But time took its toll, both through consumption and spoilage, and exacerbated by the fact that virtually nothing new was growing. Eventually, shortages began to pop up, particularly of food and medicines. Rachel began noticing how many X’s they’d marked on their maps to note neighborhoods they had cleared. One day, they’d encountered another gaggle of survivors a bit farther east toward downtown, an encounter that briefly turned violent but ended with only one person wounded. Five thousand people in a city designed to hold many times that didn’t seem like much on paper, but she was surprised by how crowded it felt.
The story was that a group in east Omaha needed a stockpile of antibiotics after two of their members were badly injured in an accident. What they did have was fresh milk from a cow they had nursed back to health; they traded the milk for the medicine another small community had stockpiled, and lo and behold, capitalism was reborn.
A month later, as legend had it, the two parties to the initial trade met again, this time here, at the West Omaha Farmer’s Market, where a gallon of biofuel was swapped for a bottle of twenty-year-old Pappy Van Winkle bourbon whiskey. Word of the market began to spread across southern Nebraska, and each month brought a handful of new faces. A fight erupted at one Market about a year in, leaving four dead. That led to the Market Compact, which every trader was required to sign before participating. Any violation of the Compact was punished by immediate and permanent expulsion from the Market.
Every first Thursday of the month, the Market opened at dawn.
#
Rachel and Eddie left while everyone slept, or more specifically, slept fitfully, if at all. Whatever the case, the compound would be quiet today, as there were no more shifts to cover, no watches to keep, no more defenses to fortify. They were on vacation now, a brief pause before whatever lay ahead. She tried not to think about it, but her mind was pulling on it like a tractor beam, these thoughts of a terrible future now imminent.
She and Eddie set out on foot, planning to cover the six miles to Market in about two hours. There had been a brief discussion of cycling there, but Rachel preferred to walk. A bike left her feeling naked, exposed. It was too easy to let the world slip by. But on foot, she could keep her finger on the trigger, keep her wits about her, let her surroundings in slowly.
It was going to be a dank, chilly day. They walked briskly, with purpose, heading north to I-80 and then swinging east toward the city proper. Eddie carried the silver briefcase, the mysterious valise swinging to and fro as they made their way toward the city.
They were living through the end of the world again, this time writ small. Rachel had slept little since the attack, her nights spent on the floor of Will’s room, waiting for something, anything, what, she didn’t know. It was all going bad, even faster than she had anticipated. The night of the funerals, fifty cans of food had disappeared. Twenty-four suspects in the theft and not a one was talking. Tina Fortune had been assigned to guard the supplies, and she claimed someone had cold-cocked her when she wasn’t looking. She had the head wound to go with it, but even that hadn’t been good enough to dissuade the conspiracy theorists.
She stole it!
She smacked herself in the head to make it look good!
String her up!
Someone had suggested torturing her to confess, but that discussion deteriorated into another bitter argument, and another fight broke out. Then two nights ago, a drunken Mark Covington attacked Harry Maynard with a broken bottle in the cafeteria, and Harry had taken a shard of glass in the arm. Harry had shot Covington, killing him.
It was all going south in a hurry.
She hadn’t wanted to leave Will behind today, but Eddie had forced her hand. Despite her pleas, he would not stay with the boy, and she didn’t trust Eddie to pull this exchange off himself. She had pleaded with Will to stay in his room, the curtains drawn, to not answer the door for anyone. She promised Will the moon if he could do this one thing for Mommy. The benefit outweighed the potential risk, she had decided. Her next step would depend on what, if anything, they’d be able to get for the case.
What if someone comes inside?
Then you hide under the bed, sweetheart.
What if? What if? What if?
He peppered her with questions until she told him to shut up, she had actually used those words, and he had cried, and then she had felt even worse. But that had taken the fight right out of him and he agreed to do what his mother asked, his big eyes wet with tears.
As they made their way along the highway, she kept seeing those eyes, the image burned on her brain. Beside her, Eddie whistled softly while they walked, a tune she found familiar but couldn’t quite place. It nagged her to her core, the name of the song right there on the tip of her brain but she couldn’t come up with it. She didn’t want to ask Eddie what song it was because that meant interacting with him.
It was hard to believe that once upon a time, they had been a happy little family. That was the thing people didn’t understand about relationships. They didn’t always fall apart all at once, with an affair or a punch of the face or blowing it all on the Patriots. Sometimes they died a little bit at a time. A chip in the wall here, a crack there, wounds that were never repaired. Enough of those and even the Great Wall of China would come tumbling down.
Strange though, they had spent more time together since the attack than they probably had in the year preceding it. It didn’t change things between them, not a bit; it was more of a reminder of all that had gone wrong between them over the years. Winding down.
An hour out from the warehouse and signs of urbanization greeted them under a gloomy sunrise. The sky lightened to the east as they passed an old vintage movie theater that had played second-run movies for ninety-nine cents, the marquee still announcing a Captain America movie. A hint of indigo bled on the horizon, a glimmer of the day to come. Cornfields gave way to small squat buildings in this industrial section of Omaha. Once comforting to Rachel in their familiarity, they now seemed ominous, dead, harbingers of things to come.
