Actually, a lot of it already had. “I used to work here one summer. Mr. Palmer sells guns.”

“But aren’t they all burned up?”

Adam stepped inside the charred, blackened interior. The roof had collapsed into the main floor, creating a maze of fire-ravaged trusses. Smoke still rose from parts of the wreckage.

“The gun vault is down in the cellar,” Adam explained. “He was a fanatic about putting the guns away in the safe every night. Unless he changed the combination, I’ll be able to get in.”

“You’re going into the cellar? That’s two levels that can collapse on you.”

“No pain, no gain.”

“This isn’t funny.” Her tone had turned serious.

He turned on her and met her in kind. “No, it’s not. Not a funny thing has happened this whole goddamn day. There’s no such thing as safety anymore, Em. There’s only degrees of unsafety. Degrees of oh-shitness. We need to arm ourselves, and this is one place where I think we can find weapons. You can stay here, you can wait in the truck or you can join me downstairs. Either way, I need to do this.”

Tempers were running hot. Stress was beyond immeasurable. He didn’t wait for her answer.

Navigating through the wreckage was a hell of a challenge, a combination of climbing, stepping over and crawling under the lumberyard that had crashed into the main part of the store. On a normal day, the aisles in Palmer’s were narrow, cramped and jammed with shit. With addition of the roof and trusswork, it felt almost impossible to get from the front to the back of the store.

“Hey, Em, are you still in here?”

“Right behind you.”

“Do me a favor and scour through this crap and find anything salvageable that we can use.”

“Like what?”

“No clue. Use your imagination. Anything that makes starting a fire easier. Duct tape, rope, whatever. Batteries, for sure, if you can find them. Flashlights, lanterns, anything.”

The stairway down to the cellar began as a scuttle hole in the floor that was blocked off by a swinging metal gate. A section of the roof had crashed down onto the gate, crushing it and blocking all but a three-by-three-foot patch of air. Adam leaned over the opening to scan the area below. The steps appeared to be intact. Remarkably, the collapse stopped before it crushed the cellar.

After testing the sturdiness of the charred rafter and the bent railing and satisfying himself that he wouldn’t plummet to his death, Adam pressed up with his hands and leveraged his legs over the wreckage and lowered himself onto the wooden steps. These were creaky under the best of circumstances, but they didn’t seem a whole lot worse now. He decided to trust them.