Lippe Simone - Blank

“What happened?” asked Tom.

“Judging by the artistic composition of the massacre in the kitchen, they killed each other. And I must have slept through the rebooting, rebuilding and ruin of an entire seafaring society. A microcosm of what happens when people are put in a limited space with an even more limited supply of food. Now I think of it, that probably explains why there’s no food left but plenty of liquor.”

“Is there anything else you think we should know Clint?” asked Tom.

“If I mentioned the fishing rods, no.” said Clint, “Oh and below decks. I was afraid to go below decks. I don’t know what’s down there.”

“Not a morsel.” said Honor. “I looked everywhere apart from the engine room, which is locked and it was too dark to pick the lock.”

“Was picking the lock an option?” asked Tom and Honor replied only with a look of slighted professional pride of the sort that Napoleon probably held in reserve for generals who asked him if he knew the way to Prussia.

The sun finally dropped below the indefinite horizon of the ocean leaving a lingering heat and gun-metal blue sky that glowed like something radioactive — the sky, for instance. So the night was lit not unlike a nightmare along the spectrum from black to blue and from the prow of the yacht Honor was able to survey the city like a prison guard in a tower.

The sounds of clumsy violence faded in rhythm with the night and the increase in the volume of screeches and whistles and howls and growls of exotic animals foreign to the California coast making themselves at home in the trees lining the boulevard between the marina and a shopping mall on the other side of Admiralty Way. At the end of the little four-lane access road larger creatures were negotiating an uneasy cohabitation of the undeveloped Ballona Wetlands, next to the marina and extending to the ocean. Doubtless the lions and hyenas and hippopotamus and elephants were lured there by the freshwater creek which drains into the Pacific from the mountains, or perhaps they were drawn by a timeless instinct to complicate Honor’s life.

The unfortunate placement of dangerous animals along the southern flank, the ocean to the West and nothing useful to the North meant that the only viable access due East to the shopping mall with its grocery store and the aerosol cheese and nacho chips and tinned pasta essential to an ocean voyage was a direct frontal assault across a no-man’s land of two uncovered parking lots and a four-lane road.

Nevertheless Honor, Tom and Clint set out with a pistol, spear gun (unloaded, two spears) and a rucksack to do some precision looting. There was exactly enough discussion of endeavoring to get the tank out of the water to discard the idea as a mug's game and they proceeded on foot. Admiralty Way was deserted at ground level. There was only the sharp, blue light of night and the unnerving sounds of strange animals sleeping and moaning and being randomly startled in the trees on either side of the road and in a sort of hedgerow down the middle. Consequently the looters crossed the road and shopping mall parking lot and arrived at the grocery store without incident before encountering their first obstacle.

“It’s locked.” whispered Clint, crouching by the door.

“Good.” said Honor. “It means it’s empty.” and she drew a length of spring steel from her hair and slid it into the lock with the practiced detachment of a senior nurse inserting something embarrassing. And her logic was sound — if the door was even still on its hinges it meant that the grocery store had escaped invasion and they could shoplift at their leisure. So when thirty seconds later Honor popped up the ratchet and slid the doors apart and the three shoppers strode casually in they were disappointed to see that the entire wall perpendicular to the door they’d just meticulously bypassed was gone, assuming it had ever been there. They were looking from the door of the grocery store into the adjacent parking lot, through a wall that had been long ago reduced to little cubes of safety glass, as though the store had experienced a spontaneous and short lived and very localized hail storm.

Further undermining Honor’s premature contention that the store was neutral territory were the dozens of young men and women scattered indiscriminately across the floor of the store, sleeping the sleep of the stuffed to bursting with party snacks and uncooked vegetables and, in the shrouded blue darkness, looking indistinguishable from the morning after a Florida frat party.

Via a complex rotation of frenetic gestures and mimicry, mainly the shush sign and exaggerated strides, Tom and Honor and Clint silently communicated to one another that they should continue with the plan, just very quietly and with their eyebrows raised like surprised team mascots. And they found that if they restricted their shopping to what could be acquired around the edges of the store they could avoid stepping over any sleeping cavemen.

The edges of the store, however, were largely dedicated to accommodations provided to those customers who, by the time they had made their way from the parking lot, found themselves too winded to do any actual shopping without the services of a café, podiatrist, pharmacist or one of the small fleet of mobility scooters lined up from the credit card kiosk to the travel agency. Honor and Clint and Tom were forced to strut on their toes to the back of the store where the more practical suburban family size sacks of cereal-shaped sugar and crispy salt were kept on shelves built like a Tokyo efficiency hotel.

The back of the store was much darker than the front and had the unmatched disadvantage of exactly no exits but it was hidden from sight and, more importantly, vacant. The scavenger hunt proceeded largely as planned until Clint, climbing to the penthouse level of a shelf of breakfast cereal, knocked a bale of crunchy balls of toasted corn tumbling to the floor where it exploded like a piñata at a calorie-camp and spread a thick and unbroken carpet of crispy, honey-flavored marbles from the back wall to the front door. To Honor and Tom and especially Clint the impact sounded like a plate-glass window being struck violently by another plate-glass window but neither the sound nor the balls of partially hydrogenated fats flowing around them like bright orange lava had any noticeable impact on the sleeping fraternity brothers.

An extended silence followed, scored only by the sound of sugary cereal fusing itself to a polished floor. Clint climbed down the shelves and performed an elaborate apology in interpretive dance and Honor and Tom signed back that he was forgiven, particularly in light of the fact that no harm was done, but that he should try to be a little more careful in future and in particular not attempt such heights.

They filled the rucksack with oranges and loaded themselves with the least perishable and hence most artificial food-like products they could reasonably carry. Shopping carts were considered and abandoned in light of the risk of the notoriously squeaky wheels alerting the sleeping sentries. They took only what they could carry stealthily which meant, above all, no crunchy cereals. Firmly balanced and burdened and holding their breath, they peered around the corner of their protective shelf like escaping POWs and determined that the way remained clear and the guards asleep. Then they stepped onto a minefield.

Each crunchy corn ball exploded underfoot like a shotgun and the combined blast was, consequently, very much like a lot of shotguns. The fraternity began to stir and Tom and Honor and Clint, in their haste to maintain their balance promptly lost their balance and began stamping on the fully charged cereal as though they had a vendetta against it. The result was deafening. The fraternity was awake and quick to take up arms against an invasion of their fertile lands. They organized themselves with alarming speed and precision and moved like a crunchy, crispy wall toward the back of the store and as they passed through housewares they armed themselves with knives and rolling pins and bigger knives.