Provisions and supplies melted from the shelves. Gasoline drained steadily from the pumps. Closing of the First National failed to inhibit the buying rush. Before closing, the bank had injected an extra $100,000 in cash into the economy, unevenly distributed. And strangers appeared, eager to trade what was in their wallets for necessities of the moment and the future.
The people of Fort Repose had no way of knowing it, but establishments on the arterial highways leading down both coasts, and crisscrossing between the large cities, had swiftly been stripped of everything. From the time of the Red Alert, the highways had been jammed with carloads of refugees, seeking asylum they knew not where. The mushroom cloud over Miami emptied Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale. The tourists instinctively headed north on Route 1 and AlA, as frightened birds seek the nest. By nightfall, they would be stopped outside the radioactive shambles of Jacksonville. Some fled westward toward Tampa, to discover that Tampa had exploded in their face. The evacuation of Jacksonville, partially accomplished before missiles sought out the Navy Air complex, sent some of its people toward Savannah and Atlanta. Neither city existed. Others sped south, toward Orlando, to meet the evacuees from Orlando rushing toward the holocaust in Jacksonville. When the authorities in Tallahassee suspected that the fallout from Jacksonville, carried by the east wind, would blanket the state capital, they ordered evacuation. Some from Tallahassee drove south on Route 27, toward Tampa, unaware that Tampa was no longer there.
This chaos did not result from a breakdown in Civil Defense. It was simply that Civil Defense, as a realistic buffer against thermonuclear war, did not exist. Evacuation zones for entire cities had never been publicly announced, out of fear of “spreading alarm.” Only the families of military personnel knew what to do, and where to go and assemble. Military secrecy forbade radio identification of those cities already destroyed, since this might be information for the enemy.
In Florida alone several hundred thousand families were on the move, few with provisions for more than one day and some with nothing at all except a car and money. So of necessity they were voracious and all-consuming as army ants. The roadside shops, restaurants, filling stations, bars, and juice stands along the four-lane highways were denuded of stocks, or put out a sign claiming so. Only the souvenir shacks, with their useless pink flamingos and tinted shells, were not picked clean. This is why strangers, swinging off these barren highways, invaded Fort Repose and other little towns off the main traffic streams.
Those people in Fort Repose who remembered rationing from the second World War also remembered what goods had been in short supply, back in ‘forty-two and ‘forty-three, and bought accordingly. There were runs on tires, coffee, sugar, cigarettes, butter, the choicer cuts of beef, and nylon stockings. Some proprietors, realizing that these items were vanishing, instituted their own rationing systems.
The more thoughtful wives bought portable radios and extra batteries, candles, kerosene lanterns, matches, lighter fluid and flints, first-aid kits, and quantities of soap and toilet paper.
When news spread that armed convicts, escaped from road gangs, had been seen near the town; Beck’s Hardware sold out of rifles, shotguns, pistols, and very nearly out of ammunition.
By afternoon the cash registers of Fort Repose were choked with currency, but many shelves and counters were bare and others nearly so. By afternoon the law of scarcity had condemned the dollar to degradation and contempt. Within a few more days the dollar, in Fort Repose, would be banished entirely as a medium of exchange, at least for the duration.
Sitting alone in his office, Edgar Quisenberry was aware of none of these facts, nor could his imagination anticipate the dollar’s fall, any more than he could have imagined the dissolution of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve System in the space of a single hour. Methodically, he read through the last batch of mail. There was nothing of any great importance, except heartening items in the Kiplinger Letter, predicting another increase in FHA mortgage rates, and better retail business in the South during the Christmas season. Also, from Detroit there was notice of a ten percent stock dividend in automobile shares in his personal portfolio. He’d certainly got in on the ground floor of that one, he thought. He hoped nothing happened to Detroit, but he had a disquieting feeling that something would, or had.
At two o’clock, as always on Saturdays, he left the bank, first setting the time lock on the vault for eight-thirty Monday morning. His car was a black Cadillac, three years old. He recalled that during the last big war automobile production had halted. He decided that on Monday, or perhaps this very afternoon, he would drive to San Marco and see what sort of a trade he could make on a new Caddy. Henrietta would be pleased, and it would be a hedge against long disruption of the economy.
When he started the engine he saw that his gas was low, and on the way home stopped at Jerry Kling’s service station. He was surprised that there was no line of cars waiting, as there had been early that morning. Then he saw the big cardboard sign with its emphatic red lettering: SORRY. NO MORE GAS.
Edgar honked and Jerry came out of the station, looking worn and limp. “Yes, Mr. Quisenberry?” Jerry said.
“That’s just to keep away tourists and floaters and such, isn’t it?” Edgar said.
“No, sir, I’m not only out of gas, I’m out of tires, spark plugs, batteries, thirty-weight oil, vulcanizing kits, drinks and candy, and low on everything else.”
“I’ve got to have gas. I’m just about out.”
“I should’ve put up that sign an hour after I opened. You know what, Mr. Quisenberry? I sold plumb out of tires before I got to thinking I needed new tires myself. I just let myself be charmed by that bell on the cash register. What a damn fool! I’ve got nothing but money.”
“I don’t know that I can get home,” Edgar said.
“I think we’ll all be walking pretty soon, Mr. Quisenberry.” Jerry sighed. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You’re an old customer. I’ve got a drum stashed away in the stockroom. I’ll let you have three gallons. Back that thing up by the ramp, so nobody’ll see.” When he had his three gallons, Edgar brought out his wallet and said, “How much?”
Jerry laughed and raised his hands in a gesture of repugnance. “Keep it! I don’t want money. What the hell’s money good for? You can’t drive it and you can’t eat it and it won’t even fix a flat.”
Edgar drove on slowly, hunched over the wheel. He knew, vaguely, that in the Second World War the Greek drachma and Hungarian pengo had become utterly worthless. And in the War of the Revolution the shilling of the Continental Congress hadn’t been worth, in the British phrase, a Continental damn. But nothing like this had ever happened to the dollar. If the dollar was worthless, everything was worthless. There was a phrase he had heard a number of times, “the end of civilization as we know it.” Now he knew what the phrase meant. It meant the end of money.
When Edgar reached home Henrietta’s car was gone. He found a note in the salver on the hall table. It read:
1:30.
Edgar—tried to get you all morning but the phone is still out of order. The radio doesn’t say much but I am frightened. Nevertheless, I am off to do the grocery shopping. I hope the stores aren’t crowded. I do think that henceforth I will shop on Tuesdays or Wednesdays instead of Saturdays. Hadn’t we better have both cars filled with gas? There may be a shortage. You remember how it was last time, with those silly A and B ration cards.