She didn’t expect there to be any left because the first thing folks asked for when they got sick was antibiotics (whether they needed them or not). She had a feeling that any smart people around or people who’d passed through would have snatched them up, or that the pharmacist at least would have snagged them and taken them home.
They stared around at the scattered packages all over the pharmacy floor.
“I can’t believe there’s so much medicine in the world,” Mama said. “I never really thought about it when it was all lined up in packages on the shelf. But look at all of this. Something for every discomfort you might possibly feel—there’s a pill for it, a cream for it, a spoonful of something to swallow.”
“Wonder how effective most of this would be over the long term,” Dad said idly, shifting the piles of boxes with his toe. “All these boxes have expiration dates on them.”
“That’s because they want you to buy more even if you don’t need it,” Adam said. “Throw out the old stuff and buy something new.”
“It’s because the efficacy of medicine declines over time, especially if you keep it in a humid environment like the bathroom, which most people do,” Red said.
“Well, there is that place in every bathroom called a ‘medicine cabinet,’” Adam said. “You can’t really blame folks for that.”
He reached down and picked up one of the packages. “I can’t believe there’s any cold medicine left. Remember that story we saw on the news? All those people knocking each other out for Nyquil and Robitussin?”
“They thought treatment meant a cure,” Red said. “There’s not enough science education in this country. Just because the medicine makes you feel better doesn’t mean you’re not still sick. You’re just not showing symptoms. But the bugs are still building their little colonies inside you, even if you don’t know it.”
“What everybody got wasn’t responding to Robitussin anyway,” Adam said.
There wasn’t much to say to that, so they all just peered around again.
“What is it we’re supposed to be looking for here, Red?” Dad asked. “Amoxicillin?”
“Yes, and any other kind of antibiotics you can find,” she said. “They won’t be up here with the over-the-counter things. They’ll be in the back where the pharmacist was. But keep your eyes peeled, because it looks like someone made a mess of this store for no damned reason and they might have tossed the good stuff up here.”
“I thought the good stuff was something that made you feel good,” Adam said. “Like opium.”
Red was so intent on checking labels that she didn’t rise to the bait. “Nope. The good stuff is a Z-Pak. They’re like the superheroes of antibiotics. It’s what they give you when you’ve got pneumonia, or when you’ve got strep throat or something that won’t go away with just amoxicillin. But any kind of antibiotics would be good, if we can find them.”
“I didn’t know you knew so much about medication, Delia,” Mama said.
“She’s paranoid about infections,” Adam said. “Of course she knows how to treat them.”
Red picked up a tube of hydrocortisone cream that caught her eye and stuffed it in her pack. It might come in handy. She also grabbed some ibuprofen and a jar of Vicks VapoRub. If she got a regular old cold (not the virus that was killing everybody), the menthol smell always made her feel better, even though she knew that it was all in her head. She associated it with childhood and snuggly sheets and chicken noodle soup and even as an adult when she got a cold she’d rub her chest with Vicks.
Everyone else had moved into the back pharmacy area— Behind the Counter, as Red thought of it. It was a land of mystical geography, normally navigated only by those who knew just what all those multisyllabic words on the jars meant and how they interacted with one another.
“Hey, I found some!” Adam said excitedly, his voice muffled as he bent over to pick something up. He held up a bottle. “Amoxicillin.”
“I think most pharmacies group their medications by type,