“What’s wrong?” another man asked. He was a big, burly sort who puffed out the fabric of his coat with his large biceps and his even larger gut.
“He was trying to cut in line,” Danielle accused, pointing her knife at the man in the CAT hat.
“I wasn’t, I swear.”
He seemed suddenly smaller, less evil and his shaking hands elicited compassion from Danielle. She lowered the knife, but just then a woman three people back hissed: “Yes, he was. I saw him. I saw him cutting. We can’t have cutters!”
Another woman took up the cry. “I saw him, too. He was creeping up on that poor woman.” In seconds the dull and sullen crowd turned into an angry mob and the man in the CAT hat was punched and kicked out of line. He stood off to the side and tried to plead his case, but someone threw a rock at him and soon he was driven away by a shower of rocks.
The crowd buzzed in ugly happiness when the man had run off—there was one less person who’d be taking food from the rest.
2— Baltimore, Maryland
The same fear-induced shortages were gripping most of the east coast and in a number of cases the mobs weren’t content to simply punch and kick and stone a perceived threat from their midst. There were lynchings, shootings, stabbings and, in three cases, people were burned alive in their cars.
Sayid Mochtar thought he was shrewd enough to avoid that fate. He was a proud American, the son of an Iranian dissident who had come to the states thirty-four years before, smuggled aboard a freighter. His father had died young and destitute; however, his son was a self-made millionaire, a fact that he let slip at every party he had ever attended.
True, he was worth only a little over 1.1 million, but it was still a million and quite an achievement.
And now he saw a chance in the bizarre turn of events happening in New York to get far more secure in his millionaire status. He was the majority owner of six gas stations in the greater Baltimore area, and had both a fuel truck and an eighteen wheeler crammed with his normal weekly shipment coming in that night after hours of delay stuck in traffic.
Sayid ordered both trucks to his largest store where he instantly jacked up the price of everything. His regular unleaded gasoline went from four dollars a gallon to forty dollars a gallon and bottled water went from two dollars a bottle to twenty dollars. Chips and candy, and everything in between saw a like increase.
It only made sense to Sayid. Everyone was hoarding, everyone was stockpiling. Supplies were at the lowest he had ever seen them and demand was through the roof. And although Sayid was the son of an immigrant, he understood better than anyone that the law of supply and demand was as basic and as immutable as the law of gravity.
It made sense and it also almost started a riot.
Despite it being four in the morning with a chill rain falling, the majority of the residents of Baltimore were awake, either waiting on the latest news report or standing in long lines outside of supermarkets. For the most part they were tense and nervous, but many of them were also angry—someone had done something to disrupt their easy, first-world lives and they were ready to lash out.
Sayid knew there could be trouble and was openly carrying a pistol, as were his two clerks, and yet it took only a minute for things to get out of hand. When the first customers rushed into his store and saw the prices on the goods, they went nuts, screaming at Sayid and throwing his own goods at him.
Rumor of the exorbitant pricing went through the mile-long line like a burning fuse and quickly the line disintegrated as people rushed the store and began hammering on the windows, while others tried to steal gas.
“If you don’t like it get out!” Sayid yelled. “Go find your gas somewhere else.” Of course there was nowhere else, and he knew it. A few people tried to pay what was being demanded, but were bullied by the others not to.
In ten short minutes, Sayid was forced to call the police, but to his dismay the ranking officer, a sergeant in riot gear with a face that was so slick with sweat that he looked as if he’d been anointed with oil, actually sided with the rioters until Sayid pointed out that there were no anti-gouging laws in the state of Maryland.
“Besides, this is all about supply and demand,” he explained. “I’m performing a valuable service to the community.”
“That’s not the way I see it,” the officer shot back. “I see you taking advantage of a terrible situation in a manner that’s practically theft.”
The people around them all started shouting, calling for the police officer to arrest Sayid. “It’s not theft!” Sayid yelled, trying to be heard over the crowd. They only shouted louder, screaming for blood. He turned to the sweating sergeant and gave him a wide smile, thinking that if he could convince the sergeant of the righteousness of his cause he would do the right thing and break out some tear gas or start whomping heads with his billy club.
“We are having these shortages because stores aren’t raising their prices. Take the bottles of water for instance. I only have about five hundred bottles and if I don’t raise my prices to accommodate the market situation, what’s going to happen is that the first person who comes in will buy all my water because they’re afraid there won’t be any left tomorrow when he comes back. Don’t you see what will happen? It’ll become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
The sergeant, who had scraped by in high school and was sneeringly anti-intellectual, wasn’t impressed with high-sounding words like self-fulfilling prophecy. “No, I don’t see, because I bet you’ll get another shipment in tomorrow so that won’t…”
Sayid interrupted him: “No, I won’t. My trucks come once a week, which means when that first person buys all my bottles of water, the next person is going to be shit out of luck. Where’s he going to get his water from?”
“He’ll get it from the tap like we all used to,” the sergeant shot back. “There’s nothing wrong with tap water.”
