The manager in the red vest got the registers up at six forty and started ringing people up.
Nine hundred people had spent the night on his floor. Two of them had died in his vestibule. The parking lot was still on fire. And there he was at register four in the sunrise, scanning a case of water for a man with no shoes, saying "did you find everything okay."
Half the store paid.
That was the thing Noah could never get over afterward, when people asked him what the first morning was like. Half the store got in line and paid.
*****
At six fifty in the morning, standing in the doorway of a grocery store in the sunrise, Noah Reyes looked down at himself for the first time in nine hours.
One shoe. A funeral shirt with four slices in it, stiff and black down the whole left side. Slacks he'd been buried in the mud in. Grave dirt to the elbow, blood in his waistband, no skin on his right forearm, and a shovel.
He'd been outrunning things all night in one shoe. He'd stood in front of a National Guard sergeant looking like that, twice, and she had talked to him anyway.
"Okay," he said out loud. "Okay."
He got a cart. He felt insane getting a cart. He got one anyway, because his hands were full and he was about to make them fuller, and he went up the far aisle where the seasonal stuff lives.
Shoes first. All Kroger had was a rack of canvas slip ons by the pool floats, and the only pair in an eleven was gray with an anchor on the side. He sat down on the floor of aisle twelve and put them on over a fresh pack of socks and did not stand up again for a second, because putting on two shoes turned out to be a bigger deal than he expected.
Then, working fast:
Cargo pants off the same rack, the kind with a pocket on the thigh. Three t-shirts. The only ones left in his size had a cartoon avocado on the front that said HOLY GUACAMOLE. He took all three.
A canvas jacket from the hunting endcap. Work gloves, leather, two pair. A roll of duct tape. A headlamp and a four pack of batteries. Zip ties. A Sharpie. A first aid kit, the real one behind the pharmacy counter, not the little travel one.
Bottled water. He drank an entire one standing in the aisle and it went down like something out of a church, and then he had another one, and only then did he understand that he had not had water since a gas station bathroom sink before midnight.
Food. Protein bars, a jar of peanut butter, a bag of jerky. He hadn't eaten since a taquito he never finished on his mother's grave.
A backpack, from school supplies, because the only ones left were kids' sizes and the biggest was purple.
He taped the shovel handle in two places where it had started to split. He put the kitchen knife from housewares in the thigh pocket and knew, taking it out and looking at it, that it was mostly a comfort object and that he'd carry it anyway.
Then he pushed the cart to register four and stood in line behind a woman buying diapers.
"Did you find everything okay," said the manager in the red vest.
"Yeah," Noah said.
It came to a hundred and forty one dollars. He had nine dollars and a debit card attached to a checking account with a funeral payment scheduled against it, and he ran the card, and it went through, and he thought about the eighteen cents all the way out the door.
*****
He sat on the loading dock with the nine points and did it properly this time.
[STRENGTH: 9]
[AGILITY: 12]
[ENDURANCE: 11]
[SENSE: 10]
[UNSPENT: 9]
"Okay," he said. "Talk me out of agility."
"I'm not gonna talk you out of anything. I don't know how any of this works."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true." A pause. "But I watched you last night same as you did."
Noah thought about the shovel bouncing off the side of that thing's head on the hood of the Tacoma. He thought about hitting the first one eleven times in a cemetery because eleven was how many it took.
He'd gotten to everybody last night. He'd gotten there fast, every time, and then he'd stood over them and had nothing.
"I don't need to get there faster," he said.
"No?"
"I need to be able to do something when I get there."
[STRENGTH +5]
[ENDURANCE +4]
[STRENGTH: 14]
[ENDURANCE: 15]
It came into him in two waves and the second one was better than the first. The ache went out of his shoulders like water out of a tub. The bone deep sick feeling in his forearms, the one he'd had since March, the one he thought was just what nineteen felt like now, packed up and left.
He picked up the shovel and turned it over in one hand and it felt like a spoon.
"Careful," Ellery said.
"With what."
"You've got a hammer now, kid. Be careful what starts looking like a nail."
*****
Bell found him at nine.
She'd been up all night and she'd stopped pretending otherwise. She sat down on the edge of the dock next to him, which soldiers do not generally do, and she looked out at the smoke.
"You said something last night," she said. "In the store. You said forty one bodies in the neighborhood behind us, in an arc. You said it like a man reading a receipt."
Noah didn't answer.
"We've been over that fence since six. We've found nine." She turned her head. "Was it forty one?"
"It's forty three now."
Bell was quiet a second.
"Two of them died this morning," she said.
"Yeah."
"Where."
"One in the yellow house on the corner with the trampoline. One about two hundred feet past that, in the street." Noah heard how it sounded coming out of his mouth and kept going anyway. "That one's on the surface. The other one's inside."
Bell got out her radio, and then didn't use it, and put it back.
"I've got forty guys and a neighborhood," she said. "I could put twenty houses behind us by dark and get it wrong."
"I know."
"Would you walk it with me."
Noah looked at his hands.
He thought about the thing behind the garden center, the seam that was still open in his side then, and the words that had asked him if he wanted something better.
