“All right. Let’s go.” Jeremy deferred to Ed’s wisdom and expertise. The longer they stood there talking about it, the longer it would take to get the food home.
Ed rose and clapped a sturdy hand to his shoulder.
In less than ten minutes, they were outfitted for the weather, snowshoes strapped on, heads bent away from the wind. They carried shovels in case they needed to dig their way to someone’s door. Using a buddy system, they tied themselves to each end of Ed’s rope and followed the trees along the parkway.
The first three houses yielded nothing. The Reynolds, Bernard, and Diaz pantries were down to their last few jars of this or that, and they all had children that needed to eat. Jeremy discussed options, situations and plans, and then he and Ed moved on.
The snow blew sideways, relentless.
Rahn Ferrell, an accountant Jeremy had known for six years, opened his door, but only a few inches. The swarthy man darted wary looks between them that made Jeremy immediately think he had something to hide. Honest and respectable, Rahn had proven himself to be a good friend; today he looked shifty and nervous.
“Hey, Rahn. How are you and Candace doing?” Jeremy asked.
“She’s ill and sleeping. What do you want?”
Taken aback by Rahn’s abruptness, he said, “Were you hit by those thugs last night? They took all our food and I was wondering if you had something—anything—that I could give to my kids.”
“We have nothing for you, Jeremy. Try Helen and Robert.”
Through the crack in the door, Jeremy caught scent of a sickening stench. “We’re on our way there next. Do you want us to—”
“Just go.” Rahn closed the door and engaged the dead bolt with a solid snap.
Ed hooked Jeremy’s elbow and drew him away from the Ferrell house.
“What the hell was that about?” Jeremy asked, dumbfounded. He adjusted the goggles over his eyes, shouting against the wind and sleet.
“I bet he killed Candace so the food would last longer. Probably toss her body out into the snow when it decomposes to the point he can’t take the smell,” Ed replied matter-of-factly.
Jeremy stopped dead at the end of the walkway and stared at Ed. “Rahn? Mild mannered, nice-as-pie Rahn? Never. He wouldn’t do that to her.”
Ed gave him a knowing, meaningful look. “People act differently when their lives are at stake.”
Jeremy, disturbed at the thought, didn’t say anything else about it.
Helen and Robert contributed two packets of oatmeal and a protein bar. The only bachelor on the street, Levin Black, gave Jeremy a can of peaches, eight pretzels and his best wishes. Although Levin smiled, there was something defeated in his eyes and posture, as if he was just waiting for the inevitable.
At the end of his own walkway, Jeremy tried to get Ed to take one of the packets of oatmeal and half the pretzels.
Ed glanced at the food with a contemplative look before accepting the packet of oatmeal. “Thanks, Jeremy. Let’s get together tomorrow morning and decide what else we’re going to do. Might have to make a trip to the store and see if there’s anything left. We’ll do what we have to.”
We’ll do what we have to. For some reason, the thought made Jeremy uneasy.
• • •
The meager meal had been met with squeals of excitement. While it lasted, Lila swooned over the peaches and Haley nibbled with relish at a pretzel and oatmeal. Andrew ate faster, wolfing his portion down, and complained his stomach was still rumbling when he was done.
That had been the night before. Now it was morning. Dressed once more to forage, Jeremy eyed his family with increasing distress. In the living room, Haley and Lila huddled together with their array of dolls, eyes luminous, mouths in little pouts. Jo sat on the couch, staring at the wall, a mug of hot water in her hand. They were out of coffee, out of hot chocolate, but the routine stayed the same. Andrew, usually rowdy and loud, sat subdued and silent in a pile of Lincoln Logs.
Jeremy’s stomach growled constantly, grumbling and clenching with hunger pangs he forced himself to ignore.
“Come give me a kiss. I’m going to get us something else to eat.” The kids brightened a little and ran over, peppering his cheeks with kisses. Jo glanced over, looking listless, but didn’t get up.
