fuonlyknew

Enjoy this glimpse inside!

With the insulin in my cart, I felt better. I could go to other pharmacies in the city and get a supply to last a lifetime. While I was in this section, I took a few other basics I would need: blood sugar

meters of every kind, test strips, shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrushes and “ladies’ things,” as my last foster mom called them.

I had barely made any money working at the 7-Eleven, and I thought about going through the store and getting all the things I had wanted but couldn’t afford. I was wearing a cheap, worn-out bra. When I had gotten dressed that morning, I had briefly thought that I could get by without one digging into my shoulders, but I wasn’t quite ready to abandon all the trappings of civilization, yet.

On the way to the women’s section, I got a top-of-the-line toaster and a fancy coffeemaker. I would grab a few more things, some groceries and then find more insulin. Now I had to think like I never had before. I’d always lived my life thinking about the near future, the short term. Regulating my blood sugar for the next few hours. Keeping my current foster parents happy until they got tired of the girl who was all the work of a child with a medical condition, but none of the joy of having a daughter.

I stayed in my room almost all the time. They just didn’t seem to understand that I liked being alone. I wasn’t crazy or psychologically scarred from my childhood. I’m just not that into other people. There were a lot less other people now. The world’s population had been reduced by 99.9895833 percent. Now I had to start thinking about the long term. The really long term. Before I had trusted in the vast network of people who worked the machinery of our economy that kept the insulin flowing. Now that was all gone. I had to get enough to last a lifetime. No one would ever manufacture it again.

Well, maybe not ever, but certainly not in my lifetime. It would take many generations to rebuild the population enough to have people who worked on ancillary concerns to society like keeping the diabetics alive. I thought about trying to calculate how many generations it would take, but I couldn’t take that kind of time then. I’d always enjoyed figuring out mathematical problems, but that one would have to wait.

If this pharmacy had insulin, then there would be others that did too. I could stockpile it all. The day had started out badly, but now everything was going as planned.

Until I heard the crash of glass shattering at the front of the store.

I ducked behind one of the aisles and listened to what was happening. I heard someone struggle to pull a cart from the long line of interconnected carts at the entrance. Then they pushed it forward with a squeak and a rhythmic thud every few feet.

An old woman’s voice said, “Every time. Even now. Every time I get the bad cart with a busted wheel.”

She pushed the cart aside, and I listened to her mutter to herself as she picked through three different ones until she found one that rolled smoothly. An old woman fussing with a shopping cart at Walmart didn’t sound too dangerous, so I stepped out from behind the aisle. Her car had smashed the front doors in. She had pulled it back, but it was still covered in glass.

The woman startled and said, “Oh, sweetie, you scared me there for a minute.”

“I scared you?”

“Sorry about the front doors,” she said. “I thought it was the only way to get in. Apparently not.”

I held up the key ring. She looked at it and smiled.

“Well, seeing you answers the big question,” she said. “Someone else did survive. I was wondering why God would leave an old woman as the last person on Earth.”

“If the survival rate worked out the same in the US as the rest of the world, about one in ninety-six hundred survived.”

“Oh, my.” She stepped out from behind her cart. “Well this sounds strange to say under the circumstances, but it’s nice to meet you. My name is Edith.”

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