The Tour Ends in Soup

The painted line is just old tape on dirty tile.

Grant stops on his side of it. Mary stays close enough to talk, not close enough to look like she is an offering. Cold air rolls out of the store: bleach, still fresh fruit, the leftover smell of a place people slept in. The automatic doors try to shut, notice them, and jerk open again.

Red stays put, like the tape is his safety zone.

“Well?” he says. “That was a nice speech outside. Impress me.”

Grant keeps his hands where Red can see them.

“You have a grocery and a dozen tired girls. I have enough people standing in your lot that this gets ugly if you want it ugly. I’d rather buy food and not fight you in a soup aisle.”

Red snorts.

“So you counted.”

“I can see the doors from the sidewalk.”

“Yeah.” Red looks past him at Paige, at Olivia, at the Explorer down the block, at Leanne and the rest who are not exactly hiding. “You brought a crowd to say you want to be friends. That usually means you already decided not to be.”

Mary sighs through her nose.

“It means your people slapped a car this morning and we didn’t feel like sneaking. If you want us gone, say so. If you want a deal, talk like a person.”

The girl with the bat giggles. Red lets her.

“What do I call you?” he asks Grant.

“Doesn’t matter yet.”

“Sure it doesn’t.” His eyes slide to Mary. “What about her?”

“Mary.” She answers flatly.

“Mary. Okay. I’m Derek, if we’re doing this.” He says it like he already regrets giving anything away. “Here’s my problem. I don’t know if you’re here to split the store or take it.”

Grant almost says something sharp and then doesn’t.

“Then walk us through. You pick the aisles. We don’t wander. You show me the pharmacy actually works. I show you I can stand in your store and leave.”

Derek laughs under his breath.

“A tour?”

“A look. I’m not taking your word that this place isn’t already empty.”

That is when Grant really looks at the women.

It has been bothering him since the sidewalk. It bothers him more under the fluorescent lights.

They are all young.

Not “young for a grocery staff.” Young like him. Maybe younger. The bat girl at the door. The one with the bike lock. The girl on the pallet jack. The two walking the lot. The one sitting on the customer-service counter with her legs hanging off. The girl outside the pharmacy twirling her hair. Every face he can see is eighteen, maybe nineteen. No thirty-year-old assistant manager. No mom grabbing formula. No random mix.

Grant’s stomach goes tight.

Mary notices him noticing. Her mouth thins.

Derek shrugs one backpack strap higher.

“Fine. You and Mary. Your people stay where I can see them. That tall blonde and the rifle stay outside. And if that dock chain out west starts rattling, we’re done being polite.”

“We’re not leaving our stuff at the door,” Mary says. “You keep yours, we keep ours.”

Derek looks like he wants to argue, then glances at Grant’s crowd again.

“Whatever. One more thing. You want me to believe you won’t grab my girls, leave one of yours here while we walk. Insurance.”

Grant does not have to think about it.

“No.”

Derek grins, surprised and not.

“Just no.”

“I’m not leaving somebody with you so you can feel brave. We walked up and asked. That’s the proof.”

The bat girl’s hands flex on the handle. Inside, somebody bumps a display and freezes. Derek’s face barely changes. That is worse than if he had gotten loud.

“Okay,” he says after a second. “Tour. Stay on the tile I point at.”

He turns and walks into the store like he assumes they will follow. Grant does. Mary does. Two of Derek’s girls trail them, not close enough to look like an attack, close enough to become one.

The store is a mess trying to look organized. Cereal swept into a pile. Aisles crooked. Pharmacy light at the back is the cleanest thing in the building.

Grant counts while they walk, and the wrongness stacks up.

Door. Door. Jack. Lot. Lot. Produce. Dairy. Counter. Pharmacy. Frozen foods — two more, whispering, both with that same young look. Another coming out of the staff hall.

Thirteen.

All of them that age.

No mix. No accidents. A matching set.

Derek talks the whole time, filling space.

