The Apocalypse

Chapter 6

Sarah

Danville, Illinois



At eight in the morning, after an hour long drive and an interminable wait going through security, Brittany Rivers boarded her flight to New York. Sarah watched the plane takeoff and stared without blinking until it was only a tiny spec in the sky and then, feeling empty, turned around and walked back to her car.

She was a mess. Sarah feared flying and she doubly feared it when Brittany flew, and she triply feared it when Brit flew alone, which happened from time to time. And had she heard about the ongoing rat attacks in the New York City subway system her fear would've been enough for her to turn the car around right there on the highway. Unfortunately for her the rat attack story had been buried by worse news: Miami, Jacksonville, and New Orleans were under an actual quarantine. A situation that Sarah couldn't ever remember happening in her lifetime or even her mother's lifetime.

It was unreal. The army wasn't letting anyone in or out of the cities and that included journalists.

Because of this, the newspapers and the twenty-four hour cable shows were all over the place, reporting on hearsay and guesses as if they were actual facts. First they said it was Bubonic plague, and people in the Gulf coast region went into a panic and shuttered their doors and windows as if a hurricane was approaching. And then it was suggested that it was influenza, but when that was explained as only the flu it wasn't deemed a creditable enough threat and the reporting on that only lasted a day.

The President had given a speech the night before and told the American public that it was an outbreak of Legionnaire's disease, the same as was being reported in London and Cairo and along the Italian coasts. He went on in a calm voice to tell us that everything that could be done was being done. The speech was supposed to be reassuring, but Sarah hadn't been reassured in the least.

In her gut she knew a slow approaching anxiety, which had only been added to by the fact that her daughter's teenage rebellion couldn't have come at a worse time. Thankfully Sarah's Ex didn't live in the actual city. If he had, Sarah would've put her foot down for real; though in truth she didn't know what that would look like. Her discipline took the form of gentle and sometimes circuitous nagging, coupled with a light sprinkling of guilt.

Her Ex, Stewart Rivers, lived on Long Island with his new and much younger wife. Sarah's lips disappeared whenever she thought of the new wife and they did so again. “I'm hungry,” she said, deciding to push the thought of Miss New Boobs out of her mind. At that point Sarah was halfway back home to Danville and took an exit to somewhere called Waynetown. She had never heard of it, but McDonald's had and that was good enough for her.

Another thing that was good enough for her was the price of gas in the little burg. All over the country, prices had surged in the last week and a gallon of gas was now over six dollars on average, and so when she saw that it was just over the five-dollar mark there in Waynetown she slipped into the line behind a honking big SUV.

That was another thing the outbreak of whatever it was had caused: lines. She really wasn't used to them. Waiting ten minutes to checkout at the Food Lion was about all she could handle. Anything more and she would grow impatient. Now the gas lines lengthened with each passing day. The last time she filled up, two days before, it was a twenty-five minute wait. And even there in Nowhere'sville, Indiana, she sat idling behind the Ford Expedition listening to song after song on the radio and turning the channel whenever the station went to news.


The people in the Expedition weren't just after gas. The driver, whom Sarah assumed was the father of the family, directed his two sons to a grocery store that sat just a few blocks away, while he walked away up the line of cars. When he came back laden down with bags, Sarah barely noticed, but when the two teenage boys arrived with a shopping cart full of canned goods, she watched them load the cans with an unsettling idea growing in her.

Should she be stocking up as well? She frowned at the idea. It almost seemed un-American. Sarah had never known a day of true want in her whole life. In her America, McDonald's could never run out of hamburgers; everyone knew they had an endless supply of them. And gas pumps couldn't possibly run dry—they hadn't ever before. And there would always be Stouffer's Pizzas in the freezer section of every grocery store, and every mall had a Macy's filled with clothes, and Hollywood was always releasing a new block-buster hit, filmed in ear-splitting surround sound. That was the America she was used to.

Still she watched the family piling their groceries into the SUV and she begun to worry. When she finally got to the pumps she went into the convenience store as she fueled and was shocked at how empty the shelves were.

And what was left was being marked up in price even then by a frumpy looking lady in a housecoat and slippers. Sarah glanced at the new price tag on a bag of Cheetos and her eyes went wide.

“Eight dollars!” she gasped. “That's…that's gouging. Isn't price gouging illegal?” It was a strange world she lived in: her daughter could throw a fit and fly half-way across the country and Sarah could barely muster the temerity to say more than a few dribbling words, but charge her eight dollars for a bag of chips and watch her outrage come out.

“And what about the morality of it? I should call the police!” she added.

“Be my guest,” the lady in the housecoat said with a laugh. “I'm sure they're going to drop everything and rush right over.”

The man behind the counter, though also looking tired, was at least in normal street clothes. He smiled somewhat embarrassed and said, “We're not gouging. Not really. First we charge only what the market bears and second, if we don't raise our prices we'll be out of business. Do you understand about replacement costs?”

“Of course she doesn't,” the woman said. “If she did she wouldn't be all in a tizzy.”

“What are replacement costs?” Sarah asked, trying to be civil and eyeing the Oreos that were next to be up-charged.

“Well, if I buy these chips for a dollar and sell them for two, I make a profit. But what happens if the next bag costs four dollars for me to buy? I wouldn't be able to afford them and thus I couldn't sell them to you. It's why gas prices are so fluid. Sure the gas in the pumps cost me three-fifty a gallon, but the next truck in will cost me over five.”

“I guess I see,” Sarah said. “What about that grocery store? Are they raising their prices too?” She had a sudden desire to purchase as much food as she could afford before she couldn't afford any.

“Yes, though not as much,” the man said with a shrug. “They have greater purchasing power than I do.”

“Oh, ok. Thanks and sorry about getting so angry. I'm a little stressed out.” Sarah left without buying anything except the gas and drove to the grocery store down the block and was amazed to see the parking lot was nearly full as if it were a Saturday and not a Wednesday morning. The crowd wasn't overwhelming; after all this was a part of the country where root cellars were still common and where some people still actually jarred their own preserves and canned peaches and other fruits.

Still the shelves could best be described as thin, especially in the Medicine/Pain Reliever aisle, and barren in the fresh produce aisle. Sarah hurried to the canned goods and went among a dozen other women and for once in her life she shopped like a man.

She looked beyond specials or prices, while the list of ingredients on the side might as well have been written in Greek for all she paid attention. The shelves were emptying fast and so she began filling her cart as quickly as she could without starting a panic.

This was a real worry. The women in the aisle were strained in appearance and had nervous quick eyes. One even said to another, “That's enough. Leave some for everyone else.” This was ignored and a shoving match broke out.

Sarah, who had thirty or so cans of soup and stew and corn, left as quickly as she could. She went for rice, but the store was out and she settled for eight boxes of dried mashed potatoes, an item she would never have touched only the week before.

And then she moved onto the biggest shock yet. The store was out of toilet paper! For some reason this hit her nerves more than anything else, and feeling jittery, she grabbed the last three bundles of paper towel thinking she was crazy for doing so. Surely her Food Lion back in Danville would have more toilet paper and plenty of fresh produce. And everything else. Surely it would.

It had never run out of anything, before.