NINETEEN

When Mack invited us into his house, my first notion was to walk straight for the kitchen and find something to eat. I wasn’t exactly starving, but my hunger was magnified by the knowledge that I was unable to satisfy it.

Mack didn’t seem to care, though. We gathered in his living room, where he revealed how he’d known our plan before we explained it.

“The idea of taking refuge in a Walmart distribution center sometimes comes up in the prepper forums. Most of the sheeple don’t even know it’s there. And it’s stocked with enough food to feed a lot of people for a long time.”

“That’s our thought as well,” said Jimmy. “We’re hoping we can enlist your help.”

“So tell me your plan.”

“If we approached with enough firepower,” I said, “we should be able to overcome whoever might be there already.”

“Maybe so,” said Mack. “You should assume Walmart built contingency plans for an event like this. They would expect to be a target. There could be men with rifles. There might be families. You’ll need to develop strategy and a tactical plan and treat this like the hostile invasion it is.”

Right about then the house began to creak under sudden, gale-force winds. Through the windows I could see trees thrashing and leaves swirling in light so low it might have been dusk. A moment later, that all disappeared behind a gray veil of pounding rain. The sound of it was something like a roar. In the old world, this is the time I would have pulled out my smartphone to check the radar or a local news live stream.

“Shit,” someone said.

“Exactly,” said Mack. “You need contingencies for the weather. You need to understand what the building looks like and how to approach it. You need to decide exactly when to mount your assault.”

“When?” said Aaron. “We’re hungry as hell. Every minute that goes by, someone else might get there instead of us.”

“I know it seems like a long time to wait,” said Mack. “But I would recommend a nighttime assault. This building will sit on a large asphalt lot, and there may be little cover.”

I hated the way everyone was looking at Mack. As if by offering a couple of suggestions, he had become our leader.

“You go there now, even in the rain, and it may turn out to be a suicide mission. So let’s sit down and sketch what the building might look like, where the entrances might be, and then develop a tactical assault plan.”

“Sounds great,” Jimmy said. “Don’t you think so, Aiden?”

“Sure. Of course.”

“We don’t want to shoot anyone if we don’t have to,” Jimmy added.

“Speak for yourself,” I said.

“That’s admirable,” Mack replied. “But the folks already in the DC will understand what’s at stake. It’s a giant building full of food.”

I looked around, waiting for someone to react to what I had said, but no one was even looking in my direction.

“Assuming we have superior weapons,” I said, louder this time, “we should be able to fight our way inside. After that, if someone tries to approach, we obliterate them with machine gun fire.”

“You mean you plan to stay there? Long term?”

“It’s where the food is. And once we get in, surely with the right weapons we can defend our position.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Mack said. “I don’t care how much firepower you have: When you are ten and they are ten thousand, you will lose. Especially when you are well fed, and they are starving to death. And we’re not talking about a bunch of pansies from California, neither. We’re talking about Texans who have been arming themselves to the teeth ever since BHO’s stint in office.”

“I thought you said this was a popular idea,” said Jimmy.

“Depends. Some Walmart DCs are more remote, but this one is on the northern edge of a metropolitan area about to eject seven million hungry people. If you somehow manage to get inside, the next thing you should do is grab as much food as you can and find somewhere else to wait it out. Ideally, it would be off the beaten path, because in a week the city will be a shit show. The problem is how to move supplies without being discovered.”

“How long do you think it will take?” Jimmy asked. “You know, for everyone to—”

“Starve to death? No one keeps much in the pantry anymore. I’d say in a city this size you’re looking at a fifty percent mortality rate within three months. Seventy-five in six months. By a year out, I’d say you’re north of ninety percent dead. In the meantime it’ll be like The Walking Dead around here. So what we should do is grab enough food to feed the folks in this room for ten to twelve weeks.”

“Don’t forget about my mother,” Chelsea said.

“You understand,” said Mack, “the more people we bring, the more food we have to haul away. There’s just no chance for a small group to survive inside the DC. Staying there would be a death sentence.”

“That’s pretty much what we already have,” said Ed.

Mack nodded.

“This tough old world just got a lot tougher.”

* * *

A bit later, Mack led us to his garage, where he pointed to a steel door mounted to the concrete floor. It looked like the entrance to an underground storm shelter.

“The weapons I sell in the store, the legal ones, aren’t military grade. They’re look-a-likes that became popular when the Kenyan was elected. For any reasonable advantage, we’ll want fully automatic weapons and high capacity magazines.”

Mack had brought a large, white candle with him, and a book of matches, both of which he handed to Nick.

“Light this while I open the door here.”

Mack retrieved a key from his pocket, unlocked the door, and descended into darkness with the candle. When he reappeared, he handed Nick a heavy-looking military rifle. The butt and handle of this gun were made of a polished, amber-colored wood. It turned out to be a Norinco 56 S.

Mack retrieved other weapons: A Norinco 56 S-1, an HK-91, two AK 47s, and a Norinco RPG. In case you’re wondering, RPG is short for Rocket Propelled Grenade.

Outside, the wind shrieked through the trees, and rain pounded the roof so hard it sounded like gunfire. The layering of this noise over the continuous whistle in my ears made me feel chaotic. I wanted something to eat. I wanted to be an agent of a change in this strange new world. I wanted a reason to kill again.

Later we took our weapons into the house, where Mack demonstrated their proper use and handling. The rifles, he explained, had been sourced overseas, built for wars that were ancient history to me. I was impressed by the lot of it and eager to get going. Jimmy, by contrast, seemed amused.

