Cruel World(122)

“Strange that we didn’t see any of them again today,” she said. “Kinda gives me the creeps.”

“It gives me the creeps seeing them,” Quinn replied.

“So what’s our plan? Do we try to find the army before dark, or do we overnight in one of the buildings here and go looking in the morning?”

“I’d hate to be without cover when the sun goes down,” Quinn said.

“Me too,” Alice said.

“Me three,” Ty chimed in.

“Okay. Let’s find somewhere secure and get inside. I’m starving,” Alice said, pulling forward.

They glided down the aisles of buildings. Many were barricaded by the same chain link that surrounded the rest of the park. Others were wide open, overhead doors gaping, windows shattered and jagged.

“Damn, I vote for that one,” Alice said, drawing even with a distributing company. The garish, electric signs advertising liquor and beer above its main entrance were dark, but the building looked solid with only a single, unbroken window in its front.

“I’ll take a walk,” Quinn said, opening his door. He brought the rifle with him, checking its load before crossing the business’s yard. The front door was locked, and when he peered in through the window, he saw it was also barricaded. A second steel door within the entry was shut tight. Quinn moved around the side of the building, pacing along its seamless block wall. On the backside there was a single door that wouldn’t budge. When he looked closer, he saw that the latch had been welded solid to the frame. The opposite side of the building was an open loading dock for trucks to back into, its long promenade of concrete empty save for a stack of pallets in one corner. Quinn took two steps onto the loading dock and stopped.

A smeared bloodstain ran in a swath to one of the overhead doors.

He knelt beside it, dipping his fingers into one of the larger blotches of gore. It was still wet.

Quinn stood and moved to the door, following the blood trail. Smeared handprints covered its bottom edge, jets of crimson spattered near its base. Quinn stood to one side of the door and pushed upward.

It slid easily.

He dropped into a crouch, flicking the rifle’s light on. Cases of beer stacked on pallets glowed in the glare along with a river of blood that led away into the darkness of the warehouse.

“Shit,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the sun. It was nearly touching the horizon. With two deep breaths, he pushed the door up its track enough to crawl beneath it and went inside.

The ceilings were high and lined with rows of darkened fluorescent lights. With the stacks of spirits on every side it was like being in a cavern of some sort, their heights soaring above him like stalagmites. He swept the area, the fresh blood shining back at him from the floor. He walked beside it, glancing up and around with each step. His boots clicked on the polished floor, the loudest sound besides his heart. The trail wound through two more stacks of booze and then dribbled into a narrow stream before ending completely.

Quinn shone the light into an alcove straight ahead of where the blood trail ended.

A middle-aged man with short blond hair lay in the shadows beneath a large shelf loaded with vodka, his shoulders propped up against the wall. His eyes were partially lidded, and he held a dark handgun in his dripping fingers.

“Stop,” he said, his voice weak and hollow in the air of the warehouse.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Quinn said, keeping the AR-15 trained on the man’s chest.

The man laughed, a quiet, wet sound. “Good; that’s good.”

Quinn lowered the rifle enough to illuminate the man’s legs.

His left foot ended in a ragged stump that oozed blood into a broad pool. As Quinn watched, the man’s arm slumped to his side, and his eyes rolled up into his head.

~

They ate a cold dinner of cheese and sliced sausages along with several cans of beer they’d taken from an open container. They sat in a semicircle on the floor, Denver lying between Ty and Alice on his side, soaking in the coolness of the concrete. Quinn kept glancing over at the man’s prone form, his head resting on a rolled up blanket, leg elevated and secured on a steel chair they’d found in the front office.

After the man passed out, Quinn had seen he’d been holding a makeshift tourniquet with his free hand, and without the pressure, the stump began to bleed freely again. He’d retied the bootlace the man had used, staunching the flow to almost nothing, before running outside to direct Alice to the rear loading dock. Once they were all inside, they’d repositioned the injured man and poured a small amount of water in his mouth that he managed to swallow. After that, he’d become completely unresponsive, the rising and falling of his chest the only movement.