The glass door is locked, and he looks around for something to break it with, finding some loose bricks in one of the tree stands. He picks one up, but even in this empty, empty place, the prohibition against what he’s about to do is so strong, all he does is toss the brick up and down in his hand a few times. He’s played baseball and basketball in gym class, the first boring him nearly to death, the second being almost kind of fun in a run-around-and-shout kind of way that other people took seriously enough that it meant he didn’t have to get too involved. But he knows he can at least throw something, even if not particularly skillfully or especially far.
But still. A brick through a store door.
He looks around again, and once again, he’s alone.
“Here goes nothing,” he whispers.
He rears back and throws it as hard as he can.
The shattering sound is loud enough to end the world. Seth instinctively ducks down, ready to make excuses that it wasn’t him, that it was an accident –
But of course there’s no one.
“Idiot,” he says, smiling, embarrassed now. He stands again, the feeling of having done something, anything, making him actually swagger a little up to the now gaping door.
Where a flock of screeching darkness comes hurtling out past his head at blindingly fast speed. He falls to the ground, protecting his head with his hands, shouting in wordless terror –
And as quick as it came, it’s passed, the world silent again except for his racing breath.
He looks up and sees the flock gathering itself into a panicked ball as it disappears over the roof of the shuttered-up bookstore.
Bats.
Bats.
He laughs to himself before getting up, kicking away the broken glass that still stands in the door, and crouching his way inside.
It’s a cave of treasures.
He grabs a backpack off a display. Next to it, he finds a whole wall of flashlights, which excites him at first, but there are no batteries to be found anywhere. He takes a large one anyway, long and heavy enough to feel like a weapon even if it never produces light. He finds a bunch of dried-up food rations nearby, too; terrible-looking stuff, freeze-dried pot roast, soup with inflatable dried vegetables, that sort of thing, but it’s better than nothing, and he also finds a little stack of butane camp stoves to cook it all on, hoping they won’t blow up in his hands the first time he tries to use one.
The store seems more tightly sealed than his house, and there’s less dust covering everything. A row of first-aid kits is practically clean, and he stuffs one in the backpack, then pauses. He takes another kit and opens it. It’s got the usual: bandages, alcohol swabs, but there, right at the back, he finds a packet labeled CONDUCTIVE TAPE. He tears it open with his teeth. A bundle of bandages falls to the ground.
He doesn’t even need to pick it up to see that the underside is covered in metallic foil.
He reads the empty packet again, but CONDUCTIVE TAPE is all it says, along with some pictorial instructions for how to stick it to your skin. Nothing to say what it’s for or why you’d use it or why the hell you’d ever wrap so much of it around your body.
“Conductive tape,” he says.
Like it’s so obvious it doesn’t need an explanation.
He leaves it there on the floor, not wanting to pick it up again, and heads for the clothes racks at the back of the store.
They’re so full he laughs out loud. They’ve even got underwear. Granted, it’s thermal-insulated so probably a little hot for summer, but he’s out of the baggy sweatpants and pulling on a pair before he thinks to mind. The cool cleanness of them feels so good he almost has to sit down.
The rest of the clothes seem to be mainly for mountaineering and hiking, but there are T-shirts and shorts and an expensive all-weather jacket that he takes. He exchanges the old sweatpants for what are essentially just more expensive sweatpants, but at least these ones don’t make him look like a transient. There are also more kinds of socks than he can count.
It takes him a while to find shoes that fit, having to wade through an ammonia-smelling pile of bat guano to get into the stockroom and find a pair his size. But soon enough, he’s fully equipped. He grabs up everything and heads out into the sunshine.
Where he’s immediately drenched in sweat because it’s far too hot to be wearing such heavy clothing.
For a moment, though, he doesn’t mind. He just closes his eyes against the sun and takes it all in. He’s not naked, he’s not in dirty bandages, and he’s not completely filthy with dust. He’s wearing clean clothes and new shoes and for the first time since he died, he feels almost human.
13
The supermarket at the end of the High Street is deeper and darker than the rest of the stores, but through the glass frontage, Seth thinks he can still see shelves filled with something. He shifts the pack on his back and realizes, stupidly, that he’s overloaded it with clothes and other supplies. No place to put any groceries. He sets it down and starts to take stuff out that he can come back for, but then something against a wall catches his eye.
That’ll do.
It takes him nearly fifteen minutes to get a rusty shopping cart separated from the petrified row of them, but eventually it comes, its wheels even mostly turning if he forces them hard enough.
It’s easier to throw a brick the second time, though once inside, the store is much darker than he thought. The ceiling is low, and the aisles block any view of what they might be hiding in their depths. He thinks of the bats again. And what if there was something larger in there than a fox? Did England have big predators? There were mountain lions and bears in the forests back home, but he couldn’t remember a single dangerous thing anyone ever mentioned as living in England.
He listens to the silence.
Nothing. Nothing at all beyond his breathing. No hum of electricity, no sound of things rustling. Though, he supposes, the smashing of the doors could have silenced anything in here.
He waits. But still there’s nothing.
He starts to push the unforgiving cart down the aisles.
The produce section is completely empty. The bays yawn open, with only a few shriveled husks of unidentifiable fruits and vegetables at the bottom, and as he goes from aisle to aisle, his hopes start to sink a little. The shelves do have stuff on them, but they’ve gone much the way of the things in the kitchen cabinets. Dusty old boxes that crumble upon touch, jars of once-red tomato sauce now blackened within, a section of egg cartons that have clearly been ripped apart by a hungry beast.
But he turns a corner and there’s good news. Batteries, lots of them. Many are corroded but some are okay. It only takes a few tries before his big flashlight is working.