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“Called for one, should be here in a minute,” a cop said. “What should we do?”
Lucas was still kneeling next to the wounded man and a woman poked her head around a corner of the aisle and asked, “Are you really a marshal?”
“Yes.”
“I’m a doctor. Should I look at this man?”
“That’d be great,” Lucas said.
She did, then shook her head and said, “Better wait for the ambulance. Can’t help him here. Don’t think he’ll die. What’d he do?”
“He was a hero,” Lucas said, looking down at the man, a hand-sized puddle of purple blood leaking out from under his shoulder. “Unfortunately for all of us.”
—
Callister, in apanic, kept running until she couldn’t run anymore, unaware of the bag hooked over her arm, though it was heavy, and when a side-stitch finally slowed her down, gasping for air, she put the bag on the street and took out her phone and called Scott.
Scott answered instantly, but she found it hard to speak, and she said, “Minute…minute…gimme a minute…”
Then, “Randy was shot in the store, he’d dead! I think he’s dead, he was shot in the head! I ran. Whatever phone he called you on, you should get rid of it.”
“Ah, no. Are you sure?”
“I saw him get shot! I saw blood all over a woman’s face! Yes! I’m sure.”
Scott said, “You are unbelievably brave. To get out and warn us. Can you get back here?”
“Yes. But the phone…”
“Do you have enough light to take the battery out of your phone?”
“Uh, I think so, there’s a streetlight…”
“Take the battery out, then bury the phone, if you can. Doesn’t have to be deep, but underground so nobody can stumble over it.”
“I can do that.”
“Do it. I’m destroying this phone, now!”
—
The supermarket wasempty, except for Lucas, Rae, and one of the cops. Lucas looked down at the fanny pack that Rae had dragged off Foss’s body and said to Rae, “We gotta look. We gotta know if any of that shit got out, if we might have a problem. You should back up.”
“I could…”
“Rae, back off.”
She backed away.
Using a plastic knife from a box that Foss had in his grocery sack, Lucas lifted the flap on the fanny pack. He could see the tops of five of the test-tube shaped vials. “Looks intact,” he said.
He used a pack of cheese slices to pin the top of the fanny pack to the floor, and eased out one of the vials, still using the plastic knife, and then the others. None of them were broken. He could see a pinkish liquid inside the tubes.
He exhaled, stood up: “I think we’re okay.”
18
Lucas called Greet and told her that Foss was dead and that he hadn’t released the virus. “He was buying a lot of food, enough for four, so now we know that they’re still here.”
