“Aren’t you worried about snipers?” Sherry said, after a while.
“Very,” Lenny said. “But I’m more afraid of getting into something hand to hand. Tip me over and I’m fucked; at gunfire distances, it’s at least even, maybe better. And I can always shoot to make them keep their heads down while Heather closes in to rip their heads off with her bare hands.”
“Pbbbbt.”
“Hey, you and I know we’re a couple of scared desk jockeys. Sherry thinks you’re Daniel Boone and I’m Q. This way at least one of us has some confidence.”
The sun found them near a pocket park with good views in all directions; Heather gave Sherry a fast course in using the pistol, finishing by telling her, “Look, it’s really nothing more than this: You point it at people you intend to shoot. Don’t point it at anyone you don’t. Put your finger inside the trigger guard only if you plan to shoot someone. Once they’ve seen you point it at them, they’re going to be pissed, so shoot. If you decide to stick around after this, then we’ll go into exciting subjects like cleaning and maintenance. For one long day in the street like we’re doing here, it’s a magic stick for blowing holes in people, so only point it at people who need holes in them, but if they do, put a hole in them quick. ’Kay?”
“ ’Kay. And thanks.”
When they had all had a rest, a long drink of water, a sandwich, and a well-guarded trip behind the bushes, Lenny said, “Time to get rolling again, I guess,” and they were back at it.
It was about ten A.M., and they were looking for a good place for their next rest stop, when they saw another living human being—an old man in tattered clothes pushing a grocery cart. He waved at them in a friendly way, hollered “They ain’t got nothing at Rescue, I’m tryin’ Salvation Army,” and kept going.
“How much of all this do you suppose he’s noticed?” Heather asked.
“Everything or nothing,” Sherry said, “that’s what most of them are like. Some of them are at the public library all day and are better informed than most congressmen, even if their take on things veers into weird; and some of them, if ten-legged aliens landed at noon, they’d have forgotten it by the time they started looking for their afternoon bottle.”
“You sound like you know your way around.”
“I used to be in social services. Went down into bad places with just my cell phone. Plus, of course, all the police in DC to get my middle-class ass out of there if anything went south. So I spent some time around bums.”
“Aren’t you supposed to call them the homeless?”
“Different beat from mine. I was dealing with the crazy guys that bother pedestrians; mostly the homeless are people and families that are managing in shelters, or relatives’ basements, or cheap hotels. My guys were bums—harder to help but more entertaining, that’s how Stan used to put it.”
She wasn’t crying, and seemed to be all right. Lenny glanced at Heather, then tried, “I didn’t know Stan very well, but we used to visit now and then. He had me teach Dennis some gun safety, because he said there were always guns around and Stan didn’t want Denny to be afraid of them, the way he was.”
Sherry nodded. “That was Stan. Never sure when to be idealistic and when to be practical. I’m going to miss him. I’m glad you guys took me out of there. If there’s a life to come and all that shit, if I’d just stayed there and mourned until someone killed me, Stan’d’ve been so pissed at me.”
“Practical,” Lenny agreed. “We should get rolling.”
They saw children who didn’t seem to have anyone to be with, a young mother with a baby who wouldn’t come close enough to them to talk, and some small groups of armed people who kept their distance.
“Wonder how many of those are out looting and robbing, and how many are preventing it?” Heather said, after a group of three men with pistols and bats had traded waves with them.
“And how many start out to do one and end up doing the other?” Lenny said.
Just after eleven A.M., a biohazard Hummer turned a corner in front of them and came to a stop. A man in a black suit with well-shined shoes got out. “Cameron Nguyen-Peters sent me out to fetch you,” he said. “And to tell you you could at least have tried a pay phone, or flashing Morse code, or something.”
Those last few minutes were surreal; suddenly the trip that should have taken the rest of the day took less than ten minutes. The air was just the right temperature, there was cool clean water for all of them, and on their way along the parkway, shots were fired at them twice.
“That didn’t happen while we were walking,” Heather said.
The driver shrugged. “When you were walking, you looked like people; now you look like the Man.”
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. PALE BLUFF. ILLINOIS. 10:30 A.M. CST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.
Carol May Kloster wondered if anyone had even thought, yet, about what they’d do for record keeping when they ran out of pencils, since as far as anyone could tell, every single ballpoint pen in Pale Bluff, Illinois, had turned to goo in the last week.
She also wondered if there was really any point in taking down the report from the Food Committee tonight; surely their own records should suffice, without her taking dictation? Especially when George Auvergne had such a knack for going on.
So far the news was that there were enough apples stored, and they probably would not need to commandeer more basements. They were lucky that Pale Bluff had been an orchard town for a hundred years, and luckier still that forty boxcars of just-harvested apples had been waiting on the siding, not yet off to the national market.
According to Linda Beckham, the town’s one dietician, there were calories enough in all those apples, enough vitamin pills had been salvaged from plastic bottles thanks to a smart pharmacist, and the local hunters and fishermen could bring in enough deer, pheasants, and small game with rifles from the local black-powder club for enough protein; they’d make it through without starvation or significant malnutrition. If the winter was cold, ice fishermen could help out, and they were talking to a Hutterite community up the road about trading apples for cheese.
As the only person in town who still knew Gregg shorthand, and therefore could take accurate minutes (take that, iScribe! she thought), Carol May had job security but she was probably doomed to be the only person who listened all the way through each meeting. She wondered whether what she had done in a previous life had been good or bad.
The Community Kitchen Committee was figuring they could keep everyone fed until June, when early beets and radishes would start coming in. The Planting Committee had located enough seed potatoes and corn. The Poultry Committee reported that there’d be eggs enough around July, and at least some chickens for the table by fall next year. They had a plan for seeing if they could capture and pen wild ducks as well.
The last committee to report was Amusements. Mrs. Martinez pointed out that the candy for the Pale Bluff Community Halloween Party was already on hand, and some children already had costumes; “I was thinking, it’s Halloween tonight, why don’t we just let the kids have a last rampage at the candy? There won’t be any more for a long time, and it wouldn’t be bad to put a little extra fat on the kids for the winter—”
Reverend Walters got up and started yelling about how Halloween and Satan were behind Daybreak. After a moment, Carol May decided to just note down “Reverend Walters objected.” It looked like she’d be eating lunch on the second shift again.
ABOUT 45 MINUTES LATER. ST. ELIZABETH’S FACILITY. WASHINGTON. DC. 2:15 P.M. EST. THURSDAY. OCTOBER 31.