As soon as she walked through the doors, that hope was dashed. Virtually all the shelves were empty or nearly so, including in the non-food aisles… She went to the soda aisle, but the shelves there were completely bare. Same with meat and drinks, as well as most of the cheese anyone would want to eat.
She went up and down the aisles at break-neck speed, looking for food. In the end, all she found were half a dozen cans of peas, two cans of Spam, a few off-brand household cleaning supplies, and stationery.
All in all, it’d feed the four of them for maybe another two days, and on realizing it, she put her head in her hands and had to take deep breaths to keep from panicking.
A man in his late middle ages, wearing a store uniform and a name tag that proclaimed him to be the Shift Manager, came around the corner pushing a broom. He cleared his throat, and then his deep voice rumbled, “Hello, ma’am. Can I help you find anything?”
She looked up, wiping her eyes, which had threatened to well over. “Sure. Can you point me to the food?”
He smiled, but with pursed lips, shaking his head slowly.
At this confirmation of her worst fears, Christine’s heart leaped into her throat. “No food…” The tears that had threatened, before, began to fall freely.
The manager put his hand on her shoulder lightly, and a couple seconds later, asked her simply, “Kids?”
Christine nodded, sniffling and wiping her eyes. “Two. And my friend is staying with us since she can’t really get home right now.”
“Ayup. Well, I have a suggestion. You won’t like it—”
“Please, I’m desperate. Whatever it is, I’ll take it.”
“No one stripped the shelves of pet food. Not yet, at least.”
“I don’t have a dog, but if I did, I don’t think I’d want to fatten it up to eat later, though.”
One corner of his mouth turned up again. “You’d be surprised how few people buy dog food in emergencies.”
“Dog food?” Oh lord, no way. And Fran had told her growing up that if things ever got desperate, dog food would work—and would still be on the shelves. Christine had been disgusted, and Fran never brought it up again, but now that conversation came to mind.
He shrugged. “If you’re hungry enough, it’ll end up looking mighty tasty. And I was surprised to see how nutritionally balanced it is. We have some fifty-pound bags of Gravy Train, which I imagine tastes a bit better than other brands. But if you’re walking, we have plenty of smaller bags, too. And I imagine some of the cat food tastes like canned tuna.”
“Are you serious?” Christine stared at the manager. The whole conversation was surreal.
“Afraid I am,” he replied, his managerial smile fading a bit.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to sound ungrateful. Thank you for the idea. It’s just not how I pictured this shopping trip going. Where is everything? Was there a riot of looters?”
He shook his head slowly, looking down for a moment before again making eye contact. “No, ma’am. No run on us, though some stores did have runs from what I saw on the news, before my power went out at home. I’d spent that whole afternoon trying to get anyone to deliver more than our usual, because we just weren’t keeping up. But the distributors were all in the same boat as me.”
“So why—”
“Why’s it empty? Well, people were stocking up more than usual, I suppose, because of the rumors. True rumors, it turned out. But the biggest thing is just that we only had a couple days of food anyway, and that’s in the best of times.”
Christine looked up. How could a grocery store only carry a few days of food? It was all they sold. She said, “What about the warehouse in back?”
“That includes the warehouse. You just have no idea how much product moves through a grocery store every day.”
She had one last, desperate hope, and voiced it, feeling her scalp tingle, afraid of his answer. “You should get new shipments in, though, right?”
“Yeah. But we haven’t had any trucks come in last night or this morning, as they should have. Since the C-M-E, our phones are down, and no one I have met has a working cell phone to call shipping and distribution in Boulder. But like I said, they were low on stock before our phones died.”
“All ours are dead, too. Sorry.”
“I figured. Anyway, if you decide to follow my advice, I’ll walk you out after I ring you up. I’m taking some with me, too, and locking up until this craziness blows over. I can’t pay the workers until then, and we’re not making money without anything to sell. Hell, the power will probably crash here, too, any minute.”
After thanking him, she headed toward the pet food aisle. The idea was repulsive, but really, how bad could it be? It couldn’t be worse than hot dogs, nor worse for her. She and the kids would simply have to learn to improvise.
She also grabbed every pack of batteries she could find, even the ones she had no use for. In the back of her mind, she decided they’d be good for trading, if she needed to—but refused to believe it could come to that. But it was better to keep the kids safe than sorry. And she grabbed all six cartons of light cigarettes the store had left, both to trade and because Mary would likely be getting real cranky, real soon when her one pack of cigarettes ran out after nursing it for two days…
Lastly, she put all the K-Cup coffee packs left into her cart, since they could be torn open and used with a French press coffee pot, and made ideal trading currency. She grabbed two huge stacks of coffee filters—Fran had told her the filters were almost as multi-purpose as bandanas. She also took every bit of OTC medication on the shelves. All the pain relief ones were gone, but there were still antacids, a few tubes of Orajel, sleep pills, energy pills… Plus rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide bottles, two tubes of triple antibiotic ointment, and six cases of one-a-day multivitamins, which apparently no one had thought would become important.
