"In the hours before midnight McKenzie dined on a last meal of tenderloin steak, French fries, tossed salad, whole milk and a half-gallon of orange sherbet. McKenzie hadn't requested the tossed salad, but prison officials thought he should have a vegetable.”
     —Michael Moore, reporting in The Daily Missoulian

CHAPTER ONE   Although Lyndon Augustus Zackheim believed with the seamless confidence of an old and deep faith that American veeks suck, he ignored the Mercedes SLK, the tasty little Beamer and the Saab 9-5 Sedan with that awesome turbocharged V-6, and headed straight for the odious one-ton Jimmy that had creamed a Windstar at the intersection of Heritage Lane and Yankee Doodle Road.

The overworked wheels on his Sam's Club shopping cart whined and rattled as he forced it across the ridges and valleys of dirty ice coating the ruined streets. But he still had room for one more battery, and wanted to bring back a big boy, something with serious cranking power. Even if it had to be harvested from an American veek. Tonight was the start of his week to sleep with Lira, and it was important for the success of his new life plan that he make a statement bold enough to get some respect. Or at least some attention. Not that she ever seemed impressed by anything he did. But before The Shit Hit The Fan he'd devoted his long working hours trying to score points on retail floors from sea to shining sea, and found the habit hard to break.

The Jimmy might have been green or it might have been red. Like everything else outside it was sealed in a drab veneer of frozen rain and gritty pumice. Even if there were some practical way to hose off this beast it would still look filthy. Out here in the demi-light of mid-morning it seemed as if the colors of the weary old world, trapped under its endless wrapper of heavy dark clouds, had been stripped away, sucked into space and replaced by so many grainy shades of gray, like the picture on the ancient tee-vee his parents once owned.

Ten miles to the north, at the vanishing point where the petrified land disappeared into the frigid sky, rose two spires of smoke that looked like pencil lines drawn against the sliver of jaundiced horizon. The line on the left rose from the smoldering rubble that had once been midtown Minneapolis. The one on the right was from St. Paul. For lack of anything else to celebrate Lyndon Augustus Zackheim enjoyed congratulating himself for his good luck in being down here instead of up there when The Shit Hit The Fan.

With a pulse of anxiety he spun around. He scanned the broken windows of the townhouses behind him, but saw no sign of life. To the left of him there was nothing but the wreckage of office buildings that had burned to the ground after one of the quakes ruptured a gas main. And to his right was an iced-over pocket park, with its lonely withered oak, the bit of open space around it deserted long ago. Although none of the patrols had reported the enemy poking around this sector in the last year, he tried to pick up the telltale smell of charcoal that would indicate the presence of those motherfucking weasels. He fished in the pocket of his parka for his talkie.

“Yo, Mutton, it's Augie. How about some cover, dawg?”

There was a cackle of static on the other end. “Don't call me Mutton.”

“Whatever,” he said, over-and-outing. Gomer.

Augie tried the passenger door, but it wouldn't budge. He fetched his crow bar from the cart and applied it to the task. The door sprang open at last. The dome light flickered on, then off. When he got a look inside he jumped back. “Barf,” he said. “It’s a Stinker.” Mutton appeared, yanked a Game Getter from his quiver, nocked it against the string of his Intruder, and pointed it at the Stinker's noggin. Just in case.

They peered in at the freeze-dried flesh pulled away from the pitted teeth in a jocular, mile-wide rictus. It was a former cowboy type, sort of old, wearing a Minnesota Twins baseball cap and a hooded sweatshirt that said I'm a roper not a doper. There was no way to know what killed it—the lingering gasses after The Shit Hit The Fan, a heart attack, the collision with the Windstar, or the empty liter of Wild Turkey on the seat beside it. And who cared? At least this particular Stinker wasn’t a Spinner. Although he had no proof, Augie believed that Spinners were contagious. But whatever, you never found Spinners in veeks. That’s because when the malady started dropping folks no one was driving veeks around because there weren't any veeks left that worked. The pitiful vics started spinning where they stood, indoors or out, faster and faster, on their way to biting the inevitable big one, barfing blood. Sometimes the eye sockets and the ears holes gushed blood as well. Not a pretty sight.

But these days, besides Lira, what was?

He held his breath and reached into the cab to retrieve a backpack lying on the seat. Dumping the contents on the ice Augie was disappointed to see that it was stuffed with cash, packets of twenty dollar bills put up with paper bands that said Pioneer National Bank, maybe sixty or seventy thousand dollars. But when he probed this wad of currency with the toe of his boot he discovered something that made both men gasp. It was a 9mm Barretta. Although Augie had never even touched a weapon until he did so reluctantly and in self-defense at the second battle of the First Store War, he extracted the Barretta's clip with a practiced hand. But of course, the clip was empty. And so was the chamber.

Now there was no choice. They searched Mr. Roper and the truck inch-by-inch, including the engine compartment and the undercarriage, looking for bullets. But they didn't come across a single shell. Augie sighed. This would have been an historic find that would have made him a major hero. Even Lira would have to cut him a little slack.

Oh, well, c'est la fucking vie, forget about it, he thought. At least he 'd be returning home with the battery, which was indeed a beefy find. He snipped the cables and the housing with his bolt cutters and eased the heavy Firestone into his shopping cart, noting with satisfaction that the terminals were relatively free of acidy white build-up.

The minivan, knocked fifty feet from the pickup, its side stove in from the impact, was probably full of soccer moms and kids, or suchlike. A church group. These sorts of scenes, the shattered domesticity, sometimes made him unbearably melancholy. But today he wanted to avoid the world's many grisly dioramas mostly because he just didn't care to mess with any more Stinkers. Although it wasn't possible these days to avoid dead things, Augie believed that overexposure to them invited bad luck.

Oh, hell, he thought, enjoying this rare feeling of good fortune. As long as they were this far from home they ought to check it out. If he found anything of worth, besides the tires and the battery and the gasoline that would have to be siphoned, the next patrol out could swing by and harvest the stuff. Walking pigeon-toed in his waffle-stompers to avoid slipping on the ice, he went around to the far side of the Windstar. He withdrew his Wrist Rocket just in case, and loaded its patch with a ragged chunk of glass.

One of the doors had been slammed open by the crash. The jack-knifed body of a woman in ripped faux-fur and Capris was splayed on the ice nearby, her head twisted at an unnatural angle. The other people in the van were black as well, a family by the looks of it-dad, teen son with cornrows, angelic glassy-eyed girl with beaded bangs, a kindergartner and even a gray old granny, everyone bundled up against what had been a winter's day dawning much colder than this one, at least twenty below, he remembered. And one that had ended with a warm, torrential rain that blew horizontally, so awesome it broke windows. And then that outpouring had been followed by a sudden freeze. The temperature hadn't climbed past freezing in almost four years.

Augie sighed again. God, how he missed colored people. Living without them was like food without Tabasco. The tiny figure of a naked infant lay face down near the twisted woman. Augie's quick appraisal of the van revealed nothing of exceptional value. As he turned away he saw that the little figure wasn't a baby at all, but a rubber doll, a boy doll, missing one arm. He brushed it off and stuffed it in his parka.

Back at the Jimmy, Mutton had shouldered his bow. Clutching his greasy little Bible, he was reciting muttered prayers at Mr. Roper, his acrid breath rising in staccato puffs. Mutton was a Baptist or a Lutheran or whatever brand of superstition it was these goy hayseeds practiced out here in the Heartland. And this had been the man's bullshit of choice long before The Shit Hit The Fan. He was different in other ways, as well. For one thing, he grew no beard and shaved his head, preferring the cold to the fleas and the lice, which everyone else found a tasty treat. Also, he was the only one of them who still had his original wife. Plus, he refused to share. Not that Augie had any current interest in the bovine enormity of Ruth anyway, who also shaved her big knobbly head. But the way things were going with Lira, you never knew.

He examined this thought. Nah.

Mutton turned around. “What?”

Augie smoothed his curly black beard across his cheeks and chin. Like most of the men, he'd let his hair grow long for the warmth. His was now a matted shock that looked like it was trying to escape. However, he was vain about keeping his facial hair neatly trimmed. The grooming habits of a salesman die hard. “Did I say something?”

“I don't know, Lyndon, did you?”

“Don't call me Lyndon.”

Mutton covered their backside as they made their way to the smudged ice of the Minnesota River, where they joined Betty, the three Joshes and Embry the boy, who chewed gum furiously, giddy with the excitement of his first patrol. These persons were gathered around the big mother sled, on which was already loaded two shopping carts laden with oddments of scavenge—a quartet of Michelins, a bale of Presto Logs, a jerry can of gasoline, a box of compact disks, mostly that godawful New Country, and a valuable two-pound plastic sack of white basmati rice that had somehow escaped the looting four years ago. Like Augie, everyone was bundled in parkas, and bristling with arrows and compound bows, Wrist Rockets, and knives. Of course, they'd rather be packing fire, but their arsenal of guns had been obsolete ever since they'd run out of ammo and reloading supplies at the first battle of the Third Store War.

Augie proudly pushed his cart onto the sled and lashed it in place with a bungee cord. He expected, of course, a happy response, maybe even some hurrahs. But the others merely grabbed their towropes. Without a word, they began pulling the sled towards home. Augie was disappointed.

But after they heaved into Bloomington an hour later, and entered the neighborhoods, everyone suddenly stopped and burst into applause. Even Mutton nodded his approval.
“Whoa!” Blue Josh shouted at Augie, pointing at the big Firestone. “Heavy hitter.” He was called Blue, of course, because of his eyes.

Augie spread his hands. “Friends, I do what I can.”

“Think you'll get laid?” Betty asked, not unkindly.

The arrow hit Blue Josh in the back of the right bicep. He raised his elbow and looked at the thing that had skewered his arm. “Oh, this is utter bullshit,” he said. They all dived for cover.

Augie fumbled for his talkie. “Cooper,” he whispered. “We're back. Blue Josh took a hit. But it do not look like much. Stay on.”

Augie knew he'd caught Cooper hanging around at school again because he could hear in the background the sweet voices of the children, singing as if they didn't have a care in the world.

Good morning to you.
Good morning to you.
With bright shining faces
We're all in our places.
Good morning to you.

Augie was a famously inept and soft-hearted soldier who was rarely called upon to fight. His aversion to conflict had earned him the nickname G. I. Jew. But now he loaded his Rocket with glass again and tried to summon the energy for battle. He raised his head above the trunk of a fine vintage Peugeot 406 Coupe and scanned the street. He saw nothing and ducked back down. Vaguely frightened and somewhat bored-the usual state of his psyche-he wrote “Wash Me!” with his finger in the ash that had accumulated on the frozen fender of this luscious, wasted automobile.

Someone on Augie's flank suddenly began screaming in terror and rage. It was Embry the boy, and he was firing mad salvos with his Rocket at someone darting from vehicle to vehicle left to right across Augie's field of vision. The figure slipped behind a charter bus painted with a faded banner declaring that the passengers were Seniors on the Go. Augie waited. When he looked up again he saw the intruder, a familiar motherfucker sporting a gigantic head-shrub of frizzy black hair, slouching in Augie's direction around the back of the bus. This would be Deek. And lurking not far away would no doubt be that supreme skank, Deek's current squeeze, Sharone. Real weirdos, that pair.

Augie's motto was live and let live, so who knows why, maybe boredom, maybe to protect Embry the boy, he let off a wild shot. His first in two years. There was a shatter of glass against metal and then a screech. Deek fell to his knees, clutching at his eyes, and was quickly hustled away by Sharone, wearing greasy lime-green ski clothes, an enormous knife strapped to her waist.

After a passage of silence, the patrol gathered around Augie and stared in amazement at the place where his shot had gone.

“Looked like Deek and Sharone,” Aqua Josh said.

“Bold little assholes,” observed Middle Josh, in height the most average of the Joshes, but named in fact after the stiff, foot-long blonde Mohawk that ran down the center of his head to the back of his neck.

Blue Josh had unzipped his parka so Betty could rip off the tail of his shirt and tie it around his arm above the arrow to staunch the flow of blood. “What did they fucking think they were doing in our hoods?”

It was Betty who started the chant. The others picked it right up. “Au-GIE, Au-GIE, Au-GIE!” Augie grinned with delight. He brandished his slingshot, shook it in the direction of the enemy and sang in his strong but off-key tenor. “We will we will rock you!”

Glancing over their shoulders, they made their way past scattered clusters of veeks, dragged and pushed into this place from the scavenged neighborhoods. Every junker was sitting on its rims with its hood popped open, the seats ripped out. They stopped at the vehicle entrance to an enormous four-story parking garage, which was heavily fortified with a wall of scorched Beetles and Honda Civics and a confusion of rusted metal lawn furniture. Stepping through the makeshift hatch, they clicked on their headlamps and flashlights, and made their way through a passageway toward a big stainless steel door hauled here by sled from Enoch's Meat Mart on Killebrew Drive.

Carved into the dirty yellow brick above the door was a single word: Sears.

Lingering outside, Mutton guarded their retreat. Concealed within the stink of burning rubber and other smoldering debris piped out from the incinerator inside Sears, the stale Aqua Velva radiating from Aqua Josh, and the general rancidness of modern life, he could detect the smoky whiff of the Kingsford charcoal the enemy used for cooking. One of Mutton's talents was his sense of smell. His wife, Ruthie, she had it too, the good nose. Maybe it was because they were country people used to sussing out weed-tainted milk or a wire cut that wasn't healing right. It was one of the many things that bound them heart and soul in their husbandry of the land and their service to Jesus Christ Our Lord. Not for the first time that day he fished inside the frayed neckline of his parka and pulled forth the crucifix-on-a-string he'd carved his own self from a hunk of scavenged cherrywood armoir. He touched the crude outline of a fish he'd pecked in the center of the crosspieces. He kissed the cross before putting it away.

At the hatchway he paused. There it was again, that stirring, that small, shifting disturbance in the stifled air he'd sensed earlier in the day, the hint of something on its way, as vague as a whispered word from behind a closet door. He'd been feeling this thing for days now, this indefinable presence. Was it a premonition? Some heavenly notice to stay tuned for an important message to follow? Or was he simply on edge because Augie the Christ-Killer was getting under his skin more than usual?

There, once more, right there. Wasn't that a cold brush of a breeze against his forehead? He scanned the streets again. Then he pulled off the threadbare shooter's glove protecting his trigger hand and slipped the wool watch cap from his pockmarked scalp. He touched the place between his eyes where he'd felt the breath of wind. He put his index finger in his mouth then held it aloft. Nothing but the eternal dead calm. His finger tasted like potting soil.

Raising his face to the sullen skies, he focused on a point just south of paradise, and closed his eyes. It must have been his imagination. The wind had not stirred once in four years. And if it was the wind he'd felt, what in heaven's name could it mean?

“Whitebread!” Augie shouted out from inside the garage. “Get your hick ass in here. And make sure to lock the hatch, man.”

Mutton put on his glove and his cap and shouldered his bow. He would keep this incident to himself. And he would pray for guidance.


CHAPTER TWO Augie’s message from patrol shook Cooper from his funk. He pocketed his talkie, waved to Ruth, who scowled at him as she lead the kids in song, and headed toward the exit of the Big Room to alert Lira so she’d be ready to patch up Blue Josh.

Cooper had always loved to hear children sing. But today the good cheer of these four younguns depressed him. Last night he dreamed about T. D., his sweet little girl, who was a thousand miles away from this dark place, back home in the bright and windy foothills of the Bighorns. She’d be ten now, in the home stretch toward the end of fifth grade, her crimson pig tails bouncing behind her Stetson as she rode Rolex, her paint, without any help from the Mom-Dad, making circles in the arena behind their trailer he’d worked up with the John Deere. Or toasting Smors on the patio for her pals from down the Nine-Mile Road on sleepover nights.
Ah, Tina Dell. A big girl now.

Stop it, he told himself. Just stop dwelling. Still, there might be some weird chance that Paige had taken T.D. to the Mall in Sheridan or some other climate-controlled sanctuary that day and that they were no worse off at this moment than he was and that he would see them again real soon and they’d go camping.

Right. The odds of that were way puny, considering that the world had been wrecked at 3:38 pm Mountain Standard Time on a school day, just when his little family would just be getting home from work and school. Troubling images of their last moments began to crowd into his brain, but he shut them out, forcing back this Dark Thought towards the source of wherever it is these demons spring.

As Cooper left the Big Room the children ran to hover around the entrance to the parking garage. They’d heard chants echoing beyond and were jumpy with hope that the adults might bring back a little excitement along with all those boring tires and batteries and stuff. A little break in the routine of school and chores and target practice. They weren’t disappointed.
By the time Augie appeared in the candleglow, pushing his shopping cart, everyone had already heard the news from Betty of his astounding bravery and marksmanship. One of the little girls, Mango, ran to Augie and clutched the hem of his parka. He fished the one-armed doll from his flight jacket and presented it to her with a deep, formal bow. Like Cooper, Augie loved children. And Mango was his pal.

“Oh, Augie,” she gushed. “This is so phat!”

“What are you going to call him?”

She held the doll before her, then clasped it to her tiny, bony self. “Bob Smith!”
Standing proudly, a war-hardened member of the patrol now, Embry smiled down with the benevolence of the protector at his eight-year-old sister, the protected one. “Yeah? I don’t know, man,” he croaked, his adolescent voice breaking. “He looks more like Lefty Smith to me.”

Lira Difelice, RN, lit a fat juniper-scented gourmet candle from Candle World ($11.95) and warmed her long fingers over its meager flame. When they were limber she went to her four-poster bed with its enormous Sealy Posturepedic Emerald Elite mattress ($2395 from Comfort Level) and eased it away from the wall. She removed a length of vinyl splashboard on the floor and reached into the hideyhole behind it for the elegant black leather briefcase that had become a central part of her life.

Such as it was.

She laid the briefcase on her bed just so, dialed the combination to its lock three times, and lifted the cover from the southeast corner with her right hand while holding down the southwest corner with her left hand. Everything had to be just-so. Lira had always been a little superstitious. Actually, as she’d been informed by a staff shrink at the annual hospital fundraiser, there were certain obsessive-compulsive tendencies in her makeup she might want to discuss with him later at his place. She tried to recall if he’d succeeded in getting into her pants. But her memory of that effervescent evening faded at around midnight.

Okay, so her mid-morning ritual did involve a certain amount of repetition. But it wasn’t any stranger than, say, ballplayers who brushed their teeth between innings or wore a lucky jock strap. You know, to insure good fortune and a continuance of plenty. And she wasn’t any weirder than Augie, who wandered around half the time in his stupid Food Suit, a wearable refrigerator, but usually without, you know, the food. Or filled out imaginary orders for slacks and jackets in his order book. Then there was Cooper, who spent hours every day writing numbers in his legal pads, adding them up, then writing them all down again and adding them up again while his pencil went scritch, scritch, scritch till she wanted to fucking scream.

The painkillers were arranged along the west side of the valise. Here were the brown plastic vials of Percocet and codeine, nearly empty, plus an ampoule of morphine she was saving for emergencies and had never touched, although at one time during the Second Store War the temptation had been staggering. On the east coast were her Buzzers: the amphetamines, the B12 in solution for easy injection, some surgical-quality cocaine when she felt like strolling that fine white line between energy and hysteria, and some nice ritalin for that all-day buzz. On the north were her Moodies, the Xanax, Serax and Ativan. Below the Mason-Dixon line were her Zombies: the hypnotics Valium and Loftram and the lovely but unpredictable Rivotril, which certainly gave her that zoned-out bliss she sometimes craved but also caused her to become ditsy and forgetful. She picked up the brown plastic vial that used to contain her sopors, regretting again that she’d been so greedy.

Lira knew that a day of reckoning was close at hand, the day she ran out of drugs. That’s why she’d been gradually reducing her consumption the last six months. Restraint made her cranky and skitzy and weird. But even with this rationing she saw that in a month there’d be nothing left in the briefcase except the morphine.

But that was a month from now. Because tonight was radio night she wanted plenty of energy, but, you know, like a controlled buzz. So she decided on extra-light rations for the day. She slipped a petite white amphetamine onto her tongue to kick-start her motor, and washed it down with a sip of blue Gatoraid. Then she broke a Xanax in half and downed one piece in order to help her believe that the personality she was about to create with chemicals was just what the doctor ordered. She slipped the other half, plus another benny, into the breast pocket of her Carhartts. She shut the briefcase, turned the dial three times, put it back into the wall, and returned her bed to its place.
             
As Lira withdrew the syringe from Blue Josh’s arm he put his hand on her chest. She looked at this unprovoked grope and laughed. Then she smacked him on the top of the head with the back of her hand. Still, the boldness of this move intrigued her. What would he do next?
Augie stepped forward with his bolt cutters. “I hear you and Aqua Josh are sharing Betty again.”

“I don’t kiss and tell,” Blue Josh said, rubbing his head.

“Eye, eye, eye, eye!” Augie cried, mimicking the sounds everyone couldn’t help but hear streaming from Betty’s quarters at night.

“Try and be a gentleman,” Blue Josh told him.

“Hey,” Lira told Blue Josh. “If you’re after variety why don’t you try the old Augster here? He’s pretty good sometimes.”

“I won’t ever go there again, thank you. Wife numero uno was a goddamn salesman. Nothing personal, Augie.”

“Can you feel that?” Lira said, pulling the arrow a bit through the meat tunnel it made in BJ’s muscle.

“No. But I got something you can feel.”
      
“Go ahead,” she told Augie, who sliced the shaft of the Thunderbolt, letting the feathered end fall to the floor.

Lira extracted the other half of the arrow from BJ’s arm and put aside both halves. Then she drove a three-eighths-inch reverse cutting needle threaded with black silk into a section of the reddened flesh bordering the wounds on either side of his arm, and set about stitching him up. She guessed six sutures each, and she was right. When she was finished sewing she gave him a shot of antibiotics.

“I celebrate myself and sing myself,” Augie read out loud from one of her books. “And what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Yeah, right, he thought. He tossed the book on her bed, wondering why anyone would read Walt Whitman when they could go to the library in the Big Room and get all the Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy they wanted. He watched Lira to see how she was going to handle this Blue Josh situation, and glanced across her apartment at Cooper, who, as usual, was scribbling by candlelight on one of the gazillion yellow legal pads he’d scored from Office City before Macy’s gutted it. Coop might be uninterested in this situation, but Augie studied it closely, hoping to pick up a helpful hint re: Scoring Points With Lira.

Cooper put aside his legal pad and unfurled a desk-sized aerial shot of the neighborhoods around the Mall taken by the Twin Cities Planning Commission a month before The Shit Hit The Fan. “Where did you guys go this morning?”

“As you ordered, master,” Augie said, pointing. “From here to here. And there, by that park.”
With a red ball point Cooper drew neat little Xs over the blocks where Augie’s patrol had scavenged. Red Xs now covered every square inch north of Sears for three miles, to the airport and beyond, and now three miles to the east, as well. West and south, of course, belonged to the enemy. Although their troop strength had declined, just like that of Sears, this sector was still too dangerous to explore without heavy archery backup. Not that the bastards had left anything for Sears to make off with anyway. What they couldn’t carry away they burned. Of course, Sears had done the same thing in their own territories.

When Lira was finished bandaging his arm Blue Josh put on his parka. “What have you got for pain?”

She was vaguely disappointed. But what was it she hoped for? Some cheap theatre involving Blue Josh jumping her in front of the two men she was sleeping with? A few moments of farce followed by mumbled apologies at dinner? She already had two lovers, sort of, and didn’t have enough drugs left to handle the emotional challenge of taking on a third. Still, seeing how far Blue Josh was willing to push things might have been amusing.

She held out a bottle and tapped a couple of pills into his hand.

He studied them. “What do you see in these divots, Lira?”

“I don’t take Tylenol.”

“No, these guys.”

Lira tore open a Sani-Wipe and cleaned the blood from her hands. In the old days she would have worn rubber gloves, but now, what did it matter? “Well, Cooper is predictable, and is a good provider. Augie’s easy to figure, and he keeps his nose hair trimmed. Let’s see . . . they both like to play games. Now if you experience any infection in that arm be sure to give my service a call.”

“Bite me.”

When Blue Josh was gone she rubbed her hands together and shivered. “So, Herr Zackheim, heard you were quite the marksman.”

Augie feigned indifference, but in fact he was pleased that might be impressed with this unexpected show of bravado. “Lucky shot.”

“Give a thousand sling shots to a thousand monkeys?”

He analyzed the statement for sarcasm. After deciding it was no more insulting than usual, he accepted her curiosity about his heroics as flattery. “The battery I got was nearly new, it turns out.”

Lira had been pondering the fate of Augie’s battery, wondering what to offer Cooper in exchange for directing the famous giant her way instead of somewhere else. The last couple of months, when it came to the sex she occasionally offered, he had been all, I can take it or leave it. Maybe he was bored with her. Maybe he’d secretly taken up with Betty, although she doubted it, because Betty would have found a sly way to let everyone know. Anyway, withdrawing the offer of a romp probably wouldn’t change his mind about the battery. He’d never voiced any interest in pharmaceuticals, preferring to throw back his nightly jiggers of Shine instead. Not that she’d ever offer her candy anyway. She decided she’d have to use logic to convince Coop that the larger interests of Sears coincided with her own selfish preoccupations. He was a careful and thorough man and usually responded to what could be made to sound like good sense. Failing that, she’d put in some volunteer work at the farm in trade for ten minutes with Augie’s big Firestone.

“Hey, Coop,” Lira said, offering him her Gatorade. Even his long beard and flowing red hair couldn’t conceal his strong resemblance to Howdy Doody. “Cooper!”

Cooper, who had opened the infirmary’s heavy safe and was counting the medical supplies, looked up from his pad and waved away the bottle. “What are you guys doing in ten minutes?”

Augie shrugged. “Working on my net game.”

“Getting out some Junior League invitations,” Lira said.

Cooper shook his head at them. They were funny people. “Could you take a quick walk with me instead? I need a hand.”

As Lira quick-checked her appearance in the mirror on her wall Augie handed Cooper the vials of antibiotics and novocaine she’d shot into Blue Josh. Cooper put them in the safe, spun the dial and yanked on the door to make sure it was locked. Then he pushed Augie with his shoulder. “Hey, man, nice shooting. Could it be you got some soldier in you, after all?”

Augie smiled in spite of himself. He’d rather be thought of as a lover, but to say so would be to name the unspoken thing that bound them together, the three principal players at Sears. Still, he saw how a little bit of moxie went a long way these days. And how he might parlay this accidental courage into the leverage he needed to convince Lira to go along with the thing that had come to dominate so much of his daydreaming, this project of his heart.


CHAPTER THREE As Augie followed Lira and Cooper up the stairwell from Level One to Level Two he stopped from time to time to turn his headlamp on the skinny copper pipe running along the base of the wall. Leaning down, he touched the sweat welds to check for leaks, and made sure the pipe was uniformly warm. As he mostly did when he performed this chore he found himself thinking about their patron saint, their founding father, the coolest dude of all. That’s because this system of pipes radiating around Sears was the first of the great man’s three critical contributions. The air outside might always be 20 degrees, but inside Sears the temperature was often almost comfortable.

While Cooper’s people were busy taking control of the northeast corner of the Mall during the First Store War, and making Sears their permanent haven, Ernie Clovis, a lanky semi-genius and former Mall maintenance engineer, cobbled together a heating system that kept them from freezing to death, or burning the place down. On busy weekends back before The Shit Hit The Fan, when as many as 50,000 shoppers might be crammed into the Mall, there was so much body heat, not to mention energy from the sunshine streaming through the skylights, the challenge for Clovis had been to cool the place, even when the savage winters of Minnesota pushed the air temperature outside to way below zero.

But when the Mall began to freeze in those first weeks of total blackout after America’s shopping spree was terminated, people were forced to keep warm by burning things in trash barrels. To let out the smoke they broke the skylights. But after a fire in the Level Four Conference Center snuffed the five Sears teens who were using the rooms as their private makeout crib, Clovis turned his big jumpy brain to the construction of an incinerator system that circulated hot water. His system was driven by a simple steam turbine. When the turbine was running at full tilt it not only heated Sears and provided people with the occasional luxury of a bath it even operated a few light bulbs and pumped enough electricity into Ernie’s jerry-rigged converter to recharge any battery that had enough life left to take a charge.

Keeping the incinerator stoked with things to burn and ice to melt was a full-time job. Sears had already cut down the small forest of landscape-quality maples and locusts on the east grounds. They had deconstructed every wooden structure within a mile east of the store. They had burned every car seat they found in the four levels of East Parking, and in the street level lots as well, drained every crankcase, siphoned every gas tank and pulled every tire. And they’d even stripped the few planes at the airport that had survived the mayhem there in the first hour after The Shit Hit The Fan, although no one had ever been able to figure out how to get the fuel out of the jets.

In the first months after the incinerator was built, they fed more than five hundred Stinkers to the flames, as well. But around the same time Ernie Clovis disappeared—captured and tortured by Macy’s (if you believed that particular story, which Augie did not), Cooper ordered this traffic in corpses to cease. He explained that the heat generated by a burning stiff didn’t add a useful amount of energy to the system, because of the temperature required to get one lit, and because of the muscle power it took to bring relatively heavy bodies from increasingly greater distances to the incinerator. Oh, Mutton and Ruth argued that cremation was the right thing to do in the eyes of the Lord. But since none of these frozen hunks of death could be buried, Augie and Lira had complained loudly about the practice, and became the voice for the majority.

As Augie entered the incinerator area behind Cooper and Lira he stopped to watch as Mutton’s Ruth heaved one of the morning’s Michelins into the inferno. Then the big woman used a grain shovel to feed the boiler a mound of Styrofoam shipping peanuts, in addition to a fake leather couch she’d blitzkrieged with a sledgehammer. The flames turned a chemical shade of green and began to spit.

“Hey, Ruthie,” Cooper said. She slammed the door and glared at him. Ruth glared at most everyone except Mutton. For him, the only real God-fearing man she’d ever known, she saved her goo-goo eyes.
 
“You’re on in a half hour,” she snapped at Lira. Ruth did not approve of Lira’s domestic arrangements. Or her potty-mouthed person in general. Ruth believed that fornication was always the fault of the woman. Most men simply behaved like the dogs they are. Always have and always will.

Lira lit the stub of a $30 Panatela from Everything Butt the Cigar and smiled warmly. “Got a hot one with Hey-soos, Ruthie? Give us the back seat and we’ll double-date.”

Augie smiled, assuming that it would be himself who’d be Lira’s date on this hypothetical evening out with the Holy Ghost, since it was his week to sleep with her and not Cooper’s. Ruth arranged her face into a beatific mask. “Oh, bless your hearts.”

Cooper stepped between them. “Ruth, you can go now if you want. I’m gonna do inventory.

“Suits me fine.” She dropped the shovel at Lira’s feet and lumbered away, head down, shoulders swinging like a sumo wrestler. Augie wondered how someone could maintain a robust figure like that on the monkey food they all got. Maybe she worked the way houseplants do, she sucked fat from the air. Some people, Aqua Josh in particular, liked to hang around Ruth because of her bigness, like she might be good luck, or maybe they thought that by osmosis they could get some of this largesse for themselves. More myth, like the bizarre religious beliefs the farmers held. But while his mind was on the subject, didn’t it look like Mutton had begun to look smaller the last couple months and Ruthie even larger?

“Why do you go out of your way to piss her off?” Cooper said.

 Lira blew a cloud at Augie, who couldn’t stand the smell of tobacco but liked to watch her smoke. “For sport. I’m a sportsman.”

 Cooper shook his head. “Okay, here’s what I need. Augie, how about you count the tires while we do the rest of the fuel?” He produced a tape measure, handed the business end to Lira and directed her to march with it to the far side of a sizable stack of debris piled along a wall near the incinerator. This was stuff from an apartment building on the Mall side of the Minnesota River they’d been plundering the last week. Although there was some nice hardwood flooring they’d ripped up, most of the stuff was the sort of junk people who rent cheap apartments own—beanbag chairs, throw rugs, futons, wicker basketry. Cooper measured the stack’s height and width and wrote down the numbers.

 When Augie finished with the tires Cooper wrote that number down too.

“What now?” Augie said.

 Cooper went to the incinerator, and checked on the status of Augie’s big Firestone, which he’d hooked up with alligator clips to the recharger. “I’ll feed the furnace till you get back.”

“Back from where, master?”

“Could you guys go down to storage and count the batteries?”

“Didn’t you do that yesterday?” Lira asked. She was suddenly bored.

“Yeah, and I counted all this, too.”

They stared at him. “It doesn’t hurt to double-check,” he said.
    
While they made their way to the supply basements under First Level Augie amused himself by appraising Lira’s ass and the delectable curve at the small of her back. Although her dirty tan Carhartt’s were sort of shapeless, in the unfocused glow of his headlamp certain pliable images presented themselves and his mind began to wander. He found himself with an erection. Well, actually, it was only a semi-leaner, but considering the cold he’d been in all morning Augie thought the ready state of The Southern Gentlemen said something positive about his general vigor.

“Did you mean what you said to BJ about me?”

She stooped in the concrete hallway to retrieve the key from its hideyhole behind the cover of an electrical outlet. “That you’re a child?”

“No, about how, you know, when we’re in bed.”

She unlocked a heavy steel fire door and pushed inside. “Long week, Augie?”

He decided then and there to actually read some of her books so he could score points by making literary-type comments. And that, he thought, was a sure sign that his interest in Lira’s femaleness, her womb, her potential, was becoming an obsession. He had to admit, he was slightly losing interest in Lira herself, per se. But he couldn’t help himself.

The batteries were stacked on metal shelves along two walls. They each counted a wall. He saw that there were considerably fewer units than the last time he was down here three months ago.

“I count thirty-four,” he told her. “What’s Cooper’s problem?”

“I got twenty-nine.”

“Really? That sucks.”

“Being careful, I don’t know.”

“Careful about what?”

“Everything. He thinks if he fusses and worries and counts everything every day we’ll live happy ever after. It’s like a mantra.”

“You think we’re in trouble?”

“I think we should put the kids on the Nordic Riders and make the little bastards generate electricity for us. What does it matter what I think? Que sera sera.”

“Hah! What about school?”

“If they starve to death they won’t need seven-times-nine-is-sixty-three.” She slid the cigar into her mouth with a deliberate motion that made Augie giddy. “That’s a very big boy you brought back this morning,” she said.

He waved away Lira’s smoke “It’s about the biggest boy you’ll ever see.”

“Help me convince Coop I should have it for the shortwave,” she said. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Meaning?”

She smiled her come-hither smile and shifted her slender shoulders. “Your favorite thing.”

He tried not to pant.

“And . . . I’ll eat a cinnamon bear first.”


CHAPTER FOUR Mutton was a sixth generation Minnesota dairyman, a devout evangelical and an unregistered ultra-right Republican who despised Semites and Papists and Wogs of every stripe. He and Ruth agreed that Darwin was a subversive, Einstein was a member of the Illuminati, and everything you needed to know about natural history and science was in the Bible. He believed in crop rotation, hybrid vigor and organic fertilizer. He believed that masturbation was mass murder. Plus, he was certain that heavenly UFOs would be arriving at any moment to offload toothsome girl angels bearing messages straight from God about why He wrecked the world, and which premium couples would be selected to Get On Board. Although Mutton had been waiting four years, he never wavered in his conviction that he and the missus would be the object at any moment of a personal such invitation.

Because he was an inspired gardener who could grow corn in basements, or make an alfalfa seed sprout in the dirt under his thumbnail, he believed that his role as the farmer was crucial to the survival of Sears, and he ought to get more respect. Ruthie, too, what with her equally impressive agrarian powers, plus her culinary and teaching skills.  And so it confounded him that his stupid and demeaning nickname had stuck like glue, this Mutton. And it also galled him that Bradley and Ruth Van Pieterburen were the objects of ridicule streaming from such lowlifes as Augie the Yid and his whore-nurse slut. If it had been Bradley Van Pieterburen making decisions around Sears, these two would have been forced into slave labor long ago for the furtherance of the farm.

“Sorry to bug you,” Cooper said, blinking against the sudden heat and humidity and ferocious glare of light in this secret and highly fortified subterranean room. “But I want to do a count. You mind?”

Mutton stabbed his trowel in the pungent black soil and glared at Augie, who had come along at Cooper’s request to second-check his counts. “I got to have some more juice for this new field.”

Cooper shaded his eyes and inspected the farmer’s latest effort. The Glacier Hybrid corn he’d planted only six weeks ago was already waist-high. The fruit on the tomatoes he’d put at their base was still green but so heavy the branches had to be lashed to supports to keep them off the ground. Nearby, a small apple tree bore three pale yellow globes. The farm was only the size of a three-car garage but it was filled to the ceiling with beds of oats and taters and cabbages and okra and strawberries and red chilies that were hot enough to burn a hole in the clouds.

There was even a small plot bursting with flowers and herbs to build morale. The ceiling itself was wall-to-wall grow lights ($30 each from Headquarters) with a Rainmaker sprinkling system on a timer ($895 from Sears). Mutton plucked a grasshopper off a leaf and offered it to Cooper, who waved it away. Mutton popped it in his mouth and chomped down once before swallowing, marveling as always at the resilience of insects, whose eggs continued to hatch in the soil four years after The Shit Hit The Fan.

If only Sears had an inexhaustible source of batteries, Cooper thought, the farm could go on forever, or at least as long as Mutton was the farmer. The farm was so important its location was known to only four of the Sears’ eight adults, and none of its four children. But when people got blue and withdrawn and desperate for something bright, they were blindfolded and led down here to bask in the land of the living for a couple of hours. Starting a year ago, when they ran out of Vitamin D pills, these sessions in the light had become critical. As Lira explained, without the Vitamin D, which this fake light manufactured in the skin, the muscles would turn to jello. So three visits a week, plus a nip or two of Shine for young and old alike, put everyone back on their feet.

Augie hated the farm, even though this was the second great invention of Ernie Clovis. It was clammy and hot. There was nothing to do. And it smelled like shit. He unzipped his hooded sweatshirt and took it off. After he counted the plants and wrote down the numbers on Cooper’s yellow pad he twisted a strawberry from its stem and popped it in his mouth. “Yo, Mutton, this place smells like shit.”

Augie, of course, had been on honey duty enough times to know where the waste products of Sears ended up. But as the Frogs say, or was it the Krauts? If you have the opportunity to piss someone off, you have the duty to do so.

“Takes one to know one,” Mutton said, surprising even himself. He usually ignored Augie’s abuse, since they were thrown together so often on one extra duty or another, figuring that when the time came to deal with these heathens The Almighty’s justice would be swift and sure.

“Now I die,” Augie said, clapping his hand to his chest and falling back.

Cooper stepped between them. It occurred to him that he was spending too much time lately stepping between people. Jeezo, they either dragged around like Night of the Living Dead or they were complete Bickersons. He obviously had a morale problem on his hands. For example, look how much Augie’s ridiculous shot this morning gave everyone a boost. They needed something more than a glass of Shine once in a while. They needed something to cheer about.

Maybe he should organize a raid into one of Macy’s outer neighborhoods. Although Deek and Sharone’s surprise intrusion this morning into Sears’ parking space was all show and no go, it was an insult and ought to be answered. People could let off some steam, maybe score a battery or two, have a few laughs, see the sights. It had been, what, six months since the last raid? He’d make it like a weekend getaway. They could dress up in their favorite war clothes. Get drunk. God knows they could use more batteries. And if they managed to actually see some Macies and do some damage to one the stories they brought back to tell each other a hundred times, bigger with every telling, these would last for weeks, and Cooper’s life would be easier. He decided that what with it being Augie’s week with Lira he’d have some time to make a plan.

He felt better immediately. Now that he had something positive to put his mind to some of his anxiety about the stockpiles of Sears began to evaporate. He put his hand on Mutton’s bony shoulder. “So what do you need?”

As they huddled over Cooper’s yellow pads talking amps and volts and whatnot, Augie said adios. He lit a candle and went across the hall, glancing over his shoulder as he unlocked yet another fire door. He made his way down a utility corridor that led nowhere, inspecting the hot water pipe that ran along the wall. He stopped, pulled open a flap of drywall, extracted a Visa Platinum card from his sweatshirt and swiped it through the battery-powered reader installed inside the wall. Then, glancing over his shoulder again, he pulled open a heavy trap door in the floor and made his way down the narrow stairwell, easing shut the door over his head and making sure the lock clicked. He flicked a switch, and the room was illuminated with the thin light from a single bare bulb on the ceiling.

Here was one reason why Augie was such a popular citizen: the still. Although he was called on from time to time for battery patrol and honey duty, his main occupation was providing Sears with a steady supply of hard liquor. He climbed a pair of steps to the wooden fermentation platform next to the copper column rising from the stainless steel boiler, and pried the lid off a fifty-gallon barrel of corn mash and water he’d started three days ago. He turned his head from the fermented stink, so funky it made his eyes water. There was a nice brown crust on what the old moonshiners called the beer. This cap was an inch thick. That meant the mash was still producing copious alcohol but not in such quantity yet that it was poisoning the yeast with its own waste. Here was one of the fun facts about distilling that Augie loved: The poop of yeast was alcohol! He broke the cap apart with a long-handled chef’s paddle, and poked the pieces back under the surface of the brew.
 
Then he went to Mr. Sprout ($185 from Garden of Eatin’). The soaked corn kernels Augie had spread inside had grown two inches of shoots and an inch of root. Perfect malt. Here was another fun fact: To extract the sugar from the kernels of mashed corn in order to feed the yeast you need the enzymes that can only be found in corn sprouts. Go figure. Augie scooped them out and dumped them into the hand-operated meat grinder from In Good Taste ($49.95). The first grind merely chopped it, but after four passes he had the kind of fine stuff he wanted. He tossed this vegetable matter into the beer, stirred the goop with the wooden paddle and pounded the lid back on. He figured the beer would be ready to distill in three days. He had learned his craft well. This batch of Shine was going to be his best effort yet.
The still was the third masterpiece of Ernie Clovis. After The Shit Hit The Fan Ernie had studied how the mobs drank everything they could get their hands on, from the last dregs of twist-off wine to Lysol and aftershave lotion. Once the incinerator was up and running and the farm was growing food Ernie turned his attention to the matter of Mall alcoholism. He began to spend less time at Sears, and started wandering around in the company of a large stray he’d rescued one night by releasing the dog’s chain from the twisted rebar where it was caught. This starving black mastiff had a spiked collar and a nametag that said Niger, scrawled in a primitive hand.

Cooper had warned Clovis about the dangers of moving around the Mall alone. What if the Macy’s catch you? Or that really nasty clan holed up in Bloomingdales? Everyone breaks under torture, Cooper argued, and if you give up the farm where will that leave the rest of us? But after Clovis unveiled his plan for the still, Cooper slept on the idea. Then he gave Ernie the long leash he wanted. Like Ernie, Cooper saw the potential for booze as a potent new currency.

First, Clovis found a stainless steel tub from a restaurant called Porgio’s and several fifty-gallon oak barrels from Hickory Farm. Then he tore apart more of the Mall’s vast plumbing system to get at the copper tubing he needed. When he’d finished pounding and welding, Sears found itself in possession of a sweet little cooker that could put out almost eight gallons of 180-proof hootch every run. Diluted to 90 proof with water flavored by clove and cinnamon, Cooper’s people suddenly had a surplus of something the other gangs in the Mall would kill for. And kill each other they did, con gusto! When Sears traded its first booze for protein, Cooper’s people turned to Clovis with the adoration they once felt for George Clooney, say, or Scarlett Johansson. There was talk of anointing Ernie the new supreme ruler of Sears. But he squelched this insurrection by announcing that he was an engineer, not a leader. Cooper’s your man, he told the crowd in the Big Room one night. And any enemy of Cooper is an enemy of mine.

Cooper had emerged as the most focused and determined mind at Sears even before the First Store War, when a hundred frightened, hungry people were coalescing into a gang. He used the Shine Ernie distilled from Quaker’s Oats and Sunkist Raisins to get things Sears needed but didn’t have quite enough muscle to take. And he built up the strength of the store by manipulating the distribution of alcohol so that mayhem erupted constantly between the enemies.

After the smaller gangs were annihilated, Sears and Macy’s took turns attacking Bloomingdales, and emerged from the wars as the only stores left. Then, of course, they turned on each other. But starting two years ago a belligerent stalemate had developed because the active warriors fighting on opposing sides of the Mall had been reduced to about the same number. And since the belligerents had holed up in impenetrable quarters, this number was no longer big enough to organize a killing blow.

Ernie had apprenticed Augie as his assistant Boozemaster partly because Augie didn’t drink. Actually, Augie couldn’t drink because the stuff gave him rashes and asthma. Also, Ernie had taken a liking to the young salesman from L.A. Augie accepted the job, plus which the alternatives involved sentry duty or truly odious manual labor like feeding the incinerator. He wasn’t a real teacher like Betty or Ruth, but he liked to read to the kids and help them with their arithmetic, although the only thing he knew anything about was retailing. And how much could a course in product placement prepare the young people of today for tomorrow’s downsized world?

As Augie headed to the larder he passed a faded snapshot pinned to the wall that showed a genial and wind-burned Ernie Clovis in sunnier days. He was standing in front of one of his fishing boats, the one named Miss J, his green eyes blazing with good cheer. On a meat hook he lofted a monstrous Northern Pike. As always, Augie saluted the Ernster with a V for victory. After all, Ernie was a hero, a supreme being, really, to whom Sears owed its very existence. With Ernie as his mentor and sponsor Augie had gained considerable stature at Sears, despite the fact that he lacked the temperament required to excel at war. Combat isn’t the only way a man’s courage is tested, Ernie had told the others the night he announced that Augie was his choice for assistant Boozemaster. There’s nothing more dangerous than working a still, he said. One leak, one mistake, and you’re toast.

In the larder Augie counted inventory, as per Cooper’s request. He had five quarts of Shine in an assortment of festive decanters ($39 each from Tiffany’s). According to the pressure gauges there was enough propane in the tanks looted from various Winnebagos and ice fishing shacks to cook maybe three more batches, plus twenty-five bushels of dried corn—good for two or three batches. There were enough charcoal briquettes to clean ten or eleven gallons of Shine—two batches. He wrote everything down on one of Cooper’s legal pads. Then he looked at the numbers again.

