The Hole (3 page)

Two weeks before Clarine got sick, the trucks failed to arrive. The number of bodies being dragged out to the street had diminished greatly, but what small piles there were just stayed there. Elliot and Evajean were lucky enough in that respect to live on a street already effectively depopulated, so the views from their front windows were unobstructed by that sad picture of human remains.

So it had been the middle of July since either one of them had learned anything about their dying world. Now, driving through its outskirts for the first time in over a month, Elliot shared Evajean’s confusion. How could the entire population of a town, even in the reduced size left after the collections stopped, simply vanish?

Evajean was back to staring out the window now, and Elliot wished he could say more to her, tell her anything. But he drove the rest of the way in silence, occasionally letting himself wander back to this newest mystery but never with real concentration. They’d find answers as soon as the road took them away from Charlottsville and they found other survivors.

Elliot put the truck in park and turned to Evajean. “Doesn’t look like we’ll find them here,” he said.

The Wal-Mart lot was empty except for a beaten up VW bus driven into one of the cart returns and now rusting there without any tires. Shopping carts peppered the asphalt, knocked over and tossed around, but there weren’t any signs of violence, no detritus from food riots or other signs that the store might have been ransacked.

Evajean opened her door and stepped out. The puppy in the back, startled awake by Elliot swinging the driver’s side door shut, stood up awkwardly and barked. Evajean leaned inside and scratched its head, telling the dog that they’d be back with food soon.

“We should bring it with us,” Elliot said, “so it doesn’t get hot in the car.”

“Leave the windows down. I just don’t want to have to worry about it getting away. Have you ever had a puppy?”

“No.”

“They run. Fast. Let’s just get what we need and get out of here.” She looked around at the empty lot. “This place is kind of creepy.”

“Definitely,” Elliot said. And that was actually why he wanted to take the dog. Having it in the cart, content with food in its stomach, would lessen how depressing the environment was. The store looked relatively unmolested from the outside but he bet once they got inside they’d find the chaotic remains of similar shopping expeditions by other emigrants from Charlottesville. The puppy would be comforting.

But he gave into her. He’d never have done so with his wife, but that was Clarine and they’d had a relationship both loving and contentious, the former often acting as the only buffer against the destructive potential of the latter. With Clarine gone, he’d lost that fighting instinct. It didn’t feel right to unnecessarily butt heads with anyone else.

Near the store’s entrance, they righted an overturned cart and, now equipped to carry their haul, forced open the sliding glass doors and walked into Wal-Mart.

It hadn’t occurred to him, even after years of weekly trips to the unpierced concrete box of a store, that it’d be dark inside. Without electricity to power the endless rows of overhead florescents, the Wal-Mart was a vacuous black void. Elliot laughed nervously.

“Should have brought flashlights,” Evajean said.

“We have one in the truck, don’t we?” he said.

“Want me to go get it?”

“I will,” he said, pulling the cart back outside. The deep darkness and the thought of wandering through it with nothing more than the weak trickle of a flashlight, made him want to pet the dog, to rub his hand through its coat, to close his eyes and pretend for a tiny moment that none of this had happened, that Clarine was still alive and the two of them had just bought Callie the puppy she’d always wanted.

“I want to get my jacket, too,” he said to Evajean to cover his fright. “Should I get yours?”

She hugged herself and rubbed the arms of her sweater. “I’m good,” she said.

Elliot nodded and jogged back to the truck. The puppy looked at him sleepily as he opened the door and pulled his coat out from behind the seat. “Hi,” he said to it and scratched the dog’s head. The tension in his chest slipped slightly and he was intensely glad they’d found the animal. It reminded him of Callie when she’d been tiny, when she’d been more of demanding house pet than an actual person.

Evajean was waiting outside when he came back. “Ready?” she asked.

Elliot waved the flashlight, turning it on and off. Then he shrugged. “I had a hard enough time finding stuff in here when the lights worked.”

Evajean grinned. “We’ll figure it out,” she said.