The smile on Sayid’s face turned thin. “Okay, yes, for now the water is still on, but think about when my gas is sold out. At four dollars a gallon, it’ll be gone in the next three hours and where is the next person in line going to get his gas? You see, if the prices are high, then each customer has no choice but to only get what they need in the short run. That way everyone gets a shot at getting some of the things they need. Ask the people: would they rather have five gallons of gas at forty dollars a gallon or no gas whatsoever at four dollars a gallon?”
With the noise, it was impossible to ask anyone anything and the sergeant didn’t bother trying. “Okay, I get it,” the sergeant said. He really didn’t and just thought that Sayid was a greedy son of a bitch, and yet he wasn’t breaking any laws. “I get the law of supply and demand, but what you don’t understand is the law of the mob. Look at them. Do you think they’re going to listen to you go on and on about what’s going to happen in three hours? No. All they see is that you are basically robbing them. Now, I suggest you lower your prices or there will be trouble.”
He started to leave and Sayid grabbed him. “Hey, where the hell are you going? You can’t leave.”
“Actually, I can. The city is a powder keg and idiots like you are lighting matches all over the place. I have two more calls just like this one and a number of shootings to investigate. So do the smart thing and lower your prices and you’ll be alright.”
He shouldered his way through the crowd, leaving Sayid with two frightened clerks surrounded by a thousand angry people. “What do we do?” one of the clerks asked. He looked as though he wanted to ditch the blue vest that marked him as an employee and blend in with the crowd.
“The prices stay the way we have them,” Sayid said, his pistol in hand, swiveling back and forth. “If the people want their gas and food bad enough, they’ll pay, if not they’ll go somewhere else.”
While the crowd inside the store were cowed by Sayid’s pistol which he kept out and at the ready, the mob outside grew increasingly vocal. They chanted, screamed threats and threw stones at the window, causing the glass to
bloom white stars. It wasn’t long before things got out of hand. A small group huddled around the gas intake feed line, trying to figure out how to siphon the gas straight from the tank buried beneath the pumps.
When Sayid saw someone dragging a hose across the parking lot, he charged to the door, knocking people over. He fired twice into the air, sending those around him screaming for cover. “Keep away from there, damn it!”
He figured he had shown them who was boss, but the next time he turned around, the starred glass on that side of the building was shot through with an orange glow. “Oh no,” he whispered. The crowd was going in every direction as he ran out to save his precious fuel before the entire place went up like a bomb.
Flame and black smoke shot up almost to the covered roof and the air was already hot enough to make Sayid cringe as he grabbed the heavy steel cover to the intake lines. He couldn’t put it back in place by hand without having his eyelashes burnt off, and so he squatted with a leg thrust out to kick the cover over the fire. The orange flame blinked out; however the smoke continued to belch upward like a chimney.
He backed away, hurrying to the “safety” of the store and watched the smoke with a fearful expression on his face, wondering whether the tank would explode. He wasn’t the only one. The entire crowd gave the tank a wide birth, but after a while the smoke became only wisps.
“Ok then,” Sayid mumbled and looked around the store. It was in shambles with a couple dozen people crammed inside, picking through the goods that were scattered everywhere. As he watched, he saw one woman try to slip a bag of M&Ms into her purse. He screamed her out of the store, looking like a wild man, a thick throbbing vein sticking out on his forehead.
The woman, a thirty-two year old, single mother of two named Jenny Fineman, scampered out of the store, tears on her face. She had all of forty dollars to her name and no credit whatsoever and very little left in her bare fridge. She was scared to death that things were going to get worse, because she had no idea how she was going to feed her kids or herself.
People asked her what had happened and she lied, saying that Sayid was “going crazy in there.”
“I’ll fix him,” someone said. The man held a gin bottle in one hand and a lighter in the other. He poured the gin over one of the fuel pumps, lit it and ran. The gin ignited with a whoomp! In no time, cyclones of flame spun into the air growing right before their eyes. A second late another pump went up with a strange crumpling noise.
Sayid stared through the starred window, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. They were burning the gas. That made no sense. He took a step toward the door and then paused, realizing that the fire was too great. He wasn’t going to be able to smother a pump fire so easily. The only way to keep the whole place from burning down was to shut off the gas that fed the pumps.
He turned, took four steps through the crowd and then grunted in pain as what felt like a shiver of ice went into him, paralyzing him from the mid back down. The ice was then covered in something warm and wet—it was blood. An amazing amount of blood ran down his shirt. Someone had stabbed him in the right kidney.
The pain in his back stole his breath. He fell, grabbing in vain for the bubblegum rack. He was still there gasping for breath nine seconds later when the first explosion shattered all the windows on the west side of the building.
In the ensuing panic, four people were trampled to death. Another two died of asphyxiation as they tried to run into the gas station to steal what they could before the fire engulfed the entire building. Sayid lived long enough to have his face stomped on by Jenny Fineman who was one of the lucky ones who made it back in despite the fire raging thirty feet away.
She had never stolen a thing in her life before she had stuck those M&Ms in her purse. Now, she took Sayid’s pistol, wallet and keys. On the way out she stuffed her purse with as much as she dared and then ran, pausing only for a second to click the fob on Sayid’s set of keys.
