Sunday Shopping

fiction

She hadn't had much use for religion in her previous life. She thought it was all pretty useless at best and destructive at worse. But now? Now she had a real appreciation for the Fellowship of the Blessed Eye.

The red spray painted eye on the wall outside the grocery store let her know they had been there and had sanctified the premises. No functioning cameras or scanners would be in the place. If she was lucky they might have left some of the wiring and maybe some glass. Parts she could scavenge for her workshop at home.

She didn't expect there to be any actual groceries left inside. Those days had long passed. In the first few months she had laughed at how even with everything falling down around them Americans would leave dented cans behind. They had gotten so used to being able to pick over things and only take the best that the reality of there being no more had not set in. But eventually even those items were gone.

When the retinal scanner obliterated the first eye it seemed like a freak accident. When it happened again she told her husband that it was going to be bad. He hadn't agreed with her, not exactly, but he also hadn't stopped her from maxing out all of their credit cards laying in supplies. She had bought as much salt as she could find as well as dry goods and bottled water. Filled their garage and parts of the house with supplies; batteries, a couple solar powered generators, seed packs, fertilizer, ammo. She showed him that she had kept all of the receipts so if he was right they could return as much as possible. If she was right the amount of debt she had just acquired wouldn't matter.

They didn't need to return anything.

The faulty retinal scanners were just the start. First the eyeballs were fried, then the brains behind them. Systems started locking people out of homes and bank accounts and factories and the nuclear weapons cache. Nothing that needed a password worked. The world shut down. First slowly, then all at once. Worse than the pandemic of 2020 had been. Worse than the rolling blackouts of 2032. Even with what looked like clear warnings in hindsight, they were all taken by surprise. Some just more surprised than others.

She entered the cavernous building that had once been mostly filled with things that nobody really needed. You were supposed to walk the edges to get the things that were good for you and avoid the center where all of the junk food was. Which of course was most of the store. Quick and easy calories. Fat and salt and sugar and... her mouth watered thinking about Oreos. Man she had loved Oreos. Her husband had been an ice cream guy. Give him a pint of Ben and Jerry's and he'd be a happy man. She remembered a trip to Vermont one year where they had taken the tour of the factory. You got free ice cream at the end. If you were lucky it would be a day they were testing a new flavor and you could be one of the first to sample. If you were really lucky the flavor would be released, if not you'd spend the rest of your life talking about that peanut butter and marshmallow fluff ice cream that was so good.

She smiled and then shook her head. That had been a long time ago. She wasn't sure when ice cream would be on the menu again. She'd need to find a cow to start with and that didn't seem really likely in this part of the country. Maybe if they had been living in Texas or Oklahoma when it all started, but then they would have had to have been living in Texas or Oklahoma and that didn't seem like a good trade off. It was easier to grow their own vegetables than to tend to a herd of animals anyway. The small flock of chickens they had was good enough.

And if she did ever find a cow the eggs would make a good custard base for ice cream.

She brushed a hand across her face to wipe away the tear that had suddenly formed.

The theories around what had happened were thick at the beginning, but eventually people fell into one of two camps. Either the machines had gained sentience and decided to wipe out the scourge of humanity, or someone had introduced a few bits of malicious code to target one or two individuals not realizing how tied all of the systems had become. She leaned toward it being the malicious code. People being greedy and ruthless made more sense to her than machines deciding to take over.

Or more exactly she thought if it had been the machines they'd have done a neater job of it. Not the kill a few billionaires by frying their brains through their eyeballs then watch the whole system start to collapse method. People being fuckups driven by greed made more sense. The Fellowship of the Blessed Eye would hang her from a defunct telephone pole if they knew she had more faith in machines than in man. Though she would argue their whole religion was based on the belief that the machines were divine. Which, of course, she would never argue with an Eyeballer.

That would be foolish.

She scanned the store trying to see if there was anything of use. She was quite the packrat now, she'd take anything she could use to repair things she had, or anything she could use to build something she might need.

There was a pile of fallen shelves in the middle of the store. It looked like someone had knocked them over like a line of dominoes. That might be promising. Maybe nobody had searched through the pile and taken everything decent. Or maybe the shelves could be taken apart and drug away easily. She tried not to get too hopeful, but it had been awhile since she'd found anything decent.

As she got close she saw a flash of yellowish tan, then the laces, work boots! There was a pair of workboots. Could there be more shoes under the shelves? This would be a miracle haul for sure if there were.

She stopped when she got closer. The boots were on someone's feet. Or what used to be someone. She thought, "oh those boots aren't made for walking anymore" and stifled the hysterical giggle that was threatening to break free. This wasn't her first dead body. Not even close, but it didn't make it any easier. She crept slowly toward the pile. "Sorry, buddy, but these aren't going to do you any more good so I'll be taking them."

She slowly untied the shoes trying not to disturb the body too much. It had been here for awhile and was more dessicated than putrefied so that was a bonus. She got the first boot off and looked at the size. Size 11. Her husband wore size 11.

She fell backward onto her ass holding the boot. Holding the boot tightly. Then she started to cry.

She cried for the deadman at the bottom of the pile of shelves. Cried for the empty store. Cried for the destroyed city beyond the doors. Cried for the looted medicine shelves that had kept them from getting the antibiotics that would have saved her husband from the infection that set in from a stupid cut on the back of his hand when his work gloves tore. Cried for herself.

Then she stopped.

She took the other boot off the deadman and headed back home. They might be a little big, but they were still good boots.

Back in October when I wrote about trying to figure out what to write about in 2026 Aaron talked about using a randomizer for fiction. Like spin the wheel and have a location, an event and an emotion. He said, "Like it could be Wasteland, Grocery Shopping, Dealing with Grief" Well I guess it could be.