There were nine hundred and forty people in the Kroger parking lot and Noah could feel exactly none of them, which was the best news he'd had since Saturday.
He found the lot because Trevor said his cousin worked there, which turned out to have nothing to do with anything, but he said it in the tone of a man contributing to a plan and Noah didn't have one, so they went.
It was the big Kroger on Braker, the one with the gas pumps, and the whole thing sat up on a pad about four feet above the road with a low retaining wall around three sides of it.
You came in off Braker at the north corner, up an entrance road that ran between two rows of parked cars and let out into the main lot. The store faced south across all of it, a long flat building with the automatic doors in the middle and eighteen registers behind the glass, all of them lit. On the left end, the garden center, a fenced yard full of mulch pallets and dead marigolds with its own gate. On the right end, the gas canopy and the loading dock and a dumpster corral.
Behind the store, past the loading dock, the pad dropped off into a drainage ditch and then a wooden fence, and past the fence was a neighborhood. Cul de sacs. Basketball hoops in the driveways.
That was the part Noah could not stop feeling.
The National Guard had four vehicles across the entrance road at the top, nose to tail, blocking it. In front of the vehicles was a folding table, and behind the folding table was a woman in fatigues with a clipboard, and on the clipboard was a form.
There was a form. Ninety minutes into the end of the world, somebody had already printed a form.
"Name," she said.
"Noah Reyes."
"Anybody with you injured."
He thought about the four seams on his ribs that had closed by themselves and the six white hairs above his left ear and the fact that he could feel forty one bodies in the neighborhood behind the store, in an arc, spread out about the way people spread out when they run.
"No," he said.
She looked at his shirt.
"It's not mine," Noah said, which was the wrong answer, and she wrote something down and waved them through anyway because there were sixty people behind him.
*****
Inside the blockade, nobody had gone into the store yet. The doors were locked and a manager in a red vest was standing in front of them with his arms crossed like the last nine hundred people were going to shoplift their way through the apocalypse, so everybody was out in the lot instead, sitting on curbs and tailgates and the concrete parking blocks, in the orange light off the poles.
The Red Cross had set up along the sidewalk that ran the length of the storefront. Four folding tables, a stack of blankets, a box of juice boxes.
They put Mara there, with a woman who had a clipboard of her own, about thirty feet from the automatic doors. Mara did not let go of Noah's shirt for the first ninety seconds, and then she did, all at once, the way a kid does. She went about eight feet. Then she turned around and came back and stood against his hip and did not look at anybody.
"I gotta go do something," Noah said.
Mara looked at him.
"I'm gonna come back," he said. "I'm saying it out loud so it's a thing I said."
She thought about that for a second and then she nodded, once, and went and sat down on the curb next to the juice boxes, and Noah walked away with a feeling in his chest he couldn't have named and didn't enjoy.
Trevor stayed with her. Nobody asked him to. He just sat down on the curb about four feet away, put the plastic bag between his feet, and started explaining to a nine year old how the rewards program worked.
*****
He went left, down the sidewalk past the propane cage and the ice machine, to the end of the building where the garden center fence started.
There was a gap between the fence and the wall, about three feet wide, that the stockers used to get to the dumpsters. Noah went down it and came out in the strip of cracked concrete that ran along the back of the garden center, between the fence and the retaining wall at the edge of the pad.
Nobody was back there. There was a stack of pallets, a coil of hose, and a light on the wall that didn't work. On the other side of the retaining wall, six feet down, was the drainage ditch, and past that the wooden fence, and past that the houses.
He could hear the parking lot from there but he couldn't see any of it.
Noah pulled his shirt up.
The four seams from the cemetery were pale and old looking already. But under them, low on his side where the hip starts, there was a fresh one he hadn't noticed in the house or the car or the line, about two inches, still open, the edges of it wet and a little gray.
The hallway. Going out. He'd known at the time and then he'd had a nine year old on the back of his shirt and a car to get to, and his body had filed it somewhere he couldn't reach until now.
[FOREIGN BLOOD DETECTED.]
[SLOT 1 OF 1 FULL.]
Noah went very still.
[TYPE AVAILABLE: UNCLASSIFIED]
[FUNCTION: it can be anybody who is already gone.]
He stood behind a garden center with his shirt in his fist and read that four or five times.
"Ellery."
"Yeah. I'm here."
"Is that what I think it is."
"I think so."
"That's the voices. That's how it did the voices. It said my exact words, it was in the cemetery, it heard me." His voice was going up. "That's how it got Mara's mom."
