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"This is kind of stupid," Steve panted. He wiped sweat and demodog blood off his brow as he leaned on his bat. "Like, you have to admit. Probably not a responsible use of resources?"
"You didn't have to come," Robin reminded him. She tried to catch her breath as she listened for any other sounds of movement in the store. All she heard was the metal groaning where the roof had caved in, and water dripping here and there. Normal end of the world sounds. It was fine.
"Well, yeah, sure, but then you'd have gotten eaten by a monster and I would have to spend the rest of my life feeling heartbroken and guilty right up until the moment I tell Nancy I let you get yourself killed and she shoots me with the closest gun."
He pushed at a half-collapsed display with his bat and it fell the rest of the way over, the metal shrieking and clanging loud enough to draw anything else in the building to their position.
Robin shut her eyes and listened again. Nothing new, somehow. A one dog building, apparently. It had jumped them practically before they'd even made it in the front door. Usually the dogs traveled in packs but maybe this one had gotten in and hadn't been able to figure out how to get back out again. Maybe it had fallen in through the hole in the roof. Robin looked at it and tried to sort out any sign of preexisting injury from the mess the two of them had made of it but it just looked like meat at this point. Slimy meat. She chose to believe that maybe they had put it out of its misery. She nudged it with her foot just to be sure. Nothing.
"Dumbass." She sighed, when she was pretty sure they coast was at least temporarily clear. "If you don't want to get me killed can you maybe try to find a quieter form of property damage to inflict?"
She turned on her clip-on flashlight as she moved into the store. The hole in the roof let in a lot of light towards the middle, but the windows were boarded up and it was still dim around the periphery. Better safe than sorry. Words to live by. Maybe a little late into this mission to remember them, but hey. She was still living so far.
The store wasn't picked clean. It had been a good tip. The woman had told her the guns would probably be long gone, and the ammo. Any kind of weaponry would probably be a bust if that's what she was looking for. It was the first thing people had reached for when everything went to hell, and she'd be better off searching people's houses and pulling those same guns off their dead bodies than trying to go shopping for them in a store.
But Robin didn't need guns. She had guns. Or. Well. She had Nancy, and Nancy had guns.
The armory was her domain. Everybody knew that any guns that came into town had to go through Nancy first, and probably stay with her too. The only people who carried them were people who were working. Patrolling. Supply runs. Guard duty. Even Nancy didn't carry when she wasn't working.
But of course Nancy was always working.
Robin wasn't looking for guns, or ammo. Although if she found any she'd gladly take them back home and watch Nancy take them apart and complain about the condition they were in before methodically cleaning them and replacing anything that needed replacing and recording every step of it in one of her log books.
She loved to watch Nancy's hands work. Loved to watch her wipe the grease and grime off her fingers with a rag that was more grease and grime than rag anymore. Her precise little shorthand that almost nobody else could read. Robin could read it.
Nancy's hands were small and dainty and filthy and busy and she never wore rings because they'd just get ruined, or worse yet they'd get her hand stuck somewhere it couldn't afford to get stuck, and none of them could afford that. They'd all be in a hell of a lot of trouble without Nancy Wheeler's hands.
And besides, Robin had her own reasons for wanting to keep Nancy's hands safe.
So no rings. Which was fine, honestly. Rings were traditional and Nancy wasn't traditional, and their lives sure as hell weren't traditional either. And anyway, rings were too easy.
They used to say three months salary, that was how much a person should be spending on a ring. But Robin didn't have a salary, nobody did anymore. And rings were free for anybody who wanted them, really.
The jewelry store was still mostly intact. People took things, here and there. Gifts. Bright, shiny, pretty things to make somebody feel better about the general lack of bright, shiny prettiness in the current state of the world. But mostly people left it alone. It was there if anybody needed it, and nobody really seemed to need it. They wouldn't get you too far in a fight so what was the point?
So no rings. And probably no guns.
