Chapter 8: Loot

  The Walgreens was standing, which made it the most structurally ambitious building on the strip.

  The Chinese restaurant had twisted ninety degrees on its foundation, so its front door now faced the parking lot sideways. Through the twisted windows, Dave could see the interior. Tables bolted to the floor holding their positions while the walls had rotated around them, so every table was now facing a wall that used to be behind it. The menus were still on the tables. The chopstick dispensers hadn't spilled.

  The laundromat was gone. Replaced by a perfectly circular pond of still, dark water that reflected the orange sky. No sign that a building had ever been there, except for the gap between the Chinese restaurant and the sporting goods store where a laundromat-shaped absence sat, full of water so still it looked solid.

  The sporting goods store had survived but every window was blown out and something large had knocked a hole in the rear wall. Dave could see tennis rackets and yoga mats scattered across the parking lot, which under different circumstances would have been funny.

  The Walgreens, though. The Walgreens was fine. Better than fine. It looked untouched. No cracks in the walls or letters missing from the sign. The automatic doors were even open, powered by some source that definitely wasn't the grid, because the grid was dead and had been since the first crack in the nursery.

  Dave didn't trust it. Things that looked fine usually weren't, in the old world or the new one. The houses on Maple Street that looked intact from the front had been hollow from the back. The swamp on Elm Court had looked shallow.

  He and Ron approached from the parking lot. Emma was babbling, a stream of nonsense syllables directed at the world in general, and the system was doing something Dave hadn't seen before. Small text, barely visible, popping up near objects as he looked at them. Quick evaluations. The abandoned sedan in the parking lot got a dismissive one-word tag. The shopping cart on its side, same. The crushed energy drink can got what felt like contempt.

  But the Walgreens itself:

  ~*~

  Go inside!

  ~*~

  Dave looked at that for a moment. The system had not, until now, expressed opinions about retail establishments. The enthusiasm had the same childlike energy as the "Bubbles!" notification. Whatever was filtering this information was genuinely excited for him to see what was inside.

  "The store?" he said.

  Ron squinted at the Walgreens. "Looks okay. Which probably means it's not."

  "My system says to go inside."

  Ron gave him a look. "Your system."

  "Yeah."

  "And you trust it."

  Dave thought about that. The text had told him something was behind the green car. It had told him to go around the big creature. It had told him three frog-things were coming up behind him in the swamp. It hadn't lied yet. It hadn't even been wrong. It had also called his weapon "Bubbles" and described his healing ability as "Kiss their boo-boos," which suggested a lack of professional rigor but not a lack of honesty.

  "More than I trust a Walgreens," Dave said. "But yeah."

  They went inside.

  The fluorescent lights were on. That was the first wrong thing, because nothing else in a half-mile radius had power. The hum of the lights was different, too. Lower, steadier, more like the purr of something living than the buzz of electrical current.

  The shelves were stocked. That was the second wrong thing, because the shaking should have knocked everything onto the floor. The products were upright, aligned, facing forward like a shelf that had just been merchandised.

  And the products were labeled.

  With system labels. Floating text, the same gold as Dave's notifications, hovering above items throughout the store. Candy bars tagged with minor energy-restoration properties. Drinks labeled as enhanced hydration. Batteries that supposedly lasted ten times longer. Some items had no enhancement at all. The Doritos were just Doritos. Dave found this oddly comforting. Even the apocalypse couldn't improve a Dorito.

  The pharmacy section at the back of the store had a soft glow around it that Dave could feel from across the floor. Warm, inviting, like standing near a fireplace on a cold day. It pulled at him gently. A suggestion rather than a direction, different from the northeast pull toward Sarah.

  "Ron," Dave said. "Are you seeing this?"

  Ron was standing in the entrance, staring at a display of batteries with floating text above them. "I'm seeing it. I'm choosing not to think about it."

  "Fair."

  Dave went to the baby aisle first. Everything else could wait. Supplies for Emma came before curiosity, before exploration, before anything.

  The aisle was intact, fully stocked. Enhanced formula. Enhanced diapers. "extra absorbent" didn't begin to cover what the labels promised. Wipes. Baby food jars with modest stat descriptions he tried not to read too carefully because the idea that mashed sweet potato could grant constitutional improvements was a rabbit hole he didn't have the bandwidth to explore.

  He loaded up. Formula went in the go-bag, two canisters. Diapers, two packs, the right size, because Sarah had taught him that running out of diapers was the one supply emergency that could not be managed, improvised, or delayed. Wipes. Food.

  He also grabbed a proper backpack from the school supplies section. Transferred the grocery supplies into it and strapped it to the front of his chest, which made him look like a man wearing two backpacks and a baby, which was exactly what he was.

  Then he saw the Cheerios.

  ~*~

  Cheerios of Minor Sustenance — +5 HP

  ~*~

  Hit points. Health points. The basic currency of every video game he'd ever played, applied to a box of toasted oat cereal in a Walgreens.

