Chapter 10 #2
Bee reaches forward and takes it from me. She bags the twin handheld radios.
Without a word, we push onwards, our steps quick to reach the end of the aisle. We keep up with Emily and Ramona to the chemist before they fork off for the farther aisles.
Like the rest of this place, the actual over-the-counter part of the pharmacy is ransacked, in a fucking shambles.
My face crumples at the sight of it.
Bottles and phials and pill packets, everywhere. Not a step can be taken in here without a rustle and clang and a clatter.
Bee realises that.
She comes up beside me, her shoulders slumped with a sag, and she turns a grim look on me.
My answer is this: Tap, tap.
Wait.
She nods, firm.
I peel the shotgun from my shoulder and, teeth gritted, set it down on the counter as quiet as I can.
Bee slides a step back, aiming around me, covering me, as I crouch down.
First, I unfasten the bag from my belt, releasing the weight. I leave it on the floor.
The boot laces are fastened at the ankles. Easier grabbing at that angle.
Practiced, I reach down and in just a few tugs, the laces are undone.
I slip my feet out, gentle, one at a time.
Bee keeps the white dusty gleam on the shelves, her gaze just as focused.
Sheathed in thick baseball socks, my feet flatten on the floor.
I scan the floor, the chaos of it, the clutter.
Reading my mind, Bee inches closer, a mere whisper, “Reminds me of your bedroom. Right at home, are you?”
She can’t see the smile that worms over my mouth.
I rise, then slide my sock-clad foot forward. I move slow, and so the packets that are pushed aside are quiet and soft. I repeat, over and over, slowly sliding around the counter to the rear shelves of the pharmacy, where the good shit is.
I’m on the hunt for inhalers—but they are always hardest to find.
When the looting started, inhalers were one of the first things to go. Those and insulin. I expected it would be something like oxy painkillers and benzos that went first.
Maybe it’s the damage from the plague, maybe it’s just that people saw a trading opportunity, that inhalers and insulin would be the new gold.
Whatever the reason, it means I’m lucky to find three inhalers tucked under a shelf.
They help.
Bee’s idea to test them.
Cool air is best for our damaged lungs. But the inhalers soothe us when the inflammation starts to suffocate. It’s not asthma that we have been left with from that plague. It’s something else.
We treat it as best as we can.
I pack the few I find into the backpack before I slide my way to the antibiotics. No one is hurt, but we did lose a bag about week back, and all our emergency meds are gone with it.
Emily had to drop her bag.
That’s when we encountered the men.
Masked men.
They didn’t see us.
Emily ditched the bag to better roll under a car.
That’s how we hid from them for the hours they were on the street before they finally moved on.
So we are here, now. For food, meds, all the supplies we need to keep us going for a while longer.
I pack a lot of antibiotics, then turn for the counter.
The light glares at me.
I squint against it.
Bee mumbles a ‘sorry’ before she drops the light to the floor.
Takes my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the shift, and I squeeze them, once, twice, before I watch lights dancing all over my vision, as though stained by the torch. I huff a breath, then start to slide to the next aisle. One more stop.
But as I turn the corner, I realise I don’t need to go all the way into the messy aisle to find painkillers. Packets are all over the floor.
I drop into a squat, and carefully pick through what the light illuminates.
Always better to have painkillers before they are needed than to have to go out looking for them when things are rough.
Emily gets migraines.
So I grab a few of those pills.
And—as my gaze latches onto a familiar box—my shoulders soften.
More bronchodilators. Inhalers.
Just two, but I stuff them into the bag without a grudge. All up, that’s five.
Not bad.
Not great, but not bad.
One more would even things out, two for each of us. Emily, Ramona and me.
The three of us got the sickness.
The plague that infected the world, an airborne virus, and before the blackout even reached us, I fell to it.
Now, the three of us carry the remnants of that virus in our lungs.
The ache isn’t constant anymore. But it swells from time to time, and when it does, it’s like an elephant’s foot pressing down on my chest, and I can’t breathe, I can’t suck in more than an inch of air, and I feel my insides swelling, closing over.
I’ve passed out from it before. The inflammation. The suffocation.
Sure, inhalers help, but cold, icy air is best. Nice and sharp.
