Chapter 17

Constance regretted not getting out of the city when she had the chance.

Of course, there had not been much of a chance. She didn’t own a car. Mass transit was completely down. With her phone out of commission, she didn’t have a map app to use to guide her. Naturally, she didn’t own a paper map. Except for the ones sold to tourists, she had not even seen a paper map for years. By the time she realized she needed one, they had disappeared from the shops. Given the fact that she only had a vague notion of which roads took her to what bridges and her knowledge collapsed completely after that, any journey on foot was destined to fail miserably. She had never had cause to pay attention to such details. Then, there was the other important question of where exactly she would go. How did she know that things would be better ‘there’ than they were ‘here’?

Those who did have cars escaped within a day or two after the power went down and stayed down. She should have talked her way into one of those vehicles, but instead she used this mass migration as an opportunity to visit the shipyards. She hitchhiked to the docks where storage container after storage container was offloaded in order to see what was there.

The place was eerily still. A small handful of cargo ships could be seen out in the bay, just sitting. Eventually, she found a real person who explained that this had begun well before the power outage. Dockworkers had started calling in sick months ago. In the last week, there had been so few that it was not possible to safely unload a ship. But that was only half of the problem. The other half was that there were no truck drivers coming in to pull the shipping containers away from the yard. You could only stack containers so high, after all. The trucks began disappearing even before the dockworkers.

The real person had to explain the significance of this to Constance. She had just stood there dumbly, trying to process why it all mattered, before finally confessing to him that “she didn’t get it.” With a slight edge in his voice, he gave what those in the heartland would recognize as a basic lesson in economics. Supply and demand. Logistics. Products, they had. Workers to distribute them throughout the country, they did not have. Scarcity of products meant higher prices. Finally, the producers stopped trying. The reason why there were ships still at anchor and not on the way back to their points of origin is that sailing required fuel, and if there were no trucks to bring fuel to the bunker boats which refueled the container ships, the container ships were stranded.

Rubbing salt in her wounds, the man had also said, “I’m sure there are loads of coffee out there somewhere in those boxes, if only we had someone who could move them along the next step of the supply chain.” The absence of her morning coffee for more than a week was one of the things that irked her the most about everything.

The real person strongly hinted that there had been a general strike by the nation’s truckers, but she could not believe this was not known to her. She was a star reporter for the Paper of Record. Something of the sort the real person was describing would have come to her attention. Wouldn’t it? The fact that she didn’t know anything about it was itself worthy of investigation. She would investigate it, if only she could find a way to get out of the city.

She had hitchhiked back home. The next day, there were hardly any vehicles on the road anymore. The ones she saw were packed with people and possessions and didn’t have room for her, anyway.

She witnessed terrifying events. She was not the only one trying to get out of the city. There were numerous violent encounters between the rightful occupants of vehicles and those trying to commandeer them in order to get out of town. She saw skulls cracked open, people shot in cold blood, and even a woman raped on the street in broad daylight. No one could intervene—a man with a pistol stuck in his waistband stood guard, watching the rapist’s back.

And what about the good guys with guns? Defunded. And now: gone. There were still police on the street on the third day. After that, they must have calculated the time had come to protect their own families and no longer reported to work. Would their squad cars have even had fuel to last much longer into the outage? At any rate, they may also have concluded that their presence was not appreciated, anyway, and gave the people what they wanted. Or, at least what President Harris had said the people wanted.

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