I braced for the eerie, deserted silence of Boston we’d seen on the news after all the shooting stopped, but Odricks Corner was chaos. Cars blaring at each other, women herding families back and forth across streets, people biking with mountains of belongings strapped to their backs. Men defending laden shopping carts in parking lots with their lives.
“Food,” Marion said when she spotted a grocery store. It all dawned on us then. How much food did we have at Elk Cliffs Resort? Imanuel had booked caterers for the ceremony and reception, but how long would those leftovers last? How much was in their deep freezers for regular guests? How long would deep freezers last if the power went out? Would the power go out?
Rhino stayed outside with the guns, asking passersby for information. The rest of us went inside the shop and pulled everything we could find off the shelves. You, Paul, and Imanuel tried to look large and intimidating as Marion and I snatched whatever was left. Single shoppers approached, eyed the five of us, then slunk away for other aisles.
“Grab the rice,” Marion hissed at me as we wheeled ourselves into the never-ending line to pay. I grabbed as many as I could. In a strange way, it reminded me almost of something she and I might have done in university with our friends, while too drunk: run to the campus food store just before it closed and play various games—who could fit inside the plastic shopping cart seat like a kid again, who could swipe an entire shelf into the basket at once without dropping a single item, who could finish their list first and race to the checkout line before the other teams. But no one was laughing this time.
“Please—I have children,” a woman behind us said. We turned around. Her cart was a third as full as ours, with food half as useful. The shelves were almost bare by then. “I have children,” she repeated. I wanted to crumble inside.
“We have children, too,” Marion lied before any of us could answer. She knew me too well. She stepped in front of us, between me and the woman, so I had no choice but to set the rice back down into our own cart.
“Please,” the woman said again, but weaker this time. “No, it’s all right.”
“Has it reached Arlington yet?” Paul asked her gently. “We’re all—we’re on vacation. With our kids. We only just found out.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think Maryland, at least. I saw something like that on the news. That’s when I came here. My sons are still at home.”
“It’s in D.C.,” the man in line ahead of us said. He held up his phone. “They caught a guy downtown near the Verizon Center this morning.”
The woman moaned. She sank lower over her cart.
“How are we going to pay for this?” I suddenly whispered to you. “I didn’t bring my purse.” It was probably a month’s worth of food, and all I had was a handful of crumpled bills in my jeans pocket from the day before, from when you had to pay a toll fee on the highway into Virginia from D.C., to reach Elk Cliffs.
“Put it on my card,” Imanuel said. “Wedding expenses.”
“Oh, God,” the woman behind us said suddenly. We turned to look at her. She was holding her wallet as if it were white-hot porcelain, searing her fingers, but too precious to drop. “Oh, God.” We all looked inside. The dark green ink on the bills had somehow vanished. The papers were completely blank.
“What the fuck,” Marion said in horror. “What is that?”
“My children,” the woman wailed. “I have to feed my children!”
“I’ll pay for it!” I gasped. I was crying, terrified. I tried to shove whatever bills were in my pocket at her, desperately pressing them against her chest. Far at the front of the line, a fight broke out. People began to yell. Then we all realized that my money had become the same impossible blank things as well.
Three days after that, reports said that almost everyone in D.C. was now shadowless. We sat in circles around the main ballroom TV, cutting marshmallows into tiny pieces and eating them slowly, to make them last. The brand on the front of the bags was a name I couldn’t read. The letters looked like they had once spelled something, but didn’t quite look like letters anymore. Rhino suggested we start trying to hunt game for food in the forest around the resort with the guns.
Philadelphia, Baltimore, then Arlington. After that, Elk Cliffs Resort lost power, because we were on the Arlington grid.
The day after there was no more electricity, Rhino and Marion returned from the far side of the mountain stumbling under the weight of a small elk. The wedding band made a fire in the fancy stone pit in the courtyard using the strange, empty dollar bills as kindling. We burned it all. Not a single person kept even one piece. We wanted it gone. They roasted the elk while you, me, and a couple of other guests from Paul’s side went through what was left in the kitchen and separated it into “eat tonight, before it goes off,” “eat within the next few days,” and “save as long as we can.”