She'd thought about books, maybe. But then it was like Which book? What was the perfect book to say everything she wanted to say and what were the chances Nancy hadn't already read it?
And books were what Nancy got Robin. It felt kind of cheap to just copy her moves, even if they were good moves.
God, Robin thought of Nancy's hands again. She really did have good moves.
But what did you get for the woman who had everything? Or. Well. What did you get for a woman who only really ever left the house to kill things?
Knives? Nancy had a whole wall of knives. And she still couldn't be trusted to chop vegetables at the mess hall without cutting herself.
A fire ax? She had three. A flame thrower? Hopper was borrowing it for some kind of nest control mission last Robin knew, but yeah she had that too. Hedge clippers? A fricking... lawnmower?
Robin knew she was getting off track. But it was hard. The situation was unprecedented. It had to be the exact right thing.
They moved deeper into the store. Everything remained still. The air the right kind of quiet.
Steve broke the quiet.
"Can we use this stuff?" He held up some gardening tools. Hand trowels and the little fork-y rake things.
Robin shrugged and watched him shove a couple in his bag. Something caught her eye behind him. "What is that?" She pointed at the display and Steve picked one up and read the package.
"It's, uh. A dibber, apparently. Why, do we need one?"
Robin gestured for it until he handed it over. She turned it over in her hands a couple times, gripping the handle as best she could with the way it was zip tied onto the cardboard packaging. Finally she sighed and stuffed it in her backpack. She had no fucking clue what a dibber was but it looked like could kill somebody in the right hands, so she figured if all else failed it was probably a better idea than a lawnmower.
She zipped up her pack and continued the slow trek through the store. They moved aisle by aisle, checking to make sure nothing was lying in wait for them.
She was glad, for once, that the electricity was out. Walking through the sunlit patch under the hole in the ceiling, the carpeting squished wet underneath her feet as she stepped over dead electrical cables that hung down like vines, sending goosebumps up her spine. She looked up at the blue sky half expecting a demodog ambush to rain down on them, but it was only the rusty water from the busted pipes she had to duck out of the way of.
It smelled like mildew and rot over here. Even the fresh air couldn't clear it. Robin though about black mold and spores and had to fight down a retch at the thought of what precisely she might be inviting into her lungs right now.
The world was so fucking gross, now. Her skin crawled under the sweat and the filthy drips of water soaking into the shoulders of her jacket.
If only she could get Nancy a bath. Not that she was complaining or anything. They bathed. They got 3 minutes per day each allotted in the rain-water showers and a turn with the community soap. They were as clean as anybody. But a bath? With bubbles? Bubbles half the neighborhood hadn't already bathed in that day? In an actual tub? A tub hypothetically big enough for two? (Because if Robin was gonna dream big she might as well dream huge.) Now that would be a gift. Who could say no to that?
"Remember baths?" She asked Steve.
He laughed. "Baths are disgusting." He stuffed a couple rolls of duct tape into his bag. "But I think I'd actually kill for one right now."
"You'd kill me?" She faked offense.
"No," he sighed, shaking his head. "Anybody else though? No question. They wouldn't stand a chance."
She laughed. She spotted replacement blades for utility knives and grabbed a few boxes. They always needed these.
"How about," She ran her finger over the sticky grime on the shelf and shook her head at the shoddy housekeeping. She wiped her fingers off on a dish towel hanging from a display and she thought of Nancy and her rags. She stuffed a handful of towels in her jacket pocket. "How about Dustin. Would you kill Dustin? Just so you could take a bath?"
"How long a bath?" Steve asked.
"Let's say... fifteen minutes."
"If you had said ten, Dustin would still be alive today," Steve lamented. "Unfortunately for him, fifteen minutes in a hot bath is absolutely worth his life."
Robin laughed. "Oof. It was nice knowing him, though."
"Truly a wonderful friend. It was an honor."
"Well, somebody's gonna have to comfort his mother," she raised her eyebrow.
Steve made a face that was at best uncharitable.
