It took her a few minutes to regain her composure. An automated message. It had to be an automated message. But, hearing someone call out like that really frightened her. On the plus side, it had stopped her imminent mental break by giving her something much, much scarier to focus on.
When it felt like her heart wasn’t going to explode, and she could see through her watery eyes she slowly got to her feet.
“Stupid automatic announcements made by people who– whatever happened to them.” she paused for a second at that. “It’s like I got scared by a ghost.” With that thought, she let out a nervous laugh. Or, maybe it was a sob. It was somewhere in the middle. So, she attempted to lighten the mood.
“Hey there ghosts and demons. It’s me. Ya girl Lily.” She expected to feel a little better after the silly joke, but the way her voice echoed through the aisles just made her feel more unsettled. Okay. Enough of that. Get in, get out with all the stuff. That’s not too hard right? It’s like an ordinary shopping trip. From her nightmares. She hurried into the store proper, heading towards the produce aisle. Her heart started beating faster as she traveled further in, feeling like she did walking down hallways in the dark or to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Like something was following her. When she arrived at the first bin of fruit, she stopped. Everything in her body told her not to turn around. Everything. Wait. This was anxiety. Just. Anxiety. She forced herself to confront it. She couldn’t keep dealing with things like this today!
Lily made herself turn around. It was like forcing a stripped screw to turn one more time. But, she did it. There was nothing there.
She stopped. That’s when she had her genuine laugh. “This is so! So stupid!” She laughed so hard she could hardly breathe. She doubled over. Running through a grocery store like ghosts were chasing her? It wasn’t even dark. There was nothing there! There was no one anywhere. Nothing to chase her. She took a deep breath, and steadied herself.
Tearing the bag free of the roll with ease, she turned to her actual task. Fruit and vegetables. Those things weren’t going to stay good for long at all. Extremely perishable, so she might as well take a bunch. Space in the car wasn’t exactly at a premium, and a boat ought to be even larger, so she gathered everything she knew she liked. Oranges and lemons (to stave off scurvy, right? You got that from being at sea, right?), apples, peaches, nectarines, grapefruit slices in water, a couple pomegranates, lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, a one pound bag of carrots, a bag of celery, and the coup de grace, a whole watermelon. Lily briefly let the fantasy wash over her of being on a calm boat under the hot sun, breaking open a watermelon and cooling off by stuffing her face. Then she thought about the backdrop being the view of Santa Del Mar burning to the ground, and swiftly pushed the thought down.
She moved on to the next segment of the store. There was a ton of ready sliced sandwich meat and cheese, so she just shoveled a bunch into the cart. Bologna? Check. Honey ham? Yes please. Pepper turkey? You bet. Every cheese under the sun? Obviously. Looking down at her half full cart she made a note to grab bread too.
Condiments! She went down the aisle and grabbed everything she could think of. Including way too many jars of olives and pickles. Breads, cereals, hot dogs! A half gallon of milk! A cooler! Ice! Back to a couple gallons of milk! Paper and plastic bowls, plates, and silverware! Bacon! Mac & Cheese! Pop tarts! ALL of the candy! She was getting overwhelmed fast, having filled two full carts of what can only be described as what a child would buy if you let them loose in a grocery store with a black card.
But, before she knew it, she couldn’t think of anything else to grab. She had an extremely mismatched set of things that she had grabbed with no plan at all besides ‘that looks good!’. So, she stood, staring down at her two carts and feeling incompetent.
“This is all the stuff I can think of that I might want to eat over the next few days. So why does it feel like I’ve done a bad job? I have food. I have drinks. That was the goal, wasn’t it? Am I… missing something? Or am I just not used to this…?”
She frowned at the pile of food. It was a ton of food. Somehow it didn’t feel like enough. Regardless, even after sitting for a while and thinking about it she didn’t really know what she had gotten wrong, so she couldn’t fix it. With a shrug she pushed the carts towards the entrance. As she was passing the check out area, she briefly considered leaving a note.
“So what, if everyone re-appears tomorrow they know who stole their stuff? This is an emergency. I’m not doing anything wrong. It’s not stealing. It’s survival.” Despite what she told herself, the rules of society instilled in her were strong. She felt very, very guilty. But, she persevered, pushing her cart loads of food out to the car, and loading it all in.
She was tired. She hadn’t moved around and gotten this much exercise in years, and her body wasn’t used to it at all. Already, her muscles felt like limp ropes under her skin, unable to properly move her body around. But, there were still a few things left to do.
First up, earlier she had spotted a Best Buy right across the street. Feeling much more confident, Lily crossed the street while not even looking both ways. Okay, maybe a glance. But it was out of habit! She pulled straight up to the red zone in front of the store, threw her car in park and climbed out. It was a lot easier the second time.
“This is how killers become serial killers.” whispered a small alarmist part of Lily’s mind. But that was stupid, so she told that part to shut up and continued up to the door, brandishing her glass smasher.
This time it only took three blows! For a second, she basked in her feeling of growth. Then she heard the noise. An alarm was going off. Not from her phone. As the glass shattered and fell in, the noise screamed even louder. It was the alarm from the store, and it was BLARING.
Lily stood, frozen in front of the broken glass. In her heart, she expected squads of cop cars to pull up any second and apprehend her. But of course, no one came. Lily waited until she felt she could move her body again, and then proceeded inside. The alarm was very loud in here. It hurt her ears, but she had things she needed to get. So, hoping that she wouldn’t end up with some kind of auditory damage, she continued on.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
The first thing she wanted seemed obvious to her. Gas generator. Long term if she was going to be in this world, she wanted solar panels and lots of them. But, for now she needed something small to keep her in electricity until she had a better set up. Even if it required siphoning gas, she could probably manage it. She’d never done it before, but she could remember an experiment about how to start a siphon in middle school science class.
