles tried to rape her?”
Reggie listened, the shotgun resting across his lap, his eyes moving back and forth from Cardo to Misty.
“No,” Misty said, looking down at the gun on the table before her. She traced a finger along the barrel, and Reggie realized that his hands were sweating. “But it was his idea.”
“His idea?” Cardo asked.
“Did you know Charles?”
“Only a little,” Cardo said. “I’d seen him here sometimes, and in town, and we’d talk every so often. That’s all.”
“That’s all,” Misty said. “Well, he was a coward. They showed up and started filling that shopping cart, and he told them that she was in the back, told them to take her instead. Crate was in the back, too, hiding and listening, and when he came out…”
“He shot them all,” Cardo said. “Even Charles.”
“Yeah,” she said, looking down, folding her hands together upon the table.
“And Clarence?” Cardo asked, looking at Reggie. “He was involved?”
“No,” she said, and glanced back at the door.
“What happened?”
She took too long to answer.
“We were out there, Crate and I,” Misty said, making an attempt to look Cardo in the eyes for more than three seconds. “We were trying to get Charlie onto the burn pile when he drove into the parking lot. He got out of his car and before we knew it he pulled a gun and started shooting.”
Reggie watched Cardo’s face. If he’d noticed her lie, Reggie could not tell. Cardo’s look didn’t change. A poker face. A cop’s face.
Misty looked at them, and there was pain in her expression, pain and sadness. She wasn’t telling the truth, not entirely, but that didn’t change the fact whatever had happened had taken its toll on her. She shrugged.
“Crate shot him. It was horrible. It’s all horrible.”
“You got that right,” Reggie said, trying to sound as warm as possible. Reggie could tell that Cardo was watching him, but he kept his eyes on Misty. “You see many of those things around?
“Not today,” she said, and Reggie wasn’t sure if he was imagining things or not—she seemed to relax, just a bit, with the previous topic of conversation behind them. “A few this morning, I think. What’s it like in Beistle?”
“Hundreds of them,” Cardo said.
“Jesus. The Army really gas the town?”
“Someone did.”
“Can I ask two favors, ma’am,” Reggie said, moving to drain the remaining tension from the air by asking two wholly normal questions, the kind this tough old gal no doubt heard several times a week.
She looked at him. “Can I ask you for one?”
“Sure.”
“Enough with the ma’am nonsense,” she said, and Reggie caught the glimmer of a look in her eye, a look he’d gotten used to, living so much of his life on the road. Older white women got a little stupid around him. “Call me Misty.”
“Okay, Misty,” he said, leaning back in his chair. Cardo continued watching him. “May I use your telephone, and can you please point me to the bathroom.”
“Phone is dead, like I said, but you’re welcome to try. Bathroom’s right there. If it were a snake, it would’ve bitten you.”
The door to the left of the deli was visibly labeled RESTROOM with a gold foil sticker, and it had been one of the first things his eyes had fallen upon after entering the store—the dead fat guy lying beneath the candy shelf had been the very first.
“Oh,” he said, trying to sound a little surprised. “Yeah, look at that. And the phone?”
“Behind the counter. Go right on back. I trust you not to rob the register.”
Reggie stood. “Can’t rob nothin’ without this,” he said, placing his shotgun upon the table. Not wanting to, he left it behind. He was standing behind the counter, looking out at the store with the receiver in his hand, when a pretty white girl—Stacy, he assumed—stepped through the door to the left of the drink coolers.
She was a hippie, that much was obvious, and while Reggie didn’t think highly of hippies, he’d been with his share of hippie broads. They talked all sorts of spaced-out shit but they put out like it was the end of the world, and when they looked like this girl, a guy really didn’t mind putting up with an avalanche of spaced-out shit.
She saw Reggie and froze, jerked left and right, just a bit, like she wanted to run but couldn’t because her feet were rooted to the floor. She opened her mouth.
“Hey, hey,” Reggie said, setting down the receiver and raising both hands to chest level, palms outward. “Everything’s okay, baby.”
“He’s okay, Stacy,” Misty said, standing up. “He came with Cardo.”
“Cardo?” Stacy asked, but then Cardo stood up and the confusion on the girl’s face turned into recognition. “Oh, Officer Cardo. What’s happening?”
“Uh,” Cardo said, looking a little perplexed. “Quite a bit. Are you okay?”
“No, no,” she said. “But they didn’t hurt me, if that’s what you’re talking about. They didn’t get the chance to.”
“I’ve heard.”
“Yeah,” Stacy said, folding her arms across her chest. “Thanks for asking.”
