All Fall Down by Annie Reed Page A

unless he needed
to find food, and then go inside buildings only after he knew he
had a quick way back out. The longer the sick were sick, the slower
they moved. Leon said it was the newly sick they really had to
watch out for, and sick people always seemed to hide away inside
places like houses and barns and stores and restaurants. Tommy said
once that maybe the sick felt safer inside, but Leon said the sick
didn't have enough brains left to know what safe felt like.
    They didn't need to go in the restaurant.
They had plenty to eat. Tommy was full, in fact, even though all
he'd eaten was fish and he wouldn't mind eating something else.
Pretty soon the blackberries on the bushes near the road would be
ripe, and blackberries were almost as sweet as candy. He thought he
could live on fish and blackberries for a long time, and he'd never
have to see sick people again unless one of them wandered on the
beach which probably wouldn't happen. Not anymore. Tommy hadn't
seek a sick person in a long time. That didn't mean there weren't
any more sick people left. He figured they were just better at
hiding, like he was better at staying away from them.
    But Tommy didn't want Jessie to think he was
afraid of going inside the restaurant. It was starting to become
important what she thought of him. He liked her laugh and her dark
hair, and he wouldn't mind if she slept next to him every
night.
    The restaurant had glass doors in the front.
They'd been locked at one time, but someone had thrown a big metal
garbage can through the glass on one side. Jessie said she'd
knocked out the rest of the glass on that side so she wouldn't hurt
herself, and Tommy hunched over so he could squeeze in the door
behind her and his backpack wouldn't get caught on the frame.
    It smelled musty and sour in the restaurant,
but not like dead things lived inside like some of the places he'd
gone into with Leon. Places where the sick hid out, or places where
they'd killed other people who came to look for food.
    "Are there any bodies in here?" Tommy asked,
and he hated that his voice sounded more like hers than his
own.
    Jessie shook her head. "I guess everybody
left, or maybe they quit serving food before everybody got sick and
no one ever came back to work. All the food's gone. I looked back
in the kitchen and there's nothing there except salt and stuff like
that."
    "So why are we here?"
    She smiled at him. "'Cause of all this other
cool stuff."
    They walked through a second set of doors
that had been propped open. Straight ahead, Tommy saw a bunch of
tables that looked like picnic tables with bench seats lined up in
a row next to tall windows. Anyone eating at those tables could
look out over the ocean. Tommy had been looking at the ocean for so
many days it wasn't a big deal anymore, but his mom used to love
coming to the beach just to stare at the water. As far as he could
remember, his parents had never taken him to eat in this
restaurant, but he bet his mom would have liked it no matter what
the food tasted like.
    Off to the left was a darkened alcove filled
with what his dad would have called junk. Strings of beads and
little drinking glasses and erasers and pencils and notepads and
postcards and sunglasses and t-shirts were stacked on shelves and
display racks and strewn across the bare wooden floor.
    Jessie took a pink t-shirt off the shelf and
handed it to him. The name of the restaurant was printed on the
front in neon green. "I think pink's your color," she said.
    He dropped the shirt like it was poison.
"Thanks a lot," he said, but he smiled. She was smiling at him, and
even in the gloom of the restaurant, he could see how pink her
cheeks were. She was teasing him, and for some reason, he didn't
mind.
    He found another shirt that was dark blue or
black, he couldn't tell. The shirt looked like it would fit him,
though, so he shoved it in his backpack along with a pair of
sunglasses. Jessie took a pair that looked like giant sunflowers
and propped them on