The store, Evajean said after they’d stumbled their way to the pet food section, was way creepier than the parking lot. Distances that had been inconveniently long when Elliot and Clarine had done their regular shopping, now seemed prohibitively huge. They did their best wandering back and forth through the grocery aisles, tossing into the cart anything that looked like it’d keep well in the back of a truck. When their limited capacity was full, they began the search for sporting goods and the guns that section housed.

Once, as they passed through the children’s clothes, Evajean giggling about how the brushing of cloth against them was like a haunted house, Elliot heard a noise. It was a faint shuffling, something being dragged maybe, and he stopped walking, grabbing Evajean’s shoulder. She called out at the sudden contact and the cry barely masked a startled thump from elsewhere in the store.

Elliot hushed her and said, “Did you hear that?”

“What?” Immediate concern wiped the schoolgirl silliness from her face.

“I thought I heard something. Like something moving.”

“Is there someone else in here?” she whispered, hunkering down a bit behind one of the racks of jeans.

Elliot realized he was shining the flashlight in her face and turned it away, crouching next to her. “I don’t know. It could be an animal.”

They they both heard it, the sound of sneakers on polished tile, and Evajean slapped her hand over her mouth. “What is that?” she asked between her fingers.

“There’s someone else in the store,” he said. “I’m going to see who it is.”

“Wait-” Evajean said, but Elliot was standing up, calling out to perhaps the first person either of them had seen in some time.

“Hello?” he shouted. “Hello, is anyone there?”

They heard what sounded like an under the breath response and Elliot tried again. This time only the sound of sneakers came back to them, though a great deal closer now.

Elliot pointed his flashlight.

The woman was twenty feet away, standing in the isle between the boys and girls clothes sections, her blue vest hanging from only one arm, the yellow smily face button bouncing erratically as she started running at them. Her mouth kept moving like she was trying to talk but words weren’t forthcoming-only a constant hum: Mmmm! Mmmm!

Evajean’s hand was away from her mouth now and she screamed.

Elliot didn’t have a gun yet. He didn’t have anything more than a plastic flashlight with a rubberized handle and no more weight than the two D batteries contained within. Around him were only racks of clothes: no shovels or bats or fireplace pokers. He was entirely unarmed.

Evajean was still screaming behind him as he fell back, away from the crazy woman. Elliot’s mind did its best to process the situation and come up with a solution but this was all happening too fast. He flailed out with his arms, grabbing at anything near, and came away with a metal sign from atop one of the racks, a sale price indicator held in a frame of aluminum with a weighted base. This he swung in front of him, waving it at the woman while Evajean stood screaming, showing only a void expression of horror.

He couldn’t see, making out just quick flashes of that blue vest, cut off again and again as the arc of his swings brought the for sale sign through the flashlight’s beam. “Evajean!” he called. “Help, dammit!”

He’d backtracked enough that Evajean, off to one side, was between him and the Wal-Mart woman. In the diffuse light of the beam he saw her shake herself, stand tall, and then, as he shouted at her to stop, charge their assailant.

Evajean hit the woman low and hard, knocking both of them to the ground. She was still screaming, the long call coming to form his name as the two women rolled back and forth on the tile, trashing and tearing.

What the hell is she doing? he thought, unable to decide between rushing over to join the fray or using this briefly stolen moment to retrieve a better weapon. His mind, racing ahead of his consciousness, settled on the latter and Elliot turned away from the melee to look for a larger club.

There, maybe ten paces away, barely made out in the flashlight-and Elliot immediately felt the sting of leaving Evajean back in complete darkness with a crazy person-was a mannequin, arms stuck out flamboyantly, a man dressed for a night out in a cheap suit. Elliot ran at it, pulled off the jacket, and wrenched one arm out of the thing’s trunk. Holding this new, and much heavier, weapon above his head in one hand, he turned back to where Evajean and the Wal-Mart woman were still on the floor, still fighting furiously.

“Get back,” he shouted when he was near them. “Get up!”

And she did. As soon as Evajean was away, Elliot started swinging. The impacts were immense, the shock traveling through the mannequin’s arm, through the plastic hand, and into his. But he kept beating her. He didn’t want to stop, not in this terrible, dark store that had scared the shit out of him long before they’d come across the psycho; not in this empty, hollowed out town where he’d had friends and family, a wife, a child, and lovers. He beat this woman like she was all of it, like he could exercise the pain via her bloodied corpse.