Robin stepped close enough to flick him in the forehead. "Hey now, Claudia Henderson is a beautiful woman. You've got to make your peace with aging, Stevie. It's coming for us all. If we should be so lucky."
"So you comfort her." He muttered, rubbing the spot where Robin had gotten him. When she made a frustrated sound and turned to keep on going towards the back of the store, he laughed. "Oh that's right, I forgot. You're a married woman, now."
She sighed. "Not yet."
"Please," Steve called from behind her. "It's a done deal. There's a rumor going around that you have Property of Nancy Wheeler tattooed on your ass."
She laughed. "Property of- Who says it's not the other way around, huh?"
"Please." Steve said again, huffing out a laugh. He moved past her to check the next aisle. "Anyway. I told them it's actually just an inventory number, so Nance can keep track of you in her little diary."
"It's not a diary, it's a ledger," Robin mumbled. "Explains why she's always staring at my butt, anyway."
"Gross," Steve complained. It was weak, just a habit. Just to keep things moving. She appreciated it.
"You're the one who brought it up."
"Well I regret it, okay?" He shrugged.
They'd made it to the back of the store, to the door separating the public area from storage. They each took one side of the door, and on Robin's nod, Steve pushed open the door and spun in, shining his light with Robin aiming one of Nancy's favorite guns over his shoulder.
No movement. No noise. Just that musty smell getting stronger back here where none of the light and not a lot of the fresh air could reach. The water had no such trouble seeping in. The carpet switched abruptly to finished concrete where the public part of the store ended and the warehouse began and the water sat in shallow puddles showing off the uneven plane of the floor.
Their footsteps were loud back here, slapping the wet concrete and echoing up into the endlessly high ceiling, eerie in the empty quiet. She looked up at the climbing shelves as far as her light would show her and she hoped like hell that what she was looking for was somewhere close to the ground.
The inventory here, at least, was organized a lot more intuitively than Nancy's system. Gardening and sporting goods and feed and power tools all grouped together conveniently so they could skip over whole sections at a time.
She slipped a little on the floor, the water collecting in a film now in this dark back corner. It felt like mud almost, like algae or slime, but she kept her footing and kept looking up and down over the shelves, skipping over a single lonely 7, a wealth of 9s and 10.5s and a handful of 13 EEEs, hoping against hope for a miracle.
And then there it was. The holy fucking grail. She reached out and grabbed the box off the shelf and it was heavy, solid. Real. Then she went to turn to call out her victory to Steve and her feet were stuck in whatever the muck was, and she shone her flashlight down at the floor and felt herself sinking and she yelled-
"Steve-!"
/////
Nancy was checking her book. She had checked her book a hundred times. She knew where everything was. She knew who had what and where they were. She knew everything, but she didn't know where Robin was.
She was supposed to be back by now. Her and Steve. They were a day past due. Nancy didn't have to check her book to know it. She knew it the minute Robin was late. She knew it the second.
She thought maybe she ought to brand an inventory tag on Robin's ass when she got back so she could keep better track of her.
If she got back.
Nancy got up and opened the front door as if she could summon Robin back with nothing but the strength of her disapproval. She saw a flashlight moving steadily at the other end of the street, the patrol right on schedule. She didn't see anybody else.
She stood there for a minute and breathed the cool night air and tried to let it soothe the panic she was still barely succeeding in ignoring. Finally she turned around and went back inside. She flipped the porch light on, even though it was against regulations. Power conservation. It was important. It was very important. Somebody would be by tomorrow morning if not sooner to remind her that the rules were for everybody, that they were for the good of everybody and that they applied to everybody. She'd nod and apologize and say it had slipped her mind and promise it wouldn't happen again.
