“So you survived your first gunfight, congratulations.” George’s low tone was acid. “It means you’re not totally worthless. But you’ve still got just about everything to learn, and no time to do it. We could run into another patrol three hours from now, and until I’m convinced you won’t do something stupid that will get us killed, or get you killed, I’m going to teach you, and you’re going to learn. Understand?” he growled.
Jason blinked the tears out of his eyes and straightened up. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the rest of the squad moving away. Not one of them would look meet his gaze. He was angry and hurt and embarrassed, his mind racing, but he looked back to George and nodded.
Ed, Weasel and Quentin walked leisurely down the sidewalk. To their left the neighborhood continued, mostly bungalows clad in red brick and white siding. On their right they passed two low warehouses which been empty and for lease before the war. The realtor’s sign in front of the second building, whose windows had been destroyed years before, shouted PRICE REDUCED! The men walked slowly, in no hurry, slouching and bent as if worn down by life, but their eyes ran over the fronts of the commercial buildings on their right and the homes on their left.
Past the warehouses were a small one-story office building, then a large parking lot, then several one- and two-story red brick commercial buildings. The street stretched before them for hundreds of yards before taking a ninety-degree turn to the north.
Weasel looked down the wide open street ahead of them. “This is such a kill zone,” he murmured, making a face.
“That’s the point, isn’t it?”
On the far side of the street, after it made its turn to the north, behind a tall chain link fence, was a huge low building, white with blue trim. That was their destination. Before the war it had been the distribution center for a chain of drug stores. There were offices, roll-up overhead doors for semis to back up to and get loaded, even secure fenced-off areas inside where the prescription drugs for the pharmacies had been kept.
They passed one final commercial building on their right. It was a two-story brown brick cube, the windows and doors on the first floor boarded over, as were the narrow basement windows. The second-floor windows were intact except for one cracked corner pane which had taken a hit from a rock some years back.
There was no one to be seen as they approached their destination. They could hear a low murmur emanating from the vast building ahead of them. Ed led the way, opening the gate in the chain link fence behind the white-sided warehouse. Ahead of them was a pedestrian door next to a double-wide roll-up door that was so rusty it seemed apparent its rolling days were long over. Ed banged on the pedestrian door with the heel of his palm, and after a few seconds it opened.
One of the men who worked security at the site peered out at them. He was big, and well fed. His hands were empty, but they knew there would be a weapon, probably a shotgun, concealed nearby.
The guard looked them over, then scanned the street behind them. Ed thought he looked vaguely familiar, but he was bad with faces. If the guard recognized them he gave no indication. He stood aside and the men of Theodore walked inside.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The general store covered nearly three acres. The building was in fact three separate structures that had been connected by the original owners of the property before the war. As Ed, Quentin, and Weasel entered it took their eyes a few moments to get used to the dim light. There were a few skylights in the building, and directly across from them was the main entrance and its twenty-foot-wide opening, but that hadn’t been enough with the death of electricity in the city, so windows had been cut into the siding high up on the walls, with rebar grilles welded over them to prevent thievery. In the winter months there were burn barrels going inside the building for warmth, and the window squares cut into the walls provided enough ventilation no one choked on the smoke.
It was far from the only such market in the city, just the largest one. Still, the men were surprised at how crowded it was. The murmur of conversation filled the air inside the large building, as did the smell of unwashed bodies, animals, smoke from cooking fires, and fresh produce.
“Wow. You ever seen it so crowded?” Weasel asked. He looked around. There had to be a hundred people inside the market, maybe a third of them vendors or security. The people bringing goods to sell at the market gave the “building manager”, as he liked to be called, a cut up front.
Both Ed and Quentin shook their heads. “I wonder if it’s because of that trouble we heard about at the government distribution center,” Ed said quietly. He gestured at the rows of goods on display and for sale. “Wander around, see what they’ve got. See what you hear. Ten, fifteen minutes, meet me over in the corner, and we can check out what they have that’s not on display.”
“Gotcha boss,” Weasel said and wandered off. Quentin nodded and headed down a different aisle.
They tried to keep things organized. Those vendors selling repaired appliances or tools, items salvaged from houses like shoes and clothing, were at the south end of the building. Fruit and vegetable growers were in the middle of the building, and anything and everything that could be grown in the climate, from raspberries to marijuana, was offered for sale. Almost all of it was seasonal, and the offerings changed from week to week depending on who the vendors were and what they’d planted in their gardens. Anyone selling meat or live animals were next to the produce salesmen and -women. At the far north end of the building partitions had been constructed for privacy, and there women—and a few men—engaged in the oldest profession. Next to the “Pleasure Palace”, as the bare-walled stalls were jokingly referred to, was an attraction just as popular as sex—barrels of water heated over carefully tended fires. For a not-insubstantial fee, you could have a hot bath or shower. They even had soap—for a price, of course.
Ed remained in place for a while, looking over the market, his eyes landing on various displays and following different people. After a few minutes he moved away from the back wall and wandered toward the animal pens. As the weather was nice, everyone grilling meat was doing it in front of the building, out from under the roof. He paused between a pen full of playing, barking puppies and one cage holding a few squawking chickens.
“Busy day today,” the man behind the animals said happily to Ed. “You lookin’ to buy? What do you have to trade?”
“Just window shopping right now.” Ed cooled the salesman down with a smile and a shrug. The man shrugged back and went back to digging through a box.
A figure ambled up and stood beside Ed, staring at the animals. “Ed.”
The corner of his mouth curled up just a tiny bit. “Rochelle,” he replied.
“Goddamn, it’s Shelly, I told you I hate that name,” she growled.
Ed’s grin grew wider and he turned to look at her. A stout black woman his age, Shelly had frizzy hair pulled back off her face with a headband and was wearing a green button-down shirt that on him would have looked like a military uniform but on her was a fashion statement. She was just over five-and-a-half feet tall, and he looked over her head to the nearby aisles. “I see a few familiar faces,” he said quietly. The noise of the animals masked their muted conversation. “How is Mickey doing? Or is it Michaela now?”
“Mickey do just fine,” she said with a snort. “What about Theodore? I saw Weasel weaselin’ around a few minutes ago.”