Posted on June 4, 2007

Part 8

Evajean was back to staring out the window now, and Elliot wished he could say more to her, tell her anything. But he drove the rest of the way in silence, occasionally letting himself wander back to this newest mystery but never with real concentration. They’d find answers as soon as the road took them away from Charlottsville and they found other survivors.

Elliot put the truck in park and turned to Evajean. “Doesn’t look like we’ll find them here,” he said.

The Wal-Mart lot was empty except for a beaten up VW bus driven into one of the cart returns and now rusting there without any tires. Shopping carts peppered the asphalt, knocked over and tossed around, but there weren’t any signs of violence, no detritus from food riots or other signs that the store might have been ransacked.

Evajean opened her door and stepped out. The puppy in the back, startled awake by Elliot swinging the driver’s side door shut, stood up awkwardly and barked. Evajean leaned inside and scratched its head, telling the dog that they’d be back with food soon.

“We should bring it with us,” Elliot said, “so it doesn’t get hot in the car.”

“Leave the windows down. I just don’t want to have to worry about it getting away. Have you ever had a puppy?”

“No.”

“They run. Fast. Let’s just get what we need and get out of here.” She looked around at the empty lot. “This place is kind of creepy.”

“Definitely,” Elliot said. And that was actually why he wanted to take the dog. Having it in the cart, content with food in its stomach, would lessen how depressing the environment was. The store looked relatively unmolested from the outside but he bet once they got inside they’d find the chaotic remains of similar shopping expeditions by other emigrants from Charlottesville. The puppy would be comforting.

But he gave into her. He’d never have done so with his wife, but that was Clarine and they’d had a relationship both loving and contentious, the former often acting as the only buffer against the destructive potential of the latter. With Clarine gone, he’d lost that fighting instinct. It didn’t feel right to unnecessarily butt heads with anyone else.

Near the store’s entrance, they righted an overturned cart and, now equipped to carry their haul, forced open the sliding glass doors and walked into Wal-Mart.

It hadn’t occurred to him, even after years of weekly trips to the unpierced concrete box of a store, that it’d be dark inside. Without electricity to power the endless rows of overhead florescents, the Wal-Mart was a vacuous black void. Elliot laughed nervously.

“Should have brought flashlights,” Evajean said.

“We have one in the truck, don’t we?” he said.

“Want me to go get it?”

“I will,” he said, pulling the cart back outside. The deep darkness and the thought of wandering through it with nothing more than the weak trickle of a flashlight, made him want to pet the dog, to rub his hand through its coat, to close his eyes and pretend for a tiny moment that none of this had happened, that Clarine was still alive and the two of them had just bought Callie the puppy she’d always wanted.

“I want to get my jacket, too,” he said to Evajean to cover his fright. “Should I get yours?”

She hugged herself and rubbed the arms of her sweater. “I’m good,” she said.

Elliot nodded and jogged back to the truck. The puppy looked at him sleepily as he opened the door and pulled his coat out from behind the seat. “Hi,” he said to it and scratched the dog’s head. The tension in his chest slipped slightly and he was intensely glad they’d found the animal. It reminded him of Callie when she’d been tiny, when she’d been more of demanding house pet than an actual person.

Evajean was waiting outside when he came back. “Ready?” she asked.

Elliot waved the flashlight, turning it on and off. Then he shrugged. “I had a hard enough time finding stuff in here when the lights worked.”

Evajean grinned. “We’ll figure it out,” she said.

The store, Evajean said after they’d stumbled their way to the pet food section, was way creepier than the parking lot. Distances that had been inconveniently long when Elliot and Clarine had done their regular shopping, now seemed prohibitively huge. They did their best wandering back and forth through the grocery aisles, tossing into the cart anything that looked like it’d keep well in the back of a truck. When their limited capacity was full, they began the search for sporting goods and the guns that section housed.

Once, as they passed through the children’s clothes, Evajean giggling about how the brushing of cloth against them was like a haunted house, Elliot heard a noise. It was a faint shuffling, something being dragged maybe, and he stopped walking, grabbing Evajean’s shoulder. She called out at the sudden contact and the cry barely masked a startled thump from elsewhere in the store.

Elliot hushed her and said, “Did you hear that?”

“What?” Immediate concern wiped the schoolgirl silliness from her face.

“I thought I heard something. Like something moving.”

“Is there someone else in here?” she whispered, hunkering down a bit behind one of the racks of jeans.

Elliot realized he was shining the flashlight in her face and turned it away, crouching next to her. “I don’t know. It could be an animal.”

They they both heard it, the sound of sneakers on polished tile, and Evajean slapped her hand over her mouth. “What is that?” she asked between her fingers.

“There’s someone else in the store,” he said. “I’m going to see who it is.”

“Wait–” Evajean said, but Elliot was standing up, calling out to perhaps the first person either of them had seen in some time.

“Hello?” he shouted. “Hello, is anyone there?”

They heard what sounded like an under the breath response and Elliot tried again. This time only the sound of sneakers came back to them, though a great deal closer now.

Elliot pointed his flashlight.

The woman was twenty feet away, standing in the isle between the boys and girls clothes sections, her blue vest hanging from only one arm, the yellow smily face button bouncing erratically as she started running at them. Her mouth kept moving like she was trying to talk but words weren’t forthcoming–only a constant hum: Mmmm! Mmmm!

Evajean’s hand was away from her mouth now and she screamed.