36 Hours: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Fiction Series (14 page)

Alex worked with the lone bagger to relocate the day’s haul from the conveyer belt to the empty carts. The groceries, which filled two carts while in the store, now required three carts to depart the premises.

The bored and oblivious checkout clerk looked at Madison and asked, “Do you have your Kroger card with you today?”

“What?” asked Madison, clearly distracted from the normal shopping experience.

“Would you like your discount? Do you have your Kroger rewards card? If not, I can sign you—”

Madison interrupted the clerk as the man behind her slammed a case of Schlitz beer on the conveyor belt, causing her to jump. “Sorry, here.”

“Your total is one thousand one hundred twenty-one dollars, thirty-four cents,” announced the clerk.

Madison reached for her phone out of her bag and immediately noticed there were no missed calls or text messages from Colton.
I hope he’s okay
. She navigated to the Chase Bank Mobile App, which was accepted by Kroger as payment. She scanned the phone to pay.

No response. She tried it again. Nothing.

“Is this machine working?” she asked, referring to the Canadian-based Moneris VX520 iTerminal mounted next to the register.

“It was,” replied the clerk. “Try a credit card.”

Madison, feeling the pressure from the probing eyes of the shoppers behind her, fumbled through her purse and found her wallet. The man behind her let out an audible sigh, followed by an obnoxious belch.

Madison found her Chase debit card and swiped it again.

Nothing. This time a message on the terminal read
Card Fail
.

Madison stared at the machine, dumbfounded. They had plenty of money in their bank account to pay for the groceries. Embarrassment was beginning to overwhelm her.

“It reads card fail,” she whispered to the clerk, or so she thought. The man behind her lifted his now empty cart and dropped it to the floor with a loud clank.

“C’mon, let’s go!” he huffed.

Madison ignored him and tried another card. Same result.
Card Fail
.

“There must be something wrong with your machine,” said Madison. The clerk stared back at her with no expression or suggestion. A store manager interrupted the transaction with an announcement over the store’s PA system.

“May I have your attention, please? Please, Kroger shoppers. May I have your attention? We are experiencing difficulty with our credit card processing company. At this time, we are only able to accept cash or check for payment.”

Madison frantically waved Alex over. “Give me your checkbook.”

“It’s in my book bag. In the truck.”

“Run out there and get it, sweetie,” said Madison.

Alex leaned in to whisper to her mother, “Mom, I don’t have that much money in my account. You do remember how much my allowance is, right?”

“Get it anyway. They’ll never know. Now, hurry. Run!”

As Alex scampered off, Madison turned to the clerk. “My daughter is going to get the checkbook.”

This brought roars of disapproval from the man behind her and several others, including a baby who was wailing uncontrollably.

“Get out of line!”

“Start over!”

“This is ridiculous!”

Madison tried to plead her case and buy time. “It’s not my fault that the credit card machine doesn’t work. My daughter will be right back. Just a moment more!”

The man behind her shoved his cart into Madison again. She was angry now.

Madison turned on the man and grabbed the front of his cart with both hands. “Stop hitting me with that cart!”

“Or what, lady?” he shouted back. “You’re a hundred and forty pounds soakin’ wet. What exactly are you gonna do, huh?”

Nothing, of course, but Madison was tired of being bullied by this crude guy. She was about to respond when one of the store managers appeared on the scene.

“What seems to be the problem here?” he asked.

“She ain’t got no money!” shouted one of the people in line.

“Yes, I do have money,” started Madison. “Your machine doesn’t work and my daughter just ran to the car to get the checkbook. She’ll be back any moment.”

“Hey, me beer’s gettin’ hot!” shouted bully boy behind her.

The store manager glanced at the man and his beer before addressing Madison. “Ma’am, perhaps we should have you step aside so that we can keep the line moving.”

Alex came running through the front entrance, holding the checkbook over her head.

“Here she comes. If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to check out and leave now.”