She lit a cigarette.
“You gotta smoke those goddamn things?” Eddie asked.
“Shut up.”
As the development grew denser, they began moving with more care, keeping an eye out on the dark corners, on alleyways, up to the rooftops. They were in neutral territory, largely because there wasn’t anything worth fighting over here anymore. That said, you could never be too careful. Mankind hadn’t exactly been on its best behavior in the absence of civilization. After pitching the half-smoked cigarette, she curled her finger around the trigger of the M4, the strap set snugly around her neck.
In the east, the dead skyline of Nebraska’s biggest city rose before them, well into its second decade of disrepair. The buildings were dirty, many of them sporting a greenish coating of mildew. Virtually all the windows were blown out, victims of vandalism and weather and time. To the north, grain silos reaching skyward like outstretched fingers broke the up the flat horizon.
“How much farther is it?”
She ignored the whininess of his query; he sounded like a child complaining to his parents on a long road trip.
“Two miles. Maybe three.”
Forty minutes later, they arrived at the outskirts of the Market, which had been set up in a city park, the previous home to a farmer’s market that had been popular with Omahans before the plague. Here and there, people milled about, chatting, arguing, dealing. An old FEMA banner hung limply from the outer fence. The agency had set up a processing center here during the outbreak, including a series of trailers that had been conscripted into service for the Market. The banner had faded but you could just make out the lettering that read QUARANTINE IN EFFECT.
Rachel focused on a middle-aged woman, frightfully thin, standing outside the gates. Her clothes hung loosely on her frame. Even from where she stood, Rachel could see the sunken eyes, the hollow in the woman’s cheeks. She stopped each person who passed through the gates, begging for a handout, b
ut no one paid her any mind. Eventually, a Market security guard came by to talk with her. He spoke for a few seconds, and the woman shook her head vehemently. Rachel knew what the man was telling her. The woman did have something to sell, yes, indeedy. It would be a matter of whether she had reached that line.
Rachel watched her and her heart broke, but not from any sense of empathy. She was the woman; the woman was her.
No.
That wouldn’t be her. She was strong where this woman was weak. She would find a way. Today was the first step toward that.
She pulled her focus back from this a microcosm of misery and took in the forest rather than the trees. It had been a while since she had come to Market, at least four months, maybe six. The sight of so many people always shocked her a bit; you forgot how many different faces you used to see every day in the old world. Faces of people you’d see once and never see again. Faces at the gas station, at a stoplight, standing in line at the bank, sitting next to you at your favorite pizza place. And then all those faces had vanished, all at once, and you’d go weeks or months without seeing a new face, and then you would forget there were still other people in the world. Then you came to Market, and it was sensory overload, even though when you got right down to it, there really weren’t that many people here at all.
Rachel liked seeing new faces, it gave her a little thrill to see other people again. Young people, old people, white faces, black faces, Asian faces, Hispanic faces, faces that might look like one ethnicity or another, but you really couldn’t tell at all.
She and Eddie fell into the queue, which was starting to thicken ahead of the Market’s opening at dawn. As they waited, she scanned the crowd, considering how to play it. Was someone here waiting for the briefcase? Had someone already spotted it? It wasn’t lost on her that they might already be in terrible danger, that the last moments of their lives might already be sluicing away, the last few grains of sands whirlpooling toward their date with gravity.
At dawn, a bell clanged, and the Market opened.
#
A band had struck up the music as they entered the gates. The smell of meat cooking on a fire somewhere wafted through the air, the aroma making her mouth water. She pushed it out of her head, knowing the price for such a treat would be too rich for what they could afford to pay. As they wandered the grounds, the Market revved to life, people setting up tents and tables, dragging coolers and crates of goods to sell. Everything would be for sale, food, medicine, weapons, ammunition, even sex.
There would be dice and gambling and prostitution and sport, probably a fight at dusk, when someone would build a big bonfire, and two pugilists would whale away on each other to the delight of the crowd. It was loud and boisterous and sometimes a bit frightening. She found herself drifting to their usual spot, where they normally set up their table. They didn’t have their table today, but she felt safer here nonetheless.
“Morning,” said their neighbor, a middle-aged fireplug of a man named Andy. He was a thickly built man, balding but for two strips of bushy gray hair flanking each side of his dome. His face bore a long scar beginning above his eyebrow and curling upward to his hairline. He had an astonishing array of guns and ammunition at his disposal, which he usually traded for food. He fancied himself the pit boss of the market, in no small part due to his arsenal. He always came solo and never spoke of anyone else; his background was a bit of a mystery.
“Andy,” Rachel said sweetly. Ordinarily, she detested making small talk, especially with Andy, but today she would have to, and she would have to do it well. He often doled out nuggets of gossip he picked up along the midway. People were afraid of Andy, and probably with good reason. Best to curry favor with him and stay apprised of the comings and goings of the post-apocalyptic plains states.