Mutton could always grow enough corn for the still, as long as he had batteries. And they could trade for more charcoal. But where would they get more fuel? Those two RVs they stripped last fall were more than five miles from the Mall, up near Lake Harriet in south Minneapolis. Making the trek up there had cost Sears a soldier, old Kenny, a barber who stroked out halfway home. It was unlikely they could spend the energy going any farther than that to search for more. And there was no way this room could handle the smoky mess they were forced to burn nowadays upstairs. That might mean they’d have to bring up the still and heat it with the incinerator. But if the move might damage the welds. Worse, everyone would then know where the booze was made. As it was now, only Augie, Cooper and Lira were privy to that critical data intelligence. Anyway, it was a good thing stuff like this was Cooper’s headache, Augie thought. I’ve got tastier fish to fry.

He put on his sweatshirt, grabbed a couple of decanters to hand around at dinner, and slipped them into his pocket. Down in the dirt and lint at the bottom was a lump of something. Fishing it out he was delighted to see that it was a cinnamon bear. He brushed it off, examined it for unpleasant substances, and put it under his tongue. As its spicy warmth flooded his mouth he felt a nice warmth rising in his groin as well.

He needed to figure out a way to get Lira her battery, and fast.


CHAPTER FIVE Dinner was the same bland casserole of boiled cornmeal and veggies they ate six nights a week. The festive plastic food Ruth arranged as centerpieces on the long banquet table of the Big Room—the mock cheeses and fruits and breads and glistening pork chops that had once festooned the shelves of the refrigerators on the salesroom floor—these had long ago lost their power to persuade people that they were in the presence of a feast. Like everyone, the only meal Augie looked forward to was Sunday dinner, when they got a little meat.

Sighing, he doused his food with Ruth’s good chili sauce, and ate a few bites. Even with the added pep it was unfulfilling. I need fat, he thought. A bacon cheeseburger! A Polish dog with onion rings! Then he amused himself by employing his spoon to shape a pair of mounds from the casserole that resembled Lira’s lovely mid-size breasts. For nipples he found two sections of chopped baby carrot, and maneuvered them into place.

 When he looked up Lira was watching him, her eyes as unreadable as a doll’s. Smiling a demure smile, which Augie thought of as her Mona Lisa smile but was actually a product of the chemical haze she drifted into every evening, she took a pair of baby tomatoes and a runt cucumber from a wooden bowl and arranged them in a provocative manner on the oak table before her. Her fingers lingered on the cucumber as she raised her eyes to meet his. The agreeable sensations the Southern Gentlemen had been sending now became a cry for help. Augie was about to suggest they go back to her rooms immediately, when she suddenly grabbed a cleaver and whacked the cucumber in half lengthwise down the middle.

 Everyone turned from Cooper’s nightly pep talk to stare. “Lira, if you have something to say why don’t you share it with the whole class?” Mango howled at Cooper’s falsetto imitation of Betty, who as always was sitting next to Lira because Lira sometimes let Betty eat things off her plate. Betty clapped her hand over her mouth to squelch the monkey screech of a laugh that had plagued her since she was a child, and which now plagued Samantha, her daughter.
“You going to finish that?” Betty asked when Cooper had moved on to other topics.
When Lira shrugged Betty reached for her plate.

Augie slumped in his chair. Events were building toward one of those long, difficult weeks with Lira in which getting along with her became more of a challenge than simply getting laid. He sensed, however, that without the battery for her shortwave he wasn’t going to get lucky on either count.  And without getting closer to her there was no way to pop the big question that had been eating at him. To make matters worse, Cooper had already made it clear that the power needs of the farm were far more compelling than Lira’s fixation on the deranged messages that cackled over her stupid radio once a week.

Augie ate a breast. Sometimes he wondered why he bothered with Lira. After all, Betty had made it clear that she would love to hook up with him again, and this time wouldn’t expect any sort of emotional alliance. But Betty just wasn’t Lira. For one thing Betty’s tubes were tied. More than that, there was just something about Lira that had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and wouldn’t let go. And it wasn’t just the frenzied way she made love. He would have been sniffing around her even if she weren’t one of the last women left in the world.

Cooper announced to sardonic cheers that this week’s videos, Heartburn and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, would be shown on Tuesday, movie night.

“Just kidding,” he said. “Actually we got that flick from last trade day called The Sheltering Sky. I think it’s a western.” People cheered again, this time in earnest. In truth, they didn’t really care what they watched anymore; what they liked was the comforting routine of gathering in the dark and relative warmth to eat popcorn and stare at images on the big screen in their home entertainment center.

Cooper prodded Blue Josh into some after-dinner entertainment involving an account of battery patrol. Though everyone had already heard the story, there hadn’t been this much buzz around the place in months. Blue Josh removed his shirt and unwound the bloodstained bandage on his arm, showing Lira’s oozing stitches where that skank Sharone’s arrow had pierced him. Then he explained how the first Sears to fire back was the newbie, Embry Orr. People shouted and clapped. Middle Josh’s towheaded twins, Greggy&Gretchen, issued shrill whistles, their little fingers jammed in their little mouths, just like their Pop taught them. Embry beamed with pride and embarrassment as Blue Josh praised his aggression in giving the cocksucking corpse-fuckers what for. He apologized to the children for saying corpse-fuckers. Augie watched Lira’s face as she hooted for Embry. The sound she made was like Rin Tin Tin—woof! woof!—only sarcastic.

What was it about her? She wasn’t quite beautiful—her nose was slightly hooked, her auburn hair, cut ragged like Peter Pan’s, was grimy, and she had a peculiar scar the shape of a snake’s tongue at the corner of her mouth. But she was pretty and sexy and her violet eyes were lively and she had good posture and radiated a presence that promised outrageous sport or that at least an agreeable time would be had by all. And like him, she didn’t drink, which gave them something in common, especially considering the amount of boozing that went on around Sears. He especially enjoyed her company on those rare occasions when she put on her blood-stained nurse’s uniform and asked him intimate questions about his body, how certain things felt, his responses to various stimulations, pretending to write the answers down on her clipboard.

Anyway, well, shit, Augie decided, that does it. It was time for a truly gnarly move. And he saw with breathtaking clarity what it had to be.


CHAPTER SIX Augie had known for two weeks where he could lay his hands on the mother of all batteries, a massive and nearly virgin gel-cell. Against all the rules of Sears, he’d been hoarding this information, which he’d discovered by accident, just in case there arose an extreme situation. And to his way of thinking there wasn’t anything besides a Thunderbolt in the brainpan that could be more extreme than this yearning he felt, which was becoming an almost organic need.

To take possession of this monster battery and return it safely to Lira would require luck and timing, but most of all balls. Although Augie knew he lacked the physical courage that Cooper and the Joshes had, his righteous wounding of Deek this morning had given him a buoyancy he hasn’t felt in many moons. He calculated the hardware he’d need to pull off this daring stunt and where it might be found. He’d start gathering things right after dinner and be ready to leave by midnight. If everything went right he’d be back before Lira was waking up, just when she always seemed so warm and gauzy and available.

He was already picturing the expression on her face when she saw the gel-cell. Of course, the battery would be their secret, another violation of the rules that bound Sears people together. But on the other hand it would take pressure off Cooper for a while to supply her with juice for her dumb hobby, and that couldn’t be bad, could it?

Augie snapped out of his reverie to discover that everyone was applauding him. Then they began chanting. G.I. Jew! G.I. Jew! He rose theatrically and raised his tattered Dodgers cap like a slugger who had just cleared the bases with a walk-off home run. He flexed his biceps and gave each one a kiss. Then he pointed to Embry Orr, and shouted “You rule!” Finally, he went around the table with his decanters of Shine and poured a round of nice stiff drinks. Ruth and Mutton sneered as they accepted their customary full rations, but knocked back the stuff with a barroom panache that always made Augie wonder where these fish-loving Christers learned to drink. He poured out small shots into plastic tumblers, watered them, and gave them to the children.

The accumulation of drugs in Lira’s brain had painted a radiant aura around everything, watercoloring the edges and making it possible to believe the world was still a safe, comfortable place. A place where she could pretend that she was back home in her cozy apartment on Old Shakopee Road after her shift at the hospital’s ProntoCare outlet in the Mall, staring at the tube all evening, with its tidy arrangement of experience into compartments, then waking to scan the Star Tribune every morning with its predictable array of human interest features and coupons for fabulous savings on many choice bargains. Plus, this was the time of day she always looked forward to, when there was a fire glowing on the hearth, and people kicked back, and you could believe that Sears was a warm and friendly cocoon, like a caveman’s cave, one of the last havens on this dangerous, frozen planet.

Because it was Saturday, and Saturday was dance night, Middle Josh went to the Bose Sound System ($1695 from Prairie Home Furnishings) and punched a button on the CD player, engulfing the Big Room in the irresistible strains of “Mail Myself to Mexico.” Everyone except Mutton and Ruth jumped to their feet and formed a line so they could do the Cowboy Cha-Cha Cooper taught them, while Buddy Jewel sang:

You know, it’s easy to see how a man like me could go postal.
I need a latitude where the attitude’s kinda coastal.

Then they danced the Boot Scootin-Boogie, singing along with “If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me,” as they slapped the soles of their waffle stompers in perfect unison. The copious hair, the ragged clothes, and the back-alley lighting made them look like the chorus line from Cats. Augie danced between Mango and Lira, who closed her eyes, trying to ignore him. By the fifth tune even Mutton and Ruth, as usual, couldn’t hold out any longer. They jumped into the mix as everyone did the steps Augie taught them, the Harlem Shuffle. The narcotic beat of the theme from the Addams Family rattled the room.

Lira saw that she’d hurt Augie’s feelings again but, God, he could be so needy. With Coop at least there was the possibility of something resembling mature attitudes. Still, she did have to admit that Augie was generally more amusing to have around than Coop and his catalog of worries. Plus, Augie enjoyed the same anarchist sexual praxis that she did, that noisy, vibrant chaos that was sometimes even better than drugs for the purpose of taking her someplace else. Although it seemed more and more that she preferred chemical stimulation to the organic kind, especially since better living through chemistry was coming to an end. After the dance, as they loitered in the Big Room, Augie fabricated one of his pouts, the act intended to get her attention. He claimed he needed time alone.

“You just spent a week alone.”

“Don’t worry about me, little girl.”

“Little girl? I’m five years older than you, you snotnose.”

They looked away from each other. Lira surreptitiously palmed the second half of her daily Xanax, although she only had ten of these left. Ten!

“Look, why don’t you just come over to my place at midnight and have your little tantrum tomorrow,” she told him. “We can play go, see what happens.”

He zipped up his parka.

She zipped it back down. “Aw, come on, Augustus. A night like this, a girl gets cold.”

“Throw on another blanket.”
             
Cooper went to his desk in the offices of the former Sears managers on the mezzanine, a vantage point from which he could observe everything that happened down on the floor of the Big Room. First he watched Augie storm off in a huff—what was that all about?—as Lira headed back to her space in what had been the dressing rooms in women’s apparel. Ruth came around with Mango and Samantha to clear the tables. Then Ruth went back through the swinging doors into the kitchen, where she and Aqua Josh were baking oatmeal cookies made from the Bisquick that had been harvested this morning in Eagan. The unbearably delicious aroma was being fan-blown from the oven through a secret conduit in the Mall toward the southeast, where the smell would drive Macy’s crazy. Fucking perfect, Cooper thought. Bisquick, he remembered, was invented in Minnesota.

After a while Mango stopped loading dishes on her tray and stood strangely quiet. Then she suddenly began twirling, her eyes closed, her face pointed at the ceiling. When she began yelping like a monkey Cooper stood up, knocking his legal pads onto the floor. This wasn’t happening! It had been four years since he’d seen a Spinner, but this is exactly how they croaked, whirling like banshees before they keeled over, blood streaming from their eye sockets and ears. He couldn’t believe that after all this time Mango’s apparent exposure to the agent that caused Spinning—the dormant virus hiding in a cell, the poison locked away in a globe of fat, whatever—the damn thing was finally taking hold. Samantha withdrew against the wall and began to sob. Cooper knew the child had seen Spinners, and was waiting for the spraying blood and the gruesome death. But just as he was about to rush downstairs to pull Samantha away from this grotesque dance, Ruth emerged from the kitchen, lumbered toward Mango, grabbed her arm and smacked her butt.

“Bad girl!”

When peace had returned, and Mango had been made to apologize to Samantha, and the room was in order, Ruth shooed the girls back to the kitchen with the last of the trays and blew out the candles, plunging the floor into darkness. Another long, cold night at Sears had begun. Cooper cranked his Luvelors shut and indulged himself with something he rarely permitted. Even though he only had a gallon of white gas left, he lit his precious Coleman lamp ($85 from the Trail Head). He spread out his legal pads on the desk and put a new battery in his calculator. Then he went to work.


CHAPTER SEVEN The Mall had four anchors. Sears held down the northeast corner, Macy’s the southwest. On your northwest corner was Nordstrom, or what was left of Nordstrom after a 747 crashed into it twenty minutes after The Shit Hit The Fan. Bloomingdale’s held down the southeast corner. From Sears, there were two ways to Nordstrom. The quickest route, of course, was outside in the neighborhood, a straight half-mile shot from Point A to Point B that led to the collapsed curtain walls outside the store. However, this rubble was impenetrable. The only way to get inside the ruins of Nordstrom was from the interior of the Mall, following a route through a maze of twists and turns and changes in elevation from one floor to another that wound perilously close to Macy’s itself before jagging north again.

Augie knew about the existence of this subterranean portal only because Ernie Clovis had traveled the length of every service corridor on every level of the Mall, inspecting every store, closet, pisser and warehouse during the time when the gargantuan building was being constructed. As he inspected things he made personal copies of the blueprints, which he locked up in his office deep in the bowels of the structure. And then, after the Store Wars, the Ernster had updated these blueprints with drawings of the wormholes. This detailed atlas was common property at Sears, and had been used over and over again to strip the Mall of anything useful Macy’s didn’t get to first.

But the map showing the wormhole into Nordstrom was a new document unknown to everyone except Augie. He’d discovered it among Ernie’s booze recipes and diagrams of the still, papers he reviewed every time he made Shine. It was weird finding the map like that, folded into one of the many zippered pockets of Ernie’s Day Planner ($39.95 from Pushing The Envelope). Augie figured he must have just overlooked it.

He calculated that it would take three hours to get where he wanted to go and even longer to return with his heavy prize. But his mind was made up. Since it was now midnight he called Cooper on his talkie to check in. Cooper liked his lieutenants to report at the end of the day, a bedcheck that catered to their fearless leader’s many obsessions.

“Going to sleep now, boss,” Augie said. “Over.”

“Sure you are. What’s Lira doing?”

“You know. Girl stuff.”

“How’s this batch of Shine going?”

“Top notch.”

“Ready by trade day?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Okay. I’ll check in with you in the a.m.”

“One thing,” Augie said.

“Over.”

“She really wants to borrow that battery I brought in.”

“The farm can’t spare it.”

“Even for, like 10 minutes?”

There was a pause while Cooper considered it again. “Would you rather have food for a week or sex for a night?”

Augie sighed. Cooper always knew what sort of game Lira was playing. But Cooper’s answer settled the question of what Augie was going to do with this particular night.

He turned off his talkie, turned on his headlight, and exited Sears through a fire door on the Third Level. He locked it behind him and made sure the key was concealed under an edge of worn carpeting. Pushing on, he followed the wide corridor called North Hall past the gutted and charred shells of Planet Hollywood, Maison du Popcorn and Perfumania, and stopped near the Food Court. The hallway ahead was gone—it had crashed through the ceilings of Levels Two and One during a quake, then through Golf Mountain and onto the floor of Camp Snoopy.
Kneeling, he reached behind him into his Arctic Explorer internal frame backpack ($250 from Ends of the Earth) and retrieved the first of the three coils of nylon climber’s rope he’d need. He secured one end to a web of rusted rebar, and dropped the other end into the darkness. Although he’d had some practice climbing and rappelling on a couple of wormhole patrols last year, he wasn’t fond of heights. But this monkey business with ropes was the only way to follow Ernie’s route to Nordstrom with the least exposure to the enemy. He took a deep breath, got a firm grip on the line and began his descent.

A while later, after another long hike and another descent, this one into the deepest of the utility corridors, he sat down against a wall to take a break. He fished Ernie’s maps from the Baby Sack he wore on his chest ($45 from Cuddleduds) and spread them out. He figured he was directly below the Barbary Pirates Water Ride in the center of Camp Snoopy, which meant he was on the verge of crossing into the no man’s land dividing Macy’s floor space from Sears. From now on he was fair game. As if fair was a word you could ever apply to a Macy.
It was said they tortured their prisoners before they killed them. Household items rammed up the bung—toilet brushes, cell phones, ice tongs—and body parts cut off, toasted in front of the screaming victim, then eaten. Of course, these were probably just myths, you know, urban legends? How could anyone know what happened inside Macy’s? No one captured by the motherfucking dirtballs had ever escaped alive. He wondered again what in the hell he was doing, wandering around exposed like this without even Mutton along for support. It was messed up. But he’d already come a long way, and home was now exactly as far away as Nordstrom. So why not finish the job?

After memorizing the next leg of the trip he turned off his headlight in order to save juice, and unzipped his flight suit. Underneath, for luck, he was wearing the Amazing & Versatile Food Suit. He always wore it when he needed a boost in his spirits. And it wasn’t just its satiny, reassuring feel, or its connection to baseball and the game’s old and comforting rhythms. Reaching into the Hot Pocket, he brought forth one of Mutton’s roasted baby red taters saved out from dinner. It was, of course, still hot. He decided to eat the other one later. He squirted on some ketchup and a dab of mustard from the Condiment Dispenser, popped the entire tater into his mouth, and chewed it slowly.

Then, marching again, he marveled at himself for the second time that day. Not since The Shit Hit The Fan had he ventured this close to Nordstrom, or to Macy’s, for that matter. The truth was, and he would be the first to admit it, he was a worthless front-line soldier. Those gung-ho types like Cooper and the Joshes and even Lira, guys who liked taking it to the enemy? He had no idea what made them tick. He wasn’t handy with weapons, had never even been in a fistfight, was insubordinate by nature, and just didn’t like the screaming and commotion of war. So he had gladly accepted Cooper’s orders to hold down the fort while the others went off to fight. Although he’d taken some lip about being a chickenshit and a wuss, he didn’t mind. While he didn’t have the temperament to charge into battle, he knew in his soul that when push came to shove he would give his life to defend Sears and the still. So maybe that’s what explained his behavior this morning—the sight of Embry out there on the ice, a mere boy putting his life on the line, a child Augie had been watching over for four years, a child in danger.

He calculated that it would take another hour to reach the ruins of the loading docks of Nordstrom. And now that he was officially inside Macy territory it was time to make a statement. Rummaging around in his pack, which was now minus three of his four ropes and a good deal lighter than when he started, he found his can of Krylon spray paint. He shook it until the ball jiggled. He made a tentative chartreuse splotch on the wall. Then he wrote Macies Suck in bloated round letters. He stepped back to admire his work. But seeing it written, it just didn’t have the punch he was after. So next to it he wrote Donkey Dicks. Then, to be accurate, you know, historically accurate, he crossed everything out with spray and wrote Macies Suck Dead Donkey Dicks.

As he turned to go he heard it. It sounded like a faint triplet of yaps drifting through the tunnels from a considerable distance. The vast and complicated edifice of the Mall often emitted weird sounds—whines and groans and hisses—as it adjusted to the shifts in the earth caused by the quakes that shook Bloomington from time to time. Still, it was widely believed around Sears that this particular sound, this woofing, was uttered by the ghost of Niger. It sounded like Niger. Or at least a dog. But if the damn vicious cur was still alive wouldn’t someone have come upon him by now? Still, Augie not only believed that Niger lived, he believed that Niger was roaming the Mall with Ernie Clovis, who had reasons of his own for keeping his distance from Sears, and would return some day with a solution to their current dilemmas.

After walking for ten minutes north, to a place where the corridor intersected another, he stopped to check out Ernie’s drawings again. Just down this corridor should be the ruins of Water World, the huge aquariums that had once been filled with marine life. Augie had once loved walking through the glass tunnels—the sharks and turtles and enormous bass swimming above him and all around—as a way to calm down after a big workday. But as he made his way through Water World he found nothing except broken glass, confirming the rumor: A week after The Shit Hit The Fan the residents of Water World had been become premium plats du jour.

Maybe he was just getting tired, but in the corridor beyong Water World he began sensing that he was being followed. He walked a few steps, then paused to listen, but heard nothing. He moved again, carefully withdrawing his slingshot and loading it with a cat’s eye. Then he suddenly turned and charged back up the corridor as fast as he could. He wasn’t sure what this tactic was supposed to accomplish, but at any rate there was nothing there, plus it got his juices flowing again. Then he thought he heard music in the heating ducts above his head. Like shopping music maybe or elevator tunes. He listened, holding his breath, but heard nothing more. His examination of the ducts revealed, again, nothing.
Nerves.
    
Lira kept her shortwave in a utility closet at the far end of her apartment. She unlocked the door, then locked herself in. She lit a candle on the vanity she’d moved here, spread out her books, and withdrew her voltage meter from a drawer. The vanity’s mirrors gave back enough reflected light to let her read the numbers as she applied the meter to the three nearly depleted car batteries she’d arrayed in a bank along one wall. If she was lucky she’d be able to stay on the air for a few minutes, just enough time to let him know about her pitiful energy situation and exchange a short message.

She checked her watch. At this point everything had to be just so. She examined the earphones for mites and spiders. Finding none, she put them on. She opened her fat compendium of American poetry to a page she’d marked with a sticky-note, and then turned to a page in her even fatter collection of English poetry. She flattened out these books and propped them open. She opened her notebook and wrote the date on a blank page with her gold-plated Mont Blanc pen, a birthday present from Augie ($675 from The Write Stuff). She plugged a jack into her Sony pocket recorder ($49 from Circuit City). Finally, she turned her attention to the Kenwood TS 990Z shortwave transceiver ($895 from Radio Shack) and clicked on the power.

A year ago she’d bribed Cooper in the usual way to install the antenna for this unit on the roof above Level Four, and then booby-trap it with snares to protect it from the enemy. With the sublime pleasure she always felt when the first static whispered from the speakers, she dialed slowly through the frequencies, listening for signs of life.

When Lira began spending time with her radio, in the phony war after the real terrors of the Third Store War, all sorts of random hysteria came squawking over the air. A Pentacost speaking in tongues that came to sound like gansta rap, strings of obscenities from a Florida woman who would never collect on her husband’s life insurance. A couple living in a former Minuteman II silo outside Minot, North Dakota, who gradually lost their minds. Lira had jumped when she heard the first shot, but the second shot a moment later didn’t surprise her. Then there was a Texas chiropractor who sang Gordon Lightfoot hits and told jokes. A man goes into a bar where roughnecks are celebrating. What’s that all about? the man asks the bartender. Oh, they just finished a jigsaw puzzle, the bartender says. So? Well, it took them six months but on the box it says two to four years.

Finally, there were only two voices left on the air. 

One of them belonged to a Cambodian teenager named Patrick Garrett Zhao, a surfer who was holed up with six other Californians inside the Mission at San Juan Capistrano. Although their situation had already deteriorated by the time Lira found him, Zhao was unfailingly solicitous, formal. How is your health, Miss Delafice? And your sex life, adequate? What about your drugs? On the day his drugs ran out—his marijuana, his Quervo Gold and his crossroads—he told her that the Mission was also out of food. So Group had voted to make their way to Camp Pendleton, figuring if anyone besides themselves had survived, it would have to be the Marines. Heading north was out of the question. Something had hit L.A., they’d heard. A wicked big wave.

She had wept at his final words, spoken almost a year ago.

Miss Delafice, I gotta tell you something? I don’t  want to say nothing but they said you should know.

Just tell me.

The ocean, man. It’s frozen?

Lira turned the dial once more to Zhao’s frequency, double-checking as she always did in case he’d returned. As usual she found nothing except static. She looked at her watch and tuned the radio’s antennae so it was pointing south to a minute and a second of longitude she knew as intimately as her own social security number. The static built to a crescendo and vanished.
There was a pause. And then a voice, a man’s voice, his voice, coming to her clear and resonant across twelve hundred lifeless, battered miles of Mississippi floodplain. A voice that, she had to admit, always made her feel the rush of prom night.
    
Like small foreign villages, whose gates have been
destroyed by bonfires
so the cities nearest my hands
are destroyed by the rust and the rustling of cool ashes.
Cool gray enters my throat.
It is painful to be foreign from you now . . .
    
As always, Lira was mesmerized. There was so much mystery and drama in his voice. That part about the “rust and rustling” sounded familiar, a line she remembered reading last month, or was it last summer? She leaned toward the microphone. Maybe later she would tell him she’d been thinking about him. For now she’d already decided to start with current events.

Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
I dress the perforated shoulder.
So soon what is over forgotten,
and waves wash the imprints off the sand.

After the wars, as the days and then the months passed in a grim parade like swine through a slaughterhouse, she had come to rely on this voice and the intellectual challenge of deciphering the poems he chose. By now he knew everything about her—the lovers, the drugs, the rages, the despairs. Although he’d never mentioned his name she knew a few things about him. Well, yes, she admitted, even if the poems he chose to describe himself with were only approximations, he was probably nuts, wandering around alone in a stone mansion in what was left of New Orleans, sometimes sleeping in the little bed where his daughter had slept, surrounded by her bears and Raggedy Anns, or wearing his wife’s dresses and robes, hearing voices, seeing ghosts in the shadows.

But he couldn’t be any more fucked up than she was, although sometimes she suspected that he’d also found a chemical antidote to modern life. His voice sometimes had that familiar vaporous quality, the tone her own voice took on when she was righteously blitzed. She thought back to the night a year ago when she had first stumbled across his voice, reciting the same verse, over and over until she broke in tell him that she was there:

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images are raised, here they receive
The supplications of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkling of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom?

Lira turned to her English poems and was about to recite a bit of sentiment, something by Robert Browning that crystallized what she’d been feeling, when he completely surprised her.

Can you feel the swell, Lira—
or is there one
of something vast & wonderful
coming over America?
    
For the first time since they met, the King of New Orleans had said her name.

("The Suicide Rates," by Lewis Warsh. "Early Triangles," by Ron Padgett.)


CHAPTER EIGHT It was after midnight when Cooper rose from his labors. Groaning with fatigue, he lit a candle, and turned off his lamp. He poured himself a shot of Shine from one of Augie’s fancy bottles and tossed it back. Then he poured another.

The results of his inventory were worse than his estimates. Sears had enough food growing or in storage to last six weeks. According to Augie there was a small surplus of Shine, but the end was in sight for the propane he used to fire the still. Lira had long ago dispensed all of the anxiety drugs and painkillers and sleeping aids in the infirmary safe, leaving only an emergency-level supply of antibiotics and lidocaine to help people get through their injuries. He didn’t bother writing down the number of pills they had for hay fever.

Those figures were bad enough. But the really depressing numbers were at the bottom of the lists recording stockpiles of batteries and fuel for the incinerator.

The trouble had been brewing for some time. Just like Napoleon discovered when he invaded Russia, the thing Charles II had learned the century before, and Hitler discovered all over again when he attacked the Soviet Union, the longer your lines of supply the more griefburgers you order. The battery Augie harvested this morning over in Eagen was located farther from Sears than a patrol had ventured since their big voyage of discovery two years ago. It wasn’t the threat of ambush that concerned Cooper about these far-ranging excursions; it was the enormous effort his people were spending to bring home the bacon. There was no way around it: The costs of going out in the world would continue to escalate, and the income from these patrols would continue to diminish. But what were the alternatives? Once again, Cooper laid them out in a row.

We could leave, he thought. Run away and start over. But run where? The Twin Cities were wrecked, and still burning from all the earthquakes. Before the TVs went to snow and the last radio station fell silent a half hour after The Shit Hit The Fan, they’d heard on CNN that there wasn’t a city or a forest in the eruption belt that wasn’t on fire. So what would be the point of fleeing to Duluth or Rochester? And even if they learned of some undamaged and fully stocked executive condos in, say, a Podunk like Mankato, just crying out for immediate occupancy by pre-qualified buyers such as themselves, they’d have to walk across sixty miles of barren, ransacked countryside that might be as lethal in its poverty and its cold as anything they’d come up against in their long war against Macy’s.

Cooper remembered the last vehicle he tried to start. It was a $60,000 Range Rover commanding the showroom floor of a dealer in Richfield. Painted black, it had a mammoth 480-horse diesel engine and tinted windows and was fully loaded with AC, 4WD, CD, GPS, power everything. When Cooper turned the key the engine jumped to life like a predator. His heart thudded with hope that here at last was a vehicle immune to the poisons of the shitstorm. But after a moment it, too, shuddered and died. Just like every other vehicle over hill and dale across our fine continent, and all the other damn continents, as well, he supposed. Something lingering in the air, that rusty grit, working its way past the filters.
After the Wars he’d found a bit of time to dissect the simple engine of a Suburu whose decapitated driver had smashed into the rear of a flatbed stalled on Cedar Avenue. It wasn’t until Cooper pulled off the oil pan that he saw the scope of the damage, and understood that his former happy life was gone forever.

So we have no way of leaving, he decided yet again.

Option Number Two: Wipe out the Macies and take over their stockyards. Like everyone, Cooper hated the conceited, bloodthirsty bastards. Not only for their brutality during the wars, but because they owned all the meat, not to mention the books and videos, the CDs, the games and the toys, possessions lorded over Sears every trade day. As pleasing as this fantasy was, which he knew was fueled by Augie’s crazy luck on the battlefield this morning, he rejected it again. Macy’s was just as dug in as Sears. And without some serious explosives there was no way to administer a killing blow. Besides, Sears needed them, he forced himself to admit for the gazillionth time. They were the yang to Sears’ ying, the demand for Cooper’s supply, the sugar in their tea. Sears simply didn’t have enough manpower to operate both stores. And that’s the fact, Jack.

He wondered if his counterpart, holed up in his quarters at the far end of the Mall a mile away, was making similar unpleasant discoveries about the state of the Macy’s economy. Probably. Cardiff Malovik was a thorough and ruthless manager, and if anything slipped past him it would never get by Ursula, the tyrant’s wife.  Well, they were assholes, that was true, Cooper thought, but they were so much easier to deal with than weak and desperate people or people with agendas that weren’t on the table. Like the former occupants of Bloomingdale’s. It’s the dull knife that hurts you, not the sharp one.

Cooper wrote down a list of the resources Macy’s depended on, and analyzed the list to see which commodity was likely to be the most critical. Their least pressing need was probably fuel. Cooper didn’t know exactly what kind of heating system they were using, but he knew they were burning the same sort of junk Sears did, because like everyone he could see the smoke and smell the stink. Although the temperature inside Macy’s was no doubt a few degrees lower than it was six months ago—just like it was at Sears--they still had plenty of material on the western fringes of Bloomington they could salvage for enough kindling to keep from freezing.

Next was batteries. Macy’s didn’t use as many as Sears did, because the bastards weren’t growing produce, and always offered up a few on trade day in exchange for more veggies or extra Shine. Their surplus, however, had decreased from a high of ten units to only three at the last meeting.

As far as books and DVDs and games and whatnot the bastards always seemed to have a steady supply for trade. During the Wars they had targeted the toy stores, a savvy tactical move indicating that the Maloviks must have anticipated how tedious life after combat was going to become.

Cooper decided that the thing Macy’s needed most right now was feed for their livestock. Their animals were obviously getting less to eat because the filets the Maloviks had been offering were increasingly skinnier and the eggs fewer. That big bag of Iams Augie brought in this morning will be worth its weight in meat come next trade day. Cooper decided that the next patrol he sent to Eagen should concentrate on trying to scrounge up some more. He opened his Yellow Pages of the south metro area and made a list. Dog groomers, pet stores, kennels, vets. Pet Smart.

He remembered the days when Macy’s didn’t own any animals. During the President’s Day Offensive during the Second Store War, they had wiped out two small clans, at Minnesota Picnic and at Pepperidge Farms, and seized their caches of specialty meats. Instead of devouring this food at once Macy’s hoarded it. At the first trade day two years ago the Maloviks employed some of this bounty to drive hard bargains for booze and veggies. But after a year their supply of high-quality protein began to dry up.

Before all the really good stuff was gone Macy’s put a new kind of meat on the table. At first, resistance at Sears was intense. So Macy’s tried to grow demand by putting together a brochure typed on an ancient manual typewriter. Cooper glanced up at this very document, which was pinned to his cork bulletin board. It featured photos cut from National Geographics and travel magazines, and there were also several spicy recipes for grilling and broiling and shish kabob. “Our new brand is considered a delicacy by millions of people throughout the world,” the brochure gushed. “Because we’re so sure that once you try it, you’ll like it, for a limited time try one of our FREE SAMPLES.”

In the end it was hunger more than marketing that won Sears over. After a couple of months without meat the Joshes caved in, and then so did everyone. And Macy’s was right! To Cooper’s surprise, when he finally tasted the stuff he loved it. Sears was now as hooked on Macy Meat as Macy’s was hooked on Shine. The flesh of rats, either freshly butchered or smoked, became a once-a-week treat, the eagerly awaited entrée at Sunday dinner.
Before Cooper turned off his lantern he withdrew a stickpin from a glossy calendar on his bulletin board and spread it out before him on the desk. Put out by the National Council of Retailers, he had used it last year and the year before that as well, telling himself that his slashing of colored marks across the boxes of the days was a form of planning. But in truth the act was simply an effort to feel something of the passage of time. He crossed the box for January 31 with a red line, next to the green line he’d drawn last year and the blue line the year before. And then because it was now past midnight he flipped over the page for February, which showed a trio of tasty South Pacific babes with heavily suggestive white hibiscus blossoms in their hair, romping in the spray of a tropical waterfall. Then it struck him.

Tomorrow was Groundhog Day.



CHAPTER NINE Across the great crumbling expanse of the Mall that night, from Sears to Macy’s, and from Level One up to Level Four, the weary veterans of four years of war and malnutrition and boredom burrowed into their filthy nests with a sense that something new had been let loose between the walls of the world. Maybe they could feel some shifting of the earth. Maybe there was something foreign in the lifeless air. Or maybe they were simply restless because of the morning’s bloodshed and the memories it stirred of how much fun it had once been to be an American.

As Cardiff Malovik made his midnight rounds from one candlelit gloom to another he found himself stopping more often than was his habit to hold his breath and listen. But all he heard were the coughs and sniffles and groans of people who were always cold and hungry. Beyond the rustle of this human static there was nothing but a kind of hush. Outside Macy’s West Hall entrance he turned his headlamp toward the stack of gutted vehicles piled to the twenty-foot ceiling. Barbed wire, broken glass and sharpened stakes bristled from this rusted barricade, which guarded the sliding steel door dragged here across the neighborhoods from the county’s road maintenance quonset on 34th Avenue.

Halfway up the pile, on the scorched hood of a Chrysler New Yorker, was a pair of cadavers, former enemies shot in the back during the raid on Minnesota Picnic. Young Donald Kefauver Lustig, fun-loving sociopath and multiple prep school expellee that he was, had thawed out these casualties, applied his special brand of magic to them, and then refroze them, arranging their persons in such a way that the male was taking the female from behind, doggy style. Or, as the boy had named the installation, Donny Style. For an added antic touch he had jammed a cigar in the male’s mouth and a beer mug in its hand. Over the female’s shriveled head he had slipped a lifelike Mother Teresa mask, the one with the naughty pout ($60 from Men to Boys), and had dressed her in a fabulous azure rayon blouse ($145 from Georgiou), glinting with sequins.

Donny had erected a number of these dioramas between Macy’s and the cordon sanitaire that was Camp Snoopy, booby-trapping them with spring-loaded spikes to deter vandals. Cardiff found the boy’s work mildly disturbing. But he had seen its effect on Sears and had to concede that this kind of perverse agitprop was essential to the climate of terror he was working so hard to produce. In truth, bottom feeders knew more about the strategic value of public depravity than gentlemen such as Cardiff ever would.

Cardiff removed his famous white Cossack’s hat, made for Russian winters from the luxurious fur of arctic hares, and ran his hand across the thick carpet of silver hair that Ursula barbered once a week to keep it short but full. He located the no-see-um biting him behind the ear, and dispatched it into the dark. Then, for the second time that day he withdrew his snub-nosed .38 Police Special from his shoulder holster and checked to make sure there was a round in the chamber. He usually performed this ritual only once a day, and in public view, for the purposes of illustrating that (one) he was The Man, and (two) The Man Was Armed. In truth, the four bullets he possessed made him the only armed man in the Mall. Of course, he could use them whenever he wanted to take out whatever Sears lowlife he chose, but why bother? The threat of gunplay was as powerful as its actual use, both home and abroad. And besides, he was saving all his bullets for a rainy day. The mere sight of them and the monopoly they represented always gave Cardiff comfort when he felt ill at ease. Like now. After the amusing exchange of hostilities this morning people had become ebullient and loud-spoken in that undisciplined simian way that made his skin crawl.

At dinner there were even hoots and foot-stomping as Cardiff raised his glass to toast Sharone Barnett for her excellent marksmanship in the matter of wounding the disgusting manual laborer, Blue Josh. And he raised his glass again to Deek Barnett for his courage under fire in the matter of that lucky shot got off by the bootlegger, Augie Zackheim. As he spoke, Cardiff, as usual, saw his public words as printed text and his private thoughts as footnotes.

Footnote number one: Although he was contemptuous of everyone left in the world except Ursula, his wife of nearly thirty years, he bore no special hatred for Zackheim and simply used him to focus the always simmering discontent at Macy’s on Sears instead of somewhere closer to home.

Footnote number two: Cardiff had privately dressed down the Barnetts for ignoring the orders of the day and venturing into the northwest lots, which technically belonged to Sears. The reason they’d gone there this morning was caused by their depraved addiction to adrenaline, which they primed from time to time in order to keep their sexual pilot light lit. Their compulsion was not really a death wish in the classic sense of the concept, but rather a form of erotic perversion whose symptoms Cardiff had been treating for two years without much success. Still, considering the risks the Barnetts took, it was a wonder they were still alive. Cardiff fretted that one day they would turn their derangement on their therapist-slash-boss, and Cardiff would have to shoot them. An egregious waste of firepower.

And footnote three: The Barnetts would be punished, of course. But he hadn’t yet decided what sort of slave labor he’d force them to perform.

After dinner everyone had gathered as usual in the Commons around the Steinway Grand rolled here from the sales floor at Bloomingdale’s. While they drank and relaxed Cardiff entertained with one of the many classical pieces he knew by heart, thanks to twelve years of music teachers brought in by his doting parents to the house on Kessler Street in the University Circle area of Cleveland.

Ursula sat as was her custom on a love seat next to the Steinway, where an elaborate candelabrum radiated a warm glow throughout the room. Aloof and regal, she was bundled in a full-length sable coat, a bargain Cardiff had bought for her in Moscow for $9,600 from a thief. This luxurious ebony wrap would have been the perfect completion for a portrait of the aristocrat except that one of the sleeves had been torn off during the Second Store War. As her husband played, Ursula searched the faces of the people for signs of sedition.

Deek and Sharone, as usual, were fawning, despite or maybe because of Cardiff’s private reprimands about their insubordination this morning, although the mask of adoration they tried to wear whenever they were in the presence of the Maloviks was slipping a bit due to the heavy bandage wrapped around Deek’s damaged eye.

Tucked into their corner of the Commons, illuminated by a candle tree, the Trumps played their endless games of bridge, murmuring their bids like the devout at prayer. The lady litigators, Allyson and Gay, were especially decked out tonight, Ursula noted. She wondered if it was because they were simply bored with their usual heavy sweaters and hooded sweatshirts, or if they were celebrating the arrow that Sharone Barnett had fired into the emaciated corpus of that smelly horse’s ass, that Blue Josh. Allyson had pulled her long ebony hair into a knot at the back of her head, and secured it with a diamond tiara ($33,400 from Relections), letting the length of it cascade stylishly down the back of her luscious amber cocktail dress. Gay was dressed in a little black thing, torn here and there, but still a classic, especially since she had lost a third of her weight since The Shit Hit The Fan. The ladies had gone overboard to make themselves up, their pert, upturned little Waspish noses powdered, their eyes lined with a subtle shade of mauve and their ear lobes adorned with pricey emerald and ruby baubles.

Even the Trump men, Jack the architect and Tomo, that odd but affable Japanese chemical engineer, dapper and tidy little fellows, were wearing their best threadbare business suits. Well, yes, she saw now as she looked around, everyone was in a festive mood, tout le monde. Ah. there was nothing like a little spilled blood to bring out the best in Macy’s.

But of course someone had to wreck this rare and delicate aura of good will. Someone always did. Suddenly, right in the middle of the adagio from Strauss’s Die Frau Ohne Schatten, Snarlin Marlin screeched: “Lighten up, pig-fucker!”

There was a collective gasp. Though everyone knew that Snarlin Marlin wasn’t personally responsible for this outburst, the events of the day had worn away Cardiff’s patience.

“Certainly,” he said, lifting his hands from the keyboard with theatrical contempt. “Something . . . lite for Mr. Greentree.” Ursula’s glare when this insubordination erupted had been formidable. Sharone Barnett stifled her giggling by clapping her hand to her mouth. And Marlin, sensing that he would have to pay this time, began to pluck at his beard. Cardiff leafed through the stacks of sheet music he had liberated from That’s Entertainment! before it had been torched. He found “West Side Story” and “Victory at Sea.” But settled instead on the favorite song of a woman who had worked as his appointments secretary right up to the moment she told him what her favorite song was.

He stretched his fingers, cleared his throat and struck the opening chords. We’ve only just begun, he sang, To live . . . . People looked at each other in delight. Certainly not because of Cardiff’s voice. While his baritone was strong and on key it was completely devoid of warmth, human feelings or color. No, it was because Macy people were great connoisseurs of Schadenfreude.  The pleasure they took in the pain of others was now being fueled by their anticipation of the punishment that the supreme commander would rain down on the hapless Snarlin Marlin. Although the little man was not responsible for his indiscretions, everyone was pleased that he would now be the lightening rod for the bolts of anger shooting from the recent black mood hovering around the Old Man.

Cardiff lifted his fingers from the keys to sing A kiss for luck and we’re on our way in a bouncy a capella. When he finished with the song, Sharone Barnett came to hover around the piano, leading the half blind and monstrously hirsute Deek, both of them mumbling praise, attempting, as always, to suck up. Everyone else wanted to hang around and see what would happen to Snarlin Marlin, but they more strongly wished to avoid any surplus Malovik wrath.
They knocked back their drinks and made careful exits. As Cardiff watched them slink off he thought that if you had to choose an anthem for this lost nation of walking skeletons the “work” of Karen Carpenter would surely dominate the short list.

Ursula watched the crowd evaporate, then rose with her usual grace and haughty bearing, and took her husband’s arm. Walking back to their quarters, his hand under her arm, they were quiet and contemplative as they faced another long night in Minnesota.

CHAPTER TEN It was almost midnight when Luke Chambers and Marlin Greentree were forced to stop at Market Square after the right front tire on their big orange Home Depot shopping cart fell off. Luke handed his bow and a pair of Thunderbolts to Marlin, grabbed their tool purse from under the cart and began monkeying with the tire to see if it could be reattached.

“Did I mention I changed my will?”

“Stop it,” Marlin said.

“Yeah. I’m leaving everything to Rotary. I’m going with the pauper box. Open casket, no cosmetics. And no pickling! Just tape my eyes and heave me in the cooker.” He arranged his features into a grotesque mask, which wasn’t hard to do, and exhaled a cloud of steam into the dead, frosty air. Like that of everyone in the Mall except Mutton the farmer, his dirty, sun-starved skin had turned a pale shade of gray. The mat of salt-and-pepper beard he sported had gone to dreadlocks. Although he knew better, Marlin recoiled from this antic voodoo menace.

“I want plastic lilies and cheap incense, Luke continued. “I want boombox music. What do you think of ‘Daddy Was a Jockey’ by Wild Bill Tater and the Joe-Joes?”

“Please,” Marlin pleaded.

“For the eulogy I thought something like ‘Lucas Browning Chambers was worked to death because his life-long companion could not keep his big mouth shut.’ ”

Marlin waited, as always, for Luke’s anger to play itself out. Fishing around in the pocket of his ragged corduroys he found the Chicklet he’d been saving for a special occasion and put it in his mouth. Although it was slightly stale, the wintergreen tang that flooded his mouth made him think of the first Christmas he and Luke and spent together, at Snowmass, skiing in the sun, hot-tubbing under the moon. They’d been crazy in love.

“You think this is funny?” Luke barked. “I’ll tell you, doofus, me pulling double duty because of your fucking hobby is not what I call quality time.”

“You’re right,” Marlin conceded. “I promise. I’ll to cool it for awhile. Till he gets out of this funk.” 

“Why didn’t you go after Sharone, instead? Or one of the Trumps? Why’d you have to put us on his shit list again?”

Marlin shrugged. “I don’t know. The challenge? I was going for something over the top.”

“Over the top.”

“Something to remember.”

Luke scratched furiously at his beard, trying to chase something that was chewing on his jaw. As usual, he found it difficult to sustain any self-righteousness around Marlin. The little man was so adorable. Only five-foot-four, rosy-cheeked, fond of suspenders and slouchy hats to cover his balding scalp, Marlin looked like a garden gnome. And Luke had to concede that his phony mental illness was one of Marlin’s few pleasures in this godforsaken place, his chance to say in a loud voice the things he’d been forced to bottle up his entire life. And double-plus, Luke had to admit that he always loved the act, although the consequences were not so fun.
Despite himself, he smiled. “Don’t you just hate the way he plays? Everything sounds like the theme from Jeopardy.”

“Jeopardy!” Marlin shrieked. He broke into the wordless theme song, the notes dripping with sarcasm. “Dah-dah-dah-dah. Dah-dah-dah.”

They made theatrical faces and turned toward an imaginary audience. “Seine Næchte sind ihr Tag,” Luke sang from the opening scene in Die Frau Ohne Schatten. “Seine Tage sind ihre Nacht.”

Marlin sang the Messenger’s response: “Zwölf lange Monde war sie sein!”

They made Strauss’ opera sound as if were being performed by the Lollipop Brigade, heavy on the lock-step cadence of a metronome and the chilling falsetto of midgets.

“But like Mark Twain said about Wagner . . . ” Luke began.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds!”