She left it on out of superstition, maybe. Some memory of being a little kid and going out to play with Barb after dinner on a summer night and feeling like they'd been gone for days by the time the sun was all the way set and the porch light was shining at the end of the cul de sac and she knew she'd be in trouble when she got home, but she always got home. Maybe she left it on out of some stubborn hope that Robin and Steve had gotten back and stopped at the mess and got to drinking there with whoever was around, telling stories about whatever dumb bullshit they'd gotten tangled up in this time, and that somebody might say Light's on up at Wheeler's, wonder what that's about and that Robin would realize she was in trouble and come running home so Nancy could pretend to be mad at her so she wouldn't have to admit how goddamn scared she'd been.
She went back to her book. She worked by candle light inside. She really did respect the regulations. She used less power than almost anybody most of the time, they really ought to let this one thing slide this one time. But everybody was a fucking-
"Fuck," she tried to wipe a wet spot off her ledger where a tear had fallen, but it smeared the ink. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck-"
The door opened just as she was about to throw the no-longer-perfect book into the fire.
Robin was wearing borrowed clothes from the gym. Nancy knew that because Nancy knew all of Robin's clothes and because she also knew all of the clothes they had in the gym.
"Hi," Robin said. She lifted one arm to scratch the back of her neck like she was nervous. Her arm was bandaged, from just below her elbow up to somewhere under her t-shirt sleeve. The other arm was holding a box.
"Where have you been?" Nancy asked. Her voice came out ragged. She hoped it sounded angry but those hopes weren't high.
Robin laughed, nervous. "There was a... A goo incident? A slime situation? I guess? We got kinda... waylaid. Steve hurt his ankle so we were slow coming back. I stopped at the gym for a shower and they insisted on-" She gestured with her bandaged arm. "It took a while. I'm sorry."
"Why didn't anybody radio me?" Nancy asked.
"I don't know," Robin shook her head apologetically. "I told them to. Got lost in the shuffle, I guess."
"I guess," Nancy turned her face away and looked at the fire because looking at Robin made her feel broken all the way open just now. "I guess I'll scream at somebody about it tomorrow."
"Real change of pace," Robin offered up a joke but Nancy couldn't bring herself to laugh. After a minute of no laughing, no talking, no nothing, she said- "Hey. I'm okay."
"Yeah, I know. Can you turn off the porch light, please?" It was too polite. It was cold. She could see the nervousness in Robin's eyes as she nodded and turned to flick the switch on the wall.
"I-" Robin tried to say something, but she stopped when Nancy started crying.
It was embarrassing. Nancy felt like an asshole. Everything was fine. Robin was home and she was fine and everything was fine and everything would be fine. They could do this forever. They would do this forever.
"No, hey, hey," Robin shrugged out of her backpack and stepped into Nancy's space, kneeling down in front of her and looking up, her hands on Nancy's knees. There was dried blood under her nails and she had a scrape across her knuckles the medics hadn't bothered to bandage. "I'm okay, see? I'm right here. I'm okay. You're okay. We're good. We're great. Steve did say he would sacrifice Dustin for a hot bath but the opportunity never presented itself so Dustin is okay too."
"What?" Nancy asked. She felt herself laughing. It hurt a little bit.
"Nothing. Just- Nothing. Okay. So." Robin's fingers tapped on Nancy's knees once, twice, and then she dropped her hands to Nancy's sneakers and started untying the laces. "Okay, so. Listen. I know you're probably really mad at me right now? Which, for the record, I take full responsibility for, but like I swear it was for a good reason, like. Truly. I Promise. But. Yeah. You're mad, and the timing is so stupid, but I am kind of hopped up on a lot of, like, brain chemicals right now and I am going to use that to my advantage, okay-"
She untied both of Nancy's shoes and pulled them off her feet all while Nancy was too dumbfounded to even question what was happening.
"Close your eyes?" Robin asked. She looked like she was apologizing and like she wanted to throw up all at the same time.
"What?" Nancy asked again.
"Please," Robin asked. Her voice was low and begging.
Nancy shook her head and sighed, but she closed her eyes.
She heard a rustling sound and then she heard and felt a heavy thudding on the floor, and then without any warning Robin was trying to wrestle something heavy onto her left foot.
