Keep Busy

10.

The town they arrived at was called Flint.

It was nothing more than a strip of body shops, diners and gas stations.

Off in the trees, a few dilapidated double-wide trailers hunkered down, as if hiding. Cheney had been a small town but Flint... Flint was like Cheney's placenta.

They stopped at one of the gas stations and Frank noticed the price per gallon and chuckled to himself. He didn't even carry a wallet anymore.

The windows fronting the little ramshackle building had been smashed but there was still a chance, Frank hoped, still a slight chance that not everything had been plundered.

There was a desk in there somewhere with a half-full bottle of Kentucky bourbon just waiting to be discovered... poured... tasted.

Frank's saliva glands slackened, and he started to feel a little dizzy.

Please, please say that desk exists.

"What desk?" Jane asked as they exited the car.

How long he had been talking—he couldn't know. "Nothing, no desk." He said somewhat confusedly.

"Are you okay? You look... pale. I swear if you say, look who's talking I will seriously consider eating you."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Good."

"I'm just hoping they have..."

"Booze?" she said, raising her eyebrows at him.

"...supplies," he stated, simply.

"Booze," she confirmed.

They walked up to the broken door, barely clinging to its hinges and Frank held it open for her. "Dead ladies first," he said. "And I also need cigarettes."

The inside of the gas station mini mart was, as Frank had expected, gutted.

Bits of random paper mixed with the glass and other miscellaneous debris crunched under their feet. The urge to organize prodded Frank in the back of the neck—even if he just pushed some of the junk to one side to make a proper path... but no. He resisted.

It smelled stale and damp. Jane found what was left of the magazine rack and began sifting through the remains. Frank's eyes scanned the shattered remnants of the beverage coolers then searched for a doorway leading to the inevitable back room. A back room with a desk.

The tattered pages of the glossy women's magazines in Jane's cold hands showed one beautiful woman after another. She tossed the magazine on the ground and breathed in, filling her dried lungs with dead air.

Make-up. She wanted some make-up. She touched her split lip gingerly. And a stapler. Vanity outlives life.

She strolled over to where she'd last seen Frank.

"I'm going to walk across the street to that drug store for a second," she said.

"Okay," he said from back in the storeroom where he had found the desk but was having trouble trying to pry open the locked drawer. He heard her crunch out of the mini-mart and crunch her way across the gravel parking lot.

For a second he wondered if she had the car keys on her—he could escape right now.

Man, I am dramatic. Escape?

This wasn't prison or some POW camp where he lived in a three-by-three-foot hole, surrounded by rats and pig shit and bamboo spikes and... and then he remembered the booze.