Jeremy hugged the children hard against him until Haley squeaked in protest. After ensuring that Andrew would blockade the door with the chair, he left the house.
Outside, he bent to strap the snowshoes on and made sure the gun was in the pocket of his heavy coat. Getting his bearings, rope in hand, he started across the snow toward Ed’s. He could only see a vague outline of the house through the swirling veil of white.
Cursing the weather under his breath, he slid down the embankment to Ed’s porch and brushed snow off his goggles.
The ex-marine swung the door open, already dressed and ready to go. Jeremy could see the days with so little food were starting to take a toll. Ed’s face looked gaunt, eyes hollower than they were the day before.
“Where to first? Davidson’s?” Jeremy asked. Located three blocks away, Davidson’s was the biggest grocery store in town.
“Good enough place to start. We can hit the smaller stores afterward if we have to. Lot of times, they have vending machines in the employee lounges. I think we should tie ourselves together and move tree to tree along the parkway,” Ed suggested, handing him a new length of rope.
“All right.” Jeremy tied an end through his belt loop. Before the storm hit, he would have laughed at the thought of getting lost in a residential neighborhood.
After accepting one of the spare shovels, Jeremy took the lead. Twice he had to be redirected when he missed a tree altogether and started going in circles. They took three wrong turns, disoriented by the seemingly endless field of snow.
By the time Jeremy finally spotted the looming shape of the grocery store, two and a half hours had passed. Frustrated, exhausted and cold, he and Ed decided to go around to the loading dock in the back. Clearing the concrete steps with the shovels, they climbed up the platform and tried the door.
“It’s unlocked,” Jeremy said, twisting the knob. He went in, Ed on his heels.
The storage area they stepped into stretched along the entire back of the store. Jeremy glanced left and right, barely able to see in the gloom. Ed pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and pierced the darkness with a beam of light. He handed another flashlight to Jeremy.
“Doesn’t look like there’s anything but boxes back here. All the pallets look empty. Still, we should check them,” Jeremy said, leaning the shovel against the wall. He clicked the flashlight on.
“I’ll take the right, you take the left,” Ed said. He propped his shovel against a pallet.
Jeremy wasted little time pawing through boxes and shelves, searching for even the smallest container of food. Sheets of plastic rustled when he shoved them aside to inspect a pile of crates. He found not one box of pasta, not one can of soup.
Nothing.
Meeting near the double swinging doors, he discovered that Ed hadn’t turned up anything either.
Exchanging a grim glance, they pressed on.
Obviously ransacked several times, the supermarket had a chaotic appearance, shelves busted and tilting, shredded boxes littering the floor. Jeremy flipped the light switch at the back; to his surprise, the fluorescent bulbs overhead buzzed and flickered to life. The pale glow made the desperation around them more prominent, like a gritty photo from some post-apocalyptic world.
“Backup generator,” Ed said, explaining the lights. “If we split up, we can cover more ground.”
“All right. Shout if you run across anything.” Jeremy banked left, finding useless plastic containers and random bits of trash. The frozen food section had nothing to offer except a discarded baggie and a rotting banana peel.
Jeremy marched up and down the aisles with increasing despair, pausing now and then to kick over a piece of flattened cardboard or lift a fal
len shelf. He tucked the flashlight into his pocket to free his hands and make searching easier.
“Anything yet?” Ed called from somewhere else in the store.
“Nothing. You?”
“Not a damn thing,” Ed said with disgust.
Jeremy cut his hips through a narrow half door into what was usually the fresh meat section. All the steel tables were clean and bare, as well as the freezer Jeremy found built into the wall. Coils of cold air spilled into the room while he stared at the empty shelves. He closed the door, leaning his forehead against the outside for a moment.
There were few places left to check. If there wasn’t food here, there was little chance there would be food at the smaller convenience stores a few blocks down. The only other grocery store was miles from here, all but impossible to access.
He had a brief vision of turning into the kind of man who broke through someone’s front door, gun in hand, demanding what was left of their food.
If there was any left at all.