She’d gotten absolutely drenched because she’d sucked on the hose too hard, and she’d gotten bullied about it for about a week. Oh hoh hoh, Lily is too good at sucking. Lily can suck my hose. “Kids are evil little brats. But who’s laughing now, huh?” Lily was decidedly not laughing. But even though she could barely hear the words around the sound of the alarm, it did make her feel a little better.
Generators were a little hard to find. She really had to scour the store before she found a more traditional hardware section towards the back, and there they were. Heavier than she’d like, so she came back with a cart and loaded it in. Lily had no idea how to choose one, so she just grabbed the one with the highest price tag. Forget reading the back, her ears were hurting bad.
From there, she looked for a portable DVD player, and felt old when she found out they are all Blu-Ray players now. But, she grabbed one regardless. There was a whole row of movies across from it, so she just started grabbing one of everything. Terrible looking B movie? Hell yeah! A whole box set of FRIENDS? Why not. Some anime she’s never heard of? Anything for entertainment in the apocalypse.
Once she thought she had one of everything, she found her way to the video games section. For the first time, she encountered a bigger issue. No consoles were out here. They had little paper things you were supposed to take and give to an employee to ring up, and then they’d go in the back and get one for you!
Assuming she’d figure that much out, she used her handy dandy glass annihilator 8000+ to break into the display case housing the games. Figuring something handheld would be the way to go, she grabbed all the Nintendo Switch games that were in the case. Carefully making sure to get one of each.
Once satisfied, she turned and looked around to see if she could spot where consoles and things were actually kept. Where were they usually kept anyways? The first thing she spotted was the service desk for the electronics area, so she approached it. Of course the PC was powered off, and when she started it up she faced a log in screen with a password.
“Hmm. Well, better try just in case.” She typed admin into the name field, and password into the password field. Nothing. “Damn. That works a shocking amount of the time, but guess I’m not lucky today. Who would have guessed.”
So, she turned and inspected the rest of the surroundings. Nothing that would be big enough to hold game consoles. But, she did find a key ring sitting on the desk, so she pocketed it. She couldn’t see anything else from here that looked useful, but she couldn’t see very far over the aisles. They weren’t that much taller than her but it was enough to obscure her view.
A lightbulb went off in her head. Oh. The rules don’t matter anymore. Carefully, she climbed up on the service area desk and stood as tall as she could. It really felt like she was doing something wrong, but she’d do anything to get out of this area sooner with everything she needed. So, she carefully turned around on the desk and got a good look. There it was! A door labeled ‘Employees Only’ towards the back. That was a good sign right? She even had keys!
Hopping down from the desk, she walked with confidence towards her new destination. Then she promptly got a little lost in the aisles. It only took a few minutes to find it though, and… it was locked! But she had a key ring, so she pulled it out and started trying keys. There were only ten, so she just went through them one by one. Of course, the tenth key was the proper one. “Always the last one. Ugh…”
The door opened right up. Lily let out a hoot of joy and success and proceeded into… a really mundane looking storage area. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but somehow the fact that this area just contained neatly sorted boxes instead of a wonderland of forbidden electronics was a bit of a disappointment. Still, she started going through shelves looking for consoles. It wasn’t too hard to find them. They’re a common enough item, so it seems likely they wanted to keep them easily accessible. She loaded a Switch into her cart, and then decided to grab one of each of the others as well. Because… might as well.
She was just about to turn to go when a thought hit her. This was the area where all the high value items are being held right? She should at least look around. So, she did. Wishing she had ear muffs or something, she snooped! A lot of it was stuff she hadn’t really ever considered wanting to own. Or big name parts that she had no use for, like video cards. But, just as she was about to give up she saw something that changed her priorities. Laptops. A bunch of laptops.
She facepalmed, embarrassed that such an obvious device didn’t even occur to her before now. But, it would be very useful to have access to one. Or a few. She was going to be scavenging a lot, and even as a place to consolidate the data she would want to keep– A second thought hit her. DATA STORAGE. Of course! She was so stupid! But first, the laptops. She really didn’t feel like she had the time to spend being choosy, so she grabbed the five most expensive looking laptops and put them in her cart.
Now, data storage. She would want a few external hard drives, and a bunch of usb drives. She would want to preserve all the media and knowledge she could access after all. So she needed a lot. Fortunately, this was a lot easier than the other electronics. She found where they were stored easily enough, and only had to look at capacity. Her eyes felt like they were gonna bulge out of her skull when she saw it. Twenty two terabytes! Since when had storage space gotten so insane? She’d been missing out locked in her apartment!
She only took five of those as well, because her cart was getting pretty full. Finally, she had one more stop before she could get out of here. Heading into the store proper again, she found where usb flash drives were kept, and just grabbed every single one that would fit in her cart. They were small, so she managed to collect more than fifty, shoving them all in.
With that, she made her way back to her car to begin unloading. When stepping outside, at first she was happy to be away from the horrible alarm, but then she noticed something. The sun was starting to go down. She thought back and realized it must be getting close to 6 PM. She had maybe two hours of sunlight left, and when the sun went down it was going to get a lot more difficult to find things she was looking for. Particularly a boat in a dark harbor! On top of that, the skyline was getting pretty full of smoke. The fires had been burning all day at this point, and were still seeming to grow rather than shrink.
Cursing herself for letting her guard down during an emergency, Lily quickly loaded up the car with all of her spoils. She actually had a bit of trouble closing the trunk and fitting everything, but after redistributing items around the car and even into the passenger seat she eventually got it all to fit. Now down an additional ten minutes, she got into the car and headed towards the shore. She was… pretty sure she knew where the harbor was.