Chapter 26

9 Hours

2:02 p.m., September 8

Bank ATM

West End

Nashville, Tennessee

They had to force their way past the throng of new shoppers who were shoving their way into the store. Madison glanced down the aisles as they pushed their three heavy carts toward the exit. Large sections of the shelves were empty. The floors were littered with broken or damaged groceries. Many customers carried what they could, as available shopping carts were at a premium. She immediately conjured up images of countries that had recently experienced economic collapse like Venezuela.

“Hey, I need one of your carts,” said a man who followed them out of the store.

“Just a moment while we unload,” replied Madison, who immediately felt apprehensive about the man following them to their truck. Despite being in broad daylight, she imagined the man carjacking their truck and kidnapping them or worse.

As their Suburban came into view, she was actually relieved to see the small red Kia that blocked them in. At least the man following them couldn’t steal their truck. She’d figure out what to do with the offending KIA later.

The man, as it turned out, was a decent guy who wanted to secure a cart before going into the store. He needed diapers and formula for their newborn and knew he couldn’t carry much. He helped the women lay down the backseat and moved Alex’s golf clubs toward the front to make room for their groceries. He chatted briefly with her about golf and then was on his way. Madison closed the rear trunk lid and joined Alex inside. She immediately locked the doors, turned on the air conditioner, and caught her breath.

From their vantage point, they could see the melee, which best described the last senior shopping day to be held at Kroger for a long time. One woman, in a panic to pack her groceries into her small car, allowed her shopping cart to roll away, which included her kicking and screaming two-year-old. The cart almost crashed into a car that was waiting on her parking space. A Good Samaritan made the rescue, but unceremoniously lifted the two-year-old out, pointed her in the direction of the distraught mother, and ran into the store, pushing the cart to its limits.

Horns were blaring. A fistfight erupted over a stolen parking spot. Some cars were simply abandoned for lack of a better parking option, which brought Madison’s attention back to the red KIA Soul.

The words of the rude man in the store came into her mind.
You’re a hundred and forty pounds soakin’ wet.
No, I weigh one twenty-eight, thank you. She looked at the KIA again.

“Alex, how much do you think that little car weighs?”

“I don’t know, Mom,” she replied as she scrolled through her Twitter feed.

Madison answered her own question. “I think about a ton. My guess is we’re closer to three tons, maybe more.”

“What’s the point, Mom?”

“Well, I believe we’ve waited long enough for whoever this rude person is that blocked us in. It’s time to go.”

Madison put the transmission into low gear and inched forward until the massive front end of the Suburban towered over its smaller counterpart.

“Mom!” Alex yelled. “What are you doing?”

“We don’t have time for this, Alexis.” Madison gave the Suburban gas and began to push the KIA sideways. The tires on the smaller vehicle began to screech as it slid along the hot asphalt pavement. Several would-be shoppers stop to watch the commotion.

Madison was undeterred. She continued to push the KIA until it began to turn at an angle. She stopped, backed up, and pushed toward the rear of the red Soul to create a wider gap. After several back-and-forth maneuvers, the opening became wide enough for the Suburban to fit through and Madison pulled off.

She caught Alex staring at her.

“What?”

“Well, aren’t you gonna leave a note?” asked Alex.

“Nope. Besides, they wouldn’t like what I had to say anyway. We need to go find an ATM.”

It took them ten minutes to get out of the parking lot and another ten to cross the White Bridge Road intersection, which yielded three bank options. The Bank of America on the corner had a line out its front doors and the ATM line was empty. While waiting for the light to change, she saw several people walk up to the machine, express some form of disgust, and then leave or join the line of people trying to enter the bank. A security guard was doing his best to keep order, but in the one-hundred-degree heat, tempers easily flared.

She drove past SunTrust on the left, hoping the smaller, more obscure US Bank location was a better option. She was wrong. The line extended around the building into the parking lot. Madison waited to turn around at Saint Thomas West Hospital where Alex was born.

