“It’s a little trick I learned as a kid,” Pel said. “A carefully placed stink bomb worked wonders when I needed to get your uncles to bug off, or if I ever needed an easy out of a social function I’d soured on.”

It was because of stuff like this that Jules was secretly intimidated by her mother.

“Fortunately,” Pel smirked, “a lot of people—especially guys and the privileged classes—don’t know that you can easily clean up the smell with some bleach or peroxide.”

“Alright,” Jules nodded, “but why do we have stink bombs?”

Bracing herself against the side of the car, Pel briefly poked her head up over the vehicle’s roof to stare at the where the supermarket’s entrance lay a couple yards away. “I saw the videos, too,” she said. “I did the research.” She shook her head with conviction. “I am not going in there while there’s a bunch of people making wild animals out of themselves, looting a Gilman’s for all it’s worth.”

“But why give them to me?” Jules asked.

Her mother flattened her gaze at her. The expression made Jules worried.

“Jules,” Pel said, “you play softball. You’re a much better thrower than I am.”

Behind her transparent F-99 mask, my daughter’s mouth made a big, fat O.

Pel pointed at the stink bombs. “To make them work, just squeeze them tightly enough to break the barrier between the powder and the liquid. That starts the reaction, and you’ll have about thirty seconds to throw them as close to the entrance as you can manage before they burst and make everything smell worse than a wet, musty fart—though,” she added a disclaimer, “these ones might take a bit longer to go off; they’re somewhat old. I don’t know if you remember, but the Principal in charge of your elementary school when you and Rale were still going to Prescott Noctis was just awful.”

Jules’ eyebrow peaked. She did remember.

Mother and daughter looked at one another, their eyes sparkling.

“Mom, I gotta say, while I really like this plan, I’m worried it might be a bit too extreme.”

With a roll of her eyes, Pel gave her daughter a somewhat condescending pat on the shoulder. “That’s your father talking, sweetie.”

Pel smiled, but it was cut short as a breeze whipped through the parking lot, and tousled her hair and the hem of her maroon skirt. Tears glinted in the mid-morning light behind her bulky plastic goggles. “I want you to be safe,” Pel said. “I want all of us to be safe—you, your brother, your father, and me.” She smiled through her tears. “Even your grandmother.” Then, Pel steeled herself. “We’re better safe than sorry.”

Jules sniffled and nodded.

“Remember, honey,” Pel said, “you’ve only got three shots.”

Jules set two of the bombs down in the shopping cart, next to the bat. Then, biting her lip for focus, she stood tall, squeezed the bomb in her hand and lobbed it at the entrance like it was the regional championships all over again.

It fell short, landing about halfway to the entrance.

Jules hissed. “Shit.”

If this ends up being a third-time’s-the-charm situation, Jules thought, I swear, I’m gonna scream.

She picked up the second bomb. Jules held it for a bit longer than the first one, feeling its shape and weight. Then, taking aim, she squeezed it and let it fly, and her heart flew with it.

It landed right in front of the entrance.

Yes!

Then a passing shopping cart plowed right through it and the bag popped like the world’s worst zit, spraying its contents everywhere, but before the stink reaction had really gotten underway.

Fuck!

Bending down again, Jules picked up the third and final bomb. She looked over the roof of the car, at some of the people going in and out of the Gilman’s, with their black-shot eyes and their vicious coughs.

As brave as my daughter was, she wasn’t brave enough to face that.

Please work…

And then Jules chucked the bomb over the car’s roof with all her might.

It landed right at the mouth of the entrance, and her heart teetered over oblivion, and then an unmasked man unwittingly kicked the bomb as he stumbled, mid-cough, while running in through the jammed-open automatic doors.

He kicked it straight into the Gilman’s.

Jules pumped her fist and howled. “Yes!”

Then the first bomb detonated. For a second, people stopped in their tracks, and then the gagging began, drawn by the rank odor of flatulence and rotting eggs. Immediately, the crowd began to scatter, with a good deal of them taking their chances and rushing into the Gilman's.

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“Try not to breathe too deeply,” Pel said.

And then the big one blew. The sound was but a puff; screams quickly followed. The rancid stench flushed people out of the supermarket like rats from a sinking ship. They coughed and gagged, spraying black ooze from their unmasked faces as their bodies tried to expel the stink bomb’s noxious fumes.

Oh my God…

The effect was more than Jules could have ever imagined. Yes, she’d seen the videos. Everyone had.

That black goo, powdered with green. That meant infection. That meant death.

People saw it, and, suddenly, it was as if they had awoken from a long slumber. They saw the faint trails of black and green that speckled parts of the walls and the windows of the cars and in the darkness of each other’s eyes. They screamed and ran, covering their mouths and faces with their sleeves. Everyone scattered.

Pel and Jules looked each other in the eyes once more. Pel gulped. “Let’s get moving.”

And Jules nodded.

They walked through the entrance unopposed. Pel even got a third shopping cart, tying it to the second with a bit of string she’d had in her pocket. She always had knick-knacks like that on hand. Some string. A piece of chewing gum, even paper-clips—and no one used paper-clips anymore.

With two of the three carts fastened together, Pel let Jules take the first cart—the one with the bat. The stink bomb’s pungent effects bled through Jules’ mask as they stepped into the Gilman’s. It made her a little queasy, but Jules was damn sure that was nothing compared to what she’d have experienced without the F-99 to protect her.

“Holy crap…” Jules muttered.

