The Oracle Year(101)
Panner’s Market was the only grocery store in Feldspar Creek—a market, really. A small store for a small town, never with all that much in stock.
Still. This was apocalyptic. Gaping holes where the staples should have been. No flour or sugar, no toilet paper, no coffee.
They had almost reached the cabin. According to Will, it was a fifteen-minute drive up the mountain from the town. The place had taken on a talismanic quality in Leigh’s mind—a refuge where they could finally settle in and think, figure out a next step.
Until, of course, the world ended in a huge nuclear fireball.
The feast had been her idea. A celebration of their arrival at the cabin, and a sort of screw-you to the Site—a dance to the graveyard.
Hamza had supposedly stocked the safe house—and “safe” was relative, under the circumstances—with canned goods, bottled water, and other nonperishables. Enough to last for a while, if they needed it, but fresh was fresh, and so Leigh had pulled into Panner’s Market in search of milk, eggs, fruits, and vegetables. A few good steaks, if they could be found. They had talked about grilling that night, maybe splitting a bottle or three of wine.
Apparently, though, she wasn’t the only one in Feldspar Creek thinking that way. The tiny butcher’s case held only a few graying packages of ground chuck. Leigh grabbed them and made her way to the register, where she waited her turn behind a line of still, silent shoppers.
The checkout clerk—a well-padded older woman with brilliant, bottle-red hair and a name tag labeling her as a Claire—worked the line with quiet efficiency.
Claire looked a little off her game. Her makeup was unevenly applied, and her hair was messy.
“Hi there,” she said, as Leigh stepped up.
“Hello,” Leigh said. She began unloading her cart and placing the groceries on the conveyor belt. Claire swiped Leigh’s items across the scanner. She rushed it and hissed with impatience when the laser didn’t ring up the price on the first try.
Leigh opened her purse and pulled out her wallet. She unsnapped it and thumbed through the sheaf of bills inside, literally the last of their cash.
She considered the fact that her trip west with the Oracle had used almost exactly, to the penny, the amount of money Will had brought with him from New York, and let her mind skitter away. She’d only known Will Dando for about a week, and she was already largely postcoincidence.
“You’re lucky you made it,” Claire the clerk told her. “We’re closing early today.”
“I get it,” Leigh said.
“I just want to be home, you know?”
“I do,” Leigh agreed. “I really do.”
Claire stopped scanning Leigh’s items and settled back, holding a thin plastic bag containing the one anemic-looking head of lettuce the market’s cold case had left to offer. She looked bleakly at her empty market.
“You know, I’ve made more money this week than I do in the whole down season up here. I should go spend it, you know? Buy something nice, while I still can.”
She pressed a button on her cash register.
“Forty-eight ninety-seven,” she said.
Leigh nodded, and looked down at her wallet, then dimly realized that words from the news broadcast were penetrating her consciousness despite her best efforts to screen them out.
“President Daniel Green.” “Cancer.” “New prediction.” “The Site.” “The Oracle.” “Three to four months.”
“The Oracle.”
The Oracle.
Leigh’s head swam. Nausea churned in her gut. Hazily, she fumbled a few bills from her wallet and dropped them on the checkout scanner. She grabbed the grocery bags and walked toward the exit, ignoring Claire, dimly aware that the woman was holding up the money and calling after her. She had paid too much or too little. It didn’t matter.
Leigh walked quickly to the Nissan, parked at the edge of the market’s small lot. Will was visible through the windshield, in a cap and wig and glasses—he was always in disguise now, unless he was behind a locked door. His head was down. The pose felt to Leigh like he was looking at his phone. The phone he had just used to fuck them both.
She ripped open the car’s rear door and tossed the grocery bags into the backseat, then slammed it shut. She took a deep breath, held it, released it, then opened the driver’s-side door and slid inside.
“Everything all right?” the Oracle asked.
She was wrong—it wasn’t his phone. He had the notebook on his lap, the Notebook in which the Oracle attempted to figure out the plan of the Site. The green pencil was in his hand, and an entire page was covered with lime-colored text. She knew what that meant—he had explained his color-coding system to her during a particularly dull stretch of road in Indiana. And so, she knew it was unusual, unprecedented, probably represented some significant breakthrough—and she couldn’t manage to give even a single shit.
“Fuck you, Will,” Leigh said. She pulled the door closed and sat with her hands on the wheel, almost shaking with tension.
The Oracle considered this, then closed the Notebook, marking his place with the green pencil.
“You heard,” Will said.
“Yeah,” Leigh said. “I heard. Of all the things you could have done, all the predictions you could put up on the Site, you gave up the one thing that’s keeping the president of the United States from coming after us—not to mention poor Hamza and Miko—and, at best, throwing us into prison for the rest of our lives. I heard.”