Jacks Magic Beans

Angie nodded at the Chinese restaurant, adjoined to the supermarket. The door was slightly ajar. The smell of cooking meat drifted out of the building. Despite his terror, Jack’s mouth watered.

“Listen,” Angie mouthed.

Jack cocked his head and focused. After a moment, he heard it—a slight rustling sound, followed by a crunching noise. Someone walking on broken glass, perhaps, and trying to be stealthy about it.

Gripping her weapon tightly, Angie crept toward the open door.

Something zipped by them—an angry bee. A second later, they heard the shot.

“Get down,” Jack shouted.

Angie was already ahead of him. She flung herself to the pavement, skinning her elbows and knees. Another blast boomed across the parking lot. Ducking behind a toppled shopping cart, Jack saw a brief flash of light from inside the restaurant.

“Get out of here,” a man screamed. “Get the fuck away from me, you crazy bastards!”

Unable to seek cover without becoming a target, Angie cast a terrified glance at Jack. Still cowering behind the shopping cart, he motioned at her to stay down.

“Hey,” he shouted. “Stop shooting! We don’t want to hurt you. We’re not like the others!”

The unseen man responded by firing another round. A car windshield exploded nearby. Fragments of glass rained down on the pavement. When the echoes of the gunshot finally died down, they heard the shooter yelling.

“The whole fucking world’s gone insane. But you won’t get me!”

“We’re not trying to,” Jack insisted. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. We just want to go home. Please!”

“Bullshit! You’re like everybody else. Bug-fuck crazy. They were cooking people in here. Cooking people who were still alive. Look at this grill! Who would do something like this?”

“Are you okay?” Jack called. “Are you injured? Do you need help?”

“You’re trying to trick me. I let you come in, and you’ll kill me. You think I was born yesterday, you crazy fucker?”

“We’re not crazy,” Angie yelled. “We’re like you. We just escaped from the grocery store.”

Jack decided to try a different tactic. “My name’s Jack. This is Angie. What’s your name?”

“Fuck you, Jack!”

“Why did you tell him our names?” Angie whispered.

“I’m trying to calm him down.”

“Well, I don’t want him knowing who I am. He just tried to kill us. Did it ever occur to you that he could be one of them? Maybe he’s trying to lure us in?”

“He just said the same thing about us, Angie.”

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

“Get out of here,” the man hollered. “I’m not telling you again. If you don’t leave right the fuck now, I’ll drop you right there.”

Jack cupped his hands over his mouth. “Are you on Prozac?”

The man didn’t reply.

“If you are,” Jack shouted, “then you need to keep taking it. You’ll be okay as long as you stay medicated. We’re leaving now. We don’t want any trouble. Okay?”

Silence.

“Are you listening? Don’t shoot us, man!”

Slowly, excruciatingly, Angie crawled towards Jack. She held her breath, anticipating another shot, expecting to feel a bullet slam into her—but the man in the restaurant had fallen silent. When she reached Jack, the two of them crab-walked to a nearby vehicle. They ducked down behind it, breathing hard.

“Well,” Angie panted, “there’s one crazy person who’s not dead yet.”

“I still don’t think so.” Jack wiped the sweat from his forehead with his t-shirt. “I don’t think he was crazy.”

“He tried to kill us!”

“Because he was afraid. And I think that’s all it was. He’s like us—he’s scared. Paranoid.”

“And that’s what we’ve got to look forward to? Paranoia? Shooting at everyone, be they friend or foe?”

“Only if we give in to it.”

He got quiet. His head hung low and his shoulders slumped. At first, Angie thought he was just waiting to see if the man in the restaurant had forgotten about them. The she realized he was sulking.

“What’s wrong?” Angie asked.

“I’ve been thinking,” Jack said. “When we get to a safer location, we need to check the expiration date on these pills.”

“They won’t have any,” Angie reminded him. “We filled the prescription ourselves. We didn’t print out one of those little labels that has the expiration date. But usually, I think it’s about a year.”

“Well, after we check on our families, our next stop needs to be another pharmacy, so we can load up on more.”

Angie sighed. “So that’s our life now? We’re going to be drugstore cowboys, spending every day looking for more and more magic beans?”

“As fucked up as it is, yes. We need Prozac even more than we need food and water. Without Prozac, we’re screwed. I mean, without it, we might as well just give up right now and march back there and let that guy shoot us. We need more.”

“No,” Angie said. “What we need is a fucking pharmacist. With no labs producing it, how long before we run out of magic beans?”

“One step at a time, my fellow giant-killer. One step at a time.”

They slowly crossed the parking lot, taking deliberate steps and picking their way through the wreckage. Then they walked down the main drag, heading away from the relative safety of the store. Both of them felt eyes upon them, but when they glanced behind, there was no sign of the man with the gun.

The city skyline loomed in the distance. Columns of smoke rose into the sky. Massive fires burning on the freeway, washing the bellies of the clouds in a wavering orange glow. They saw signs of an explosion. The burned out shell of a tanker trunk sat smoldering on the median strip. The overpass had collapsed, burying the road beneath it in a mountainous pile of rubble. Chunks of concrete lay on top of crushed cars.

They reached an intersection and came across the first dead body. Then another. Then a dozen. Then two dozen. And then hundreds. Their revulsion grew with each city block. The streets resembled the grocery store’s interior, but on a grander and more gruesome scale. The only thing moving were the birds—crows, gulls, pigeons; they swooped down from the rooftops, perching on the mounds of corpses and feasting on the choicest morsels. Dogs and cats and even a few rats were present as well, not quite as bold as the birds—but they would be by the time the sun went down.

Jack and Angie walked in silence. They stopped at a restaurant and grabbed some napkins, and then stuck the napkins in their noses to block out the smell. It was already bad. It would be unbearable after the corpses had laid out in the sun for a few days. After a while, the silence began to get to them both. Jack tried calling out once, but the sound of his voice echoing through the empty streets disturbed him even more than the carnage all around them.

“Jack?”

“What?”

“Are you sure we won’t change?” Angie asked. “Are you sure we won’t become like them?”

“Yes,” Jack lied. “As long as we take our meds, we should be fine.”

They went out into the world, and hoped they wouldn’t wake the sleeping giant.

AFTERWORD

Jack’s Magic Beans started with the opening sentence.

Okay. Yes, I know that’s how all stories start, but in this case, that’s all I had—the opening sentence. I had no ideas about plot or characters or even a title. All I had was an opening sentence. I typed: The lettuce started talking to Ben Mahoney halfway through his shift at Save-A-Lot. Then I stared at the laptop. I had no idea what happened next. I had no idea who Ben Mahoney was or why the lettuce was speaking to him.