“The love of my life,” he said. “You still with this jerkoff?” Andy asked, nodding toward Eddie. The two men did not get along, and Andy was not afraid to express his disdain toward Eddie. He had taken a shine to Rachel, though, and he had always been fair with them. He was their primary ammunition vendor.
Eddie stepped toward the man, his chest puffed out.
“What’d you say to me, asshole?”
Andy shoved him aside like a child pushing away a boring toy.
“I’ll let that one go,” Andy said. “My way of paying my respects.”
“What are you talking about?” Eddie asked stupidly.
She nodded. Andy knew about the battle for the warehouse. She didn’t reply, wondering where he would take this conversation. He liked to talk, that was for sure, hated empty silences.
“Sorry about your pop,” Andy said, turning his attention back to Rachel. “Kind of a legend, that man.”
Adam was well known at the Market, having run a medical clinic there for years. Few doctors had appeared at the Market, and his services were frequently in high demand. There was simply no escaping the man’s shadow.
“Anyway, lotta folks talkin’ about your warehouse,” he went on. “Biggest one in months. Probably the way things is gonna be from now on. Y’all ain’t the only ones running out. Food’s getting expensive.”
“Any idea who hit us?”
“No.”
Rachel eyed him, trying to decide if he were telling the truth.
“There’s more out there,” Eddie said. “We’ll find it.”
“If there were more, it’d have shown up here,” Andy replied. “Population around here’s been getting bigger every year. People abandoning the coasts.”
“Why?” Rachel asked.
“The big cities, they’re death traps,” Andy said. “Controlled by warlords. That’s where the worst of the worst set up shop. They went in, scooped up all the food and supplies. Now the food is running low. People starting to stream to the middle. It’s no secret there are tons of warehouses and distribution centers in the Midwest, near the Mississippi. Like a funnel. It’s only going to get worse.
“You know what happens when there’s a shortage of a vital resource?”
War.
Rachel shuddered.
On the plus side, if they all killed each other over a dwindling food supply, then their baby problem wouldn’t be all that big a deal. In fact, without the lid on their population, they may have run out of food long ago. Strange that had never occurred to her before.
“If I was you,” he said, “I’d start thinking real hard about what else you got to trade for food.”
He winked at her, and disgust swept through her. Disgust at what he was suggesting, but an even more thorough revulsion at knowing he was right, and that she would do anything to ensure Will’s well-being. God help her, she would do it.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie asked, this question even dumber than the last one.
“Your missus knows what I’m talking about,” he said, crossing his arms across his broad chest.
Eddie dumbly swung his head toward her.
“And she knows I’m right.”
“Enough,” she said sharply.
Andy quieted down and went back to the work of arranging his wares on the table. She took the briefcase from Eddie’s hand and set it down. Andy looked up at her but didn’t say anything. His face was blank. If he had any knowledge about this briefcase’s provenance, he wasn’t letting on.
“Know anything about this?”
He kept his eyes on her.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Doesn’t matter how I got it. I got it.”
“All right then.”
“Do you know whose it is?”
“I might.”
“You might.”
They stood silently.
“Why do you have to be such a prick?” she asked, her shoulders slumping.
“Wasn’t loved enough as a child.”
She laughed, not because the joke was funny, but because of how stupid this was. How everyone was trying to out-badass everyone all the time. Deep down under the harsh exterior was the ma
n who’d watched the world collapse a decade ago, but who worked desperately to cover it up.
“What were you like?” she asked. “Before, I mean.”
“Doesn’t matter anymore.”
“I think it does,” she said. “Let me guess. A software engineer?”
He smiled.
“Taught biology at a community college.”
“From teaching to this.”
“You do what you gotta do.”
“OK, listen up, Professor. I’m going to find out whose briefcase this is, with or without you. And if I have to do it without you, I’ll make sure the owner knows I did it without you. How do you think that’s going to play?”
Her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry; she hoped she sounded more convincing than she felt. His right cheek bulged as he probed it with his tongue.
A flicker of fear in his eyes.
She held his gaze until he looked away, her breath coming in ragged gasps. He spat in the grass behind him.
“I’ll find out.”
“You do that.”
#
While Andy worked on his promise, Rachel and Eddie gingerly made their way through the midway, pausing at each booth to browse. At the first, a raggedy pop-up shelter, there was an elderly man hawking salted meats for a fortune. Rachel had a sudden vision of someone trailing the man home and murdering him for his food supply. And then that was all she saw. From booth to booth, visions of brutal, violent deaths for these vendors, everyone slaughtering each other in humanity’s last terrible war for a case of black beans flickered in her mind.
She glanced around for Eddie, but he was nowhere to be seen. A quick survey of the crowd, starting to thicken as the afternoon wore on, failed to reveal his whereabouts.
“Dammit.”
She didn’t actually care where Eddie Callahan the man was. What she did care about were the current whereabouts of her partner, her backup, the one supposed to be looking out for her as she did for him. There was some semblance of law and order at the Market, but it wasn’t as safe as, say, Grandma’s house. Tempers flared from time to time, and rules didn’t mean a whole lot when you took a shiv in the gut for looking at someone funny.
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