Chapter Three #2
All over the valley, Sela thought, people were probably coming to the same conclusion and hauling out their pressure cookers.
She hoped they were, anyway. She’d never done any canning herself, but that was about to change.
“Chop-chop,” Carol said, and they all headed out on their assigned errands.
Carol had two fuel cans at her house and got them; Sela had one at hers, which she fetched, and five new ones in the store.
She stopped there, darted in to get them, then she and Carol evenly divided the cans and went their separate ways.
She half expected someone to pull up to the door, looking to clean off her shelves. But the cars that were on the road didn’t
even slow down. There weren’t enough supplies in her little store to tempt anyone. If there was, she wouldn’t be heading to
town herself.
Sela could barely pay attention to her driving. Her thoughts were doing the crazed rabbit thing again. What else would they
need? Duct tape. She didn’t know why, but duct tape seemed important. Salt, lots of salt; sugar, flour, cornmeal, powdered
eggs, powdered milk, any basic food stuff that wouldn’t need refrigeration. Anything canned—literally, anything.
She imagined before this was over, people would be eating whatever they could get, even things they never would have touched
before. She’d bought what seemed like a ton of stuff earlier in the day, but viewing it from the other side of the official
warning, she knew they’d need more.
Town was chaos. The grocery store parking lots were full, with people driving up and down the aisles looking for parking spaces.
She couldn’t find a break in traffic to make the left turn, so went up to the traffic light—for some reason people were still
obeying the lights—and circled around to enter the parking lot. It was a useless effort; there was literally nowhere to park.
She spotted some open space on the grass in front of Taco Bell and managed to squeeze in there before someone else grabbed
the slot. So what if she was on the side of the road? So what if she got a ticket? She’d never had a ticket before, but this
seemed like a good time to take the risk.
Her heart beating hard with urgency, she ran across the scorching heat of the parking lot and threw herself into the blast
freezer of the grocery store, headlong into what seemed like just short of a riot. The aisles were packed with people grabbing
whatever they could, wheeling carts left and right with none of the usual grocery store method. Barb had said get all the
produce she could, but the produce area was so crowded she couldn’t squeeze in. Skirting the edges, she took whatever she
could reach. Bypassing the bread aisle, she then went to the canned goods and repeated the process, spurning nothing, getting
what she could. Next was the baking goods aisle for staples like flour, sugar, powdered milk, and all the salt she could grab
while other shoppers were doing the same thing. She was bumped, shoved, pushed, and once knocked into the shelving; she barely
kept herself from going down.
The self-checkout lanes were closed down, and she stood in line for forty minutes before she got to the counter. It helped
that some people were being refused checkout because they wanted to use either credit cards or checks. Handmade “Cash Only”
signs hung above every register. They left their full shopping carts where they were standing, and the people still in line
raided the carts to fill their own needs.
Thank heavens she’d hit the bank earlier and had cash on her, because normally she wouldn’t have had much more than twenty
bucks or so. If she were forced to abandon her supplies . . . she didn’t know what she would do. She was already tense with
stress and anxiety, fighting the sense of impending doom.
After paying, she wheeled the cart across the parking lot, jerking it over the curb onto the grass, and reached her white
Honda CR-V. After the chill of the grocery store the sunny heat felt good on her skin. She put the groceries in the back seat,
because the cargo area was full of empty fuel cans, and by the time she’d finished the chill had gone and she was beginning
to sweat.
Heavy traffic snaked down the highway, as well as around and around the parking lot, and she had no idea how she was going
to find a way to squeeze into a lane. She saw tense, almost predatory faces turned toward her as vehicles inched past; there
was no way she could return the cart to the grocery store and leave her vehicle unattended; it would be broken into and her
supplies stolen within half a minute. Her heart pounded from stress. If it was this bad now, what would it be like when there
actually was no power, no food to buy?
The highway was impossible, so she bumped over the curb into the Taco Bell parking lot, and managed to weave her way, through
parking lots and side streets, to a gas station that sold kerosene. The gas pumps were clogged, but she didn’t need gas, thank
God.
