Go and look for the men, she said. They might be here, she said. It's very important, she said.
So he had gone topside and spent fifteen whole minutes bitching to the empty inside of a store about how stupid this task was. The men were smart. Okay, no, but the consigliere was smart, and by and large, Nico trusted the consigliere to be able to piece together that the Donna had descended into the subways. Or, and this is just a silly fucking idea, maybe one of those morons would stumble onto the freenet. And be able to ask. Honestly. They were dumb, but even they weren't that brainless.
This task, you see, amounted to 'getting Nico out of the Donna's hair'. The whole idea was to wander aimlessly around for a few hours in the hopes of finding the men. Or, more accurately, since Nicola Zoccarato was many things, but stupid was not one of them, candy instead.
He found a tiny grocery store picked mostly clean, except for empty boxes on the floor, an enormous blood stain in the produce section, and a few scattered sponges. (These he gathered up, because you never knew when you needed a sponge. Safer than sorry.)
He found a gas station with nothing but petrified things in the case that had to have been hot dogs at one point, but which now resembled shriveled up zombie fingers. (In retrospect, he was not entirely sure that they were not zombie fingers, placed in some sick joke, as he was relatively sure hot dogs would have moulded.)
He found a small bakery with powdered everything scattered over the floor and a zombie in the back room. (Dispatched: one bullet to the head.)
And finally, he found some sort of video or entertainment store. This was akin to a jackpot. The back room had remained by and large untouched, and so there were a couple boxes of candy he could scavenge. (There were also four zombies, but four bullets was a relatively small price to pay for whatever mixture of candy happened to be in the box.)
So, lugging his box of candy, which appeared to be mostly hard caramels and the hardened remnants of gummy candies, Nico returned to the subway.
His face, a mask of grumpiness, smoothed to a smile as soon as he saw her face. When the Donna smiled, Nico couldn't help but be happy. He dropped the box carefully beside her. "You're going to be even happier when you see what's inside this box," he said. He crouched beside the box. "Candies. More of them." His smile flickered just a little and he added, "But no sign of La Famiglia."