“Where did you get all this?” he asked Mack.

“That’s my business. But there is an active market for weapons like these.”

“Unless you’re planning to break into Fort Knox, why own actual military rifles?”

“Aside from using them to wage war on Walmart?”

Jimmy smiled.

“Look,” Mack said. “This event may be a surprise to you folks, but some of us have been prepping for years. If that star hadn’t gotten us, it woulda been a solar flare. Or a nuke detonated over Kansas. Ever since America turned weak, ever since city folk got used to electricity and iPhones and groceries on demand, it was bound to happen.”

Mack looked around at all of us, clearly pleased with his speech.

“And now here we are,” he added.

But I wondered why, if he was so prepared, Mack was even bothering to help us. Unless it turned out he was low on food himself.

* * *

Eventually, the weather cleared and the sun came back out. Mack grabbed some paper and a pencil and sketched a rectangular shape.

“A building like this probably doesn’t have many windows,” he said, pointing. “There may be an office up front, and if so it will be the facility’s weakest point. But the rest of the place will be a huge concrete shell. The loading docks will be garage-style doors. If I were defending the building, I would post men near these docks.

“Chelsea, it looks like your mom’s house will need to be our staging area. You women will stay behind. We’ll post men at the DC and make as many trips as we can back to the house. If we fill a whole room full of high-calorie, protein-rich food, it should be enough for the ten people in this room—plus your mother—to get through the worst of the shortage. Each trip will be dangerous, though, especially if other folks discover what we’re up to. They will beg and eventually they will try to steal.

“Honestly, it’s a huge risk to stay anywhere near the city, but I don’t see another option, not with one pickup and the roads as crowded as you claim. We’ll need to stay out of sight and be ready to fight when the shit gets real. Hopefully it will be enough.

“Now,” Mack continued, “let me explain how I think we should approach the DC.”

* * *

As the day wore on, I wondered if my stomach would digest itself. The hunger pangs were like earthquakes flattening whole city blocks of internal machinery. And I wasn’t alone.

“I am fucking starving,” Keri finally said. “Don’t you have any food around here, man?”

“I hadn’t been to the store in more than a week,” Mack said. “And I’ve eaten all the junk in my pantry over the past couple of days.”

“So your speech about being prepared, that was all bullshit?”

“I’ve got weapons. I’ve got a shitload of ammunition. But I’ve been out of a job for five months, and when I got low on funds I ate my supplies.”

Keri looked at me and smiled ghoulishly.

“A survivalist who can’t afford the apocalypse,” she whispered. “Now there’s the economy sticking it in your eye.”

Since evening was still hours away, there was a lot of time to kill. Mack taught us offensive maneuvers and how to split our attack into separate formations, which would force anyone in the DC to divide their defense. When he was done, Keri and I walked outside, where we sat in a bench swing on the front porch.

“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’m glad this got pushed back until later.”

“I thought you were starving.”

“I am, but I’m also scared. Aren’t you?”

I could have told her about God’s plan to end the world, about my special role in the new order, but I don’t think she would have understood.

“Of course I’m scared,” I said. “But if you think you’re hungry now, wait until tomorrow or the day after that.”

“Why don’t we climb into the truck and drive somewhere else? Where there’s less people and more food. Like a farm or something.”

“You think a farmer will be thrilled with ten people who want to squat on his land and eat whatever he’s growing?”

“I don’t know. But two days ago there was enough food to feed everyone. It can’t all be gone already.”

“It’s not gone. It’s just far away. We already talked about this.”

Keri abruptly stood up and marched off the porch. The loss of balance pushed the bench’s gentle pendulum motion into disarray.

“I know we already talked about it!” she cried. “I was hoping you could make me feel better and not rattle off more depressing facts. I’m scared, Aiden! I’m scared this isn’t going to work and maybe some of you will get hurt or killed.”

The frustrating thing was Keri understood what we were up against. That she wanted me to supply her with bogus platitudes made her seem like a child.

“I don’t like this any more than you,” I lied. “But we have to take risks if we want to live. And it’s not like you’ll be on the front lines. You don’t have to worry about anything.”

“I’m worried about losing you, Aiden. Can’t you see that?”

“I thought you were more concerned about running out of painkillers.”

At this Keri smiled a bitter smile.

“I have problems same as you,” she said and stepped onto the porch again. As she stood over me, I was sorry for what I had said, only because she might never wrap those killer legs around me again.

“But at least I’m willing to talk about them. If you keep your problems bottled up long enough, eventually you’ll explode.”

She marched away, into the house, and for a while all I did was contemplate the loneliness of a nearly-empty world. The way Mack talked, it was like he had wanted something like this to happen. Why? Because the old world made him feel ostracized? Or because, in this new one, he had been promoted to the top of the food chain?

I closed my eyes and imagined empty cities overgrown with trees and vines, freeways crumbling, bridges collapsing, the disappearance of all Man had wrought. My mind shrieked like a tea kettle. I wondered how much longer I could go on like this.

When I finally went back inside, the rest of the men were standing in the living room, guns in hand.

“Aiden,” Jimmy said. “Nice of you to join us. It’s time to go.”

“I thought we were going after dark.”

“While you were outside swinging,” Mack said, “we decided to gather recon while it’s still light out. We’ll drive past the DC on the way to Chelsea’s mother’s and see how closely the building matches our expectations. Then we’ll go back there after dark to execute the plan. Sound good to you, Colonel?”

“Sounds great,” I said, wondering how it would feel to shoot Mack in the face. “Let’s go kick some Walmart ass.”