I flash my light past him and around him and find the same dull contours of the rest of the basement: gray dusty walls, cracking concrete floors. The crates stand surrounded by piles of disorganized junk: sagging-sided cardboard boxes; a blue plastic packing bin filled with camping lanterns and kitchen matches. In the back, a rack of clothing: puffy coats and long johns and stocking caps. Two half-height steel filing cabinets, piled one on top of the other like decommissioned robots.
And Cortez in the middle of it all, his foot up on one of the packing crates like a conquistador, his face a mask of joy, eyes wide and full of promise. I aim my light at him and it’s like he’s glowing, all of that barely restrained intensity I sensed before is restrained no longer, it’s beaming off of him in waves.
“Well?” he says.
I’m impatient, I’m confused. I want to get back to my bodies, get back to work.
“Cortez, what?”
“What, what? What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About everything.”
“Everything what?”
He laughs. “Everything everything!”
We’re Abbott and Costello all of a sudden, down here in the darkness. My mind is elsewhere. Where is that weapon? The infamous sawtooth buck knife. It occurs to me with a shudder of horror that I won’t find it anywhere on that floor in the darkness, because the killer may have pitched it into the woods. But again why, always why—why throw away a knife when you’re about to kill yourself—why hide evidence in a forest that’s about to burn to ash? My mind is reeling with facts and suppositions, but Cortez grabs my arm and drags me over to one of the crates. He turns, squats, and slides the lid off and it clatters to the ground and he steps back dramatically.
I aim my headlamp inside the crate: it’s full of macaroni and cheese. Dozens of boxes of it. A generic brand, not even a brand at all, just the cardboard boxes stamped MACARONI AND CHEESE.
Cortez waits behind me, breathing heavy, running his hands through his hair. I pull out a few of the boxes, toss them aside, wondering if it’s under the mac and cheese—the gold bars, the guns, the bricks of refined uranium, whatever is supposed to be impressing me right now. But no, it’s a crate full of pasta, bright orange boxes of uncooked pasta as far down as I can dig.
“Cortez—” I say, and he waves his arms and yells “Wait!” like a TV pitchman. “Wait, there’s more!”
He’s pulling the tops off more of the crates, wrenching them off like coffin lids, but it’s more of the same, more nothing—more macaroni and cheese and then a crate full of spaghetti sauce, forty Costco-sized megajars of lumpy marinara. Stuffed ravioli, applesauce, foil-wrapped snack cakes … it’s all nothing, boxes full of nothing, except it’s more like a parody of nothing. It’s like a joke you would play on someone who wanted to prepare for the end of the world. “Well,” you would say, smirking behind your hand, “well, you’re going to need pasta!”
But Cortez isn’t laughing. He’s looking back and forth between me and the boxes of junk food, as if waiting for me to drop and scream hallelujah.
“We found it,” he says at last, smile widening, eyes practically pinwheeling.
“We found what?”
“A stash. A horde. We found stuff, Policeman. Weapons, too: Tasers and helmets and walkie-talkies. Stuff. And this here,” he says, turning to kick another of the crates, “is full of satellite phones. All charged up. I knew these people had stuff down here.”
I stare at him, baffled. This is his own mania, Cortez’s very own brand of undiagnosed asteroid psychosis. Tasers? Helmets? Like we can sit underground with our helmets on and weather the collapse of civilization like a thunderstorm. Who does he think we’re going to talk to on our satellite phones? But he goes on, wrenching the lid off a crate of bottled water and shouting “Ta-da!” like he’s discovered King Tut.
“Five-gallon jugs,” he says, yanking one out by the thin plastic handle. “There are twenty-four in this crate, and five of the crates so far are just water, just so far. A person ideally has three gallons a day, but it’s really one and a half, just to live.” His eyes reflecting the headlamp are buzzing and flickering like a computer, crunching the numbers. “Let’s make it two gallons.”
“Cortez.”
He’s not listening. He’s done—he’s gone off to wherever he is, he’s jumped the rails. “Now, if we’re these jokers, if there are fourteen of us—you said fourteen?”
“There were,” I say. “They’re dead.”
“I know,” he says, offhandedly, and goes back to his calculations, “if there are fourteen people that’s a month, maybe. But for the two of us, Skinny Minny, for just the two of us …”
“How do you know they’re dead?”