“Knives? Really?” Cortez looks up. His eyes gleam. “Are they big and sharp?”
“Two of them are big. The third is a paring knife. I don’t know about sharp.”
“Paring knives can be surprisingly effective. You can do some serious damage with a paring knife.”
“You’ve seen it,” I say. “You’ve done it.”
He laughs, winks. I rub my eyes and look around. I’ve caught up with Cortez in the three-car garage, the last unexplored area of the station. No cars left in here, just stuff—engine parts, broken pieces of tools, other miscellaneous junk that’s been forgotten or left behind. It’s big and echoey, smelling of old spilled gasoline. The sun comes in refracted through two grungy glass-block windows along the north-facing wall.
“Knives are always useful,” says Cortez cheerfully. “Sharp, dull. Take the knives.”
He gives me a congratulatory salute and goes back to what he’s doing, which is rifling his way along the wire shelving units in the back of the room, across from the big garage doors, looking for useful objects. Cortez’s features are strangely large: large forehead, large chin, big glowing eyes. He has the jollity and the fierceness of a pirate king. The first time we met he shot me in the head with an electric staple gun, but our relationship has evolved in the subsequent months. On this long and complicated journey he has proved himself to be endlessly valuable, skilled at picking locks, siphoning fuel and reviving dead vehicles, discovering stores of resources in a resource-depleted landscape. He is not the sort of sidekick I ever would have predicted for myself, but the world has been reordered. I never used to think I’d have a dog.
“The knives are covered in blood,” I explain to Cortez. “I’m leaving them where I found them, for now.”
He glances at me over his shoulder. “Cow’s blood?”
“Maybe.”
“Pig?”
“Could be.”
He waggles his eyebrows insinuatingly. We’ve eaten what we brought, what we stumbled upon or bargained for along the way: snack-type food, jerky strips, a big thing of honey-roasted peanuts in tiny foil bags. We caught fish in the Finger Lakes in improvised nets, salted them, and ate those for five days. All we’ve been drinking is coffee, working our way through one massive sack of arabica beans. Cortez rigged up a manual pencil sharpener into a grinder; we measure out cups from the barrels of spring water we took with us from Massachusetts; we boil up the coffee in an old carafe over a camp stove, strain it through a mesh spatula into a hot/cold thermos. It takes forever. It tastes terrible.
“Can you make coffee?” I ask Cortez.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Great idea.”
Cortez stands, stretches, takes the necessary items from his golf bag and gets set up, while I think about blood. Two trails, one running out of the kitchenette and one running back.
Coffee on the boil, Cortez goes back to rummaging for treasure, working his way down the shelving system, lifting each object to the light, quickly assessing, evaluating, moving on.
“Training manual,” he says. “Porno mag. Empty shoebox. Sunglasses. Broken.” He tosses the mirrored state-trooper-style shades over his shoulder, shattering them further on the patterned-concrete floor of the garage. “Holsters. Could use these, maybe. Oh, goodness. Goodness gracious, Policeman. Binoculars.”
He holds them up, bulky and black, points them at me like a birdwatcher.
“Bad news,” he says. “You look like shit.”
He takes the binoculars. He takes a bag full of cell phone batteries. I’ve stopped asking Cortez what good it all is, all of the collecting and acquiring and sorting. It’s a game to him, a challenge: keep gathering up useful objects until the world caves in and no one has any use for anything.
I am aware of the possibility, of course, that it is Nico’s blood on the knife, in the sink, on the ground. It is too early to think about that, too early to reach that sort of conclusion.