Too bad they were out of toilet paper. That was weird—it wasn’t as if people could eat the stuff.
If the power came on tomorrow and the trucks rolled in that afternoon, she’d feel awfully stupid for her shopping trip, but she could always return the stuff. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it, especially the antibiotic stuff.
At checkout, the manager rang her up, handed her a receipt, and said, “You’re the first person all day to talk to me without yelling, as if I can do something about all this. Your money’s no good here, ma’am. It’s on the house. I rang it up so you could return anything you don’t end up needing, when this is done and over with. If you’re that honest.”
She thanked him, and as he walked her out to her car, she thanked him again for helping load her goodies into her car. The manager was a nice guy, but still, seeing that store empty with no trucks on the way was a disturbing image.
What if the trucks never came back? She hadn’t thought of that until then. She shivered, but put it out of her mind. Of course there would be more shipments. Of course FEMA and the feds would fix this. They had to.
When Christine got home, Darcy was doing a horrible job of covertly looking out through the blinds. She was apparently too naïve still to know that even peeking through blinds drew the eyes of anyone in view, making one less hidden, not more. She smiled and waved, and the slight parting of the blinds disappeared. A few seconds later, as she was stepping out of the car, her front door opened, and both kids and Mary came out—the kids eagerly, Mary looking all around carefully before stepping off the front porch.
Everyone grabbed what they could manage, and Christine took the little bit that was left, all in one trip.
Before the kids even got inside, Darcy started freaking out. “We’re getting a dog,” she shouted, voice squeaking with excitement as she ran inside with a medium-sized bag of dog food.
Christine came in last, locking the door behind her. She took a deep breath, then turned back to face the family.
Hunter and Darcy had already taken everything out onto the kitchen counter, a
nd stood there going through them one-by-one, complaining loudly about each item. Mary stood at the other end of the kitchen, clutching a can of cat food in one hand, her forehead with the other.
Christine approached the kitchen with her bag, the one with all the batteries, and crossed the threshold from the living room.
Mary eyed her warily. “Before I freak out completely, would you care to tell me why you bought pet food? Please tell me you don’t expect us to eat this. I don’t think I could. I know what it was—you had a seizure before you got into the store. You had an aneurysm. Something.”
Hunter spoke before Christine could reply, his voice dropping nearly an octave but going up several decibels from usual. “How could you spend money on coffee? We don’t even own a K-Cup coffee pot.”
“About that—”
“—And batteries? Mom, we’re going to be real hungry, real soon if they don’t fix the power in the next couple days. You can’t pull out more cash, remember?”
“Yes, and that’s why—”
Darcy said, “Are you trying to starve us? Because that’s how you starve us. By not buying food.”
“Enough!” Christine roared, and she flung the bag of batteries against the wall, sending their plastic clamshell containers scattering across the floor.
The room went silent, and all eyes locked on her, the kids with open mouths and wide eyes, and Mary flinching reflexively like she’d just been shot at.
“Listen up. You weren’t shopping with me out there. You didn’t see what I saw, and you don’t know what I know.”
Hunter couldn’t keep eye contact after her outburst. He looked at his feet, while his bottom lip jutted out just a tiny bit more. Meanwhile, Darcy had frozen in place with her eyes wide as saucers, her hands clenched together behind the counter.
When Hunter spoke again, his voice was softer. “Okay, Mom. I’m sorry. But what are we going to do with two thousand coffee filters? Why’d you buy that instead of flour, or sugar, or…bananas maybe?”
Christine forced herself to take deep breaths, square her shoulders, and put on a wan smile. “As to why… Fran told me growing up that I should keep most of my money in a coffee can, hidden, rather than in a bank. She said that when the system crashes in a disaster, people will take cash but not I-O-Us. She said that’s all checks and credit cards are, ultimately.
“But I’m a bit savvier than she is. Cash is just another I-O-U, too. It has no intrinsic value. And if the power stays off and the trucks with food stay gone, there will come a time when no one takes cash.”
Hunter began to say something, but Christine cut him off. “But some things, like batteries, have intrinsic value because they can be used to survive and to do things we can’t do without them.”
Hunter cocked his head to one side. “Even two thousand coffee filters?”
Mary was suddenly attentive, too.
Christine continued, “Especially coffee filters. They can be used to clean up, but are tougher than paper towels. You can filter water with them, or strain used vegetable oil to make fuel. You can use them as a bandage, in a pinch. And they’re dirt-cheap.”
Darcy, bottom lip quivering, asked, “You don’t think we’ll need to use them to filter water, do you? Is the water going to stop working, too?”
Christine tingled at the sight of her daughter about to cry. This was an adult conversation—but these were adult times, and it was remotely possible they’d actually have to use those things to trade. “No, of course not. It’s just insurance. I can almost guarantee you we’ll all be back to normal, more or less, in the next couple days. Then, we can laugh about how paranoid I was, and we won’t have to buy batteries or coffee filters for years. Maybe it’ll motivate me to buy that snazzy Keurig I’ve been dreaming of.”
Darcy smiled at her mom, but her eyes were blinking rapidly, still.