Marlin found a rusty hex nut in their tool purse and Luke mounted the tire back on the cart. They took their sweet time meandering down a handicap ramp strewn with broken drywall to the lowest level of the Mall. Yawning, Marlin applied a key to a heavy service door and they followed the sloping tunnel behind it to the basements deep under West Hall Square, heading toward the Warehouse, which had been sited away from Macy’s because of its contents. Since the location of the Warehouse was a state secret, Luke brandished his bow and fixed an arrow, in the unlikely event he’d have to ward off a trespasser, as Marlin pushed the cart.
The final tunnel was sabotaged. Ten-penny spikes driven into oak planks mounted on hinged arms and weighted with cinder blocks were ready for intruders who stumbled over the trip wire on the floor. Although there was no evidence that anyone besides the Macies had been down here since The Shit Hit The Fan, the Warehouse was too valuable to leave unprotected. Before they could move on, Marlin disengaged the wire and laid it aside.

The air inside the Warehouse was vented to the outside because it was full of dead things. Arranged by size and species and ear-tagged with the date of acquisition (or limb-tagged, if the head was missing), the carcasses were stacked to the ceiling like cordwood. The odor here was peculiar, but certainly no fouler than the robust funk radiating from the persons of Snarlin Marlin and Luke themselves. The few Macies who had experienced the stench of the Warehouse hated it. It was sweet and slightly rancid, like the smell of a home freezer harboring old pork fattened on Krispy Kremes. But Marlin and Luke were comfortable with the odor. To them, it was the smell of money.

When the world was a happier place Luke and Snarlin Marlin had been morticians. They preferred the title Funeral Director, especially since it had been a decade since either one of them personally drained a corpse or rubbed foundation into a dead face.

“Get down that skinny Indian,” Luke said, playing his flashlight on a pile of children and runts. “No, the other one, the one with no arms.” He found a nicely emaciated old woman that didn’t weigh much, and lugged her to their shopping cart. Then they collected a small mailman, the top half of a stewardess, a pair of hunting poodles and three brindle cats. On another pile was a very photogenic cop that Luke had been keeping his eye on as a possible addition to his private collection. But that 200-pound speci-man would have to wait for another trip.

When they were finished there was no more than three hundred pounds of product on the cart, a very easy haul. Since Cardiff’s punishment for Marlin’s indiscretion required only that they return with product—he hadn’t specified an exact amount—there was no reason to put themselves out with a heavy supersized load. Especially since they made a delivery from the Warehouse only this morning as part of their regular workload, and would return in two days.
As they began to make their way back to the factory. Luke made sure the Thunderbolts in his quiver were at the ready and that his bow, strung over his shoulder, would readily come to hand. Reading one another’s mind, they simultaneously began singing their newest favorite work song:

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,
A beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Won’t you be mine,
Won’t you be mine,
Won’t you be my neighbor?


CHAPTER ELEVEN The 747 had dropped nose-down from the stricken heavens and knifed through all four levels of Nordstrom at 200 miles per, ending up in the basements, where it exploded in a fireball that scorched much of the northwest corner of the Mall, turning unknown numbers of previously happy shoppers and carefree tourists into Stinkers and gas. Not only that, the jet completely ruined the display in men’s wear that Augie had worked on so hard all day. The antique oak haberdasher’s tables, gone. Twenty thousand retail bucks worth of Lyocell slacks, folded, and sports coats, brushed and arranged on hangers, zapped. The full-color signage put up in glare-free glass and stainless steel frames, also toast.

Besides Lira, Nordstrom was something Augie and Cooper shared in common. They were both at the store when The Shit Hit The Fan. Cooper was delivering pallets of par-tee shirts and shorts from Tommy Bahama, after which he had been scheduled to drive to the other side of the Mall and offload washing machines at Sears. Augie was finishing up his work on the floor by educating some of the sales force about the Business Casual look. After the first waves of ash and gas and burning cinders both of them had immediately fled deeper into the Mall for luckier places, where they waited out the hysteria and the stampedes. Augie had headed for Camp Snoopy, and was almost trampled by a stream of children stampeding from the Playhouse Theatre. He had grabbed as many of them as he could and herded them back into the theatre, figuring that a sanctuary for children had to be safer from the shitstorm raining down outside than the panicked melee he’d seen in the stores. Two of these children were Embry and Mango, who would never feel secure again unless Augie was around.

Idling at the loading docks inside the Mall while he filled out his paperwork, Cooper had been spared because he’d clicked on his air conditioner to cool off after his first delivery of the day. It was the filters in his AC that had somehow protected him from that first smoky deluge that wrecked the world. When the Kenworth’s engine died and he couldn’t get it started he got out and waded through the confusion inside the Mall straight for the gun department at Champs Sports. As he was helping himself to a pair of .300 Savage deer rifles and a .357 Magnum revolver the jet slammed into Nordstrom.

One of the things Augie admired about Cooper was the fact that the master’s instincts were always first-rate. To Augie’s way of thinking good instincts made good leaders, and good leaders made life easier for creative people such as Augie.

He stopped to fish out Ernie’s maps from his Baby Sack. The corridor before him was blocked with blackened rubble, which meant he’d arrived at the place where the jet had come down. He found a gash in the ceiling at the end of the corridor exactly where Ernie’s drawings said it would be. He tied a grappling hook to his last rope and heaved it straight up at the opening. But it didn’t catch on anything and came sailing back down. He lunged out of the way, then tried again, working at an angle. This time it snagged on something and stayed put. He hoisted himself up, walked up the wall, and wiggled through the slit. The hook had found a crumpled airline seat wedged against a block of ragged concrete. A scorched and headless skeleton sat welded into the melted plastic.

Mutton would have a field day in here, Augie thought, escorting sinners to heaven. Augie retrieved his rope for the descent that was coming up ahead, and pushed on.

The floor was littered with seared bones that crackled when Augie stepped on them. He stopped once, repulsed, wondering if there was some other way. But after checking the map again he resigned himself to the fact that this was indeed the only route to the loading docks and the big diesels that Ernie claimed to have investigated on one of his forays with Niger. Augie passed by some broken skulls and a welter of twisted sheet metal that was probably a remnant of the 747. The air was colder here than in the tunnels.

When he found the hole in the floor Ernie had marked on the map Augie secured the grappling hook to a water pipe, dropped his rope onto the level below, and lowered himself into the darkness. Shining his headlight on the walls as he descended, he experienced a rush of nostalgia and longing for the old days. This section of Nordstrom had been the storeroom complex next to the sales floors. Although there had been some serious dislocation of inventory, the firewalls had kept the flames at bay. He stopped at a mound of debris, and shone his light on a jumble of white cardboard boxes. Falling from the boxes were scores of lady’s shoes. Thinking how Lira might go for a pair of spiky black heels, the kind that made the butt ride higher and lowered the jealous eyes of other women, he grabbed a half-dozen pair of the most expensive, and stuffed them in his Baby Sack.

Then he got down on his hands and knees and inserted himself into a burrow under the rubble. Although he didn’t like to get dirty, and tried to avoid touching things that had touched Stinkers, this was, again, the only way. The burrow led to a utility corridor that had been reinforced because it had shielded one of the Mall’s main utility corridors. Augie was glad to be on his feet again, although he knew he’d have to return home this way. At the end of the corridor was a steel door bearing a faded warning that a forklift zone lay beyond.

The door resisted, but after Augie applied his shoulder it finally gave way against a mound of rubble on the other side that had apparently fallen down since Ernie explored the place. Augie stopped to examine the way ahead. And there, just like the map promised, were the broken steel beams and collapsed brick walls that no doubt concealed the crushed bodies of three big 18-wheelers. Augie wasted no time attacking the rubble blocking what turned out to be the door of the most accessible of these trucks.

When he got the door open he expected to find a Stinker. The reason he didn’t find a Stinker was that this particular Kenworth had belonged to Cooper. He knew it was Cooper’s because of the snapshot slipped into a pocket on the driver’s visor. There was the man himself, with that goofy Howdy Doody smile, in his clean-cut, flat-top, and his happy wife and his happy girl and his happy Jack Russell terrier chomping on a beef joint twice its size. The little girl had Cooper’s red hair and his lopsided grin. Although he never talked about her, Cooper’s wife (name of Paige, Augie remembered) was a certified babe, the kind of pretty that makes grown men sick to their stomachs. Cooper had never said a word about what a beauty she was.

Augie stowed the photo in his pocket. Then he grabbed the pair of tiny boots Cooper had draped with a leather thong over his rearview mirror. He stowed these in his Baby Sack next to the high heels.

The Kenworth had drawn its juice from three big gel-cell batteries, sprouting orange and red wires, arranged on a bed behind the cab. After Augie had cleared away the broken brick and concrete covering them he discovered that the first of these batteries was crushed. When he applied his voltage meter to the second one it showed no sign of life. He panicked. But to his relief he determined that the third monster was a winner. He cut the cables, maneuvered Moby Dick into his backpack, and hoisted the straps of the pack around his shoulders. A good night’s work. When he stood up he almost fell over backwards, so heavy was his prize. But he managed to get his legs under him and reset his posture.

He pictured the pleasure on Lira’s face when he returned with this score, and how she would respond eagerly, with warmth and tenderness, to the thing he had been aching to ask her for months.

As he turned for home he forgot his vow of silence and began to sing.

Macho, macho man.
I want to be
a macho man.
 
At the spot on the wall where he had painted his chartreuse diss he stopped singing while he adjusted his backpack. And suddenly he heard it: the pounding of boots. When he turned to flee he saw flashes of light play on the walls before him. Something slammed into the top of his spine and knocked him to his knees. Reaching behind him he felt the shaft of an arrow.
So this is how it ends, he thought. No one will ever know that Augie Zackheim died for love. Because he didn’t feel anything he figured that the arrow had severed his spinal cord. Maybe he was already dead. He tried to wiggle his toes, and was relieved to find out that they indeed wiggled. In his panic and dread it took him a moment to realize that the arrow hadn’t plowed into him, but into the battery. He shrugged the heavy pack from his shoulders and cast it aside. Scrambling to his feet, he pulled out his Wrist Rocket, loaded it with a pair of cat’s eyes and turned to meet his fate.

“Stand and deliver!” he shouted into the passageway, praying that a display of ferocity might convince his attackers he wasn’t worth the trouble. There was a pulse of light in his eyes, then people shouting. In the confusion he somehow allowed his ammo to fall from the patch. Now defenseless, he pushed himself against the wall and tried to make out what was happening. Two greasy-looking Macies he recognized immediately were writhing inside a net. Standing over them was a tall, willowy figure wearing pigtails, a pink-and-teal après-ski jump suit, and a battered Vikings football helmet from which a headlamp cast a withering light. Although this person had unnaturally large shoulders Augie saw now that it also had breasts. He watched as it whacked the Macies with a big stick.

“What the fuck!” Marlin Greentree shouted. His filthy, matted hair was already sticky with blood.

“Stow it, Greentree, you piss-ant!” the girl shrieked, letting the mortician have another shot on the noggin. Then she pounded Luke Chambers across the head again for good measure. The sound it made was thock.

She leapt over the thrashing men on the floor with bountiful grace and flew by Augie, grabbing his arm as she passed. “Run now!”

“Not without my battery.”

Luke Chambers had found his talkie and was reporting the attack.

“We don’t have time for that,” the girl said, yanking on Augie’s sleeve. “Move it!”

He did as he was told.

After they had sprinted a couple hundred yards she suddenly stopped, and he almost ran over the top of her. When he recovered his balance he saw that she was looking at his slingshot, which he still gripped in a menacing way. Behind them in the tunnel he heard something that sounded like fingernails clicking on stone. He thought of that poem in one of Lira’s books, the one about “rats’ feet over broken glass.” He wondered for a moment if in fact this was a rat, maybe one of Macy’s rodents that had gone feral. But if it was a rat making this clicking he must be a wicked big fucker.

The clicking abruptly ceased.

“You won’t need that,” she said. He noticed then the sexy rasp in her voice.

“Yeah, right.”

 “Drop it.”

 “Say please.”

She smacked him so quickly on the wrist with her stick he didn’t even see her move. The slingshot fell to her feet and she tucked it into her clothing.

“Thank you,” she said pleasantly.

As Augie rubbed his wrist she reached inside her clothes and withdrew a heavy custodian’s key chain, which she applied to a keyhole hidden behind a length of steel conduit on the wall behind him. She tugged at his arm again and they pushed their way through the concealed door, which locked behind them. Another utility tunnel stretched away before them, one that didn’t appear on any of Ernie’s maps. After walking for a short distance Augie stopped.
He turned and faced her. “Who are you?”

 She slid off her helmet. “Kiss me.” She had high cheekbones, a strong jaw, a small, sweet nose, and eyes that were a luminous shade of green, flecked with golden sprinkles. Not only that, she was clean! Her long strawberry-blonde hair, tied in pigtails, shone luxuriously in the light of his headlamp. And she bore a subtle aroma of lavender and sandalwood.

“Excuse me?”

She put her hands on his hips, looked into his eyes, and stood up on her toes, like a ballerina.

He thought, why not?

 “Good,” she said after a moment. “Now put in your tongue.”

 Augie had no idea what he was getting himself into, but that had never stopped him before. Plus, she was not only tasty and warm, he found her curiosity exciting. The Southern Gentlemen agreed. As he embraced her he discovered that under her ski clothes she was wearing a football player’s shoulder pads. Since she didn’t resist his groping he put his hand on her chest and discovered that although she was skinny, like everyone except Ruth, her breasts were more ample than he had supposed they’d be for a girl so young.

“Okay, then,” she said, withdrawing from him.

She put her helmet back on and began heading deeper into the corridor, pulling on his sleeve to urge him forward. “By the way, is that a Dodger Dog in your Food Suit or are you just glad to see me?”

Augie was astounded. “What?”

“Let’s motor.”

As he followed her from one tunnel to another he tried to ask her who she was and where she came from and how she knew these things, but she shushed him with a finger to her lips. After an hour of this, and disoriented by the route she was taking, he lost his patience. “Well, at least tell me your name!”

She stopped. Even in her football helmet, or maybe because of it, she was gorgeous. Or maybe he was simply influenced by the novelty of kissing a girl who dressed like a halfback. 

“Maybe I’ll tell you on our next date,” she said.

“Date?”

She stopped to unlock another door. Behind them Augie heard that clicking again, which now sounded like the claws of a big predator. He was certain they were being followed by a large animal.

“Did you hear that?” he asked.

The girl unlocked the door, pulled it open, and handed him his slingshot. “So you should meet me here. Tomorrow at midnight. And don’t tell Lira or Cooper nada. Kay? If you do, I’ll smack you good.”

As she nudged him through the door Augie saw that he had been returned, after this twisting and circuitous night, to the floor of Camp Snoopy. There was his rope, dangling a few feet away. Even if he’d been looking for this door he never would have found it. There was no doorknob and it blended seamlessly into the wall, one of those service portals enabling the swift and unobtrusive delivery of inventory into the stores, just like the ones at Nordstrom. But this one wasn’t on any of Ernie’s maps.

The door closed behind him without a sound, leaving not a trace of itself in the wall, and he was alone again. He was thinking about the girl’s eyes. If she became the mother of his child what color would the baby’s eyes be? Would they be sparkly and green like hers, or sparkly and gray like his?

He found Mutton’s other tater, which was still nice and warm. Had the whole night been one of his fantastic dreams? Or could it be that he was actually dead, killed by that Macy Thunderbolt after all, and this was the first chapter of the afterlife of Lyndon Augustus Zackheim?

Probably not. He could still smell her. And the taste of her was still sweet on his tongue. Plus, he wondered, do dead men eat potatoes?


CHAPTER TWELVE  Lighting her way with a Snow White & Seven Dwarves Menorah ($78 from Novelties), Ursula Malovik wandered into the “kitchen” of their “apartment” to wait for Cardiff. The shabby little room was furnished with a Weber Outdoor Grill vented through a hole cut in the ceiling, and a battered Whirlpool refrigerator Deek Barnett packed once a week with ice quarried from the Minnesota River. There was a jar of sweet gherkins on the marble-topped table ($1278 from This End Up) and a squeeze container of Kraft mustard, decorative touches intended to supply the illusion that the Malovik home was still located squarely in the land of plenty.

Ursula went to her faux-antique potbellied stove ($940 from Oak and Brass), and used her tongs to feed a chunk of two-by-four to the modest glow within. Then she turned to a sideboard crowded with almost empty liquor bottles, and sat down to pour herself the last inch of their precious Bombay gin.

She was sweating again, a result of the hot flashes that had raged over her besieged body every evening for the last three months. Even though it was chilly in the room she yanked open the neckline of her sable and fanned herself with a Planet Hollywood menu, from her collection of Mall restaurant menus she’d read so many times she knew them by heart. At least she didn’t have to bear this ridiculous burden alone. Even though the other Macy women were only in their forties they were struggling with menopause as well. How dismal, she thought, this geriatric fade. Without some new breeding stock Macy’s was headed for extinction.

Of course, attrition by old age or not, neither side could survive this impoverished scavenger life forever. At least Sears had children, and the faint hope for the survival of their store that those brats represented. She examined for the millionth time the filthy little faces—Samantha, the twins, Embry and his feral sister, Mango. These were displayed along with those of the adults in a collection of individual headshots pinned to the wall above her table, guerilla Polaroids taken around Camp Snoopy and the lots by Deek and Sharone during the cease-fire after the Third Store War. Surprised by the glare of the camera’s flash, the smelly and degenerate Sears trash stared red-eyed and furious, like night feeders. Cardiff had drawn X’s across six of these faces, victims over the last two years of accidents or disease.

Ursula reached up and unpinned Augie Zackheim from the dozen adult survivors, and Embry Orr from the children’s side, and brought them closer into the candleglow.

The real mystery was Zackheim. He was normally a noncombatant. So what in the world had compelled this piece of scum, this salesman—this bootlegger!—to shed Macy blood? Did his act have a larger meaning? Or was it simply a spur-of-the-moment impulse? And what about Embry Orr? Had Sears finally allowed this child to begin experiencing the responsibilities of adulthood? Or were Cooper’s people so desperate for soldiers they were recruiting children? (Of course, these days the line between childhood and maturity had blurred). Although it was Ursula’s nature to analyze every bit of data and crunch every number, she tried to resist the urge to read something alarming into recent developments. As Cardiff said, there’s no predicting behavior these days because everyone’s unbalanced.

She assumed that the leadership of Sears was under growing pressure these last few months from the hotheads, those Joshes. After all, she and Cardiff had heard vague grumblings from their own people about “the situation.” Although Cardiff had never discussed “the situation” with her she knew the scope of the problem.

It was clear that both sides were finally running out of food. Even someone with undeveloped analytical skills, someone like Donny, for example, had complained loudly and publicly, before Cardiff had shut him up, about how each new day was getting to be a bigger pain in the ass than the day before. Dear Donny had such a way with words.

If Macy’s were a democracy—and thank God it wasn’t—someone simple would demand a vote on whether to start the fight that would end all fights. And within days a crazed war party would be dispatched to Sears. But without some new strategy or weaponry this pointless and feeble assault would simply waste everyone’s time and energy.

She decided to cheer herself up by planning her wardrobe for the coming spring season. By the light of her Menorah she made her way down the narrow hallway to the chambers where her clothes were stored. Although the quarters of Macy’s First Family were really only a warren of cubbyholes that had once been the store’s business offices, squalid by every measure, she had made them marginally livable by filling the place with objects selected from the Mall’s better stores. Of course, she would rather they were living in Nordstrom, but Nordstrom was no longer livable. And although Macy’s certainly didn’t have the panache of Nordstrom at least it wasn’t, thank God, Sears.

Five entire rooms were devoted to her clothes, one room for each season, and one room just for her shoes. Her cottons and linens, of course, were in the Summer Room. Her tweeds and worsteds in the Winter Room, and so forth. She prided herself on rigorously dressing for the season, as she always had when the world was still intact. Even though she hadn’t been outside in four years. And even though the changing of the seasons had ceased.

Chilled now, she gathered the sable around her throat and went to the spring room to take inventory. She examined some lovely silk pantsuits in four watercolors ($875 from Images by D. M. Easton). She had never worn them because they’d been splattered with blood. But she saw now that the stains had faded, or were not as extensive as she once thought them to be, and decided that in this era of diminished expectations these suits might prove serviceable. Then there was a series of coordinated ensembles from Ann Taylor: hose, dresses, sweaters, tops, hats, the works. Most of these collections were in decent shape except for some random tatters; she decided she could probably get another’s season’s wear out of them.

However, all her cashmere sweaters ($385 from Foxmoor) were hopelessly threadbare. Rather than throw them out she’d give them to Sharone Barnett. This gesture would recognize the woman for her relentless fawning, and ensure that it would continue. The key to control was information. And there was no source of inside dope more effective than an incurable gossip.

Because she was feeling especially glum tonight she decided to work in her shoe room until Cardiff came home, even though she was among the shoes only yesterday. Inside the room she placed the Menorah on a shelf, removed her sable, draped it around the shoulders of mannequin hauled here from Tall Girl, and slipped on a heavy duster. Then she reached into a concealed pocket she’d sewn inside the sable, withdrew her beautiful platinum Lady Derringer and transferred it to a similarly concealed pocket in her duster. The petite eight-ounce pistol featured over-and-under barrels each holding a single .32 Magnum bullet, and scrimshaw grips on which were carved reproductions of the Mona Lisa and Botticellli’s Madonna and Child.

She’d learned to use this beautiful piece of Texas craftsmanship at a security school in Milan during a time when wealthy Americans touring Europe were increasingly not secure. Not even Cardiff knew about this weapon. It was one of Ursula’s contingency plans, like the fully stocked house concealed on a hundred acres of heavily timbered benchland in Oregon waiting for them should something in the world go terribly wrong (no one could have predicted a disaster so profound they wouldn’t be able to even get there). She believed that certain resources would serve them both more effectively if Cardiff didn’t know about them.

For Ursula, the Derringer was a comforting reminder that although she was smaller and physically less adept than anyone else at Macy’s she wasn’t completely at the mercy of the material world. Among those who had been armed during the Store Wars, she alone had been disciplined enough not to pull the trigger. Of course, it had been necessary for Cardiff to demonstrate his leadership by shooting as many of the enemy as he could, but the result was his famous, pitifully diminished magazine. Oh, four bullets would still keep the halfwits at bay. But if push ever came to shove again his tiny arsenal wouldn’t supply enough firepower—she’d have to step in. And because it would be the element of surprise that would save the day it was necessary to keep the Derringer a secret.

On floor-to-ceiling shelves formerly stocked with letterheads and forms, all of which had been fed to the incinerator long ago, she had arranged more than a thousand pairs of shoes gathered over the last four years from the Mall and from other top stores in the south metro area.  The collection was undoubtedly the finest in the world. And it was her chief source of pleasure.

Her boots covered one wall, arranged by height first, then heel design, then material, and finally by color. Her casuals were on the opposite wall—the mules, sandals, boat shoes, and athletics. Facing these were her eveningwear, the pumps, the peaus de soir, some stilettos, and six pairs of delectable silk slippers. She fetched a pair of black and white spectators by Salvatore Ferragamo ($190 from Soleil) and sat down with them in the mahogany and velveteen love seat ($430 from the sales floor at Victoria’s Secret) that Cardiff had moved here for her. She opened a drawer in her antique cobbler’s bench ($768 from Oak & Brass) and withdrew a bottle of moisturizer from her assortment of polishes, stains, repair kits and treatments. It was crucial to prevent the leather from drying, because dry leather is leather that can crack. In the parched air of the Mall maintenance was a demanding job that required her constant surveillance. This particular material, however, responded favorably to her attention, and after a few moments she was feeling better. As the shoes began to glisten and the aroma of rich, well-tended Spanish leather filled the room she found herself humming. Her mind wandered back to the bright winter day they had come to this place.

She was wearing her sable that day as well, the shiny Derringer tucked away securely in its secret pocket. As they walked off the Leer and into a white stretch limo she remembered how happy and fulfilled both of them had felt. This glow of well-being was about far more than the sense of power and attainment the family’s jet always gave her when they touched down someplace new. That fall Cardiff, Jr. and Mutsy had presented Cardiff and Ursula with Percy, their first beautiful grandchild. 

Special times, she thought, as she returned the pumps to their place on the shelf. She turned next to a pair of daring open-toed sling-backs ($498 from Jimmy Choo) in blood red with a sequined straps, employing a piece of chamois to make the shoes glisten like rubies. Even though they were designed for a much younger crowd, the deb set, bitchy Soho club girls, whatever, she would have loved to parade them in public except that in order to stay warm enough in them she would have be wear socks. Socks with an open-toe! A Jimmy Choo open toe!

She put away the luminous Jimmy Choos and reached for a pair of dazzling patent leather pumps in seafoam with four-inch heels ($563 from Gucci.) She shook her head at how quickly they had deteriorated since her last session with them in September. At the instep of the right shoe a cobweb of tiny cracks had appeared. She extracted a small jar of paste that matched the subtle shade of the Guccis and went to work repairing the damage.

When they were restored to their former glory she turned to her pride and joy, her precious collection-within-a-collection of Little Black Shoes, the classic pumps and sandals and heels that would never go out of style. She kept these elegant treasures in red flannel bags, wearing them only while in the shoe room. She fetched a bag off the top shelf, pulled off her Cole Haan Air Toscana boots ($325 from Jill Lane), and removed her heavy wool socks. She opened the bag almost reverently and removed the exquisite Manolo Blahnik stilettos within ($450 from Neiman-Marcus). In the candlelight they looked feline and sleek and imperious, giving her a momentary surge of that old confidence. Although this pair was a size 8 and she was a dainty size 6 she was happy to own them.

Even when the world was her oyster finding her size in the stores had been a challenge, so she had ordered directly from Mr. Blahnik himself. For a moment she wondered if the famous pony-tailed Italian had somehow survived. In his villa, perhaps. As she slipped her feet into the shoes and turned her ankles to admire the effect they made she shivered when the chill pressed against her bare skin. But she didn’t mind.


CHAPTER THIRTEEN  After Bloomingdale’s was sacked, and Sears and Macy’s emerged as the only players left in the Mall, it became clear to Cardiff Malovik that it would be impossible to keep the people who hated him away from the people who hadn’t made up their minds. So he opted instead for management strategy number two: Never let your drones see the Big Picture.

It was a shame, though, that there was no way to hoard all the information. Tomo Trump could make guesses about why there were fewer eggs. The undertakers understood that the raw material stockpiled in the Warehouse and the product leaving the feed mill were slipping far behind last year’s numbers. And even Donny must see that the filets weren’t as fat or as numerous as they once had been. Not that the boy would much care. But only Cardiff possessed enough pieces to fit together a picture of the larger theme: Macy’s economy was collapsing. And unless the sun came out again pronto there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Three years ago, when his power was no longer in dispute and he could take some time to plan, he calculated that this bankruptcy was inevitable, that unless the heavens opened and the light poured forth, his people would eventually run out of food. Back then he estimated that the calamity was four years away, not three. In four years the world would surely right itself—would it not? And the denizens of Macy’s, hardened by fighting and deprivation, would step from their dank fortress into the glow of a new spring to find ways of living natural kinds of lives again.

Of course, Cardiff’s calculations had been skewed by the bounty recovered during the Edina Expedition. Going boldly from the Mall into the silent, twenty-degree gloom of August, guided by the Yellow Pages, the patrol made their way from one ruined supermarket and factory-direct warehouse to another. They trudged west through Bloomington. Then north to the shattered Southpark Mall in Edina, which had burned to the ground, and finally back home through the southern neighborhoods of Minneapolis itself, a grueling forced march around a thirty-mile circle that took them more than a week. On this deserted prairie of empty buildings and charred rubble they saw not one sign of life, not a bird on the wing nor a track in the snow. They were ready to give up and limp home when they discovered the Sam’s Club in Richfield.

Cardiff remembered the relief he felt after he had picked his way through the corpses stacked like French fries in the entrance. There, rising to the ceiling of the big cement box, arrayed on shrink-wrapped pallets, were cases and cases of Cheese Whiz, Cold Duck, Kit Kats, Spaghettios, Rolling Rock, Spam. Jolly Green Giant Niblets. Pop Tarts. Not only that, the fully stocked pharmacy was only partially looted. Judging by the casualties inside Sam’s there had been one hell of a fight. But luckily for Macy’s the combatants had apparently done each other in before much of the place could be stripped. When the beam of his cop-quality Maglite ($99 from Edie Bauer) glinted off a frosty pallet of Stolichnaya in a storeroom, Cardiff understood Howard Carter’s ecstasy when the archaeologist’s light gleamed back at him from the gilded sarcophagus of Tutankhamen.

They brought home as much stuff as they could carry in their backpacks. Cardiff called for a meeting in the Commons to announce what the patrol had found. While the crowd cheered, Ursula handed out shooter glasses and Cardiff poured everyone a shot of Stoly to celebrate.
“Yes, Virginia,” he said, lifting his glass to the veterans of the Edina Expedition. “There is a Santa Claus.”

In truth, he had no idea how to get the contents of Sam’s Club the four miles back to the Mall quickly, and in a way that didn’t expose his people to attacks from Sears. As the Macies drifted off to their squalid quarters, feeling like they had a future after all, Cardiff put new AAA batteries in his talkie. Then he called the man who always came through when Macy’s needed something special.

“Where are you? Over.”

“Here and there,” Ernie Clovis replied at last.

Cardiff thought again about house arrest, and, as always, rejected the idea. Although it would be a catastrophe if Sears ever captured Macy’s number-one handy man during one of the self-centered bastard’s solitary wanderings around the Mall, Cardiff didn’t dare piss him off. So his only choice was letting this ungovernable Macy do whatever he wanted.

“I wonder,” Cardiff said, “if you might have some time tomorrow to meet with me. I have some news.”

A week later Macy’s was back at Sam’s Club, this time in force. While a squad of archers protected the flanks, the goods were passed from hand to hand, in the manner of a sandbag brigade building a dike. Their line stretched the two blocks from the sprawling building to the tracks of the Canadian Pacific tracks that ran down from the Twin Cities, past the Mall, and linking up with other lines running all the way to New Orleans. Sitting on the tracks was a lightweight work car, in floor space almost the size of a boxcar but basically just a wooden platform mounted on steel wheels. When it was packed full of inventory a dozen people grabbed the ropes attached to it.

“And a one!” Cardiff shouted, “and a two, and a three, pull!” Here was the critical moment, he thought, holding his breath.

After a chorus of grunting and swearing, Macy’s finally overcame the vehicle’s resistance and it began to inch southward toward the Mall. Soon its pullers could tie their ropes to their waists and walk along at a leisurely pace. The car that Ernie Clovis had designed was no work of art, but to Cardiff it was the most beautiful object in the world, at least in this cold, dark world. As usual, the famous inventor himself was busy on another scheme for Macy’s, and wasn’t here to see his creation in action.

They would make two more trips to Richfield, removing much of the value from Sam’s and also bringing home hundreds of tires, barrels of crankcase oil and many jerry cans of gasoline. But when they went north for a fourth time they found Sam’s in ruins, a smoldering, sacked mess. And Cooper’s bunch had even stripped all of the vehicles along the right-of-way. There would be retaliation, Cardiff vowed, and it would not be pretty.

Six months later he saw that they were consuming their bounty at a far faster rate than he’d anticipated. The fact is, outside of eating, drinking, fornicating and watching movies from Video World, modern life didn’t offer his people very much to do. This sort of existence in exile, this waiting for the sun, might suit Cooper’s bunch, those couch potatoes and working class trash who were used to the torpor of trailer courts and cheap apartment buildings, marginal neighborhoods where a dog fight was a social event. But Macy’s people had come from the professions, from money and action and the social whirl, and were accustomed to shaking and moving.

Instead of instituting overt austerity measures, which Cardiff believed would undermine morale, and thus his authority, he looked to the future. The rationing he put into effect was subtle. There was no way to know for sure you were getting less to eat unless you took pictures of what was on your plate a month before, and wrote down the weight of everything.
Then they discovered the break-in. And Cardiff was presented with an opportunity to avenge the sack of Sam’s. Snarlin Marlin noticed vague scrapes on the floor where a pallet of Hormel Vienna Sausages had been pushed forward, then pulled back to its original place. Underneath it was a shoulder-sized hole the thieves had cut through the floor from a utility tunnel. The bastards had made off with a quarter of the bounty from Sam’s Club. They had concentrated on the big tickets—the canned meats, the sugar, and the entire cache of pharmaceuticals—the supplies whose value was the most concentrated. And they had taken all of the Stoly, emptying the bottles and refilling them with water. To camouflage their theft of the other stuff they had taken only parts of pallets, from the back, in order to make it appear that nothing was missing. This way they could return to rob Macy’s blind, bit by bit.

Cardiff cursed himself for thinking that Cooper wouldn’t dare risk the lives of thieves sent into Macy-controlled floorspace. Then he cursed himself again for storing the contents of the pharmacy in the Warehouse along with all the common goods, underestimating the self-destructive love proles have for drugs. He posted guards inside—and cursed himself a third time for not doing so earlier.

He wasn’t surprised when the thieves came back the very next night, predictable as pantry mice. After a hand-to-hand fight all but one of the thieves got away. This was the waitress named Audrey. Although he knew what his final decision would be regarding their first prisoner of war, Cardiff encouraged debate in the Commons about what to do with her. He found democracy an impossible method of management, but in this case it was not only politically savvy to feign interest in the views of others, it was a dollar well spent.

Use the bitch for breeding stock, Deek Barnett shouted. Children are the future, you know. Donny suggested that the slut should be tortured till she confessed how Sears discovered the warehouse. Then they should behead her and impale the head on a spike on the Sears side of Camp Snoopy. Cardiff found that idea over-the-top grandstanding, mostly because he knew that what Donny really wanted was to keep the prisoner in a cage inside his quarters. Sharone argued that the girl should be enslaved. Beaming with self-congratulatory zeal, she recounted how productive she’d become in Junior League after her second husband had allowed her a live-in maid.

Cardiff nodded, but from the beginning he had agreed with the wisdom of Ursula’s idea that they trade the captive for the materiel Sears had stolen, plus some. Cardiff would never part with supplies that would sustain so many people, and thus his leadership role, in exchange for only one life. But Cooper might figure the humanitarian propaganda a deal like this generates would be worth it.

Cardiff had met the truck driver on the day of the ceasefire after the Third Store War, and thought him a little squishy at the core. Someone who could be persuaded by sentiment. Besides, short of the entertainment value of public execution, Cardiff had no idea what other use this captive might serve. You had to feed slaves, and doctor them, plus they were always trying to escape. As for the future of the species, he could care less. He sent Luke and Marlin to Sears under a white flag to set up a meeting.

That night, with talks scheduled for noon the next day, the waitress wriggled free of the duct tape binding her to a pole in the Commons. The Barnetts, on night watch, had been responsible for guarding her. They caught her just as she was about to flee the Commons. But she squirmed away from them and slipped out into the darkness. They had no choice—they had to wake Cardiff. The girl was faster and had a head start but was at a disadvantage because she didn’t have any light and they knew where she was going. By the time the Macies reached the Log Ride on their side of Camp Snoopy they were gaining on her. But finally, being older and in much worse physical shape, they ran out of steam near the Camp Theatre. It was clear the girl would get home free. Lungs heaving, Cardiff stopped, leveled his pistol, sighting along the beam of his flashlight at her legs, and fired.

He’d never considered himself a superior marksman, nor even a good one, but this time his aim was even worse than usual. Audrey collapsed like a sock monkey dropped from a crib. When they got to her, blood was pumping from a hole in the back of her head. Cardiff was disappointed in himself. He hated to use one of his precious bullets to rectify his own carelessness in the matter of appointing fools like the Barnetts to guard duty. And now he’d lost his chance to recoup the stolen bounty of Sam’s.

But at his meeting the next day with Cooper at Camp Snoopy—both leaders surrounded by a hedgery of filthy, hairy people wielding bows and slingshots and knives—Cardiff didn’t let on that the topic on the agenda had recently had her brains blown out. As it turned out, it didn’t much matter. Cooper would only part with the booty from Sam’s if it were an even-up trade for Audrey, no value-added. And he wouldn’t budge an inch on that matter. Cardiff was surprised by Cooper’s resolve. As for the problem of the dead captive he decided to bluff. He saw that despite their differences here was an opportunity for both sides to do a little business. Cooper had all of the Stoly now. And Cooper knew, thanks to the thieves who had gone along with Audrey, that Cardiff’s people had plenty of meat and other goodies. It wasn’t clear how long these supplies would last, but while they did a little commerce would be mutually advantageous.

“I wonder if you might be interested in some other business,” Cardiff had offered.

And so began the first trade day. From the standpoint of capital gain, it would not net either side a fortune, but it was a start. There was simply too much distrust to overcome. Macy’s offered a honey-cured ham and a jar of beef jerky. When Sear’s offered two bottles of the stolen vodka, Cardiff demanded five. Cooper conferred with Augie and Lira, who both said, in unison, fuck that. Cardiff was on the verge of losing his temper when Ursula whispered that it might be better if she took over at this point. 

Now facing the cold-hearted and unflappable Ursula, Cooper sent back to Sears for something that made Macy’s gasp: a pair of fat, fresh red tomatoes. The existence of this luscious fruit in a world that hadn’t seen the sun in two years, that’s what sealed the deal. In the end, after some fierce negotiations, Ursula accepted seven bottles of Stoly plus the tomatoes in exchange for three hams, the jerky, and a DVD, Lost in Translation.

Now, no matter how much bad blood there had been, or would be, between them, the fates of Sears and of Macy’s were bound together. They agreed to meet again in three days to discuss the Audrey situation. The delay would give Cardiff a chance to figure out how he would deal with the dilemma. It seemed to him that the thief was worth less than what she had stolen, and so Sears actually owed Macy’s in the exchange. It was doubtful, however, that Cooper’s bunch would see it that way.

But as the former anchor stores retreated from the center of Camp Snoopy there passed between Cardiff and Cooper a look of understanding, a recognition of the real politik that was about to replace the shooting war with a Cold War. The era of mutually assured dependence—and terror—was born.

Cardiff sent Cooper a message explaining Audrey’s attempt to escape, and the consequences of her impetuous decision. The Joshes demanded an all-out assault of Macy’s in revenge. But it never happened. There would be, however, one more act of barbarity before they settled into the Mall’s endless silent night.

A lawyer named Tipp had taken an unauthorized solo trip to look for private booty among the ruins of the stores lining South Hall. A bad move, because the Joshes happened to be out on patrol in that very same sector. They left the shyster’s arrow-studded body where it lay. Cooper informed Cardiff by messenger what had happened, and where the body could be found. Cardiff, still believing that Macy’s had come out on the short end of the stick in the matter of Audrey vs. the theft, turned to Donny. Because even then, young D. K. Lustig, with Halloween in his soul, was laying the foundation for his work with the dead that would come to known as the Donny School.

And so Audrey would appear one morning on East Hall near the main entrance to Sears, her vessel tarted-up in a crotchless red teddy and matching see-through bra ($139 from Victoria’s Secret), her raised hand grasping a leather whip. Cooper lodged a protest with the Maloviks about this grotesque display. But despite an exchange of angry notes and bruised feelings on both sides, trade day became a regular and essential feature of life at the big stores.

The following spring Macy’s mounted another expedition, this time along Union Pacific spur tracks to the south, across the Minnesota River to Burnsville. Although they harvested a small warehouse full of Kingsford Charcoal Briquettes, and the remaining inventory of a mini mart, the Burnsville Git-n-Go, the scorched suburb lived up to its name. On the way home they gathered a small supply of hardwood furniture from an office building for the incinerator. And they marked on their maps the locations of some choice vehicles so they could come back later and strip them. But Cardiff knew they never would. The effort to return to these cars and strip them would cost more than the resource could ever supply. After Burnside, every time he dispatched his foragers to look for product he was still forced to apply the basic rule—will the return be worth the investment? The answer, increasingly, became no. They mothballed the work cart and never used it again.

Cardiff began to have a recurring dream. In it, two gray lines on a graph curve inexorably toward one other. Then they converge.



CHAPTER FOURTEEN  “Sula!” Cardiff was standing in the door of her shoe room. “You’re talking to yourself again, dear,” he said kindly.

“I was? I’m sorry.”

“I have to go back out.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Chambers and Greentree. They were on their way back from the Warehouse. There was a net. A beating with a stick.”

She stood up and went to him. “No! Who was it?”

“They’re not sure. There were at least two of them. But the only one they recognized was Zackheim.”

Her newest paranoia about Sears was now complete. “Twice in one day?”

“We’ll talk.”

“Where are they?”

“In the kitchen at the Commons. They’re bloody, but I think they’ll be okay.”

“Do you want some help?”

He put his hand on the back of her neck, his comforting gesture that after all these years still gave her a little rush.

“You’re sweating,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“It’s nothing. Probably just a little cold.”

 “Okay, then. Don’t wait up.” He looked at her feet. “I like those. Maybe you should wear them to Sunday dinner.”

Men, she thought.

When Cardiff returned to the Commons, Luke and Snarlin Marlin were debating the identity of their attacker. There were rivulets of drying blood on their clothes, but it looked as if the bleeding from the gashes in their skulls had stopped.

“Breasts,” Luke said.

Luke whistled. “Shoulder pads, you twit. If you’d ever played a real sport you’d know they were shoulder pads.”  

“And if you’d ever slept with a real woman you’d know they were breasts.”

Cardiff drew some water from the steel pitcher heating on the antique baker’s stove ($1675 from Artifacts) and began cleaning their wounds. Although he found tending to the physical needs of his people unsavory, he was as close to an attending physician as the Macies would ever have. Plus, it was important to demonstrate compassion from time to time, even though he felt nothing. Rule with an iron hand and a slap on the back. Spank, then hug.

Their wounds weren’t deep, but they’d heal faster with stitches. However, besides a liter of Shine he didn’t have anything to kill the pain. So stitching was out of the question, considering what big babies the undertakers were. Cardiff scissored away a patch of Luke’s greasy hair. Then he cleaned away the blood from wounds of both men, applied a line of antibiotic gel and pulled the skin together with butterflies. These fixes weren’t pretty, but they would have to do.
.
“There you go,” Cardiff said. “Take tomorrow off, gentlemen. But let’s get your product in the oven tonight before it stinks up the place.”

Luke wobbled as he stood. Marlin steadied him with a hand on his elbow. They anticipate each other’s needs, Malovik noted, just like he and Ursula did. Old marriages produce old patterns neither partner sees anymore, in the same way that fish don’t see water.

Malovik was vexed enormously by this business of the girl in the helmet, or whatever that creature had been. Cooper’s bunch didn’t have any females that fit the undertakers’ description. But in the darkness and confusion maybe what Luke and Marlin had seen was indeed not a girl, after all, but Embry the boy. He knew from raising Cardiff, Jr. that the looks and voices of teenagers change as fast as their shoe sizes. And according to reports from the battlefield this morning Embry had been seen in combat for the first time, a fierce but undisciplined fighter backing up Zackheim. Still, it was peculiar that both men insisted this creature with a stick wasn’t someone Zackheim seemed to know.

Oh, Cardiff had heard the rumors that there were other people living in the Mall, a weird and devious clan the two big families had missed somehow when they were trying to exterminate the independents during the wars. But he’d always dismissed this as the simple-minded talk of people who liked to scare themselves with images of bogeymen. The same people who claimed to have heard phantom barking from a dog. It just wasn’t possible that any kind of dog, no matter how fierce, could have avoided ending up in the stewpots of either Sears or Macy’s.

He went down the hall, disengaged the booby trap, unlocked a heavy steel fire door, and stepped inside. The place stunk worse than the warehouse, but at least it was the stink of the living. There was a rustling and scurrying of tiny feet, and a dry whisper of animal voices. He clicked on his Maglite and shown it briefly round the room to make sure all was well. From the cages, dozens of beady red eyes glared back.
           
Donald Kefauver Lustig was right at the good part of his favorite porn, Sheepless in Montana, when he was interrupted by Malovik’s knock. He quickly flicked off the teedle with the toe of his boot.

 “I know already!” he shouted at the door. “I got the feedlots tonight!”

 “Open up, son.”

Inside Donny’s jumbled chambers, Cardiff glanced at the tiny TV and the VCR rigged for battery power but decided not to turn the issue into a capital case. Technically, Donny wasn’t supposed to waste good juice for his own private use, but Cardiff sometimes ignored the little pervert’s minor insubordinations in order to remind him of who made the rules in the first place. He didn’t like or trust Donny—except for Sula, of course, he didn’t like or trust anyone—but he wanted to channel Donny’s temper into acts that would benefit Macy’s.
“Take those back to Commons first thing tomorrow,” Cardiff said.

Donny shrugged. “Hey, man, what’s eating you?”

“Chambers and Greentree can’t work tomorrow, so you’re going to have to pull a double shift.”

“Fuck me and the horse I rode in on!”

Cardiff smiled at him, despite himself. “How about just the horse?”

Donny ran his hands through the shoulder-length jungle of black hair he maintained, his caveman look. One of his nostrils was pierced with an ivory stud carved to resemble a human skull.

“Take this shift,” Cardiff offered, “and I’ll give you two days off at the end of the week instead of just one.”

“Plus you let me have the teedle again.”

“For a day.”

“For both days.”

Cardiff sighed. Sometimes it just didn’t pay to get out of bed. Here was a distinguished figure in American psychotherapy negotiating with a juvenile sociopath over the quality of the boy’s jerk-off sessions.



CHAPTER FIFTEEN   Augie had never felt like this before. The mysterious, golden girl—this impossible girl—was the only thing he could think about. When no one was looking, he buried his face in his arms because her smell lingered on his sleeves. The odd things she said and the dance-step rhythms of her voice, duh-duh-dum, dah-dah-dee, rattled around in his brain like lines from ads. Amazingly, after two dates they hadn’t even slept together even though she wanted to, desperately. But Augie had his reasons for holding out.

On their third date, they were swinging in the blackness of Camp Snoopy on the surviving unit of the towering twenty-foot steel swing set at Playground, which had been spared during the Store Wars. She sat in his lap, facing him, her hair a gilded confusion, her long legs outstretched to pump one way while he reached out to pump the other. In this manner they had achieved considerable altitude.

People from both stores sometimes braved this dangerous, exposed no-man’s-land just to break up the monotony, to savor the pleasure of forward motion. But they always brought along an archer for protection while they played.

