The noises woke Beka up before the alarm did. The light was out in the room, which confused her a moment but there was no trouble understanding what was going on. Sam was having another seizure, and she sleepily leaned over and patted him on the rump. “Shhh, what’s wrong my baby?”
Her 350 pound, six foot tall, bearded ‘baby’ made a whining noise and rolled over to cling to her. “Mommy,” he whimpered, eyes unfocused.
Beka rolled hers. She HATED that. Sam’s non-epileptic seizures were better than they used to be. Antipsychotics and time had slowly started to ameliorate his symptoms, but mornings were usually bad. And the mommy thing was gross. But he was off in a dream world of shadows and hallucinations and it probably wasn’t too unreasonable to want one’s mommy at such a time.
The alarm goes off just then, and Sam grunted, made a sort of snort before letting a fart, and rolled back onto his face to whimper into the pillow before he sighed and seemed to drop off.
Beka sat up, squinting at her alarm, then up at the light overhead. Sam always was more comfortable sleeping with the bedroom light on. Darkness made his hallucinations stand out to him, especially since the most pervasive one was a floating, evil speaking demon who ‘lived’ in the south west corner of their bedroom. She then looked around and realized it was really dark, more dark than just the bedroom light out. Sam’s computer usually had some lights on it. There should be light outside from the street lamp. She rolled out of bed, stepped one step to the window and moved the curtain to peer out. The sun wasn’t quite up yet, though the sky was lightening, but the street lamps were all dark. For that matter, nobody’s porch lights were on. She plopped back down onto the bed and picked up her phone again. It was quickly obvious that internet was down. With power out, that should be expected. But she was surprised to find that switching to cellular data gave no signal. Grumbling she got up, stumbled over the dog, who snorted and got up to shake, moved a cat with her foot, and shuffled into the bathroom. It didn’t take long to get ready in the mornings; Beka was not a girly girl and didn’t use any makeup most work days. She smacked her long hair with a brush a few times, pony’d it, brushed her teeth, and changed her clothes and slipped into her shoes. Next on the list was putting Sam’s morning pills into the little cup she left by the bed, and making sure the pets still had water. She grabbed her bag and coat, and was just walking out the door when a familiar truck pulled up and parked right across her drive, and she felt serious dread.
Beka’s dad was a sort of hard man. Generous and kind and the life of the party when he wanted to be, he was a total **** when he didn’t. Or when he was drunk, which was more often than not anymore. Still it was only quarter past seven so he wouldn’t be drunk, thankfully. She approached him warily, but with a smile on her face pretending nothing was wrong. That’s how it went in their family.
“Bek!! I’m taking you to work!” Bek’s dad was shorter than most men, though he liked to brag he was the tallest of his family. Bek was only a couple centimeters shorter than her father, and she wasn’t a tall woman. Her mother was quite tall for a female, and was a good head higher than her husband. He adored her.
She stared at him for a second. “What?” This was typical, she thought with irritation. He had parked across her lane so she had no choice. He didn’t allow choices. She’d chosen Sam, and he didn’t like Sam. He didn’t allow choices when he could force his choice.
“Something’s going on and I don’t know what it is,” the man practically growled, stalking towards her. “I’m taking you to work and if it doesn’t look good I’m taking you home.”
“I don’t-”
“The power is out!” He pointed all over, as if she hadn’t noticed. Likely he didn’t think she had, he usually acted that way. “But the RADIO is out. And I can’t call on the phones. The radio, Bek! It’s not the batteries, it works but there’s no stations! The power can’t be out everywhere.”
Unnerved, Beka shifted her bag on her shoulder. “What about the sheriff?” Her dad had been a sheriff's deputy for a couple decades, before he retired. Most of the staff still knew him, or knew who he’d been. Calling up to the dispatcher and getting info wouldn’t be hard. And he had a scanner at home. He heard all the news.
“They’re not saying NOTHIN’ just emergency calls, emergency- ****, Bek, do you know what I think? I think there’s been something happened and they don’t want people to panic, I don’t know Bek but I can’t feel comfortable you driving all the way to work, and..”
Beka kind of lost the trail of her dad’s harangue, but maybe he was right. The whole thing sounded funny. “Guess we better go then.”
On the way to her work, which was a good forty minutes away two towns over, her dad kept talking. They spun the radio dial a few times and listened to static before shutting it off. Eventually her dad’s run of theories, which all centered on ‘something happened and they don’t want us to know’ ran out and they went on in silence.