She was able to park next to the Dumpster, close to the kerosene pump. A whipcord lean white-haired man wearing overalls and
a stained John Deere cap was at the pump, an unreadable expression on his face as he watched the parking lot turmoil. Local farmer, she thought. The old-timers like him would likely be the ones who got this area through the approaching crisis, because they
knew how to grow food and how to get by without all the modern conveniences.
She noted the cost per gallon of the kerosene and did some quick math: she had four five-gallon fuel cans, for a total of
twenty gallons. She pulled out the appropriate cash as she darted into the station and got in line to pay. Just as she had
earlier, the station manager had stopped credit card payments. People were cussing, some under their breaths and some not,
as they handed over their cash and complained that now they wouldn’t have the money to get something to eat on their way home.
Mostly tourists, she thought, catching a variety of accents. They were rightfully in a panic to get home; some of them might
live so far away they wouldn’t make it.
She kept an eye on her vehicle, making sure no one approached it. The people here weren’t thinking about groceries, though,
they were thinking about gasoline. Turning, she looked at the rows of shelving in the store: mostly empty.
The sense of unreality was so strong she wondered if there were camera crews hidden somewhere, secretly recording everything,
because she felt as if she were in the middle of a disaster movie. No buildings were falling sideways, nothing was exploding,
no one was screaming or fighting each other, but the tension and barely restrained panic were pushing at everyone. Tension
crawled along her veins and she tried to think what she would do if someone did start fighting here in this crowded store. How would she get out? Should she get behind some shelving, or duck down to the
floor and try to crawl out? Would she get trampled?
But nothing happened. Despite the tension, the line to pay inched forward. When she reached the clerk, a middle-aged woman
whose own face mirrored the stress Sela felt, she handed over the money and said, “Kerosene. I have four five-gallon cans.”
The woman nodded, and rang up the sale. Behind Sela, someone said, “I’ll give you fifty bucks for those cans.”
Sela didn’t dare look back. She darted out the door and over to her vehicle, where she dragged out the fuel cans, lined them
up, and filled them while keeping a weather eye out for anyone approaching her from behind. She’d never fought for anything
or with anyone in her life, but she’d fight for these cans of kerosene.
Finally—finally!—she wrestled the heavy cans back into her SUV and slammed the hatch. With her peripheral vision she saw a man heading her
way and she quickly used her remote to lock the vehicle, securing everything until she could get to the driver’s door. Hearing
the beep of the horn that signaled the lock engaging, the man halted, and turned away. Breathing fast, Sela unlocked the door,
slid in, and quickly locked the vehicle again. She started the motor and the air-conditioning blew in her face, evaporating
the sweat.
Slowly she reached out and turned off the air-conditioning. Mileage mattered, now more than ever.
The highways were clogged; she could see police and deputy cars crawling from motel to motel, blasting on their bullhorns
that all non-locals should check out and get to their homes while they still could. At least the off-season had begun with
Labor Day; the Rod Run had provided another spurt of tourists, but the crush had dropped drastically after that—at least until
October brought the tree colors and tourists returned. There wouldn’t be an October crush this year, she thought. But even
during the off-season there were always tourists, and the weekends were crowded. She shuddered to think what the traffic would
have been like if this had happened during one of the busy times.
The only way she could get home was to wind her away around secondary streets and roads until she hit Goose Gap. Even the
secondary roads were crowded, though mostly with locals who knew how to avoid the traffic on the main drag. Eventually she
had to hit the highway, though, and she sat for several minutes before there was a gap big enough for her to shoot into.
Fifteen minutes later she pulled into Carol’s driveway and sat there shuddering in relief. Carol was already back, as well
as Barb and Olivia. Olivia came outside and down the steps, coming to help her carry in supplies, and when she looked at that
innocent, pretty young face, Sela thought again that, come hell or high water, she would protect her family—no matter what
it cost her.
Carol had done better at gathering produce than Sela had. “I stopped at a couple of roadside stands,” she said. “I knew town
would be a madhouse.”
That was an understatement. Sela didn’t tell her aunt that she’d actually been frightened. Nothing had happened, and the man