Another vision, this one of Haley and Lila and Andrew’s faces swam across his mind. Hungry faces, pleading eyes.
“I don’t guess you found any food,” a voice said behind him.
Jeremy whirled around, startled. A man stood there, layered in clothes and a thin coat, eyes haunted under the hood that covered his head.
“There’s nothing left,” Jeremy said, deciding on the truth. A strange tension hung in the air. Jeremy knew the other man felt it, too. He could see it in the man’s dark eyes. Sense it in his posture.
“Haven’t heard from anyone in weeks,” the stranger said.
“Neither have we.”
“We?”
“My wife and I,” Jeremy clarified.
“So you live close by then?” The stranger rubbed his hand over his mouth in a calculating way Jeremy didn’t like.
“Not too close. We have nothing anyway, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
The man stared, cold and hard, as if trying to decide whether he was lying.
Jeremy said, “Why do you think I’m here?”
“You could have something though.” The stranger raised his other hand; light glinted off a gun. “Tell me where you live.”
Jeremy licked his lips. “There’s hundreds of other houses you can check besides mine.”
“I’ve checked quite a few. Lot of people are dead for one reason or another. And it’s hard getting around, if you haven’t noticed.” He gestured with the gun. Impatient. “Tell me where you live.”
An array of butcher knives in their holders sat to Jeremy’s right, too far out of reach to be useful. In periphery, he saw Ed creep through the half door with a pipe raised. Although his eye was drawn there, Jeremy resisted the urge to glance.
“All right, man. All right,” he said, showing his palms as signs of surrender. “I live on Juliet Drive. Twenty-four twenty-four.”
With a mighty swing, Ed hit the stranger hard across the head. The man went straight down, landing with a heavy thump.
Jeremy hurried to retrieve the gun when it skittered across the floor. “He took me by surprise.”
“Never even heard him come in,” Ed said, staring at the man on the ground. A thick pool of red blood oozed toward the toes of his boots. Ed took a step back.
Jeremy frowned when he saw the blood and crouched close to feel for a pulse.
There wasn’t one. He bowed his head in shock, bracing the side of his wrist against his mouth. The gun hung limp from his fingers.
“Didn’t mean to kill him,” Ed said with a defensive edge to his voice. “But it’s him or us.”
“I know, I know. This whole thing is turning into an unbelievable nightmare.” Jeremy stood up, glancing around like an answer to their problems might suddenly appear.
When he looked back at Ed, the older man was staring down at the prone body with a quizzical look.
“What is it?” Jeremy asked.
A brief look of disgust crossed Ed’s face, and he tossed the pipe down. “You’re not going to want to hear it.”
Jeremy frowned. “What am I not going to want to hear? If you think you’re going to jail for this, I’m not—”
“It’s a shame to waste the meat.” Ed met Jeremy’s gaze dead on.
It took a moment for the insinuation to sink in.
“Oh hell no. Ed, you can’t be serious.” Jeremy turned away, yanking the beanie off his head. His stomach heaved at the very thought of…just no.
“Where are we going to get food?”
“Somewhere! If I have to go door to door for five miles in all directions, I will.” Jeremy turned around and jabbed a finger at the dead stranger. “We’re not resorting to that.”
Ed continued to stare at him. Silent.
“I can’t believe you’re even suggesting it,” Jeremy spat. “There’s no way I’m feeding that to my kids.”
“What will you do day after tomorrow, when they’re crying and inconsolable because they’re hungry? What will you do next week—”
“The storm will break by then. It has to. Relief is on the way.” Agitated, Jeremy paced like a lion in a cage. Bile rose in the back of his throat.
“They can’t relieve the whole country. We’re in a world of hurt, son. You know it, and I know it.”
“We can go up into the foothills. There’s probably hundreds of rabbits—”
“In all this snow? We’ll never find them. And even if we do, one little rabbit isn’t going to feed a whole family. Much less two,” Ed said.
“I can’t.”
“A man can do, and will do, anything he has to in order to feed his family.” Ed turned the dead man over and started to remove his clothes.