Elliot only stopped when Evajean grabbed him from behind, wrapping her arms around his own, saying, “Elliot! Elliot, stop it!”

He did.

The Wal-Mart lady lay on the tile, one leg kicking, her arm twisted under her back. She gazed up at Elliot and Evajean, eyes still wide and aware, though glazed with the craziness both had seen before during the slow deaths of loved ones. Elliot was suddenly angry at her for making him do this, for forcing him to hurt her so badly that she’d be dead in a few minutes. It was somehow easier when the disease took them, no matter how painfully, but to have it make another person do it, even in self defense, only heightened Elliot’s derision of the virus-or bacteria, or whatever the hell it was.

Evajean said, “Is she okay?”

Elliot looked at her. Surprisingly, she appeared unhurt, aside from a gash across one cheek, a ripped ear, and torn clothes. “I think she’s going to die,” he said.

Evajean mouthed “Oh,” and turned away.

Elliot crouched down next to the Wal-Mart lady and leaned close to her face. “Can you hear me?” he asked. The rage was gone. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do that.”

The woman shifted her eyes to his and some of the crazy tension went out of her face. She opened her lips, slid out her tongue, and then started babbling again, though this time quieter and more measured.

It sounded like a language to Elliot. Callie has made odd noises like all kids do but this was different. With his daughter, they’d clearly been only sounds, random syllables her mind assembled as it tried to wrestle down the vocabulary and syntax the adults were bombarding it with. But with this woman, driven mad by the disease, he heard actual language. Of course he didn’t know what any of it meant, just like if he’d been dropped in a foreign country, and the words were distorted from forcing them through the pain of her wounds, yet it had the sound of actual speech.

“What are you saying?” he said to her, getting his ear as close to her mouth as he was comfortable doing with a lady who had, minutes ago, been trying her best to smash Evajean’s head in with her fists.

But just that strange language came out, none of the words recognizable. Each sentence was clouded with humming, though-that constant “Mmm…” that she’d been calling out when she’d first charged the two of them.

Then, abruptly, the “Mmm” broke through, like it had been blocked up but now the whole word was free. “More!” she shouted. “More!” Again and again that single word.

“More what?” Evajean said. “Does she want you to hit her more?” This last she said with sick incredulousness.

The shouts lead to coughing, however, and the coughing consumed whatever was left of the Wal-Mart woman’s strength after the terrible injuries. She faded fast then and within a minute Evajean and Elliot were standing and sitting next to nothing more than a corpse of the kind they’d both seen far too many of.

“We still need those guns,” Elliot said after he and Evajean had composed themselves and started thinking about such things again. They’d started walking, slower this time, the flashlight waved a bit more thoroughly in case the store housed any more crazies.

“Definitely,” Evajean said and she laughed.

“What?” Elliot said.

“Oh, it’s just-” She laughed again-very near giggled, actually. “This is insane. What we’re doing: climbing around in here in the dark and there’s that lady back there… Did you see what she did to my ear?”

“I’ll try to bandage it when we’re back out in the truck,” Elliot said. “After we get the guns, let’s try to find the pharmacy area and pick up some of that stuff, too.”

The ear had started to bleed and looked terrible. Elliot had no first aid experience-a terrible deficiency in his parenting toolbox, Clarine had told him, but one he’d never bothered to remedy-and now he was wondering what he could do besides soaking a bandage in alcohol and wrapping it around Evajean’s head.

Pushing their cart carefully through the maze, feverishly vigilant for attacks, they eventually found the sporting goods section. The gun case, tucked to one side behind a ring of counter, had been smashed. Glass sparkled on the floor tiles and crunched under Elliot’s boots with a terrible scraped chalkboard sound. He prodded around in the case and the nearby drawers with the flashlight while Evajean stood watch, but came up with nothing more than a few boxes of ammunition. Someone else had had the same idea as they and now that someone was out there protecting himself with their guns.