The lights on a Mercedes blinked on and off. She sprinted to it and instead of thinking of herself as a bad person who was adding a charge of grand theft to the petty larceny and assault she had just committed, she grinned, thinking that her luck was finally turning.
3—Washington DC
Marty Aleman, Chief of Staff to the president, waved aside the two secret service agents and thrust himself boldly into the president’s private bedroom, but stopped only a few feet inside. It wasn’t just dark in the room, it was so black that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.
A second of groping on the wall found the switch, and when he flipped it up, the president groaned, waving a hand at the light as if he could shoo it away like a bad smell. “Turn it off,” he groused. “I have a wakeup call set for five. Go away.”
“You ignored the call, sir,” Marty explained, going to the window and yanking back on the curtains. A grim, wet, DC morning stared back at him. Opening the curtain hadn’t done much to help illuminate the room and nor did it make it anymore cheery.
From where Marty stood, he could see that 15th Street was already clogged with traffic. There were more people out and about than was usual for that time of day, and Marty knew why. The disruption of the normal traffic flow around the city coupled with mounting fears, caused people to think more about the future than they usually did. Lines at stores already stretched several blocks.
“Five already?” The president had turned from snappish to groggy, with a touch of petulance thrown in. He wanted to be babied—he was used to it. He wasn’t used to zombies and soldiers thinking they knew more than he did. And he definitely wasn’t used to having to deal with an actual crisis.
It was horribly inconvenient. He had missed his normal afternoon round of golf the day before and he’d had to reschedule two different donor meetings in lieu of the much graver military ones, and perhaps worst of all, the crisis had kept him up late the night before. After ten at night, he was basically a zombie himself.
“So what’s going on?” he asked, scraping sleep pebbles out of his eyes and then scratching his scalp through his thinning silver hair. “More bad news, no doubt.”
Marty shook his head. “Just the opposite, actually. The line held, sir!”
“You act surprised, Marty. Weren’t you the one telling me all day that the military would hold. Were you lying then?”
Lying was about thirty percent of Marty’s job and lying about lying took up another ten percent. “Of course not,” he lied. The truth was that at about ten the night before, the reports from the western border of Connecticut suggested that General Collins’ force had been overrun and there wasn’t anything standing between the million people in Hartford and an army of zombies. And yet, somehow Collins had held.
“The situation isn’t perfect, mind you,” Marty added. “The word from Connecticut is that the soldiers are cut off and running out of supplies. They should…”
The president interrupted: “What about FEMA? You said they would be able to start shipping supplies today.”
“Later today,” Marty allowed, again lying. He had no idea when FEMA would get moving. They had warehouses full of goods: canned food, bottled water, blankets, tents and such, but most of it was located in the deep south where floods occurred, or in the midwest’s “Tornado Alley,” and along the southeast coast where hurricanes struck two or three times a year.
There were two warehouses in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, that put them on the “wrong” side of the situation, and the trucks which were mated up with the supplies, were useless since the roads were impassable with traffic and/or zombies. The items would have to be flown in, but of course, they couldn’t be flown directly to Bradley Airport ten miles outside of Hartford, because it had gone from a madhouse at three p.m. the day before to a ghost town by ten.
Everything would have to go into Providence first and then be trucked across a closed border into a state consisting of little more than fortified towns. Marty was sure it would work itself out, but first, he had to avert a n
ational crisis of faith.
“FEMA will do its thing and you will do yours. We have to show the nation that you’re on top of this, that this is what you’re lasered in on. People are getting a little weird and what they need now is to see you in action. I have Mitsy over in communications getting some B-roll footage ready from when you were at Fort Benning last year. Never before seen stuff, the networks will eat it up.”
“That was a good trip,” the president said, vaguely. “They were all very nice and the weather was good. I was surprised how pleasant it was.”
“Yes, yes, it was great, but let’s concentrate, sir. We need to stay on message and that message is: the situation is under control.”
The old man nodded and repeated: “The situation is under control…but is it? I don’t want to go around…”
“The situation is under control,” Marty repeated, with the soothing voice of a hypnotist. “To the south, New York City is no longer threatened. To the east, Boston is fine. In the west is the Hudson and a whole lot of nothing. Our only point of worry is the Connecticut border. It’s got some holes, but the situation is under control.”
“What about casualties?”
Marty kept his ire in check. The old man wasn’t cooperating this morning. “Let me give you the bullet points that you need to repeat over and over today. First and foremost: ‘the situation is under control.’ That is key to calming down the rest of the country. Second, there are ‘heavy’ casualties and we’re doing everything we can for them. We’ve got FEMA rolling. We’re coordinating with ‘disaster relief agencies,’ such as the Red Cross, and we are asking for everyone to do their part and donate blood.”
He paused and waited until the president repeated the first two points. Marty waited a second too long and the old man got off track. “And…and is it time to federalize the situation, yet?” He hadn’t always been so helpless, but after thirty-three years in the public eye, it had become easier and easier to just do what his handlers told him to do and say what they wanted him to say. Gradually, he had also come to let them do his thinking for him.
The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3 Page 5