However, Augie’s courageous excursion to Nordstrom had buoyed his confidence. And so infectious was her fear of nothing that Augie himself felt invincible. Although he was proud of his adventure and would love to share the story, he hadn’t mentioned anything about that night or his run-in with Greentree and Chambers because the trip had violated Cooper’s rules about solo expeditions. And plus, Augie’s admission might lead to hard questions revealing the existence of this strange being. She said she wasn’t ready to meet Sears just yet. And he was certain that Sears wasn’t ready to meet her. The timing would have to be just right in order to minimize the stress.

“How old are you?” he asked her for the tenth time.

“I say again, who knows?”

“Well, how long have you been here?”

“Push now!” she yelled.

“Come on, tell me.”

“Well, how long have you been here?”

“Four years,” Augie told her. “Are you saying you’ve been in the Mall all that time.”

“I was here when The Shit Hit The Fan. Just like you. You say that’s four years?”

Thinking back over the terrors of the Store Wars Augie couldn’t understand how a young girl could possibly have survived here alone. But he imagined it had something to do with Thumper, the big hickory stick she wielded, and her ability to fade into the darkness without a sound. “You don’t keep track of the days?”

“If I wrote down the days it would make me zappy.”

“Zappy.”

“Nervous. Sad. I would see what I’m missing.”

“You’re not missing anything.” He touched her ear with his tongue as they soared through the air. “Because there’s nothing out there anymore to miss. Believe me, I know. There’s just this.”

Wriggling with pleasure, she kissed him deeply. Her tongue was alive while she searched his mouth as if it were the most fascinating place in the world. This is what got him—her curiosity. It made him feel exalted, or at least like the subject of an experiment. And it made him insane. When he thought he couldn’t stand it anymore he disengaged himself from the passion of her embrace and pressed again about her age.

“Come on, baby, let’s just swing,” she said. “What does it matter?”

“Jews are superstitious about people’s ages,” he lied.

She cocked her head like a crow finding something shiny. “Say, what exactly is a Jew?”

“If I promise to tell you that sometime will you tell me how old you were when you came here?”

He wished he’d never asked. The day The Shit Hit The Fan she was nine. And that meant she was now only 13 years old! Just being here on the swing with her, kissing her, he could get arrested for child molesting! He felt light-headed.

“When’s your birthday?” he asked her.

“A month before yours.” The gravel in her voice made her sound older than her years.
“What do you mean?”

“Your birthday is March 7. Mine’s Feb 7.”

“How do you know that?”

Her green eyes were wide and absent of tricks.  “I told you. I get around.”

 He did a quick compute. Although he had never been super-conscious of the calendar himself he knew from talking at lunch with Cooper, who kept track of time like it was money drawing interest, that today was February 4. That meant she wouldn’t be legal for three whole days! Although Augie was dying from desire he commanded himself to wait.

February 7. He tried to remember why that date meant something to him. As he savored the warmth of her strong, sinewy body, and the mild g-forces flooding his brain with sensation, he ran through all the birthdays and holidays he could recall, but nothing clicked.

Then he remembered. A blast from the past, a recovered image from his brief career at Hebrew School, cut short after a year, when his mother decided that the rabbi was a jerk and that Augie’s Bar Mitzvah would have to be postponed. He believed that February 7 was a Jewish celebration called Too Bish Vat. Or something like that. The birthday of the trees, the day in the old Hebrew month of Vat the old Yids said was when you should add another year to the life of a tree. Augie couldn’t remember why the age of trees was a big deal, something about foresting the desert. But he remembered that the holiday involved eating figs. Funny religion.

This realization that she was born on a holy day reinforced his conviction that they should hold out a little. He wasn’t sure why, but it had something to do with the easy sex of his past, how none of that lust and happy screwing had led to anything like real love. Anyway, now that waiting till her birthday and her coming of age was only a matter of three days, it would be relatively easy to practice a little self-restraint.

When he told her last night that they should do the right thing and wait till they got to know each other better she had stamped her foot and told him to stop acting like a nun. But he’d stood his ground. He had this idea that by waiting a little bit, by demonstrating an act of discipline, they might bring themselves luck. As they fell deeper into their kiss they forgot to pump, and the swing finally drifted to a stop.

“I’ve waited for you long enough,” she whispered when they finally disengaged.
“What do you mean, waited for me?


She let go of the swing chains and threw her long arms around him.

“That feels good,” he said.

She leaned away from him and hugged herself. “It does!” she cried. “It does feel good. So why can’t we?”

“What’s your name,” Augie asked her for the tenth time.

“Spider,” she said, surprising him. “It’s Spider. So now can we?”

“What? Spider who?”

“I didn’t say knock, knock first.”

“Okay. Say it.”

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

She wrapped her legs around the small of his back and nuzzled his throat. “The love of your life.”

When it was time for Augie to go home he gave her a final kiss, and nearly lost his resolve when her hand fluttered across the front of his slacks, and then, like a hummingbird, flew away.

Holy shit, this was torture. He turned away from her and leaned down to retrieve his daypack. When he stood up she had disappeared.



CHAPTER SIXTEEN   It was almost dawn when Augie got back to his crib. He should have been exhausted, what with three straight days on battery patrol, plus three straight nights with this new light in his life. But for the first time in ages he was brimming with energy and optimism, just like the old Augie. Still, he couldn’t be completely sure that Spider wasn’t a hallucination. Or a vision, like the Indians used to get when they were real hungry. As with most Sears people, Augie sometimes had trouble sorting out his dreams, which tended to be vivid and eventful, from his daily life, which tended to be dark and boring. So sometimes you just had to pinch yourself.

He reached into the top drawer of his dresser and searched among his wool socks for the pair of small hard-boiled eggs he’d been saving. Carefully peeling away their dull green shells, then nibbling them slowly in order to savor their every morsel, he decided that as long as he was wide-awake he might as well make some booze. Although trade day was still a week away, meeting his Shine quota now, instead of at the last minute as usual, this would free up his mind and his soul for Too Bish Vat. Euphoric with the thought of it, he grabbed his Visa card from its hiding place under a broken floor tile. As he headed off to work he whistled a tuneless tune.

Inside the distilling room he climbed up onto the fermenting platform and employed his hydrometer to test the barrel of mash he’d been brewing. The beer was perfectly ripe—as stinky and alcoholic as it was ever going to get. He opened the spigot at the bottom of the barrel, and watched while the entire fifty gallons passed through the hose and into the steel filter fitted into a copper strainer tank, which removed the solid pieces of corn kernels in the mash. When the tank was full Augie removed the strainer it and dumped these solids into a plastic tub, which he would deliver later to Mutton for compost. Then he opened a spigot in the tank and waited again while the tank emptied into the boiler of the still.

Next he lit the burner under the tank and turned the heat all the way up. He sat down in his lawn chair and grabbed a magazine from his stack of reading things. It was a copy of Outside, which featured young babes and hunks frolicking in lush exotic locales. The photos made Augie feel warmer. He fantasized what it would be like to swim nakers with Spider under a pregnant moon in a secluded Caribbean cove the temperature of a footbath. And then to feast on a midnight dinner of, say, deep-fried snapper with coconut salad, before retiring to their thatched beachfront hut for some tropical love in a hamock.

Suddenly a rumble began to issue from deep below the basements, jolting Augie out of this luscious daydream. When the walls began to shudder he flung away the magazine and leapt across the room to the door, where he peered back at the still from the protection of the door frame. Even after the baby quake played itself out he stayed put. Although it had never happened, you never knew when a tremor like this might rupture one of the still’s welds.
But when the beer began to boil, and nothing exploded, Augie went back to work. This was the fun part of distilling, the payoff, which made booze-making an art as much as it was a necessary creation of wealth for Sears. Rising straight up four feet from the boiler was a three-inch wide copper pipe divided inside by steel plates drilled with scores of holes. Ernie had packed the spaces between the plates with hundreds of glass marbles scavenged from Toys R Us. As the beer boiled it sent up a vapor of alcohol and water. When this hot gas hit the cooler surfaces of the marbles much of the steam turned to water, and dribbled down the column and back into the boiler.

Meanwhile, the remaining steam and the alcohol vapor rose into a pair of copper coils stacked inside sections of a closed tube at the top of the column. Augie opened a tap to flood these coils with cold water. The first coil, the stripper, turned all the steam to water, which fell back down into the boiler. The second coil condensed the remaining vapor into 190-proof hootch—a red-eye that was 95 percent ethyl alcohol. The alcohol flowed out of the condenser coil and into another column packed with fresh charcoal briquettes that sucked out that vile oily sludge called popskull, impure shit that would give you killer headaches. After the Shine was filtered once or twice the end result would be a good-quality product Augie would cut back to 95 proof with boiled water flavored by whole cloves and cinnamon sticks.

There were two keys to making booze. First, you had to maintain the temperature at the right level all along the system, from boiler to marbles to stripper and condenser, in order to separate alcohol from water. Because alcohol turns to vapor at 173 degrees and water turns to steam at 212 degrees, you had to make sure the temperature of the marbles stayed between these two extremes so the alcohol was forced all the way into the condenser coil as vapor, and all the steam was turned to water before it got past the stripper coil. Augie constantly checked the little heat gauges Ernie had installed here and there, adjusting the flame under the boiler, opening or closing the tap to admit more or less water into the coils.
The second key was: Don’t get blown up. If there were a gas leak in the system the alcohol vapor seeping into the room might come into contact with the burner and go up with a whoosh of flame that would incinerate the place. So he checked constantly for any external moisture, which would indicate a vapor leak. Although he knew how to fix such leaks, by employing solder and his butane torch, the Ernster’s plumbing skills had been so excellent there had never been a single problem.

Still, when he turned off the burner at 8 a.m. he sighed with relief. This batch yielded 27 quarts of raw alcohol. After he diluted it with flavored water he’d have 48 one-quart fruit jars full of Shine ready for trade day, half of it for export and half for domestic consumption. Because this was several quarts less than last trade day’s offering, due to Cooper’s instructions to conserve the propane, Augie decided to filter it three times. The extra effort might make it worth more. That would be good for Sears. And what was good for Sears, he believed, would be good for Spider. His interest in the future, he realized, had been completely recharged. He felt like celebrating. 
 
Lira was sitting up in her big four-poster bed surrounded by a jumble of poetry books.

“Cramming for a final?” Augie asked.

“Where you been?”

“I went back to my crib.”

“Liar. You’re not catting around with Betty, are you?”

He sat down on her bed. His aura of good will was immune to anything mean Lira could say or do. She dog-eared the page she’d been reading and cast the book aside. “Cooper say anything about my battery?”

“Yeah. He said no.”

“Will you ask him again?”

“Yes.”

Augie’s take on Lira had changed considerably the last three days, from obsession and desperation to some other thing. It wasn’t indifference, because no one could afford that luxury anymore. But in fact Spider had released him from Lira’s grip. The speed at which this had happened surprised him. It just goes to show that when you get into a rut the people around you who are familiar and comfortable can also be your jailors. But maybe after all this time he and Lira might actually have a chance now to become friends. And because friends can say things to friends, he also decided to ask her the question that had been dominating his thoughts these last months.

She poked at him under the covers with her foot. “Speak, Rover.”

“I was wondering. What are you using for, you know. For birth control.”

She leaned back on her pillows. Then she burst into laughter. “Jeez, with guys around like you and Cooper lately who needs birth control?”

He didn’t really want to know about Cooper’s relationship with their mutual lover, but Augie’s eagerness for jumping in the sack with Lira, it was true, had sort of faded. “Just curious. You’ve never said anything about, you know, condoms or anything.”

“God, you’re so weird lately.” She put a hand on his forehead and touched his neck with professional efficiency. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Well?” he said.

“No fever. Pulse normal.”

“Come on.”

She shook her head. “Nothing. I don’t use anything.”

He was astounded. Two years of semi-regular sex with Augie, not to mention whatever form of relations she had with Cooper (Augie didn’t want to know!) and never preggers? “What were you thinking?”

With the palms of her hands she smoothed the comforter across her luscious thighs, a gesture that usually drove Augie insane with lust. “What I was thinking is that I’ve never used anything. And I’m not about to start.”

“What? How many guys have you slept with?”

Lira held out the fingers of one hand, and counted them. “Fourteen-thousand seven-hundred and twelve, counting you.”

“Come on.”

She yawned. “I don’t know. Enough to figure out that since I’ve never gotten knocked up it’s not going to happen now.”

“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment.

“Sorry for what?”

He picked up the book of poems she was reading, Invisible Horses, and put it back down. “How about a game of go?” 


CHAPTER SEVENTEEN  In the first moments of Too Bish Vat, as Augie waited in the dark for Spider on Golf Mountain, he turned first one way in anticipation, then another. But, as usual, no matter where he was standing, she found a way to suddenly appear behind his back.
“Hey,” she said, touching his shoulder, then sliding away like a little manx.

“Come here,” he said.

She leaned Thumper against the wall and pushed her football helmet back on her head. “Why?”

He reached around into his daypack and withdrew a perfect red carnation on a long stem, wrapped in Saran Wrap. To get it he’d had to apologize to Ruth and Mutton yet again for being rude, and then peddle their stupid generator bike half an hour so they’d have enough juice to listen to those ofay hymns they mooned over. His eye is on the sparrow, they sang along, their voices wobbly with fervor.

“Happy birthday.”

She put the blossom in her mouth.

“Spider, no,” he said pulling at her hand. “It’s for looking. For smelling.”

On those rare occasions when she smiled, her green eyes opened all the way, as if anything pleasant was a surprise. “This is cool.” She searched for a word. “This is poignant.”

She moved close to him and looked up, holding the flower against her breast. “But later I’m going to eat it anyway.”

He followed her through a door that revealed nothing of itself against the wall and down four flights of narrow stairs to a utility corridor that wasn’t on any of Ernie Clovis’ maps. He turned on his headlight. He had tried to memorize the routes they took to the scattered cubbyholes where she lived her hidden life, but there was nothing to mark one corridor from another. For all he knew she was leading him in circles to cook his bearings. On their dates she made him wear sneakers and ordered him to shush till they got where they were going.

After a while they passed a votive candle burning in a glass bowl on the floor. And then another twnety yards away. His heart thudded in anticipation. After several more candles and then a cluster of candles that emitted the essence of sandalwood she stopped and lifted Thumper in order to push against something on the ceiling. There was a click and the unspringing of a latch. A door opened in the wall, flooding the hallway with a warm golden light. Augie switched off his headlight and followed her inside. 

He had a moment then of deja vu so strong it made him dizzy. Illuminated by dozens of candles, here was a double bed pushed to a corner heaped with pillows and dolls and stuffed toys next to a CD player and DVD player and two walls of books. Pinned to the other walls were Jessica and Jewel and a color glossy of the Dixie Chicks, signed. The floor was padded with six inches of buoyantly colored throw rugs, and there were mirrors everywhere. Her room was probably the warmest and safest and most innocent place left in the world.
Spider put Thumper aside and pulled off her helmet and sat down on the bed. “Sing me happy birthday?”

So he did, in his karaoke Danny Boy tenor.

“You look like a monkeeee . . . ” he finished. “And smell like a zoo.”

She covered her mouth in delight. Her laugh was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard. She unzipped his parka and held one sleeve so he could shrug it aside. He reached into his pocket and produced two wedges of apple in a ziplock that he’d saved out from dinner.

“Remember I promised to tell you about Jews?” he asked.

He put the apple in his mouth and chewed it, and watched her do the same. Being 100 percent organic and relentlessly babied by Mutton, the fruit lay on their tongues like an exotic candy.

“Ooh,” she said.

“Today’s your birthday, but it’s also a Jewish holiday.”

“What’s it about?”

“Trees.”

“Why?”

“It’s good luck to eat things today that come from trees.”

She brushed her lips across his, her breath lush and warm.

“You saved my life,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“So? You saved me too.”

“What do you mean?”

“One time I got so sad I wanted to die. Then I went to see you.”

“See me? What do you mean? Have you been spying on me?”

She took his hands in hers and turned them palms up.

“Spider, what are you doing?”

“Looking at the hands that are going to be touching me.” 

Sprawled in their plastic lawn chairs in the absolute blackness of a plumbing corridor, holding hands and necking, Augie and Spider were killing time before the home show began. The home show was Spider’s invention. When the Store Wars ended, and her natural fearlessness returned, she had crept around the back alleys and worm holes of the Mall cutting away small sections of drywall and insulation in the utility spaces next to the rooms where people retreated from their communal spaces to live their private lives. Then she’d drilled peepholes through the walls with her battery-powered Black & Decker drill ($59 from Sears).

When the denizens within lit their candles and settled in for the unavoidable long night at home a shaft of light beamed through the peephole, into the pencil-thin enlarging scope she inserted from her side into the aperture, and cast a full-size picture of the domestic proceedings on Spider’s corridor wall. Audio was simpler because the drywall was so thin that hearing the proceedings on the other size was a snap. While gathering information was crucial to Spider’s fortunes, it had also become her chief source of entertainment. And it made her feel like she belonged to a big family.

One night they watched Marlin Greentree and Luke Chambers put on one-man stage shows for each other. First Luke strutted up and down an imaginary runway, the lascivious hiphop strains of Salt ‘n’ Pepper’s song “Do you want me/I gotcha” blaring from the boombox. His hips swinging, his face sporting big ticket sunglasses from Specttica ($160 from Trappings), he peeled away one layer after another of a natty cotton plus-size dress-for-success ensemble from Tall Girl. When he was completely starkers he demurely shielded himself behind an elegant calkskin briefcase ($390 from Urban Traveler). Snarlin Marlin burst into wild applause and whistles. Then it was his turn.

 Marlin tap-danced across an imaginary nightclub dance floor in a glossy although worn black tuxedo and top hat ($955 from Mosier’s Formalwear), twirling his cane, and singing from the repertoire of bouncy tunes he had committed to memory. He sang “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” and Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again” and his own lyrics for “I Scare Myself,” by the incomparable Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks:

I hate myself
I’m boring and obnoxious
And I hate myself
I’m dreary and pretentious
And I hate myself
I’m cloying and self-righteous
And I hate myself . . .

When he was finished and collapsed giggling into Luke’s outstretched arms Spider allowed Augie to drag her away. When they were safely out of earshot the younger lovers burst into choking howls of laughter.

The next night they spied on an elabortae meal concocted from two small strips of beef jerkey, a precious can of Chicken of the Sea, a fried green tomato, a baked turnip, Tang, the daily sardines Macy’s ate for the Vitamin D it contained, and a Snickers Junior. This was all served by Sharone Barnett with great fanfare to Ursula and Cardiff Malovik on the occasion of the First Couple’s thirty-fourth anniversary. Then the young lovers followed Sharone home, through the utility corridors, and watched the bickering that broke out after Deek complained about the dometic servitude the Maloviks had compelled the Barnetts to perform in punishment for straying into Sears space. They watched its pronto evaporation when Sharone pointed out that she was wearing a newish teal-colored cashmere sweater ($385 from Foxmoor) given to her that morning by Ursula. And in addition, she argued, check this out, showing him the jerkey she’d pilfered from the dictators during dinner, as well as two fingers of Quervo Gold she’d shoplifted from the back of their filing cabinet.

Deek looked at Sharone. And Sharone looked at Deek. Then they crashed onto their tattered Fingerhut futon ($675 from This End Up) in a fit of urgent coupling that Spider found mesmerizing and from which Augie, embarrassed and vaguely disgusted, finally had to drag her away.

For Spider and Augie the home show had quickly become their second most fave thing to do on dates. Spying on Macy’s gave Augie a heady rush of fear that opened his senses and put him on a heightened sexual alert. This constant ready state of the Southern Gentlemen was good because ever since Spider joyously awarded him her virginity she’d been the sweetest and most inquisitive partner Augie had ever known or, considering the prospects in the current dating pool, would probably ever know. There had been times over the last ecstatic week when he thought that if they went at it even one second more his heart would seize. But one second had led to another and here he was, still intact, and happier about Spider every time he woke up in her arms. It seemed like he’d known her forever.

The most memorable of their spy trips to Macy’s so far was the night they witnessed Cardiff Malovik “treat” one of his “patients” in Cardiff’s “office.” Luke Chambers lay on the fine Italian leather couch (overpriced at $2849 from The Elegant Life), while Cardiff sprawled in his cognac-colored “Skyhawk” Barcalounger ($1499 from Neiman-Marcus). Because the walls were covered with tapestries and carpets from Shivago Rugs and silk sheets from Linens, giving the room the feeling of a sultan’s tent or a very large womb, Spider had been forced to break into the space the previous summer in order to slightly rearrange the fabrics and drill a peephole just over the place where Cardiff’s shoulder was positioned when he held court in the Barcalounger.

Now, in the glow of the candelabra on the nightstand beside him, Cardiff took notes as he asked Chambers questions.

“Luke, let’s start with your journal.”

Chambers opened his notebook and read from it. “Tuesday, Feb One. Dream: I’m in a line of Kachina dancers at First Mesa. It’s very hot. We dance our way around the plaza and I look up and I see a cloud.”

“One cloud? A big one?”

“No. Tiny.”

“Then what?”

“It starts to rain.”

“And you wake up thirsty.”

“Exactly.”
Cardiff drew a cloud. “Tell me what you had to drink today, Luke.”

“Breakfast: Three Kool-Aids, two small Sankas, one Geyser.”

“Where did you get the seltzer?”

“Traded Marlin half a Moon Pie.”

Cardiff drew rain falling from the cloud “You gave up food to get water.”

“If you call Moon Pies food.”

In the rain Cardiff drew a gallows and the legs and arms of a stick figure. “Continue.”

“Filled canteen. Finished canteen by noon. Refilled. Empty by dinner. Refilled. Drank half.”

“Next day?”

“Two Kool-aids for breakfast and a pot of Stash tea, licorice-spice, weak. Canteens about the same. After dinner drank Shine with water backs till drunk, then bed.”

And so forth. Cardiff added up the numbers for the week, omitting the liter of hootch because Chambers didn’t have an alcohol problem, at least by the standards of the day. Then he flipped back through his pad to the figures he had scrawled during last week’s session next to a deadlocked game of tic-tac-toe.

“Do you see any patterns, Luke?”

“You know, I think I’m drinking a little less?”

“And so you are. This is excellent progress.”

“You figure writing it down helps me reduce.”

“Absolutely.”

In his notebook Cardiff drew a head on the stick figure waiting under the gallows. This would be tricky. But a plan of action was forming. It wasn’t that he could “cure” Luke, of course, but the man was a critical cog in the machinery that kept Macy’s, and more importantly, the Maloviks, intact. This compulsion to drink water, though amusing and rich in meaning, was potentially life-threatening. There were cases in the literature in which the blood had been flushed of electrolytes and the patients developed abnormal heart beats resulting in fatal heart attacks. Unfortunately, in respect to courses of treatment for psychogenic polydipsia the literature was barren.

“Salt,” Cardiff said.

“What?” Chambers asked.

“Go ahead and drink whatever you want, just make sure you put a little salt in the water.”

“Why?”

“I think you’ll find that it will make your system retain water, and ultimately your thirst will be satisfied, and you’ll drink less.”

“That’s it? How much salt?”

Cardiff shrugged. “Try a teaspoon per canteen. Ask the kitchen for the low-sodium variety. We don’t want your blood pressure to blow up. You might also check with the Trumps about that Gatorade they’ve been hoarding. Maybe you could trade for some.”

Suddenly, Luke sat up. Underneath the heavy cover of beard, his normally sleepy, heavy-lidded face was transformed into the glib and shining smugness of a television personality. And when he spoke his voice was a robust baritone melodious with the self-confident cadence of someone who had spoken in front of millions of people for years.

Cardiff leaned forward, on full alert. On the other side of the wall Spider nudged Augie, to indicate how rich this was going to be.

“Just kidding!” Luke suddenly shouted in glee.

Cardiff sighed. The traveler’s alarm clock he employed for clients began to beep. “Same time next week, Luke?”

After his patient was gone Cardiff poured himself a small Jim Beam and drew a noose around the neck of the stick figure waiting under the gallows. Spider and Augie crept away, their sleeves stuffed in their mouths so Cardiff couldn’t hear them gagging on their own laughter. 



CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


Augie and Spider
sittin’ in a tree.
Kay I ess ess I en gee.
First comes love, then comes marriage.
Then comes Spider
With a baby carriage.

This was Spider’s lullaby for herself, the night song she sang whenever she got zappy during the nervous time between being awake and being asleep. She changed the tune from time to time, sometimes making it romantic and waltzy or sometimes making it, like, hip-hop. But the words were always the same because these were the words that made her feel safe. She would sing the song aloud or sing it in her head, while imagining that her big soft bed in the deepest part of the Mall was the same big soft bed in Edina where Mommy and Daddy used to come every night to kiss good night and tuck. Or that the pillows arranged next to her under the covers in the shape of a person was Augie himself. Usually, these mind tricks helped her fall right asleep. And when she couldn’t sleep she read her books.

It was in one of her books that she learned something new and weird about becoming a woman. Oh, even before that day long ago when she came to the Mall she had known all about menstruation and how to take care of herself. So that when she finally had her period she didn’t freak out or anything, even though there was more blood than she had figured on. Wandering around the Mall she learned much good stuff about sex, you know, the positions, the kissing and sucking and squeezing and fondling and whatnot that gave everyone involved so much moaning and yelling and fun, which she watched during her home shows.

So it was a big shock when she stumbled on the thing the book called popping the cherry. The screaming of the girl in the story and the bleeding and the pain were things no one had ever told Spider about. The reason why reading about the cherry thing had been such a shock was because the women she had watched making love during the Home shows already had their cherries popped long before Spider saw them doing the deed, frontways, sideways, upside down, all the different ways Mall people invented.

That’s why Spider couldn’t figure out at first why they didn’t screech and cry like the girl in the porn. Anyway, that book led her to a thick medical book she stole from Macy’s, and in the medical book she saw the colored paintings of the cooter, inside and out, and her uterus and whatnot that was inside women’s bellies. And right there was the part called the hymen. While she studied the paintings she compared them to the pictures of herself in the mirror she held between her outstretched legs, shining a flashlight on herself. And when she had the female parts memorized and their names in addition she turned to the paintings of the boy things, and memorized those as well. She liked to say the names out loud. Knowing what everything was called made them more interesting. More exciting. More romantic.

And then it hit her like, ka-thud, that there was no reason why the majestic Augie should have to put up with any screaming by her or crying or blood or whatnot, it might bum him out. She thought maybe a broomstick would do the trick or maybe even a flashlight. But then she had a better idea, one that would get her ready better for her lover. Her lover! She adored the sound of it. It would require stealing something from Donny’s room, a place she didn’t like because he kept it so messy, piled with stuff, including Stinkers once in a while. But that one thing he had there (that $27 item from The Green Door) would be the perfect tool for the job.
However, the night before her scheduled raid on Donny’s place she read further in the book in which she had learned about the cherry, and discovered that men like the idea of what the book called deflowering, They like the trophy aspect, and whatnot, of being the first guy. And that being the first guy makes them think special thoughts forever about the woman who let him be the first.

On her birthday when she lay down with Augie for the very first time and he held her and eased himself inside her, being careful and slow as she quivered under him, she had just melted from the heat of it and the unexpected and huge and awesome feeling. Her hymen resisted for a moment, but Augie was patient. She wrapped her legs around his back and pushed to force him into her deeper and there was some pain but not as much as she thought there would be, and then she surprised herself by crying. This was what she had waited for so long, and it was so way more than she had expected! Augie thought he’d hurt her, and that seemed to make him proud (men!), but he was so sweet trying to comfort her afterwards, even shedding a few tears of his own, she could forgive him for just about anything.

And now they had made love 23 times. But who was counting! And it just got better and more wonderful every time. Asleep beside her after Number 23 he was snoring softly, his arms wrapped around her shoulders in the spoon position that fitted her against him like they were halves of the same block of wood, like in her Daddy’s shop at home. She thought about how many times she had imagined moments like this while she had watched over Augie as he lived the life that would bring him to her on the day she was ready to be a woman. But it wasn’t like in the books. And it wasn’t like in the home shows either. It was the sort of knowing about a thing that you could only get by doing it yourself. The feeling she had when she was with him was hard to give words. She felt protected again, and safe. But there was this comfortable feeling, too. A friendly feeling.

But ta-da! Of course there would be a friendly feeling because they were friends! She had known him for years, knew everything about him, from his favorite color (Dodger Blue) to his Food Suit to the way he brushed his teeth (first scraping the back of his tongue with a spoon to make his breath sweet). She liked every single thing about him, even his snoring, which was quiet and regular, like a doggie. She decided not to tell him that her rescue of him from Luke and Snarlin Marlin was not the first time she had saved his life. Men are very vain, her Daddy had told her once, before she really knew what the word meant.

She knew she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. But this time it wasn’t an anxious type thing that kept her awake. It was excitement. Well, maybe a little anxious. Tonight was the night she had decided to show him Macy’s biggest secret. She wasn’t exactly sure why he needed to know this thing. But there was a change in the Mall lately, something different about the place that she had sensed the last couple weeks, more buzz than before. In fact it was that very buzz, plus her readiness to be a woman, had convinced her that it was time she and Augie met face to face. She had known, of course, from her spying, that he would go after Cooper’s big battery, and that they would finally meet. And now that he was hers, and they would have the life together she had always wanted, she would need his help figuring out what it all meant. She knew what their next move should be. And then the one after that. But then what?

Augie dreamed that they were floating in a diaphanous light under the surface of a tropical sea, like when his parents took him to Hawaii that one Chanukah. His arms wrapped around her shoulders, he spooned Spider closely, fitting the curves of her long, taut body into his. In the dream they drifted through the warm and life-giving water just like this, like twins in their momma’s womb.

It wasn’t the growling that finally pried open his left eye. It was the smell of dog breath.
“Don’t move,” Spider whispered, switching on her battery-powered lantern.

Augie had no intention of moving. It wasn’t just that he was paralyzed with terror, it was also because he was so weighed down with the heavy sediments of satin and wool on Spider’s bed he couldn’t flee.

For a moment the massive square head of the animal, and its bared yellow fangs, were the only things he could think about. And so it didn’t register that Spider was groping for something in the vicinity of Augie’s butt.

“Hi, honey boy,” she gushed at last, holding forth a small pink rubber squeak mouse by its snout.

The huge black mastiff wagged his stubby docked tail furiously, and stepped forward. Augie winced.

“It’s okay,” Spider said. “You were on his Mousy, that’s all.”

 The dog cradled the toy tenderly in his teeth and retreated to a corner of the room, where he lay down and chewed the mouse as gently as if it were his own paw, forcing from the toy small, reedy exclamations. But his big brown eyes didn’t budge from Augie’s throat.

“I don’t fucking believe it,” Augie whispered, now round-eyed and awake. “That is Niger.”
“Isn’t he gorgeous,” Spider said. She untangled herself from the covers and gushed across the room to the big dog. “Who is gorgeous? Who is an excellent canine product?”

Niger smiled his doggy smile, and the Mousy dropped from his mouth. Spider was wearing her fave jams, the ones with the bunny feeties that squeaked when you squeezed them. She reached down now and groped one bunny, which produced a small, breathless simper. Niger panted in appreciation.

“Baby, it’s really time you and me had that little talk,” Augie said.

“Say it again.”

“You and me—"

“No. Say baby.”

When he leaned toward her, Niger growled, so Augie withdrew. But now he was excited. “How did you get him?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean where’s Ernie? Is Ernie still alive?”

“I can’t do this story yet,” Spider said.

“Girl, you gotta do this story. Because we’re together now. You can trust me.”

She searched his face. And suddenly her eyes filled with water.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll go slow.” He reached out again to her, keeping watch on Niger. This time Ernie’s constant companion didn’t seem to mind if Augie held the strange girl who had somehow succeeded Clovis as the dog’s new boss. “How about for now you tell me your real name.”

She blotted one eye with the corner of a pillow. “Genevieve.”

Augie nodded. “That’s a beautiful name.”

“They call me Jenna.”

“Also beautiful. So why Spider?”

“That was Daddy.”

“He called you that when you were little? How come?”

 “No, not little. After The Shit Hit The Fan. Sometimes we watched spiders together. He wanted me to think like them. To wait. To not be afraid of the dark. To be quiet. And then to go fast. So I could catch things.”

“Your father brought you here. For shopping? For Camp Snoopy? What happened to him?”
She stared at him, her eyes watering again. Augie wondered not for the first time how it was possible for Sears people not to have run across Spider after all their years together inside the same building.

“It’s okay,” he said soothingly, thinking of how frightened and lonely she must have been when she lost her parents. “Well, what did you catch?”

“All kinds of stuff,” she said, sniffling. “Hey, you should see it. I’m the richest person in the Mall. But you know what the best thing is I caught?”

Augie pointed to himself and mouthed the word me?

And then it struck him with a force that made him light-headed. As if it were for the first time, he looked into her green eyes and studied her strawberry blonde hair, and finally heard the real cadence of her voice, the one hidden inside that delightfully raspy one outside.
Miss J.

What an idiot he’d been. 

“You have got to be kidding,” he said at last, letting Niger lick his hand.



CHAPTER NINETEEN   When Donny arrived at the feedlots for his sixth shift in five days he saw that the undertakers had left a load of product simmering in the oversized crock pot, as usual. However, the greasy juices from this batch, piped back into the main burner, were scarcely keeping the flames alive. He found a crate of pressboard tiles the fuel crew had ripped from the ceiling of some ruin out in the hoods, and shoveled them into the burner along with a number of tricycle tires and smashed up computer furniture. Stepping back from the sudden heat, he kicked the door shut. Macy’s was such a drag, he thought. Nothing but old women and old men and old queens. No wonder he was addicted to porn.

At least he wouldn’t have to stoke this beast again today. He’d do his harvesting and feeding, then he’d relax with a drink or two, and have a nice nap till the end of his shift. Tomorrow he’d put in his last shift of the week and then be done with this place for not just one, but two glorious days, as per Malovik’s promise.

Sweet. He had a backlog of very tasty titles he’d been saving for just such a special holiday. The cripples getting done by the hotties in Girl Scout uniforms, Good Deeds, was the one he’d been eagerly anticipating. Plus there was some excellent artwork waiting to be completed in his studio: A pair of choice lady stiffs Malovik had allowed him to put aside for a special project featuring a dead horse that Deek the Geek had found on stiff patrol. Donny envisioned this particular installation as the pinnacle of his career. He could hardly wait to see the reaction on trade day.

Moving unseen beside Donny in the utility corridor, Augie and Spider chose their steps carefully, following a route Spider had made Augie practice earlier because this particular home show was the most dangerous of them all. A moment after they settled onto their lawn chairs Donny opened a heavy fire door, lifted his noise protectors to his ears and adjusted them. Inside, as soon as he flicked on his lighter to light the candles, there was an explosion of rodent hysteria.

Warehoused behind the floor-to-ceiling steel webbing that cordoned off most of the room were three-dozen rats. Donny believed that over time their shrieking had damaged his hearing. Or, who knows, maybe it had been the metal, you know, played at full blast. Whatever, the constant buzz in his right ear made it easier to ignore Malovik’s orders and tune out the rest of the static at Macy’s.

He chilled on the sofa and waited for the rodents to cease their theatrics. When the bedlam faded to a whispery anxiety he removed the noise guards and draped them around his neck. The older rats, the alphas, knew the smell and sight of Donny as intimately as they knew that of each other. Bearing the scars of their many turf battles and struggles for supremacy, they climbed out of sight into the plastic children’s fort ($299 from Funcoland) that reached to the ceiling. The young and the foolish scurried around aimlessly on the grated floor.

Donny hated the alphas, just like he hated all authority. Kick the ass of the ruling class, man. But this vermin bourgeoisie was Macy’s prime breeding stock, and he knew as well as anyone the consequences of damaging the food supply. Besides, it was the kids that came under the heading of what Donny did for a living, not the oldsters. He began humming a tune from his favorite band, They Eat Their Young.

Time for work. Moving slowly to reduce alarm and to preserve valuable rodent calories, he went to the feed bin and fetched a half scoop of Stiffies, the baked and ground protein meal that had become the feedlot’s chief feed. He took this to the kill cage, opened the grate on top and poured it in the black rubber pan. The rats began to shriek again. He grabbed his Wrist Rocket and loaded it with a ball bearing. Then he lifted the hatch that separated the kill cage from the main cage, and drew back on the slingshot. While he waited for his first unit he found himself thinking about Augie Zackheim’s dissing of Macy’s this morning. He’d like to put a shot right between Augie’s eyes. Or maybe an ice pick. Then do an installation featuring Zackheim taking it up the wazoo from some large animal. Maybe a kangaroo, from up at the zoo, say, or a llama. He thought the undertakers would get a kick out of that.

Although his role as Macy’s butcher was essential for their survival, Donny didn’t like the work. Of course, there was no work he liked. But at least it gave him control over something. And since no one else wanted the job Malovik was forced to cut the boy some slack. Plus, Donny found ways to make the chore semi-bearable. His executions sometimes followed on the heels of elaborate courtroom dramas. First, he trapped his actors by covering their feed pan with a board as they feasted, then fished them out with heavy oven mittens to avoid rat bite. Next he wrapped the little peckerheads from neck to knees in Ace bandages to immobilize them, and dressed them from the collection of doll’s clothes he had scavenged for just this purpose. Jaunty little sailor suits. Tank tops. Cowboy duds. Then he choreographed scenes in which confessions were extracted, and sentences were handed down. Finally, he tied the guilty parties to stakes and dispatched them firing squad style, with or without blindfolds.
Although a scene was forming in his mind involving a rat named Augie dressed in a sports coat and pleading guilty to several felony counts of being an asshole, Donny decided he was just too tired tonight to rummage through his wardrobe box.

In the best of times he would have harvested a dozen rats. But their numbers had been declining steadily the last year for reasons no one could figure out, so the Maloviks had been compelled to lower the quotas. After putting his sixth and final unit in a bucket Donny went back to the feed bin and filled his scoop with Stiffies. The younger rats fled as the Old Guard came forward for supper. He checked to make sure the animals had water. Then he took his bucket of product down the hallway for chore number two.

Augie followed Spider to another location, ascending a twisting crawl space to a concealed spot on Level Three, where they could look down on the scene.

The ravens were kept in a cage built all the way from the basement to the ceiling of Level Four. Like the rats, the birds were free-range. Their cage was designed to allow the evil bastards to fly around and keep up their health. When Donny lit the candles there was only a brief rustling from this enormous space. Thirty of them, they sat on their perches and stared down at Donny with the contempt that always made him feel self-conscious. A few of them were really big. Thigh-high and yellow-eyed, they looked like goblins and always seemed to be judging him, as if he was dog squat and they were, you know, so high and mighty. This was way weird because among the rats, Donny was King Rat. In truth, the ravens haunted his dreams.

He dumped the rat carcasses into the stainless steel restaurant sink hauled here from Planet Hollywood, and sharpened a pair of hickory-handled filleting knives till the edges gleamed ($80 each from Chicago Cutlery). Then he slipped on a pair of rubber gloves. He gutted and skinned each rat with deft and sure moves, lopped off their heads, sliced the torsos in half down the middle, and rinsed them with warm water from the spigot.

He totaled the figures. Adding this latest batch, he’d have ten frozen halves and twenty smoked halves ready for export on trade day. Ursula had been hard-selling the smoked variety lately because she could get more for it. So on tomorrow’s shift Donny would process today’s harvest in the Bradley Smoker ($399 from Kitchen Collection), brushing them at the end with soy and chili.

He sprayed down the sink with Lysol. He put on his safety goggles, and adjusted his hockey goalie’s helmet. Finally, he put on his oven mitts again. Then he filled a bucket with Stiffies from the larder kept here, noting that it needed to be refilled, and carried the feed plus his bucket of guts to the cage door. The ravens, who’d been watching him quietly, suddenly let forth a raucous chorus of caws and screeches and beating wings. As always, the explosion of violence made Donny wince, even though this racket was just the topbirds telling the underbirds who had first dibs on the guts. Although he’d never been attacked, he believed the ravens were just waiting for the right chance. They’ll go for the eyes first, is what Malovik said. They’ll punch out your eyes, then they’ll peck a fuckin hole right into your fuckin brain.
 Donny put down his buckets inside the cage so his hands would be free to secure the door.

But in the instant before he turned around, a shadow fell from the blackness at the top of the cage and sped through the open door. Without the betrayal of a single wingbeat the shadow glided to a dark corner away from the candles and hid itself. Donny saw none of this. Watching the ravens closely, he shut the door. He dumped his rat treats in one trough and spread out his bucket of Stiffies in another. As he backed away, the birds dove for their supper. There was no quarreling—their food fights had been settled long ago.

While the alpha birds ate, the others waited for their turn. Donny climbed a rolling inventory ladder to the packing crates chained high up on the side of the cage. Here and there in the shredded paper and Styrofoam peanut nests inside the crates he found a few dull green eggs freckled with darker spots, and put most of them in his bucket. The pair of eggs he left alone belonged to a matriarch who was a proven chick-producer.

Every raven was given a couple of toys to keep them amused and distracted, coins or jewelry or watches. Donny had noticed that over time these trinkets tended to shift from one nest to another, evidence that when one raven got tired of a thing it traded the thing away for something new. It was this apparent intelligence and capacity for boredom that frightened Donny the most about Mr and Ms corvus fucking corax.

The first ravens had been captured in Camp Snoopy. How they got there or how they survived the shitstorm was anyone’s guess. The guy who netted them was old Ernie Clovis, the famous and majorly weird inventor of much of the industry of Macy’s. In the beginning he kept the ravens as pets, along with a pair of tame rats he’d rescued from Animal World before all the other pet-quality beasts in the place were eaten.

At first there was plenty of stuff to feed Ernie’s growing menagerie, dogfood and birdseed and the cattle meal Macy’s had scavenged from a wrecked truck on the Interstate west of the Mall. But as the numbers of birds and rats increased this resource began to run out. Because he had to feed them something, and couldn’t rationalize tapping into Macy’s limited food supply, he began to offer them bits of frozen stiffs. But butchering cadavers wasn’t work anyone wanted to do, so Ernie began experimenting with a process of reducing stiffs by cooking them, which lead to the development of the crock pot and the food dryer and the meat grinder that allowed Macy’s to bring a constant supply of high-quality protein to these ravenous animals. Ernie was worried that they might develop the spinning disease, especially the rats, being, you know, like mammals.  But they never did.

No one knew why, but after a while the girl birds started laying eggs every couple weeks. Which is gnarly because, most wild ones do it only once a year. Or so Malovik the egghead (hah!) had explained. There was something in Stiffies, all those preservatives, maybe, the additives, that had settled into the fat of the stiffs. And fuck knows these former cheese-fed Midwesterners had plenty of fat! Whatever it was, Stiffies had changed the ravens’ cycle. Donny yawned. He could care less about the whys and wherefores. All he knew was, he was glad he didn’t have to eat anything from the feedlots to stay alive.

It was the Maloviks who saw the business opportunities of this burgeoning livestock operation. By then Sears was growing produce and distilling Shine somewhere in their store, which Cooper was ruthlessly using to get what he wanted. Several Macies were killed in attempts to find these places, until Malovik had ordered that spying was a waste of time. That was when Macy’s and Sears climbed into bed together! This capitulation to the enemy made Donny nauseous, although being in bed with Lira, he thought, would not be a bad thing at all.
He stowed the egg bucket on a table in a cold closet and shut the door. Tomorrow he’d wash the eggs and pack them up in a carton for export. But right now it was Happy Hour. He stripped off his protective gear and hung everything back on the wall. He rattled the cage door to make sure it was locked and grabbed his bucket of dressed rat halves.

 The moment he opened the fire door to the hallway the raven was all over him, a storm of wings and claws and pecks and shrieks. Donny dropped to all fours and covered his head. But the raven wasn’t interested in punishment. He just wanted out. As the big bird soared down the hallway, looking for an exit into the vacant, dead world outside the Mall, the cage went ballistic.

To Donny, bleeding and stunned, it sounded like a cheer.


CHAPTER TWENTY   Back in the toasty sanctuary of Spider’s nest, Augie climbed from her enormous round bathtub, plumbed with hot water that was probably siphoned here from Sears. He dried off, wrapped the mammoth beach towel around himself, walked from the bathroom and sat down heavily on the bed. He was wrung out by what he’d seen at Macy’s, bewildered by this rush of new information about a building he once believed he understood from top to bottom. But at least the evening had included Spider—the ultimate surprise among all the surprises of the last week. And then there was the outstanding comic relief of seeing Donny get his butt kicked by a raven. Bloodied by a birdbrain. The kid was such a creep.

Niger wandered through the dog door into the apartment from wherever it was that Niger spent his hours away from the nest, and allowed Augie to give him some love. The big dog’s back leg thumped reflexively on the carpet while Augie scratched his ears.

Wrapped in a pink terry cloth robe and bearing a cardboard box, Spider emerged from a concealed chamber at the back of her place, one of the secret storerooms all over the Mall where she hid her caches of goodies. She twisted the cap off one of her precious miniature Cokes put up in the classic Depression-era bottle, and handed the bottle to her lover. “How are your nerves, baby?”

Augie drank from his bottle and belched. “God that’s good. A little bit jumpy.”

“You didn’t know they feed the animals Stiffies, did you?”

“The bastards said it was cattle feed. Dog food.”

“Once it was. But they mostly ran out of that stuff a long time ago.”

Augie shrugged.

“It’s kind of pukey,” she said. “But is it wrong?”

“Wrong? Who knows anymore? I guess the stuff’s kept us alive. You ever steal Macy Meat?”

“Barf. Junk food.”

Augie drained his beverage. It seemed to ease the nausea in his churning stomach. He wondered if he should tell the others about Stiffies, and decided that knowing this thing wouldn’t do them any good. “What do you think about moving in with me after trade day?”

She shook her head.

“We’ll be safer there,” he said. “People will love you, I promise.”

“I’m not ready,” she said.

“Why don’t you trust them?”

“I don’t trust anyone. Except you.”

Augie took her hand and kissed it. She reached into her box and held forth two cans of Spencer’s Chunky Stuff, the Meaty Meat and the Vegan Minestrone. She loved cooking for Augie, and then feeding him bits of food from her hand. “Say which one.”

Augie smiled at her, despite himself. She was so damn cute. “Very funny.”

And because she was so damn cute he decided it was the right time to give her the present he’d been saving. He grabbed his backpack and asked her to take off her sneakers.

“I can’t have tickling,” she said.

“It’s a present.”

“All right!”

