Without warning

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

The car park of the Safeway on Broadway East could be a challenge at the best of times. Barbara’s little Honda had picked up three mystery scratches or dents in there over the past six months. But today it felt like genuine hell. With one hand she was trying to control a heavily laden trolley sporting at least two malfunctioning wheels, while carrying a sobbing child on her other arm and attempting to redial Kipper’s number on her cell phone. The parking lot was full of hysterics and loons, some of them normal people who’d gone over the edge, others professional nutbars who’d turned up with sandwich boards urging everyone to REPENT as the HOUR OF DOOM was AT HAND!!!! The signs looked quite professional, as though they’d been prepared much earlier for just this occasion. Barb had taken a small measure of childish joy from clipping one of the God botherers with the corner of her fast-moving, barely controlled metal shopping cart.

She was less pleased with the long scrape she gouged out of the paintwork as she stumbled and lost her grip on the cart just as they made it back to the car. ‘Shit!’

Suzie, who at six years old was way too big to be carried, one-armed or otherwise, for more than a few steps, struggled to clamber deeper into Barbara Kipper’s embrace. ‘I’m scared, Mommy,’ she cried.

Struggling with her daughter, Barbara lost her grip on the cell phone – a cheap clamshell model – which fell to the bitumen and broke in two. ‘Oh shit! Oh… I’m sorry, sweetheart. Mommy’s sorry. Just hop down, would you, and…’

Suzie, her head buried in Barbara’s neck, shook her head and wailed, ‘Noooo.’

‘Suffer the little children unto Him, good lady…’

Barb spun around to find that one of the religious nuts had followed her through the heaving crush of the car park and was holding aloft a small branch of some sort, waving it as if to bless her.

‘Suffer the little -’

‘I’ll fucking suffer you to get the hell away from me, you goddamn freak! You’re scaring the bejesus out of my daughter.’

She fixed him with such a baleful stare that he actually seemed to recoil as if struck, but Barbara, who was normally so conscious of others’ feelings, felt not the least bit contrite. This place was a madhouse. It was like people had gone nuts or something when the news first came through, and these holy fucking lunatics were only making it worse.

Barb managed somehow to lower a clinging Suzie down to the ground while digging her keys out and thumbing the car’s electronic lock. It opened with a reassuring bleep-bloop, lessening her fears that whatever had happened might have put the zap on all the electrics. Back in the store, some bearded panic merchant had jumped up onto a checkout to announce that an ‘electromagnetic event’ had taken out all the circuits, everywhere. Unfortunately for him, the automatic conveyer belt on which he was standing was entirely functional and it jerked forward, pulling his feet out from under him. The last Barb had seen of the man, he was lying on the floor of Safeway with a badly broken ankle.

His theatrics, combined with the almost instant viral panic that seemed to run through everyone, a couple of fender benders in the parking lot, followed by the inevitable blaring of horns, the trilling of alarms and increasingly ugly screams of abuse – it had all been enough to upset Suzie so badly she was shivering, begging to know where Daddy was, and whether it was ‘Mine Eleven’ happening again. Barbara Kipper soothed her as best she could while pushing the child into the back seat, where her stuffed panda, Poofy Bear, might at least provide some comfort.

She popped the hatch and transferred the shopping bags as quickly as possible, with no idea of how she was going to get away from here. The lot was a gridlocked nightmare, with people increasingly desperate to leave, backing and crunching into each other, while more turned up every minute, presumably to panic-buy a year’s worth of discount Pop-Tarts and Cheeseburgers In A Can – the specials of the day.

A short distance away, two men were squaring up for a fight. An actual fight. One was huge, enormously obese, while the other looked tall and fit. God only knew what they were pissed at each other about. Perhaps the big guy got the last of the cheeseburgers. They circled each other, feinting and throwing out air punches, and then, much to Barb’s surprise, the thinner of the two bent over and charged the other guy like a rhino, head-butting him in the gut. They went down in a tangle as police or maybe ambulance sirens seemed to be closing in from somewhere nearby. Barbara shook her head in disgust and threw the last of her groceries into the hatch.

Having unloaded the cart, she didn’t dare push it back to the collection bay, for fear of leaving Suzie alone for even a moment. She could have killed Kipper at this point. He would choose this of all weeks to disappear into the mountains.

As soon as she voiced the thought in her mind, her heart lurched forward. Disappeared.

No, he wasn’t gone too. He was fine. He’d left a hiking plan with her and the park rangers, and as soon as she’d called them they said there was no way he would have been anywhere near the edge of this… effect… event… whatever it was. It was on the far side of the mountains.

She began shaking anyway, an uncontrolled shudder that seized her whole body as dizziness threatened to steal her legs from under her. Biting down on a knuckle until she drew blood helped to focus her mind away from the terror that wanted to swamp her. The pain was something sharp and real, something on which to focus. And as soon as she did, Barb was embarrassed that she’d let herself get so frantic. She gathered up the broken pieces of her cell phone and tossed them into the front passenger seat before moving around to the driver’s door. She was going to hit the shopping trolley if she backed out, but really didn’t care. Getting Suzie away from here was more important.

‘Is Daddy all right, Mommy? Is he okay?’ she asked as soon as Barb had the door closed. It shut out some of the chaos and madness but meant that Suzie could see without any distractions just how disturbed her mother was.

‘He’s fine, sweetheart,’ she said, as calmly as she could manage. ‘His friends from work are phoning him and sending a helicopter just for him. To bring him home. He’ll be back later, don’t worry.’

‘But what if he got eaten, Mommy. I heard a man in the store say everyone was eaten. Everyone.’