"Yeah," he said. "I'll walk it."
*****
They gave him a can of orange spray paint and a reflective vest, and he put it on over the canvas jacket and clipped the headlamp to the strap even though it was daylight, because he'd learned something last night about buildings with the power out.
The neighborhood was called Winter Park, which is a name somebody chose in Texas on purpose. Six streets. Fallbrook, Aspen, Cypress, and three more that all dead ended into each other. Cul de sacs. Basketball hoops in the driveways and one of those little free libraries on a post, still full, glass door shut.
The sun was all the way up and it was going to be ninety eight degrees by two.
Noah walked down the middle of the first street with four soldiers behind him and did the thing.
It was not dramatic. That was the part that surprised him. He just walked and it came in, the way you feel the shape of a room with the lights off, and every so often he stopped in front of a house and sprayed an orange X on the driveway and a number under it.
Two here. One here. Nothing in the next four.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Four here.
He did nine houses without saying anything and then a soldier named Ruiz asked how he was doing it, and Noah said, "I don't know," and Ruiz said, "okay," and after that nobody asked him anything else.
*****
The thing in the house on Fallbrook came out of the garage.
It came fast and low and it went for Ruiz because Ruiz was closest, and it got him off his feet and into the side of a truck before anybody had finished turning around.
Noah didn't think.
He got to it in about a second and a half, which was normal now, and he swung the shovel with fourteen strength behind it.
It did not bounce.
The blade went into the side of that thing's head and kept going, and the whole body came off the ground and folded around it, and it hit the driveway in a way nothing gets up from.
Everybody stood there.
Noah stood over it with his hands still on the handle and his heart going, and the first thing he felt, before anything else, was not triumph. It was something ugly and hot and enormously satisfying, and it scared him more than the garage had.
"Kid," Ellery said.
"Yeah. I know."
[+90 XP]
He pulled the shovel free and helped Ruiz up. Ruiz had a broken wrist and a look on his face like the ground had moved, and Noah said, "you're okay, you're okay," which was true this time.
The soldier behind Ruiz said, "How did you know it was in the garage."
"I didn't," Noah said.
That was the thing he'd been chewing on all morning. He could feel the dead all day long. He could not feel a single thing that was still moving. Every one of these things could stand four feet away from him behind a door and he would have no idea until it opened.
He was a map of everybody the world had already lost.
"Hey," he said to Ruiz. "Anybody almost die today, they come find me. Okay? I want to know who."
Ruiz looked at him funny and said okay.
*****
House forty one was on Cypress.
Noah stopped on the sidewalk in front of it and did not need the spray paint, because he already knew, because he'd known since the parking lot and had been walking the streets in an order that put this one last.
Basketball hoop in the driveway with the net gone. A cracked plastic pot with something dead in it. And through the front window, taped to the inside of the glass at about four feet off the ground, a piece of construction paper with a hand traced on it in crayon and MARA written under the thumb.
"Give me ten minutes," Noah said.
Bell said, "Reyes."
"Ten minutes."
He went in through the front.
She was in the kitchen. He'd known that in a gas station parking lot two miles away at eleven o'clock the night before, and now he was standing in it with the morning coming through the window over the sink and a dish towel folded over the oven handle.
Noah put the shovel down on the floor. That felt important.
He found a blanket on the back of the couch, the good kind, the heavy one people keep for company, and he brought it in and put it over her the way you do it for somebody sleeping, up to the shoulders, not the face. Then he sat down on the kitchen floor with his back against the dishwasher and put his forearms on his knees.
"Her kid's alive," he said out loud. "She's at the Kroger. She's got a Red Cross lady and about forty juice boxes and this guy Trevor who won't stop talking to her."
The kitchen didn't say anything.
"She was in the bathtub. She did everything right." Noah's voice did something and he stopped and let it, and then went on. "She thinks she heard you calling her. Through the door. I told her it wasn't you. I want you to know I told her that, because it wasn't, and she's gonna carry it either way, and I didn't want her carrying the other thing too."
He sat there a while.
"I'm gonna look out for her," he said. "I don't know what that means yet. My mom died Saturday, so I'm not, like." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "I'm not the guy you'd pick. But I'm the guy that's here."
Outside, somebody's sprinkler system came on. Timed. Six sprinkler heads going up in a yard on Cypress at nine forty in the morning.
Noah went out and sprayed a small orange one at the end of the driveway, because that was the job, and the number was true.
*****
The black SUVs came into the Kroger lot at two in the afternoon.
There were three of them and they parked in the fire lane, which by then was the only part of the lot that wasn't full, and a woman got out of the middle one in a suit that had spent the night somewhere air conditioned.
She had a laminated badge on a lanyard and a folder under her arm, and she walked past the National Guard, past the Red Cross tables, past nine hundred people sitting in the shade of their own cars, and she went directly to a nineteen year old sitting on a loading dock in a t-shirt with a cartoon avocado on it.
"Noah Reyes," she said.
Noah looked up.
"You're on a list," she said, "that I have."
Behind him, flat on his back on the dock with his shoes off, Trevor said, "Is he in trouble?"
"No," the woman said. "He's early."