As they approached town, it was obvious that the entire area had gone dark. Wal-Mart was the first big place you passed when entering town; there were no lights there either. Beka craned her neck to see over the hill down into their parking lot as they drove past. “There are a lot of people going in and out of Wal-Mart, Dad.”
Her dad grunted something and glanced back and forth warily before moving through the intersection. The traffic lights were out but looked like everyone was treating it as a four way. “I smell smoke,” he said darkly, and gestured at a smudge against the clouds.
“That’s near the clinic!!” Beka exclaimed.
Dad grunted again.
Deeper in town things quickly were becoming chaotic. Not all the intersections had been treated so kindly and there were more than one fender bender. Beka noticed again people streaming out of Wal-Greens, which was as dark as the rest of the town, with carts stuffed full. They were silent for the next few blocks, watching the dark smoke and a hint of flames.
Beka cried out in shock when they saw it- her clinic was in flames. Riotous, leaping flames that were already breaking through the roof. In front of the clinic, instead of firemen, were a group of men who gave her a cold chill. As Dad slowed the vehicle, passing the entrance, one of them pointed at them, and they seemed to gather together, like they were organizing or ready to interact with the vehicle if it turned in.
Dad kept going, went around the corner, and Beka noticed he was being a bit more aggressive with the accelerator. He slowed down in a residential area and she looked at him. “Dad. DAD. What the hell is going on?”
He shook his head, looking grim and irritated.
“Maybe we should go back? We can go in the ER side of the hospital. They… there’s patients in there,” she said weakly.
Her dad shook his head violently, looking from left to right as they drove. As they got near the main drag near the edge of town he kept glancing towards Wal-Mart.
“Dad. How much groceries do you have? Do you have any cash?”
“Do you think the registers are running, without any power!?” he shouted at her. “Jeesus God, Bek!”
She shrunk back.
He worked his jaw, looking at the Wal-Mart as they drove past, then he did a 3 point in someone’s drive way and drove back, and turned onto the frontage road leading into the parking lot. He went slow, his shoulders hunched and looked out the windshield, gauging every person he saw. The Wal-Mart seemed calm, really. People were leaving with carts stuffed high, but they were quiet. Some were laughing and cheerful, others looked determined and didn’t talk or look right or left as they headed to their vehicles. Dad drew into a parking space far out in the lot, then he grabbed Beka by the wrist.
“You do what I say! Alright?! You LISTEN to me!” he gave her a deadly glare, then she noticed he was pulling his hand gun out from under his seat and trying to clip the holster to his belt. She felt small and shrunken, chided by a powerful voice she’d been lectured by for the last 35 years. But when he got out, she got out too, and they walked together towards the Wal-Mart.
The doors were standing open and there were only a couple carts left. Beka grabbed one, and her Dad was practically on her feet as he walked shoulder to shoulder with her. Inside the Wal-Mart it was fairly chaotic. People were being calm, only kids were running around, but the place had been destroyed. No employees were in sight. They walked through slowly, past the produce, which was well picked over, and the frozen. People were loading their entire carts full from the frozen aisles. The open freezers in the aisle by the fresh meat wall were being actively cleaned out by several enterprising families with a lot of kids. Her dad was stiff as a rail, eyeing everyone around her. Beka actually saw a few people she knew, not friends but acquaintances she’d seen at her work. Dad’s mail problem, or at least what she felt and judged to be his major malfunction, was almost everyone they saw were not white. There was a high population of ‘Chinese’ (almost no people in town were actually Chinese) and ‘Mexicans’, actually mostly central americans and lately a lot of Cubans. There were also a lot of ‘Sudanese’, who actually were mostly Sudanese, but lately they’d had imports of Eritreans and other African nations. She saw several of them, and they looked grim. She wondered whether they were reliving things they’d escaped. Traumas lingered.
An old grandmother was shrieking in a mix of Lao and English at another, younger Laotian woman, in the middle of the completely empty bread aisle - they appeared to be fighting over something. Beka looked up and straight into the eyes of a Cuban man she knew fairly well, pushing a cart full of groceries. She’d known him for years; taken care of his father in the nursing home and he went to her clinic. She also knew that he was a pastor of a small charismatic church. He had the grace to look ashamed even as he ‘Hello, Hello’d’ and nodded at her as he always did. Dad eyed him like he was a threat.
Beka was now really worried. Maybe he wasn’t an ethical fellow even though he was a pastor, but she’d always found him completely polite and civil. His wife was right next to him, and she was shading her eyes with her hand as if that’d make her less recognizable. She looked mortified, and worried.