“Generator’s on the receiving dock. Water still runs…for now.” He stops at the aisle end-cap and looks Grant over. “Your turn. How many people you actually got?”

“Enough.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one you’re getting.”

Derek’s jaw flexes. The girl on the counter watches them like this is better than her favorite Netflix show.

Mary nods at the pharmacy glass.

“You look too comfortable for somebody who spent all night taking over a grocery. Either you’re good, or something else is going on. We don’t need your life story. We need to know if this street has two working places or one ugly fight.”

Derek stares at Grant’s hands.

“You’re stronger than you look,” he says. “You don’t fidget. Guy came through at dawn fidgeting. He’s not a problem now.”

Grant keeps his fingers loose.

“If the next line is a threat, we’re done.”

“It’s not.” Derek nods toward the back. “It’s a job. Van came by from the river once already. Didn’t stop. It will. You put people on my dock tonight, I send a couple toward your block. No tours of your place. No touching each other’s people.”

It almost sounds like a real deal.

It is not.

Grant sees the look Derek flicks at the bat girl. Tiny. A manager’s “go ahead.”

She swings at Mary’s head.

Mary is already moving, because Mary has been waiting for the cheap part since the tape. The bat hits the end-cap instead of her skull and soup cans explode across the tile. The girl with the bike lock comes in from the door. The pallet jack shrieks as the third one tries to shove it forward.

Derek goes for Grant with a kitchen knife he had along his wrist, under the backpack strap.

He is not fast.

He is not strong.

He is just a man who thought surprise was the same thing as an easy win.

Grant catches his wrist.

It is easy. Too easy. Derek’s arm stops like it hit a wall. The knife is still in his hand and it does not matter. Grant turns him, drives him back into the soup display, and the strength he has been treating like a curse does what it has been waiting to do. Derek makes a short sound, more shock than pain, and then Grant hits him once, hard enough that the fight leaves his body before the second thought can form.

Derek slides down the ruined end-cap and does not get up.

The knife clicks on the tile.

That is all the time the store gets to be quiet.

Then it is chaos.

The bat girl screams, not for Derek, not exactly — for the sudden hole where her owner was. The pharmacy girl drops to her knees. Somebody in frozen foods starts crying and then runs. One of the lot girls bursts through the automatic doors with the crowbar up and sees Jaz already coming in. Olivia is a shape in the lot glass. Leanne’s second wave hits the entry in a rush of shoes and orders.

“Doors!” Leanne shouts. “Nobody out the front. Jaycee, dock. If they hit the west chain, stop them there.”

Grant does not stand over Derek. There is nothing useful left in that.

“Hold them,” he says. “Don’t hurt them if you don’t have to. Bring them to me.”

His women do.

It is not clean. It is a grocery fight with crying, screams, and desperate struggle. Paige wraps the bat girl from behind and takes the bat away like she has done it before. Zoya and Magdalena pin the bike-lock girl to a checkout lane. Lily talks two of the runners down into a crouch because Lily cannot help trying to make it less scary for them. Sarah gets a cut on her forearm from a wild kitchen knife and swears, then keeps moving. Willa is already pulling her toward the pharmacy whether the door is open or not. Harlow blocks an aisle with both arms out, looking bolder than her makeup. Eve puts a hand on the counter girl’s shoulder and the girl sobs and stops kicking.

Grant takes them one by one in the wreckage of aisle seven.

“Name.”

The bat girl is shaking, mascara smeared, eighteen if she is a day.

“Ashlyn.”

He takes her wrist. “I claim you.”

The change hits. The scream in her throat turns into a gasp, then into focus so sharp it looks like relief. “Oh. Oh my god. Okay. Okay.”

Twenty-five. No new trick in his body. Just another light on the map.

The bike-lock girl is next, tiny, sunburned, a beaded bracelet from some beach shop.

“Name.”

“Riley.”

“I claim you.”

Twenty-six. Still nothing extra. Riley slumps into Magdalena and then straightens like she just remembered who she belongs to.

