Nearly four decades later, having long shed his fears of the walking dead, Michael is nonetheless wary of the phantoms presented by this rainy night, because one of them might prove to have substance and a gun. When he reaches the end of the long building, he looks north, past the back gable wall of Whole Fruit, then south along the back of Specialty Products. To the west, the interminable procession of dead trees continues. That sight increasingly depresses him with its endorsement of the theory that there are people who create and build and people who can only destroy, and that the latter are winning because their task requires less thought and labor.
Aleem most likely didn’t turn right and enter Whole Fruit, in front of which his dead companions lie. He doesn’t know for sure that Nina and John are hidden in there or where to find them. He’ll want to put distance between himself and the site of the shooting, find a refuge from which to assess the situation. He believes that he’s gone from seven homeys as backup to just three, when in fact it’s one. In either case, he’s possessed of a gang mind, deciding tactics according to the strength of his numbers; he isn’t his best in one-on-one encounters. He’ll be rattled by this change in circumstances and by his inability to identify who has come to the aid of Nina and the boy. Not least of all, this environment is alien to him; his world is the city and its suburbs, and the only thing this orchard has in common with his usual territory is its decayed and decaying condition. He’s accustomed to going into conflict with boldness and swagger, but here the hunt requires stealth and patience, a prospect that will surely unnerve him. Because he has always seen himself as being above others, he’ll feel more confident if he literally takes the high ground, a vantage point from which he can look down—and shoot down—into the common area onto which all these buildings face, with a bird’s view of the main pathways along which someone might appear in cautious search of him.
As the wind rises again, Michael moves south toward the back of Specialty Products.
Along the eastern flank of the muddy common area, from north to south, stand Cider and Juice, Special Accounts, and the single-story building that served as an enormous garage for trucks and orchard machinery. Cider and Juice faces the building labeled OFFICES. The garage stands opposite Specialty Products. In the middle, Special Accounts is opposite Whole Fruit, where four dead men are sprawled in their voluminous black raincoats, which the wind billows like the membranous wings of prehistoric airborne reptiles that have fallen through time and the sky. The crisp white beams of two dropped flashlights intersect in a Greek cross of equal arms, as though in an ironic memorialization of the deceased.
From a glassless window at the end of the hallway on the second floor of Special Accounts, Aleem commands a view of the common area and of the wide passageways flanking Whole Fruit. The passageways between other buildings are beyond his monitoring. However, if the shooter is here to rescue Nina and John, and if Nina and the kid are hiding in Whole Fruit, as the hundred-dollar bill seems to indicate, then he might try to bring them out through the common area. Very likely, he won’t be looking for Aleem and remaining members of the crew; these decrepit buildings can’t be searched in silence or in this blinding dark, and using a light would make him an easy target.
Aleem doesn’t understand who this gunslinger could be. The guy comes out of nowhere, blazing away like John Wick in those bitchin’ movies. Because you can’t totally trust anyone, Aleem might think one of his homeys who is not yet dead—Speedo or Masud or Orlando—is taking out the entire inner circle of the gang to give himself a clear path to the top. But Speedo’s head is a pot of thin soup that is never at full boil; he’s no more likely to envision himself as the leader of the pack than he is to decide to rush off to medical school to be a heart surgeon. Masud loves kittens; he always has three or four, and when they become grown cats, about two years old, he kills them and gets new kittens. A man who has a soft heart for kittens is not a man with political ambition. Orlando Fiske is a harder guy than Speedo or Masud, and he takes pleasure in jacking up people until they break. However, these past few years, with his hot schoolteacher cooking for him like Julia Child and also cooking like a porn star, Orlando is in a relationship that he never imagined a knee-buster as ugly as he is could expect. He’s become domesticated, and he isn’t going to risk what he has for a chance at something he never previously seemed to want. Aleem doesn’t know anything about farming, whether apples or corn or soybeans, but he knows enough about cash flow to be sure that whoever owns a dead orchard can’t afford a security guard to watch for trespassers; besides, no security guard is going to ruthlessly blow the crap out of people with whatever version of an ArmaLite rifle this guy is using. Then who the hell is he?
Standing, waiting, watching at the broken-out window, listening to rain on the roof ticking like a thousand clocks counting down to some dire event, Aleem scans the night. He’s on the lookout for the shooter, but he repeatedly fixates on the four corpses and has to remind himself to remain alert for movement. He isn’t afraid. He’s concerned. He’ll admit to being concerned. Who wouldn’t be concerned in his position? Even the fearless assassin, John Wick, would be concerned. Aleem has some misgivings about his situation, a mild apprehension that’s only what a man with a strong survival instinct would feel. He will wait here until the dude with the semiautomatic rifle appears, and then he’ll open fire or not. Depending on the circumstances, it might be best to lie low and wait for dawn. If Speedo and Masud and Orlando appear shortly, in response to the rifle fire, Aleem can call down to them and reveal that they’re looking for just one man, which he’s pretty sure is the case. When his homeys set out to find their quarry, Aleem can remain at the window and sound the alarm to bring them running if the rifleman comes creeping into the common area. Aleem is the equivalent of an army general, and good generals function best from the heights, overlooking the battlefield below, so they have a full picture of the conflict.
Specialty Products is as big as Whole Fruit, but it has a second floor. No windows here on the ground level. From outside, Michael saw windows upstairs. The big roll-up is missing at the back, but the gable wall at the front has no large opening. He is convinced Aleem isn’t sheltering here; he would have run farther from where he saw all his homeboys meet their maker. Yet Michael proceeds with caution, the AR-15 in his right hand, the buttstock pressed between his arm and his side. The flashlight in his left hand emits a blade-thin beam between his masking fingers, the light momentarily fanning away the darkness to reveal the inflow of the storm in which wallows a miscellany of colorless debris, small shapes not readily named.
To the right is a large shaft, open at one end. The gate and cab are missing, but dangling hoist cables and roller-guide shoes and a pile of counterweights tumbled on the floor confirm a freight elevator once occupied this space. The steel rungs of an emergency ladder are embedded in the right-hand wall, though there has to be another and easier access to the upper floor.
He turns away from the shaft and wades through the ankle-deep lakelet, sliding his feet along the concrete floor to minimize the water noise. When a hampering length coils around his left foot, he thinks snake, but it’s only a cable from which he is able to free himself quickly. In the right front corner of the building, beyond a doorless opening, an enclosed staircase with wide treads offers him the second floor. Michael switches off the light and stands blinded, listening for anything other than his breathing and his thudding heart and the ceaseless rustling of the rain. He climbs slowly in the vertical dark, and although he should be heavy with exhaustion and dread, he feels all but weightless, like black smoke rising in a soot-lined flue, as if the new life he’s had for five days, since waking from death or something like it, is evaporating from him.