The Gilman’s… it was chaos and aftermath. Black and green covered the vinyl floor near the entrance in a broad fan, stippled by footprints and streaked and smeared by passing wheels. The light fixtures dangled from the ceiling, suspended by pendulous cables from the ceiling. Normally, the Gilman’s would be abuzz with customers’ chatter and the sprightly bloops of cashiers scanning goods. But the checkout lanes were empty. Many of the shelves were barren, and those that weren’t were often in total disarray, their goods jostled about, even spilled onto the floor.

Pel loudly cleared her throat. “Let’s go to the cereals first, then the canned goods, then the freeze-dried.”

“Right.” Jules nodded.

They made quick work, grabbing what they could when they could. But so many of the shelves had been raided bare.

“Dammit,” Jules muttered. So much was gone.

Everything whole wheat? Gone. Canned goods? Gone. Frozen goods? Essentially all gone. Meat, fish, eggs, dairy? Gone gone gone.

Worse, what wasn’t gone was often streaked and speckled with black and green.

I’m not touching that. No way in hell.

While Jules grumbled, her mother darted to the next aisle over, and then called out in surprise. “Ah!”

My daughter’s back went stiff.

“Jules, come here!”

Jules pulled her cart back and rolled it into the next aisle over. “Don’t scare me like that,” she muttered, only to stop and gape. To her astonishment, the first few shelves at the right were filled to the brim with all sorts of colorful-looking grain products, mostly cereal.

“Quickly,” Pel beckoned, “grab as much as you can!”

Boxes piled up in the carts one by one. Jules was on her seventh box when she paused and examined the boxes front and back, taking a look at the nutrition facts.

Her intuition told her something was amiss.

“Why hasn’t anyone else taken these?” Jules asked.

“They’re unleavened,” Pel said. “Old Believers and many Irredemptists still adhere to the dietary laws.”

Jules nodded. “That’s right. Shrovestide’s coming up next month, so… the food thing.”

“No leavened bread products for them,” Pel said. “The legalism of it all is so strange,” she added.

“So…” Jules gave her mother a look. “we’re buying religious food?”

Another pit opened up in her stomach.

Angel’s breath, it must taste awful.

Pel saw the concern in her daughter’s eyes. “It’s not that bad—and it’s certainly better than starving!”

After a couple more boxes, Pel nodded and grabbed her cart. “Alright, that’s enough. Let’s go see what else they have.”

Though the next aisle could have been better, it wasn’t nearly as bad as the parts of the aisles closest to the entrance. There was still a reasonable amount of food laying on the shelves. Pel and Jules gathered Gran Crackers, steel-chopped oats, saltines, and several bottles of oat milk.

“Won’t the milk go bad?” Jules asked.

Pel shook her head. “Milk, yes, oat milk, no, at least so long as you don’t open the container. Once you do, it’ll last a week to use it, but, until you open it for the first time, it’ll basically stay good forever.”

Jules grimaced as she spotted several untaken loaves of rye, liberally sprinkled with caraway seeds.

Yuck.

She put them in the cart anyway. Her mother got five hefty sacks of rice.

“Next aisle over,” Pel said.

Nodding, Jules pushed ahead of her mother, making a U-turn into the next aisle, only to come face-to-face with some fellow Gilman's customers. They looked reasonable enough. The woman had her dark hair tied back in a braid, and wore deep blue dress without any coat on top. The man—undoubtedly her husband—wore a pale yellow vest atop a dress shirt and felty, corrugated slacks. He was missing a spot of hair on top where he had just begun to bald.

But neither of them were wearing masks.

“Who are you?” the man said. “Get out of my way. Get back!” He coughed profusely. He tightened his grip on the reams of toilet paper he held beneath his arms. “This toilet paper’s ours!”

“Mom,” Jules looked to her, “stay back!”

Bending down, Jules pulled Rale’s bat out of the shopping cart, brandishing it with her pitcher-scaring pose.

“I’m in Junior Varsity, and I know how to use this.” To emphasize her point, Jules thwacked the bat through the air in an impressive flourish. “Get back!” Jules belted. “Get away you infected maskless asshats!”

The two shoppers staggered back. The woman coughed.

Jules gripped the bat so tightly, her arms trembled. “Don’t make me use this!”

The woman threw her disgusted eyes at Jules’ mother. “What the Hell is wrong with your daughter, lady?”

“What’s wrong with you?” Pel snapped.

The maskless woman answered by spitting at my wife and daughter, and though Jules leapt back to dodge, a bit of the fluid landed on her goggles. The sight of it up close, barely an inch from her eyes made Jules’ breath catch in her throat.

The saliva was streaked in black and green.

Jules slammed the bat into the empty shelves at her left, making a big dent. She bashed the shelves again. The whole thing rattled. “Get back!”

“Damn atheist jackasses!” the man said. He stepped back, and then bent over and coughed.

Jules bellowed. “I’m not gonna say it again!”

The two infectees turned tail and hobbled off, clearing the way for Pel and Jules to go down the next aisle. Even so, my daughter’s heart raced in her chest. The only thing she wanted to do more than clean the infected saliva off her goggles was to never, ever touch that crud, not even with a thousand layers of gloves.

The videos. So many of them had been censored. And now, most of the net was being cordoned off, with access restricted to VIPs only.

There were rumors. Whispers of monsters. Creatures, zombies, inhuman things—and worse.

Things like what Jules thought she’d seen growing from some of the roadkill on the street.

Jules had to fight to keep her arms from shaking. It helped a little when she turned to her mother and smirked. “Jerk repellant,” she said. “T-Told you we’d need it.”