I looked at Keri.
“Let’s try it,” she said.
As we walked away, the fellow in the Whataburger line called out.
“You got cash, man?”
“A little.”
“How about sharing a little green with the man that gave you the 4-1-1?”
“Sorry,” I said. “We don’t have much.”
“Oh yeah? Or maybe you’re full of shit.”
“Be cool, man,” I said. “Be cool.”
Keri and I waited for a while in the Saltgrass line, but eventually a broad-shouldered fellow marched outside and announced the food had run out. There were a lot of groans and a few lazy threats, but the crowd seemed to understand the supply wasn’t endless. Half the line shuffled over to Whataburger, and as I watched them, I noticed the 4-1-1 guy had barely moved. We decided to walk farther down the road to see what else we could find. By then my mind had returned to its normal, human size and I spotted two more restaurants ahead: Ruby Tuesday and Red Lobster. But when we reached them, we could see they were both dark and apparently deserted.
“I’m really hungry now,” Keri said.
“Me, too. You don’t have anything at home?”
“All I can remember is chicken nuggets and edamame in the freezer. But there’s an H-E-B a little farther up if we want to buy groceries.” “Maybe we should do that. I was just thinking that even if we find a restaurant with food, what will we do for breakfast in the morning?”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
It was another ten or so minutes to the H-E-B, where we found a sizeable group of people, mostly men, loitering in the parking lot.
“Don’t bother unless you got cash,” said a fellow as we approached the front door. He was short and slight, but the look on his face was angry and formidable, like a miniature dog posturing in front of a Doberman. He leered at Keri for a moment and then looked back at me. “You got cash?”
“We have a little cash.”
“Ain’t much food left, anyway,” said another nearby fellow. He ran fingers through yellow hair and looked up at the sky. By now it was almost dark, and the new star was near the horizon. It was brighter than anything I had ever seen in the night sky, even the moon.
“That’s why we should go in there and take what we want,” said the first guy. “We deserve to eat like anybody.”
“It ain’t time to start robbing stores,” said the fellow with the yellow hair. “It’s only been one day.”
“That’s right! It’s been a whole day and we ain’t heard shit from no cops or the government. Nothing. It’s like we ain’t even in America, man. Like we’re some kind of third world country.”
The guy was still muttering as we approached the store. The front windows were almost dark. What light there was seemed to be chemical in nature, and inside I could see they had set up propane lanterns and candles. A security guard greeted us immediately.
“This store only accepts cash,” he barked.
“We have cash,” I said.
“Let’s see it.”
“Pardon me?”
“Look, buddy,” he said. “We got people coming in here pretending to buy so they can walk out of here with shit in their pockets. Show me some cash or I’ll show you the way out.”
I nodded at Keri and she produced a twenty from the waistband of her leggings. There were a couple of hundreds in her shoe. We’d left the rest back at her apartment.
“Fine,” he said. “We don’t have much food left, anyway.”
He wasn’t kidding. I had never seen a grocery store with shelves so barren. If you didn’t know otherwise, you might have thought the building was being remodeled. The only ready-to-eat items we found were a loaf of blueberry breakfast bread and a package of Fritos shaped like corkscrews. Scattered around the store were other items less easy to prepare, like baking mixes, spices, and canned goods in the variety of beets and turnip greens. The only produce left were vegetables of little nutritional value: radishes, shallots, limes.
I had expected the store, like the restaurants, to be packed with desperate customers. But the only other shopper we saw was a hollow-eyed old woman who wouldn’t make eye contact and seemed to be whispering to herself.
“I feel like a ghost,” Keri said at one point. “Like I’ve come back from the dead to haunt this place. It’s fucking creepy.”
“I can’t believe all the food is gone.”
Laugh all you want at our ignorance. But we were accustomed to being assaulted by information, all day, every day. Remember how your phone would light up every five seconds when a news alert came through? You had Facebook reminding you of the past and Instagram barking about someone’s story and “Guess What Donald Trump Just Said? Tonight at 6!” It didn’t seem like a real disaster without the nonstop news coverage.
There was one checkout line open and it was manned by a sleepy-looking kid of about sixteen. He was tall and wiry and his earlobes were punctured with iron rivets.
“Where is everyone?” Keri asked him.
“We’re out of food,” said the kid. “After that woman leaves I think we’re going to close.”
“Was it a lot busier before?” I asked.
The kid looked at me like I hadn’t spoken English.
“Did you sleep all day? Don’t you know what’s happened?”
Keri and I looked at each other.
“We know something terrible is going on,” I said. “But still we didn’t expect the store to be so empty.”
The kid laughed.
“Dude,” he said. “It’s the end of the freaking world.”
“What?” said Keri.
“The supernova. It killed everything. How do you not know this?” “We’re not idiots,” I growled. “We can see things aren’t running. But surely the government will fix it soon.”
The kid looked at me with an expression of such pained tolerance that I was tempted to punch him in the face.
“Let me explain what an EMP is,” he said. “Then I’m going home to my mom.”
At the end of his speech, the checker informed us the store was out of bags and piled our meager groceries into a cardboard box that had previously contained jars of Miracle Whip. Then we headed for the door, tearing immediately into the bag of Frito twists.
The darkness outside was overpowering. Suffocating. By now the new star (the supernova?) had fallen below the horizon, and the other stars were so bright they didn’t seem real. But they didn’t cast much light on our path.
We should never have been caught so far away from Keri’s apartment after dark. Partly because the walk would take forever, but mostly because of all the people who were still outside, people we could barely see in the pitch-black darkness.
“Aiden,” Keri said. “Do you think that guy is right?”
“I don’t know. He sounded pretty smart.”
“I’m scared. This is way worse than a war.”
After we crossed the H-E-B parking lot, when we reached the sidewalk, a man stepped out of the bushes and blocked our path. His gaze focused somewhere between Keri and me, rather than directly at either of us, and his fists were balled at his sides. It was the yellow-haired guy we’d seen before.
“We need your food,” he said.
I stepped in front of Keri just as the guy lifted his shirt to reveal a handgun that was jammed into the front of his pants.
“We gave you a chance to loan us money and you didn’t. So hand over the food.”
Normally I’m not aware of my beating heart, but in that moment it seemed ready to burst out of my chest. Keri put her arms around me and pressed her face into my back. She whimpered and sniffled but, admirably, didn’t break down or scream.