would be yelling his fool head off already, and followed him.
The room was much bigger than she expected, a little warehouse attached to the back of the store. It was lined with aisles of metal storage shelves attached to the concrete floor. There was a strong scent of off-produce—the wet rot reek of greens, the halfway-to-cider fermentation of apples, bananas well past their banana-bread usefulness. Red could see flies buzzing around several of the boxes in the aisles directly before her.
Red couldn’t see Adam anywhere, which was no surprise. It would never occur to him to wait for her.
“Adam!” she called.
“Yeah?”
“Where the hell did you go?”
“Aren’t you following the tracks?”
“I’m not a damned bloodhound, Adam.”
She heard movement on her right side, and Adam stuck his head out of one of the aisles several rows away. “Here.”
Red moved in that direction, peeking at the floor as she did so. She couldn’t see any marks that indicated they were heading in the correct direction. What she did see were boxes of dried goods on the shelves. Not a lot, but there were several unopened cases of soups and other things that could be useful.
“Hey!” Red called. “Did you see all this food?”
“Yeah, the soldier-boys must not have had enough room in their trucks for everything,” Adam said. “Come look at this.”
Not enough room in their trucks, Red thought, and that made something go twang deep inside her brain. Before she could latch onto that alarm and explore it further she was next to Adam.
He pointed to a hole underneath one of the storage shelves. It looked like something had chewed through the concrete.
“There,” Adam said triumphantly.
“What about it?” Red said.
“The trail leads here and there’s a hole, so whatever came out of those people went in here.”
“It looks like a rat hole. And Norway rats can chew through concrete,” Red said. “In fact, those streaky marks on the floor probably are from rat tails. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”
She shuddered a little, because she really hated rats. She didn’t like mice, either, to be honest. As a child she’d turned away from books with rodents as the main character (and there were a surprising number of these, as if children’s authors thought every kid was in love with small furry animals even if they were disease-carrying monsters) because just the thought of their slithery little tails made her sick.
“Rats didn’t bust out of those corpses,” Adam said.
“I don’t think anything did bust out of those corpses,” Red said. “I think maybe a person did it.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Adam said. “The chests look like they exploded from the inside, not like they were cut from the outside.”
“Do you have a medical degree? How do you know?” Red asked. “It makes a lot more sense that rats came and nibbled on the corpses and left those tracks. And that would also account for the mangled insides.”
“Then where are the rat paw prints in the blood?” Adam asked. He gestured toward the hole in the ground. “I say some freaky alien thing grew inside their lungs and then broke out and ran away in here.”
“And I say you have no proof,” Red said. “But if something like that did happen, you probably don’t want to put your face so close to the hole.”
Adam stood up so quickly that his pack banged into the shelving behind him and knocked over a bunch of paper towel rolls.
“Look, whether it’s rats or aliens there’s no creatures now,” Red said, glad for the mask that covered her mouth so he didn’t see her grinning at him. “So let’s collect the food we need and get out of here.”
Adam shot one last suspicious glance at the rat hole (Red was going to think of it as a rat hole and nothing else, because the other option was absurd and that was that) and then followed her.
They spent some time figuring out how many cans of soup they could each