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“Yeah.”
“Pull your shirt out,” she said. “I can see your gun.”
“Yeah.”
“If they’re together, I’ll be looking at the woman. If they don’t spot us as cops, we could trail them…”
“Okay. Slow down for a few seconds before we go in,” Lucas said. “Catch our breaths…”
They caught a break in the traffic and ran across the highway; the parking lot was crowded with cars and pickups, and they kept as many as they could between them and the supermarket’s front windows.
Rae: “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m going in.”
Lucas took a breath, walked through the door and turned to the right.
Foss was right there, just through the checkout counter, holding two big brown grocery sacks. He locked eyes with Lucas and dropped the sacks and shouted, “No!”
17
Darkness inside made it worse.
Scott, Catton, Foss, and Callister were lying on bare mattresses in the two bedrooms, or sometimes sitting in a circle on the living room chairs and carpet, afraid to let any light hit a window, in a house that was supposed to be empty. The only illumination, in a shut-up bedroom with a blanket over the only window, came from a laptop screen, and it wasn’t enough. They hadn’t had anything to eat except two shared power bars, and the stress from the flight down the mountain, along with hunger, cranked the anxiety.
Foss had gotten online through an unprotected Wi-Fi at a neighbor’s house. A website told them that the Smith’s supermarket closed at midnight. After some talk, they decided the best time to shop would be between nine and ten o’clock—late enough that there’d be fewer people around, but not so few that they’d be memorable.
“They must have my face and Clarice’s too,” Scott told Foss and Callister. “You two should walk over, get enough food for a couple of days.”
“I could drive over in my car,” Callister said. She added, “If they don’t have our names, my Oregon license is still good…”
“Better to walk,” Scott said. “They’ll be going over every car; there’ll be checkpoints everywhere. And if you’re both in the car, and if they know one of you…”
“Okay.”
“And get some water, and maybe some bottled tea,” Catton said.
“Stay together, hold hands. Look like a couple, taking a stroll. That’s less suspicious than a lone guy walking in the dark,” Scott said. He was making it up as he went along. “Separate just before you get to the store—if they’re watching the store, and they stop one of you, the other might have a chance to call us and let us know. Or get away clean.”
“Do we take our flasks with us?” Callister asked.
Scott said, “Not in the safe boxes. Use the fanny packs.”
“The fanny packs were supposed to be…an attack thing,” Foss said.
Scott: “I think we’re there, Randy. If a cop approaches one of you in the store, if you know you’re done, break the flasks. Maybe something will come of it. A supermarket late at night…we’d get a few people, and with any luck, some of them would be leaving town.”
Foss: “The viral footprint…”
“Would be small, but the Covid footprint was small to begin with. The Chinese became aware of a few people with pneumonia, and from there…boom.”
Callister: “Boom.”
—
They lay around,talking sporadically, Scott did some pushups, Foss joined in, and Callister started rattling along about death.
She said, “I thought I might die if we did this. I thought I might be killed by angry people, in revenge. I thought I might die from the vaccine. I didn’t care. But then I got through the vaccine, and I feel good, better than I’ve felt in years. Now I don’t want to die.”