She stopped the cart and looked at her father, who tried to shove her further on. “Will you ****ing stop it?!” she snapped, finally at him. “Dad! Stop acting like everyone is carrying a bomb.”
At that word several people looked at her with wide eyes and a couple with a baby in their cart, full of cans of Enfamil, skittered away in a rush.
Dad was about to snap back, then he shut his mouth. Beka was amazed.
“You stay right by me-”
“No, Dad, look. You… Let me do the groceries,” she cajoled. “You know engines and stuff. You should go to automotive. And… and I don’t know. I can think of a lot of things….” She trailed off, seeing him waver. “Bullets?”
“I am not leaving you unprot-”
“Give me your gun then,” she said, almost surprising herself. She hated guns. Shed grown up around them but was still scared of them for some reason. Yeah, she could use one. Her father had seen to that.
He paused, and to her surprise and relief he did just that. He wouldn’t leave until he saw that it was staying on the belt of her scrubs, then he shuffled his feet a little. “I will meet you at the back of the store. By those bath rooms back there.”
As much as she’d tried to shoo him away, Beka felt sort of lost watching his back disappear. But she wasn’t really afraid of the people around her. Looters and thieves they might all be, she was not their target. And Wal-Mart was not on her list of corporations she had a lot of sympathy for.
Besides. She knew Dad could pay for anything they took. All of it. Ten times over, probably. He was a wealthy man, if he didn’t look it or live like it. But he was also a suspicious, angry person. When she met Sam he’d immediately become convinced that he’d magically learned of her dad’s wealth and married her for that reason and that alone. I mean it was too much to believe the large, soft hearted and sometimes grumpy older man who’d married her actually liked her. She would have rolled her eyes had it not taken time away from her plotting.
She exhales, and starts to move down the aisle.
She thought she knew what she was doing. Seven years ago she’d gotten a really bad feeling about the current administration and had started doing some ‘prepping’. The problem was, she was not wealthy like Daddy Warbucks. She and Sam lived paycheck to paycheck, especially since Sam had been unable to keep steady work due to his seizure disorder. But she hadn’t gotten much farther than some canned goods and water. It was always good to have extra food in the house when the paycheck was short that pay period. They had lived off their supplies for a week or two more than once, and they sure hadn’t starved. Both she and her hubby were too fat, but they were happy fat. It didn’t leave more than a couple weeks of meals in the house since they used it almost as quickly as she put it aside.
Anyway she’d read articles and had a good grasp of nutrition, she thought she knew what would be most important to grab. She even had a book about prepping on a budget that had grocery lists in it, she would just try to remember.
The aisles were really pretty bare already. The bread was a no go, so she kept moving. There were still two 40 oz of peanut butter left. She grabbed both. Sam loved peanut butter sandwiches. The jelly was nearly untouched. So were the pickles. She picked up several. In the spices she passed up the salt. She had salt at home, three or four pounds anyway.
Canned goods were picked over. The little plastic containers of fruits were gone other than a couple things of pears. Beka ignored them and grabbed several cans of different fruits. She tried to make sure most of them were packed in juice. The canned condensed soups had been raped, but the dry packets were there. She grabbed a couple, more for something to take than as part of any plan. She kept telling herself that she was being stupid as she progressed to the baking aisle.
She found that the baking mixes were largely gone but there were still several. She threw cake mixes, muffins, and brownies in with abandon. Flour and sugar hadn’t really been picked over. She knew she had at least ten pounds of flour at home, in a bucket in her basement. She knew there was also sugar. She hesitated but eventually grabbed some fancy bread flour. For good measure she took two cans of blueberry pie filling. Then she came to the oil.
The hesitation increased. She knew from her reading that oils and fats were important in a diet restricted by- what the hell was she thinking? The power would be on in a week. Two weeks, tops. Even if it wasn’t, she had cooking oil at home. Mom had cooking oil. She walked straight by the aisle and went to the next.
Beans and rice were picked over. An enterprising looking Vietnamese was pushing a cart full of rice bags down the aisle. She found two bags of bean soup mix and threw them in her cart. Then she went back to the last aisle and grabbed two gallons of vegetable oil, feeling embarrassed. The coconut oil caught her eye and she peered at it. Everybody thought it was some miracle storage medium but she didn’t know much about it, other than she didn’t know anyone who cooked with it. She didn’t want to get into new products she wasn’t familiar with.
