"Sorry," apologized Zehedi.
Groff heaved and got him through the window and went back to the front door to wait. He hoped to God Zehedi would be able to unlock something from the inside. They would never get the women through that upper window, and he didn't want to have to break the front door. They would need every bit of shelter they could get.
Zehedi appeared, tried the front door from the inside (you idiot, didn't you see the padlock? Groff thought sourly), and made shadowy gestures toward the rear. He was yelling something, but you couldn't hear a gunshot in the crashing rain. Groff got the general idea in any case, and stumbled around to the back. Zehedi let him in.
The grocer was all keyed up. "That looks like a fuse box," he chattered. "Didn't see a switch for the pump motors, but it ought to be right around there someplace, wouldn't you say? And there're some soda bottles in case we can't find a gallon jug. All we have to do—"
"Go get the others, Sam," Groff ordered. He took his fingers off the light switch he had been trying, though he had known what the results would be ahead of time. "No electricity, you see? So the gas will just have to stay in the pumps for a while."
He closed the door behind the grocer and looked over their refuge. It wasn't much of a filling station—a couple of pumps out in front, an ice chest full of soft-drink bottles and a little serving counter inside. They had come in through a sort of storeroom, and there was the chance that there might be something useful in there, but it had looked like nothing more promising than the usual collection of old newspapers and three-legged chairs. There was a rickety stair to, presumably, a couple more storerooms.
Groff made thrifty inventory of what was on and behind the serving counter. A coffeemaker—no good. No power, though a cup of good hot coffee would have helped a lot. Easily a dozen cardboard boxes which, opened, proved to contain peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers and Orioles. Candy bars and bags of peanuts beyond their utmost powers of consumption—they might get rickets, but they wouldn't starve. But water, though—the place didn't seem to have any.
Scratch water. They could get by on the soft drinks, or if worse came to worst, there certainly was much more water than they needed right outside.
A telephone! He looked through all his pockets without coming up with anything smaller than a quarter; he slipped the quarter into the slot and there was a mellow bong to acknowledge it. There was nothing else. He held the receiver to his ears for a good two minutes, but the line was dead.
And then he found the greatest treasure of all, a box of stubby short candles, under the serving counter. Evidently power failures were not unheard of around here—something, Groff reminded himself automatically, to keep in mind when he talked to the burgess tomorrow.