The pharmacy girl: “Maya.” Claimed. She starts crying and laughing at the same time and keeps saying she still has the keys.

Counter girl: “Brooke.” Claimed. She reaches for Grant’s shirt apologetically and Jaz pulls her back until he nods that it is fine.

Frozen foods: “Chloe.” Then “Natalie.” Both claimed in the cold aisle with ice cream melting around their shoes. Natalie keeps looking at Derek’s body and then at Grant as if the world has a new manager and she is trying not to get fired.

Lot girl with the crowbar: “Sadie.” The other lot girl, knife still in her fingers until Olivia takes it: “Emma.”

Staff-hall girl: “Jordan.” She has a paper wristband still on from a club, the date from two nights ago.

Pallet-jack girl: “Kelsey.” Small shoulders, shaking, says “Sorry,” before Grant can even finish.

Produce: “Tatum.” Dairy: “Grace.” The last one they pull out of the receiving hall trying to shove the back door is “Piper,” hair in two braids that make her look younger until she says she turned eighteen in March.

Thirteen.

Grant claims the last wrist in the receiving hall with his pulse in his teeth, waiting for the world to pay him.

It does not.

Thirty-seven points on the map. Same strength. Same sensing. No extra speed. Derek is still on the floor, his blood mixing with soup, and does not get a second chance.

The store is loud in a different way now. His original twenty-four moving, talking, catching breath. The new thirteen blinking through the change, some clinging, some standing very straight, all of them looking at Grant like he is their world and always has been.

Mary finds him by the crushed cans, breathing hard, eyes sharp.

“You good?”

“He’s dead. I’m fine. They’re all mine.” He looks at Ashlyn’s innocent beauty, at Maya’s slender, petite body, at Piper’s cute braids. “Mary. They’re all the same age.”

Ashlyn hears it. She wipes her face with the heel of her hand.

“We were on a trip,” she says. Simple. Raw. “Senior trip. Spring break. Bus got back late and then the phones went crazy and we were just… at the store because we needed water and chargers and Maya’s mom used to work here.” Her eyes flick toward Derek and away. “He was in the parking lot. He said he could get us inside. Then he— he grabbed Mr. Pell first. The driver. When he wouldn’t… Derek… he killed him. And then he started grabbing us. We couldn’t— once he had a couple, the rest of us couldn’t make them leave and then they held us for him…

Riley nods, miserable.

“He made us hide the bus. Behind the store. In the trees by the drainage ditch. He didn’t want anyone seeing a whole bus and doing the math.”

Jaycee is already at the receiving door. She looks back at Grant.

“She’s right. I can see the roof of it from here. Dirty. Parked badly.”

Grant stands in a grocery full of food, eighteen-year-old seniors, and a man who thought a knife under a backpack strap was the same thing as power.

Thirty-seven women.

A bus in the woods.

A dead driver he cannot do anything for.

He rubs a hand over his face.

“Leanne, lock this building down. Nobody in, nobody out unless it’s us. Willa, Sarah — pharmacy, then Sarah’s arm. Noor, start a list. Real names. Who’s hurt. Who can drive.” He looks at Ashlyn. “The bus. Keys?”

Maya lifts a shaking hand.

“He put them in the backpack.”

Nobody wants to touch the backpack. Jaz does it anyway, because Jaz does the jobs nobody else wants to do. She holds up a set of keys on a plastic sun tag.

Grant takes them. They weigh almost nothing.

“We get the bus after the doors are secured,” he says. “I’m not leaving a bus full of luggage in the trees.”

Mary watches him check his own hands, the quiet test he cannot stop doing.

“Anything?” she asks, low.

“No.” He flexes once. Thirty-seven dots. No prize. “Whatever the next one is, it isn’t yet.”

Outside, Jose and Garret are still in the Explorer, staring at a store that just changed owners.

Inside, Grant looks at the automatic doors, at the tape on the tile, at the girls who went on a trip and came home to Derek.

“All right,” he says, and his voice comes out hoarse and normal and tired. “Store is ours. Let’s not waste it.”