  He grabbed two boxes. Opened one. Poured a small handful into his palm and offered them to Emma.

  She took a single Cheerio, held it between her thumb and forefinger, and examined it with the gravity of a jeweler appraising a diamond. Turned it. Studied it. Looked at Dave, as if confirming that this met her standards.

  She put it in her mouth.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Dave felt something shift. In Emma. A tiny pulse of warmth, barely perceptible. The system text in his vision sharpened fractionally. Colors got a half-shade more vivid. The hum of the fluorescent lights grew a tiny bit clearer.

  Emma took another Cheerio. Chewed. The pulse repeated. Tiny. Incremental. But real.

  "Huh," Dave said.

  He gave her the whole handful. She ate them with methodical focus, one at a time, her standard approach, never two at once, never rushed, each Cheerio given its individual due, and with each one the warmth steadied a little more. The system text got a little brighter. Dave's muscles felt a little less tired, his senses a little sharper. The gap between "nap Dave" and "Emma-powered Dave" narrowed, just slightly, with every tiny oat circle.

  The system-enhanced food was feeding her. And whatever she was, she was feeding him.

  He thought about that loop, he feeds her, she feeds him, both of them stronger together, and it landed in a place that was familiar and warm and also slightly terrifying in its implications.

  Dave added a third box of Cheerios to the bag. Then a fourth, because he was not going to lose his Cheerio supply again.

  A sound from the back of the store. Dave's hand went to the crowbar. Ron straightened up from the stool where he'd been sitting, tire iron raised.

  "I have a knife and I'm not afraid to use it, so whatever you are, stay back."

  The voice was female. Firm. Coming from behind the pharmacy counter.

  "I'm human," Dave called. "I've got a baby and an injured man."

  A pause. The kind of pause where someone is making a decision based on incomplete information and knows it.

  Then: "How injured?"

  "Gash across the ribs. I cleaned it and bandaged it but it needs real work."

  Another pause. Shorter this time.

  A woman stood up from behind the pharmacy counter. Late twenties. Dark hair in a practical ponytail, the kind you tie back when you're working and don't have time to think about hair. Brown skin, sharp eyes, dark and quick. She was wearing blue scrubs with a Millfield General Hospital lanyard still around her neck, and she was holding a box cutter in one hand and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the other. The box cutter was open. The hydrogen peroxide was held like a backup weapon, which it was. Dave had once gotten peroxide in a paper cut and could confirm it was weaponizable.

  She looked at Dave. At the baby on his back. At the crowbar in his hand. At the two backpacks and the collection of system-enhanced groceries he was clutching.

  "EMT," she said. "Noor Hassani. I was on shift when everything—" She gestured at the general state of the world. A single gesture that encompassed the orange sky, the warped buildings, the floating text, and the collapse of reality as we knew it. "I walked here from the ambulance bay. The hospital is…" She trailed off. Swallowed. Reset. "Bad."

  "Dave Thompson. This is Ron Kowalski. That's Emma."

  "Ba!" Emma said, and held out a Cheerio. Her arm extended toward Noor with the solemn generosity of a baby offering her most valued possession to a stranger. The Cheerio wobbled between her fingers.

  Noor looked at the Cheerio. Her composure cracked. Her eyes went bright. She blinked. The crack sealed.

  "How old?" she asked.

  "Nine months."

  "And you're out here. With her."

  "My wife's across town. Our house collapsed. I'm walking to her."

  Noor processed this with the speed of someone who triaged for a living. Information in, assessment out, decision made. "Let me look at your friend."

  She came around the counter. She knelt next to Ron, who had lowered himself onto a pharmacy stool with a groan, and peeled back the bandage Dave had applied.

  She examined the wound. Pressed gently at the edges. Checked the depth with a penlight she produced from her scrub pocket.

  "You did okay with this," she told Dave. "Pressure and clean gauze. Right call. The edges are clean, which means whatever bit him had sharp teeth, which is paradoxically better than dull teeth for healing." She looked up. "I'm guessing the thing that did this wasn't a normal animal."

  "It used to be a dog," Ron said. "Key word: used to."

  Noor's expression said she had stories of her own. She didn't share them. "Do the labels on the medications say anything?"

  Dave handed her a tube of antibiotic ointment. The system tagged it with accelerated wound closure properties. Noor read the floating text with the expression of a woman who was deeply, professionally offended by the concept of magical ointment but unable to deny its potential utility. She uncapped it. Smelled it. Applied a test amount to the back of her own hand, watched for thirty seconds, and when she didn't dissolve or sprout extra fingers, she applied it to Ron's wound.

  Ron inhaled sharply. "That's weird. That tingles. That really—"

  The wound was closing. Faster than a wound should close. Visibly faster. The edges drew together over about thirty seconds, the skin knitting in a way that Dave could watch happening, the pink new tissue forming in real time. When Noor wiped the excess ointment away, the gash was a raised pink line. Fresh scar. Tender but sealed. No more bleeding.

