Foraging runs are governed by two rules:
Stick with your crew.
And never leave a man behind.
For the grocery-store run, we took out two crews, ours and Ben’s.
Ben had his group of five, stocked with the usual suspects. And we had ours, led by Patrick. In addition to me and Alex, we had Eve, Rocky, Jenny White, and Kris Keuser.
There hadn’t been many volunteers.
Though we hadn’t spotted any Hatchlings close to the high school yet, Patrick’s Winchester was loaded with rock-salt shells and Alex had taken her hockey stick and my baling hooks to the cafeteria kitchen and baptized them again with salt water.
It was past midnight on December 14, and the waxing moon lent a pale gleam to the wild grass of the baseball outfield. Each crew pushed two empty wheelbarrows—Rocky and Kris steered ours. We reached the zone where the Hosts had disintegrated on the outfield grass. Over the past days, the puddles had bled together, leaving a soupy film across a patch of center field. The smell made my eyes water. For a moment I thought the organic matter was moving again. A trick of the moonlight? But no, it was throbbing with life. I went on alert, leaning closer.
Maggots.
My first thought was, How boring.
Jenny White gagged a bit.
I put my hand on her back, but she shook me off and threw up, contributing to the sludge.
“Shut her up,” Ben hissed from over by the fence.
“She’s ten,” I whispered. “Cut her a break.”
Jenny wiped her mouth, and we continued on. The two packs moved separately, Ben’s crew angling up the first-base line while we took a circuitous route through left field, skimming along the third-base dugout.
Ben reached the slit in the fence first. He’d repaired it himself after the Host invasion, cinching up the chain-link with a series of combination padlocks from old gym lockers. He had every last combination memorized. He went to work now unlocking them. Our crew waited over by the dugout. The purring of the first dial carried over to us, followed by a metallic click as the lock opened. The process went on for a very long time.
At last we watched their dark forms vanish through the fence line. Dezi stumbled a bit on his way through, given his bad knee, sending a rattle of metal through the night air. Ben grabbed Dezi’s shoulders and held him balanced on one leg, perfectly still, halfway through the fence. Then he and Mikey guided Dezi through.
After they filtered between the Dumpsters and faded into the darkness, Patrick held up his hand, holding us in place. We waited another five minutes, and then my brother lowered his hand. We crept across the infield dirt.
Ben had laid the gap open perfectly like an unzipped jacket. He’d let the loose padlocks dangle from one side of the slit so their weight tugged the flap wide. Despite all the ways he was awful, I had to admit he was really useful when it came to stuff like this.
Rocky and Kris parked our empty wheelbarrows beside the two left by Ben’s crew. We breezed through the fence, lifting our feet carefully so as not to jangle the chain-link. Then we huddled up behind the rows of Dumpsters.
Ben’s guys had already forged into the grocery store through the rolled-up door of the loading bay. We crossed the asphalt, climbed onto the dock, and slipped inside. Ben had left the door open for us. We found him and his crew in the back room, which was rimmed with freezers.
The doorway to the main floor was covered with dangling plastic strips. Terror bubbled up in me as I saw them bulge inward at us. They fell away, revealing Mikey steering a flatbed cart into the room.
I exhaled shakily. Ben’s dark eyes found me. “Feeling jumpy, Little Rain?”
“You’d be an idiot not to,” Alex said.
Ben rested his hand against the door of the nearest freezer unit. “Still cool,” he said. “This bad boy’s never been popped.”
Mikey moved the cart close, and Ben opened the door. The freezer was packed with cuts of meat. Ben rubbed his hands together to warm them; it made him look like a cartoon robber about to plunder a bank.
His guys started stacking vacuum-sealed cutlets, chops, and fillets onto the flatbed. Ben looked up at my brother and jerked his head toward the plastic curtain. “Roll out.”
Our job was to secure the main floor and load up on nonperishables.
We pressed through. The plastic dragged across my face, falling away to reveal the main floor. It was chilly—the front doors had been breached by Hosts way back at the beginning.
Patrick signaled for us to break up between the aisles as we’d discussed. We split off in twos to complete our various tasks. Mine and Patrick’s was to deal with the shattered sliding front doors.
Rocky and Eve started grabbing armloads of Cheerios, crackers, and energy bars. Jenny and Kris peeled down the aisle toward canned goods. Alex stayed alone in the back. We’d said that her job was to provide overwatch, but it was really to keep an eye on Ben and his crew.
Patrick and I eased our way to the front of the store. The night wind whipped back my hair. Despite the cold, I armed sweat from my forehead.
We reached the sliding doors. One of them had been smashed in by the Hosts, but the other was intact. The doors were made of heavy-duty Lexan. Jack Kaner had installed them last July after an F2 tornado ripped through and turned all his windows to slivers of glass.
As I stared across the parking lot, I felt my heartbeat revving up, a thump-thump-thump at my wrists and the sides of my neck. Town square was barely visible beyond the lot, a lake of black framed by the blocky shadows of the hospital, the church, the One Cup Cafe.
A body lay at the edge of visibility, either a rotting teenage kid or a dead Host. It was twisted grotesquely, as if it had landed there from some great height, the torso jackknifed back over the hips, arms splayed. I wondered how it had happened.
When Patrick tapped my shoulder, I jumped.
He pointed at the emergency metal gates tucked into the wall at either side of the doorway. We gave a last scan of the parking lot and then leaned our weapons against the wall and set to work. I dug my hand into the crevice on the left side and hooked the handle at the end of the gate.
It expanded outward with a screech.
I froze. Bit my lip. My eyes were scrunched shut against the noise. I pictured it rolling across the parking lot, town square, the whole stupid valley, and echoing back from Ponderosa Pass fifty miles away.
I looked behind me at Patrick. His eyes were wide, his Stetson cocked back on his head. He eased a breath out through his teeth and made a calming gesture with his hands: Slower.
He grabbed the gate handle on his side of the doorway and extracted it one painstaking inch at a time. Rather than screeching, it made a grinding noise. Patrick eased off the pressure even more, and the grinding slowed to a series of metallic ticks as the rusty hinges accordioned open.
I followed his lead, guiding the other side of the gate out to meet his in the middle.
I felt exposed there in the open mouth of the store, my whole right side laid bare to wind and darkness. But I forced myself to move as slowly as I could.
As the gate stretched open, my side of it would give a tick, and a few seconds later Patrick’s would. It sounded like a clock winding down.
We backed up toward each other. At last I felt my brother’s shoulder blades bump into mine. An industrial-size padlock dangled from the metal loop, and Patrick freed it. I fastened the thick hasp, and he hooked the padlock through, clicked it, and extracted the key.
When he exhaled, his shoulders lowered a solid inch. He stepped away from the doorway, picked up his shotgun, and turned to face me.
He whispered, “Now let’s—”
He read my face and stopped.
My mouth had gone bone-dry. A sheen of panic sweat covered my body—it had sprung up instantly. My throat clutched. I couldn’t force out a single word.
I didn’t have to.
Slowly, Patrick turned his head toward the window just behind him.
On the far side of the pane, no more than six inches away, nostril holes quivered and blew twinning plumes of mist against the glass.
Eyelids flickered over bulging black pupils. Even in the darkness, the orange hue of the flesh was clear. The mouth parted as I dreaded it would.
And kept parting.
Jagged teeth stretched wide, each one tapering to a gleaming, pearly point.
The Hatchling reared back and launched himself into the window.