THE EXPO HALL OPENED AT TEN IN THE MORNING. VICTOR WAS first in line when they unlocked the doors. He’d been standing there for forty minutes, determined to beat the crowd.
The show got bigger every year: hundreds of tables, thousands of firearms. In recent years the organizers had branched out. There were night-vision goggles, antique swords, a vast selection of helmets and body armor. There were blowguns and stun guns, Gadsden flags and kukri knives, an enticing display of high-end surveillance cams. Victor took his time wandering the aisles. It was, in point of fact, the only type of shopping he enjoyed. Back in his driving days, he’d visited gun shows in thirty states. He was, by then, some years sober, and there wasn’t much for a solitary man to do along America’s interstate highways that didn’t involve a shot glass.
He made a slow tour of the perimeter, scoping out the merchandise. Certain vendors, he knew by sight: the Civil War reenactor with his muttonchop sideburns, the enormously fat man who sold nunchucks and ninja stars at suspiciously low prices, the young skinhead with his vast inventory of knives.
He stopped to look at some night-vision goggles and heard a noise behind him, a low electrical humming. He turned to see Luther Cross rolling up in his chair.
“Jesus God, Victor! What happened to your face?”
“I got a tooth that’s giving me trouble.”
Luther grinned broadly. “I can pull it for you, if you want. Wouldn’t take me a minute.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Victor said.
They had known each other since high school. Luther, a few years older, had gone to Vietnam ahead of Victor and left his legs there. Since then he’d rolled around town in a motorized wheelchair, his hair tied up in a ponytail, his lap covered with a blanket to hide what was missing.
Luther looked him up and down. “How you been, man? Still driving?”
“Naw. I retired last fall.” Victor chose his words carefully. Luther Cross was a talker. Telling him anything was like writing it in the sky.
“Retired?” Luther looked astonished. “What the hell happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Victor said irritably. “Time to hang it up, is all.” On some level it was probably true, though failing the eye test had helped him along. His old boss might’ve let it slide, but the new manager was an uptight kid who played by the rules. You get pulled over with an expired license, and I’m in deep shit. Victor surrendered his rig and left quietly. He retreated to the log cabin in the valley and waited for the world to burn.
He said, “I hear you’ve got a generator to sell.”
“Yessir,” Luther said.
“My backup one crapped out. I might be interested.”
“All right, then. Come over to the house and take a look.”
Victor continued on his rounds. He wasn’t in the market for anything in particular. Already the subbasement contained more firepower than he needed, more ammo than he’d use in a lifetime in the pre-collapse world. Strictly speaking, he didn’t need a goddamn thing, which—in his experience—was when lightning struck. He found the exact right piece when he wasn’t even looking. He’d acquired most of his arsenal this way, a series of happy accidents.
Buying a weapon was like falling in love.
He passed a table of ladies’ guns, pistols and revolvers in shades of lavender and pink. A young lad with acne and a sad attempt at a mustache stood studying the merchandise, as though he were on intimate terms with a woman who’d appreciate this type of gift. Victor had been looking for such a woman his entire life, and had long ago concluded that they didn’t exist. If they did, it seemed unlikely that this kid would have acquired one.
He stopped to study a display of crossbows.
As always, the shoppers were ninety-nine percent men. The vendors too, unless you counted the handful of peroxide blondes who’d been hired to stand at certain booths, in a blatant attempt to drive horny male foot traffic. This tactic was effective. Victor himself had fallen for it, but only once. When he tried to make conversation about the merchandise, he was sorely disappointed. The girl knew nothing about guns.
He stopped at the table of a guy he knew, a dealer named Wayne Holtz.
“Victor, man. How you been?”
Victor let the question sit. He had never been good at small talk.
“You in the market for anything special?”
“Just looking,” he said. In fact, one piece in particular had caught his eye, a used Ruger Mini-14 in perfect condition. Well, why not? In the spirit of preparedness he wore, beneath his shirt, a ripstop nylon security pouch he’d ordered off the internet—filled, at that moment, with hundred-dollar bills.
“How much is this here?” he asked.
“Four fifty,” said Wayne. “But I can give it to you for four.”
Wayne Holtz was a cretin. New, the piece would go for a thousand. Victor didn’t need another semiautomatic; already he had a half dozen in his arsenal. But he was constitutionally unable to pass up a bargain.
“Sold,” he said.
Wayne reached under the table and handed him a form. “For the background check.” He offered Victor the pencil from behind his ear.
Victor reached for his wallet and placed a Pennsylvania driver’s license on the table. Wayne understood the particularities of his situation. They had done business before.
Wayne studied the license. “How do you say that, anyway? Thibadoo?”
Victor said, “Tib, bow, doe.”
Squinting, he filled in Randy’s address and birth date and Social Security number, information he’d long ago committed to memory. The form was hard to read: the type was large enough, but the letters looked wavy. As he wrote he felt a presence behind him. He turned to see an armed Black man.
Ringing in his ears, a flash of alarm.
The guy was a Pennsylvania statie. His uniform shirt was neatly pressed, his head shaved shiny bald. Immediately, instinctively, Victor made a series of calculations. He did this routinely whenever a cop came into range. This one—L. WASHINGTON, according to his nameplate—was taller than Victor, thirty years younger, and built like a brick shithouse. His service revolver was holstered at his hip.
“Hey, man,” Wayne said, shaking the cop’s hand. “You on duty?”
The friendly tone took Victor by surprise. He wouldn’t have thought Wayne was the type to buddy up with cops, never mind Black ones.
“Not for another hour.” The cop leaned on the table. “Right now I’m just shopping.”
Victor kept his head down and continued writing. A lick of sweat trailed down his back. Randy’s license sat in plain sight on the table, six inches from the cop’s hand.
“I see you made a sale,” the cop said to Wayne. He took the Ruger from the table and raised it briefly to his shoulder. “That’s a good-looking weapon.”
Victor’s back was now slick with sweat.
The cop handed the Ruger back to Wayne. Then he noticed Randy’s license on the table. “What’s this?”
Wayne looked suddenly alert. “I ran a background check on that guy a while ago. Poor bastard left his license behind.”