  "Okay," Noor said quietly. She looked at the tube. Looked at the shelves full of glowing, labeled medications. Her eyes were doing math. Fast, professional math. The math of a first responder calculating how many people she could help with a shelf full of miracle supplies.

  "I'm taking all of this," she said.

  She grabbed a pharmacy bag and started filling it. Bandages, ointments, painkillers, antiseptics, all tagged with their modest enchantments. She moved through the pharmacy gathering items, and within five minutes she had a bag that clinked with bottles and rustled with packaging.

  Ron stood up. Pressed a hand to his side experimentally. Pushed harder. No wince.

  "I think I'm good," he said, with the careful surprise of a man who's been hurt for hours and suddenly isn't. "I think I'm actually good."

  He looked at Dave. At Noor. At the baby eating Cheerios on Dave's back. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. Ron was a man who fixed tires for a living, who spoke with his hands and his tools, and what he wanted to say didn't have a wrench equivalent.

  "Listen," he said. "I live on Birch Lane. Or I did. My wife, Linda, is in Columbus this week for a banking conference. If the phones come back, when the phones come back, she'll try to call, and I should be somewhere she can find me. Somewhere she'd think to look."

  "Go home," Dave said. "Board up what you can."

  "You sure? I can walk with you further. I'm good now, I can—"

  "Go home. If Mrs. Huang is still in the Morrisons' garage on Birch, let her know you're there. She's got a rake and a cat and she could use a neighbor."

  Ron stood there. The tire iron hung from his hand. He was a man who built things and fixed things and the helplessness of the last two hours, hiding behind a dumpster, tapping SOS, waiting for someone, anyone, sat on his shoulders.

  "Thanks," he said. "For the bandage. And for stopping. A lot of people wouldn't have stopped."

  "Take some food before you go."

  Dave handed him a Gatorade, two Snickers bars, and, after a moment's consideration, one of the four boxes of Cheerios. The Cheerios were the hardest to give up. But Ron had a wife coming home to him, maybe, and food was food.

  Ron took them. Hefted his tire iron. Looked at Dave one more time. A long look, the kind that memorizes a face.

  "I'll keep the dumpster tapping going," he said. "SOS. If anyone else comes through, I'll help them."

  "Good man."

  Ron walked out of the Walgreens and turned left, back toward Birch Lane. Dave watched him go. A big man with a tire iron and a sports drink, walking alone down a broken road, heading home to wait for a phone that might never ring. He walked with purpose.

  Dave let him go and turned back to the store.

  Noor zipped her pharmacy bag closed. It was full and heavy and she slung it over her shoulder with the practiced ease of someone who routinely carried equipment. She looked at Dave.

  "Where are you headed?"

  "Serenity Springs Spa. My wife's there. Past the hospital, on Route 9."

  "The hospital's on my way." She said this the way you state a fact that has weight to it. A fact, placed on the table, available for someone else to pick up.

  "You want to walk together?"

  Noor looked at him. At Emma. At the crowbar and the dish soap visible in the go-bag's side pocket.

  "Is that dish soap?"

  "It's a long story."

  "Is the dish soap part of the story?"

  "Centrally."

  "Centrally."

  "It's a weapon. The dish soap. It pops monsters."

  Noor's face went through several phases in rapid succession. Disbelief, consideration, suppressed hysterical laughter, and finally exhausted acceptance.

  "Yeah," she said. "I'll walk with you. At least until the hospital."

  Emma, who had been following this conversation with the attentive silence of a baby at a tennis match, offered Noor a Cheerio again.

  This time, Noor took it. She put it in her mouth. Chewed. Her eyes widened slightly.

  "Did that just—"

  "Yeah," Dave said. "They do that."

  Noor chewed. Swallowed. Looked at the Cheerio box. Looked at Emma.

  "Okay," she said. "Okay. Walking with the dish soap man and the magic baby. This is my day now."

  Emma clapped her hands. Cheerio dust puffed into the air between them like tiny confetti.

  They walked out of the Walgreens together. Dave with his baby and his crowbar and his three remaining boxes of Cheerios, Noor with her pharmacy bag and her box cutter and the expression of a woman who had professionally committed to a course of action she was not yet ready to emotionally process.

  The strip mall sat behind them, the Walgreens glowing softly, its doors still open. An oasis in a broken world, stocked and lit and waiting.

  The road continued northeast. The hospital was about a mile ahead. Sarah was past it.

  Dave walked. Noor walked beside him. Emma ate Cheerios and babbled at the sky.

  And somewhere in the back of his mind, in the box where he kept the thoughts too big to look at, a new thought joined the others: the system was building something. The Walgreens, the labels, the enchanted supplies. It wasn't random. It was infrastructure. Someone had built it. And Dave was walking through it whether he wanted to or not.