Sela wasn’t sure when having a ham radio had become a sign of being a nut; she knew at least one other person in the valley who owned one. The thing was, Jernigan had never seemed like a nut to her—the opposite, in fact. He struck her as a man who had dealt with some hard realities.
She leaned on the front counter while she tried to square her instincts with her doubts. What if—? “What if he’s right?” It was an alarming idea, one she hesitated to voice. Immediately she had to fight down a sense of panic, because she couldn’t even imagine what life would be like without electricity for months.
Carol stopped sweeping and leaned on the broom. She wasn’t much wider than that broom, truth be told. She rolled her eyes and made a face. “I still have my Y2K windup radio. You were a kid when the calendar went from 1999 to 2000, so you might not have paid any attention to all the hysteria, but seriously, there were people who thought the same thing would happen when computers tried and failed to make the switch. Banks would collapse. Power plants would go offline. Chaos! Pfft.” She started sweeping again. “Nothing happened. I’d stocked up on enough toilet paper I didn’t have to buy any for a year. And I have a nifty windup radio for emergencies, not that I’ve ever needed it.”
Maybe Carol was right, and nothing would happen.
Then again . . . what if it did? She’d be silly if she acted on the warning of a man she barely knew and nothing happened, but if she didn’t act and his warning was right on target, then she was stupid.
She’d rather be silly than stupid. Silly was embarrassing at worst, while stupid could be deadly. That wasn’t a chance she was willing to take.
She grabbed a shopping basket and started filling it with a few essentials. She wouldn’t clean off the shelves, wouldn’t lock the front door and close for the day, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a few things set back, things that she’d need anyway, even if they weren’t used right away.
While Sela was grabbing some tuna and canned chicken, Carol decided to sweep down the canned meat aisle. After watching her for a few seconds, Carol made another scoffing sound. “If you’re preparing for doomsday, don’t forget to pick up some mayo.”
“I won’t. I’m just getting what we’ll use anyway. If nothing happens, then no big deal. I can put everything back on the shelves.”
She walked up and down the aisles, her mind buzzing. She liked to be organized and controlled, but abruptly she felt neither. Everything around her was the same, but she felt lost. She didn’t know what to do, couldn’t get her mind around the scope of what he’d said could happen, so she concentrated on what he’d actually said. She had some cash, but not enough to get them through a long-term disaster. What good would cash do anyway? But he’d said get cash, so she’d get cash. If the solar storm happened and the grid went down, the way Jernigan said it might, she wouldn’t be able to access her bank. The credit and debit card charges she had in her cash register would be worthless.
“Just for today,” she said in a voice just loud enough for Carol to hear, “we’ll take cash only. Tell everyone the credit card reader is out of order.” She hadn’t taken checks for years, so that wouldn’t be a problem.
“What about the gas pumps?”
She thought about it for a minute. Tourists would be headed for home, if Jernigan was right and an alert went out. At least, she assumed so. She would, if she was away on vacation; she’d burn the highway up getting home. The tourists would need gas. Everyone would need gas. “We’ll leave them, for now.” She didn’t want people who didn’t have enough cash to fill their tanks to end up stranded in her parking lot, or down the road. It was a decent compromise, at least for now. That would change if there really was a warning.
Again she felt a sense of unreality as she tried to deal with the realities of the possible situation. Civilization and culture as she knew it, as everyone knew it, would vanish in an instant. This was too big. There was no way to prepare.
She headed for the cookie aisle. Carol called out, “If anyone else had told you to prepare for Armageddon, would you have taken it seriously? Or are you stocking up for the coming apocalypse because Hottie McStud is the one who told you it was coming?”
“I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “I don’t know that I believe him. It’s just . . . why gamble that he’s wrong?” She took a deep breath. “And it isn’t just me, it’s you and Olivia, too.”
That was what terrified her, she realized. They were family, she and Carol and Olivia, and they didn’t have many other relatives. There were a few scattered cousins, and Olivia’s older brother, Joshua, who was in the military, but here it was just the three of them. If anything happened to Carol or Olivia because she, Sela, hadn’t been prepared enough, she’d never forgive herself.
They’d suffered enough loss, all of it in the past ten years. Olivia’s parents—Carol’s daughter and her husband—in a senseless car crash. Sela’s own parents of natural causes—a slow cancer and a quick aneurysm—three and five years later. Carol’s husband had died after a heart attack four years ago, less than a year after Sela’s divorce.
She’d lost enough. She would damn well do everything she could to keep what remained of her family safe.
Their lives were so entwined she couldn’t imagine being any other way. They lived in a small subdivision within easy walking distance of the store and each other, in houses that were similar on the outside, though wildly different inside. Sela was a minimalist. Carol never met a knickknack she didn’t like. Most importantly, Carol wasn’t prepared for more than a couple of days without power. She’d decided that she didn’t need a generator, because Sela had one, and if there was a power outage she and Olivia would just stay with Sela until the power came back on. Both houses did have fireplaces, though Carol hadn’t had a real fire in hers in years. That might be about to change.
Suddenly it seemed to Sela that she could take everything in her own store and not have enough for them, not for months. And it wasn’t just Carol and Olivia. What would happen when a friend or neighbor showed up, and they needed something? Her family came first, but it would be damn hard to turn people away. Shit. She stared at the pitiful stash she’d accumulated.
No way was this enough.
She took a deep breath. “Of everyone here in the valley, who would you choose to believe when it comes to surviving a catastrophe?”
The two women stared at each other, and Sela knew they were both picturing their friends and acquaintances, and measuring them against the tough, grim, hard-muscled man whose eyes said he’d seen more than they could ever imagine, or want to imagine.
“Hot Buns Steelbody,” Carol said reluctantly, coining a new term for Jernigan.
They shared another look, then Sela said, “Watch the store for a while.” She put the last of what she’d gathered in the office. “I’m going to town.”
“For what?” Carol asked.
“Smart things we need to do. Call your pharmacy and get refills on all your medications, and I’ll swing by and pick them up.”
“They aren’t due, insurance won’t—” Carol began, then said, “Oh. Forget insurance, we’ll pay for them ourselves. Right? Will pharmacies do that?”