“Mom, from what I can tell, there hasn’t been any formal announcement or emergency alert about the solar flare. I got a text from my friend Janie, who said school let out early and the golf match was canceled this afternoon.”

“Try the news networks,” said Madison. She wheeled the big SUV in a U-turn and headed back towards the SunTrust ATM. Alex tuned the radio to CNN, where two people were yelling at each other about whether the White House was being irresponsible by not making a statement. One of the talking heads claimed the President was acting calm and prudent. The other complained the President was out of touch by playing with her grandchildren during a time of national crisis. This elicited an angry retort by the other argumentative combatant, who contended no such crisis existed. “
The sun is shining, big deal
,” he exclaimed.

This exchange was indicative of why Madison was disgusted with politics. Everything was politicized. A tragic school or restaurant shooting quickly became a raging debate about gun control. The poor grieving families didn’t even have a chance to learn if their loved one was dead or alive before the two sides draped themselves in the flag. While one side decreed that allowing illegal aliens to enter the country uninhibited was compassionate and the right thing to do, the other side was deemed to be racist because they disagreed. It was a never-ending battle of left versus right. Common sense took a backseat to it all.

Madison found a parking space at the bank despite the long ATM line. She instructed Alex to keep monitoring the news, and Madison also asked her to try to reach her dad again. She didn’t want to alarm Alex, but Madison was genuinely concerned about her inability to reach Colton by phone. She had no idea if he was still at the Cowboys’ complex or whether he was on a flight home. She hoped he’d caught a plane, which would explain his lack of contact with her.

While in line, she engaged in idle chat with some of the other bank customers. Incredibly, several people in line were unaware of the impending solar storm. Madison casually asked if anyone had heard about it, which piqued the interest of those within earshot. They immediately took to their smartphones to look for information.

Within a minute, everyone in line, starved for information, attempted to call friends and family. Conversations turned into panicked discussions about what it meant. One man suspected the worst-case
doomsday scenario
, as he put it. He summed it up as no power, no utilities, and no government.
Think
Mad Max, he surmised.

Those in line began to focus their attention on the person using the ATM. Madison could feel them pressing from the rear as the line grew longer. The bank’s parking lot was full, as were the drive-thru tellers.
The word was spreading
, and it had been less than an hour since the cell phone alert was issued.

Madison wished that she had more than one debit card. The most she could withdraw in a given day was six hundred dollars. After her experience at Kroger, she decided that having some cash on hand was a good idea. She had checked her balance this morning, which was part of her daily routine.

When it was her turn, Madison nervously entered her PIN number incorrectly twice. The pressure of the day and the people behind her caused her to lose focus. On the third try, she succeeded. As the transaction was being completed, she opted for a written receipt, hoping it might provide her a clue as to whether Colton had made a similar withdrawal.

She stepped to the side of the ATM and read the printed balance. She quickly did the math in her head. Only her earlier purchases and the cash withdrawal appeared to have been taken out of their account. Colton had not used the card today. As was her habit, she counted the money dispensed by the ATM machine. Madison normally would do that before leaving the ATM, but the long line forced her out of her routine.

It also caused her to lose awareness of her surroundings. Suddenly, a man rushed her and tackled her to the ground. He was grabbing for the money she held tightly in her fist.

“Give me the money,” he growled in Madison’s ear, while pinning her down with his knee. Madison could feel blood dripping down her neck where her chin had struck a rock. He was grabbing at her wrist. When he grabbed her hand and bent it backward, she lost her grip and let go of the money. The twenty-dollar bills blew into the grass, bouncing aimlessly until they wedged against a row of liriope plants.

She tried to yell for help, but couldn’t vocalize the words. The man crawled over her, his knees driving the air out of her lungs. As he scrambled for the money, which was now blowing along the grass toward the hedges, he kicked her in the face. Madison was stunned.
Why isn’t somebody helping me?