He reached into his pack and brought forth a pair of the high heels he’d fetched from Nordstrom. He’d been anticipating the look of her in these things, these gleaming black Manalo Blahniks with an open toe and a spaghetti strap. When he tried to slip the left one onto her foot Spider covered her mouth and giggled. The shoe was a size six, way too small for her.

Searching among the other pairs of Blahniks he was disappointed to find that none of them fit. But what did he expect? After all, she was five-ten, and in these heels would be tall enough to look him straight in the eye. Kids are so big these days! He examined one of her sneakers. It was a size nine. If he’d done his homework he could have avoided building her up just to let her down.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching down to kiss the high arch of her foot.

“Hey, they’re really, really pretty. They are classy. But I couldn’t wear them anyhow.”

“Why not?”

“One, I don’t know how. Plus, you should never wear shoes you can’t run in.”

She put her hand on the back of his head and pulled him towards her so she could give him a French. “But I know someone who would kill for these heels.” 


CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE   On trade day, as Cardiff Malovik entered the floor of Camp Snoopy, Ursula at his side, and his minions guarding the front and rear, he felt utterly alone, a dimming glow in a blackened world. He longed to share his bad news with Ursula—maybe he’d misread the numbers or his analysis was flawed—but he couldn’t bring himself to do that just yet. Her well of natural confidence was sometimes the only thing that compelled him to rise from bed every morning.

His entourage passed by The Tumbler, “fast-paced action in a two-seat gondola that spins and turns in every direction,” the Camp Snoopy brochure advertised. Just beyond it was the Camp Bus, “a bright yellow bus that transports happy families high into the air for a wild, wacky and whirling adventure!” Up ahead, Snarlin Marlin and Luke, who were each pushing big orange Home Depot shopping dollies loaded with inventory, suddenly stopped. Cardiff could see their breath rise in clouds like that of barn animals.

“What is it?” he called.

Marlin was snickering. “Fucking Donny.”

Near the cement pit where the Snoopy Fountain had been, the exact center of the Mall both sides had chosen as a neutral place to meet on trade days, was the hull of a children’s carousel. Macy’s had long ago carted off the carved oak horses inside and fed them to the incinerator. But today not only was the Carousel slowly revolving again, it was lit up by the glow from dozens of glassed restaurant candles. A boombox played the William Tell Overture. As Cardiff watched, its spin brought around again the object of Luke’s mirth.

The horse hadn’t been much of a specimen when it was alive, swaybacked and slackjawed as it was, but in death it had been rearranged along heroic lines, rearing, nostrils flared, one outstretched hoof at the level of its head. And despite the fact that the horse had been a gelding it also sported an enormous erection. Grasping the business end of this battering ram in her frozen fist was a large-breasted blonde cadaver draped backwards across the animal’s back, arms and legs wrapped around his flanks, her backside in the air. Astride this amorous equestrienne, this Viking-like figure resonant of a German opera, was another frozen female, clutching a lock of the horse’s mane. She was wearing a black leather bra, designer sunglasses ($160 from Bill Blass) and an unnaturally large ebony dildo, which was jammed into the blonde stiff’s butt parts. A cigarette dangled nonchalantly from the corner of her garishly painted mouth, in the offhanded manner of a municipal worker breaking up pavement with a jackhammer. The only sculptural flaw was that her nose had been eaten away by frostbite or bitten off before she died, producing a look more sinister than sexy. Even so, Cardiff had to admit that Donny’s taste in the female form, though tending towards the slatternly, was exquisite.

“Oh, bravo,” Ursula said.   
              
“Still,” Cardiff said. “Consider the results.”

Already waiting at the meeting place in the fountain, Cooper and his people were not amused. Cardiff searched carefully among them for this creature who had beaten the undertakers, but of course saw no one new, which reinforced his opinion that the attacker had been Embry, the boy.

Illuminated by a lantern burning Sears’ precious reserves of white gas, and a smoky trash fire in an oil drum, Mutton and Ruth clutched their Bibles and glared, Augie cracked his knuckles, while Lira pulled at her cigar and blew angry smoke rings. Only Embry stared with the rapture of an art lover. But what teenage boy isn’t an aficionado of female anatomy? The author of this tableau morte was nowhere to be seen—Cardiff had ordered him to take up a position in the shadows, as usual, where he could send an arrow in the direction of Sears at the first false move. Cardiff knew that Cooper had placed an armed sentinel or two somewhere out there in the darkness as well. Business as usual.

Cardiff pulled a chair away from the table for Sula, then sat down next to her. Cooper, as usual, preferred to stand. He produced the halves of the Thunderbolt that had wounded Blue Josh, and pushed them across the table.

“One of your little Indians lost her arrow.”

Cardiff pushed at it the tip of the arrow with a pencil and feigned indifference. “No, I don’t believe it’s one of ours, sir.”

“That’s a Thunderbolt,” Cooper sad.

“Your grasp of the obvious has always been impressive. But who knows where you got this.”
Cooper glared at Sharone, who glared back. “So where’s old Deek?” he asked Cardiff.
“Improving his mind,” Cardiff said.

“Hah!”

“Not a concept I would expect a teamster to grasp.” Cardiff pushed the broken arrow away from him, an object of no importance. “While we’re on the subject of straying, there Bubba, what was your salesman doing in the Nordstrom corner last week?”

Cooper looked at Augie, who showed around the palms of his hands, as if they were model citizens.

“If you saw Mr. Zackheim anywhere near Nordstrom’s you were seeing things,” Cooper said. “Maybe you’ve had a little shitstorm in the old brain pan. You know, from not enough to eat.”
“And you’re going to help me out with that.”

“Hey, business is business. Just ‘cause your fuel line don’t reach your carburetor, that don’t mean we can’t get in the back seat together.” He winked at Snarlin Marlin, just for fun.
Ursula made a show of glancing at her Rolex, as if the time of day might matter. “If you’ve finished amusing yourself, Mr. Cooper, perhaps we might push on?”
Cooper shrugged. “Why don’t you turn that thing off?”  
    
Cardiff glanced at the carousel. “The Communists were also opposed to freedom of expression.”

You’re dangerous and you’re scary and you’re whacko. We get the point. So shut it down so we can do some business.”

“No can do. We happen to find the arts a comfort in these trying times.”

Cardiff had long ago turned over the duties of negotiating with this garbage to his wife, who could hold her temper longer when dealing with inferiors. She found her organizer in the pocket of her sable coat, next to the concealed pocket hiding her Derringer, and fished it out. Then she put on her reading glasses, although they were missing a lens.

“So, Mr. Cooper, what have you got for me today?”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

Cardiff shifted uncomfortably in his chair as the Sears trash giggled. He longed to smash something over Cooper’s head. Instead, he nodded at the undertakers, who faded into the darkness and reappeared with their shopping carts. Ursula ran her finger down the figures Cardiff had prepared. She remembered a time when there had been twice as much on this list with which she could use to drive a deal. But then, there had also been more mouths to feed.
But certainly not twice as many.

“First, thirty halves, mostly smoked.” Snarlin Marlin stepped forward with a package wrapped in yellowed butcher paper and laid it on the table before Ursula, who pushed it towards Cooper. 

Cooper scribbled on his legal pad and passed the package on to Ruth, who had managed somehow, in the unwashed stink of contemporary life, to maintain her formidable sense of smell. She unwrapped it, turned the carcass over in her hands before the lantern, and sniffed it with the eagerness of an airport dog. This ritual had replaced the mandatory grilling of samples from each fillet, which selected Macies had eaten while Sears watched. But since no one had been poisoned in two years, mostly because it was recognized that poisoning had a chilling effect on commerce, the practice was abandoned.

“Let’s see a few more,” Cooper said.

“Something wrong?”

Cooper hefted the packages Marlin put on the table. “Sort of skinny, aren’t they?”

“Lower in fat, dear. Better for your heart.”

“We don’t care about that. We’re on the Atkins. So what about the smoked?”

When these passed Ruth’s inspection the traders moved on to eggs. “Six dozen,” Ursula said. “Three dozen large, three dozen medium and small.”

“Is that all? Birds holding out?”

“What with Easter coming we’re planning a hunt.”

“A hunt. Since when did Macy’s get a kid?”

“It’s for Luke and Marlin.” Her voice was a stage whisper. “The boys do enjoy their special holidays.”

Ruth plucked an egg from a carton and tossed it in the fire. “Just the one rotten.”

There was an anxious lull while Cooper added his numbers. “Okay,” he said at last. “We can give you ten quarts for this stuff. Plus a bushel of veggies.”

She stared at him. “The Shine is triple-filtered,” he said. “It doesn’t get any better.”

Although Ursula had expected that he would try to screw her deeply—he always tried—she wasn’t prepared for the poverty of his offer. Fifteen jars of Shine was the figure she had anticipated he’d put on the table first. She decided to stall.

“Let’s have a look, Mr. Cooper.”

“You got it, doll.” Cooper motioned to the shadows behind him, and Middle Josh appeared with a fruit juice jar of Shine and a bulging white kitchen-sized garbage bag.

She unscrewed the cap and sniffed. One needn’t taste this swill to know that it would be dreadful, although this batch smelled slightly less like turpentine than usual. In the bag was the usual assortment of emaciated carrots, potatoes, cabbages, beets and turnips. Basement food. The cuisine of your lower Irish.

 “Let’s get back to your offer a little later, Mr. Cooper,” Ursula said. “Can we talk non-food items?”

“Such as?”

“A reprint: the complete works of Thomas Hardy.”

“What else?”

“DVDs: Eighteen episodes of Andy Griffith. The History of England, in six parts. From Here to Eternity.”

“The original?”

“Colorized.”

“Two jars for the lot.”

“CDs: The Final Bee Gees Concert. The Symphonies of Mahler by the London Philharmonic. The Woo Tang Clan. Norah Jones. The best of k. d. lang.” 

“One jar. Keep the Norah Jones.”

“A board game, Risk, still in its plastic wrap.”

“Half a jar.”

“More books: Paintings in the Hermitage. The Redneck Manifesto. The Little Friend. Marlin, please show Mr. Cooper the art book. There, see how big it is? Hours of enjoyment.”

“Any food pictures in it?”

“Several.” Marlin opened the big volume to a painting by David Teniers The Younger, Monkeys in a Tavern.

“I’ll give you a jar and a half.”

“That makes fifteen jars.” Cooper said, jotting on his legal pad. “Next, we need charcoal.”
“I regret that the price has gone up. It’s now a quart per ten-pound bag.”

Cooper had expected a beating like this. But he decided for the time being to roll with the punches. “Two bags,” he said, writing down the number. “What else you got?”

This was the moment Cardiff had been anticipating. The next set of reactions would reveal volumes about recent events at Sears.

 “We’ve had a bit of luck lately in our neighborhoods,” Ursula said, affecting nonchalance. “Gentlemen?”

Luke and Marlin laid out five run-of-the-mill car batteries. Cooper poked at them with indifference. But when the undertakers hefted the mammoth gel-cell onto the table the level of tension inside Camp Snoopy increased palpably. The Maloviks and the undertakers studied Augie. He recognized the battery, of course. The cosmetic arrow wound in its black polyurethane casing was apparent to everyone. He tried to allow nothing to show on his face.

But when he turned his eyes to examine a greasy stain on the hem of his parka with the scrutiny of a scholar studying the Shroud of Turin, Cardiff knew that Zackheim’s visit to Nordstrom’s was a fact. Lira, despite herself, stepped forward to get a better look at this sudden object of desire, ignoring the wide-eyed warning on Cooper’s face.

Cooper produced his voltage meter. “Okay?”

Ursula shrugged. “Whatever.”

The Eveready was still strong enough to accept a full charge. Even Cooper was having trouble pretending this wasn’t a major find. He looked at his clipboard again.

“I can go twenty-one quarts for the works,” he allowed.  
  
Ursula closed her eyes. “I must have a hearing disorder.”

“The meat is skinny. There eggs are less.”

She tapped on her ear as if trying to dislodge a bug.

“Two, one,” Cooper said. “Twenty-one.”

Throw the slider, Cardiff thought. Back him off the plate.

“At that price,” Ursula said, “I’m afraid we just couldn’t part with the batteries.”

Good girl.

Lira tugged on a strand of Cooper’s long hair. “Hang on,” he told Ursula. When he turned around, Lira was all over him with some argument carried out in whispers. Cardiff had never seen the nurse so assertive at trade day.

His heart sank.

Cardiff had his answer, and it was exactly the one he dreaded most. The desperation of Sears to take the big battery home could only mean that their economy was in worse shape than he imagined. It might even be breaking down faster than Macy’s. He knew that most of their power was being used to produce light in order to grow things, to raise vegetables for food and corn for booze, and maybe oats or wheat as well. But until this moment he didn’t suspect how close they must be to losing the farm. And if Sears lost the farm Macy’s would lose the farm as well. Even if Cardiff offered his aid, an unlikely event that would erode the competitive zeal of both sides, there was nothing to be done and no place to go. Both sides could starve inside these walls. Or they could starve outside. At least in here they’d die in relative warmth.

This was an old man’s kind of death, of course. The last people on earth ought to go out with a bang, not a whimper. But it was his death and he would arrange it anyway he wanted. No matter what happened he would save two of his bullets.

Finally, Cooper silenced Lira with a hand to her lips and returned to the table. “Here’s the best I can do: twenty-two jars and the veggies in the bag. Also six big green tomatoes and three pounds of baby crook-neck squash.”

He saw that this still wasn’t going to be enough to soften Ursula’s position, and decided to administer the coup de grace. “And thirty pounds of dog food. Iams Mini-Chunks and some Alpo.”

Ursula looked at her husband, who looked away. Cooper was disappointed to see that they were not as impressed with the dog food as he thought they would be.

“Give me a couple more movies,” Cooper said. “And I’ll throw in a pound of French Roast.”

“Ground?”

“Whole. Still flavor-sealed.”

Snarlin Marlin tore a page from his notebook and began chomping on it nervously. 
Ursula pressed her advantage. “What can you offer me in the area of bakery goods?”

Marlin suddenly palmed the spitball he just made and heaved it at Augie, who dodged it deftly and stepped back into the shadows.

“You lie, Lyndon!” Marlin yelled. “You bloody fucking meat puppet!”

Ursula knew Cooper was holding back the best. Like everyone else at Macy’s she’d been driven to distraction by the heart-breaking ambrosia of baking muffins and cookies that wafted through the Mall from time to time. Its source, of course, was Sears. Fanning the smell of fresh baked treats in the direction of Macy’s was no less an act of terrorism than was Donny’s little hobby with the dead.

“Earth to ma’am,” Cooper said. 
      
Luke restrained his partner with an arm around his waist and pulled him aside.

“About your bakery,” Ursula told Cooper.

“Where would we get bread?”

“Who said anything about bread? I didn’t say bread.”

Cooper shrugged. “I suppose we could find some Ding Dongs somewhere. Maybe a Slim Jim. You know they keep forever.”

“I believe we’ll pass on that . . . ” Ursula paused.

The low rumble that began under their feet was by now a familiar harbinger of a recurring scare. Everyone found something to brace against. Lira sat down and covered her head with her arms. When the tremor hit, it was sharper than most of these little rock-and-rolls, and it lasted longer. The contractor’s promises that the Mall was earthquake-proof never seemed much of a comfort at times like these. There was a crash in the darkness and the grinding scrape of tortured masonry. Someone swore. Something crashed against the oil drum with a metallic clap; from the fire burning within it a pyrotechnic funnel of sparks soared toward the skylights four floors above.

As the rumbling faded, a fine grit sifted into the air. It always got into your mouth with a sweet-and-sour tang, like a penny under your tongue.

Cooper did a head count. All his people seemed okay. 
                    
“Shall we proceed?” Ursula asked, patting the dust from the sleeve of her coat. “We’ll take the produce you’ve offered.  But for all the bounty we’ve offered we’ll need 26 jars. As for the extra videos you mentioned I can give you a double feature a man of your . . . calling might enjoy. She read from her notebook. There’s something called Crash and another one called Freeway.”

Cooper turned to whisper with Augie and Lira again.

“Take it,” Lira urged.

“It’s a jar more than last month,” Augie said. “And they’re offering less.”

“We need this battery,” Lira said.

Cooper shrugged. “What about that battery, pal?”

“What are you going to offer for Gift With Purchase?” Augie said.

“The usual. A couple flowers.”

Augie opened his Baby Sack. “Let me give her these instead.”

Cooper stared at the shoes. “What’s this?”

“What is cloudy will be clear.”

Cooper turned back to Ursula. “Twenty-two jars.”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty-three.”

Augie stepped forward. When he revealed the pair of size six ebony Manalo Blahniks from Nordstrom and placed them in front of Ursula, she glanced at the shoes as if they were dog turds. “Twenty-three,” he said.

She studied Cooper for a moment, ignoring the salesman and his shoes. Then she nodded at Luke Chambers, who brought forth the Macy deal-sealer, something from one of the toy stores they’d looted. It was a mid-range box of Legos.

She scanned the calendar in her organizer. “Say four weeks from today, same time?”

The morticians exchanged goods with Middle Josh. Each item was checked off in the notebooks and packed into the shopping dollies. As the anchor stores began their retreat from Camp Snoopy Cardiff shot Cooper a parting glance. Its meaning wouldn’t be clear to anyone else. But both of the Mall’s leaders knew that the next trade day between Macy’s and Sears might be the last. 



CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO   For Donald Kefauver Lustig the public’s response to Trigger with Two Tinas was deeply gratifying. The culmination, really, of his entire career. As he stood sentry on the steel second-floor deck of Snoopy’s Boutique he could hardly wait to begin work on his newest installation, which he planned to finish in time for trade day in March. The details were just beginning to take shape in his imagination. But the theme, based on the recent discovery of several frozen young Catholic misses in their high school uniforms sprawled on the floor of the cafeteria at St. Xavier’s, was quite clear. He would take a high approach and call it Cinq Debutantes sans Vertu. It would be, he told himself, extremely rich.

Below him, negotiations droned on and on. Blah, blah, blah said Cooper. Yeah, yeah, yeah said Ursula. Donny shifted from foot to foot to keep warm. Despite Malovik’s orders to stay sober he was nipping steadily at the fancy stoppered Grolsch beer bottle he’d filled with Shine.

F or amusement, he trained his arrow on first one Sears then another. But when he got to Lira he lowered the bow. She really was something, even better than his recent fantasies. See how the tah-tahs pushed against the overalls. And see extra-especially the way the cigar entered the mouth. And then there was her delightful fuck-you attitude. He liked that best of all. He visualized the cage he would build for her in his apartment and how she would pace around in it with a terrified wild-eyed look, then how her eyes would go all droopy-like when he entered the cage to be with her. Yes, master, yes! she’d moan again and again.

But Augie Zackheim was severely pissing Donny off. He was standing too close, for one thing, the way a guy does when he wants the world to think he owns some chick. Donny had sensed for some time that Augie must be dicking Lira. And now he knew it. Otherwise, why the proprietary attitude? Donny considered the options and the repercussions and decided that Zackheim had earned some righteous punishment. Donny thought Deek the Geek was a dweeb, and found the lifestyle choices of the undertakers revolting (life-partners my ass!) but they were Macies after all, and ought to be avenged. He’d want them to do the same for him.

The subterranean rumble began without warning. Donny ignored it. These shakers happened all the time. He took a pull on his bottle and raised his bow. Heart or throat? He decided on the groin area instead and trained his arrow there. Like almost everyone else during the Store Wars he had maimed and he had killed, and would experience no qualms about inflicting pain again. It’s dawg eat dawg, man. He didn’t have permission this time, but so? Everyone would understand. Hell, Malovik might even give him a perk or two. Still, whenever he was about to dive headfirst into das Scheisslike this, he wondered whether he would actually go through with it. But, of course, he always did.

At the first shock, Snoopy’s Boutique lurched so violently it almost knocked him off his feet. When he found his balance he raised his bow again. The whole joint was rocking and rolling now to the beat of a really big one. Something in the direction of the Bloomingdale’s corner came down like a ton of bricks. Hah! It probably was a ton of bricks. Down in the fountain people were scurrying around just like the rats, throwing antic shadows in the lantern light as they looked for something to hold on to.

Damn it all, the bastards were getting in the way of a clear shot. But when Lira sat down, or fell down, covering his head with her arms, and Augie stood there all alone for a moment, Donny found himself with a window of opportunity. He eased back on the string and took half a breath, holding it to steady his aim.

“Bad boy!” Spider said as she kicked Donny’s butt.

The arrow flew off wildly towards the floor of Camp Snoopy, missing Augie and everyone else by a wide margin, and slammed into the oil drum. Donny whirled in rage and Spider kicked him again, a solid shot to the scrotum. Donny went down screaming, clutching his crotch, knees drawn up. Spider snatched up his bow and heaved it into the darkness. Then she smacked him across the shoulders with Thumper just for good measure. Se recalled a line a character said in one of her books.

“Hey, I’m a big fan of your work.” By the time he could draw his first agonized breath she had disappeared into the shadows.

“Been out hunting on your own?” Cooper asked Augie when they got back to the Big Room at Sears.

Augie glued his eyes to Cooper’s. “No.”

“Why would think Macy’s make up a story like that?”

“You saw Greentree. The dork is losing it. Hallucinating.”

“Hey, that gel-cell’s an Eveready. Same as we used in the Kenworths. Wonder where they got it?”

Augie shrugged. “Must be the one out there everyone missed.”

“Yeah? So where’d you get those fancy shoes?”

Augie scratched at a cootie rooting around in the thick mat under his chin.

“How does my truck look?” Cooper pushed on.

“How would I know?”

“I’ve checked out Nordstrom myself. That time when me and the Joshes went on patrol over there? I’ve walked around every side of it. I’ve walked on top of it. There’s no way in. Did you find out something that could help us, pal?”

“No.”

Cooper waited.

“Yes,” Augie said. He reached into his Baby Sack and produced the map of Ernie’s wormholes at Nordstrom. As Cooper scanned it, Augie explained how he had stumbled across it. Cooper’s face clouded with concentration. Augie thought about turning over the photo of Cooper’s family, and the little boots. But he decided the timing wasn’t right. The man seemed to be having enough problems right now.

“Are you trying to kill yourself?” Cooper said.

“The opposite.”

“I thought we all had an agreement. No solos.”

Augie looked away. “You know how it is. It’s something Lira wanted.”

“So how did my battery end up at Macy’s?”

Augie told the story of his journey, of the attack by Chambers and Greentree, omitting any reference to Spider. By the time he finished Cooper was laughing.

“You’re lying again, aren’t you? You couldn’t outrun anyone. You couldn’t outrun Ruthie.”

“Maybe not right now at this exact moment. But when your ass is on the line I guess you find a way to kick it up a notch.”

“That much is true,” Cooper allowed, remembering the adrenalin of his own battles. “Anyway, what the fuck has gotten into you lately?”

“Hard to say.”

“Bullshit. This thing between you and Lira. It’s about that, right?”

Augie nodded. “Yes,” he lied. “Look. It was a one-time deal. You know me. I’m a team player. If you want to run a patrol over there and see if the gel-cells in the other truck are any good I’ll go.”

Cooper put his arm around Augie’s shoulder. “Do me a favor, teammate. Stay close to home from now on.”

“Why, what’s up?”

“Maybe nothing. But whatever those fuckwads are planning, you’re now public enemy number one.”

“So, what, I’m grounded?”

“Just keep your eyes open. ”

“I always do.”

Normally, Augie would have done anything Cooper wanted, such was his willingness to please, and Cooper’s ability to make you see that serving Sears was the same as serving yourself. But ever since the night of his visit to Nordstrom nothing in his life was normal.


CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE In order to persuade Cooper to loan her the big gel-cell, Lira agreed to put in three nine-to-fives at the farm even though the week’s schedule also called for her to put in three graveyard shifts at the incinerator. By noon on the second day she was exhausted and filmed with a caustic sweat that smelled like vinegar. If Mutton had opinions about her stench and her pathetic lack of muscle tone he kept it to himself. He had assigned her to work buckets of cooked, dried sewage into the plot where the flowers and herbs had been so they could lay in a bed of fast-growing collards.

She worked slowly and methodically, applying her spade to a dozen square inches of soil at a time. There was a nice little rush of ritalin pulsing through her brain, probably the last time she’d ever experience that particular friendly glow. All the amphetamines were gone, as well. As were the Percocets. Luckily, she’d be able to ease into her new semi-drugless life with relative style, because she still had a week’s supply of Xanax. Also, she had a couple doses remaining from of her once vast stores of codeine and Phenobarbitol. And there was still the morphine, which she would probably never use, but represented psychological money in the bank.

Well, fuck it, she thought. When the sport drugs were gone she’d start drinking, like everyone else, and somehow find a way to let the alcohol replace the chemicals for getting her where she wanted to go. Lush life here I come.

Maybe it was the heat or the glare or the stink, but she’d been nauseous yesterday, and now this morning as well. She tried to remember if she’d eaten anything weird—steamed wheat and veggies for Sunday dinner with a couple cubes of smoked Macy Meat, nothing unusual, and a carrot for breakfast. She lingered on that carrot. Unaccountably, the sight of it in her memory made her gag. Before she could stop it the vomit suddenly rose in her throat and spewed all over Mutton’s precious topsoil.

“Woman, what in the world?”

She sat on the floor and dabbed at her mouth with the front of her shirt. He fetched her a cup of tepid water from his thermos and looked away while she drank it.

After a moment the nausea retreated and she felt steady enough to stand. It’s just withdrawal, she thought. A couple more days of misery abetted by tiny bits of her precious downers and Moodies and she’d be over the anguish of losing her uppers. Her Xanax habit would be the next to go, but she figured the cold turkey around that little friend wouldn’t be this heavy.

“Okay?” he said.

She took a deep breath and went back to work.

Mutton didn’t have time for this nonsense. He was preoccupied with what was more than ever a real life and death matter: the effort to bring forth the same amount of food he grew a year ago with half the amount of light. Back on Groundhog Day, during an anxious meeting with Cooper and his figures, he’d seen the predicament and immediately laid out a strategy. First, they’d confiscate all the mirrors at Sears and line the walls of the farm with them. Then he’d set about rearranging the plots so there wasn’t a square inch on the farm that didn’t contain a leaf or a bud bathed in light. Finally, he convinced Cooper that the flowers and herbs had to go and that those “therapeutic” visits by the others to the farm would have to be cut back to minimum clinical visits for the Vitamin D. Mutton no longer had enough strength to raise crops and make people feel good at the same time. Damn foolishness anyway, he said, holding out against Cooper’s argument that they gave people hope. Hope? They want hope they should look to The Lord.

And speaking of the hopeless and the Godless, here was the nurse who couldn’t heal herself, who reeked of a putrid soul. And here was Cooper, normally a sensible man, making sweetheart deals with her that appeared to benefit Sears not one whit. In trade for fornication. This business with the shortwave, for example, was not only a waste of their valuable resources it was utter nonsense. The only voice coming through the air that they should be listening to was that of The Shepard. On the other hand, in order to work the farm round the clock he needed all the help he could get, even hers. Watching her move, like someone half asleep, Mutton began to see how the crisis at Sears could work in his favor—in the Lord’s favor, that is—how at some point he and Ruthie could make the others see their weaknesses and the errors of their ways and the salvation that is Jehovah. Sears would become a beacon of faith that would guide Him to them and He would create the everlasting government of God on Earth with Bradley, himself, probably named president or possibly emporer. As he fine-tuned the angle of a framed bureau mirror he smiled at the all-knowing and all-powerful image of himself that he saw in the glass.

When Lira’s shift finally ended she dragged herself back to her apartment and collapsed on the bed. She had a couple of free hours before dinner and the inevitable medical complaints that people always brought to her table, and was hoping to rest first. All this labor would be worth it, she reminded herself. She had sensed from her last truncated conversation with the King of New Orleans that he had something important to tell her, something he was building a drama around. There had been this hopeful, tentative cast to his voice. And then there was that verse:

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky.

Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

She wasn’t sure what it meant—there was no weather left in the world, of course—so she chose to believe the poem was about her. She closed her eyes and summoned a soothing, familiar fantasy, the one that helped her fall asleep when she didn’t want the stupor of a sopor nap, back when she had sopors. In this happy vignette she strolled in the sun along a bricked walk through a garden bursting with roses and poppies. The gauzy air was wrapped around her like flannel and it fairly vibrated with birdsong and the rattle of cicadas. All this bright new life in the world, the seemingly endless parade of creation, the feeling of it had always washed away her anxieties and let her sleep.
             
“The end is at hand,” Cooper said. “I’m going to attack Columbia from Brazil. With everything. You lose this country, you lose the continent. You lose the continent you can kiss your sweet ass goodbye.”

Without interest, Lira watched him roll the dice. “Isn’t that your job?”

“Three sixes!”

Lying on her side across from him on the big Posturepedic, she drew deeply on her cigar and blew a perfect smoke ring toward the ceiling. Then she pushed her beleaguered army into the Caribbean with a slippered foot. “There. The world’s finally safe for democracy, Coop. Happy now?”

Cooper had been looking forward all week to spending a few evenings alone with her. He didn’t just need her company, which was amusing enough when he guessed right which mood she was in, he was desperate to escape the endless skirmishes in his head and all that bad news between the lines on his legal pads. There had been times when days like this had saved his sanity, when they had been in sync and needed the same things, when they had made time to hole up in her apartment for a while, in this cocoon, away from the administrative demands of Sears. Lying in bed with her after a noisy and liberating session of raw sex had once been the only sanctuary he had that made him feel like there was a tiny spark of civility left in the world. Cooper knew from the sorry offerings the Maloviks put on the table at trade day that the lights at Macy’s, like those at Sears, were beginning to dim. He poured himself a glass of Shine.

“Mind if I join you?” she asked.

He was astounded. In the four years he’d known Lira he’d never seen her touch a drop of liquor, not even that pretty good beer Mutton used to brew before Augie and Ernie Clovis perfected the still.

“What’s this all about?” he asked.

She smiled. “Gosh, I just want to be like everyone else. Fit in, you know?”

He poured another glass and handed it to her. As she reached for it her robe fell open revealing a perfect, creamy breast. She knocked back her drink like a sailor on shore leave, then grimaced at its astringency. It occurred to him that someone who’d just put in three shifts on the farm ought to have a tan, or at least a hayseed’s burned neck like Mutton’s. But her face was as pale as her delectable chest.

“When you and Paige were waiting for T. D.,” she said, her eyes watering from the alcohol, “did you ever wonder if you really wanted her?”

“I thought we had a rule.”

“Make an exception. I just let you conquer the world.”

Moping around in a funk about his family, this wasn’t what Cooper had in mind for the evening. He’d spent four years practicing ways to keep his beloveds from appearing at all. But now that Lira had summoned the demon of his past he couldn’t avoid a memory of T. D. that had become the image of her he cherished the most. Barely four years old, she’s demanded the halter rope so she can lead Cooper’s paint gelding into the arena all by herself. “Rolex, whoa!” she commands in her big voice, glaring up into the gelding’s eyes as if she could hypnotize the animal, which was twenty times her size. “You go when I say!”

“Before doesn’t matter,” Cooper told Lira. “After she was born I couldn’t remember what it was like without her. Why are you doing this to me?”

Lira shrugged.

“It must be ticking.” Cooper asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, your biological clock.”

She removed the cigar from her mouth and looked at the wet end of it. “Will you go tomorrow and help me get my battery, Dr. Spock?”

“What’s in it for me?”

She smiled at him again. Two smiles in one night, he thought. It must be a record. At last now he had a drinking buddy.

“Whatever you want,” she said.

Lira woke up with a start. Her sheet was soaked with sweat. Although the dream had been vivid, almost electric, it was already fading. She memorized just the tail end of it before it evaporated completely. She’d been in the park again, that same sunny park, or a version of it. But in this version there had been another woman present, looking down with admiration at something in Lira’s possession, something she was pushing before her. It wasn’t the liquid events of the dream that stayed with Lira like the fumes from Augie’s Shine, it was its texture, the emotional valence, her pride in the thing the other woman admired. And also her anxiety about it.

She decided that it must have been merely a worry dream about the big Everready. Beside her in the bed Cooper snored slightly, his red hair splayed across his pillow like the consequence of a motel suicide.

Or maybe it was a dream about the end of one life and the beginning of another. She wrapped her robe around herself, grabbed her flashlight, and went to the urinals. She opened the door to a small closet opposite the big one where she kept her shortwave, and began plowing through the boxes stacked inside. Tampons, Ace bandages, Q-tips, corn patches, pregnancy testing kits, she swept the cartons from the shelves into a pile at her feet and kept at it till she found what she was looking for.

It was a small white metal box that once contained ten delicious Balkan Sobranie cigarettes manufactured in England ($9.95 from the Import Depot). Until her dream, she’d completely forgotten about hiding it here two years ago. As she opened it her fingers felt like they were vibrating. Inside were two small purple pills. She swallowed one without ceremony, returned the other one to the tin, and slipped the tin in the pocket of her robe.

After the First Store War, when Sears was running out of their limited supply of drugs ransacked from ProntoCare, Lira had been the chief push to send out a patrol to the nearest pharmacies in the area, the Bloomington Walgreens and the dispensary at the hospital. But they were too late--these places had been looted and burned. However, Lira had used the protection of the patrol to swing by her apartment on Old Shakopee Road, on the pretext of retrieving a few of her things. Although the building had been looted, she found her drugs safely tucked away in their valise, hidden above the ceiling tiles of a closet.

She’d been super vigilant about concealing the existence of her own private stash, which she’d collected from over-medicated patients and unguarded vials since the day she graduated from nursing school at the U of Minnesota (Go Gophers!) Without this pharmacopia the last four years would have been unbearable. And anyway, it was her personal possession, and none of their business.

When she climbed back into bed Cooper woke up. “What?” he said, half asleep.

“Bad dream.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “For the time being.”
   
Poem, "Storm Warnings," by Adrienne Rich, from A Change of World (1951)


CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR  When Cooper unplugged the big gel-cell the lights in the farm flickered, then dulled like execution night in a prison flick.

Mutton winced as if he’d been hit with a rock. “The deal was an hour.”

“And an hour it will be,” Cooper said, lifting the battery into Lira’s shopping cart. As she wheeled it to the door Mutton took Cooper aside.

“We haven’t tried to force our faith on anyone, Ruth and me.”

Holy moley, Cooper thought. Now what?

Mutton forced a wad of faded pamphlets into Cooper’s hand. “Anyway, we think these might be of some comfort. Guidance, you might say.” He glanced at Lira. “If trouble starts up.”

The portrait on the top tract showing a beneficent blue-eyed Jesus radiating halos from his head like smoke rings from Lira’s cigar. This bearded, long-haired weirdo bore a strong resemblance to Blue Josh, Cooper thought, except for the knife-fighting scar BJ bore across his forehead. “I thought you guys were Baptists or something. Methodists.”

“We belong to the Church of the Lutheran Hour,” Mutton said in that unctuous Sunday voice he’d been developing lately. “But the truth is, our hearts have been turning to the Kingdom Hall.”

Cooper edged away. Jeez, as if he didn’t have enough to fret about. “Well, thanks. I’ll take a look at these as soon as I can.”

“Okay?” Mutton seemed unwilling to let Cooper off the hook without a more zealous commitment. Although tan and fit-looking, the farmer also looked wasted. His eyes were rimmed with the redness of deep fatique.

“Bradley, let me lean on someone to spell you for a night,” Cooper offered.

“Cannot do it,” Mutton said. “Got to get these new taters sprouted.”

“Maybe then?”

“We’ll see.”

“The Watchtower?” Lira said when they were out in the hall.    
    
“What can I say? We need him.”

“Pop quiz: How many stairs are there on the Stairway to Heaven?”

“One hour,” Cooper said. “Let’s not make Mutton any weirder than we have to.”

Cooper went back to his rooms to stock up on ball bearings for his slingshot and fresh batteries for his headlight so he could do the night’s final perimeter check. He withdrew his talkie and informed Middle Josh, who had pulled sentry duty, that he was going to do a quick patrol of the north lots outside. It was only eight p.m., and Cooper usually waited till after midnight to make his rounds, but everyone was acting so weird, Lira included, that he was feeling a tad bit jumpy himself. He wanted the minimum reassurance that in terms of the enemy, all was well.

“You want back-up, master?” Middle Josh said.

“No, just keep your talkie close.”

Cooper made his way through the parking garage to the hatch, and locked it behind him. For four years, night in Minnesota had been as lifeless and lightless as a mine shaft. But out of habit he looked up at the outdoor thermometer above the hatch. The hand was pointing at twenty-three. That would make this the warmest night in more than four years.   He reached up and tapped the needle to make sure it was working. It didn’t budge. He locked the door behind him and began moving with the stealth they all practiced as second nature, stopping every few steps to look and listen. It was probably just because of the steady state of his anxiety the last months, but he began to feel a presence behind him. He went on a few steps, then whirled around. There was nothing following him, of course, and he felt silly immediately. But after a while he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something different about tonight, that the frozen air harbored more than just the acrid stink of the car seats Aqua Josh was burning in the incinerator.

Near the loading docks he heard it—a sibilant hiss, like the tuneless whistle of a hobbyist sorting sandpapers. He crouched down to slip a ball bearing into the strap of his slingshot.
“Yo, Josh,” he whispered into his talkie.

“Yeah?”

“I’m at the docks. Come running if I yell.”

“Yes, master.”

Cooper tried to guess the source of this white noise, one improbable image replacing another: One, Macy’s had built a drill that could bore through brick. Of course, that wouldn’t get the bastards anywhere because Sears had reinforced all of its most vulnerable parts by building new buttresses inside the flimsy curtain walls of the store from rebar, cement and rubble. These bastions were now three feet thick in most places, and even four, in others.

Two, a geyser or a lava plume hadpunched to the surface through a crack opened by last week’s quake. Probably not.  More likely, the noise was coming from a ruptured gas pipe. He’d seen this before, here and there around the neighborhoods. Pressing himself against the wall he began moving towards the sound, heading northeast, his hand gripping his slingshot. The whistling grew louder. Finally, at the corner where the wall headed back to the southwest, the whistling became a low howl. Cooper took a couple of breaths and let the adrenalin hop up his blood. Then he pushed himself around the corner, ready for mayhem.

The force that met him there stripped the hood of his parka from his head and flooded his eyes with tears. He raised his arm against its power and dropped into a crouch. What the hell was this?

And then he understood.

It was wind. That old west wind, the ancient force that once blew the weather from left to right day after day, millennium after millennium, from Oregon across the Rockies through Wyoming and past a thousand miles of prairie to this very place. Cooper turned his face to it and pulled off his gloves so he could feel it against his hands. He took in a great lungful of this bright fresh air.

The wind suddenly stopped. After a moment it gusted again, this time from the east. And then it was gone. The night dropped back into its monstrous silence. He turned off his headlight and looked up into the pitch black.

There was a chance that this had been a hallucination. Or that he was dreaming. It wouldn’t be the first time his unconscious has trespassed on his conscious. It happened to everyone at Sears from time to time. Maybe the confusion was caused by malnutrition, or maybe there was so little going on in the world these days your mind decided to amuse itself.

But the sting on his hands and his face seemed real. So if it was real was this wind a fluke, Mother Earth’s last gasp, a death rattle? Or was it living proof the world was waking up at last? Were the clouds going to lift and let the sun shine down on their ruined, arid lives? And if this was a first breath, if it meant a change was going to come, would the sun break through in time to save them?

He called Middle Josh and told him he’d be home in five minutes. For the first time in ages Cooper knew he was going to be struggling all night not with despair, but with the assassin that is hope.


CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE  Now that trade day had come and gone, and Augie’s latest batch of Shine had done its duty and bought Sears the protein it needed to survive another month, he was spending a long, dreamy evening with Spider.

First they wore themselves out with some love in the standing position. Then they filled her big tub with hot water, lit a dozen pine-scented candles, and took a long, narcotic soak.

“Ready for some angel rain?” he asked after a while.

“Ooh, yes, please.”

He grabbed a plastic pitcher and filled it. Standing between her long, outspread legs he poured down a precise stream of warm water. She closed her eyes and brought her knees to her chest and writhed under this waterfall, lifting her bottom and pushing herself at him. When he was midway through the third pitcher she moaned and cried out and brought him down inside her to finish the good work the water had begun.

Later, they dressed in matching grey hooded sweatshirts with the Los Angles Dodgers logo on the front. Spider had hidden these during the Second Store War, putting them away for the inevitable time when Augie would be hers. She made him a dinner of ramen, anchovies, smoked baby clams, and pickled okra. She fed him the clams on toothpicks, one at a time, watching carefully as he ate. It was the best meal he’d eaten in more than three years. He knew it was a betrayal of Sears for him to be feasting like this when other people were dieting. And he knew he ought to tell Cooper and Lira the truth about where he was spending his evenings. But this special time he had with Spider wasn’t going to last forever. Besides, she promised that when she was ready to move in with him she would open her storerooms to everyone.

After dinner, with Niger sleeping between them on the bed, he read to her aloud from one of her fave books, a biography of Joan of Arc. She made him read the part three times about the battle of Orleans, laughing with pleasure each time Joan stormed the ramparts, waving a banner, and leading her troops to victory even though she’d been wounded in the shoulder by an arrow. Then they got dressed, grabbed their lawn chairs, and went out for a home show. Niger followed them at a distance down the black tunnels, his claws clicking on the concrete.

“So who is it tonight?” he whispered. “Ursula?”

“Sir, no, sir!”

“The Trumps?”

“No again. Did you know they play strip bridge?”

“Not till now.”

“Yeah, then they all do it. Afterwards they play bridge again till they’re dressed.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing a little of that.”

“Well, it’s pretty much fun to watch. I’ll take you sometime. But tonight we’re going to see something else.”

“What’s the big secret?”

“You’ll know soon enough.”

After a while they stopped at a spot in a utility tunnel that looked like any other place in the back alleys of the Mall. While Augie unfolded their lawn chairs Spider fitted her scope into the wall. Then she turned off her headlamp. They passed the time waiting for the show to begin by necking and feeling each other up.

After a while they heard a key in a lock. And then the creaking of a door opening and closing. There was a flicker of light on their wall. An image gradually came into focus as tonight’s featured performer lit more candles.

Augie sat up. This wasn’t Macy’s. It was Sears! And not just Sears, but the apartment of Augie’s ex, a place where he’d spent more nights than he cared to count, mired in frustration, longing, ecstasy and confusion made even more complex by the knowledge that on those rare togethers when she deigned to share herself, Lira could be sweeter than his Nanna’s Sachertorten and as impetuous as a sack of Tijuana fireworks.

“Spider, no,” he whispered. “Let’s go home.”

She laid the back of her her wrist on her forehead and waggled her fingers. “Chicken?” 

He watched as Lira pushed her shopping cart, which bore the monster gel-cell Augie had scavanged from Nordstrom. So here was the reason she’d been slaving for Mutton, he thought. How droll—Augie had risked his life for that battery, she ends up with it anyway, and he didn’t even get laid. In the past this would have qualified as a first-degree bummer. But ever since Spider came into his life Augie felt like the old Augie, the happy-go-lucky, live-and-let-live Augie who took everything he could from life, the genius behind the Amazing & Versatile Food Suit, the unquenchable super salesman from before The Shit Hit The Fan.

Lira sat on her bed in that state of suspended animation Augie knew so well, staring her thousand-yard stare. Augie began to fidget. After an eternity of this really boring torpor she shook her head as if coming out of a trance, and reached into her breast pocket. She stared at the thing for a moment, then put it in her mouth and washed it down with the dregs of the Gatoraid on her nightstand. A wave of shivering passed over her, and she rubbed her narrow shoulders. Finally, she stood up and wheeled her shopping cart out of sight. He heard keys in the door of the closet where she kept her stupid shortwave, then the clatter of a dead bolt as she locked the door from inside.

“She’ll be in there forever,” Augie whispered. “Let’s split.”

An image suddenly washed across his brain.

“What,” Spider said.

“You watched us, didn’t you,” he said. “Me and Lira. You sat right here and you spied on us.”
“So?”

Despite himself, Augie was aroused. Of course almost everything Spider said and did aroused him.

“And you watched Cooper and her too, didn’t you?”

“Coop, get back in here and finish what you started.”

Augie was astounded at her perfect imitation of Lira’s night voice. “Spying on people?” he said. “When they think they’re alone, it’s wrong.”

Spider smiled her Spider smile. “Why?”

“Ever heard the word voyeur?”

“No. But I’ve read it. That’s how you say it?”

“Peeping Tom? Pervert?”

Spider rolled her eyes.

“It’s about privacy,” Augie said. “How would you like it if people spied on you in the toilet?”

“How else am I supposed to learn things?”

“You got a whole room full of books.”

“There’s nothing in my books about this.”

“About what?” he teased.

She eased from her chair onto his and wrapped her legs around him. “About . . . this.”

Just as they were finishing making love, a hand over each other’s mouth, meeting each other in perfect unison, they heard Lira’s closet door open. When they were finally able to catch their breath they eased back into their chairs and tried to return some order to their clothes.

Cooper’s big battery lived up to its name. The moment Lira turned on the shortwave she could sense that there was more power coursing through the air than there’d been in months.  A wavelet of nausea passed over her. And then she sighed with pleasure as her brain was flooded with what might be the very last chemical glow she would ever experience. Smiling, she tuned first, as always, to the frequency once used by Patrick Zhao in California. But, as always, there was nothing on his band except static. She reached for the microphone and tuned the set to the King of New Orleans. When the crackle from the speaker quieted to a hush she knew he was on the air. And then there he was, reciting a poem that made her light-headed.

The years have been kind, they tell me, not that many,
enough to carve an accent where longing
should leave a mark, and where the steady
business of imagining has etched these lines.

Looking there at the end of a day like so many others,
I left behind what was and what is.
The colors shifted. The air moved.
And I felt you standing next to me.

How to make a place for you.
How to think of twice instead of once.
It’s not that I can’t do these things, I can.
There’s a room here for every purpose.

But just as you will see again after not seeing,
and hear again after not hearing,
will I feel the terror, as well,
of being a new thing in a new world?

And following on the heels of that, before she could speak, was another poem. When he was finished with it Lira held her breath. For a moment, despite the sense of order only Valium can bring, she thought she might throw up again.

There were three raps on her apartment door, the one-long-and-two shorts that Lira’s lovers used. When she opened it Cooper went straight for the shelf where she now kept the Shine and took a pull right from the bottle. He began snapping his fingers. Augie leaned forward. All of Cooper’s tics were fraught with meaning. Pacing meant he was planning. Whistling meant he was angry. This snapping was an advisory that he was excited about something, that a major policy announcement was eminent. Spider leaned forward as well.

