“I thought you were from Washington.”
“I travel back and forth,” Eckhart tells me. “I have an apartment here and another one in Virginia, just outside of D.C.”
Eckhart’s idea of not far is not the same as mine. We only stop once at a small convenience store where Eckhart ducks through the broken front door and grabs bottles of water for each of us.
We’re looters.
Eckhart looks back and forth across the street as he takes a long dri
nk from the bottle.
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
“There have to be other survivors,” he mumbles. I don’t really think he’s responding to my question. “Where are they?”
It takes more than an hour to get to Eckhart’s apartment at the edge of downtown. It’s a simple, gated community, but we don’t see anyone there, either—just more bodies in the parking lot. Unlike the downtown area, most of the buildings are still standing.
Eckhart waits for me to go first as we head up a flight of stairs. At the top, he unlocks the apartment door, and we go inside. It’s a small, uncluttered space. There’s a couch, a chair, and a large screen television in the main room, which connects to a small kitchen. There are a couple of closed doors in the hallway beyond, and Eckhart heads for one of them.
On the other side of the door is a bedroom. The only furniture inside is a bed and a small nightstand, but the room is completely full of stacked, black crates.
He opens a closet door, and I glance inside and take in a sharp breath.
There’s the expected rack of clothing, but that doesn’t catch my attention. Each wall of the closet is lined with all kinds of guns. There are big guns, little guns, shotguns, guns with long scopes on them, and even a sword of some kind. On a shelf, there’s a collection of knives as well.
Who is this guy?
“How many guns do you have?” I ask breathlessly.
“Enough,” he replies.
“What’s in the crates?”
“They’re footlockers.”
“What’s in the footlockers, then?”
“Ammunition,” he says. “Also enough food for about six months and a water purification system.”
I stare at him open-mouthed.
“I’ve got some medical supplies, too.” He pulls a roll of gauze and some other items out of one of the footlockers and then retrieves a washcloth from the bathroom. “Let’s take care of your leg.”
He sits me beside the bed and drops down next to me. I remove the shoe he commandeered and slip off the torn pantyhose. He takes my heel in his hand, placing my foot across his thigh. I tense a little. He’s barely touched me the whole time, and this contact feels more intimate to me than any contact we’ve had since we met. He slowly unwraps the bit of shirt he wrapped around my leg and takes a good look at the wound.
“Not gonna lie,” he says, “this is gonna hurt. You want a drink first?”
“Will I need one?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Okay.”
He gets back up, heads out to the kitchen, and returns with a bottle of whiskey.
“Take a good drink,” he says, and I do so. The liquid burns my throat, but I don’t make a face at it. He sits back down and grabs my foot again.
He runs the pad of his thumb next to the gash, examining it closely before carefully wiping it off with a cool, wet washcloth. It stings, but it’s not so bad. The whiskey is warming my stomach, and I try to concentrate on that feeling.