Apocalypse Plus One: My Snarky Sidekick novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Checkout Line

With Maisy beside her and $38,400 in hand, Annabel stocks the Space and ends her engagement in public. The hospital calls: the man in 412 crashed the moment she stored the pallet.

Maisy came through the door of my room the next morning in her blue clinical scrubs, and I started crying before she said a word.

She was alive.

She was warm and nineteen, and she had a granola bar in one hand.

"Annie, what happened? Your face is wet. Did your head hurt?"

"No," I said. "Come here."

I held her with my good arm for so long that she gave up asking.

Under her sleeve, her glucose monitor blinked green against her skin.

"I'm checking myself out," I said into her hair. "Today."

"The doctor said Friday."

"The doctor said I could leave if someone drove me."

"Okay." Maisy pulled back and wiped her own eyes. "Where are we going?"

"Shopping."

I signed the form against medical advice.

The nurse from the day before took it from me, and she looked worried.

"If anything changes with the man in 412," I said, "will you call me?"

She hesitated. "I'm not supposed to, but I'll try."

Maisy's old Corolla smelled of french fries.

We drove to the warehouse club on the east side with my grandmother's money on my phone.

"Turn off your location sharing," Plus One said. "Your ex has been watching your little blue dot since breakfast."

I turned it off.

"Rules of the Space," he went on. "One. It holds what you touch and will to put away. Two. Nothing alive. Three. Nothing spoils in here and nothing cools. Soup stays soup. Four. Moving a lot at once is heavy. I feel it."

"You feel it?"

"I live here," he said. "Mind the shelves."

The warehouse club was loud and bright, and every aisle smelled of cardboard.

I had a list.

I had made it in the last life, over seventy-one days, one regret at a time.

It started with water filters, rice, propane and salt.

Antibiotics came next, and Maisy's prescription card would cover those at the pharmacy counter.

Last was insulin for Maisy, forty weeks of it, which would never spoil in the Space.

Maisy pushed the flatbed cart.

I laid a hand on each thing and it vanished.

I put away a case of filters, a pallet of canned beans and a hundred pounds of rice.

Maisy watched a pallet of bottled water disappear under my palm and went very quiet.

"Annie," she said. "That's not normal."

"I know."

"Okay," she said. She took a long breath. "Is it a good thing or a bad thing?"

"It's how you live."

She nodded and pushed the empty cart forward.

At the checkout, I had a second flatbed and nothing on it, and a line of eight people with full carts behind me.

The cashier looked at the empty flatbed and at my receipt. "Ma'am, you've been through the aisles for an hour."

"I'm paying for what's in my bag," I said. "Everything is in my bag."

It was one canvas tote.

The cashier stared at it.

"Annabel!"

Dane and Lindsey came across the front of the store.

Dane carried an iced coffee.

Lindsey had her phone up, and the red record light was on.

"There she is," Lindsey told her phone, in a voice of pure worry. "Annabel, honey, you've had a head injury. You can't be walking around like this."

"Babe, it's okay," Dane said. He put on the soft face he used for waiters. "Maisy, hand me her keys."

Maisy did not hand him anything.

"Hold the phone higher," I said to Lindsey. "I want the whole line in it."

She lowered it an inch.

"Dane Prewitt was driving drunk on Route Two," I said, loud enough for the whole line to hear. "He ran a red light and hit a courier's van. When it stopped, he left me in the passenger seat and walked away."

"That's not true," Dane said.

"Then why is the man in the other car in a coma and I'm the one with a police report?"

Someone behind me said, "Oh, no."

Dane's face went white and then red. "She hit her head. She doesn't know what she's saying."

"Yesterday you told the nurse I grabbed the wheel."

I took the ring off my finger.

I had put it back on that morning only to have something to give him.

I dropped it into his iced coffee.

The ice clinked.

A man at the back of the line began to clap, and then he stopped, embarrassed.

"We're done," I said.

Maisy took the tote from my shoulder. We walked out past a security guard who didn't try to stop us.

In the parking lot, my phone buzzed.

"Plus One?" I said inside my head, as we reached the car. "Do you want to say anything about that?"

He didn't answer.

"Plus One."

"Stop." His voice came thin and faint. "Annabel, please stop. I can't hold that last pallet."

The phone buzzed again. It was the hospital.

I answered. The nurse from room 409 was breathing hard.

"Ms. Holt, I'm sorry. The man in 412 just crashed. His heart stopped for a full minute on the monitor."

I heard a door open behind her.

"It was at 2:14," she said. "That's what's so strange. He's been stable for four days."

I scrolled up to the receipt in my email.

The last pallet had vanished under my hand at 2:14.

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