Luna was pressed against a mountain of canned beans when the emergency lights in the underground warehouse came on.
"Produced May 2024, shelf life until 2027..." She mechanically read the can label, her fingers touching the sticky liquid. It wasn't blood-it was crushed blueberry jam, seeping down through cracks in the warehouse roof. The vibrating cell phone slipped out of her pants pocket and waltzed to its death on the pile of canned goods.
Thirty-seventh missed call. All from Mom.
The freezer's backup power was running, the cold air raising goose bumps on her arms. This was the store manager's private "tax loophole warehouse," where she'd crawled in last Thanksgiving with her appendicitis looking for painkillers, when it was stacked with tax-evading cans of salmon and Viagra. Now those gray shelves are gone, replaced by a pyramid of canned goods reaching to the ceiling that a Black Hawk helicopter could smash down.
The cell phone suddenly played voicemail automatically.
"Luna, it's mom..." The sound of electricity ripped through the familiar voice, "We're holed up in the Chinatown Supermarket Cold Storage, your dad, he's... His legs are starting to go transparent..."
There was the crunch of ice crystals shattering in the background, like someone throwing a bohemian crystal chandelier through a meat grinder. "... Don't come to Chicago! Remember, don't trust anyone who says they're hungry..."
A scream choked off the message.
Luna buried her face in a can of SPAM lunch meat. The cold touch of the can reminded her of when she was twelve years old and her mom shoved her feverish self into the Walmart freezer. "Bear with me," the woman shouted from outside the cabinet door, "fever reducers are too expensive!"
The warehouse steel door suddenly slammed.
"Someone's in there, right?" A raspy male voice mingled with the sound of scraping metal, "I smell beans."
Luna bit her wrist dead center. The smell of blood mixed with the sweet scent of strawberry jam from the warehouse as she typed in her cell phone memo, the trembling of her fingertips fragmenting the sentence:
[Rule #1: The cries could be a predator's baby recording]
[Rule #2: Make believe the cans were eaten long ago]
The sound of a slamming door turned into the roar of a chainsaw.
She fumbled and crawled deeper into the warehouse, her knees crushing several slabs of chocolate. Fluorescent green cockroaches poured out of Hershey's Kisses packages and crawled up her jeans. In the wobbling circle of the flashlight, she suddenly saw the inventory list on the wall - the
The bolded number "5,032" glows behind the entry for "canned beans."