“There,” Evajean said.

“What?”

“Over there. I think there’s a door.”

Elliot looked. A rectangle of bluish grey hung in the middle of a large blank of deep grey. An open door.

“I’ll go first,” he said.

“Okay,” Evajean said.

He worked his way over there, continuing to go slow, feeling for anything that’d make a lot of noise if they ran into it. It was weird that the crazies had stayed at the truck instead of chasing them, but he’d given up on their motivation. Instead, Elliot took it as a lucky break and nothing more and reminded himself that the crazies might have realized their mistake, might be coming after him and Evajean right now. So he went slow and Evajean did the same.

It was a door, opened outward, and as he reached it he felt a change in the air, knew it lead to the heart of the massive warehouse. That was where they’d hunker down and wait.

“We’ll go to the other side, away from here,” he whispered back to Evajean. He heard her exhale. “Ready?” he asked.

“Uh huh.”

The floor was concrete and cold, and hurt his knees. He stood up and walked straight across from the office door. Soon, his finger tips punched into thick plastic wrap: a pallet of cardboard boxes, wrapped for shipping. He sidestepped to the right, keeping his hands out, and when he found the edge of the pallet, continued forward again. They walked for some distance along this corridor between the stacks, Elliot still leading, Evajean still a pace or two behind.

Then there was corrugated metal and they had reached the far wall. Elliot put his ear to it and heard nothing but his own breathing and Evajean shuffling her feet.

“It’s cold,” she said.

“It’ll warm up,” he said. “When the sun comes up.”

“How long are we going to stay?”

“As long as we need to. Until it’s dark again.”

Evajean put her head near the wall and listened. “That’s all day,” she said.

“If that’s what it is.” He began walking again, turning right along the wall. “This way,” he said. “Let’s find a spot, maybe between some of the pallets.”

“We’re going to stay here all day?”

“I don’t know. If we have to.”

“Hope’s asleep,” she said and he could tell she was annoyed. She didn’t like this plan and he had to admit, as he found another corridor and turned into it, that he was starting to feel a little stupid for leading them into the situation in the first place. Did he really expect them to just sit here for ten or twelve hours? With no food and no water? It might be better to just go back out there and fight.

“We’ll stay for a while,” he said, revising. “Just long enough that maybe they’ll have started looking for us. I want them away from the truck when we go back. It’s three of them and only two of us.”

“I know,” Evajean said.

Ready to ad lib more as needed, they pressed themselves into a narrow opening between two of the stacks of boxes and sat down. They were both silent for several minutes. The dog began to snore.

“Tell me about you,” Evajean said. The tone of annoyance was gone.

“Me?”

“We’ve been traveling– God, has it only been a few days? But, anyway, we’re doing this trip, it feels like to the bitter end, and I don’t know anything about you. Except that you had a wife and had a daughter and you moved to Virginia, what was it, a couple of years ago?”

“Three,” he said. “It was three years ago this November.”

She nodded. “So tell me about yourself, Elliot Bishop. We’ve got a while sitting her ahead of us, there’s no way I’m going to sleep, and I want to know it all.”

So he did. He told her about graduating from college with a degree in art history because he didn’t know what else to take at the time. The degree had been a bust, art historians not eagerly sought to fill job openings, but he’d got Clarine out of the deal. They’d met his junior year, while he was working part time, late night door duty at one of the dorms, and she was a freshman.

“She was locked out. Left her key in her room,” he said. “She pounded on the door, something like one in the morning, and I let her in. And you know how someone can just glow? You see them and there’s this light? It was like that with Clarine. She glowed. So I let her in–”

“‘So‘ you let her in?” Evajean said. “You mean you wouldn’t have if it weren’t for that glow?”

Elliot laughed, then winced and brought his voice back down to a whisper. “You know what I mean,” he said. “It had been raining and, well, girls always look so good like that.”

This time Evajean laughed. “I’ve been told,” she said.

“Since she didn’t have her key,” Elliot continued, “I had to let her into her room. And on the way over, we chatted and when we finally got there and she was about to go in, I asked her out. We went out that weekend and that was it. I was hooked.”

Evajean sighed. “Love,” she said.

“Yeah,” Elliot said.

“And you got married.”

“After Clarine graduated. She wanted to wait, wanted to have school out of the way before starting her new life.”

“What was school for her? You were art history…”

“Psychology. I don’t know why. I never really figured that one out, but she studied it obsessively for four years, graduated, and never touched the stuff again. We had Callie and I started the business with my brother, the landscaping, and that went well for a while, with Clarine staying home and me working. We lived okay.”

“Why’d you move?”

“Not sure. It was Clarine’s idea. One day, we were having breakfast at IHOP, and she said, ‘Let’s move.’ And she talked me into it. It took a while, but she did.”

“Why Virginia?”

“That’s what she wanted. Said it was a nice place, that she’d visited as a girl. They’d rent a cabin in the summers and she loved it. I found a job with another landscaping business, we packed everything up, and then we were in Charlottesville.” He leaned back against tight plastic wrapped around the pallet. “And that’s it. We live there until– We were in Charlottesville when this all started.” Elliot tapped Evajean on the arm. “Now it’s your turn.”