“It’s your schedule that I want to talk about,” Garriga said.
There was a pause before the other man responded. “You have a problem with our scheduled time for calls?”
“No,” said Garriga. “I mean your other schedule. The one your Supreme Leader just announced to the world.”
The Korean’s voice was cautious now. “What about it?”
“This is not what I agreed to!” snapped Garriga. “You promised me action. Your country was going to rain fire and death on the heads of the Americans! Burn their cities to the ground!”
“And so we will,” said the Korean.
“Then why are you issuing deadlines? This is supposed to be the apocalypse for those murdering capitalists, not a diplomatic negotiation. Where is the destruction that you talked about?”
“The destruction is coming,” said the Korean. “Everything we have promised will happen. But first, the world must see the unbeatable American superpower kneel before the very nations they have pissed on. They treat my country like a leper, and they treat yours like a tiny lapdog — finally allowed into the dining hall to prance, and caper, and beg for scraps from the hand of the master.”
The anger in the Korean’s voice was obvious now, and still rising. “The world will see America grovel. And then, we will destroy them.”
“When?” demanded Garriga. “How much longer do I have to wait?”
But he was talking into a dead phone. The North Korean had terminated the connection.
CHAPTER 41
Gracie Hopkirk slid the barcode for the twentieth can of beans past the laser doohickey and waited for the bleep of a successful scan. The register was behaving itself for once, and a good thing too. This customer had two shopping carts piled high, and the guy behind him had three.
What in the world did anybody need with twenty cans of beans on a Saturday night? More than twenty, because the guy was still piling them on the belt.
Beans. Corn. Peas. Soup. SpaghettiOs. Carrots. Sardines. Potatoes. Mixed veggies. Peaches. Pears. Those little meat sausage things that nobody likes. Gallon jugs of water. Powdered baby formula. Everything in cans or plastic bottles. Nothing from the refrigerated or freezer sections, and nothing perishable. Not even bread or milk.
The man’s second cart was loaded with non-food stuff. Bundles of disposable diapers. Four flashlights and six kinds of batteries. Baby wipes. Paper plates and plastic utensils. Bottles of hydrogen peroxide and boxes of gauze. Three first aid kits. At least two bottles of every over-the-counter pain killer in the store.
Gracie took a quick glance at the next guy’s haul and saw the same general sorts of stuff, minus the diapers. Canned goods. Water. Aspirin. Motrin. Tylenol. Bandages. Like he was shopping from the same kind of list, but he didn’t have any babies to worry about.
There were two more people joining the line now, both with more than one cart in tow.
Gracie had never seen anything like it before. This store was usually a ghost town after ten. Where were these people coming from, and why did they all look so jittery? Almost frightened…
She kept powering through the items on the belt, bagging them as she went, and passing each filled sack back to the customer. As she worked, she could hear the automatic doors opening and closing behind her. More people coming in. A lot of them.
And the line at her register was getting longer. Still grabbing and scanning with her left hand, she snagged the intercom phone out of its cradle and hit the call button. “This is Register Four. We need backup checkers to the front, please.”
The doors kept opening, more people streaming in. Everybody moving quickly, stuffing things into carts almost without looking. Like they thought the store was going to run out.
That’s when it hit Gracie that the store really was going to run out. At the rate things were going, the shelves would be empty in an hour. Nothing left but bread, produce, and the perishables from the cooler sections.
The first customer was done now, fiddling with the chip reader for his credit card.
Gracie figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. “People are stocking up pretty hard. Was there a hurricane warning on the news, or something?”
“Road trip,” said the customer absently. Like his mind was already somewhere else.
“Where are you headed?”
“West,” said the man. And he started his carts toward the front doors. “As far west as possible.”
Gracie watched him go as the next customer started loading the belt.
People were still pouring into the store.
While Darryl Tanner was bolting the upper hatch and checking the air seals, Jeanette was down in the shelter tucking Molly and Evan into their bunks.
The Tanners had practiced the drill often enough that the kids were getting good at it. They could be roused from a sound sleep, zombie shuffled the eighteen yards from the back door of the house to the tool shed, and be carried down the entrance shaft into the shelter — all without fully regaining consciousness.
Jeanette was in charge of herding the kids. Darryl was responsible for hiding the Jeep in the pine thicket behind the house, buttoning down the hatch, and taking the final steps to conceal the entrance.
He’d built a pretty cool cable rig for that. It rolled an old lawnmower right over the top of the hatch, hiding it from anybody nosey enough to take a look in the shed. If any hostiles showed up and started seriously poking around, the shed had a few surprises in store — some of which had their own tripwires, and some of which could be triggered by remote from down in the shelter.
No one in the Tanner family ever called it the shelter, of course. That word was an absolute no-no. Not much point in having a secret hidey-hole if your kids could blab about it in kindergarten class.
To prevent just that sort of lapse in security, Darryl and Jeanette always referred to the shelter as the “family room.” That way, if Evan or Molly did happen to let something slip about their late night emergency drills, any mention of sleeping in the family room would encourage images of happy children napping on sofas while the Disney channel played at low volume on television.
The “family room” was a 10x20 galvanized corrugated pipe style unit, built by Atlas Survival Shelters, and buried fifteen feet underground. Darryl would have preferred the 10x26 unit, but the cost difference was more than $20,000, and the “home improvement loan” that had financed the installation just couldn’t be stretched that far. Besides, the 20-foot unit was adequate for his little family.
When he got to the bottom of the entrance shaft, he checked his watch. They had made decent time tonight. Everyone in and locked down less than twelve minutes after he had given the signal. A couple of minutes over his ideal time, but not bad at all.
Jeanette had Fox News going on the little flat screen with the sound muted when Darryl got to the seating area.
He sat on the narrow couch next to her. “Anything new?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. They’re rehashing the ultimatum.”
“We should take turns keeping an eye on the coverage,” Darryl said. “I’m good for a couple of hours if you want to sleep the first shift.”
“Can you tell me what you’re thinking, Honey?” Jeanette asked. “You know I’m not doubting your judgment. If you say it’s time to hunker down, we hunker down. But Kim Young-what’s-his-name gave the government a week to meet his demands. We should have at least a few days before things get dangerous, don’t you think?”