And so did Lira. “Speak, Fido.”

Cooper began pacing. Six tiles south to Lira’s Turkish throw rug ($980 from Carpeteria), six tiles east to her sideboard (a not-for-sale piece of “decor” from the displays at Upscale), six tiles north . . .

Smoking a Marlboro, Lira held up her recorder. “Whatever. You need to hear this.”

Cooper retraced his steps and stopped at the sideboard. He took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “Four weeks.”

What?”

“Maybe six.”

Lira put her thumbs to her temples. “Try again. Nothing’s coming in.”

“You saw the numbers.”

Lira stared at him. Then she understood. She’d known for some time what Cooper’s numbers meant, but so what? Until tonight it seemed that there was nothing anyone could do about it, so it was pointless for her to discuss with him what was there in black and red.

“In five weeks,” he said, “you and me and all of us are going to begin starving to death.”
Augie reached for Spider’s hand. He wasn’t surprised at this news, but he was disappointed—just when his life had begun to get back on track. Oh, Cooper was probably right. When it came to things involving numbers Cooper was always right.

“Yeah, well, boo-hoo,” Lira said. She held up her recorder. “You’ve got to listen to this.”
“Did you hear me? Unless we find a shitpile of batteries there won’t be any more light for the farm and then there won’t be any more food. Period. That’s the bad news.”

“I know.”

Cooper took another pull from the bottle. “Good news is we still got plenty of Shine.”

“Coop, listen. There is something we can do about it.”

“Invade Macy’s? There’s no way in. You know this.”

“But there is a way out.”

“What, draw them into the streets? Ambush them? Like Custer?”

She waited for his rant to wear itself out.

“How do you figure to get more than a couple of them outside?” he pushed on. “Issue chits for one free fuck on Killebrew Drive? Besides, if we killed all the bastards Sears isn’t big enough to run the farm and their feedlots plus keep our incinerator going and theirs too, and then go out every day on patrol.”

Lira looked at him. “You’re not listening.”

Cooper pushed on. “Anyway, whatever’s left in their inventory right now would only stall what’s going to happen.”

“Macy’s is no longer a factor,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

Lira punched her recorder and the room suddenly filled with the honeyed FM radio voice of the King of New Orleans.

Moving by day
Concealed at night
Edging south
Along the old levee road
Away from the hills
And the dead delta towns
They stopped to rest
And my Teresa
Lifting her azure eyes
To the low press of heaven
Saw the clouds pull apart
And there it shone
A beacon, a beckoning,
The shine of creation
Streaming down
From a hole in the sky
           
Cooper stared at the recorder. He could feel the glow of windburn on his forehead. His gaze fell on the Risk board. He touched a point in the Midwest where the Twin Cities used to be. Then he drew his finger toward the blue of the Caribbean. In the candlelight his finger cast a shadow in four directions.

“Think about it, Coop. Sunlight!”

He took another hit on his bottle and handed it to Lira. “Let’s get drunk.”


CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX   The moment Augie and Spider stepped onto the floor of the Big Room Betty screamed. Then the young lovers were mobbed. People were too terrified of Spider and Thumper to get within thumping range. But because of the power this exotic stranger evidently possessed in order to have gotten to Sears from anywhere, they were drawn to her. Ruth emerged from the kitchen to see what the commotion was all about, then disappeared, returning a moment later with Mutton, who promptly fainted. Only Mango dared enter Spider’s air space, dangling Bob Smith by his tattered foot. “Did you bring a Kit Kat?”

“Next time, Mango,” Spider said, switching Thumper to her other hand so she could find the girl a stick of Monster Gum.

Lira and Cooper showed up last. They bore the frazzled weariness of a married couple who’d spent the night bickering about money.

“What the hell,” Cooper said.

“That was my first reaction, too.” Augie said.

Lira stared at the girl, her eyes widening as the buzz around Spider grew. Then she poked her cigar at the girl. “This is, you know, this is . . . ”

“Good,” Augie said. “Me, I’m so dense it took me a week to see it.”

Betty edged closer and raised her hand to Spider’s face.

“Ernie Clovis,” Lira said.

“Say hello,” Augie said, “to Genevieve Anne Clovis.”

“Hello,” Spider said, looking hard at each person, as if trying to memorize them, although she already knew everyone by heart.

“You can call her Jenna. But she likes you to call her Spider.”

Muttering astounded exclamations, the crowd edged closer. “No way,” Aqua Josh said.

“Are you blind?” Lira said. “Look at her!”

And so they did. They stared at her and they walked around her and they sniffed the strange wild perfume of her exalted person. Ruth helped Mutton to his feet and they brandished their Bibles so that this messenger of God would see their piety.

Betty put her hand on Spider’s arm and wept. “She’s so clean!” Betty and Ernie had once been an item. Of course, Betty and everyone had once been an item.

Finally, Cooper asked the million-dollar question. “Spider, where’s your Dad?”

Spider waved her hand sadly at the larger world. “I wish I could know.”

“We need him.”

“Tell me about it.”

“How did you get here?”  
    
“What do you mean, Cooper?”

“Where did you come from?”

Mango and the other kids clustered around Spider’s long legs and began pulling her toward the kitchen to play action figures. “See, the thing is?” she said before disappearing with them through the swinging doors. “I’m like you. I was here even before The Shit Hit The Fan.”

When she was gone Augie told Spider’s story, as people sat down around him at the big table. Mother dies, and Ernie, heart-broken, remarries someone to help raise his only child. But Spider can’t stand the woman, and runs away from home. Where she runs to is the Mall, of course, where her Daddy spends his nine-to-fives, which are really eight more like eight-to-tens. It’s at the Mall that she changes her looks, and finds a new way to live.

“What, she moved into the Mall?” Lira asked. Trembling, she pulled the shawl she was wearing tighter across her shoulders and took a long pull from her squeeze bottle of water.

“She found some closets they didn’t use,” Augie said. “She hung there at night. A different one every couple nights.”

“What did she do all day?” Cooper asked.

“Duh, Coop,” Lira said. “It’s the Mall.”

They were quiet for a moment, remembering the bounty and the humanity and the light. Augie found himself salivating at the memory of a steamer cart called Does This Corn Dog Bite? in Bloomingdale’s Food Court.

“Orange Julius,” Middle Josh said.

Cooper shook his head. “Don’t start.”

“Anyway,” Augie said. “After the stores closed she’d go through the tunnels and drop into places through the air ducts. To get stuff.”

“She never got caught?” Cooper said.

“The Mall is big. She was little.”

“And I already knew it by heart.” Spider had returned to the Big Room as quietly as snow falling on water. Augie looked at the wonder on the faces of Cooper and Lira and knew that the girl’s mere presence had given everyone at Sears a second wind. He fell in love with her all over again.

“Didn’t you get lonesome?”

“I was already lonesome.”

“When The Shit Hit The Fan, Daddy was at his job. I got scared and went to him and when he saw it was me he cried again.”

Cooper examined Augie, who was obviously smitten with this orphan. And vice versa.

“Why didn’t he bring you to live with us?” Cooper asked.

“He didn’t trust you. He didn’t trust anyone. Why should he? He thought it would be better if it was just me and him. In our secret places.”

“Why didn’t you come to us after he disappeared?” Lira finally asked.

“I saw the things you did during the fighting. It scared me. You all scared me.” Spider tapped Thumper once on the floor. “Well, not Augie.”

There was a moment of shared glee at the memory of Augie’s battlefield behavior.

“We didn’t have a choice,” Cooper said.

“So now you make a living stealing from us,” Lira said.

“Sometimes. And from Macy’s. Mutton’s tomatoes are out of sight.”

Cooper and Lira could not conceal their horror.

“You’ve been inside Macy’s,” Lira said.

“Every room. Except for the cages it’s not so different.”

“So what are we supposed to do with you?”Cooper asked.

Augie draped his arm around Spider’s shoulders. “We’re getting married.”

With perfect antic timing Lira sprayed the mouthful of water she’d taken.

“You’re all invited to the wedding,” Augie said.

Despite the cramping in her stomach that had come and gone all day Lira was laughing so hard she was gasping.

“Our pattern’s registered at the Pottery Barn.”

When the merriment evaporated Cooper dabbed at his eyes with a lock of his hair. “Seriously, sweetheart, I don’t know how we can feed you.”

“I have my own,” Spider said. She rummaged around in the zippered pockets of her jump suit and produced a tin of kippered herring, which she handed to Cooper, and a cellophane bag of beer nuts she gave to Lira.

“She’s got two rooms full of food,” Augie said. “Refried beans. Ramen.”

“Daddy collected it. It’s like my . . . dowry?” Spider lingered deliciously on the word.

Everyone was salivating. Cooper offered Spider his root beer, but she waved it away. “Hey, I gotta ask you. We hear barking. Have you heard it?”

Lira stared at Augie, who was grinning like a lucky contestant on Wheel of Fortune. She thrust the beer nuts away from her, an object of revulsion, and Betty scooped them up. “Some people think it’s a ghost,” Lira said scornfully, looking at Betty.

Spider took Augie’s hand. “If it’s okay with you guys, can we bring Niger up here to live with us?”


CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN  Cooper turned off his Tiny Lite ($14.95 from Sears) and lowered the legal pad onto which the happy couple had written their simple vows. “May fun and warm water follow you all the days of your lives,” he recited. “May you always have enough to eat. May you never get bored.”

In the torchlit glow that illuminated their bit of protected patio between Sears and the East Parking Garage, where the wedding party had gathered in the midday gloom, Spider was radiant. Just after breakfast Ruth had taken her aside—everyone thought the girl was going to get one of the big woman’s sermons about the debauchery of all creatures with a penis.

Instead, she crafted Spider’s hair into a complex French braid, and then adorned the braid with an orange rose she’d rescued from Mutton’s conversion of the flowerbed to veggies. It was probably the last blossom on earth. The heart-shaped 1.5-carat diamond on Spider’s finger ($19,000 from Carimar), which had been presented on a satin pillow with beaming great pride during the ring ceremony by Mango, flashed with an intense blue fire.

Now, standing in the sight of these witnesses, Spider bore a luminous beauty that reminded Cooper of Paige on their wedding day, although Spider was only fourteen and Cooper had at least waited till Paige graduated high school. Cooper did his best to suppress these negabots: What with all the good will at large aided by extra rations of Shine and the coming feast, it was almost possible to believe that everything might somehow turn out okay. Besides, making guesses about the chemistry of another man’s marriage is a no-win deal. Like the song says, it just goes to show you never can tell.

“And now, by the power vested in me by all of you I now pronounce you husband and wife. You can kiss.”

Spider whooped with delight. When Augie reached out to embrace her Niger barked. Spider jumped into Augie’s arms, put her tongue in his mouth, and wrapped her long legs around him. Her luxurious white silk wedding gown rode up on her thighs, which were wrapped in white cotton tights ($49 from Banana Republic). She’d dreamed of a June wedding with the sun on her face and the perfume of blossoming fruit trees in a sultry prairie breeze, just like the marriage of her cousin that one summer on the lake where her mom grew up. But she was happy enough just to be outdoors for the first time since she’d run off to the Mall all those years ago, even if it was always dark out here and always cold.

And, oh my, at long last she was married to The Augster! Now it was time to devote herself to their honeymoon. Honeymoon! She loved the sound. So what if, you know, no one had actually seen the moon in a very long spell.

Or honey, now that she thought about it.

As people crowded around the happy couple, offering good wishes, eager for something to chase away their blues, the children sang in not too shabby of harmony the wedding song Betty had helped them memorize from the West Side Story CD.

Make of our lives one life,
Day after day, one life.
Now it begins, now we start
One hand, one heart,
Even death won’t part us now.

When Spider and Augie finally unclenched, Lira was the first to congratulate them. Her eyes were red with fatigue. People had been gossping about her, worried at her appearance.
“You can kiss him if you want,” Spider told her. “Go ahead, really. You’re a good kisser.”

And so Lira did. The depth of the goodwill in her embrace surprised Augie, and she was trembling with what Augie believed was deep emotion. He felt sure that Lira would be someone he and Spider would always be able to count on if the going got tough.

Cooper called in the sentries, and everyone began shuffling toward the barricaded entrance to Sears, where a generous wedding dinner awaited them, featuring a small Bisquick cake baked by Ruth, and a long-saved container of French fries they’d taken from the Chili’s on the B Concourse after defeating the last gang holed up in the airport. On the menu was also their penultimate ration of Macy Meat. At least there’d be plenty of Shine. Cooper took Augie aside.
“As usual, you’re one lucky man.”

“Isn’t she something?”

“That she is.”

“You know, we waited till her birthday, till she was legal.”

Cooper couldn’t stop himself from laughing.

“What? Augie said.

“In this state legal is fifteen.”

“No!”

“Don’t sweat it, man. I don’t think the sheriff’s going to find out.”

It was Mutton, pulling sentry duty with Aqua Josh, guarding everyone’s back as they retreated indoors, who saw it first.

Betty shrieked and bit the sleeve of her parka.

And then everyone was back outside pointing and shouting. All of the torches, hunks of pipe wrapped in rags soaked in crankcase oil—were shuddering in a fine little bully of a breeze. And didn’t it seem like there was just a smidge more frozen light creeping under the clouds, seeping across the iced prairie from the thin circle of horizon on every side?

Everyone stared at Cooper.

“We’ll eat,” he said, spreading his hands in a gesture that promised secrets to be revealed. “Then we’ll talk.”

Cardiff and Ursula Malovik were taking a rare day off together from their constant supervision of Macy’s shrinking affairs. Ursula was re-reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, pacing herself because the only things in her library she’d only read once were a history of soccer, an illustrated study of medieval weapons, and an Australian murder mystery called Death Comes a Hoppin’. Her collection of books, modest as it was but still one of the finest in the Mall, occupied a small room that had once been a janitor’s closet, and had come into her possession when Macy’s had terminated that miserable clan at Minnesota Picnic, rednecks, construction go-fers and other no-accounts who had been using the inventory of Barnes & Noble to heat their store.

Cardiff was giving himself a light workout out on his exercise bike. He found that pumping the pedals in a drone-like fashion made his brain work better. And it was also a way to recharge the two car batteries they used to run their VCR-television setup and the CD player they played from time to time on special occasions, such as now, when the lush piano of Prokofiev’s Tocatta in D Minor filled the apartment and made it possible to believe you were somewhere else.

As the final chord sounded and faded away they heard it. It was a quiet moan, an unearthly rising and falling he’d never heard before. For a moment he wondered if there was trouble in the cages. Then, although he had never been one to dwell on his health, he wondered if this was how an aneurysm started, or a stroke. But the moans were real, and they were coming from the ceiling.

Ursula rose from her rocking chair, and her book fell to the floor. “Cardiff?”

He wiped his brow with a towel, grabbed his flashlight and trained it on the ceiling. There. It was coming from the vent. He strained to remember where this air passage emerged, and recalled that it went all the way to the roof above Level Four.

He sighed with fatigue. But there was no choice. Although this noise was probably just something settling after the last quake, one of those groans the big building issued from time to time, he’d have to go up there and investigate.

As he emerged onto the roof something in the subfreezing air made his eyes water. But he forgot his discomfort the moment he heard the moans again. He crouched, feeling his heart race, and withdrew the .38. He moved past a row of air conditioning units toward the sound.
Just as he located the vent he felt a cold sting on his face. His lifted his hand to his cheek. And there it was: A sharp breeze, the first stirring of air he’d felt in four years, was keening across the vent’s grated hood. Thoroughly weary, he sat down in the dirty ice on the roof and listened to the moan and turned his face to the wind. Was it possible? After all this time could it be that the world might finally be waking up? Or was this just some hiccup, a passing belch of meteorological colic?

His talkie sputtered to life. “Card?” Sula called out. “Are you alright?”

Well, there was no longer any choice, he decided. Ursula would have to be told the whole story. He needed her counsel. And now more than ever he needed to share the burden of knowledge with someone. He covered the moaning vent with a scrap of sheet metal to shut it up.

When he was finished with his report Ursula leaned back and drummed her fingers on the arm of her rocking chair. She agreed with Cardiff that the meaning of this change in the weather was unclear, if that’s what it was. But she already knew about the failing economy, although she had kidded herself into believing that things weren’t quite this bad. She laid out the possibilities in her mind. Even if one didn’t choose to believe that the wind was a sign this endless winter was almost over, their eminent starvation required action.

Finally, she got up and went to her library. She came back with Medieval Siege Warfare, flipping through the pages, and handed it to him. The crude techonology it outlined now seemed like the only choice. Cardiff stared at her.

“What’s this?”

She surprised him by singing. “Don’t know much about the Middle Ages. Looked at the pictures and turned the pages.”

They laughed together quietly, touching hands, sharing this private joke.

Even without explosives or firepower, Cardiff saw immediately, here was mayhem for the most demanding of palates. Take the assault on Beaucaire in Provence during the First Crusade of the 13th Century, for example. Although the battering ram used there against Islam would certainly be violent enough to smash a hole in any modern masonry you could name, all that noisy and repetitive pounding lacked the shock and awe he knew would be the key to his plan. Plus, Macy’s had already attempted once to breach the curtain walls of Sears, with disastrous results. He also rejected the ballista, the enormous crossbow built onto into a heavy wooden platform that Philip II of France used to rain terror on Chateau Gaillard in 1203. While this thing would be relatively easy to build, and the arrow it fired—the size of a blunt-headed javelin—would easily drive a hole through a brick wall, the hole would be too small to provide instant passage for the sort of blitzkrieg Cardiff had in mind. Donny, of course, would enjoy the ballista—when the Vikings laid siege to Paris in 885 the French defenders firing on them from the parapets skewered four of the smelly bastards with one arrow, like chickens on a spit.

Donny would probably fall in love with the trebuchet as well, an enormous siege engine that was used to hurl two-hundred pound boulders a fifth of a mile, or launch a dead horse over a hundred-foot wall, where the fevers that killed the poor beast would spread among the troops holed up on the other side. And Donny would certainly savor a story told by a chronicler named Froissart, who wrote that at the siege of Auberoche in 1345 a messenger captured sneaking out of the fortress was forced into the sling of a trebuchet and shot back over the walls, his letters undelivered.

But, then, who wouldn’t have hours of fun with the thunder and drama of the trebuchet? For Cardiff’s purposes, however, it was overkill—the drawing showed a massive wood and iron sling twenty-five feet high and fifty feet long. Even if they could somehow find enough material to build this behemoth they didn’t have the time. A war machine must be ready for combat a week from today, on March 11, two days before the next trading session.

He went back to the chapter on catapults. These monsters operated on the principle of torsion—twist or bend certain materials and they’ll spring back to their original shape with a force that can be harnessed to reap some serious carnage. He turned to a nice one that was used to attack Lisbon in 1147. Facing it was a beauty used at the siege of Acre in 1189—that one hurled great balls of fire.

When Cardiff turned the page he found the answer. It was a catapult used during a rare winter siege during Christmas in 1137 by King Stephen of England against Miles de Beauchamp, who was garrisoned in Bedford Castle. The thing operated like a giant mousetrap. A heavy 15-foot arm bearing a round cup on one end was torsioned with two flat metal springs built into a timbered framework. The arm was winched back and a stone ball three feet in diameter was rolled onto the cup. When the chock holding the arm in place was smacked free with a mallet the arm sprang forward, collided with a crosspiece wrapped with rope to protect it from the arm, and the boulder was propelled with enormous force towards its unlucky target.

This war wolf was doable—it was only eight feet high at the crosspiece, and twenty feet long. Best of all, it was built on runners so it could be pushed into place across the ice. Cardiff didn’t know exactly what they’d use for materials; all the lumber in the Mall not holding up a wall or a ceiling had been burned for heat. But they could go out on expedition yet again and probably find something. And there was certainly plenty of steel lying around Camp Snoopy. If Ernie Clovis hadn’t disappeared last year he’d have something pounded together in a night. Well, goddamnit, Cardiff didn’t have Clovis, but he did have this schematic drawing, and he had Jack and Tomo Trump, who were somewhat handy. Failure wasn’t an option. They’d simply have to make it work.

Cardiff wasn’t certain yet about what they should do once they punched a hole or two in Sears. They wouldn’t want to use fire, because that might destroy resources. But since there was no longer enough food for everyone, some of the enemy would have to be eliminated. But afterwards, when they had taken the survivors prisoner, some hard choices would have to be made. If they survived the attack Mutton and possibly Ruth should be kept around because of their country skills. Although if they resisted working for their new masters, they wouldn’t be worth the trouble. The four children, of course, would be spared. They don’t eat much anyway. And then as an incentive to bring out the very worst in Donny, Cardiff would offer him Lira as a spoil of war. The others, Cooper, Augie, the Joshes? Execution, of course. Macy’s would move into Sears, because that’s where Mutton’s secret gardens were, and new accommodations would be built to house Macy’s factory, the cages, and the Warehouse.

Cardiff’s plan was dangerous, but short of mass suicide or yielding to starvation, what choice did they have?


CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT  Cooper knocked back his Shine and rapped his glass on the table to call for order. He didn’t need to marshal anyone’s attention. Even though the day should have belonged exclusively to Augie and Spider, all eyes were on the master.

“I don’t know what the wind is all about,” he said. “Maybe it means something, maybe it means nothing. It could be gone tomorrow. But here’s the real deal.” He pulled a candle tree closer so they all could see the legal pad on which he had gridded a graph. On that graph he had drawn two curved lines, each moving from west to east, one red and the other green, across a grid numbered along the edges side to side and top to bottom. He pointed to the green line.

“This is our food.” He pointed to the red. “This is how much food I figure we need just to stay alive.”

Everyone edged closer for a better look. “What’s it mean that they cross?” Middle Josh asked.

Lira gestured toward Ruthie and Mutton with her cigar. “Sinners, prepare to meet thy maker.”
“How long?” Aqua Josh asked.

“Five or six weeks,” Cooper said.

“This sucks,” Blue Josh said. “I say we hit Macy’s.”

There was a babble of agreement Cooper quieted with a finger to his mouth. “Hey, guys, we’ve been over this. There’s no way in. And no way to draw the bastards out. But you know me: I’m open to new ideas.”

Betty gestured at the wedges of untouched Macy Meat on the plates of the newlyweds. “You guys going to eat that?”

They pushed their plates across the table. Betty wanted dearly to immediately wolf the pitiful gray slabs herself, but reluctantly cut them into tiny pieces instead and offered them around.
“There’s another way,” Lira said.

Middle Josh chewed his little wad of meat and wiped his greasy hand on his mohawk. “Choose straws and eat each other?”

“No, you dork. We leave.”

People groaned. Like the frontal assault, this was old news, a tired option they had been all over many times before.

“Play it,” Cooper said.

People jumped when Lira turned on her recorder. The room was flooded with the deep, rich voice of the King of New Orleans, reciting in his langorous delta twang his most recent tranmission. Because there was no audio at Sears people had not yet heard, nor video they had not yet seen, the sound of this stranger came as a minor surprise in a day already full of major jolts.

A flurry from the sea.
A rush of wings.
The shadow of a chevron
ghosting the fields.
An arrow on the lake,
Pointing north to you.
But I swear,
Until you stand before me,
This turning season
Can’t feel like anything
Except ice in my blood.

“This is your guy?” Blue Josh said. “He sounds like a fruit.”

“This fruit might just save your life,” Lira said. She played a medley of select broadcasts from the King that told about the end of this endless winter. And there was a poem that hinted at the stores of food and medicine he had managed to accumulate. 

“You’re guessing,” Blue Josh said. “This is like high school, man. Where you had to analyze the fucking poem? What do the birds mean? Are the snowy woods a metaphor for death? We should take a risk like this because you got a B in lit?”

“What’s the choice?” Lira shot back. “What if he’s telling the truth? What if he does have all that stuff? What if he has seen the sun?”

Blue Josh shrugged. “Then maybe the sun’s going to come out here. Maybe that’s what the wind means. It’s gonna blow these clouds away.”

Betty suddenly beamed. “Maybe the sun’s already out!”

Middle Josh and Embry ran with her to throw open the door. But when they saw nothing but the usual gloom outside they pulled shut the door and slumped back to their seats.

Cooper addressed the crowd. “Look, even if it came out tomorrow bright as a baboon’s butt it’d take us six weeks to build an atrium and grow a crop of anything. Whether taters or oats or even, you know, spinach. Am I right, Bradley?”

Mutton nodded.

“How can you even be sure this guy even lives in New Orleans?” Blue Josh asked. “And where? It’s a big city.”

Lira reversed her tape, watching the numbers on the counter till she got to the right place. The room was washed in a song everyone knew.

Don’t remember much about my baby days,
But I been told
We used to live on Chestnut in the Garden District
close to the Sugar Bowl.
Mama used to wheel me past an ice cream wagon
One side for White and one side for Colored.
I remember trashcans floating down Canal Street
It rained every day one summer.

“Okay, are you saying we should just, like, walk to Louisiana?” Aqua Josh said. “That would take months.”

“I know,” Cooper allowed. “Two miles an hour. Maybe three. Even if we could put in eight hours a day, which I doubt we could manage, it’s 1200 miles. Walking would take us at least two months, maybe three.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is we’re not going to walk.”

“Hey, Coop, we don’t know how to fly,” Aqua Josh said.

“Yeah, we know how to skate, don’t we?”

Everyone was smitten by the obvious. “Hey,” Cooper said, standing. “Are we not Minnesotans?”

“What about all our food?” Betty asked. “The farm.”

“Yeah,” Middle Josh said. “We’ve got to take our produce, man. All the plants. And all the Shine.”

“And we’ll need our weapons and clothes and shit,” Aqua Josh said.
“My dolls!” Mango cried.

Cooper held up his hands to restore order. “Well, I was thinking about a big sled, bigger than the one we use on patrol. This would be sort of a stagecoach on runners. You know, like Santa Claus. We could put what’s left of the farm inside with some space heaters and some Gro-Lites and batteries.”

He looked around. This image had obviously not captured the complete imagination of Sears. The fact being, someone would have to pull the damn thing.

It was Spider who broke the anxious silence. “That’s a good idea, Coop. But there’s maybe another way?”

As Cardiff predicted, Donny was smitten with the drama of the trebuchet, the high adventure and delectable carnage it represented. For three wild nights and days he threw his entire bloodthirsty self into its construction, putting down his hammer and his epoxies only to work his shifts at the cages, and to catch a few zees. He was driven, of course, by the agreeable pictures in his mind of the destruction at hand, the fall of Sears, the killing of Augie, or at least the bastard’s enslavement. But what really excited him were certain one-act vignettes featuring Lira pacing helplessly in her cage, fearing Donny but desiring him as well, clad in various of the skimpy outfits Donny had been collecting for two years by way of scavenge and barter. He thought of the red silk nighty from Victoria’s Secret.

The war engine he pounded together in congress with the Barnetts and the Trumps was not as elegant looking as the one in Cardiff’s book, but it would prove to be just as deadly.
It was midnight when they finally finished their work.

“Let’s fire this baby up,” Donny said, stepping back to admire the thing.

Cardiff stifled a yawn “There’ll be plenty of time for that tomorrow.”

The Barnetts took Donny’s side, sensing a groundswell of popular opinion that might allow them to get away with some liberating insubordination. “Come on, Card,” Sharone said. “Let’s see what this bastard can do.” Cardiff made note of this insurrection, but was willing to let it go in the interests of encouraging the enthusiasm of his troops for battle.

The trebuchet was inert and very heavy, being a collection of many glued- and hammered-together two-by-fours torn from the walls of a condo way out up on 82nd Street, which Macy’s had taken considerable risks to deconstruct. Their ropes strained with the effort it took to slide the monster across the floor of the store over a slippery bed of glossy women’s magazines Ursula, Sharone and Snarlin Marlin had only reluctantly agreed to donate to the cause. The steel runners of the war engine scoured the glistening, heavily made-up faces of Jennifer Aniston and Britney Spears and many sultry models even skinnier than Mall women as it was inched forward from its drydock to the heavily barricaded door leading to the loading docks outside. But once on the ice they were able to move the thing with relative ease.

The wind was now discernible, no longer a Malovik secret, and bore a subtle mélange of scorch and death wafting from the shattered plain.

They moved the trebuchet to a point a hundred feet from the yellow brick wall of the West Parking garage, and stopped to gather their strength. Then, taking turns at the handle of the heavy winch they found in a construction site, they slowly brought back the beast’s fifteen-foot steel arm, onto which was bolted a saucer-shaped cup they had pounded from a circle of sheet metal. The stressed springs of the catapult emitted a promising whine. When the arm was fully torsioned they returned to Macy’s and the big Home Depot dolly where awaiting them was a two-hundred-pound chunk of blackened concrete reinforced with rebar.

They cajoled this irregularly shaped hunk of rubble onto the war engine’s cup with crowbars and fussed with the rock until it seemed to achieve a certain balance.

Cardiff clapped his gloved hands together in the frigid air, made even colder now by the dip in the chill factor produced by the wind.

“Donald? Would you care to have the honor?”

Grinning lewdly, his forehead glistening, Donny approached the trebuchet and put his hand on the lever that would unleash the dogs of war. He was thinking about trade day, and the Sears bitch that had attacked him in the dark, whom he had decided was Betty. This beating was a humiliation he hadn’t shared with anyone. But it was an act of war he would soon avenge.
“And a one,” he said, “and a two . . . ”

The arm sprung forward and smacked the padded crossbar with a thunderous whump. The trebuchet lurched forward as if it had been back-ended by a truck. Two-hundred pounds of hell were hurled through the darkness with such ferocity no one saw a thing. There was a cataclysmic ceramic crash that produced sparks and fire and smoke.

They sprinted towards this mayhem and shone their lights through the clouds of dust. Because it was a weird shape, the rock had not adhered to the flight path they had planned for it. The rock had not just pulverized a ragged four-foot hole in the front wall, it had been propelled with such force it flew all the way through the parking garage, smashing a hole in the back wall as well. The whole place was littered with shards of broken brick and shredded concrete. Cardiff saw that this monster would reduce any wall to rubble in no time at all.

“Holy shit,” Deek said.

“Indeed,” Cardiff agreed. During the Dark Ages warriors liked to give nicknames to their murderous inventions—the Wicked Neighbor was a famous trebuchet, God’s Hammer a catapult. He decided that Macy’s should have a name for its ultimate weapon, and that Donny should choose it. It would give the boy even more incentive to do what he does so well.
“Well, what are you going to name it?”

Donny was tap dancing with pleasure, feeling more alive than he had in years. “Dick!”
“As in?”

Donny smiled. “You’re screwed.”  [Lyrics by Randy Newman]


CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE  A week before trade day in March, morning dawned with a strange new pinkish tinge. And didn’t it seem as if the heavy quilt of cloud had lifted from the horizon just a smidge? Although it was key that Cardiff focus the attention of his war party on war, like everyone he couldn’t prevent himself from staring across the unending frosty gloom of Minnesota toward this odd light in the east, feeling for the first time in four years that unfounded optimism that only a break in the weather can bring. The wind blew almost constantly, usually just breezing but sometimes gusting hard enough to cartwheel scraps of trash. They watched a shopping cart clatter down 81st Street until it collided with a dump truck.

“All right, people, let’s get with the program,” Cardiff ordered in the mock military diction he employed on expeditions. He handed a rope to Deek Barnett, whose eye had finally healed enough from the damage wrought by Augie Zackheim for him to return to active duty. In fact, every single Macy had been conscripted for this ultimate battle. Even Ursula had committed herself to giving the final calorie of energy to this desperate last-ditch attempt at victory. If for no other reason, she longed to bask in the sun once more before her days were over. Before she grabbed a rope she patted the secret pocket in her sable to make sure her Derringer was in place and ready for action.

Dick resisted for a moment, but with six ropes straining to move the beast, inertia was overcome and they were soon making good progress from Macy’s loading docks across the ice covering the west lots. Although Donny hadn’t slept a wink he was grinning. Partly because of anticipation, and partly because he was drunk. But then, everyone except the Maloviks had been nipping. In the ammo sled were six boulders the size of St. Bernards from the faux rock gardens on the Cedar Avenue side of the Mall. Jack the architect had tweaked this arsenal with a hammer and chisel into shapes that were more or less round, so that they would fly straight and true. Donny anticipated that after only a couple of salvos with these ball-breakers Sears would surrender, and Lira would be his.

With the wind at their backs they soon crossed into Sears territory. Cardiff pulled his Cossack hat tighter on his head and asked Luke Chambers to take point, which he did, nocking an arrow against the string of his bow and striding out to move ahead of Dick. When they closed to within 100 yards of the yellow-bricked northwest wall of Sears, looming above them four stories, they began moving faster. Although this wall was windowless Cooper’s bunch had cut a few long slots in it. During the disastrous attempt two years ago to knock a hole in this wall with a tree trunk attached to the frame of a Volkswagon Beetle, a stock analyst and a college dean had been killed by arrows fired from these slots. Today, however, thanks to Dick, they could inflict massive damage on this superstructure, and they didn’t even need to advance within the range of Cooper’s bowmen, who could certainly fire an arrow 200 yards or more, but couldn’t hit a cement truck unless they were less than 50 yards away from it. So barring several extremely lucky shots—an unlikely scenario—there wasn’t much Sears could offer in the way of resistance.

Sixty yards from the wall Cardiff ordered them to halt. He’d chosen an offensive position behind the shells of three pickups resting on their rims, figuring they could use the wrecks for cover when Sears started firing at them. Everyone needed a moment to catch his breath. Then they swung into action with the practiced choreography of a field artillery crew.

Inside the Mall Allyson and Tomo Trump made their way to the interior entrance of Sears at the intersection of the East Hall and North Hall, positioning themselves so they could shoot anyone who tried to escape. As they waited for the Trumps to check in, Donny took charge of winching back Dick’s big arm. When it was cocked Deek and Luke inched one of the boulders from the ammo sled down a sheet of three-quarter inch plywood into Dick’s launching cup. Cardiff scanned the slots for signs of the enemy.

“What do you think?” he asked Donny.

“Let’s move the crossbar forward a notch so we get more of a line drive. I’m thinking head-high.”

Cardiff sensed that they were being watched, but no arrows flew from Sears. Finally, Ursula’s talkie sputtered to life with news from the Trumps that they were in position. When the adjustments to Dick were made everyone except Donny moved away and brandished their weapons, expecting Sears rabble to pour through the hole there were about to punch through the wall, like bees from a punctured hive, where they’d be greeted with an arrow storm.
“Ready, steady. Away!” Donny screamed, pulling the trigger.

Just as in target practice the rock was hurled with so much force its flight was a blur. But unlike target practice, when the rock hit the wall, only a couple feet from the spot where Donny had aimed, it shattered with an eardrum-wrenching crash, showering the lot with shards. One of these ricocheted fragments hit Deek in the forehead, knocking him to his knees. As Sharone knelt beside him and dabbed at the cut with her sleeve, he gathered her in an embrace and they kissed deeply.

“Stop it,” Ursula told them.

“Jesus Christ,” Donny said. “Get a room.”

Despite the thunder of this fusillade the result was: no hole in the wall. The yellow facade had been pulverized, but Cooper’s bunch had built some kind of barricade behind it. Still, Cardiff was expecting a response from Sears—screaming, curses, a few stray arrows, something. Yet after waiting several minutes, Macy weapons poised for mayhem, nothing moved but the wind.

 Donny began pacing back and forth like zoo wolf.

“Let’s move it closer,” Cardiff suggested. He had weighed the danger but figured that Sears wouldn’t have had the resources to reinforce the whole goddamn wall. “Try for something higher, up in the second story.”

Forty yards from the wall next to a gutted stretch limo, they positioned Dick in such a way that Donny could pull the trigger from inside the relative protection of the big car’s front seat. After they adjusted the crossbar he climbed into the limo while everyone else retreated to the pickups.

The second shot was even more thunderous than the first. When the smoke and dust cleared they saw that the rock had smashed a hole in the wall almost six feet in diameter.
Donny jumped from the car, shaking his fist at the hole. “Who’s yo Dad-dy!” he chanted in a singsong, daring Sears to fire at him. But there was no response. A yellow brick fell from the ragged arch above this hole and clattered onto the pavement.

Over the course of several hours they fired their four remaining boulders, pulverizing a section of wall they could drive a bus through. After they lobbed in their last rock they waited again. And again there was nothing but silence.

“What do you think?” Cardiff asked his wife.

“The only thing to think is it’s a trap,” she said. “If we go in there they’ll jump us.”

Cardiff called on his talkie to Tomo, who reported that all through the house not a creature stirred, not even a mouse. Cardiff took Donny aside.

“How’s Cinq Debutantes going?”

“What does it matter now?” Donny asked.

“Answer the question, son.”

“They’re in the stinky room. Thawed out, by now, I guess. I haven’t checked them in a couple days.”

“Perfect.”

LATER IN THE DAY, still without any sign of resistance from Sears, Cardiff watched the figures of Donny and the undertakers grow larger as they returned from Macy’s with the ammo sled, now bearing a much more yielding load than boulders. When he caught the first whiff of dark high funk his eyes watered. Ursula gagged and put the sleeve of her sable against her nose. Cardiff hoped everyone could keep down the meager field rations they’d eaten before the battle.

He figured they had three hours of light left. And the wind was gusting now with considerable force, lowering the wind chill factor by the moment. They wouldn’t be able to spend the night out here without a fire. But they had nothing within easy reach to burn. So these constraints dictated that their opportunity to force a surrender, as Sears fled from the building, would have to be seized before dark. And before the cadavers froze again.

The bowel of the first girl split open as Donny dragged her from the sled into Dick’s launching disc. The caustic stench of the dark discharge from this lesion caused Gay Trump to vomit. The Barnetts turned away. Donny seemed unfazed, and eagerly adjusted the crosspiece of the trebuchet for another volley.

The corpse whirled through the air like a Frisbee and disappeared neatly into the cavity, hitting inside with the whock of a honeydew dropped on asphalt.

Macy’s waited for a few moments. But when there was no white flag or cries for mercy, they fired another girl, this one a big blonde. After she was launched, a slaughterhouse reek saturated the air before the wind blew it away. But as before, there was no movement from the store.

Donny went berserk. Before they could stop him he charged headlong at the wall. “You buttwad motherfuckers,” he shrieked. “Get your candy asses out here!”

As if summoned, a figure suddenly appeared in the ruins. Macy’s raised their bows in unison. Cardiff fumbled for his pistol.

“Goddamn!” the figure called down, coughing. They saw now in the fading light that this was no demon from Sears.

Cardiff lowered his pistol. “Tomo? What’s the story?”

“Boss,” the engineer yelled down. “Ain’t nobody here but us yellow people.”


CHAPTER THIRTY   As Sears glided down the Minnesota River in their trio of iceboats the only colors in this ruined gray floodplain were the elegant red nylon sails straining against the wind and the green tell-tales streaming from the top of the masts. The blades under the outriggers issued contented sighs, and so did Spider. Cradled in Augie’s arms, bundled up under comforters in the second boat, she had never been happier. She would have enjoyed necking with her husband, of course—after all, they were on their honeymoon!—but they’d wrapped their faces and necks with heavy scarves to ward off the windchill, and she was wearing her football helmet for safety. So they made eyes and thought of nothing but the adventure that lay ahead and the new lives waiting for them at the end of this journey. This was Spider’d first visit outside Minnesota, and now she was going to see the whole country! In the back seat Niger leaned out to thrust his nose into the wind and collect the stores of information it carried.

Up ahead Cooper was setting a careful, steady pace in the lead boat, conferring on his talkie with the Joshes. Working point, they were skating just out of sight around the first big bend in the river. Sitting beside Cooper, Lira rode shotgun. Even under the sleeping bags she’d wrapped herself in she was shivering. Although she was, unfortunately, clean, she was, fortunately, not sober. Although alcohol had none of the delicious complexity of, say, Xanax, she was relieved to discover that it might very well carry her to New Orleans, and those “rooms for every purpose” the King had mentioned. And just in case, if worse came to worse, she’d sewn her ampoule of morphine into the lining of her Carharrts, along with a hypodermic kit. Stowed behind her in the boat, the contents of the infirmary safe had been transferred to a Gucci bag ($565 from Trappings). But this stuff was strictly medicinal. Sears had long ago run out of the things that interested her.

The third boat was piloted by Betty, who was packed into the seats with the four children, swaddled in so many clothes they waddled when they walked. They were making insect gestures with their hands, and singing through their scarves.

The itsy bitsy spider
Went up the waterspout.
Down came the rain
and washed the spider out.

Spider turned to wave at the children, who were having the best ride ever, better even than anything in Camp Snoopy. And there, looming above them in the half-light, she saw the receding skyline of the Mall. Some of the others were looking back too. She knew that they must already be feeling homesick as they left their solid old fortress behind and moved toward the fluid and unknown things ahead. She nudged Augie’s arm and made him look, too.
“Buh-bye,” he shouted happily, returning his attention to the steering pedals at his feet.
She hugged him, more excited about the future than ever. Because that’s exactly the way she felt about the Mall, as well. What was, was.

Tethered by a wooden yoke to each iceboat was a big covered sled bearing their stores of batteries and meager possessions. Square-rigged sails mounted to each sled helped push the burden along. Augie and Spider were hauling a shack containing what had been salvaged from the farm, the plants transferred from Mutton’s beds into individual boxes, warmed by an electric heater and nourished by Gro-Lites powered from a deck of batteries. The Shine, put up by Augie in a barrel with a spigot, was packed into a sled pulled by Cooper’s boat. The kiddie boat was hauling their food, clothes, toys and weapons. The skaters who weren’t in the boats were hitching rides by holding onto ropes. Embry showed off by cutting across his own wake like a waterskier, and skating backwards. Mutton and Ruth plowed along behind the farm boat, as solemn as lugs behind a tractor.

Although their Waterbug-class ice racers ($1495 from WinterSport) could sail sixty miles an hour with a crew of three, Augie figured that with all the weight they were transporting the best they could manage was twenty. Right now they were pushing maybe fifteen. He did a little salesman’s arithmetic in his head. At this rate, working down the Mississippi by day and camping by night, they’d be in New Orleans in two weeks.

Daydreaming, he didn’t see that the lead boat had stopped until Spider yelled at him. He had to push hard on the right pedal with his skate in order to avoid a collision. Mutton and Ruth dropped their lines and skated to an efficient, artless stop. The reason for the delay was that Blue Josh had come back from point and was gesturing downstream.

“What’s up?” Augie called to Cooper.

“Come see something, would you?” Augie stepped carefully out of the boat and onto the ice as Spider took over the pedals to pivot the sail away from the wind and keep the boat anchored. Augie wasn’t a great skater, but every stroke brought him more confidence.

Even after all the unthinkable and unspeakable things Augie had experienced the last four years what he saw before him blew his mind. Here in the core of the cities, at the spot where the Minnesota forked into two channels around an island just before it entered the Mississippi, was the solution to one of the Mall’s great mysteries. Sealed in ashy frost, sitting with his back against the trunk of a box elder tree, was Ernie Clovis. Bearded and bright-eyed, wearing hockey skates, dressed in red earmuffs and his trademark Mall jumpsuit with the gazillion zippered pockets, he was smiling that bountiful smile he had passed on to Spider. One hand was on his heart. With the other he pointed to something, his arm supported by a low limb.
Augie sighted down the arm of his father-in-law, now a human highway sign, and saw that what the Ernster wanted them to consider seemed to be the north fork of the river.
Cooper checked his map as the Joshes looked over his shoulder.

Middle Josh pointed to the south fork, the channel on their right. “Don’t we want that one?”
Cooper nodded. “They’ll both get us to the same spot, but see, the north fork is way longer.”
Middle Josh pointed to Ernie. “Then what’s this all about?”

Cooper lowered the map and scouted downstream with his binoculars ($49.95 from Sears). “Why don’t you guys head down the south fork and see what you can see.”

When they were gone he turned to Augie. “Jesus.”

“This so sucks,” Augie said.

“What do you think he was doing out here?”

“He never told me anything about going this far from the store.”

“There’s a lot he didn’t tell you.”

Augie shrugged. “He had a plan for everything. And it was all about Spider.”

They didn’t hear Spider skate up behind them. Augie moved to step between his wife and her Daddy, but it was too late.

“Oh,” she said, sitting down abruptly. Niger trotted to Ernie Clovis, wagging his stub like a windshield wiper, and began sniffing the great man’s frozen feet. Augie kneeled, and cradled Spider’s head in his arms. They were like this when the Joshes returned from their scouting trip.

“It’s weird,” Blue Josh reported, struggling for breath.

Aqua Josh gestured downstream. “It’s like something under the ice blew up. You can’t get across it. Mid Man almost skated in.”

Middle Josh was doubled over, trying to get his breath. “Crevasse,” he wheezed, exhaling a cloud of steam.

Cooper had unfurled his map and poked at it.  “Must be this big gas pipeline.”

Lira showed up. Her skating was even wobblier than Augie’s. “Holy shit.”

“What do you think?” Cooper asked her.

“That’s Ernie.”

“I know that, doll. What happened to him?”

Lira wrapped her arms around her shoulders and studied the corpse. “Stroke? Heart attack?”

Cooper gestured with his thumb back at the Mall. “We’ve got to go.”

Augie stroked Spider’s hair. “Baby, what do you think we should do with your Daddy?”

Spider considered the choices. One thing for sure, this wasn’t the time or the place to say goodbye. She could do that later, when they were a safe ways from here.

“Cooper’s right,” she said, pressing her sleeves against her eyes. She grasped Thumper and pulled herself to her feet. “We should motor.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE   How piquant, Cardiff thought. Here, on a potting table in the abandoned catacomb that had recently been the Farm, Cooper’s bunch had left a farewell present. It was an Idaho spud, rotten on one side. Or rather, a Mr. Potato Head, bearded and wearing a crude miniature of Malovik’s famous white Cossack hat. Driven through the temples of this ludicrous figure was a shish kabob skewer. Cardiff withdrew the skewer and pocketed the spud.

