“Why don’t we find a car?” he pants.
“Dad never showed me how to hotwire.”
“What if somebody left their keys?”
“Those ones are probably all gone by now. But keep an eye out.”
Addis abruptly stops and turns around. “What was that?”
Nora didn’t actually hear it, so she feels okay saying, “Nothing. Probably boats knocking against each other. Come on.”
They pass several motels on their way up the hill, but a bed isn’t much use if you can’t sleep, and she knows she won’t be able to tonight without a gun under her pillow. She pushes forward, scanning the shopfront windows.
“Why aren’t we stopping?” Addis says after keeping quiet for an impressive ten minutes.
“We need guns.”
“But I’m tired.”
“There are things out there that don’t get tired. We need guns.”
Addis sighs.
“Tell you what, A.D.D. If we find a lot of bullets, I’ll let you shoot the next thing we need to shoot.”
Addis smiles.
The neighborhood gets seedier as they move north. Pawn shops, smoke shops, dark alleys littered with condoms and syringes. This is encouraging. The “bad neighborhoods” of yesterday are the survival buffets of ^butveeys ltoday, full of guns and drugs and all the other equipment necessary for living the low life. No neighborhood built for prosperity has any place in the new era—no one needs parks or cafes or fitness centers, much less schools or libraries. What’s useful now is the infrastructure of the underworld, with its triple-bolted doors and barred windows, its hidden passages and plentiful supplies of vice. The slums and ghettos had the right idea all along. They were just ahead of their time.
“There!” Addis says, pointing wildly at a storefront.
Nora stops and stares at it. A lovingly painted plywood sign, declaring in thousand-point font:
GUNS
She chuckles to herself. She almost walked past it.
• • •
Naturally, a cache this obvious has been thoroughly looted, but they search anyway. The display cases are empty, the ammo boxes are gone. There are more than a few puddles of dried blood on the floor and walls, but no bodies. Whoever made this mess was careless. Everyone living in these times knows the most important rule of conservation: if you have to kill someone, make sure they stay dead. It may be a losing battle, the math may be against the Living, but diligence in this one area will at least slow down the spread of the plague. Responsible murder is the new recycling.
“This is the worst gun store ever,” Addis says, scanning row after empty row.
“Pretend you’re a looter. What places would you check last?”
“What are looters like?”
“I don’t know, hungry? Scared?”
“Okay. That’s easy.”
“So you run into this place, you’re hungry and scared, maybe you shoot some people…what do you do next?”
“Well…” A little smile blooms on his face as he gets into character. Nora realizes this is inappropriate make-believe to play with a seven-year-old, and for a moment she feels bad. But only a moment.
Addis runs around the store aiming an invisible pistol, making blam sounds near all the blood pools and taking little grabs at the empty shelves. Then he turns to deliver his findings.
“I’d grab all the ones off the shelves first. Then the stuff in the cases. All the stuff that’s right in front, ‘cause I’d be scared to go into any back rooms or corners.”
“Well I already checked the back room…”
“What if I was the owner of the shop?” His eyes widen with inspiration. “I bet I’d be even more scared then!”
“Okay, what if you were the owner?”
“I’d put guns in secret spots all over the store. So I could grab one no matter where I was.”
Nora checks the cash register. Its drawer is open, empty. She checks the shelves under it. Empty.
“But if there was lots of shooting all the time,” Addis continues like a scientist explaining his breakthrough theorem, “I’d probably be hiding on the floor a lot.”
Nora shrugs and lies down on the floor behind the cash register, playing along. “Oh shit,” she laughs. She grabs the Colt .45 taped to the cabinet molding and jumps up, aiming it at an imaginary target.
“Blam,” she says.
Addis grins with huge, Christmas-morning eyes.
Nora checks the magazine. Full.
ret c="lhriI love you, Addis Greene,” she says. “Let’s go find somewhere to sleep.”
• • •
When choosing their lodging, they ignore all the feeble enticements on the billboards. Fragmented advertisements with letters either missing or added by vandals.
CLEAN & QUI T
FREE INTERNmEnT
MONTHLY RA p ES
They base their choice solely on the thickness of the window bars.
Not wanting to damage their room’s lock, Nora kicks in the office door instead, finds the key for the room furthest from the street, and enters the civilized way. Once inside, she locks the doorknob, latches the chain, hooks the hook, turns the deadbolt, the mortice, and the night-latch.
This is a good motel.
A scan of the room brings a grim smile to her face. Peeling beige wallpaper. Dark orange carpet with wall-to-wall stains. Teal bedspread with a pink floral pattern. She tries the light switch but isn’t surprised when nothing happens. Businesses in areas like this probably only bought gas generators, leaving the solar and hydrogen stuff to the downtown folk. As a general rule, she doesn’t expect to find electricity anywhere she can’t find art galleries.