“This is Reggie. He saved my life.”
“Wow.” She looked at Reggie and almost smiled. It was little more than a shy twitch at the corners of her mouth. “That’s far out.”
Reggie, resisting the urge to look her up and down, picked up the phone again and brought the receiver to his ear. There was a hiss, steady and faint, broken by some distant clicks.
“Told you,” Misty said, walking up to the counter. She’d left her gun at the table, too. “It’s been like that since, oh—the second or third day.”
“Can I turn this on?” Reggie asked, indicating the television.
“Sure,” Misty said. “That’s three favors.”
“I’ll have to return one of them,” Reggie said, smiling. Either she was playing along, or Misty didn’t see him as a threat. Which meant that they might get out of here without anyone shooting at them.
“Oh, God,” Stacy said. “He’s still here.” She looked at the dead fat guy.
“Yeah,” Misty said. “Crate’s still looking.”
“We’ll get him,” Cardo said, looking at Reggie with raised eyebrows. “Right?”
“Sure,” Reggie said. “No problem. Just give me a second.”
In the bathroom, he splashed water onto his face and stared at himself in the mirror. His skin, usually a healthy shade of milk-chocolate brown, looked ashen and puffy. The flesh around his eyes was darker than usual, and his eyes were bloodshot. His teeth were filthy, and his breath smelled like dog shit. He was vile.
He sat on the toilet but nothing happened. He’d crapped in the woods behind the abandoned bakery that morning, and had eaten precious little since. And he was tired, damn it. Despite the sleep he’d gotten, he was exhausted to his very bones.
Misty waited for him with a pair of large yellow rubber gloves. They were a tight fit. Stacy had already vanished into the back, and Cardo, also wearing rubber gloves, stood near the dead man’s feet.
“You ready?” he said.
“Sure.”
Reggie took the hands. Rigor mortis had set in, and it was a chore just prying the fat bastard from the floor. Something inside the body’s massive bulk sloshed, and when they got it off the ground, a long and noxious fart bubbled out.
“Ack,” Cardo said, dropping the feet and stepping away, waving his hands in front of his face.
“Come on,” Reggie said, motioning for Cardo to join him. “Let’s just drag the bitch.”
Misty opened the door wide, jingling the bell. She stood holding it, blocked from their view by the blinds. The each took a hand and, grunting, dragged the body to the threshold.
“Can’t both fit,” Reggie said. “Get the feet.”
Cardo hopped over the body, grabbed its feet once more. They got it through the door and dragged it the rest of the way. Their guns were in the store. If Misty was going to act, she’d do it now, and when Crate returned they’d have two more bodies for the heap.
Within five minutes, their job was done. They were winded and sweaty, and the massive corpse sat with its back to the burn pile. Its right eye gazed heavenward. Its left was gone.
“Damn,” Reggie said, peeling the gloves away from his hands and tossing them at the burn pile. One of them landed on the fat corpse’s head, the empty fingers draped down across its good eye.
“Heavy son of a bitch,” Cardo said, leaning against Reggie’s truck and peeling away his own gloves and tossing them atop the corpse heap. “Maybe we should have waited for the chainsaw.”
They washed their hands more than they needed to, and when Misty offered them beer, they accepted. Stacy returned, said a few words, and then went about mopping up the last of the blood.
“Anything to eat?” Misty asked him.
“No,” Reggie said, smiling. “You hold on to your food. I have more than enough in the truck.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I stocked up before leaving town.”
“Cardo?”
“Reggie is right—we really shouldn’t be eating your food.”
“That may be, but I have about five pounds of deli meat left in that case, more than we can eat before it goes bad, so…”
“Good point,” Cardo said. “I’ll take a chicken sandwich.”
“I’m all out of chicken,” she said. “One ham and cheese.”
Reggie got up and walked over to Stacy, who flashed the shy smile again.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“You want a hand with that?”
“Nope,” she said. “Thanks. You really save Officer Cardo’s life?”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“That’s amazing,” she said, and now her smile was a little less shy.
“I was in the right place at the right time. That’s all.”
“Wow.” She shook her head, eyes wide and distant. He knew the look. Next she’d be stroking the crystal around her neck and going on about the karmic wheel of life.
He went around the check-out counter and turned on the television. With the exception of the leering CBS eye on channel 4, there was nothing to see, only snow.
“It’s been like that since last night,” Misty said, who sidled up to the counter and stared at the television screen. “The eye. Bad shit going down.”