As Macy’s people scoured Sears for information and anything else of value the smell of putrid flesh grew stronger and they were forced to keep their sleeves pressed to their noses. They found the store’s home entertainment center, Zackheim’s subterranean still—broken apart, but without corn or grain useless anyway—and a short-wave radio that had been hammered senseless. But nary another scrap of food nor a jigger of Shine. Cardiff was curious about the radio, and ordered everyone to search again for something that would reveal its meaning.
While he poked around the Big Room his opinion of Cooper and his people was confirmed. The trappings of trailer court life lay everywhere. The country-western music, the moronic bestsellers and bodice-busters and Big Print Bibles, the games of Parcheesi and Twister, the Barney doll, the muscle shirts and pig farmer boots and snowmobile bibs.

Donny got lucky. He found Lira’s digs straight away, since it was the only thing in the store that interested him. After throwing himself on her king-sized bed and thrusting his groin into her mattress, he pawed through the clothes and personal whatnots she’d strewn around in her hurry to flee. Although Donny was aroused by her smell and, of course, by the idea of her bedroom, he was enraged that she wasn’t there for him. After stuffing a couple units of her intimate undergarments in his pockets he flew into a rage. He pushed over her bookcase and overturned her bed. That’s when he found a small black tape recorder on the floor.

It was almost dark when Cardiff ordered them back to Macy’s. They’d return in the morning, he announced, seeing the footnote: When the carcasses of these schoolgirls are frozen again, and the stench is gone.

Back home, while he sat in his Barcolounger with a glass of Shine, analyzing the evidence for a clue about the disappearance of Sears, Ursula slept. At midnight there was a knock on the door. It was Donny, drunk, smirking, holding forth the recorder.

“You should hear this, man.”

At first light, which was even rosier than that of the previous dawn, Macy’s spread themselves out in a search line across the littered neighborhood east of the Mall, looking for signs. Thanks to Lira’s medley of hits from the King of New Orleans the Maloviks knew where Sears was headed and what they thought they might find when they arrived. However, they didn’t know how Cooper’s bunch expected to get there before they ran out of food. But when they came upon the cut marks of blades and runners in the ice they knew how, as well. Cardiff took Ursula aside.

“I’m too old to skate,” she said.

“The question is, even if we had some other way to catch them, is it worth the effort?”

“I don’t want to die here, Card.”

“So you’re willing to leave your shoes?”

“You!”

“Well, any ideas?”

At first she drew a blank. And then it came to her, as solutions always did once she opened her mind to the problem. The answer, of course, was blowing in the wind.

The big square-rigged sail filled with wind and the mast groaned and pivoted in its steel sleeve and the axles began to creak. Then, to everyone’s amazement, Macy’s work cart, mothbolled after the Edina Expedition, resurrected now as a rail boat bearing eleven ragged humans and a pitful supply of food and booze, began to inch forward. Ursula sighed with relief as the vehicle picked up speed. Soon they were rolling along at a steady clip, making their way at nine nauts knots down a spur of the Canadian and Pacific Railway that would connect to the Rail Link tracks, which headed south on the west bank of the Mississippi.

Knowing not a thing about sailing, Cardiff had doubted whether this craft would actually work as a vessel of the wind. But Jack and Tomo Trump knew what they were doing when they designed the mast, the brake and the pulley-and-rope contraption that controlled the sail. Both men had done some sailing, Jack at his country club on Lake Michigan, and Tomo while in college at San Diego State (Go Aztecs!).

Their quarters inside the cabin, hammered together from plywood on the forward two-thirds of the cart, were cramped and afforded no privacy. It was more like a car for cattle than people. But at least the pot-bellied stove from the Malovik’s apartment glowed with a toasty charcoal fire that kept the cold at bay. In order to make the cabin less claustrophobic a small Plexiglas window on either side of the cabin admitted a little light and a view of the passing world. Their water was stored in blocks of river ice on the back deck, next to the mast and the brake. A ladder on hinges allowed them access through a hatch to the crow’s nest on the roof.

While Jack Trump manned the sail Cardiff volunteered to take the first watch, in order to demonstrate his leadership. Wrapped in a quilt, he was sitting on the roof of the cabin in his Barcalounger, protected from the stinging wind by a ski mask and goggles. Employing his superior Steiner binoculars ($1245 from Successories) he sipped the hot Lipton’s tea Ursula had boiled for him on the stove, and scouted the tracks ahead. The visibility across Minnesota had improved dramatically since the siege of Sears, and he could see that for at least a few hundred yards they’d have smooth sailing.

Despite himself he glanced back at the receding skyline of the Mall. He wondered if his years under those sheltering ceilings had made him agoraphobic, a classic neurotic shut-in suspicious of the outdoors and afraid of outsiders. The idea mildly interested him for a moment until he realized that in today’s world paranoia and unfounded dread were symptoms of good mental health, not bad. But whatever, he no longer had a choice. Now it was up to the wind.

As they made progress down the track he gradually overcame his reluctance to abandon the big building and its soothing, womb-like ambiance. He even began to enjoy the ride.

Above him the ravens glided in wide circles, cawing at each other in a way that sounded like they were making plans. They had escaped the day after Macy’s laid siege to Sears through a service hatch in the ceiling of their cage that had been opened somehow. After examining the hatch Cardiff concluded that it had probably never been properly locked; when the wind began gusting the thing had simply blown open.  Whatever, the birds, all thirty of them, had refused to leave the vicinity of the Mall. As Macy’s worked on the railboat the ravens perched on the edge of the roof, and looked down, watching every move. Cardiff thought they exhibited the symptoms of the Stockholm Syndrone, the perverse bonding of the prisoner with the jailor. But with birds, who knew?

An hour later as the boat passed through the outer fringes of the exurban sprawl south of the Twin Cities he saw trouble up ahead and yelled into his talkie. Jack Trump pulled the brake and turned the sail away from the wind. When the boat coasted to a stop Cardiff unbuckled his seat belt and climbed down the ladder onto the ties.

Deek threw open the cabin door. “What!”

“There’s a wreck on the tracks.”

In his apparent frenzy to find safety after The Shit Hit The Fan the driver of a milk tanker had collided head-on with the driver of a county snowplow at a train crossing. Judging by the damage—the cabs crushed into accordions and the stainless steel tank shredded—the trucks must have been pushing sixty. Cardiff groaned. How many times would this scene be repeated from here to New Orleans? The others tied their ropes to the biggest hunk of debris blocking their way—the plow, which had been torn from the truck—and began to haul it out of the way. Ursula joined her husband and they studied their maps again.

The evidence inside Sears indicated that Cooper had a three-day head start, maybe four. But the iceboats they were no doubt using for transportation would probably be compelled to stay on the rivers, and away from the highways, which were frozen as well, but no doubt clogged with wrecked traffic. And that meant Sears would have to traverse every curve and coil, which would add a couple hundred miles to the trip.

The multiple tracks down both sides of the Mississippi, however, sat above the flood plain for the most part, and adhered to much more of a straight line. Even at the slow but steady pace the railboat had maintained this morning Macy’s would catch up with Cooper somewhere around Memphis. Wrecks like this would delay that rendezvous, of course, and there might even be places where quakes or explosions had damaged the rails. And what about the freight and passenger trains that were operating when The Shit Hit The Fan? Wouldn’t they still be on tracks? How would Macy’s deal with that?

Well, they just would, Cardiff thought, because they didn’t have a choice. They’d already put ten miles behind them, and soon there’d be another ten, and another, and in no time at all, they would log a thousand miles. And then their day of reckoning with Sears would finally be at hand.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO When Cooper was making plans for their flight from the Mall he jotted down some figures regarding bonus food they might find along the Mississippi, in the little towns or the riverfront sections of the cities they’d have to pass through. A mini-mart or a grocery, maybe even a warehouse where a few canned goods or dried beans or packages of spaghetti or frozen fish sticks had been overlooked. But as their first day on the river drew to a close his optimism about any bonus happy meals faded with the puny winter light.

They stopped twice, in Winona, Minnesota, and again in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. While Middle Josh stayed with the kids the others shouldered their bows and wandered the streets, which were degraded with the usual wrecked veeks and burned-out buildings. Sprawled in comic positions here and there were the frozen carcasses of Spinners, and other Stinkers who’d been the targets of various sorts of malevolence. They found stores, of course, but nothing inside except garbage and more bodies. The wind swirled trash.

They paused outside a gutted stone house in LaCrosse to gather around a wind chime caroling on the porch. Outside a Zip ‘n’ Skip Augie called everyone over to enjoy a bumpersticker on a farmer’s pickup. Eat Cheese Or Die, it read. On the way back to the boats he looked up to see a black garbage bag dipping and gliding like some antic goblin.

But at least they’d put the pedal to the metal and made some excellent time, even with the stops and especially considering how tricky an iceboat can be when you’re new to the game. By Cooper’s reckoning they’d already logged close to 120 miles on this very first leg of the trip. That was plenty for one day. He called ahead on his talkie to Embry and Augie, who were taking their turns on point.

“Boys, it’s time to call in the dogs and piss on the fire.”

“What does he mean?” Embry asked.

Augie smiled at him, at how sheltered the kid had been. “He means it’s Miller time.”

“What?”

“We’re done for the day.”

“Okay.” Embry doodled on the ice with the point of his skate.

“What?” Augie said.

“She’s really cool, man. Spider is.”

“She likes you, too.”

Embry beamed. The rotten bicuspid Lira had pulled a year ago was the only flaw in his guileless smile. As they skated back to the others, he trailed behind, nocking an arrow. Now that he’d been allowed to pack a serious grownup weapon he couldn’t keep his hands off it. Augie called to him. “What are you doing, E? Get up here.”

“I got your back, man.”

Kids, Augie thought.

Exhausted and anxious about the coming night, Sears made camp in the middle of the ice, at an empty expanse of flatness where the Root River joined the Mississippi. Although they’d run across nothing indicating there was anyone else alive in the world they didn’t feel safe camping on shore. Here, on the river, they’d be able to see trouble coming from a half mile away. Augie looked up into the clouds. In the enclosed nests of the Mall, with walls around you and a roof over your head, you always felt at least life-sized. But out here you were a speck, a nothing. He experienced a moment of weird vertigo in which he had been lofted into the sky and was looking back down. Below him there was the milling of insects on dirty ice.

As darkness crowded in and the gusts of wind softened into breezes they pulled the iceboats into a circle and built a bonfire from branches gathered on the banks. Ruth and Betty simmered a veggie stew in a pot over the open flames, and boiled some icewater for tea. It was a skinny meal, because they were saving their Macy Meat for the final push to New Orleans, but at least it was warm. They were even vaguely comforted by the endless benediction Mutton muttered over this gruel, even when he finished by telling God that he and Ruth were ready to take charge of His Kingdom on Earth, if that’s what, You know, You want.

After dinner Spider dumped a handful of kibble into Niger’s bowl and watered it. The dog was lying at the foot of Ernie Clovis, whose frozen person, covered by a blanket, was strapped with bungee cords to the farm shack. It was Spider’s wish that when they found the right time and the right place her Daddy would be cremated. She didn’t know what he would have wanted because funeral arrangements are not something a father normally discusses with his pre-teen daughter. But after the many creepy uses for former humans she’d seen Macy’s employ she didn’t want him made available to them. Or anyone else.

Although Augie’s squeamishness about Stinkers had grown into a phobia since he found out how Macy Meat was raised, he felt okay hauling around Ernie Clovis. In fact, he was comforted by the great man’s presence, inert as it might be. He slipped his arm around Spider’s waist. “Your Dad was the best.”

“Do you think it hurt him?” she asked. “When he died?”

“He was smiling. He was thinking about you.”

She considered the idea. “Hey, everyone seems zappy tonight. Let’s give out treats.”

While Spider went from person to person distributing Hershey Kisses from her dowry, Augie started a bottle of Shine on its rounds. Gradually, everyone relaxed and stopped peering into the night. And the bonfire was cheery. People leaned back in their lawn chairs and watched the flames. At Betty’s urging the children sang a song Augie taught them, stutter-clapping when they got to their favorite stanza, just like he’d shown them.

There’s never been a dance that’s so easy to do,
It even makes you happy when you’re feelin’ blue,
So come on, come on, do the Locomotion with me.

As they sang, Augie ice-danced with Spider. She put her hands on his hips and turned him away from her and showed him how to skate backwards. When his feet went out from under him she caught him around the chest and eased him onto the ice. The children hooted with glee.

Cooper skated upstream with his binoculars. He slowly turned 360 degrees looking for fire or candlelight, some telltale gleam of human presence in this heartless Heartland night. But from horizon to horizon there wasn’t a glimmer. He was sort of disappointed. Of course, they didn’t want to tangle with any strangers right now. On the other hand, if they didn’t come across a single living soul in what had been this very crowded Mississippi corridor, what were the chances that anyone in lonesome Wyoming had survived? He tried to stop his mind from drifting to the past and the anguish that lurked there. But tonight he didn’t have the strength to resist.

When Cooper was driving an eighteen-wheeler all over North America, he’d had plenty of time to map out the geography of heaven and hell. In it, the Devil, the Dark Force—whatever you wanted to call the opposite of when stuff worked out okay—this was nothing more than the part of your old animal brain that can’t help but generate bad pictures and show them around to the new parts of your brain. Images of flaming Cub Scouts, beheaded cheerleaders, old women in wheelchairs cut to pieces by a firing squad, mere products of the haunted, antediluvian sectors of your cerebellum trying to sabotage the cerebrum. The secret to good mental and emotional health requires a man’s constant vigilance against these bogeymen of his own creation.

Well, that was then. Cooper’s confidence in the mechanics of the unseen world had vanished the day The Shit Hit The Fan. Satan, as he knew now, not only existed, the sick bastard had a seriously harsh attitude and worked 24/7. Although these revelations had not inspired Cooper to embrace a white, beard-and-robes sort of supreme being like that of Mutton and Ruth, or the good-natured humanist enthusiasm of Augie, there must be some countervailing energy that would push back the devil who had been at large ever since that awful winter afternoon that began with a humongous clap of thunder, that sonic boom, whatever it was. And that this bright energy would set things right again. Cooper might even be willing to pray to such an entity if he could be shown a sign. But without a picture ID of some sort he would not waste time sending off solicitations in the wrong direction. No way. It was Cooper’s nature to worry about waste.

Enough of this dark matter, he told himself, forcing his brain to snap shut like a suitcase. Overhead the black clouds roiled and bulged with the new energy at large in the world. The heavens looked like they were being stirred with a great ladle. He wondered if the moon was still up there somewhere. And what about the stars?

Augie skated out to bring him a drink. “See anything?”

“Zip.”

“Okay. Good.”

Cooper took a pull from the bottle. “We ought to get the tents up.”

Augie decided that because master seemed kind of low tonight this would be the right moment to give him those personal items retrieved back at Nordstrom in the ruined Kenworth.

Cooper stared at the things in Augie’s hand, the family portrait and the tiny black Tony Lama cowboy boots, insoles scuffed raw from months of being rubbed against stirrups. These had been Tina Dell’s first boots when Cooper was teaching her how to ride her pony.

He put the boots in his pocket and looked at the photo.

They’d been married the first Saturday after graduation from Ranchester High (Go Rustlers!) and T. D. was born eight months later. From the moment he fell in love with Paige over a dissected squid in soph bio it had seemed to him that she had been put on earth for him, and vice versa. He’d heard about married people who claimed they could read each other’s minds, but in their case, he swore it was true. The first year after The Shit Hit The Fan he often stopped whatever he was doing every day at noon (if he wasn’t in a firefight) to send her a message, and then keep his mind open for a reply. A couple times it seemed as if he could hear her calling out, but he could never be sure. Finally, the effort became too painful and he found ways to pull a curtain over his feelings about home.

“Earth to master,” Augie said.

“What?”

“You never told us what a fox Paige is.”

Cooper was still staring at the picture.

Augie pushed on. “I mean, how does a guy like you get a babe like that?”

Cooper shrugged, and carefully put the picture next to T.D.’s boots. “She didn’t have much to choose from. Ranchester’s a small pond.”

In the shelter of their three-man MSR Phantom all-weather tent ($445 from The Trail Head) Spider straddled Augie while he grasped her backside and they made slow, quiet love. Then, bundled up in a pair of sleeping bags they’d zippered together, they fell into a deep dreamless sleep as Niger snored in the corner.

At dawn Augie saw that night hadn’t been as kind to the others. Although Cooper was now sleeping on a regular basis with Lira, whose constant presence tended to act on him like a mild sedative, he looked haggard, and hadn’t bothered to comb the twigs and dead leaves that had parked in his hair as he sat up late stoking the bonfire. Lira had grown so skinny her cheeks were beginning to sink.

The newlyweds bustled around, chattering and making coffee, selling people on the great day that was waiting for them. Ever since Sears decided to flee the Mall Augie had felt a growing need to make sure everyone in his extended family got along. He was a married man now, a man with responsibilities, number one of which was making sure his wife was happy and warm and safe. So he needed everyone pulling together, because that’s the only way they’d make it to New Orleans. On this cold and gloomy morning far from home he tried to radiate an aura of confidence and good cheer. He found increasingly that this wasn’t hard to do because that’s exactly how he’d felt since meeting the daughter of Ernie Clovis. He even made a point of bringing coffee personally to Mutton and Ruth, ignoring their suspicious looks. When Lira held out her cup he poured her a refill.

“Ruthie’s got cornmeal mush.”

She lit a cigar. “I can hardly wait.”

Once the stately procession of iceboats was on its way again, and the pallid glow of that weird new pink light began spreading across the river, everyone’s good spirits returned. After some creative whining, the children were allowed to hitch a ride on the ropes tied to the farm boat. Mango showed off by lifting one leg behind her like a ballerina, pointing her toe, and balancing on one skate.

They sailed past the burgs of Reno on the Minnesota side of the river on Genoa on the Wisconsin side, then they began sliding down the eastern edge of Iowa. As they passed the towns Cooper put check marks by the tiny circles printed on his map, as if he were a kid again playing one of those road trip games that awards points for seeing bald-headed men or pink convertibles.

When they came to the Turkey River they stopped to eat a bit of lunch, some raisins and small wedges of Ruth’s oatbread. Then they switched around assignments. The Joshes Blue and Middle climbed into the boats to rest. Cooper and Augie skated out to take their places on point. By mid-afternoon the outdoor thermometer Cooper had taken from the doorway at Sears registered an all-time high of 27 degrees. Still, people wrapped their faces to ward off chilblains and frostbite caused by the drop in the wind chill.

Ten miles north of Dubuque they passed the remains of an airliner that had failed to make an emergency landing in a soybean field. The only thing that hadn’t burned to cinders was the rear third of the plane, the tail section, which apparently had broken off on impact. Through Cooper’s binoculars they saw that there were Stinkers inside still strapped to their seats.

Augie pointed downriver. “Let’s push on.”

“They’re dead,” Cooper said.

“Exactly.”

“Still superstitious?”

“More than ever.”

“Why more than ever?”

Augie leane d down to tighten the laces on his skates. “That’s the old world, man. We’re done with that.”

Cooper looked west, as he found himself doing more and more now that they were no longer confined to the Mall. The wind brought tears to his eyes.

They passed nervously through Dubuque, the first town of any size they’d come across. Cooper called Spider on his talkie and told her that everyone should keep their weapons ready and their eyes peeled. As Augie scanned the bridges above them and the nearest buildings, looking for hostiles, Cooper drew his bow and nocked an arrow. They flinched when the wind gusted and a curtain flapped madly outside a broken window, like a cheap trick in a theme park, and was sucked back inside.

They cleared the little city without incident. They left Wisconsin and headed south along the edge of the Hog Belt of Illinois. Cooper’s immense knowledge of American geography was once a source of shameless pride—meeting strangers when he was trucking, and knowing more about their places than they did. It occurred to him that there were thousands of porks lying frozen in the farmyards and feedlots. But he would keep his mouth shut, figuring that Sears didn’t need to be reminded of bacon right now. Anyway, the meat would be freezer-burned and possibly infected with who knows what.

On the Iowa side of the border just before the village of Belleview they spotted a local freight train, a single Diesel at the head of a dozen boxcars. Although the tracks ran at the edge of the floodplain a quarter mile from the river Cooper wanted to stop the boats and check it out.
“I don’t see any looting,” Augie said, lowering the binoculars. “Engines must have frozen up.”

He raised the glasses again. “And no Stinkers.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

They took Spider and the Joshes with them, trading skates for waffle-stompers. They crossed a farmer’s field and stepped over the tracks of a siding. The first six flatcars were loaded with brown and yellow bricks shrink-wrapped on pallets. On the seventh and eighth cars they found paving stones, also shrink-wrapped and put up on pallets. And then a car stacked with half-inch sheets of white plastic. The last two units were covered boxcars. The doors were unlocked and inside they finally found something organic: cases and cases of Uncle Wiggly’s White Vinegar.

“Fuck this place!” Middle Josh screamed, running his hand angrily the length of his Mohawk.

“Isn’t this where they grow all the fucking food?”

“The Cornhusker State,” Aqua Josh said.

“That’s Nebraska,” Cooper said.

That night around the fire they ate some cornmeal and a bit of green tomato salad dressed with vinegar. To cheer themselves up they popped some of their precious Orville Reddenbacker popcorn with that fake butter everyone loved. Ruth and Mutton took the first watch. Cooper made his nightly tour around the perimeter of their icy camp while Lira went back to their tent, bundled up in her sleeping bags, and knocked back the daily ration of Shine Augie had poured for her. When the first wave of righteous well-being hammered her brain she grabbed her backpack and read some of the messages sent by The King of New Orleans, starting with a mysterious poem that she had never fully deciphered:

I have always wondered about the leftover
energy, water rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting there long after midnight

Then there was the one that mentioned his wife:

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days

I don’t know who we thought we were
that our personalities could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead

Lira’s heart began beating faster. She knew her feelings about this far-away man were sort of bonkers, considering that she’d never laid eyes on him. He was way lonely and completely unstable, of course. But who wasn’t these days? All she had of his, really, were these pages ripped from her books and his disembodied voice that had come to her once a week for the past—what was it? Almost a year. A voice that only spoke when it was reciting a poem, and which refused to acknowledge anything she said that she hadn’t found in verse. He seemed to know every poem in all her books. Which was pretty staggering considering that the only poem she’d ever read before she met him was the “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” In response, she had assembled at least the second largest collection of verse in America. She soon saw that this was the exact right way to talk with him. Especially since their shortwave time was limited to five or ten minutes once a week because of the pitiful amount of battery power Cooper let her have.

The challenge had been finding a poet who had already said something like the thing she wanted to say. The words were so dense, and the feelings so deep, it took her a whole week, from one brief transmission to the next, just to figure out how to respond. These literary conversations had been so intense she dreamed about them. And besides her sport drugs, the King had been the only reason she got out of bed. Suddenly yearning to hear his voice again, she rummaged around in her backpack, looking for her recorder.

When Cooper showed up Lira had dumped everything she owned on the quilt covering the floor of their tent.

He waved his flashlight around. “What’s up?”

“I can’t find my recorder.”

“So?”

“It’s got his messages on it!”

Cooper figured that as usual she was just being obsessive about her obsession. “I’ll go look in the boat.”

“I already did that.”

“You’re saying you left it at the store?”

“I don’t know!” she said, rummaging through a wad of clothes. “Yeah, I guess I did!”

He pondered the ramifications of this uncharacteristic fuck-up. “So Macy’s will probably find it.”

“The tape will tell them where we’re heading.”

“So what?”

“You know they’re going to come after us, Coop. They don’t have a choice.”

“Again, so what? Can you imagine Ursula on skates?”

“They’re not going to skate.”

“Whatever, they don’t have iceboats. Spider already figured that. They’d have to build something.”

“What if they did?”

“Look, doll, they’ll never catch us. We’re already 227 miles down the river. And trade day isn’t till tomorrow.” 

Lira shook her head. “You—”

“Okay, suppose they make it to New Orleans somehow. We’ll already be way dug in. Remember the last time they tried to break down the door?”

Her sunken eyes were blazing. “You don’t get it!”

He put his arms around her shoulders and tried to rub some warmth into her increasingly threadbare body. Last night he had counted her ribs. “What don’t I get?”

“The tracks,” she said, suddenly exhausted. “What about the railroad tracks?”

Poems by Adrienne Rich


CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE  Macy’s first night on the road was a wretched experience, the people jammed together like economy class on a Delta flight to Cancun. The glow from the stove kept the place warm enough, by the standards of the Mall, but the intimate smells and sounds of other funky and noisome human beings during those close dark hours had made Ursula uncomfortable and she had slept very little. When morning finally arrived she convinced Cardiff that they ought to stop at night in the little towns, where there were buildings near the tracks. This would allow people to spread out inside and get comfortable.

After breakfast Cardiff followed Jack and Tomo Trump as they inspected the boat to make sure it was still railworthy. Near the end of their ride yesterday an irritating and worrisome screech had developed somewhere. While Deek manned the sail and the brake, allowing the boat to inch forward, the Trump men listened to each wheel.

“Here it is,” Jack said, blowing his nose daintily into a piece of rag. His nose had been broken so many times during the Store Wars it resembled a piece of stomped fruit.  

Tomo applied a grease gun to a nipple on the noisome axle, and the screech disappeared.

“Is there any way we could get some more speed?” Cardiff asked.

The Trumps stood back from the railboat and considered it.

“Spinnacker,” Jack said.

Tomo nodded happily. “Exactly!”

They crafted a sail from their store of rip-stop and rigged it to the prow. When everyone was on board Jack unfurled his creation. It filled with the morning wind like a frog’s air sac and immediately began pulling the craft along the tracks, while the big square sail at the aft end continued to do its good job of pushing. They were soon moving noticeably faster than they did the day before.

 Up in the crow’s nest Donny took his turn as scout. All morning he reported clear sailing with no wrecks on the tracks, and by lunch they’d covered more than fifty miles. They ate on board, wolfing down bits of Chef Boy-R-Dee beef ravioli braised over the fire in a frying pan, downing this swill with some wretched instant coffee that before now no one wanted to drink. But it was the only caffeine they had left. Cardiff found himself thinking about their supply of Macy Meat. If it was true that if there are no atheists in foxholes, were there any vegetarians in concentration camps?

Donny ate in the crow’s nest, leaning forward in the old man’s Barcalounger, keeping his Wrist Rocket close at hand. There was no way to bow out of taking his turn on watch without admitting that he was terrified of the ravens pacing the railboat overhead. He had missed his chance to eliminate these bastards, and now he would just have to live with them. When the Maloviks had decided to slaughter all the rats so Macy’s would have a surplus of food to bargain with on the road Donny argued that they ought to do the same with the damn birds. But the old man had countered that while they had no choice but to quit the unsavory business of rat ranching, they ought to take some of the birds with them because the eggs might turn out to be even more valuable than the meat.

There wouldn’t be room for any birds, Donny countered, plus all the Stiffies Macy’s would have to lug along to feed them. Double plus, do you really think there’s anyone else out there, man? Encouraged by the Maloviks’ silence, he reminded his bosses of the yummy raven’s breast they’d eaten those times they’d butchered a boy bird or a layer that wasn’t laying.
Finally, they bought his reasoning. So get with the program, the old man said. But when Donny had entered the cage room with his slingshot he discovered that every damn bird had flown the coop.

He never said anything when the old man shared his theory that the wind had blown open that service hatch in the ceiling, allowing the birds to escape. It blew open, all right, Donny thought, but he had checked the slide bolt a month ago and it was secure. He was convinced the hatch was unlocked by that fucking bird that beat him up. He raised his binoculars again and studied this particular black bastard—he knew all the birds on sight. It alarmed him that the raven seemed to be staring back down. Of course, if they intended to attack him, Donny decided, they would have done so by now.

When he lowered the glasses he saw the jet. “Pull up, Tomo!” he yelled into his talkie.
After the boat had coasted to a stop most everyone emerged to see what the fuss was all about. Donny gave Malovik the binoculars and waited for his verdict. Donny had figured that because the tail section was still intact, with stiffs still in the seats, and it didn’t look like the thing had been looted, it might mean there could be stuff on board they could use.
“Who wants to check it out?” Cardiff asked. Everyone except Ursula raised their hands. He dispatched the girl Trumps and the undertakers, knowing that the thieves Deek and Sharone would pocket anything they could conceal.

While Macy’s waited for the patrol to return, the ravens settled into the trees along the river, cawing in that raucous birdsong that can sound to tired ears just like human speech. “What’s eating you, son?” Cardiff asked Donny.

Nothing that wouldn’t be cured by a flock of dead ravens, and Lira in a cage, Donny thought. “I’m going down to warm up.”

When the patrol returned from the disaster they were chattering like the birds. “Look what we got!” Luke Chambers enthused. As people gathered around they began to salivate. Here were a dozen bags of individually packaged salted peanuts, a case of frozen Diet Pepsi, several cans of Coors Lite, also frozen, and a dozen mini airline bottles of Gordon’s Gin and Lewis and Clark vodka, nicely chilled. This was a real find. Cardiff confiscated everything, then handed out all of the peanuts as a morale booster. The food value of these oily goobers wasn’t much, but the promise they held of further booty raised everyone’s spirits and reminded them of the triumphs of the Edina Expedition. When they got underway again they did so with gusto. The future, like the landscape itself, seemed a good deal brighter.

They clattered into Dubuque. Seeing nothing of interest they pushed on and made further excellent time all afternoon across the empty cornfields of central Iowa. Cardiff checked his rail map late in the afternoon and was confident that by dusk they’d be rolling into Maquoketa and some accommodating shelter for his exhausted wife. But when they came upon a freight train in the middle of nowhere loaded, inexplicably, with bricks and vinegar, he knew they were in for another long, tedious night in the boat.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Mango owned thirty-seven dolls. But despite the major hissy fit on her part she had been allowed to bring only Lord Fistula the Barbarian, a Betty Spaghetty that had been tortured on the butt parts with a cigarette, and her newest, favist, the one-armed Bob Smith. Although she liked the gingery smell of Bob Smith, and was fond of scrunching the corners of his eyes to make his face even more smiley, the reason she’d fallen so hard for the little man was because he was made from a spongy chocolate-colored vinyl that felt good when she gave him a love nibble.

Cuddled up in the tent, waking from a long good sleep, she yawned and stretched and began whispering to the doll, telling him all her secrets. Sleeping next to her, under their three king-size goose-down comforters ($130 each from Bloomingdale’s), Embry snored softly and clutched his bow. Embry didn’t usually sleep in like this, but he had skated so hard yesterday, and had been so majorly jacked about the trip to New Orleans, he was totally shredded.
Mango told Bob Smith about the other dolls, which doll was in what clique, who were the most popular dolls. And who to avoid (Barney was a cocksucking backstabber). When she moved to the subject of school she began to lose it. Betty always called on Samantha more than Mango during Read Aloud. And only because Betty was Samantha’s mom. It wasn’t fair! Mango knew more words than Sam The Clam, who had that squeaky thing in her voice when she laughed, just like Betty. And the twins, Greggy&Gretchen, always said they liked Mango’s reading better because she didn’t stumble or lose her place. Unlike The Clam.

Mango held Bob Smith above her head, giving him a spaceship ride, way up to Fourth Level, then drew him close. She looked into his warm brown eyes and gave his tiny nose a kiss. Then she chomped down so savagely on the top of his bald head a small piece of it came away in her mouth. Shaking the doll, she growled way back in her throat like Niger. It felt good to growl.

“Mango!” Embry said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Knock it off, sicko!”

She gave Bob Smith a vicious wrench and tossed him from the bed. “I’m hungry.”

Embry scratched at the spot where something had bitten his chest while he slept and felt again the trio of scrawny blonde hairs that had recently grown there. They were sort of kinky, just like those ones down below. God, it was such a relief being fourteen, a man at last. No more school with Mango and the other dwarves, finally getting to go around with the adults. First the chance to kick some righteous Macy butt, and then going out with Augie on point. If Mom and Pop were here he knew they’d be proud of him, just like they were when he’d pitched the RotoRooters to the Little League championship. This deal about his voice breaking all the time was a pain, but he figured he’d grow out of it soon enough.

“Emmy!” Mango whined again. “I’m fammed!”

With a deep sigh he rolled out of his comforters, slipped into his parka and his Wranglers and laced up his insulated Northface Chilkats ($100 from the Trail Head). He went to his backpack and fished out the dense corn muffin he’d stowed there in a baggy. This was one of Ruth’s muffins—she always made sure the Orr kids, poor orphaned things, got a bit extra from time to time. He’d been saving it for an emergency. Instead, he gave it to his sister. Her eyes lit up as she wolfed it.

He was suddenly giddy with anticipation about the day ahead. This trip was so cool! Cooper hadn’t exactly said no when Embry had begged him yesterday to take point with Augie. And that indecision had finally turned into a sort of yes, thanks to some excellent pestering by Augie, who figured Embry was now old enough to be out on the front lines, and promised to use his influence with the boss. He shouldered his bow, strapped the quiver of arrows around his back, and stowed his slingshot in the pocket of his parka along with the pouch of big clearies. He unsheathed the small Buck knife on his belt, and sliced a capital E in the air with it.

Then he pulled his long black hair away from his head, and wrapped it at the roots with a rubber band, forming a high shock just like Augie’s. “Yo, Mango, better get your clothes on.”
She disappeared into her comforters like a field mouse, and emerged mostly dressed. While she strapped her Bear Back around her tiny shoulders and put on her gloves Embry slipped her skates on her feet and laced them up. “Get going, girl. You’re on breakfast duty.”
“Emmy, would it be wrong to sucker punch Samantha?”

The Orrs had nicknamed her Mango because of the shape of her head the day she was born. He pushed a lock of hair from her shiny brown eyes. What a nut job. “Way wrong.”

The energy in the farm was holding steady, even though the plants had to be constantly warmed and illuminated to keep them alive. After breakfast Augie helped Mutton dump four dead batteries on the ice, and hook up fresh ones.

Monkeying with a cable, Mutton poked his chin toward Spider, who was showing Mango how to hit things with a stick.

“What?” Augie asked.

“That girl.”

“Don’t start.”

“She’s a good one.”

“Bradley, I really don’t think Spider is Jesus material.”

Mutton wiped his runny nose on the sleeve of his parka. “No. I just mean, we like her.”

What was this all about, Augie wondered, surprised again by something the Van Pieterburens had said or done since Spider had come into his life. “Well, she likes you guys, too.”

Embarrassed, Mutton skated off to help Ruth fold their tent and stow it on board.

“You snap it with both hands, like this,” Spider told Mango, viciously jerking Thumper counterclockwise as she leapt forward. Embry, who was watching, flinched at the speed and power of this wheelhouse move and fell even more deeply in love. Mango mimicked what she’d seen, employing a mini-Thumper she’d named Spanky, which Augie had whittled for her from an oak limb he’d saved out from the bonfire. The beleaguered Bob Smith poked his battered head from her Bear Back.

“Good, sweety,” Spider said. “That’s what you want, short strokes lean and mean, so the motherfuckers can’t see it coming.” She demonstrated how to ram someone in the stomach or the balls. Mango was a natural.

Everyone suddenly stopped what they were doing and looked at Niger, who had raised his big square head to howl.

The quake began with an ominous low rumble, like a truck downshifting out on the highway. From years of experience everyone knew this was going to be a bad boy. Mango sat down on the ice first, and then everyone followed her lead. Better to sit down, then get knocked down. There was nothing out here to fall on them, so there was no reason to run for cover. And they weren’t going to drop through a hole in the ice because the water was frozen solid all the way to the bed. Still, the rocking and rolling was impressive. Samantha sobbed against her mother’s embrace.

The ground shook savagely in long waves that seemed to flow under them forever. The air filled with a fine mist that painted everything with an orange aura. When the shaking and the rumbling finally began to die away a deep cracking groan passed under them from upstream to downstream. Augie felt it in his bones as the earth under the river shifted and the ice adjusted to its new bed. A web of fine cracks appeared here and there, springing up from underneath them. Betty screamed. But after a moment the world fell silent again, except for the wind that began nudging at them, telling them to go.

Cooper stood up and peered into his binoculars at the country upstream, nervous about the possibility that Macy’s might indeed be on their tail. He had agreed with Lira that they ought to keep this information secret for now. No reason to bump up the anxiety level.

“Cooper?” Augie said.

“We’ve seen worse,” he lied. “So let’s roll, okay?”

Augie had spent the previous evening by the fire tinkering with a one-man sail. Between the forked limbs of an ash tree he’d attached a triangle of rip-stop nylon cut from the swath they’d brought along to repair the sails. As the boats began to push off in the gathering wind Augie placed the end of the trunk of this contraption into the coffee cup he’d lashed to his ankle. Then he lifted the mast and angled it away from his body like the sail of a windsurfer. As Spider and Embry cheered, the sail filled with air and off he went, riding his own personal transportation device on the wind.

An hour later in Clinton, Iowa, they had to stop because an old highway bridge across the river had collapsed. They saw from the fact that the wreckage wasn’t iced over that the bridge must have been knocked down by the quake. As they searched for a way through the confusion of steel and concrete on the ice and the occasional Stinker-loaded veek, there was a small aftershock, and then another. Apprehensive again, they made their way south more carefully than before, wary of all the narrow cracks in the ice. When they passed under I-80 five miles north of Davenport they all reflexively stooped, as if they were driving through one of those claustrophobic parking garages with maddening low ceilings.
 
Emerging from the south side of the bridge, they saw that the column of ominous black smoke they’d been watching had grown. It was leaning east, away from the wind, and reached all the way into the clouds. The boats circled to a halt while Cooper skated forward to confer with Mutton and Betty, who were taking point. Scoping out the source of this inferno with his binoculars, he saw that because of the quantity of smoke and its dense black color this must be a new blaze, probably touched off by the quake.

Mutton fingered his crucifix, which he’d taken to wearing outside his parka, having decided that there was no longer any point in concealing it from the heathens. “You wonder what there’d still be so much of that would burn like that.”

“I know,” Cooper said, peering through his binoculars again. “You guys come back with us. We’ll take it real slow till we know what’s happening here.”

They could see the glow of the flames against the cloud cover from two miles away. The column of smoke had shifted to the west with the wind. But as they slowly entered what civic boosters used to call the Quad Cities, and which was now merely ruined urban tangle lining both banks of the river, the flames had died down and the smoke was less intense. Some of the old brick buildings along the waterfront levees had collapsed. And a section of a railroad trestle had crashed down onto the ice. Cooper was pleased to see this wreckage and wondered how they could inflict even more damage on the train system. But there were lots of tracks running down the Mississippi corridor, and they didn’t have the means to sabotage much of anything, not to mention everything.

He surveyed the area with his binoculars, Davenport on the right bank and Rock Island, Illinois on the left. Then he handed the glasses to Augie, who did the same. The fire was burning three or four blocks north of the river.

“Let’s quick check it out.”

“Why?” Augie said.

“A feeling.”

“Like indigestion?”

Cooper unfolded his map and pointed to Davenport. “Look, it’s three days, maybe four, between here and St. Louis. You got one burg of any size, Burlington. The rest of these towns are Hootervilles, most of them abandoned even before The Shit Hit The Fan. And hardly any of them are near the river. If we’re going to find any real food it ain’t gonna be down there in the sticks.”

So they put fresh batteries in their talkies, and Cooper asked for volunteers. He got Aqua Josh, Embry, and Betty. They checked each other’s weapons, then they put on their boots and hauled ass across the ice and a set of railroad tracks behind the levee. A half hour later Augie’s talkie squawked.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Cooper shouted.

“What is it?”

“We got a live one!”

“Come again.”

“People! They were living in the hospital.”

“Shut up!”

“Get up here, pal. And bring Lira.”

Only one wing remained standing of what had been recently a big building. They found Cooper two blocks away from the fire, standing over three figures sprawled on the ground. The heat from the flames was so intense they could feel it from even from this far away.

Cooper pointed to a guy who could have been twenty, or sixty. Cooper’s parka was draped over the man’s emaciated frame.

“This is Bessman,” Cooper said. “He says there were eight of them living in there, Mercy General. They had a tanker truck full of gasoline in the park that blew up.” As Cooper talked he snapped his fingers.

“What did they eat?” Augie asked.

“We didn’t get that far.” One side of Bessman’s filthy blond dreadlocks was burned to the scalp. His ears had been blown off and he was bleeding from the mouth. As Lira bent down to check the man’s pulse and put her stethoscope on his chest he issued a death rattle. The familiar stench of burning human flesh filled the air. Smoke rose from the charred clothes of the two women who had died beside him. They were Pakistani or Indian or maybe, like, from Ceylon, Augie couldn’t tell.

“Shit,” Lira said, standing up weakly and staring at the ruined building.

“We’re not going to find anything to eat in this damn place,” Aqua Josh said.

They circled the neighborhood around Mercy General looking for survivors, but didn’t find anyone else. This place looked like every other place, Augie thought. Stripped to the bone, then ruined. One good thing about America these days--the plague of obesity was over. He remembered the hordes of fatties waddling through the malls where he plied his trade, puckered jowels and thighs and buttocks trembling with each leaden step. Will attack your stubborn weight loss areas, the ads for diet pills promised these mounds of gunk. Augie had vowed at the beginning of his career never to sell plus-sizes.

 When the remainder of the building collapsed behind them with a roar and a storm of dust and debris, and they headed back to the river. A half-hour from Davenport they came across something that gave them a surge of optimism so strong people began humming little tunes. It was a barge, ice-bound in the middle of the Mississippi. Smudged human footprints, and those of animals, as well, lead from the vessel all the way to the Illinois shore.

Cooper volunteered Augie and the Joshes, and together they climbed aboard. Dried husks and filaments of cornsilk were scattered everywhere, swirling in the breeze. Augie began panting in anticipation. If he knew anything from his years as Boozemaster, it was corn. But the first four holds were empty, no doubt cleaned out by the scavengers who left the tracks.

It was the final hold that bore fruit. When they beamed down their flashlights they saw that was still full of product. The bastards had probably been planning to come back for this as well, Augie thought, and met an unpleasant end, boo hoo.

Grasping the outstretched arms of the others he lowered himself into the hold. He showed around his light, then grabbed an ear and peeled back the husk. The cob was frozen, slightly shriveled. Probably been grown for animal silage, it would never have won a ribbon at the State Fair. But, hey, corn is corn.

“My friends,” Augie said, holding the ear aloft. “I present you with your next dinner.”


CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE  Because it was fixed to the rails, Macy’s vessel had no way to tack against the wind, and could only go where the wind sent it. So in order to make a detour around this preposterous and immovable freight train full of bricks they had no choice but to push and pull their boat three miles back to the switch at Belleview, the village where the siding began. This tedious, exhausting labor wasted an entire morning.

The ravens flew from place to place, watching these efforts and laughing. Although Donny was freaked, and kept his Wrist Rocket handy while he trudged along, he watched the birds carefully to see if they were eating any of the things they lighted on, indicating a possible food products. 

Cardiff was counting on making up the lost time by bypassing the big two-hundred-mile bend in the river coming up, which Sears couldn’t avoid because they were ice-bound. After spending the night in Davenport, Macy’s would cross the Mississippi on the Illinois Central trestle and head south on a straight line the length of Illinois to St. Louis.

Late that afternoon they rolled into Davenport from the northeast. Buildings had fallen down everywhere. Not far from the tracks they passed some extensive smoldering ruins. Judging by the amount of ice that had melted around the rubble and then refrozen, Cardiff figured that this had been one hell of a fire. Whatever incendiary had been stored in that building would have supplied Macy’s energy needs for a long time. 

The good news was they found a decent place to spend the night, a newish one-story Mutual of Omaha building in a professional park right next to the tracks. And there were no Spinners or other stiffs in any of the offices to haul out. In the lobby the skylight had caved in, so once they swept up the glass they’d have a nice hole in the roof through which to vent the smoke from the big bonfire Cardiff ordered them to build. Along with the booze they’d scavenged from the airliner, he figured that the fire would be an excellent morale booster that would help them get over the unbelievably long day they’d just logged.

The bad news with this: A section of the Illinois Central trestle had crashed down onto the river. After examining the damage, Jack Trump advised Cardiff that, yeah, they could rebuild it strong enough to bear the weight of the railboat. But it would take longer to do that than it would to forget the shortcut through west central Illinois and just push on down the tracks by the river. Cardiff saw on his map that ten miles down the line, however, there was another trestle across the river that might still be standing. They’d try their luck there.

As darkness fell they arranged their bedding in the offices of long-dead underwriters and claims agents and actuaries. Then they broke apart the furniture for kindling and ransacked the filing cabinets for tinder. Soon, a hearty little blaze was glowing on the ceramic tiles of the lobby’s floor. Everyone set about fixing themselves a skimpy supper. Going over their provisions with his checklist Cardiff saw that their food would be gone in three days, leaving only Macy Meat remaining in the larder. He decided that rations would have to be cut in half.

In her Spartan quarters Ursula looked forward to a long night of blissful sleep, and was so cheered by her surroundings that she decided to celebrate. She rummaged through her suitcase and withdrew a red flannel bag. She gave her mid-length black hair its customary hundred stokes to remove some of the kinks, and donned her sable. Finally, from the bag she withdrew the perfect size six Manalos, and sighed with pleasure as her feet slipped into the luxurious black leather.

When she emerged from her makeshift chambers for dinner she walked slowly to a place along one wall to sit in a steel office chair next to Cardiff. It was Sharone Barnett who saw the shoes first.

“Ursula, my god, those look beautiful on you.”

“Why, thank you, Sharone.”

“How do they feel?”

Ursula closed her eyes and nodded. When the undertakers came over to admire the Manolos, Snarlin Marlin was especially congratulatory. Ursula wondered what had brought his Tourettes under control. Maybe with the low rations lately the little man’s brain simply didn’t have the energy for any more of those vulgar theatrics. At any rate, she was grateful for the calm tonight, and for the chance to wear her Blahniks.

Cardiff distributed the airline booze, and soon everyone was feeling good. The alcohol, the fire, a bit of dinner, and the shared camaraderie brought on by the hardships of the day, compelled him to lead them in a song. He searched through everything he knew by heart, and found out that they all remembered most of the words to what he was slightly ashamed to admit was one of his sentimental favorites. His baritone was as wooden as ever, but everyone followed his lead. All except Donny, who associated this gooshy dreck with his grandparents.

Well, it’s still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

When the last note died everyone fell silent. Then they began making their way to bed.
As usual, Donny woke up several times during the night. Once, when he was certain that the ravens were trying to smash through the window of the office where he’d bedded down, he grabbed his slingshot and scrambled to his feet. But he must have been dreaming, because there was nothing at the glass but the cold black night.

