A Memory of Zero Degrees

Chapter 6: The Price of Prophecy (2)

Arthur stood in the parking lot, the envelope of cash heavy in his jacket pocket. Almost nine thousand dollars. In thirty days, it would be worth less than the paper it was printed on. Today, it was a ticket to survival.

He walked across the lot to a wholesale club a cavernous, warehouse sized store that sold everything in quantities meant for restaurants and large families. The kind of place where you needed a membership card just to breathe the recycled air. Arthur didn't have a membership. He didn't need one. He walked through the entrance with the confident stride of a man who knew exactly what he was doing, and the teenager at the door, distracted by his phone, didn't even look up.

Inside, the scale of the place was almost obscene. Pallets of goods stretched toward a distant ceiling crisscrossed with steel rafters. The air smelled of cardboard, industrial cleaner, and the faint, sweet rot of produce that had been sitting too long. In his previous life, Arthur had shopped at a corner bodega, buying single cans of soup and boxes of pasta one at a time, living paycheck to paycheck. This place was a monument to a civilization that had no idea it was about to be entombed in ice.

He grabbed a heavy duty flatbed cart and began his grim harvest.

He moved with a predatory focus, his eyes scanning nutritional labels like a machine reading code.

White rice. Fifty pound bags. Buy four. Carbohydrates were the bedrock of survival. They kept the furnace burning.

Canned protein. Tuna, chicken, sardines. Forty cans. He stacked them with the care of a man building a wall against starvation.

Dried beans. Lentils. Split peas. Twenty pounds. They would last for years if kept dry.

Cooking oil. Salt. Sugar. Powdered milk. The essentials. The things that turned mere calories into something resembling a meal.

Instant noodles. Cases of them. Morale food. When the world outside was a white hellscape of screaming wind, a bowl of hot, salty broth was a psychological anchor.

The cart groaned under the accumulating weight. The wheels squeaked in protest. Arthur ignored them. His body, newly fortified by the system's baseline enhancement, moved with an ease that still felt foreign. He hoisted fifty pound sacks of rice as if they were bags of feathers, stacking them with a precision that bordered on obsessive.

He was loading a second cart with bottled water when he heard them.

Two men, standing near the end of the aisle, their own carts filled with normal, reasonable quantities of food. They were watching him with the open, unself conscious curiosity of people who had never known true hunger.

"Jesus Christ," one of them muttered, a stocky guy with a red baseball cap pulled low over his brow. "You see that? Guy's loading up like the world's ending."

His companion, taller and thinner with the weary posture of a man who had seen too many internet rabbit holes, snorted. "Probably fell for that Ice Prophet crap on YouTube. You seen that video? Some guy up in the mountains, calling himself the 'Harbinger of the Frozen God.' Claims he had a vision. Says in thirty days, the sun's gonna die and we're all gonna freeze."

Red Cap laughed, a harsh, dismissive sound. "Yeah, I saw it. My aunt sent it to me in the family group chat. Told her to lay off the conspiracy channels. Every year there's a new one. Last year it was the asteroid. Year before that, some guy said the Yellowstone volcano was gonna blow. They're all grifters, man. Selling supplements and emergency kits to scared old ladies."

Thin Guy shrugged, pushing his cart forward. "Still. Dude's dropping some serious cash. Guess if you're dumb enough to believe a prophet on YouTube, you're dumb enough to max out your credit cards on rice and beans."

They walked away, their laughter echoing off the high steel rafters.

Arthur's hands, resting on the handle of his cart, tightened until his knuckles went white. The old Arthur would have felt a flush of embarrassment. He would have ducked his head, avoided eye contact, and maybe even abandoned the cart to escape the judgment. The old Arthur had been a man desperate to be liked, to be seen as normal and reasonable.

That man was dead.

The new Arthur watched the two men disappear around the corner, and he felt nothing but a cold, quiet certainty. Laugh. Laugh while you can. In thirty days, when the snow was piled up to the rooftops and the grocery stores were empty tombs, their laughter would be frozen on their lips. And he would still be here, standing on a mountain of rice and canned tuna, watching the world die from behind the walls of his fortified apartment.

He pushed his groaning carts toward the checkout.

The cashier, a woman with tired eyes and a name tag that read "Marge," scanned his items with the slow, methodical rhythm of someone who had long ago stopped being surprised by anything customers did. The total flashed on the screen: $1,847.32. Arthur peeled twenty hundred dollar bills from the envelope and handed them over without flinching.

"You know there's a limit on bulk purchases of certain items, right?" Marge asked, not looking up from her scanner.

"Is there?" Arthur's voice was flat, disinterested.