“We still need those guns,” Elliot said after he and Evajean had composed themselves and started thinking about such things again. They’d started walking, slower this time, the flashlight waved a bit more thoroughly in case the store housed any more crazies.

“Definitely,” Evajean said and she laughed.

“What?” Elliot said.

“Oh, it’s just—” She laughed again—very near giggled, actually. “This is insane. What we’re doing: climbing around in here in the dark and there’s that lady back there… Did you see what she did to my ear?”

“I’ll try to bandage it when we’re back out in the truck,” Elliot said. “After we get the guns, let’s try to find the pharmacy area and pick up some of that stuff, too.”

The ear had started to bleed and looked terrible. Elliot had no first aid experience—a terrible deficiency in his parenting toolbox, Clarine had told him, but one he’d never bothered to remedy—and now he was wondering what he could do besides soaking a bandage in alcohol and wrapping it around Evajean’s head.

Pushing their cart carefully through the maze, feverishly vigilant for attacks, they eventually found the sporting goods section. The gun case, tucked to one side behind a ring of counter, had been smashed. Glass sparkled on the floor tiles and crunched under Elliot’s boots with a terrible scraped chalkboard sound. He prodded around in the case and the nearby drawers with the flashlight while Evajean stood watch, but came up with nothing more than a few boxes of ammunition. Someone else had had the same idea as they and now that someone was out there protecting himself with their guns.

“Shit,” Elliot said.

“Maybe there’s a gun shop around here,” Evajean said, putting her hand on his arm.

He shrugged. “Could be. But what you want to bet it’s locked up? They don’t leave those places open with big glass windows for junkies to smash and steal handguns.”

“Do you want to not worry about it, then?” Evajean said, voice tinged with the faintest exasperation.

“We should have guns,” he said, looking back in the direction they’d come. “That’s why we came in here. We get back outside, let’s drive through town, see if there’s a store. If there isn’t, or if it’s locked up, we’ll keep our eyes out once we hit the freeway.”

“Small towns off the highway always have gun nuts,” Evajean said. Then, “This is Virginia, you know? We could search houses.”

Elliot shook his head. “I don’t want to do that. It doesn’t feel right.”

Evajean didn’t argue. “Take some of those bullets,” she said. “Might as well get as many as we can.”

Though all this, from the moment they’d pushed the heavy cart ponderously away from the dead woman to their disappointment about the guns, neither had spoke about what the crazy person had said before she’d died. Elliot knew they would, that it’d provide constant road conversation through this leg of their journey, but he’d been consciously avoiding it. He felt put off by his actions, thrown out of whack by the violence he’d found himself capable of. He imagined Callie watching him do it, what she’d have said with her father pounding away with a heavy hunk of metal on another human being until that person, once alive—even if mad—was thoroughly broken. She’d have screamed, first of all, and then run to Clarine and probably never have looked at her daddy with complete and unyielding love again.

Was Evajean feeling the same way? Was she as shocked by his actions as Elliot? He didn’t know and didn’t dare ask for fear that talking about it might force a confrontation and end with the two of them going separate ways, perhaps one to Colorado and the other to Montana. She’d said nothing and that could be a good sign. She’d been more interested in what the woman was trying to say than in how she was trying to say it through a brutalized and dying body.

“Dog food,” Evajean said.

“What?” He wasn’t really paying attention to anything outside of his own thoughts and the swing of the flashlight’s beam, and her declaration startled him.

“We can’t forget the dog food. That thing will never forgive us if we do.”

“Sure,” he said. “I think it’ll be up here on the right.” They were near the front of the store, heading past the empty check out lines toward the pharmacy. Pet supplies were around there, he thought, and was right.

The lack of noises from other store occupants since their fight had them both feeling a little more sure of themselves. They picked up their pace and soon had the cart mounded over as far as it’d go with Ace Bandages, bottles of peroxide and other disinfectants, random medical supplies, and two huge bags of Alpo dry dog food. Elliot found room in the cart to squeeze a plush dog bed, too, and stacked a couple packages of rawhide bones on top. It felt good to be taking care of something.

Outside, with the sun’s light cheering them up immensely, they loaded the truck, somehow making room for it all, and fed the dog. The puppy demolished its pile of food in seconds, consuming half of it and spreading the other half across the back seat. Evajean laughed and Elliot smiled, and they both decided that their next order of business, just as soon as the guns were taken care of, was the give the animal a name. Evajean said she had something in mind but told Elliot to think of his own before she gave away her idea. “I don’t want to prejudice you,” she said.

They pulled out of the parking lot, driving slowly once again, this time not because of obstacles but, rather, because the back of the truck looked like an overstuffed landfill and a tight turn or a good bump would have sent all their hard won supplies tumbling out into the street.