Chapter 5: The Publix Lot

The Publix on West 49th Street has a sub deli and a cart corral the size of a tennis court.

It also has a bakery counter that my grandmother has refused to visit since 1998.

I pulled into its lot with the dash clock showing one minute to the Forecast.

The lot held about two hundred cars and the usual Saturday crowd, and about half of them carried a gun.

That morning's difference was that the other half were holding them.

The store manager stood at the sliding doors with a laminated sign and a clipboard.

The sign said NO FIREARMS IN THE STORE, and he had taped it up in the last quarter hour.

"Sir, you'll have to leave the rifle outside," I heard him say to a man in a baseball jersey.

"It's for the monsters, man."

"Then the monsters have to leave the store outside," the manager said.

He had a point, and he was the only one in that lot who did.

Customers had parked their carts in a line across the front of the building and ducked behind them with their pistols over the handles.

It was a decent firing position, and I made a note of it for a Plan I no longer believed in.

Then I saw my grandmother, and I forgot about the Plan.

She stood at the end of the cart line in her house dress and her chancleta.

She was holding a flat of thirty eggs in front of her chest.

My aunt stood two steps behind her with a cart and no gun.

"Abuela! The thing is coming here!"

"They have eggs," Abuela said. "Seven dollars. I bought two flats, but I'm only carrying one."

Over the rooftops, a roar came down from the sky.

It was an orange-and-white helicopter with COAST GUARD across the tail.

It dropped into the middle of the lot, and its wash flattened the carts.

Air Station Miami is at Opa-locka, ten minutes away, and its crews had been flying since the first minutes of the wave.

The Publix lot had become the casualty point for the west side of Hialeah, because it was flat and big and had a pharmacy.

Six people lay on the asphalt on blankets from the store, and a pharmacist was kneeling over two of them.

They were the first wounded I had seen who had not been shot by a monster.

Three had been hit by someone's ricochet, and two by someone's panic.

The last one, an old man, had been hit by a car.

A woman in an orange flight suit dropped out of the helicopter's door before the skids touched.

She was tall, five-ten at least, with braids pinned up under a helmet and a sunburned nose.

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