Chicken swung his legs off the counter. “Girl, you better be ready to feed me.” Karen stiffened but Joe ran to the table and brought back a stack of cooled pupusas and a bottle of hot sauce. Chicken held it in his lap and started to eat.
They stood around while he ate. Joe watched Chicken. Karen stared out the front door, thinking.
Chicken finished and set his plate aside. “Thank you, baby.” He snaked his neck around and kissed Joe on the cheek. Joe smiled. “We need to find a place with water and stay there for the night. And get some clothes. You coming?”
They both looked at her.
“Sure,” she said. She was better off with them than on her own, she decided. “Take it easy on that leg,” she said to Chicken. “We can walk slow.”
He rolled his eyes and hopped off the counter, then winced. “Ok,” he said warily. “We go slow for now.”
They walked at his pace, away from the direction that Karen had come. They checked out the drugstore Joe had been in and had a soda each, but the water was gone. They tried a boba shop and a row of restaurants. Syrups and toppings, bottles of ketchup and soy sauce. No water. By noon the fog had cleared and they were very thirsty.
“How the hell is there no water anywhere?” She was starting to feel crabby.
“The panic,” Joe said simply.
“The panic?”
“Yeah,” Chicken broke in. “Bad news freak people out, they panicking. They at the store, buying up toilet paper and water and guns, except they hardly any guns in San Francisco. Since the water been off, we been looking for water. Every day.”
She tried to do the math. How many days in the hospital? How many days sick and unconscious? How many days until the city fell into panic? How long since the power and water died? The last day she could remember waking up in her apartment with lights on, catching the bus, and going to work was back in January.
“What’s today?”
“Huh?” Joe looked at her like she was crazy.
“Do you guys know what today is? Like the date?”
Chicken snorted. “You gotta be somewhere? Come on, let’s try in here.”
They were at the door of an office building. The front door stood slightly ajar.
“Why here?” she asked.
“I got an idea.”
They went up the stairs, which were windowless and dark. They came out on to the second floor into a huge room full of cubicles. Sunlight flooded in from the glass walls. Chicken went to one end of the room, Joe and Karen followed his lead and spread out. Karen looked at desks she passed, hoping for a water bottle at a workstation. She saw dead plants hanging over the sides of their pots and pictures of children. She came to a dead end. From the other side, she heard Joe yelling.
“I got it!”
She jogged in the direction of his voice. Joe stood beside the office bathrooms. Standing between them was a nearly full water cooler, with a fat, upright blue five-gallon bottle. Joe had sunk to the floor and was filling a paper cup. Karen grabbed one right after him and got out of Chicken’s way when he hobbled around the nearest cubicle. They sat and drank cup after cup.
“Why are you called Chicken?” she asked when the silence had gone too long.
“I won a game once,” he said.
“A game of chicken?”
“Yeah.” He stared into his cup.
“Did the other guy die?”
His head snapped up. “No! He swerve out the way. I won his car. Did that a couple times and sold the cars. Made some money that way.”
“Oh. What did you do for a living, Joe?”
“Mostly I worked in restaurants. Cooking and cleaning type of shit. Sometimes I worked lights in theaters for shows. That’s where I met Chicken.”
“Yeah, I ran soundboards. We been dating like maybe three months before all the theaters were closed. Shit, I was pissed. But everybody was too sick to go on anyway.”
She remembered the theaters closing about a month ago. A temporary measure, the city said, to combat the worst flu season on record. It was hard to think that she hadn’t seen it coming then, but no one had.
“Have you guys seen many people since the panic died down? Besides shovel-man?”
“Some,” Joe said. “Seems like everybody died or left the city. But everybody is like, crazy.”
Chicken was nodding. “Every motherfucker got a gun or some shit. Everybody either act like they wanna kill you, or you gonna kill them. I couldn’t believe Joe let you in.” He wasn’t smiling.
“Yeah, but…” Joe looked guilty.
“Yeah but what,” she pressed him.
“I haven’t seen no girls. No women. No ladies. Cero mujeres. You the first woman I seen alive since I left my mama, and I know she was dying. I left her in Sac while I could still get home. I needed to find Chicken.” He leaned his head on Chicken’s shoulder.
“Are you guys going to stay in the city? Keep searching for water?”
Chicken shrugged and Joe got off him. “Why not? It’s our city. It’s mostly empty. Maybe we get a big house and all the water and food in the world.”
“Then what?”
“What do you mean?” Chicken looked at her blankly.
“No other people. No kids. No work to do. Just, what? Surviving?”
Chicken laughed a little and filled up another cup. “We don’t need other people. We were never gonna have kids. Living is work enough. And all we’ve ever done is survive. It might look different if you go to college and buy a house and do all that shit, but all we do is survive. Ain’t nothing changed. Just now there’s less competition.” He drained his cup.
She nodded. Yes, that’s true. No it isn’t. Wasn’t. Won’t be. Won’t be enough. Could I stay here? With them, or near them? Stay home, Jack might find me.
They fell asleep as soon as the sun started to set, curled up on the hard office carpeting, their bellies sloshing and full of water.
In the morning, they climbed to the next floor. One office had a kitchen full of shelf-stable snacks, all bright colors and preservatives. They ate these for breakfast and drank half the contents of another water cooler.
Even without working plumbing, they all felt compelled to use the bathrooms for their intended purpose. Karen sat in a stall with the weak diffused light from the open door slanting in under the stall dividers and pooling around her feet. She thought she’d never have to stand in line to do this again, and the feeling was emptiness.
Clumsily, they filled empty juice bottles and a handful of thermoses with the clean water from the cooler and left the office building in the afternoon. They all needed a change of clothes but couldn’t decide where to go.
“There’s a mall like ten blocks that way. We can just follow the tracks,” Karen said, pointing.
“There’s all the Chinese knockoff stores like right here,” said Joe, pointing away.
“Yeah but they might not have everything we need.”
“They’ll have everything we need,” Chicken said.
There’s me and there’s them. Don’t need them, but still…
“Fine,” Karen said turning away. “Guess we can meet-“
The explosion knocked them all flat down. Chicken had fallen almost on his face and came up with his lips bloody. Joe was scratched up and down both arms from grinding against the pavement. Karen pushed up on her palms and felt the wave of heat on her face.
Joe was screaming but she heard nothing but a high-pitched whine.
“THE FUCKING GAS!” He was screaming it over and over, but she had to read his lips to know it. Chicken grabbed Joe and ran, pulling him along, stumbling in huge strides away from the blast.