Ursula assumed she’d fall asleep instantly, but after ten minutes of turning one way then another as she listened to Cardiff’s deep breathing she was afraid her replaying of the stresses of the day would go on for hours. So as she often did when she needed to relax she willed herself to drift back to happier times. What came to mind was that vibrant May morning in 1975. It was the day that changed their lives.

She’d driven to work wondering how much longer they could afford a housekeeper. Cardiff’s practice, which in the days before they met had been lucrative, was now more like a hobby. Ever since he decided to turn away his neurotic yuppies and concentrate on his pro bono crazies the money had stopped flowing in. She was in her fifth year with the firm, but her advancement as a tax attorney was blocked by a logjam of partners who didn’t need another one and who looked like they were going to live forever. Plus, five-year-old Cardiff, Jr. would be attending a very expensive private school in the fall. Double-plus, they needed a new washing machine.

But by the time they fell asleep that night their bourgeois financial concerns were a thing of the past. That’s because at 1:38 pm they became millionaires several times over. Cardiff didn’t feel the world change at the precise moment of their good fortune, of course, nor any noticeable shift in his emotional valence. And he even suspected the worst when Ursula arrived home from the office two hours early, at 5 p.m., bearing a magnum of Dom Perignon.

“You’re A., fired, B., having an affair or C., drunk,” he said. “Or all of the above.”

“It’s not multiple choice,” she told him. “It’s essay. Ready? What’s the effect on the price of a piece of commercial property when the City of Cleveland decides it wants to build a convention center there. And how will this demand change the lives of the land’s owners?”

“We don’t own any land.”

“Not any more we don’t.”

The next day she didn’t go to work, and would never go to work for someone else ever again. Instead, she and Cardiff got in their three-year-old Volvo and headed toward the Lake. While she scribbled “to do” notes in her day book Cardiff followed her directions and drove them to a section of the Flats that looked as if it had been firebombed. He couldn’t believe that the sprawling Rust Belt junkyard she showed him had just put $4.2 million in their pockets. What was even harder to believe was that she had borrowed $140,000 to buy this wasteland a year earlier, and had never told him about the loan. To this day he still didn’t know how she found out about the convention center. But as it turned out, he didn’t want to. And he long ago forgave Ursula her secrecy about the loan. He had discovered that the aura surrounding a woman with access to inside dope turned him on. If he ever doubted her ability to bend the world to her will, it evaporated that day. And along with it, any reluctance he might ever have had about helping her deal with lesser people in the ruthless and businesslike manner they deserved.

The young couple bought a Lincoln Town Car, and a big but not ostentatious Tudor on Maynard Road next to the Shaker Heights Country Club, a curving lane canopied by enormous American elms. Then they turned their attention to making some really serious money. The kind of money that would change the world.

When her room became infused with the first pink light of dawn and the wind began to bump against the building she stretched and yawned and sighed, her breath clouding the cold air. As rested as she’d been in weeks, she moved her Lady Derringer from her robe to a concealed pocket in her eggplant-colored Donna Karan pantsuit ($230 from Georgiou), and finished dressing. Outside her door she could hear a scramble of activity as Macy’s got ready for another long day on the road. And then there was shouting.

 “Card, what is it?” she asked, joining him in the lobby.

“Allyson’s missing.”

She followed him down a hallway to the office where the litigator had wandered off to sleep after a late-night card game in Jack’s office. As television cops used to say, there was no sign of a struggle. There weren’t even scuffmarks on the ice outside her office.  But her window was wide open. Outside in the chilled air, people called her name.

Bows and slingshots drawn, as they kept together in a line, they canvassed the neighborhood all morning, burning up valuable time and energy. Sharone fired an arrow at a flurry of movement in the second floor window of stock brokerage, but when they climbed the stairs they found nothing but computer printouts blowing around cubicles in a large anonymous room. At a lunch meeting Cardiff announced that they didn’t have a choice: They’d have to leave Allyson behind. There was protest from the Trumps, and a plea from them to wait until the next morning before leaving Davenport. But now even Ursula didn’t want to spend another minute in this dangerous place.

As they put into the wind and made their way south no one was comforted by the possibility that the Mississippi Valley might be harboring other people. Because in the new world order, human beings have proven themselves to be nothing but trouble.


CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX  As Sears searched for scavenge among the riverfront streets of Hannibal, Missouri, the presence of Mr. Samuel Leghorn Clemens was unavoidable. Rummaging through a pile of knick-knacks scattered on the sidewalk under the shattered shop window of Aunt Polly’s Notions, Augie found a doll dressed in homespun and a straw hat.

“Huck Finn,” Spider said, poking at the pile of icy kitsch with Thumper. They found a Jim doll and a Pap doll. Niger had extracted a large green plastic catfish from the pile and was gnawing on its tail.

Augie brushed the frost from the Huck Finn. “Hey, you think Mango might go for this? That other one is looking kind of ragged.”

Spider took the doll from him, and pushed at it with her fingers. Then she dropped it back onto the sidewalk. “That’s so sweet, honey. But she likes those chewy ones. This item is too hard.”

Augie called in their position to Cooper, who was working with the Joshes a block south on Bird Street. He picked up his Wrist Rocket, and they made their way down the middle of Hill Street. Holding hands, they passed a sign that said Hannibal: America’s Home Town.

Two blocks later they came to a grape-colored convertible parked at the curb.

Augie stopped to stare. “Unbelieveable.” There was a dreamy thing in his voice she’d never heard before, like he was hypnotized.

“What, baby?”

“This is my car.”

“How could your car get here?”

He ran his hand over the hood. “1998 Jaguar XK8.”

To his surprise it wasn’t locked. And equally surprising, there wasn’t a Stinker inside. He got in, leaned across the gearshift, and opened the passenger door. “Let’s drive up to Tahoe.”
   
“Wow,” she said as she sat down. “You didn’t say you were rich.”

Augie ran his hand over the elegant hardwood dashboard. “V-8. Power roof, rain-sensing wipers, Harman-Kardan audio. Trip computer. Telephone. Hundred miles an hour, and you don’t even feel the road. Of course, mine is English racing green and has brown leather instead of white.”

“Where’s it now?”

He shifted through all five gears. “At home in Sherman Oaks. In her garage.”

He loved the Jag too much to leave it in long-term parking at LAX when he was on the road.
Spider watched him. “Her?”

“Exie. That’s her name.”

Spider got out of the car and slammed the door. As she marched down the street she pounded Thumper on the cars she passed. He followed her, surprised by this sudden heat. She was usually so steady.

“I’m sorry,” he called. “Exie was before you.”

She ignored him.

“It’s not the love of my life.”

She kept walking.

“It’s just a car,” he lied. “Our car.”

She suddenly turned around, and for a moment he thought she was going to thump him. Instead she melted into his arms. “You’ll show me how to drive?”

“Sure I will.”

“Hey, maybe I’ll drive our car someday.”

Augie nodded. Not. Nobody drives Exie but me.

When they passed an Ace hardware Spider went inside.

“Sweety?” Augie called to her from the door. “What are you doing?”

When she didn’t answer he checked nervously up and down Hill Street, then stepped into the store. She was standing in the dark at a revolving bin, raking through a mound of dusty nails with a steel claw. The head of a nail was poking from her mouth like a toothepick.

“They taste good.” She selected a nail, and offered it to him.

“Baby, you feel okay?”

“Pretty good. We can go now.”

They made their way back into the street and came to an old, restored clapboard house that was some sort of attraction. They read the frosted signage out front.

“Oooh!” Spider squealed in delight. “This is where he grew up! This is Tom Sawyer’s house. Can we go inside? Please, please!”

As a rule Augie hated a certain kind of tourist trap, that static House of Famous Dead Guy/Doll Museum/Living Colonial Village sort of thing, where you walked around like an antique moron and stared at things. He preferred instead the Miniature Golf/Go-Cart/Six Flags variety of tourist trap because there were sports and other stuff to do. But the pages of Mark Twain’s books, read when he was a distracted ten-year-old city kid, were beginning to come back to him, the exotic river world of no adults telling you what to do, the place where they were standing right now.

On the second floor they found Tom Sawyer’s boyhood room, and a bed you were supposed to believe was his boyhood bed. Spider sat down on it and bounced a little, as if testing the mattress.

“What are we doing?” Augie asked, feeling a pleasant buzz.

She turned down the bedspread and tugged at the zipper of her cobalt blue Dolomite Gore-Tex Ski Jacket ($295 from Big Dog Sports). “Let’s pretend we’re Tom and Becky.”

Afterward, as they lay panting, Niger asleep at the foot of the bed, Augie’s talkie rasped to life. Cooper’s party had found something to eat.

They threw on their clothes and made their way through the rubble of several collapsed brick storefronts to Palmyra Road. They found Cooper and the Joshes standing around a big white plastic tub in front of Huckleberry’s Family Restaurant.

“This was under some junk in the back of a freezer,” Cooper said.

Augie peered into the tub. It looked like lard. “What is it, lard?”

“Maybe that’s what the looters figured,” Cooper said. “M.J. thinks it’s funnel cake dough.”

Spider poked at the tub with Thumper. “What’s funnel cake?”

“It’s like fry bread?” Middle Josh said. “You boil it in oil. It gets, you know, crispy. Then you put cinnamon on it and sugar.”

Augie was salivating. They explored a couple more downtown blocks, but didn’t find anything else of interest. Spider wanted to go back to Hill Street and visit the Haunted House and Wax Museum, but Augie said no thanks, figuring he’d had enough excitement for one afternoon. They were walking across the railroad tracks next to the levee, on their way out to the boats, when Cooper saw the Coca Cola truck down at the corner of Church Street.

Actually, it wasn’t the delivery truck itself that interested him so much as the fact that its tires were still inflated. And that meant maybe it could be moved. He explained what he wanted done.

“Why?” Aqua Josh asked.

Middle Josh nodded. “Yeah, can’t we just go eat some cake, man?

“If you guys just help me with this,” Cooper said, “I promise I’ll tell you at dinner. Plus, I’ve got another announcement. Double plus, I think it’s time to party a little.”

“All right,” the Joshes said.

First they searched the truck to make sure there weren’t any yummy beverages on board, but didn’t find a thing. Cooper jammed the sticky transmission into neutral and let off the emergency brake. At first the big truck only groaned when they leaned their weight against it. But it finally stopped resisting, and they rolled it onto the tracks. Panting from the exertion, Cooper pounded at the gearshift to put the transmission back into gear. Then they punctured the tires by shooting arrows into them.

“Should we dig out the Gamegetters, master?” Middle Josh asked.

“Nah. Leave ’em in. We got plenty of arrows,” Cooper said. As a final act of sabotage he located the vehicle’s jack, carried it to the top of the levee, and heaved it over the side.
Back in the iceboats and three miles down the river they came across a replica stern-wheeled paddleboat with two smokestacks, frozen in the ice next to an island. Of course, this floating tourist trap was called the Samuel L. Clemens. Augie was exhausted, but when Cooper asked for volunteers to search the vessel Spider raised her hand, and that of her husband as well. Ruthie and Mutton agreed to go along, and also Embry.

It was a big boat, spacious enough to accommodate a full dining room and a small bar. Augie’s heart began beating with anticipation when he saw that it was neat and clean, meaning it had never been looted. But as they searched the freezers and storerooms they saw that the reason it had never been looted was that there was nothing on board worth the trouble of taking. He realized that this particular tourist trap probably only operated during the summer. When The Shit Hit The Fan the Samuel L. Clemens probably broke away from its dock and floated off before it got wedged against the island and then became ice-bound.

After ransacking the downstairs cabins without result Augie and Spider went upstairs with Embry to the wheelhouse on the roof. While Augie opened drawers and hatches Spider and Embry took turns at the big theatrical wheel, pretending to be the Captain barking orders to an imaginary crew.

“Argghh,” Embry cried, his voice breaking. “Keelhaul the landlubbers!”

“Oy vey,” Augie said.

“What is it?” Spider asked, laughing at Embry.

Augie reached into the hatch and retrieved the gun, stowed away in a shoulder holster behind a pair of orange life vests. There was also a liter bottle of Southern Comfort, only a third of it gone.

Embry whistled when Augie slid the weapon from its holster. “That’s a double-action Colt .44 revolver. Is it loaded?”

“What does it mean, oy vey?” Spider asked.

“It means holy shit,” Augie said.

Embry took the gun from Augie and flipped opened the cylinder. It was fully loaded with six brass-jacketed bullets. They went downstairs and showed what they’d found to Mutton and Ruth, who were extremely enthusiastic about the weapon. And they gave the whiskey a long, lingering look.

When they got back to the iceboats Cooper was ecstatic. “Oh, this is good work, kids.” Although he’d become an advocate of gun control the day Tina Dell was born, he now gave thanks to the National Rifle Association for seeing to it that drunken steamboat captains could carry handguns, ensuring that someday—this day, in fact—the balance of terror at the Mall would be restored.

He removed three bullets from the cylinder and handed the gun to Blue Josh, a former Rifleman in the United States Army. Blue Josh had always been the best shot at Sears. “Self-defense only,” Cooper told him. “Or my command.”

The gun made Blue Josh happier than Augie had seen him in at least a year. “Yes, master!”
As everyone crowded around to get a look at the revolver Spider drifted away. When Augie caught up with her she had skated to the ice barge they’d hammered together to haul their new stash of corn. Although it had slowed their progress and forced them to work harder, it was worth it. The barge helf 150 bushels, enough food to last them weeks.

“What’s wrong, baby?”

Spider withdrew an ear of corn. She pulled back the husk and ran her finger along a row of kernels. “It’s time we said goodbye to Daddy.”

Augie looked around them at the expanse of ice and gritty, congealed frost stretching away to the levees on either side of the mighty river. He was thinking of all the brush they’d have to haul here for the pyre. “So you want to do this out here?”

She fell against him as his arms reached out to circle her. “Remember how much he loved his boats?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN On watch atop the railboat, it was Donny who saw the wolves first. There were five of them, long, tall skinny nightmares with unearthly yellow eyes, not at all like dogs, loping in long, easy strides through the ice fields at a distance from the tracks. They didn’t look hungry. Donny grabbed his talkie and screeched down to Cardiff. But the old man had seen the wolves himself through the starboard porthole, and was already making his way to the roof as the vessel lumbered along at fifteen knots in a brisk, astringent wind.

“Good God,” Cardiff said.

They watched the animals for a while, frightened and awed by their power and grace. Overhead the ravens circled and called out to each other, in cackles sarcastic and accusatory.
The lead wolf lead suddenly veered away from the tracks. In a moment the pack was gone from sight. The ravens disappeared, as well. Cardiff wondered for a moment if what he had seen was real. Whatever, the matter of one issue was settled: There would be no more straying from the boat at night, no matter how uncomfortable they were or how restless their sleep might become.

Donny gestured with his Wrist Rocket at the place where the wolves had disappeared. “What do you think one of those bastards would taste like?”

“Eyes peeled,” Cardiff said, lowering himself back down the hatch.

There was smooth sailing all that morning and into the afternoon. They stopped twice to examine mile-long trestles across the river, one south of Davenport and another in downtown Burlington. Jack Trump didn’t like the looks of either bridge, pointing out stress cracks in the steel girders. The infrastructure of the country’s rails had been in sorry shape even before The Shit Hit The Fan, he told Cardiff, and after all the quakes and whatnot these suckers look like they’re ready to fall down. With this news, plus the fact that they were making good time, Cardiff abandoned his plan for a shortcut through Illinois.

Sitting beside the stove in her sable, Ursula watched the Trumps, looking for signs of mutiny. But they seemed resigned to the disappearance of Allyson, and said no more about it. Relaxing a bit, Ursula occupied herself, as she was doing more and more, with memories of another day.

The reason for their visit to the Twin Cities, on the day The Shit Hit The Fan, had been a source of great satisfaction. At last, their Minnesota allies in the school voucher campaign were about to gain the victory everyone had worked so hard for. All they needed was a pair of votes in the Legislature. The Malovik money, their success with the voucher movement in Ohio, and their growing coziness with GOP heavyweights whose attention was shamelessly bought with thick campaign contributions, were just the 12-guage buckshot they needed to put the Gopher State in the bag.

Ursula had no doubt that they would triumph. Not just because of the Malovik muscle, but because it was the right thing. The idea was to give parents money to spend on whatever school they wanted for their children. Taxpayers, not governments, should make this choice. Oh, the liberals whined like schoolgirls about elitism and white flight, but wasn’t the point to give the brightest kids the best education? Why waste a superior teacher and an accelerated curriculum on some little genetic backwater heading irretrievably into a life of bowling, multiple divorces and cheap beer?

What Ursula believed in, what she had chosen to champion, was intelligence. Intelligence you could measure and assign a number. To her it seemed like the natural order of the world that the smart should dominate the stupid, until blatant stupidity no longer existed. But in America this organic process had been perverted due to seven decades of governments that pandered to the rabble and undermined it at the same time. She had watched in horror as the country went from dumb to dumber, then dumbest. She had to do something to save her Percy—and the grandchildren to follow—from a society infested by morons, and fast.

When she heard about school vouchers she knew she had her tool. Whatever happened, she would not go to her grave with regrets about that issue, thank you. After she established the American School Trust the interviews and talk shows and controversy that followed brought Ursula before the national gaze. There were even rumors of a modest Latin American ambassadorship for herself.

At the Mall conference center before heading to the Capitol for meetings with law-makers, some of the young voucher parents, voices joined in a sarcastic acapello, sang the movement’s unofficial fight song. 

Don’t know much about history,
don’t know much biology.
Don’t know much about a science book,
don’t know much about the French I took

By late afternoon the wind eased off, and the railboat slowed. Ursula stood at the Plexiglas window with Cardiff staring at a yellow school bus stopped behind the guard arm at a crossing. The seats were occupied by the slumped cadavers of children, killed where they sat by the gasses on the day The Shit Hit The Fan. The driver’s seat was empty. There were black kids next to white, and a couple of Asian children as well. Up on the roof Donny studied the bus as well, and thought of the multiple possibilities it represented for some truly groundbreaking work with certain porn installations of the kiddy variety.

At dinnertime they ate in the boat, a light meal of tea and Genoa salami, their next-to-last sausage. They were eating on the run, to take advantage of the breeze, weak as it was. The beam from a pair of dry cell lamps played on the rails ahead. By midnight they were still moving along the tracks at a slug’s pace. People slept fitfully, and snored, and spoke in their sleep, in dreamy tones that no one else could decipher.

At 4 a.m. Cardiff posted Snarlin Marlin to take watch, and additionally posted Luke Chambers on the roof to guard him. For warmth and mutual assurance they lay beside each other in the Barcalounger, snuggled inside their sleeping bags. But Luke’s bow was at the ready, and they had orders to put a Thunderbolt into any creature that approached the boat. On two occasions the couple believed they saw eyes glowing in the night. But when Marlin switched on his flashlight nothing revealed itself except the dark, dead trees of the floodplain, and the dark, dead fields between the trees.

The undertakers were sound asleep in each other’s arms when the railboat collided with the truck.

Augie and the Joshes carried Ernie Clovis across the ice to the wheelhouse atop the Samuel L. Clemens and propped him in the Captain’s chair. They placed his outstretched hand on the big wheel. When they finished adjusting him as per instructions from Spider, the Joshes left Augie alone with her. She kissed her Daddy for the last time, and put his favorite cap on his head, the one advertising Shakespeare fishing tackle ($19.95 from the company catalog). Augie reached out to touch his father-in-law on the shoulder. Then the newlyweds went outside, where everyone was waiting on the ice for the funeral.

“Without Ernie Clovis we’d be nothing,” Cooper began. “We’d be nowhere. No heat, no Shine, no farm. No vacation trips to New Orleans. We owe our lives to him. He was a genius, and he had a big heart. We will always miss him.”

Cooper, of course, didn’t mention that Ernie Clovis had seen to it that the enemy store survived this long winter as well. But everyone knew all about that business now, and it was water under the bridge. Besides, the happy result of Ernie’s duplicity was this wild, wonderful girl who made everyone feel better just being in her vicinity. Betty began sobbing, and there were wet eyes all around. Augie held his wife, who shuddered once, but remained dry-eyed.
After a moment’s silence Augie went up into the boat and applied a match to the rags and paper and furniture they’d piled against the wall of the dining room. When he joined Sears again on the ice, flames were already shooting through a shattered window. As the fire spread throughout the vessel, and the filthy ice around it began melting, they backed away from the gathering inferno, fanned by the wind. In ones and twos they made their way to the iceboats a distance away and the tents and the modest bonfire they had built, their traveling village, and circled their lawn chairs.

Gobs of it roasted on sticks, the funnel cake was slightly freezer-burned. But along with a morsel of smoked Macy Meat, a small cup of oat gruel and a bit of stewed tomato canned by Ruthie, followed by green and red M&M’s from Spider’s dowry, Sears feasted. Augie surreptitiously pocketed his Macy Meat, and that of Spider, in order to return it to the larder.
As the bottle of Southern Comfort went from mouth to mouth a festive mood began to reign. The campfire, and the thundering blaze aboard the Samuel L. Clemens, lit up the night sky. The thermometer, which had hovered at 27 degrees all day, shot up to 28, maybe from the fires or maybe from the changes in the world. When one of the smokestacks fell to the ice in a shower of sparks everyone cheered. It was like fireworks on the Fourth of July. And they cheered again when the other stack fell.

Cooper wondered if Macy’s was close enough to see this glow in the sky, and maybe even these pyrotechnics. But he did another quick table in his head and decided at their very best the bastards couldn’t be closer than two or three days behind them, even if Malovik was ordering forced marches and they were traveling all night. Assuming they were moving by rail, and assuming that the boat actually worked. But so what? Cooper thought. The discovery of the revolver had changed everything.

“Announcement,” he said. The others stopped chattering to listen. “According to the maps . . . I figure we just crossed the Mason-Dixon Line.”

Cooper’s infomercial brought nothing but stares. “It means we’re not in the North any more,” he said. “It means we’re in the South.”

With a dirty finger Aqua Josh pushed the gristle he was chewing to a holding pen between his cheek and gum so he could talk. “So, like, what, we’re halfway to New Orleans?”

“Well, not quite,” Cooper said. “We’re like a third?”

People seemed disappointed. “But look how fast we got here,” Augie reassured them. “Remember when we wondered if we’d even get ten miles?”

He began singing. “Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton. Old times there are not forgotten.”

And then everyone was singing. Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.

Augie remembered a guy he played tennis with whenever he worked Dallas, the heir- apparent of the family who owned a clothing store called Land of Cotton. As usual, whenever these memories of long-lost friends surfaced, Augie felt a twinge of remorse, then a fugitive triumph at his own survival, followed by a twinge of guilt.

“So is Dixie like, from Mason-Dixon?” Embry asked.

Cooper shook his head. “It’s French for ten. The frogs were the first white people on the river, and it said dix on their ten-dollar bills.”

Embry laughed, in a Beavis and Butthead sort of way. Dicks!

Augie wondered, how does Cooper know all this shit? Or does he just make it up?

“Truth or dare, master. What’s with the Coke truck?”

Cooper and Lira looked at each other. Then she told them that Macy’s might be following them. To people who thought they could never be shocked again, this was shocking news indeed. People craned their necks to peer into the darkness upstream. Betty stood up so she could see better. “Why don’t they just leave us the fuck alone? What do they want?”
“Duh, Betts,” Blue Josh said. “They want our women.”

“There are all sorts of tracks down the river,” Cooper said. “So there’s no way to know which ones they’re using. If they’re using any at all. Hell, maybe the assholes crashed somewhere and we’ll never see them again. But when we get a chance to fuck with them again I say let’s take it.”

Middle Josh asked how Macy’s could have found out where Sears was headed.

It was the question Lira was dreading. Sitting next to Spider and Augie, smoking a cigar, she spread her hands, a gesture of contrition. Then she told them about her missing tape recorder. They sat in silence. Lira was the smartest one here, they were thinking, and now she’s done the dumbest thing. Even if Macy’s didn’t confront them on the river, Sears would probably have to deal with the bastards in New Orleans.

Cooper came to her defense. “You know, they would have found the blade marks on the river sooner or later. This just makes it a little more obvious.”

“Well, just fuck them,” Blue Josh said. He lifted his arm and patted the bulge under his parka where he’d strapped the shoulder holster. “Now two can play, baby.”

“That’s right, man!” Aqua Josh gushed. “Let’s get it on!”

They passed around the Southern Comfort and listened to things pop and sputter inside the dwindling Samuel L. Clemens.

“The puking and whatnot,” Betty said. “Are you preggers?”

Lira experienced an unnerving image of a drooling, hydrocephalic imbecile with flippers emerging from the toxic waste site that was her womb. In fact, she had felt better today than she had since fortune forced her to cold-turkey her old life.

She took a swig of whiskey.  Then she took Spider’s hand. “It’s interesting you said that.”

Spider blushed and removed the nail she’d been sucking on. “You mean now?”

“Why not?” Lira said.

Spider covered her face with her hands, and looked at Augie through little windows she made with her fingers. “Hey, guess what?”

Augie studied her blankly.

“What?”

“Well, you know that thing you said you wanted?”

“Which thing?” And then he knew.

“You and me?" Spider said. "We’re gonna have a baby.”


CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT  The collision with the Coca-Cola truck pitched Luke and Marlin out of Cardiff’s Barcalounger and sent them sprawling onto the roof of the cabin. Because they were bundled up asleep in their sleeping bags, like pliable drunks in a car wreck they didn’t have time to brace themselves, and were only slightly damaged. The other Macies swarmed wasp-like from the railboat, rubbing their bruises and dings, shouting curses and brandishing their weapons in the gauzy pink of dawn. Once they saw that there was no menace, they calmed down. Except for a broken headlight the railboat was undamaged. Cardiff shouldered his pistol and reached out to examine the Gamegetters imbedded in the collapsed front right tire of the truck.

“Sears.”

“Cocksuckers,” Snarlin Marlin said, hoping this patriotic vehemence might camouflage from Cardiff the fact that he and Luke had fallen asleep on duty.

 “Standing watch means staying awake,” Cardiff told the undertakers, who knew that one way or another they’d have to pay for their dereliction.

Cardiff consulted his rail maps. They passed a siding thirty miles ago, too far to backtrack. So Macy’s had no choice but to push the damn truck off the tracks. To do that they’d have to remove the flat tires so the vehicle could roll on its wheels. Working in pairs, they jacked up each corner with a heavy-duty hydraulic jack they found at the Hannibal Ford dealership, stripped the lug nuts from the big 22-inch Firestone Radials, and eased the wheels back down onto planks they scavenged from a ruined clapboard bungalow nearby. After an hour of this messy, backbreaking work, they applied their aching bodies to the business of overcoming the truck’s inertia. Soon the way south was clear again. As they rolled out of town a biting wind from the west filled the mainsail and puffed up the spinnaker.

Whenever they had stopped to investigate the river they’d found fresh blade marks on the ice. And once they came across the melted and refrozen char of a fresh campfire. But the Coke truck was the first proof positive that Cooper’s bunch was moving on the river. And more importantly, it was evidence that Sears knew they were being followed.

On the summit of a bluff three miles down the river Deek and Sharone, on watch in the Barcalounger, called down to say there were signs of a huge blaze on the ice below, a blackened expanse of rubble and ashes at the head of a small island a quarter of a mile out in the river. Cardiff led a patrol comprised of the Barnetts and Tomo Trump down the bluff to investigate. On full alert, everyone drew their weapons.

There had been two fires--a small one, now completely burned out and cold, surrounded by the cut marks of ice skates and runners, and the remains of a sizable inferno, the one the Barnetts had seen from the bluff. Tomo Trump poked at a giant sheet metal tube lying in the rubble. A hiccup of smoke erupted from underneath it.

“Still warm,” he reported.

“What do you think this was?” Cardiff asked.

“One of those paddlewheels, those casinos?”

“Why would Cooper stop to burn a boat?”

Tomo shrugged. “Wienie roast?”

Cardiff followed the line of blade marks downstream. “How long ago were they here?”

“Do I look like a Comanche, Cardiff?”

“Don’t smart-ass me, Green Card.”

The chemical engineer smiled at him. There was nothing inscrutable about his contempt for this arrogant old hakujin. “I guess maybe two days, three at the most.”

Back in the railboat, moving south again, they opened their last canned ham, and warmed morsels of it on the stove. Cardiff consulted in whispers with Ursula. Then the First Family laid out the options.

“If everything is smooth sailing,” Cardiff said, “we should catch the bastards in four days, tops.”

On the map stretched out at her feet Ursula pointed to a stretch of the river bordering Tennessee and Arkansas. “Somewhere north of Memphis.”

“We’re thinking ambush,” Cardiff said.

“Kill them all,” Deek said. Sitting beside him, Sharone brandished the carving knife she carried in the sheath strapped to her waist, and plunged it into the plank floor. Macy’s might be tired to the point of collapse, and so undernourished some people were beginning to experience mild hallucinations. But after the Coke truck sabotage no one was in a live-and-let-live kind of mood. There were angry mutters all around.

“Well, I understand your feelings,” Cardiff said. “But they’ll be no infanticide on my watch. We haven’t sunk that low.”

 “We might need the kids as bargaining chips,” Ursula said. “We’re going into a situation in New Orleans we only know a little bit about.”

“They like to camp in the middle of the ice,” Cardiff said. “Out in the open. So we move down the river ahead of them. We stop. We rest. We wait. Then we hit them before dawn. Cooper and the Joshes will no doubt put up a defense. So that’s who we knock down first. Once they’re out of the way there won’t be any other resistance.”

“We take Lira and the children and the food,” Ursula said.

“Why Lira?” Gay Trump asked, looking at Donny, who glared back.

 Cardiff adjusted his shoulder holster. “It stands to reason that she knows more about this man in New Orleans than we’ve heard on the tape. How many others are with him? How are they armed? Where are they holed up? How do we break in? What would they give us in exchange for the children?”

As the railboat rocked and swayed against a growing wind, Macy’s pondered the plan. Its flaws were obvious to everyone. But it was Jack Trump who finally spoke up.
“How do we get past them without being seen?”

“We’ll have to play it by ear. There are tracks on both sides of the river. When we get closer we’ll look for a route that gets us around them to a place where we can wait.”

Jack pushed on. “So, what, we sneak up on them at night and surround their camp, you know, like Comanches?

Cardiff looked hard at the architect. Ah, the Trumps had been sharing their little stories of insubordination with each other again, he thought. No doubt they were still bitter about the order to leave Allyson behind in Davenport, their little fuck buddy.

“Like I said, we’ll play it by ear.” 


CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE  As Sears glided down the mile-wide river toward St. Louis, moving deeper into the unknown South, it seemed to Augie that the skies grew less foreboding by the hour, and that the freezing air didn’t bite the skin quite as hard. In fact, the thermometer still registered 28. But maybe the world seemed like a happier place because Augie was a happier man.

Even in his junkest dreams during the 24-hour hibernations Sears people sometimes enjoyed on their days off, he never imagined a person like Spider sharing his life. Nor this kind of sliding liberation from the Mall. The closest approach his dreams had ever made to this new reality was a recurring vignette featuring Augie behind the wheel of Exie, driving along a winding road toward his hillside villa in, like Tuscany, or Hawaii. Someone was waiting for him in that mansion, the love of his life. But she had never shown herself. 

Now he knew the identity of this mysterious woman. And his baby would be waiting there as well, the child he had only hoped for, and had begun to believe would never be his. Spider wanted to think up names right away. But Augie was superstitious and thought they should wait till the kid was born and holding his own in the world.

As Augie windsurfed, Spider showed Mango how to steer the iceboat. Up ahead Lira piloted the lead boat. Her condition seemed much improved the last couple of days. And this also added to Augie’s happiness. A healthy Lira would be a healthy midwife, which would give his baby a better chance of a good start. Baby, Augie thought again. Or maybe even babies—what were the chances of twins? Or triplets?

Slumped beside Lira, Cooper stroked his red beard, lost in one of the funks he slipped into more and more often the farther from the Twin Cities they traveled. The man hadn’t said word one to anyone since last night. Now he just sat there like a park bench vagrant with a hangover, gazing out at the monotony of ice and dead trees passing by on either shore.
At noon they stopped and circled the boats to rest. Augie watched Cooper as he took a cup of boiled corn and a wedge of funnel bread from Aqua Josh and went back to his boat to pore over his maps. Sitting off by themselves to one side of the fire, Lira sat murmuring and giggling with Spider. Augie thought they were probably discussing pregnancy and whatnot, breast-feeding. But when he skated up behind them with his brunch he discovered that they were talking about masturbation.

“Oh,” Augie said, blushing. They turned around to look at him, and burst into howls of laughter. “I remembered something I have to ask Coop.”

He skated to Cooper’s boat and climbed in. “Where are we?”

Cooper raised his head slowly from his maps.

Augie waved his hand. “Yo, Coop!”

“Lewis and Clark,” Cooper said at last.

Augie looked at the maps spread all around, and the worn and faded snapshot Cooper was clutching. “That’s a town?”

“Lewis and Clark sailed from the Mississippi up the Missouri all the way to Montana.”

“So?”

Cooper turned back to the photograph and began snapping his fingers.

Understanding hit Augie like a fastball to the noggin. “No, you can’t.”
“I have to.”

“That’s what, a thousand miles? You’d never make it, master.”

“Look at all the food we’ve found so far.”

“Yeah, but you don’t know what’s waiting up those rivers. It’d be just you against them.
Whatever they are.”

Cooper put his arms around Augie. “I can’t stand it any more, man. I gotta go home.”
Augie was stricken. He’d never seen Cooper like this, even during the scariest parts of the Store Wars. “What about us? Who’s going to tell us what to do?”

Cooper let Augie go, and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “You are, master.”

Augie shook his head. “I’m no leader.”

“Yeah, you are. People will follow you anywhere.”

“I don’t know how to give orders.”

“You don’t have to. Just talk straight common sense.”

An hour later, after the discouraging word got around, the boats slid to a stop at the historic point where the first America met the second one. They peered up the Missouri heading west, and down the Mississippi heading south. Cooper was struck by the absence of ambiguity here, the simple choices the big rivers represented, as clear as a toggle switch. Here at last was a place where there was only clean lines and clear thinking.

Shuffling in the wind, hands buried in their pockets or raised to their mouths in sorrow, Sears gathered around Cooper. There were wet eyes and long faces all around.

“I love you guys,” Cooper said. “But you gotta understand.”

“Your odds are better with us,” Augie said.

“I know that.”

Lira lowered her head and began to weep, her slender shoulders heaving. Cooper put his arms around her and kissed her hair and took her aside so they could say a private goodbye. When they were finished Mutton and Ruth brought forth a saucepan and matches plus a big bag of shucked corn and a jar of preserved veggies, and stuffed these items beside the sleeping bag and one-man tent in Cooper’s big backpack. Mutton also put in a miniature King James Bible, ragged with use. Mango went to the kiddy boat and returned with her number two favorite toy, the one she loved almost as much as the tattered Bob Smith. This was Lord Fistula the Barbarian.

“He kicks ass,” she informed Cooper.

One by one people came forward to give him a bit of this and that, and to embrace him and wish him luck.

Finally, Cooper reached into his pocket. He brought forth the three bullets from the Colt.  He handed them to Augie. “You guys will be fine,” he said. “You know who you are. You know what you’re doing. And you know where you’re going. You’re tough bastards. And you’ve survived much worse shit than this.”

There was nothing more to say or do. Augie lifted Cooper’s heavy pack and helped him balance it on his shoulders. “Write if you find work.”

Cooper raised his personal sail and began tacking at an angle against the wind. In no time at all his receding dark figure disappeared into the gloom. It was as if he had never even existed.

CHAPTER FORTY  Cardiff and Ursula had mapped a route through the western suburbs of St. Louis that avoided the center of the big city and its lurking dangers. They made slow but steady progress around this loop until they reached Creve Couer, where a derailed freight had torn up the main track, and the sidetrack as well. The six flatcars in this short train had been transporting yellow and green John Deere tractors, which were sprawled across the mangled railbeds in rusted heaps.

As the Maloviks inspected this tangle it didn’t seem possible that Macy’s would be able to summon the muscle they’d need to put the right-of-way back in order. They’d been sleeping poorly, and had only eaten twice in the last two days. But the alternative meant backtracking ten miles to a freight spur heading south, at St. Ann. Cardiff could only imagine the sort of low-life scum that had been watching them on their way here, and might even be following them now.

As the Maloviks debated, the others huddled in the cabin around the stove, feeding the flames scraps of plywood they scavenged after the final precious Kingsford briquette was burned at dawn. Although the stove was stinky, it kept them warm enough. The soot had filled the tired-lines on their faces.

Suddenly, Luke straightened his shoulders. The fatigue in his eyes disappeared. When he rearranged his features into that familiar visage everyone had seen many times before they backed away from him, as if his condition was contagious. 

“The Great Carnac sees all and knows all,” Luke said, his voice filled with the scary cheer of a carnie luring suckers to a fun house. This voice, so different from his own quiet and unctuous drone, bore a startling similarity to the character created by the late night host he and Marlin had come of age adoring.

Luke held up an imaginary envelope to his forehead. “What do crabs get high on?”
He closed his eyes in theatrical concentration.

When they popped back open they were bright with revelation. “What do crabs get high on? Shake-N-Bake.”

Marlin sniggered. Donny groaned.

“What do cannibals find hard to digest?” Luke asked, repeating the shtick. “Old wives tale.”
And then: Why didn't Mrs. Franklin have any kids? Ben gay.

Luke knew these ludicrous routines by heart as a result of a getaway weekend in Vegas he and Marlin went on twenty years ago. During a stage show at the Sands Marlin dared Luke to volunteer as a subject for a hypnotist named Dr. Mesmer.  Along with nineteen other members of the audience Luke was cast into a deep trance, and convinced that when he awoke he’d be transformed into his favorite celebrity. Most of the men became Elvis. There was a quartet of Dolly Partons, a few Goldie Hawns, and two John Belushis, Bluto Belushi from Animal House and the samurai Belushi from Saturday Night Live.

But only one Johnny Carson.

After the guinea pigs amused the audience with some foolery and bad singing, Mesmer clapped his hands and nineteen of his subjects were washed clean of their autosuggestions. Like the others Luke woke right up. But there was a delinquent portion of his brain that had been frozen by Mesmer’s suggestions. From time to time Luke fell under its spell, for periods lasting from an hour to a day, unless Marlin was there to shake him back into the world. He had somehow memorized scores of Carson’s opening monologues, and all of his Carnac the Magnificent routines. During these episodes he spoke like Johnny Carson and he moved like Johnny Carson and he looked like Johnny Carson. With the right crew cut and some creative make-up he could have made a living as a Johnny Carson impersonator on any of your better cruise lines, say, or maybe in Branson.

“Make it stop,” Donny pleaded.

Outside in the wind, the Maloviks were weighing the options.

“Cardiff, this kind of work, people are going to need a real meal first.”

He checked south along the right-of-way with his binoculars. “Do you think any of them will eat it?”

She shrugged.

“Are you going to eat it?” he asked.

“Heavy lifting isn’t on the list of things I do for a living. What about you?”

He made a face. “Sears food.”

It was decided to open the larder anyway. Some of the others were tempted, and Sharone actually picked up a filet and unwrapped it. But in the end no one else had the stomach for Macy Meat either. Still, Cardiff knew that the hour was coming when hunger would finally break down their resistance, his included. And he knew it wouldn’t trouble him much that then they’d be no better than Sears.

Ursula made a pan of pale tea, stirred the last of their sugar into it, and filled cups for people. Then they went to work, moving as if they were under water. Directed by Jack and Tomo Trump they began pulling small pieces of debris from the railbed, stopping often to get their breath. They dragged away the heavier scraps with the railboat, using ropes looped around utility poles in order to get the right angles. It took most of the morning to open the way. The ravens sat in the dead trees nearby, and watched and chattered. They seemed as fat and fit as ever. No one wanted to think about what they were eating.

The Trumps pounded together a pair of makeshift rails confected from two-by-fours stripped from a fitness center under construction when The Shit Hit The Fan, and laid the lumber across the ties that hadn’t been torn away by the wreck. Spinnaker pulled down, the boat inched across these jerry-rigged tracks and was coaxed onto the real tracks. Everyone staggered into the cabin and collapsed as both sails filled with wind and they were finally on their way. They had wasted almost a day in St. Louis, and almost all of their energy.

The moment Gay Trump lay down she fell asleep. Snarlin Marlin and Luke Chambers crawled to their section of floorspace and fell against each other like a pair of drunken sailors. Donny went aft to man the sail, but as soon as it was unfurled and they began to move he fell asleep as well. Only Deek and Sharone seemed alive as they climbed up to the roof to take their turn sitting watch. Trembling, Cardiff sat down beside Ursula, trying to maintain his dignity. She offered him a wan, dreamy smile.

“How do you feel?” he asked her.

“Like I’m walking on water.”

The swaying and rocking of the railboat, the glow from the stove, and the slow clacking of the wheels on the tracks had a deep hypnotic effect. It occurred to Cardiff that during the last twenty-four hours he’d stopped feeling hungry. In fact, after only a few hours of sleep last night he woke up experiencing a weird energy, as if he’d wolfed a box of chocolate truffles. The air felt warmer to him. And even his anxieties about the journey to come and their confrontation with Sears had been replaced with a kind of peace. He remembered a monograph about the phenomenon of starving people who sometimes experienced a sort of ecstasy. Looking for energy, the brain finds a pure and concentrated form of emergency fat stored in the liver.

After a while the cabin was suddenly filled with the impossible smell of limed chicken and jalapeno sauce and frying corn dough. It took him a moment to connect these exotic aromas with an image from his childhood, such as it was. And then there he was, back on the street again, the filthy, starving boy with sores that weren’t healing, a cough that wouldn’t go away, begging that vendor on la Plaza del Perros Rojas for just a taste of the empanadas criollas the old man sold from a cart. The bastard had slapped his face and chased him away.

When Cardiff opened his eyes he was confused for a moment about where he was. Whatever this experience had been, it seemed so real. He could still feel the sun on his face. And the smells were still in his nose. But in truth he didn’t know for sure whether this boyhood scene actually happened, or if he had dreamed it, or whether he’d been visiting the memory of a dream.

What he did know was this: His first years were indeed spent in Mexico City, where George and Darlene Malovik of Akron, Ohio, had bribed the foul and starving urchin to leave his crate in an alley pooled with sewage, and get in their car. Cardiff would never forget the taste of that chorizo sausage wrapped in a tortilla. But it was the cup of hot chocolate poured from a Thermos that overcame his fear about leaving with them. On his eighteenth birthday they had tried to explain to him why it had seemed like a waste of time to stand in adoption lines when there were thousands of desperate and needy children only a bribe and a road trip away.
For Cardiff this miracle of good luck had saved his life. But it had left him with a heavy sense that he belonged nowhere. He wasn’t quite European and he wasn’t quite Indian and he had never quite fit in. Whatever, he was certainly no stranger to hunger. What he found peculiar now was that over the course of six decades he’d traveled in a perfect circle, and was heading once again in the direction of zero.

Donny’s snooze was shattered by his talkie. It was Deek the Geek screaming to goddamnit hit the fucking brake!

It was almost dark. On the tracks before them in Frontenac loomed a pair of empty boxcars. Groaning with fatigue and the soreness of underfed and overused muscles, they eased down from the railboat and stood shivering in a windy wind. Checking his maps Cardiff saw that there was a spur only two miles down the tracks. He reached out and put his gloved hand on the boxcar, then leaned into the vehicle’s massive weight. To his surprise, it creaked and then moved slightly. Or was it his imagination?

The others followed his lead and soon they pushed the boxcars down the track several feet. Would it be possible to bully these cars with the railboat all the way to the spur?

And so they did. Halfway there, at a crossing, they came upon something reaffirming Cardiff’s belief that he might always be the object of rescue. At first it appeared to be just another one of the dioramas of the dead that now littered the planet. Here was a hairy, bludgeoned man, his frozen brains driven from his head with, what? Probably the aluminum softball bat the big bald guy on the ground next to him was still clutching in his frozen grip. The bigger man had been stabbed in the back of the neck with a butcher knife; it still protruded there, and the ground around him was pooled with blackened blood. There were three other men on the ground, as well, and a couple of women stiffs, everyone battered or skewered with spears or punctured with arrows. Cardiff wasn’t interested in the forensics of this skirmish, which resembled the sort of gang fight that had once been common at the Mall.

It was object of this battle that had stopped the railboat in its tracks. In the center of the carnage was an old-fashioned baggage trolley of the sort you once saw in railroad stations and airports. It was loaded with cartons and crates. Ever since The Shit Hit The Fan there were only two things that compelled normal people to murder other normal people face to face.

Deek and Sharone were the first ones to the trolley, skipping there in anticipation. All at once Deek was clutching a white cardboard crate to his chest as if it were a long-lost pet.

“McNuggets!” he cried.


CHAPTER FORTY-ONE  As each new day slid past the old one and Sears edged deeper into the monotonous frozen plain of the Delta, the river began to coil back on itself in a maze of oxbow lakes and loops and false channels. With more distance to cover because of this meandering, their progress south was slowed, and they had to stop at every bend while they checked Cooper’s maps to figure out the true way south.

They were spared the cost of traversing a fifteen-mile loop in the river near New Madrid, Missouri, because the narrow neck of this peninsula had been severed by a ragged trench a hundred yards wide that ran east and west all the way to both horizons.

“What the hell is this, a canal?” Blue Josh said as he looked over Augie’s shoulder at the map, which showed no canal.

“It’s a fault line,” Lira said.

“What kind of quake would do this?”

Augie put away the map and skated out onto this great gash in the earth. “A wicked big one.”
After a few yards they glided over the first Stinker, a tall blond man in a green coat and bib overalls, frozen face up just under the ice. The brown eyes were wide open. Nearby was a goat. Farther on they skated over a pair of freckled, tow-headed boys. Then they were forced to veer around a weathervane poking out of the ice. Below it they could see the great red steel roof of a barn sloping away into the depths. As they passed the vane it swung, creaking, to the north, then again toward the west. Augie felt better when they were on the other side of the fissure, back on the familiar ice of the Mississippi, where Stinkers were few and far between.

They made camp that night on a small woody island. They built an enormous fire, and sang songs around it until they couldn’t sing any more. The next morning they got up early for the sail through Memphis.

 Just like St. Louis, where the Gateway Arch had crashed down onto the river in a jumble of twisted metal that looked like a train wreck, and columns of smoke snaked into the bruise-colored heavens from dozens of fires, Memphis lay in smoky ruins. T