Nancy opened her eyes.
"Robin what the fuck?" She laughed. She looked down at her foot, at the big brown boot that was halfway pulled on, and she reached down to pull it the rest of the way on, the heel counter locking her ankle in, perfect. "Robin?"
"You have the smallest fucking feet in the world, do you know that?" Robin asked her. "I looked everywhere. They really don't make boots for people your size almost at all, it's actually incredibly rude and probably rooted in misogyny in some way. I mean, what isn't, right? But look. Here. It's um. They're good. I asked Maureen? down at the farm? I asked her where she got hers and she told me, so we went to this, like, like a feed store? Like a hardware store but for farmers? I don't know. I got you a dibber, too, by the way. But look. It's a... A Vibram..."
Nancy picked the other boot up off the floor and ran her hand over the rough rubber treads of the outsole. "A V100 lug sole," she said. She slid her right foot into it. Just as perfect as the left.
"Right. Yes. And they're very, uh. Heavy. And the tongue is fully... Fully... You know what I mean."
"Fully gusseted," Nancy nodded. They were beautiful. Chocolate brown roughout a couple millimeters thick. Ten inch uppers. Logger heel with a full leather heel stack, natural beeswax finish. "God, these are..." She started lacing them up. They were tight and tough to move in, but the leather felt oily against her fingers in a way that told her they'd fit like gloves before long. They were beautiful.
"Right," Robin nodded. She kept nodding, like she was trying to convince herself. "They're good. Indestructible, Maureen said. She said Yep, those oughtta last you a lifetime." Robin cleared her throat and put her hands back on Nancy's knees. She looked up into her eyes. "So I thought. I just thought. You know. I thought. I wanna last you a lifetime. Nance. If you want me to. So this is... You don't wear rings, so this is- I want to marry you. I want to marry you, if you want to. I'm asking you if you'll marry me, is what this is."
Nancy was crying for real now, leaning forward and holding Robin around her neck, tears staining her borrowed t shirt.
"So what do you say?" Robin asked. Nancy couldn't see Robin's face just this second but she heard a kind of laughing in her voice that meant she already knew the answer.
Nancy pushed her away not hard enough to do much more than make her laugh even harder. "Fuck you," she laughed. "You fucking- Of course. Of course I do. We're already married, I thought. We're already. I mean, what else would you call this?" She gestured around their house.
"Well-" Robin looked around, confused. Exhausted, probably. "Well I mean. You know, that's actually really presumptuous on your part. Who says I want to be tied down? Why buy the cow, when you can-"
Nancy slapped Robin on the arm and she hissed. The bandages. Right. "I'm sorry!"
"It's fine," Robin laughed. She looked up at Nancy from where she was kneeling on the floor. She looked like she could fall asleep down there any second now. "I'm fine. We're fine. I'm fine but i am also so tired. Can you please just tell me if you'll marry me and if those boots fucking fit? Because if not, you might be out of luck. We kinda had to burn the whole store down. It was-"
"A goo incident," Nancy laughed. "Yeah. I got that. Get up. Go to bed."
"Will you marry me?" Robin asked again.
"Yeah, I'll marry you. If you get up and go to bed," Nancy stood up and offered Robin a hand, pulling her to standing.
"God, look at you. You're almost as tall as me in those," Robin laughed. "Must be nice."
"Shut up," Nancy pushed her towards the bedroom. "And go to bed."
"Do the boots fit?" Robin asked again.
"Yeah," Nancy told her. Her footsteps thudded loud on the floorboards. The boots really did feel indestructible. She felt indestructible. "Go to bed."
"Are you coming with me?" Robin asked. She'd said she was tired but she was acting amped up. She'd be asleep in five minutes, Nancy knew. "Are you gonna keep the boots on? Maureen said something about a break-in process, I'm very eager to hear more about that."
"Shut up." Nancy pushed her through the bedroom door. "I'll marry you. Go to bed."