The mayor was not as friendly in death as she had been in life. There was a coldness to her now, particularly on winter days given that the projectile that had killed her had also broken the window behind her. Steve looked into the office and waved. The mayor did not wave back. She would have done so in the old days, maybe even risen from her perch behind the large desk in her office and come around to give him a hug. Handshake at least. But nothing today, nothing anymore. Ah well, he thought. Happens to the best of us. The giant schnauzer barked, and the sound rang through the halls so loudly that Steve, used to it by now, winced in spite of himself. He shushed it and pulled the key card from where it hung around his neck.
It was a small city, his city, though it was a city. When things had gone to hell it had been high up the list, during the time when there had still been lists, and so the supplies a city might have, it had, though being on the small end the mayor’s office was one of the few good, centralized warehousing options available. He slid the keycard against a small section of refurbished wood, and with a beep and a click the wall in front of him slid open. He hadn’t been there when the mayor had died, but the bodies around him and their general state of brain-related degradation when he had found them suggested to him that that had been a real source of friction between the two sets of people who would now occupy this building until it collapsed and became a part of the Earth again. A clean, white light shone out and reflected off of nominally temporary metal shelves in front of him. The schnauzer sat, as he always did, at the doorway with his back to the inside, the ultimate dog-shaped gargoyle. Steve nodded, and said thanks. The door closed behind him as he stepped inside. Then, shuffling through his pockets, he managed to find his shopping list, thumbed to the Wednesday page of it, and set to work.
What would you go shopping for? Consider the implications of shopping, in a post-consumer world. Consider what resources are scarce, really scarce, and what resources would be in demand. Medicine, you might think, and certainly you’d have a point. But then consider why you think that- we contend that the absence of the human crush would reduce disease drastically, and that in a world where the population has suddenly declined, a single, large haul of any given medicine would probably be enough to last a person a good long while. Food would, we imagine, be another cog in the wheel of your shopping machine. That’d be fairly normal, but after a moment or two consider the ramifications of the collapse of societal infrastructure. Where are you shopping for this food? Surely the stores have all been cleaned out, and if you’re planning on doing any kind of surviving for any serious length of time we think you must have a plan for food that doesn’t involve what your ancestors did. And yes, by now, your ancestors ate Cosmic Crunch out of plastic bags and paper boxes, so don’t get too indignant.
We think the answer is mid-tier items, things you don’t require for survival and could theoretically make yourself or substitute. We think the answer is items for trade, to take advantage of others’ failure to plan or change their ways, to take advantage of a nostalgia for the past in a world where that past is dead. We think the answer is, more even than perhaps the self-satisfied now in which you life, creature comforts. Secondhand creature comforts, old and wet and rotting creature comforts or musty creature comforts that smell like antiseptic and death, but creature comforts nonetheless. After all, they were never missing, but everyone hoarded the Oreos and toilet paper anyway.
As Steve pushed through the cleanroom environment, sweeping blankets and towels into the cart formation his dolly warped into with a couple of well-timed clicks, he considered the room he was in. A mobile command post. Commanding what, exactly? Some kind of battle against first the planet on which it lived and then an invisible enemy invading via literally every possible channel? It seemed to him to be exactly the kind of alliance that you’d actually want no command post for. And yet here it had all come- the supplies, the funding, the people, the water, the disease. Creating a cluster of people in a world where clusters of people were usually attacked by stealth had worked out roughly as well as one- who wasn’t the decider, apparently- would imagine.
It wasn’t that he was against any of this, he thought as he shifted four gas masks into his cart and reshuffled the cellophane-wrapped towels he’d decided to take home and barter with the nomads. It was only smart to concentrate your resources. To use interior lines. But that didn’t quite work as well when the interior in question was somewhere near each individual’s cerebral cortex. And anyway how would you keep towels there? He had once, long ago, seen a movie where exactly that sort of thing might have been depicted, and he smiled at the thought of blood cells in business suits stockpiling plasma towels and joking about the viral remnants of a vaccine. Then he stepped over the dead guy he’d never been quite able to explain and pulled a package of emergency rations off the shelf.
The room Steve was standing in was the room where you didn’t die. That was the confusing part, he thought, as he munched on the weird, life-sustaining biscuit that came as part of the ration. It wasn’t that the guy was dead- that made sense- but that he was dead in here. Steve poked him with a toe, the same way he always did, and as always the guy didn’t come to life in a hot of zombie rage ready to try and eat Steve’s brain. He just moved slightly and then settled back into his permanent position.
There were no unexplained holes, no evidence of melted tissue, no signs of drowning. Just a dead body in a room of life-sustaining items. If anything, the guy should still be alive and Steve should be dead. That was the thing that made the most sense. And yet, here they were, in their respective roles, and the world continued to spin. Steve looked around, one last glance of appraisal to verify that the things he wanted now were already in his cart, and saw nothing worth reconfiguring his load for. He pulled his dolly back along the racks of supplies, took one last look at the improbably corpse, and held his probably illegally-acquired keycard up against the reader.
The door opened perfectly, as you might expect. Electrical engineering, after all, has reached a pretty high efficiency level. It slid on whatever tracks it rode like a perfect gondola across hidden polymer canal. Steve marveled at this, as he usually did, because how was it even possible to have designed this before having made sure the world was protected from catastrophe? Surely a regular swinging door with a lock on it would have been fine in the mayor’s office of a small city while everyone worked away at solving the problems of societal collapse. And yet here was the evidence, together with the bag of meat and kevlar behind him and the dried bloodstains at his feet as he stood in the doorway. These people hadn’t even been done in by events. This was a hallway of death by panic, the most natural of conditions.
Steve stepped through the doorway, passed around his sentinel, and the door slid shut. The schnauzer stood, shook, raised up on its hind legs, put its paws on Steve’s shoulders, and licked his face.
The morning at the market was complete.
