He follows me.

– Yeah. Thought about that myself.

He jerks a thumb back at the corpse.

– Old Solomon never was a lucky one.

I reach the top of the stairs and push the door open and the smells of roasted nuts and dried fruits and caramel and chocolate and high-fructose corn syrup and red dye number 5 and pure cacao and refined sugar and gelatin and all the other stuff that goes into the stock of the Economy Candy Store hits me in the nose.

– Yeah, but he ran a great fucking candy shop.

Christian walks past a counter, reaches into a glass jar, grabs a jawbreaker and tosses it into his mouth.

– No lie there.

Bottle Caps, Big League Chew, Pop Rocks, Almond Joy, Gold Mine bubble gum, candy cigarettes, Pixy Stix, 100 Grand bars, Chunkys and a couple hundred other varieties of packaged candies. And in barrels: roasted and raw cashews, peanuts, almonds, brazils, hazelnuts, pistachios and filberts. And in plastic buckets: dried cherries, apricots, apple rings, peaches and pineapple. And laid out on wax paper inside the glass cases at the front of the crowded shop: bricks of dark Belgian chocolate, turtles, white truffles, chocolate-covered pretzels and strawberries and orange slices.

He bites down on the jawbreaker; his perfect teeth, polished and hardened by the Vyrus, crush it like an eggshell.

– Before I got infected, ’bout half the teeth in my head were ready to fall out because of this place. Growing up off Water Street, my mom used to bring me and my sister up here after church on Sundays. Give us a buck to split between us.

He rips open a Fun Dip packet, licks the white candy wand, dips it into the sugar powder inside and pops it in his mouth and sucks on it.

– Still got that sweet tooth, man. When I first found out the business old man Solomon ran in the basement, the real moneymaker, I was a little disillusioned. Got to say. Kiddies upstairs getting fixed on sugar, Vampyres in the basement scoring. That’s kind of jacked up. Even in my book.