Upside Down

Shopping

"Shh. Quiet. Bonnie, down," Eva whispers. On her command the dog crouches low beside her in the narrow hedge that runs along the sidewalk of La Palma's main street, its flank quivering in anticipation of a run.

Eva holds her rifle close. The Ruger 22 Hornet was a gift from gramps on her tenth birthday. Her pellet gun is tied snug, almost painfully to her hip. She keeps dad's cigar lighter in her pants pocket, because Rhiannon likes to play with it, and Eva's afraid of fire.

She watches in the growing light of morning, as the local gang scavenges her neighborhood drug store. "You've already destroyed everything worth having, you punks, move on," she growls under her breath.

The dog looks at her for a signal. "Not yet, Bonnie." Dad didn't raise a coward or a fool, and she knows she loses if she stands up against the gang, but at least she stands a chance armed and wearing her dad's camouflage Bomber jacket.

Suddenly, about seven gang members stream out of the drug store, and take off in a run down the street. Eva blinks away a tear and gasps, relieved that they run in the opposite direction of her and Bonnie's hiding place.

Eva purposefully slows her breathing. She counts to one hundred and waits, and sure enough, three gangly figures appear inside the drug store door and step out onto the sidewalk. She looks through her rifle's sight, and tries to make out the writing on the boxes that they carry in their arms. "They found the soup, darn it," she whispers to Bonnie. The gang members shout out in triumph to their successful raid and run off in the same direction after the others.

She counts to one hundred again and then waits five minutes more before she utters her command, "Go, Bonnie." The golden retriever shepherd-mix runs low, fast, and slips quietly into the two slightly ajar drug store front doors.

Eva waits until Bonnie reappears and sounds one sharp, almost imperceptible bark before she takes off in a crouched run toward the dog. Once inside the drug store, Eva braces the doors shut with a mop handle that she keeps hidden behind a check stand, and sits against a wall with the rifle to her chest to catch her breath. She pulls the red-checked bandana around her neck up over her nose and mouth to help ward off the overwhelming stench of mixed chemicals and rotting food emanating from the broken bottles and jars inside the store.

"Stay", she commands. Bonnie obediently stands guard just to the left and inside the door. With her rifle at ready, Eva quickly wades through the mess of broken glass, overturned aisles, and a floor sticky with goo and mildew. She is determined to find the remedies that her sister Arianna read about in their dad's medical encyclopedia.

It is now twenty-three days since her parents disappeared, and there has been no response to the letter that she wrote to President Nixon; no help from any adult at all. All Eva knows is that she is responsible for herself, her sisters, her dog, and her home, and that they haven't been able to break little Rhiannon's fever in the last twelve hours even with cold compresses and a warm tub bath.

The encyclopedia says that the little girl needs baby aspirin to break her fever, an ointment to relieve her chest congestion, and lozenges or syrup containing zinc gluconate for her sore throat.

It is impossible to find anything anymore by the overhead signs. Eva walks past the fallen hair-care and dental hygiene products and around a corner where she catches herself before nearly stumbling over a pile of yellow rubber ducks and baby oil containers. "Bingo," she whispers.

The ointment is the easiest to find and she slips four of the blue, heavy, round jars into her canvas hunting backpack fitted tightly across her shoulders. A quick scan reveals broken bottle after bottle of baby cough syrup, but Eva is nothing, if not persistent. Only three precious unbroken bottles left, but they swiftly make their way into her backpack. It's the pink baby aspirin that prove elusive.

A sweet childhood memory of mom taking care of her when she was six-years-old and sick with the measles is quickly catalogued and shelved away for another time. Although Eva did leave a yellow rose bud and a case of canned soup on the doorstep of the Thompson sisters who buried their baby brother three days ago, she has little time for sentimentality these days.

Eva's attention is drawn to an oddly out-of-place display of summer seeds that she never noticed before. She doesn't stop to analyze her oversight, but instead grabs every vegetable seed packet that she can identify from the colorful pictures on their front, and fills her backpack.

She walks back to what is left of the baby aisle to toe her shoe through the broken bottles when she finds tucked away under a broken metal shelf, a case of infant formula. A ragged sob escapes her. "If only I had looked harder, I might have saved baby Thompson," she thinks.

Eva pulls the case out carefully, mindful not to knock over the shelving unit. She discovers behind and between the aisle, a pile of unbroken baby aspirin bottles. She draws her Bomber jacket ties tightly around her waist, and fills up the front of her jacket with all of the bottles that fit.

Swinging her rifle by its strap around her back, Eva grabs the case of infant formula, and runs back to the front of the store where Bonnie patiently awaits her. The dog wags her tail and Eva knows by this silent greeting that there is nobody within Bonnie's immediate sensory radius. Dad took Bonnie's training serious early on, and he made a hunting dog out of her. He also shared his dog handling skills with Eva. However, the danger present everywhere in the last month has made the girl and dog almost psychically connected.

Eva pets the dog's head. Bonnie grins up at her and licks her hand. Eva is concerned more than usual today, because they are out later than usual, and they are only half-way through their mission. Plus they've got the added challenge of getting home safely while carrying an extra fifteen pounds of supplies.

If she never had much awareness of it in the past, time means everything to Eva now. Rhiannon had a fever of one hundred and two when she left the house, and there's no telling what has happened in the nearly two hours since they've been gone. If only the gang hadn't taken so long in the drug store, she would have been home a long time ago.