"Yeah."
Noah put the heel of his hand against his forehead.
Because he could see it. That was the problem. He could see the whole thing laid out in front of him like a hand of cards. Something that can sound like anybody who's already gone. He could stand in a dark street and call them to him instead of the other way around. Pull them off a house. Off a block. He could make himself the loudest, most interesting thing in a neighborhood, on purpose, and hold it there while people got out the back.
That was a weapon. That was an actual weapon, and what he had instead was a thing that told him where the bodies already were.
[OVERWRITE SLOT 1?]
[THE PREVIOUS TYPE IS NOT RECOVERABLE.]
He thought about Cypress. Twenty six people, and he'd walked onto that street knowing exactly where every single one of them was, and it hadn't saved one of them. Mara was alive because a monster stood outside her door and said her name in her mother's voice, and Noah heard it with his ears. Like anybody would have.
His blood hadn't found her. His blood had found her mother.
"How many people are in that parking lot," he said.
"Kid."
"How many, if I could pull those things off a street, how many could I"
"I know," Ellery said. "I did that math too. I'm not gonna do it out loud for you."
Noah stood there with his thumb on the edge of the wound.
Then he thought about eight feet to the left of a plastic marker, four days new, close enough to touch through nothing but dirt.
He knew where her hands were.
It was the stupidest thing in the world. It was worth nothing. It was worth less than nothing, it was the thing that had put him on his knees screaming at a dead man to turn it off, and it was also the only part of that whole night that was still hers. If he traded it he'd never find her again. Not in the ground. Not anywhere. She'd be a plot number in a filing cabinet in an office that had probably already burned down.
He was nineteen years old and he'd buried her that morning.
"No," Noah said.
[DECLINED.]
[BLOOD PURGED.]
It hurt. He wasn't expecting that. It went through his side like somebody pulling a stitch out fast and he got a hand on the pallets and stayed up, and when it was done the little wound had closed and there was nothing there but one more pale seam.
He stood breathing in the dark behind a Kroger for a while.
"Say it," he said.
"I'm not gonna say anything."
"Say I made the wrong call."
"I've been dead about four hours," Ellery said. "I'm not gonna be the guy who tells a kid what his mother's worth."
Noah laughed. It came out wrong and small and turned into something else about a second in, and he put his back against the pallets and slid down them and sat on the concrete with his arms on his knees.
"For what it's worth," Ellery said, after a while.
"Yeah."
"There'll be more of them. That's not comfort, that's just true. Blood comes off things that hurt you and there's a whole lot more of them coming." A pause. "You'll get another shot at that trade. Probably a worse one. Probably at a worse time."
"Great."
"Yeah."
Noah wiped his face with the back of his hand and got up.
He caught himself in the dark glass of the garden center doors on the way past and stopped, and turned his head, and got in close.
Six.
Still six.
Saying no hadn't cost him anything. That was the part that stayed with him the whole way back up the gap between the fence and the wall, out onto the front sidewalk, past the propane cage, toward the lights. Saying no was free.
It was the last free thing he ever got.
*****
Mara was where he'd left her, on the curb in front of the second Red Cross table with Trevor four feet away. She had a juice box and hadn't opened it.
Trevor was still going. "So you don't even need the card, is the thing, you can just do your phone number, and it's like four cents a gallon, which sounds like nothing, but."
"I'm back," Noah said.
Mara looked up at him, and then at the juice box, and held it out. Noah took it and got the little straw off the side and stabbed it in for her and handed it back.
Then the sky did something behind the store.
Not the seam. The seam was still up there, wide open, doing what it had done all night. This was low, down over the rooftops of the neighborhood past the fence, maybe half a mile out. A section of the dark went blacker than the rest of it, the way water goes dark where something big is underneath it, and then that darkness moved a quarter mile to the left in one motion and stopped.
Everybody in the lot turned around at once and looked at the back of a grocery store, because that was all there was to see.
Nine hundred and forty people went quiet at the same time.
Noah felt it before he heard anything. Twenty two of them, on the surface, in an arc through those cul de sacs. Then thirty.
Then he stopped counting on purpose, which was a thing he'd learned how to do about two hours ago.
He crouched down in front of Mara.
"Hey," he said. "You still got the back of my shirt?"
She got it in both fists.
"Okay." Noah stood up. "Trevor. Get everybody in the store."
"There's nine hundred people."
"Then start."