Getting Home

10

The tall man stood there with a blank expression on his face.

“Hands in the air,” shouted Max, aiming his Glock, finger on the trigger.

The man did as he was asked. Slowly, he raised his hands above his head. The man had lost a lot of weight. His shirt hung strangely and loosely around him. With his arms in the air, the sleeves of the shirt fell away, revealing how emaciated his biceps had become.

His arms were like sticks, with the elbow the widest part of the arm.

“Don’t move,” shouted Max.

Max moved forward, and Mandy followed.

“Pat him down,” said Max, standing about ten feet from the man, the Glock pointed right at his face. “One false move and you’re dead. You try to hurt her, and you get a bullet. You understand?”

The man nodded. There wasn’t fear in his eyes. There was nothing. Blank, wide eyes that said nothing at all.

Mandy patted him down quickly, doing a thorough job.

“He’s clean,” she said. “No weapons. Nothing at all.”

“Who doesn’t have a weapon these days?” said Max.

The man didn’t answer.

“Tell us what’s going on,” said Max, nodding to the Glock as an incentive. “How many of you are there here?”

The man began to speak in a halting voice, as if he wasn’t used to speaking. “About twenty… no, I mean ten… of us.”

“Which is it?”

“Ten, now.”

“What happened to the rest?”

“Something bad.”

Max interpreted that to mean they’d been killed.

Either the man was dumb, or he’d been through something horrible that had knocked a part of him loose, in some sense. But starvation alone was enough to do that to a man. It shouldn’t have surprised Max.

“Do you have the key to the convenience store? Is that how you’ve been living? Eating the food there?”

The man nodded. “The key’s around my neck.”

“I must have missed it,” said Mandy, reaching down under the man’s chin and grabbing a lanyard. When she pulled it up, there was a cluster of a couple keys.

“So there are ten of you here? Living in the back or something?”

The man nodded slowly.

“Where?” said Max.

“In the backrooms.”

“Are you all employees of this place?”

The man nodded. “A couple janitors… the employees… most of us stayed here… the bus never came to pick us up.”

“Show us,” said Max.

Mandy sidled up next to Max, and whispered in his ear. “What do you want to see back there? We need to get moving.”

“It’s just a gut feeling,” said Max. “I don’t think there’s much risk, and plus, we’ll learn something.”

“We’d better grab the food while we can,” whispered Mandy. “If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that we’ve got to take what we can while we can. Five minutes in the backroom and that food might be gone.”

“Good point,” said Max. “You keep guard on this guy here. Keep your gun on him in case he tries anything.”

Max didn’t think the guy was a threat, but he’d gotten to the point that he didn’t trust strangers. And he had good reason to be that way.

As Max hurried back to the convenience store, he thought back to their initial visit to the compound. Maybe Max had been suspicious there and hadn’t followed his gut instinct, or maybe he’d been naïve and not been suspicious enough. Either way, what had seemed like an ideal rest during one of the hardest parts of their journey had quickly turned into a nightmare situation.

They’d made it out of the compound alive. Most of them, that is. Chad had lost his life.

Max had barely thought about Chad since it had happened. That was the way he was. He preferred to look to the future rather than the past. It was probably part of what had kept him alive so far.

But for some reason, he thought about him now.

Maybe the employee with the dead, blank eyes reminded him of Chad.

Now that he thought about it, there was something strangely similar about them. What did that mean? Was the emaciated former employee also on opiates?

It was something to consider.

But it’d be strange if he’d had such a long-lasting supply.

What would Chad have done as the days gradually wore on and he eventually ran out of his drugs? It had seemed at first as if Chad could handle being clean. But he couldn’t. It’d been too much for him.

Chad had gone out as best he could. He’d saved James’s life in the process.

Max didn’t judge Chad. There wasn’t any point in deciding whether his actions had been right or wrong. None of that mattered. All that mattered was that Chad was dead and Max was alive.

There wasn’t anything to learn from Chad. Max had never been tempted to go down that particular blind alley himself.

In the convenience store, Max found a couple of empty plastic bags behind the register and began stuffing them with bottles of warm soda, beef jerky and candy. There was still an ample supply of food in the convenience store.

