Using the firm’s own computer data, Winnie worked backwards from the packaging line and traced the feed to Agway and Blue Seal outlets throughout the metro area. The stores had been ransacked systematically over the course of many weeks. Supermarkets and food warehouses, now under armed protection, had become too risky as targets for thievery. No one thought to keep watch over the outlets of bagged farm animal feed.
Winnie learned from law enforcement that officials had detained a middle-aged woman as she left the hush-hush business. The lady was a travel agent at a small local firm, or so the story went. She’d always loved horses, and knew full well that bulk horse feed was many times cheaper per pound than boxed cereal for human consumption.
“You figure it out,” the lady chided the officers. “Before prices went through the roof, you’d have to shell out $150 for fifty pounds of Cheerios compared to ten bucks for fifty pounds of horse chow. You do the math. I did. I figured I could make a ton of money selling animal grain to moms crying over the ten dollars they’re getting these days for a few ounces of cereal. You know,” she added, “you grind that stuff up and it makes a pretty good porridge. Sticks to the ribs, honey.”
The horse feed ruse was but one of countless criminal conflagrations large and small erupting across the Midwest. At the opposite pole was a sweeping epidemic of amateurish breaking-and-entering episodes at residences. With roads impassable in many areas and police cruisers and emergency vehicles often crippled by ash dust, local and state police forces were powerless to respond to the fast rising tide of these crude burglaries.
On the home front, there was the constant stress of obtaining provisions for the house. Winnie longed for the return of the familiar bored grocery shopper and the effortless shopping routine. You needed something, fine; you drove to a market, waltzed in the aisles, pulled the object of your desire off a shelf, and paid for it. Done. So simple! Scanners did the calculating. Magic. A piece of plastic in the wallet passed for cash. More magic. You could obtain your daily bread without a single conscious thought. No more.
Abel had been on target, Winnie concluded. Disable the production or distribution system, Abel had preached, and the people of megalopolis would grow gaunt for the want of a few spuds. Lose the heartland and its farmers for any reason, and citizens everywhere would be forced to boil bark and roast insect grubs for their supper.
Winnie touched her fingers to her eyelids and rubbed them slowly, trying to drive off fatigue and tension. She tumbled out the car and stood surveying her neighborhood, shivering in the unseasonably cold summer night air. Curse the temperature. There hadn’t been a day all season that felt like suntanning weather. The gas furnace ran at night whenever the natural gas utilities could bring ash-plagued pipeline pumping stations online. Most mornings there was dust-infested frost on the windshield of the car, thick enough to scrape away.
Winnie turned from the street to the house and climbed the steps to the side entrance. The door was ajar. Alarm rippled along her spine. Never did she leave a door unlocked.
The entryway, designed to mimic wood but sheathed in steel, had been slammed with a heavy sledge-like tool, shearing away the door latch. The exposed lock mechanism had been struck hard several times until pieces of it flew out of the door and landed on the far side of the kitchen.
Winnie stepped through the portal and flicked a light switch. Damn it! Power was out again. She tiptoed into the kitchen. Every cabinet door was askew. Random contents from every drawer and cupboard littered the floor. The open pantry doors revealed clean shelves. Every can, box, bag and wrapper full of edibles was missing. There was not so much as a bottle of herbs or spice on the shelves or on the floor.
Winnie’ first instinct was to examine every particle in the room. But blood ran out of the woman’s head. The room demanded a thorough examination, but the prospect made her woozy.
She turned to the refrigerator. In it she had placed a small, precious rib eye steak packed in ice, fought over and won in the heat of a consumer battle with frantic sister supermarket shoppers. Suddenly she became obsessed with the whereabouts of the morsel of meat. She thrust her head and hands in the cold box. The appliance was naked.
“Damn it to hell,” the agent screeched into the white plastic interior of the refrigerator. “They took my steak. My steak! My goddamn steak!”
Winnie slammed the unit’s door so forcefully it rebounded and bounced against the interior wall that hid the stairs to the basement from view. Winnie careened down the basement stairs and sprinted to the far corner of the cellar to a bank of floor-to-ceiling cupboards. They too were open to the world.
When she had left the house, the shelves in the basement had been half full. They held her stash, her hoarded nutriment. She had tried mightily to create a reserve once familiar foodstuffs began disappearing from market shelves and prices began to climb wildly. The pantry was empty.
The sound of Abel’s voice floated through the barren larder. She could hear his voice pleading to all who matriculated at the Institute for Total Life Skills to abandon the pick-up-a-few-things mode of living demanded by the mass culture and build in its stead a lifestyle of permanence, sustainability and security. He cajoled his audience to put up food not just for tomorrow but also for a year and a tomorrow. Shakers had. Fundamentalist Mormons did so, as did the Amish, he’d preached. Why not the average American?
Winnie sat down on a paint can, her hands drooping to the floor. She felt disembodied, ephemeral, divorced from her emotions.
Ten minutes she sat in the basement gloom, confined to a carapace of sorrow. Winnie surveyed the cellar. It was such an uninviting tomb, never inhabited, always shunned by the living unless there was laundry to do. The walls fostered misery. There was no warmth within its confines. She craved a warm touch suddenly.
Winnie conjured up Abel’s face on the gray cement foundation walls. He was only mental mischief, but she wanted him in the flesh. His body would be sultry to the touch, his embrace a warm comfort. There was a spark there. An aura surrounded his person, rays of hope and threads of new ideas. He was exciting. He seemed kindly. He had been a target of her inquiry once, before Yellowstone, but no more.
In the basement, Winnie desired to kiss the man, to hold his warm torso close, entice him to intimacy.
Winnie rose from her paint can seat and climbed the cellar stairs to the ruined kitchen. She found it utterly alien. When would desperate citizens break in again, she wondered? Who in the neighborhood was plotting against his or her neighbors even now? Today she was a victim, as so many others around her had already been. What about tomorrow? No home was a safe haven. Whole neighborhoods were at risk. An entire community of people with empty stomachs and few prospects of filling them was a recipe for anarchy.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. There was no food in the house. “What the devil am I going find to eat tonight?” she fretted, speaking to the walls.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Following two days of cold soaking rain across the West, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 200 lifted off from Calgary International Airport at Calgary, Alberta, Canada. In minutes, it was joined by a U.S. Air Force 737 transport, assigned to escort the small plane, and a Royal Canadian Air Force harrier. Under a whitewashed morning sky, the three aircraft banked toward the serrated Canadian Rockies that framed the city, then swept southwest just west of downtown, bound for Wyoming. The summer snow line in the mountains was well down the slopes. They had the shine of peaks sporting a November snow mantle.