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Wednesday, March 10, 2021, 3PM Eastern Standard Time
Mary was crouched down behind the butcher’s counter at Ball-Mart, trying to hide from the people who had invaded the store looking for food. How had they gotten past Gene and the other guys? Were they armed? What the hell is going on?
She watched as a masked woman with a toddler on her back grabbed a number of cuts of meat. Was she a Mexican? Mary couldn’t tell behind the mask. The woman saw Mary, and indicated the baby, pointing to her mouth as if to explain why she was doing this, and walked off rapidly.
Mary yelled over to the Bakery section. “Are you guys there?”
“Yeah,” one of the women in Bakery said, the one who had first alerted her to the danger. “But we’re keeping down.”
“Where’s Gene and them?”
“I don’t know,” the Bakery woman said, her voice, like Mary’s, muffled by her mask.
“Where’s the manager?”
“I don’t know.”
Mary thought for a second.
“I think I’m gonna go to his office.”
“Your funeral,” the Bakery woman said.
Mary crept out of her hiding place and walked slowly, crouching, around the butcher’s counter. She saw people grabbing huge amounts of food and putting it into shopping carts. But were they stealing, or just shopping?
Mary jogged down past several aisles, looking for one that was unoccupied. When she found one, she made for the manager’s office in the front of the store. She got to the front of the store to the long row of registers. Some of them appeared to be operating normally. She saw her friend Sheryl checking someone out as if everything was fine. She saw another person, also masked, using the Self-Check-Out machine.
But most of the rest of the people in the store looked like they were looters. They all wore those longer, turtleneck kind of masks. Some of the masks seemed to have been taken from the store itself. The amount of stuff in their carts seemed excessive. She walked over to Sheryl.
“Where are the cops?” she asked her.
“Cops?” Sheryl said.
“I mean, don’t you notice what’s going on?”
“What?” Sheryl said.
“I’m gonna call someone.”
“Okay. You taking break?”
“Uh… sure.”
Now she was wondering if she should have left the meat department unguarded. She walked back to the butcher’s counter. The coast appeared somewhat clear. She went out the back exit to get a cell signal – Ball-Mart suppressed cell signal within the store so employees and customers would not be distracted – and got out her phone and called Jeff.
After a couple of rings, he answered. “What’s up?”
“I think we’re being robbed,” she said.
“What?”
“I think we’re being overrun by hungry people,” Mary told him.
“What’s happening?”
“I see all these masked people.”
“Yeah, well that’s kinda normal, ain’t it?”
“Not like this,” she said. “People are going behind the counters and grabbing huge amounts of meat.”
“Okay,” Jeff said, now a little alarmed.
“I think it’s a mob, one of them mobs of unemployed people, like an organized thing,” Mary said.
“Listen, honey, you stay down,” Jeff said. “I know just who to call.”
“Okay,” she said. “You gonna call the police?”
“No, I got someone better,” Jeff said. “Go back to your spot and stay down.”
Mary hung up and went back inside. A customer was standing at the meat counter like it was a normal day.
“I’d like two New York Strips,” he said.
“Okay,” Mary said. “Which ones you want?”
The man looked through the glass.
“Those ones in the back, closest to you,” he said.
Mary wrapped them, priced them, and handed them over. The man thanked her and moved along.
Mary stood fearfully behind the counter, looking for signs of further chaos. It was hard to tell who the bad guys were, because everyone was wearing masks.
Ten minutes later, she heard yelling at the front of the store. She crouched down again. A moment later, a group of heavily armed men, some in camouflage, some in Hawaiian shirts and body armor, were running up to her counter.
“Where are they?” one of them asked her.
“Uh,” Mary said. “I saw one of them run down there.” She pointed to the general area toward which the lady with the baby had moved. But that had been some fifteen minutes ago.
“There seemed to be a lot of people just grabbing food and moving around real quick,” she said. “All in masks.”
The armed men, themselves masked, moved away toward the place she had indicated. She heard more yelling.
“FREEZE! ON THE GROUND!”
Mary braced herself for the sound of gunfire. It never came. What came instead were other shouts.
“POLICE! DROP YOUR WEAPONS!”
Mary crouched further down now.
***
The late news had the story when she got home.
“A local Ball-Mart was invaded by a squadron of armed men who styled themselves ‘Doorknob-Lickers,’ and ‘Boogaloo activists,’ who said they had been called to the store by a panicked employee, whom they refused to name, but who had told them that a group of possibly armed people had invaded the store and started looting.”
At this point the report showed one of the armed men Mary had seen, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt she suddenly realized was the same pattern as Jeff’s.
“We have these organized flash mobs of people who say they are hungry and destitute, but who are obviously just looters taking advantage of the good people here,” the man said on the TV report. “It’s so easy to blend in with all the masks around because of this fake virus Hoax. These people are trying to bring down society. We saw their kind at polling places and took care of them there in November. They want something for nothing. So, we have repurposed our militia into an Anti-Virus-Hoax Militia, to try to keep order here.”
A reporter asked, “But you yourselves were confronted by the police at the store, after holding a customer on the ground at gunpoint.”
“We are very sure that that ‘customer’ was actually a looter. It’s real hard to tell the difference nowadays. That’s what they count on. These people hate America. They hate the President. They sow chaos with this Deep State Virus Hoax, they want the economy to be shut down, and they come into our stores and terrorize good people to accomplish their socialist ends.”
“How is the virus a hoax, when the President himself had it?”
“You’re falling for Fake News.”
The reporter decided to drop the subject.
“So, the police released you?”
“We got no beef with the police, as long as they are upholding order and resisting these rebels. When they refuse to, we will show up. Now we were simply exercising our Second Amendment rights, so naturally they had no cause to arrest us.”
“But holding the customer at gunpoint –”
“He warn’t no customer, I can tell you that. I don’t even think he was an American to be honest.”
“Well, live for Channel 5, from Ball-Mart, this is Terence Rodgers.”
***
“I was sure they were robbing us,” Mary said.
“I’m sure they were,” Jeff told her. “They are taking advantage of this situation, this fake Virus Hoax, and the Democrat Election Fraud, to create civil disorder.”
“Who did you call? I thought you were going to call the police.”
“Police ain’t no use. I called some friends I’ve been talking to on-line. Good fellas. You okay?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said.
She prayed her name would not come up in connection with the incident – or was it a non-incident? She just didn’t know anymore.
“I’m going to bed,” Mary said. She started walking back toward the bedroom.
“I’ll be in soon,” Jeff said. “I just got some texts to answer. Someone took down our ‘We Stand With The President’ poster and threw it on the ground. I had to put it back up. I think it was our friends next door again. I think the guys who helped you today might help us with that too.”
Mary was about to turn around and suggest that maybe it was just the wind, or to bring up the fact that Jeff had taken down the neighbors’ “Black Lives Matter” sign several times, but instead she just shivered.
“Sometimes I think we’re headed to a new civil war,” Jeff said. “Well, at least our side has all the guns.”
At the bedroom door, Mary turned back towards Jeff.
“I’m scared of my neighbors,” she said. “Those rioters scare me. Tell those men, whoever they were, tell them thanks.”
Jeff nodded, and then turned back to his computer screen.
© 2020 Nolan O’Brian