Max wouldn’t have thought that there’d be enough food here to feed ten people for such a long period of time. Maybe they’d been eating food from the other restaurants as well, supplementing their diets with the food from here.

What didn’t make sense was how skinny the former employee was. It’d take very strong willpower to deny oneself the available food when the stomach was rumbling and the body was crying out for food. And that guy didn’t seem like he had any willpower at all.

A brief pang of guilt flashed through Max.

Here he was, stealing food that belonged to others.

Was it right?

Max didn’t know.

He pushed the thought out of his head.

He wasn’t taking everything. Just enough for he and Mandy to get back safely to camp.

Max shut the gate as he left. It slammed into the floor, bouncing up a little.

“He didn’t move,” said Mandy, as Max approached them. “I think he’s on something.”

“Funny,” said Max. “I was thinking the same thing.”

The two of them waited, but the man said nothing.

“You on something?” said Max.

The man just smiled and nodded.

“Where are you getting it from, whatever it is?”

Mandy glanced over at Max. He knew she was probably thinking that if there was a supply of opiates, they should do what they could to get some of them. They’d be invaluable in the future for pain relief for serious injuries.

“All right,” said Max, handing one of the plastic bags to Mandy so she could carry it. “Show us these backrooms where you’re all living.”

The man turned dumbly around and started leading the way.

“You sure this is safe?” whispered Mandy.

“No,” said Max. “Keep your gun out, obviously. But if the rest of them are anything like this guy, they’re not going to be much of a threat.”

The former employee led them through big double doors that he unlocked, down a darkened hallway into the back rooms where the food deliveries had arrived.

There were no skylights here, and it was much, much darker. A couple candles burned here and there, casting some dim light around. Some light came in from under the closed cargo doors.

The room was large, with a concrete floor. There were wooden pallets stacked here and there, along with some barrels of some unidentified substance.

The whole area stank. The inhabitants might have been defecating and urinating right there in the large room, rather than going outside. It would explain the stench.

But there was also the stench of rotten food.

“What’s your name, anyway?” said Mandy, tugging on the arm of their guide.

“Jones,” he said, speaking vaguely in that sleepy way.

“Why don’t you introduce us to some of your friends, Jones,” said Max.

“All righty,” said Jones.

Jones led them through the maze of wooden pallets.

There were people scattered here and there on the floor. The majority of them were lying down. Some were on the wooden pallets. Some lay on the concrete floor. Some lay on piles of plastic bags and other strange things that they had gathered in order to form nest-like sleeping spots.

Some of the people snored loudly. Others seemed to be in a dream-like state, with their eyes half open, existing somewhere between dreams and reality.

Hardly anyone reacted to Max and Mandy’s presence. Some of them gazed up at them with their strange blank eyes. But most of them didn’t react at all, as if they weren’t aware of anything.

“What the hell’s going on with them?” said Mandy, not bothering to whisper because it didn’t seem like anyone was aware of what they were saying.

Max watched as Jones shuffled on over to a wooden pallet, and lay down on his back, staring at the ceiling. Apparently his duties as tour guide were over.

And apparently he wasn’t concerned in the least bit that Max and Mandy had stolen some of his food, or that they had guns and had entered his safe haven.

“OK,” said Mandy. “This is getting creepy. What the hell’s going on here?”

Before Max could say anything, the sound of engines outside came drifting in through the cargo doors.

“I think we’re about to get our answer,” said Max. “Come on, we’ve got to hide.”

Max and Mandy dashed off behind a big stack of cardboard boxes.

“Shouldn’t we get out of here?” whispered Mandy.

There wasn’t time.

Before they could even think about getting completely out of the room, one of the cargo doors opened up, making a metal-on-metal grinding noise as it did.

“Can you see anything?” whispered Mandy.

Max shook his head, and put his finger to his lips, signaling that they needed to be quiet.

Max set the plastic bag of food down on the ground, careful not to let it make any noise at all. He held his Glock, finger on the trigger.

He was ready.

He glanced at Mandy. She was breathing heavily, but she had determination in her eyes.

Whatever was about to happen, they’d be ready. They’d fight their way out if they had to. Whatever it took.