“You can’t—” he tells her. “That’s stealing.”
But she just shrugs and keeps on stuffing. “We’re getting busted for breaking and entering,” she says. “What’s a little light shoplifting thrown in?”
Simon is about to argue more, but then he sees two Mr. Rogerses pass by, pushing shopping carts filled with hunting supplies. He catches up with them.
“Our gear needed an upgrade,” Katniss tells him from under her mask.
Simon slows, watches them turn into the electronics aisle. At the other end of the store, he sees another Mr. Rogers eyeballing the gun display. It’s Randall Flagg. Simon walks over.
“You ever fired an assault rifle?” Flagg asks him, which is a strange question coming from a man who looks like America’s neighbor.
“I’m a little behind on my weapons of death,” says Simon.
On the wall across from them are hundreds of long guns, displayed in orderly rows. In the glass case, handguns are arranged by manufacturer, by make and model. Looking at them Simon’s anxiety is a throbbing pulse in his neck. He hears Flagg breathing inside his rubber mask.
“What he did, see,” says Flagg, “he pulled the fire alarm. So he didn’t have to go room to room. He could shoot us when we came out into the hall.”
Simon swallows the lump that forms in his throat when he realizes what Flagg is talking about. Parkland.
“My brother knew him. They were older. I was twelve. Tommy used to say how they were weird, Nik and his brother, that they liked to do stuff to animals, especially Nik. Jabbing sticks in rabbit holes to kill the babies, shooting squirrels. I guess he was adopted, and first his dad died and then his mom, and he was living with somebody, a friend. She was old, his mom. Adopted. This was after he got expelled for selling knives out of his lunch box, or maybe it was the bullets in his backpack. Those are just, you know, details.”
He points to the wall.
“That’s the gun. Smith & Wesson, manufactured by American Outdoor Brands. A .223-caliber that could be modified automatic supereasy. That shit’ll punch a dozen bullets through you at thirty-two hundred feet per second. Recoil’s real light, standard mag thirty rounds. He probably bought it at a place like this when he was eighteen. No waiting. This was before he put on YouTube that he wanted to become a professional school shooter.”
He tilts up his mask, lights a cigarette.
“We all have thoughts, you know,” he says. “Who doesn’t want revenge for things? But that’s, like, hit the guy when he’s not looking and run away. Not—I don’t know, seventeen dead. Maybe it’s Florida. Maybe we’re the problem. America’s liver.”
He reaches under his rubber mask, and Simon gets the feeling he’s wiping away tears.
“All I know is, as long as they’re packing, I’m gonna be strapped. I’m done hiding in supply closets.”
“What happened to Tommy?” Simon asks.
Flagg drops the cigarette on the linoleum, lifts his rubber mask, spits. “What do you think?” he says.
The Prophet comes over. There is a middle-aged woman with him, part native American. She is Wanda Salas Soto, who lives in a double-wide outside Coyanosa.
“Bad news,” says the Prophet. “Wanda says the government came for Javier and his father last week.”
“Our government?” says Simon, then immediately feels stupid. It has been thirty-six hours since his last Ativan and his brain feels like a box of spiders.
It was 110 degrees in Paris last week.
You Deserve a Break Today.
There are 1,000,000 more guns in America than people.
I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing.
“County sheriff raided last week,” Wanda tells them. She is in her midforties, moon-faced with a smoker’s cough. Truckers on the dating app she uses describe her as “exotic” when they text her from the road. “Maybe you saw the billboards. Sheriff Roy. He calls himself the real immigration police ever since the ICE purge and that southern border reform bill—which—that shit don’t fly in Texas. So the deputies come in with stun guns and Black Jacks, took fifteen of us. Javier also.”
“Where?” says Louise, wandering over.
“Sheriff Roy built a detention center outside Balmorhea,” says Wanda. “Cyclone fences and razor wire. A few un-air-conditioned Quonset huts. They keep the kids in cages, away from their parents.”
“Wait a minute,” says Simon. “How old is Javier?”