She picked up a box of dry milk, which she already used for cooking and was familiar with, and a canister of Nido, which was Mexican whole dry milk. At the end of the aisle from the open freezer she spotted and grabbed a box of frozen chicken breasts that was all on it’s lonesome. All the fresh milk was gone. The cheese was gone except some pepper jack, she grabbed the last block. The rest of the dairy was empty. As she reached the eggs she started to hear shouting and raucous laughter, and the doors to the back burst open with a bunch of teens dragging a pallet on a pallet jack. The pallet was stocked with cases of beer and the kids proceeded straight down the aisle with it, she supposed to go right out the front door.
The eggs were mostly gone, but they had a couple dozen. She picked them up and went around the corner to the liquor aisle. This had also been well picked over! There wasn’t much to grab. She did find a huge bottle of Five O’Clock. Nasty stuff, but it… well wait a second, why didn’t she just go to the pharmacy and get rubbing alcohol? She picked up her pace and started hurrying through the store. The healthcare section is where she should have headed first. That’s when she heard the gun shot. People screamed, shoved each other, ran. She huddled behind her cart, which was heavy enough people went around it instead of through. There was a lot of shouting now and someone was moaning but quieted almost as soon as it started. The HBA area, the shampoos and such around the pharmacy was emptying - but she could see some brave souls just calmly moving through. With a curiosity that she wished she wasn’t cursed with, Beka snuck forward and peered around an aisle.
A pharmacist or maybe a tech was laying on the ground in the doorway to the pharmacy, in a pool of blood. He wasn’t moving. People were in the pharmacy, and she felt some real fear at that time. She stood up, and just… looked at the shot man. She didn’t have any doubt he was dead. She’d seen dead people before. Not from gunshot wounds but dead was dead. She swallowed and started with her cart towards the back of the store, along the toys towards the sporting goods and the automotive. Then she saw men, all armed, all colors and ages, carrying rifles. They’d broken into the display and one started to grin at her. He… didn’t have a nice grin.
Then she saw him, striding towards her with a gun in his own hands, at low ready. “Bek!!” Dad barked. “What the **** is all that ****, do you think we have time to deal with that ****, ****ing ****…” he was shouting. Her hero.
The nasty man eyed her dad and kept walking and Beka’s ears were burning.
“SHUT. Up.” She snarled the words at him. “It’s FOOD.”
He made a snarly face at her and grabbed at the cart he’d been pulling behind. There were bullets in it, and a couple of those green Coleman fuel things, and motor oil. She thought it was motor oil, it was bottles of something.
“They’re in the pharmacy and they started shooting people,” she said, low, and without a word he gestured and she spun the cart in the aisle and started moving. All the way out into the parking lot, her dad was looking left and right, eyeing every vehicle they passed. He was nervous as a pet coon. He popped the back of the car and she loaded while he stood with the rifle, watching. She loaded as fast as she could, shoved the carts away and they hopped into the vehicle.
“GOD!” Her dad suddenly shouted, and he wrapped an arm around Beka’s neck, yanking her towards him.
She yelped and started to flail. “Dad!!! Stop!!”
“I shoulda NEVER let you out of my sight!”
“I’m FINE.”
“I can’t believe.. I have NEVER stolen anything, Bek, not so much… not a candy bar! NEVER!”
“You can write it all down and pay for it later” she muttered. His grip loosened on her and he looks around a second. He looked lost and like he didn’t know what to do next.
Beka started to shake, the shock of the gun fire and seeing a murdered man starting to get to her. Her stomach started to do uncomfortable rumbling that she suspected were going to need a rush towards a bathroom soon. “...Dad.”
He shook his head and was blinking, a lot.
“Dad. Dad. Do… did anybody say what they think is happening?”
He shook his head, his hands white knuckled on the wheel. He put the vehicle into gear and started moving out of the parking lot.
“......Do you think….”
“What, Bek.”
“Remember Y2K?”
He looked at her with some bemusement. Y2K had been ‘the’ topic of conversation for a couple years before it actually happened, which was the Junior year of high school for her. She didn’t know where Dad had heard about it, but ten years before she heard anyone else speak of it he’d started planting fruit trees and seemed to be doing a lot of planning on paper.
He never did stock the house with food. As the date grew nearer, he was mostly convinced it wasn’t going to be a big ruckus. He made sure all the cars were full of gas and they had a full fridge. They all waited up watching the news to see ‘if the end of the world’ was coming, and there’d been a few uncomfortable moments when they started reporting a nuclear plant somewhere that was having difficulties. It was somewhere in Europe and was brought under control, and was supposedly just coincidental.