That’s hard to come by in a world without technology, no running freezers to stick my head in. I only know it helps because of those few cold days we endured about a week after leaving quarantine. We slept outside, in the woods, rugged up in sleeping bags we took from the campervan.
I hardly slept—and when my lungs started to constrict, and that icy breeze swept into my parted mouth, I felt the immediate relief.
If we stick around here, on the west coast of British Columbia, that would be an upside of winter. But our plan is to go down south, back to Cali, and chase the warmth.
I want to be home…
Not stuck on another continent, across the ocean, no way to get back to London—
No.
Can’t let myself think of that right now.
Not while I’m crouched in a mess of fallen, scattered medicines, a parted backpack barely balanced on my thigh, and torchlight dusting over me.
We’ve already been here too long.
Wallow later.
So I bury it all until it’s poison festering in me, and I slide out from the aisles. It takes a while, these slow sliding steps, and when I rejoin Bee, the other girls are back from their raid.
They wait, patient, as I secure my backpack, then fasten the duffel to my belt, slip on my boots, tie the laces, and finally steal the shotgun back into my hands.
Emily takes point for our exit.
She leads the way through the aisles, and when we reach that long, wide lane to the entrance, she veers into the tech aisles.
Crouched, we follow, zigzagging around and around, just one faint light to lead the way.
Ramona sticks close to my heels.
Too close.
If I have to stop suddenly, she’ll knock into my back, and the backpack will crunch and rattle and thud at the impact. There’s too much in there, weighing me down, the straps tugging on my shoulders.
I just want to get back to the safehouse.
We don’t call it home, because it isn’t. It’s just a place off-road and hidden in the trees, but also close to the highway so we can make an easy break for it if we need to.
It’s why we have those.
The bicycles leaning on the abandoned cars out front. Smooth, quiet—and easier than walking, that’s for sure.
It’s how we’ve been getting around since ditching quarantine. Emily’s idea, actually. A good one.
Our formation holds to the cars—and only then do we splinter off for our bikes.
Mine is propped against the door of a small white van, the kind I was warned about as a child, and Bee’s rests beside it.
I mirror her, reaching one hand to my belt as I lower into a crouch and unhook the duffel strap.
The bag thumps to the road. Then Bee’s.
Then two more behind me.
The four of us unload the weight from our belts before we each hoist the duffels onto the metal racks at the rear of the bikes.
Our guns stay balanced in one arm as we fasten the bags in place.
I’m tugging the hooked bungee cord, tight, then locking it, when a light bounces over my shoulder—and I have not a moment to react before a cry splits the quiet air.
I swerve my glare to Ramona just as she drops her balanced bike by the handles—and it clatters, so fucking loud, to the ground.
My muscles jolt under my skin.
I cringe against the rattle, a hiss between my clenched teeth.
“Holy fuck!” Ramona’s grunted words come with a sudden stagger.
The heels of her boots catch on the tumbled bike, and she topples backwards.
She’s fast out of sight.
Her torchlight has vanished. Broken in her fall, a dead battery, or she switched it off, I don’t know.
I can’t see shit, not without turning my own light in her direction.
I inch around to find Emily, her light, but her torchlight has disappeared behind the pulse of red, and I can only guess she’s flattened her hand over it.
Cold dread spills through my insides.
Rapid, raspy moans come from the darkness.
“What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck…” Ramona’s words get gravellier as they go on.
Beneath it, there’s the bass of a moan—that I guess is coming from Emily.
Everything in me, every scrap of instinct, is urging me to dump everything and hide, to roll under the van and shield myself. But I can’t do that.
I force myself to turn my shotgun, and with the torchlight, illuminate the fresh pocket of darkness at the sidewalk.
Ramona is right where I last saw her fall.
Sprawled there, on her toppled bike, she hugs her weapon to her chest, mouthing the same words over and over. Her dark complexion has washed out into something ashy.
Terror.
That’s what I read on her.
Sheer, raw terror.
It startles me, and that pause darkens into something ugly, coiling in my belly, when I spot Emily.
She’s tucked into backseat of the car, eyes so wide they might just pop out of her head, and her is hand firmly pressed against the glare of her flashlight.
The door is ripped off, gone, and the interior left exposed to this new, dead world of ours. The seats will be soaked and mouldy.
But that hasn’t stopped Emily from hiding in there.
And she is hiding.
But from what…?