“Yeah, but it caused something called an electromagnetic pulse.”
“Who cares?”
“Why don’t we sit down?” I said. “And I’ll explain why we care.”
Jimmy is a smiler. He smiles when he sees you and he smiles when he’s pissed off and he smiles when he wraps his brand new 56-degree wedge around a tree. Jimmy is also not much of a sitter. He’s more of a pacer. After I explained the details of what the EMP had done, and the effort to repair every chip and transistor and transformer in the world, he jumped to his feet and traveled around the room as if he’d snorted four lines of coke.
“So now what?” he asked. “If we do nothing, we’ll starve to death, right?”
By now Amy had come downstairs and was sitting next to Chelsea, who was still sleeping so deeply she might have been comatose. Bart sat next to Keri and me.
“I have an idea,” I said.
“What is it?”
“The company I used to work for shipped stuff all over the country. But fuel costs were so high, and the need for our products so time-sensitive, that we built distribution centers in strategic places to make shipping more efficient.”
“So?”
“So, H.E.B. and Albertson’s and Walmart surely do the same thing. A place like that would be a lot bigger than a grocery store and wouldn’t sell to the public. So if there’s one nearby, it’s probably still stocked.”
Jimmy’s smile, having faltered, seemed poised to recover. But Bart was not as impressed.
“Don’t you think someone else already thought of that? Like people who live near one of these warehouses? They were probably knocking on the door yesterday.”
“I don’t know. Everyone who could bought food yesterday. And this is still just Day Two. Most people probably don’t know what’s going on or realize how difficult a recovery would be. They’re just waiting for someone to turn everything back on.”
“So what’s your plan?” asked Jimmy.
“I think we should put together a group—loyal friends, people who owe you money, whoever you can trust—and take the place with force.”
Jimmy’s smile returned to its normal wattage. He laughed.
“Storm a Walmart warehouse like a platoon of soldiers? This isn’t Mad Max, you crazy cat.”
Bart, though, wasn’t as skeptical.
“Hold on, Jimmy. If that H-E-B kid was right, we either need to head for the sticks to hunt deer and rabbits, or we need to find food in the city. And according to Aiden, the grocery stores are already empty.”
“All right,” said Jimmy. “But if we’re wrong, and the government fixes this, we’ll go to jail. They’ll lethal inject us for treason.”
“It’s a risk,” I agreed. “But if we wait for the government to show up and they don’t, someone else will hit the warehouse first. Then what do we do?”
“This isn’t a bad plan,” said Bart. “A warehouse full of food means we could survive a long time.”
“But not forever,” Jimmy said.
“No, but long enough for everyone else to starve. By then there would be enough food for whoever is left. Right, Aiden?”
“Exactly. And we could save other people if we wanted. Like, if we controlled the warehouse, we could let in the people we choose.”
“You’re crazy. Both of you. Even if we manage to get, I don’t know, five guys—”
“I’d say ten,” said Bart.
“Ten guys. We have to absolutely trust them. We have to feed them until we get in. And once we’re inside, and everyone outside is starving, won’t the hungry people attack? We’re talking about serious organization. That’s the only way this would work.”
“So you think it could?” I asked, feeling hopeful.
“Maybe it could work. If we ran it right.”
“What about friends?” Amy said. Until now, neither her nor Keri had said anything for a while. “What about my family?”
“Who said you’re invited?” asked Jimmy sharply.
Amy’s eyes widened and she looked down at her hands.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Of course you can come, baby. But there will be hard choices to make if we do this. I want you all to understand that.”
Amy nodded without looking up at him.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us if we’re going to do this,” Jimmy said. “We’ve got to find our guys and outfit them. I’ve got some guns but we’ll need more. And—”
The harsh look in his eyes made me wonder if he had suddenly changed his mind.
“What?” I asked.
“So, Mr. Smart Guy. Maybe there’s a grocery warehouse somewhere in Dallas. How are we gonna find it? It’s not like we can hop on the fucking Internet.”
I’d been wondering this myself. I was hoping Jimmy or Bart knew.
“If you put together a team,” I said, “one of them is bound to know, right?”
“And what if they don’t?”
“I know where one is,” said a broken voice. For a moment I thought someone else was in the house with us, but then I realized the voice had come from Chelsea, who still hadn’t opened her eyes.
“Are you sure?” asked Jimmy.
“Yeah. My mom lives like a mile away from a Walmart one. I’ll tell you where it is, but you have to promise to take my mom, too. And whoever Amy and Keri want to bring.”
Jimmy looked back at me and smiled. His whole body seemed to glow with electricity.
“See there?” he said. “Already this thing is getting harder to manage.”
Even though everyone agreed with my plan, and that time was something we could ill afford to waste, the next step had not been to gather weapons or sit down and map out a strategy. Jimmy thought a better idea was to relax and recover from the drug-induced stupor of the past two days.
I understood the desire to rest. In the months since I lost my job, I’ve wasted time alternating between nights at the bar and days recovering from those nights. It’s a terrible, debilitating cycle that robs a man of productivity, of his will to succeed at anything other than remain in the cycle. But that morning, for the first time in nearly a year, a worthwhile goal stood before me. I could see a real reason to put aside the bottle and do something constructive. And no one else would get off the couch.
At the first opportunity, Keri pulled Jimmy aside and explained her situation with the painkillers. He took her into the kitchen, and a minute later she was back on the sofa with a calm look on her face. Then Jimmy went back upstairs with Amy.
The living room was outfitted with a sectional sofa, gas-log fireplace, and a giant television. On either side of the TV stood huge shelves of Blu-ray discs; beneath it sat a couple of stereo components and an AppleTV console. It seemed so pointless, so hopeless, to wonder if the television would ever be watched again. The Blu-ray movies were movies no longer. They were flat, useless discs. An ottoman stood between the sectional sofas, and on it lay an iPad, also useless. I’m not much of a reader, but I might have picked up a book to pass the time had I seen one anywhere. Instead I just stared out of habit at the dark television set.
What point, I wondered, was God trying to make with all this? And what would come next? There was no reason to report to work. No television to watch. There was no way to get news and the only method of available travel was by pedal or foot.
Some people, like the family we saw earlier, were taking proactive steps to survive. Maybe they were marching to a safe place in the country. Maybe they owned a cabin on a private pond where they enjoyed lazy summer afternoons, fishing or swimming or watching NASCAR on satellite television. The dad might be one of those preppers who had seriously contemplated the fall of Western civilization. I knew guys like this, men who approached survival like a video game. They acquired assault rifles and purchased supplies and preached to whoever would listen how, when the Fall came, they would be ready. While the rest of us easygoing city slickers lived paycheck to paycheck, buying food daily, never planning for emergencies, they were doing the hard and thankless work of survival.