“I’m going to go upstairs for a while. I didn’t sleep well last night, and my back is killing me,” Christine said over her shoulder. It was best to give them time to adjust to the idea, though she hated using scare tactics on them. But they had to be prepared for—
A flash of memory hit her. Fran, talking to a ten-year-old girl about how she should keep a stash of cash that wasn’t in a bank, just in case. And about how trade could replace cash if inflation went out of control, as it had in pre-war Germany. Unfortunately, it looked like her mom might have been right—but only if the trucks and phones stayed down.
Of course, being prepared only made sense, a lesson Christine had learned well after watching the unnecessary tragedy of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. Ever since then, with Fran’s voice stuck in her head, Christine had been buying gold coins. She’d also put money in savings and the stock market, more money in fact, but neither of those would do her any good if this was what her mom called an “S-H-T-F” scenario—stuff hits the fan, since Fran wasn’t normally one to use profanity, especially when talking to kids.
Christine wasn’t about to tell anyone about her stash, either. No, when they packed up to leave Denver until the crisis was over, she’d put it in the bottom of her bag.
And just like that, she realized she had made the decision to leave, for her family’s safety. Hopefully, she’d have a few extra sets of clothes to fit her skinnier, taller friend, and Mary would just have to live with what she got until they could get more.
Christine smiled as she thought how Mary would complain about having to wear Christine’s “old-fogey fashions.”
9
Sunday, May 31st
David greeted Orien in the kitchen. His trainee had slept on his couch since the CME, both because Orien’s car hadn’t magically started to work again, and because David’s place was closer to the precinct. Close enough, in fact, to be in range of the handheld radios they’d been issued from the warehouse.
They were old units, which worked off simple repeater towers. Rather than keeping those towers all powered at all times, which wouldn’t have been practical, the powers-that-be had consigned civilians with radios to pass messages back and forth until they reached the handheld units of others down the line. They worked much like the telegraph operators in the old days. That was an ironic thought, though—those operators had been put briefly out of work by a similar CME in the 1800s, David recalled.
All of which meant that, by the time he heard a message coming “down the line” to reach him, it was an hour old by the time he sent his acknowledgment, and if he had to go to the precinct, he might well arrive before the acknowledgment did. It was…not an ideal setup.
Orien slid a coffee mug over to him. “You only have half a can left, so I re-used the grounds we had, and just added a spoonful of fresh grounds. It’ll last longer that way.”
David grumbled. The coffee was hot, which was good, but it wasn’t as hot as he usually liked it. He drank the bitter, warm liquid in one go. “Drink it now, taste it later.”
Orien shook his head, wearing a smirk. “It’s not that bad, man.”
“Yes, it is.” David wiped his mouth with a napkin. The same napkin he’d used for two days, now. “We have to go, though. The captain is calling us all in for a briefing.”
“Crap.” Orien let out a long breath and set his mug, already empty, on the counter. “Last time, we had to go rescue people on the freeway. That airliner really did a job on the road.”
“Don’t remind me.” The sight of hundreds of charred corpses, both in the plane and in the densely-packed cars it had landed on, still bothered him.
Orien asked, “What horrifying thing will we be dealing with today, do you think? It’s Sunday, so my money’s on a trainwreck.”
David paused, but caught himself before he could snap a frustrated reply, or ask why trainwrecks were a Sunday thing. Instead, he simply said, “Get your gear; we’re leaving in five mikes.”
As David and Orien drove to the station, the streets were empty. It was a miracle that the mayor had organized so many people, so fast, to clear the main roads of dead car
s. Impressive, really, even if David wasn’t his biggest fan.
Along the way, they passed a grocery store that, like all the others he’d seen on patrol since his last shift began, was guarded. The National Guard, some of the better private security, off-duty police—the mayor had enlisted them all to protect the bigger stores. Not by coincidence, those had been the ones the mayor requisitioned for “the duration of the crisis.” Rumors said that many of the store owners had threatened legal action against what amounted to armed robbery by the local government, but the mayor ignored their angry letters and refused meetings with their angry representatives.
When David pulled into the precinct parking lot, it was not like the roads had been—it was packed, so much so that it was hard to find a parking space. Most of the officers and employees had older cars, which were the ones that still worked well. A few of the later-model cars were running, still, but only roughly. David had overheard that the problems had something to do with cars’ onboard computers needing updates to run smoothly again. Unfortunately, those were updates that no one was in a position to obtain, much less install.
Inside, however, the captain had made sure there was coffee—fresh!—from which David took two Styrofoam cups and gleefully told Orien to get his own, before heading into the briefing room. David dismissed the idea of finding a chair, though. It was standing-room only. He and Orien settled into a space near the back, and waited for Captain Arnerich to begin.
The captain stood at the podium at the head of the room, both hands gripping its sides. “Nice. I guess we can begin, now that Sleeping Beauty and Sleepy the Dwarf have joined us.”
David forced himself to smile, though it took some effort. “Blame your radio repeaters. They weren’t exactly efficient. We—”
Inception of Chaos: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Story Page 6