were other metal shelves to the right of the door, and these were filled with the store’s backstock. Several brands of cigarettes were stacked there, along with boxes of candy bars and beef jerky and potato chips and all the other random snack foods one could find at a mini-mart.
Adam grabbed a bag of nacho cheese chips, opened it, and started cramming them in his mouth like he’d never eaten before.
“At least chew with your mouth closed,” Red said.
Adam responded to this by noisily crunching several more chips. Red rolled her eyes and started scanning the shelves for anything with nutritional density.
Beef jerky wasn’t bad. The protein at least filled up your stomach. Nuts were good, too. She rolled down the stock with her eyes from top to bottom.
And when she got to the bottom, she stopped. And sucked in a hard breath.
“What?” Adam asked, chip crumbs falling over his chin.
“Blood,” Red said, and pointed.
There was a line of streaky, faded red that went from the door into the shop to the back door they’d just entered. It was rusty and erratic, but it was definitely blood. Red was sure of it.
“It’s not blood,” Adam said, because he had to argue with her. “It’s probably spilled root beer or something. Why do you always have to think of the most dramatic possibility?”
“It’s blood,” she said, and reached for the door that led into the shop.
“Wait,” Adam said, grabbing her hand. “If it is blood, and I’m not saying it is, do you really want to go in there? Somebody probably died of the virus in there, and coughed all over the floor like that lady we saw at the pharmacy.”
“If it’s blood then someone might be in there who needs our help,” Red said.
“Nobody needs our help,” Adam said. “That’s old blood, if it’s blood at all. And you know damn well that nobody with the virus can be helped.”
“It might not be the virus,” Red said. “But we’ll wear the masks and gloves, just in case.”
Adam threw up his hands.
She didn’t know why she wanted to go into the shop so badly. It went against her risk-averse nature, the intense caution that dictated almost everything she’d done since the virus had first been discovered.
Maybe it was the sensible Ford parked outside and the tidy desk with its pen cup filled with the same pens she liked best. Maybe it was just that she needed to know for sure that she couldn’t help, that she couldn’t do anything for whoever had made that trail of blood from the back door to the shop door.
Even with their masks on they could smell the rotting flesh as soon as they pulled the door open. Adam halted in the doorway.
“No need for further investigation,” he said, his voice muffled under the mask. “That’s the smell of dead things.”
Red ignored him, kept following the long streaky path of blood. There was something strange about the blood trail, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It didn’t have the splattery look of someone coughing hard, like Probably Kathy Nolan. Anyway, the blood would more likely be on the walls or shelves in that case—not the floor. And the streaks didn’t really look like they were made by footprints, or even someone crawling along the floor on their hands or elbows.
It’s not a lot of blood, either, Red thought. It doesn’t look like a fresh wound that’s bleeding. More like someone got blood on them and was trying to wipe it off.
Red shook her head. That didn’t make any sense at all. She followed the trail around the counter, and when she saw the body everything made even less sense than before.
The man was lying on the floor behind the counter, which was why they hadn’t seen him when they peered in the front door. He was on his back, his brown eyes wide and rigid and terrified.
In the center of his chest there was a giant hole. Or rather, Red thought, there is a hole where his chest ought to be.