“Yeah.”
“Do….. you think this is something like it? Dad. If it is. Dad we should hit the Ferryco.”
He stared at her. “You are ****ing out of your mind.”
“We need all the groceries we can get if something major is happening!!” she insists.
He paused. “We’ll drive by.”
The grocery store parking lot was much less full than Wal-Mart had been, but there were people going in and out. However it looked a little different. Their items were even bagged in their carts, and there were bag boys helping them to load their cars!
Amazed, they pulled in and got out of the car, and walked up to the entrance. Three teenagers, dressed in the uniform of black pants and white shirts that made them look like Mormon elders, were standing in front of the entrance and exit doors, and one stepped forward. “Excuse me. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but I can’t let you in unless you have cash,” he says politely. He had it down pat like he’d said it a few million times already that day.
Dad puffed out his chest. “Wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” he almost swaggered. Beka was disgusted not for the first time at her father’s unpredictability.
Inside the store it was very dark, not having sky lights like Wal-Mart did. But the aisles were not only clear and orderly, staff were stocking with items from the back. They were picked over, yeah, but Bek and Dad picked up several pounds of rice and beans, and those little pasta dinners in a box. They also got a lot of tuna and canned chicken, and then there was the meat counter. Dad started stalking up and down the counter, peering at all the cuts. Beka wandered off. She found the tea, and grabbed a box of tagless bags. She and Sam drank a lot of iced tea. It was cheap. She paused again at the flour, and at the oils. This was all too easy. What if they didn’t have a chance like this again and this was the last chance to shop for food? Conversely, the power could be on again in ten minutes and this might all be a fool’s errand. She hesitated before she grabbed three bags of different flours, some more sugar, and three bottles of olive oil. “I feel so stupid,” she mutters, as Dad walked up.
He had an armful of paper wrapped bundles of meat. “The meat manager says he talked to his brother in law, who’s a State Trooper, and he said THEY don’t know what it is, and nobody’s giving any orders. ****ing something is ****ed up”
“How are you gonna keep all that meat cold?” Beka questions.
“It’s 30 degrees outside.”
“Yeah but it’s supposed to be more like forty some in a couple days,” she argued. Then she skidded to a halt. “....Dad, how many canning jars do you have?”
He paused. And stared at nothing a second. “Your mom can can anything,” he says as if it’s an answer, and loads two flats of quart jars onto the bottom of the cart. Then he grabs rings and lids. Beka grabbed a box of pickling salt. Dad almost snarled at her again but piped down. He was random, she knew, and she just looked at him cooly til he busied himself by patting the coffee that was sitting in the cart. “Gots to have my coffee, Bek!” he said airily and started to whistle as he pushed the cart ahead. Beka followed with some trepidation. When he turned angry again it would be the more unsettling.
The checkout was orderly too. With no power the staff weren’t scanning anything, they were writing down every item on a list by it’s bar code and name. Then they handed the list to a manager who gave it all a long, thorough glance and wrote a total on the bottom. Beka wasn’t even sure why they were open. Maybe the manager decided it would be better to try being open than the doors being forced and the placed robbed? But why, insurance would pay for everything stolen wouldn’t it?
It was like a weird, funky dream. Dad actually had the money to pay for their purchases. He had several hundreds in his wallet- she wondered if he’d anticipated some sort of trouble. This was nuts, all of it. A bag boy helped them pack the groceries into their vehicle. Inside once again, Beka stared blankly at her hands for a long minute. “This is psycho.”
“When we get home we are going to TALK, you and I.”
Oh God. Dad’s ‘talks’ were something to be dreaded. He was never wrong and always right. Now, there were times she’d convinced him he had the wrong end of the stick, but that wasn’t an easy task. It was close to impossible. And his ‘talks’ usually ended with her in tears. He was… not a bad dad. He wasn’t unfeeling. He wasn’t unloving. He cared for his children’s welfare and futures. But he was a rioting ******* with a short man complex who was convinced his daughter was trapped in some sort of unloving marriage with a fortune hunter with a ‘fake’ illness who was too lazy to work. This did not make for comfortable chats with him.
“Bum bum bum ba bum bum bum, ba bum bum bum bum,” he hummed to himself as they drove. She settled herself back into the seat. It was going to be a long day, even without the whatever emergency. God.
Unprepared - Beka's story
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