“Ed…” Jeremy put a hand out in a clear stop gesture.
Ed didn’t stop. He peeled the coat and layers of clothing off, tossing them unceremoniously aside. There was something eerily mechanical about his movements, as if even he didn’t want to be doing what he was doing.
Jeremy paced faster. He set the gun on an empty counter and looked out into the ransacked store. The empty, teetering shelves mocked him. Through the high vents in the ceilings, around the cracks in the doors, he could hear the wind howling as the storm intensified.
Madness.
They couldn’t be reduced to animals. There was another answer besides this. He heard one boot drop on the concrete floor. And then the other. Jeremy rubbed a hand down his face, taking several measured breaths.
His stomach rumbled.
No. No.
The sound of tearing paper turned Jeremy’s attention back. Ed crouched down next to the stripped corpse on the cold floor and struggled to put a length of sterile paper half under the hip and thigh. A large butcher knife rested on the dead stranger’s chest.
Jeremy looked away. Contemplated leaving the store altogether. If Ed wanted to take this road there was nothing he could do abou—
Chop. The thick, wet thud made Jeremy gag. He staggered into the main section of the store, curling his hand into a fist near his mouth. The end of a shelf caught his shoulder and he bounced off, stumbling over an overturned shopping cart. It made a ruckus, but Jeremy could still hear the steady chop of the butcher knife. Relentless.
Hacking the dead man into manageable pieces.
Jeremy threw up on the floor, hunched over with his hands braced against his knees. Hot, salty tears streamed from the corners of his eyes into the curve near his mouth and off his whiskered jaw. He shook with violent denial, both for what Ed was doing and for the crazy state of the world. Weeks of believing someone would eventually help them had led to this moment in time, where their very survival depended on making impossible choices that he didn’t want to make.
He found the employee restroom and snapped on the light. It blinked and hissed like it might go out any second. At the sink, he turned on the faucet and rinsed his mouth of the foul taste. His stomach continued to rumble; he couldn’t tell if it was in disgust or hunger.
Holding
onto the edge of the counter, Jeremy Buckle tried to come to terms with his grisly situation. Going door to door had to be better than this. Someone out there had food. But he wasn’t fool enough to believe strangers would give it up any easier than he would—Jeremy wasn’t the only man with a family. He wasn’t the only man suffering hunger pangs and fear.
By the time he left the bathroom, it felt like an hour had passed. Or maybe two or three. Jeremy couldn’t be sure.
Ed stood outside the butcher’s shop. A line of white wrapped packages sat atop the steel counter above the display case. As if this was just some other ordinary day and they were picking up meat for a barbecue.
It was so bizarre that Jeremy had to stop and orientate himself. He could see black writing across the paper: Round steak. Flank steak. Rump roast.
“Do the cooking yourself so the women don’t ask questions about why it doesn’t look exactly like the meat they’re used to. If you use enough herbs and spices, it’ll help disguise the taste,” Ed said.
“How are you going to explain the blood on your clothes?” Jeremy asked, swallowing convulsively. He refused to think about eating human flesh.
“I’ll tell Louise a shipment came in and I had to help do the butchering.”
Shutting his mind down, Jeremy lurched forward and snatched several packages off the counter. He stuffed them into the pockets of his coat and a stray bag he found lying on the floor.
Jeremy said nothing as they gathered the dead man’s remains and left.
• • •
With a shaking hand, Jeremy set a plate in front of each of the kids. Jo had hers on the table, utensils at the ready, salt and pepper shakers within reach. The children bubbled over with excitement and anticipation, forks held tight in their little fists, waiting for him to sit down. The house smelled ripe with fresh-cooked meat.
He sat at the head of the table, reluctant, avoiding the strange, questioning looks Jo gave him. He said a short prayer aloud and added a silent one for himself.
The kids dug in. They ate with gusto, chattering about how lucky Daddy was to get the last of a shipment of meat at the store. Jo kept trying to smile, too, apparently caught between relief and confusion.