Surviving the Fall (Surviving the Fall 1)

First in the cart were sacks of beans; black, red and pinto. Next went every spare bag of rice she could lay her hands on, both white and brown. Once her cart was half-full with rice and beans she pushed the heavy cart to the next aisle and began throwing canned soups, vegetables and fruits into the cart. As she struggled to turn the over-burdened cart towards the front of the store, she heard a faint electrical hum that grew louder by the second until—POP!

As the lights in the store blinked out, the screaming began. The only light available to see by came in through the front windows, which were nearly completely covered by advertisements. Realizing that things were about to get extremely hairy, Dianne barreled down the aisle and skidded around the turn at the end, knocking over the endcap as she worked to keep the cart upright. Ahead of her, the chaos had grown to a level she could scarcely believe. The cashiers had all but fled their posts, leaving the customers fighting to push their carts out through the checkout lanes to escape the store. People of all ages fought viciously with each other, though she was somewhat relieved to see that the fighting hadn’t escalated past fists and using shopping carts as battering rams.

Since Dianne was off to the side of the checkout and away from the center of the chaos, she took a few seconds to dig through her purse and pull out several twenty-dollar bills. She shouted at the lone clerk who remained at his post, a skinny, scrawny teenager wearing a shirt and pants that were two sizes too large for him.

“Hey!” Dianne shouted at him again, and he turned to look at her, wide-eyed. “Here!” Dianne wasn’t about to leave without paying, and she balled up the money and threw it at him. It landed on the floor next to him and he scooped it up quickly. Without power, the cash register refused to open and no one could pay with a credit card, so Dianne wasn’t exactly sure what he could do with the money. She still felt better than she would have if she had simply dashed out the front of the store without even trying to pay.

As the cashier picked up Dianne’s money, the people who were at the front of the line realized that they weren’t going to be able to pay with their cards, and began moving their items back into their carts. Sensing that there was about to be a mad dash for the door, Dianne pushed against the heavy cart and rolled it towards the automatic doors, not bothering to stop. Designed to open on hinges in case of emergencies, the doors gave way as soon as the cart pushed against them, allowing her a quick escape from the store. As she turned the cart to the left, heading for the side of the store where she parked the truck, the screaming and shouting from behind her took on a new, fevered pitch as the hordes of customers decided to abandon their attempts to pay for their goods and resort to simply running out with as much as they could carry.

As Dianne rounded the corner to the side of the building, she looked back and saw the first stream of people exiting the store and running towards the parking lot. Glass shattered behind them as two people absorbed in a fistfight barreled through the front window and tumbled out the front. Shaking her head, Dianne turned back around to look at her truck, only to stop as she saw that she wasn’t alone.

Approaching the rear of the truck, Dianne could see two men standing on the left side, both wearing blue jeans and hoodies and wielding crowbars. One of the men stood off to the side while his accomplice alternated between smashing at the driver’s side window and the back left window with the crowbar, grunting as it simply bounced off the reinforced glass without leaving so much as a scratch. “Dammit… how the hell are you supposed to get through this?” The man hitting the glass grumbled to the other, who mumbled something unintelligible in return.

“Hey!” Dianne pulled the shopping cart to a stop and shouted at the men. They turned abruptly and stared at her as she reached behind her back and pulled out a snub-nosed .45 revolver and drew down on them. “Get the hell away from my truck! Now!”

Caught unawares, the man who had been beating on the window dropped his crowbar and fled, leaving the other one to shout at him before turning back to Dianne. “Hey! Get back here you idiot! Oh screw off, lady, and give me the keys before I beat your head in.” The man took a step towards Dianne and raised the crowbar. She responded by calmly pulling back the hammer on the revolver and taking careful aim at the man’s chest.

“I said to get the hell away from my truck.” Dianne’s tone was menacing, and the man stopped, glancing between her face and the revolver a few times before making his decision. He charged Dianne, getting no further than two steps before she squeezed the trigger. It had been several weeks since she had last practiced firing the revolver, and she had forgotten how much it kicked, not to mention how much noise it made. Her would-be assailant screamed in pain as the hollow point bullet tore along the side of his ribcage, tumbling and rolling as it went.

“Bitch!” He shouted as he scrambled to alter his path and get away, flinging the crowbar in her direction as he ran away from the truck and pursued his accomplice. So focused was Dianne on keeping the revolver trained on him in case he decided to charge her again that she didn’t even notice the crowbar arcing through the air until it slammed against the side of her head. The heavy piece of metal hit her skull directly above her right eye, sending an explosion of light cascading through her brain. She nearly dropped to one knee from the force of the impact, but managed to stay upright by grabbing onto the cart with her left hand while her right began to shake as she kept the revolver trained on the man as he ran into the parking lot and soon disappeared.

It took all of Dianne’s willpower to fight through the explosive pain in her head without falling to the ground, but she slowly tucked the gun into the holster at the small of her back and pushed the cart up next to the back of the truck. Keeping her blurred vision trained on the direction the two men had run, she started stacking everything from the store into the back of the truck until the cart was empty, then she moved around to the driver’s side door. She pulled at the handle twice before remembering that she needed the keys, which she quickly retrieved and used to unlock the truck. She jumped in, locked the doors and took a deep breath.

“Mom?”

Dianne jumped in her seat and let out a short yelp, the pain having momentarily made her forget that her kids were still in the back seat. She turned around and pulled off the blanket that was covering them to reveal their terrified faces as they crouched on the back floor. “Mark! Jacob! Josie! Are you okay?”

“We’re fine, mom.” Mark got up off the floor and crawled forward into the passenger’s seat.

“Those men—they didn’t hurt you?”

Mark shook his head. “No; we heard them talking outside the truck for a few minutes before they started trying to break the windows. We stayed still like you told us to, though.”

Dianne leaned over and wrapped her arms around Mark, then bent back to squeeze Jacob and Josie’s hands as they climbed back into their seats. “Good work, all of you!”

“Were they trying to get into the car?” Jacob was trying to put on a brave face, but his shaking voice betrayed the fact that he was still scared.

Dianne nodded. “They were. But they’re gone now.” Dianne turned back and looked toward the parking lot, still seeing no sign of the two would-be thieves. “We need to get home, though.”

“Mom, are you bleeding?” Mark pointed at the gash above Dianne’s eye. The mere mention of the wound caused Dianne to suddenly remember it, and she touched a finger to it, wincing in pain and pulling back a pair of fingers covered with dripping blood.

“Yep, looks like it. Can you find some napkins, or a cloth or something in here for me? You two—” Dianne looked in the rearview mirror. “Got your seatbelts on?” Jacob and Josie nodded and Dianne threw the truck into gear and mumbled to herself. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

As they pulled out of the grocery store parking lot and out onto the road, Mark and Jacob looked out the right-hand windows of the truck at the mayhem in the parking lot. The people who had been inside the store had taken their battle out into the parking lot, where fights were going down for shopping carts full of food and other supplies.

“What are they doing, mom?” Jacob asked from the back seat.

“They’re… worried, Jacob. They’re worried and scared, and sometimes when people get worried and scared, they act like that.”

“Do you know what’s going on?” Mark kept his nose pressed to the glass as they made another turn, slowly making their way back to the house.

“Something very bad happened, something to do with people’s cars and phones and other things.”

“Are we gonna be okay, mommy?” Josie piped up from the back seat.

Dianne adjusted the rearview mirror and smiled bravely at her daughter, who was busy kicking her feet and looking around the truck. “We’re going to be just fine, baby. Just fine.”

Chapter 9