It’s like he can’t do it anymore.
Jamison
HAVING ANDREW IN MY HOUSE IS ODD,but in a good way. He’s been here a little over a week and we’ve kind of just slipped into this strange domesticity. It’s like he’s been here far longer.
Honestly, I think it’s because he reminds me of my friend Wes. Not that they’re similar in any way. They especially have different senses of humor—Andrew is sarcastic and deadpan, while Wes loves telling the corniest jokes. Though when Andrew does make a corny joke, it’s fun to react the same way I did with Wes.
There’s still something about Andrew that feels familiar, like we’ve been friends since we were kids. Because that’s what we are now. Friends.
At least I hope we are, considering I’m in a looted Home Depot looking for a gift for him. That’s not the main reason I’m here—it’s getting warmer and I wanted to find seeds to plant in the backyard—but thought I’d look around while I was here.
I feel a little bad having to leave him alone back at the cabin, but I figured it would be nice to give him some alone time.
The swelling in his leg has gone down, but I can see the winces and pained faces he makes. He never slows down. It’s like he’s refusing to let himself rest. I might be wrong, but it seems like he’s eager to leave and trying to learn to deal with the pain so he can get out sooner. I tried to give him some pills before I left but he refused because they were making him constipated last week.
And now I know why it seems like we’ve been friends forever. Because Andrew can’t help but sayeverythingon his mind. Even the TMI stuff.
I smirk as an idea comes to me. I leave the indoor garden area—the seeds rustling against their paper pouches in my backpack—and head for the plumbing aisle. Halfway down the aisle I find the plungers and my smile grows. He’ll definitely feign offense while thinking it’s the dumbest, funniest thing. A combo of Andrew’s humor and Wes’s. Sarcastic and corny.
Now I just have to decide if I go for the cheapest one, $2.99 in prepandemic prices, or the most expensive, $17.99.
But before I can even begin to weigh the humorous pros and cons, the sound of crunching glass shakes me from my thoughts.
Then voices, hushed but clear.
I get low and run in the opposite direction down the aisle and around a disheveled endcap. The new people’s voices echo through the store, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. My heart pounds in my chest and I drop my backpack slowly, and quietly, to the ground. I unzip it and take out the handgun.
Andrew has the rifle back at the cabin; I double-checked that it was loaded and explained how to shoot it, but at the time he lookedlike he was barely paying attention. I should have told him about the cigarette butts, that there was someone nearby. But every day when I went out for more firewood, I would count the butts. Always four.
I assumed whoever it was had been there and left long ago. Maybe they wanted an empty house and left when they realized it wasn’t.
But now I’m starting to think there are more survivors in the area than I originally thought.
There are at least two people talking. I can’t count their footsteps, but two is already outnumbering me, and that’s enough to make my hands tremble as I pull on the backpack.
“Hey, Howie!” The voice makes me jump because it’s not one of the two whispering. This one is just a few aisles over from me. “Over here.”
The voices shift and begin to sound closer. I raise the gun slightly, ready to shoot if I have to. My chest tightens and it becomes hard to breathe. The pounding in my ears blocks out the sound of their footsteps.
I scan the empty, dark aisles. The paint section is to my left, behind me is lumber—but all the wood is gone and the aisles are bare.
There’s a brief shuffling sound of plastic and the clang of metal against the floor that makes me almost jump out of my skin. They’re in the next aisle.
I catch the tail end of a conversation from farther away. It’s a woman. “...more on fortifying than this.”
“We can’t do both?” a man asks.
“Apparently not.” She sounds annoyed. And closer. They’re a couple of aisles down.
And they’re heading toward me.
Their flashlight beams flit across the floor, growing larger. I spin and duck into the next aisle as light washes over the floor where I was just standing.
“I mean,” the woman continues. Her voice is lower, like the closer she gets to the plumbing aisle, the less she wants the first guy to hear. “We need to do something. The winter probably kept people in, but they might start out searching now that the weather’s warming up.”
“But Chad also says we have a small window to get the irrigation set up if we want to get the crops we need. We can’t have a hundred people walking around with watering cans all day.”
Ahundredpeople.
