One Second After [48]
"Hell, there were even people going through the fast-food places by the interstate waving hundreds of dollars wanting to buy up the burgers uncooked.
"The smart ones, though, they pilled into the three big markets in town, and it went from lines twenty deep to suddenly just people pushing out the door."
"Did anyone try to stop them?" And he looked at Tom. Tom sighed.
"John, we're talking about our neighbors here. Damn it all, I saw folks from my church in there, parents of my kids' friends. Yeah, I tried to stop them, but I'll be damned if we were going to shoot them."
"Somewhere around twenty people died anyhow," Kate said. "Mostly collapses, heart attacks. A display case in Ingram's was shattered; someone fell into it, and bled to death."
"John, people just pushed past that woman even as she died," Tom said quietly.
John looked out the window to Bartlett's VW as it puttered off, leaving behind a stack of boxes, and headed back up Montreat Road.
"John, it was surreal," Charlie said. "Everybody on foot, the streets filled with people, I think the most coveted item yesterday was a supermarket shopping cart. Every last one has been looted and people were just walking up and down the street pushing their loads home."
"That's why the heart attacks," Doc Kellor finally interjected.
John looked at his old friend. Kellor, who as a very young general practitioner had brought Mary into the world, was with her when she left. He now tended to Jennifer and usually would drop over to the house once a month or so, to "check on my favorite girl," and then stay for a scotch and a round of chess. It rankled him that nine times out of ten John won.
"Fear, combined with people actually having to walk more than fifty yards," Doc Kellor continued. "There's been something like three hundred deaths since this started."
"Three hundred?"
"Why not?" Kellor said dryly. "You forget how fragile we really are, the most pampered generations in the history of humanity. Heart attacks, quite a few just damn stupid accidents, at least eight murders, and several suicides. To put it coldly, my friends, all the ones who should have died years ago, would have died years ago without beta-blockers, stents, angioplasties, pacemakers, exotic medications, well, now they're dying all at once."
John glared at Kellor for a moment, wondering what else he was thinking.
"It even hit pacemakers?" Charlie asked. "Good God, my mother has one."
Everyone looked at him.
"She's in Florida; I don't know how she is... ." And his voice trailed off.
"I'm sorry, Charlie," Kellor said, "but I've got to be blunt. Some yes, strangely, are still working, but how long the batteries will hold, well, I guess that's a countdown for them. But some died within minutes or hours."
John looked back at Charlie.
"You're going to have to take control, Charlie," and John said it sharply, a touch of the "command voice," in his tone, to shock Charlie back to the reality of the meeting. "Clamp down hard or it's going to get worse. So far we're just in the first stage of panic here."
"What do you mean ?"
"People grabbing what they think they need, but not many thinking yet about a week from now, a month from now." He paused. "A year from now. Have you held a public meeting to discuss with people what happened and what to do?"
"What a disaster," Kate sighed. "Yeah, last night. Five or six hundred showed up; it was hard to get the word out. It almost made it worse. The moment Charlie started talking about EMPs and nuclear bursts, some folks just heard 'nuclear' and went crazy, saying they were going home to dig shelters."
"Same as in Charlotte, according to Don Barber," John said. "When the realization finally hits that this is the long haul, people will start looking at each other, wondering if a neighbor has an extra can of food in their basement."
"Or an extra vial of medicine hidden in a cooler," Kellor said quietly, and John knew he was talking about him