“There was something about a nuke going off in the Middle East,” Reggie said, remembering the crowd of corpses gathered around the TV display in Beistle.
“They said it might not have been nuclear,” Misty said.
“Really?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think anyone knows what they’re talking about. And I don’t think they’re coming back on.”
No one had anything to say to that. Stacy rolled the mop bucket into the deli.
“Do you have a radio?” He asked Misty.
“Yeah,” she said. “In the deli. What are you hoping to hear?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Good news, I guess.”
Reggie left the television on and returned to the table, where Cardo sat finishing up his sandwich.
“They’ve got to come back on,” Cardo said around a mouthful of food. “I mean, it’s only been, how many days now? Damn, I’ve lost track of time.”
“We all have,” Misty said.
“They’ve got to come back on. I mean, we’re still here, right? They must be too.”
“I don’t know,” Reggie said, looking closely at his new friend. Cardo’s face was red from the sun, but his eyes weren’t as glassy as they’d been when he crawled into the truck. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” Cardo said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m better.”
“You look better.”
“This was good.” He tapped his paper plate.
“You eat like a pig.”
“Ha,” Cardo said. “You should have one.”
“I might,” Reggie said, looking at the scrap of sandwich on Cardo’s plate and feeling his stomach twist.
“How long are you staying?”
“I don’t know. Not long. You coming?”
Cardo frowned, looked down at his plate. “I need some sleep.”
“You can sleep in the back while I drive.”
“You’re going to need some sleep, too.”
“I’ll be okay,” Reggie said.
“Molly going to get you through?”
“When I need her to, yeah.”
Cardo finished his sandwich, and when Misty swooped by and asked Reggie if he was ready for one yet, he said sure, thank you, he was. Stacy stepped out of the deli and walked past them, head low, eyes downcast, the fingers of her right hand touching her crystal. She vanished into the back, and both men watched her go. A minute later, Misty brought his sandwich. He’d taken his first bite when someone pulled into the parking lot. A car door slammed. A dog barked.
“Shit,” Reggie said, grabbing his shotgun and putting the canned goods shelf between himself and the entrance.
Cardo stood, gun raised.
“It’s just Crate,” Misty said and walked to the door. She looked through the blinds and disengaged the lock.
“Crate,” she said, and a wiry old man carrying a chainsaw in one hand and a gun in the other stepped into the store. A dog—a shaggy mixed-breed—padded in behind him, sniffing the floor and sneezing once. Frowning, the old man placed the chainsaw on the counter and looked from Reggie and Cardo to Misty and back again. Sitting at his feet, the dog sneezed again.
“Ah,” Crate said, recognition relaxing his face. “Officer Cardo.”
“Hey, Crate.”
“How the hell are you?” th
e old man said.
“I could be better,” Cardo said.
“Yeah. A little too much sun, huh?”
“I was stuck on a roof for over thirty hours, until this guy saved me.” Cardo nodded toward Reggie.
“Oh,” the old man said, barely glancing at Reggie. “You two boys get that whale out of here?”
“Yeah,” Cardo said. “It wasn’t easy.”
“No shit,” Crate said, opening the door and whistling once. “Out, you.”
Tail slowly wagging back and forth, ears down, the dog listened to its master. The bell jingled, and Crate locked the door.
“What’s his name?” Reggie asked.
The old man looked at Reggie, his smile barely visible within his wooly beard.
“Bilbo Baggins.”
“Good one,” Reggie said, laughing. He didn’t know what the hell a Bilbo Baggins was, but he didn’t really care enough to ask. They were making a good impression, or so it seemed, and he was beginning to allow himself to relax.
Crate extended a long-fingered hand. It was thin-skinned and covered in veins, and the nails needed to be clipped. Reggie shook it, and was surprised by the old man’s strength.
“Creighton Mumsford,” he said. “But you can call me Crate.” This close, Reggie could smell the old man—the sour stink of an unwashed body beneath the clinging herbal aroma of grass.
“Reggie Turner.”
“That your rig out there?”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Nice.” His eyes flashed down to the tags hanging from Reggie’s neck. “You were over there?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Crate said, walking away. “Bullshit war.”
“How was it?” Misty asked, and for a second Reggie thought that Misty was talking to him—that she was actually asking him about ‘Nam.
“How was what?” Crate said.
“Did you see any more?”
“Not a single one,” the old man said, shaking his head. He got a beer out of the cooler and sat down where Misty had been sitting. “I saw Lester Coleson and his wife and kid. They’re all doing fine. Didn’t see anyone else.”
“What about Tommy Cornwell?”
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