"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 w