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