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Callister looked to her left; a half-mile away, at another traffic light, they could see a cluster of cop cars with the light bars flashing, and a two-block line of cars trying to get through.
“Gotta get across,” Foss said, dropping Callister’s hand. “I’ll slow walk—you go on ahead. Stay away from me inside.”
—
They got agreen light and crossed the highway, Callister walking ahead. She went inside, tried not to look around too much, but saw a dozen shoppers around the cash registers, more moving in the back. They hadn’t talked too much about what she should buy, but since they had no power, and were operating in the dark, they were essentially camping out.
She put a three-dollar burlap shopping bag in her cart, to make it easy to carry heavier loads. Okay, what would she take on a camping trip that was reasonably healthy and vegetarian? She shopped carefully, bought bottles of coffee, ready-to-eat carrots and apples and oranges, sourdough bread, honey spread, cheese and crackers, peanut butter and jelly…and a Covid mask for Catton…
She was moving slowly through the store, hyperaware of the sounds around her, voices, anything that might be an alarm—she heard nothing like that—and slowly began to loosen up.
Foss came in a minute behind Callister, moving fast. He saw Callister down one aisle, and avoided her, hurrying on, throwing a variety of no-cook food in his shopping cart: bananas, grapes, packs of sliced cheddar, pepper jack and Swiss cheese, three boxes of crackers, sliced deli chicken and sliced ham, mustard, potato chips, peanut butter and bread, bottled tea and bottled water, a box of plastic knives.
Five minutes in the store and he headed toward the check-out counters. The cashier was a little slow, and he tried not to show his impatience. When it was all totaled up, he handed the cashier two fifty-dollar bills, got change, picked up the paper shopping bags, and turned toward the exit.
The cops were right there.
He instantly recognized them for what they were, a big guy, blue eyes on him, a black woman behind him, the black woman already with a gun in her hand.
He shouted “No!” and dropped the bags and reached around his hip for the fanny pack and the glass vials of liquid virus media.
The white cop shouted “Hands! Show me hands!” and reached inside his jacket…
But Foss went for the fanny pack and dragged it around his hip and yanked on the Velcro strip that kept it closed, and the ripping sound that it made as he pulled it open was the last thing he heard in his life…
Because Rae shot him in the head.
—
Callister was lookingat yogurt when she heard a man scream “No!” and she was at an angle to the check-out counters and she twisted that way and saw a picture that froze in her mind, a tableau of Foss and a check-out woman and three or four other people and two of them were looking at Foss who reached for his fanny pack…
A black woman shot Foss in the head and Foss threw up his hands and went down and a heavy-set checkout lady jerked toward Callister and Callister saw that her face was covered with what must have been Foss’s blood…
A woman screamed “Shooter!” and then somebody yelled something else and people began screaming and running through the store and a man shouted “Active shooter!”
There was another shot, and then another, and without eventhinking about it, Callister picked up her bag and stumbled toward the back of the store, the heavy bag banging on her hip, where a store employee in a blue apron spread his hands and bellowed, “What the hell?” and Callister screamed “Shooter, active shooter!” and the employee turned and ran through a swinging door into the back and she followed, saw an outdoor light and went that way. She dropped off a loading dock and ran into the dark…
—
“No!”
Lucas saw Foss drop the bags and realized that the other man was going for a fanny pack and that the pack contained either the virus vials or a gun, and he went for his gun but Rae, who was a step behind him, already had her weapon up and she stepped to the left and fired and Foss went down.
People began screamingShooter!and Lucas went for his ID and badge case and began shouting “U.S. Marshals, U.S. Marshals,” and Rae joined in, “U.S. Marshals,” but the store had dissolved in chaos with people screaming, and a man came out of the water aisle holding a pistol in both hands and Rae shouted, “Gun!” and Lucas swiveled toward the man with his badge and shouted “Marshal” but the man pulled the trigger on his gun and it jumped in his hand, the bullet missing everything, and Rae shot him in the chest and he went down.
Lucas said, “Ah, shit!”
Rae: “Who is he, who is he?”
“Don’t know…” He ran toward the wounded man with Rae still shouting, “U.S. Marshals, U.S. Marshals,” and Lucas knelt over the man, who looked at him with eyes gone hazy gray and Lucas kicked the man’s semi-auto across the aisle. The wounded man was wearingan overshirt on top of an olive drab tee-shirt that said, “FREEDOM” in block letters. Lucas pulled the overshirt open and looked for a fanny pack—or anything—and found nothing.
He punched up the police chief on his cell phone: “We’ve got two down at the Smith’s supermarket, one dead, one wounded. We need an ambulance here RIGHT NOW!”
Rae, with her gun in her hand, stooped over the dead man, Foss, reached back into a hip pocket and produced a switchblade and cut the fanny pack strap that went around the dead man’s waist. She saw no signs of wetness, liquid, on the outside of the fanny pack, and pulled it free of the body and left it on the floor.
The screaming had stopped although there were people in the parking lot calling back and forth, and two cop cars rolled up to the store and the cops hurried inside.
Rae called to them, “We’ve got a wounded man, we need to transport him…ambulance coming?”
