Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller by Bobby Adair

parking lot, feeling
frightened, self conscious, and silly all at the same time. But as
silly as the whole exercise felt, he kept telling himself that a
hundred bucks was a small price to pay to take the worry off his
mind.

Chapter 15
    A guy checked his membership card and rolled
an enormous basket in front of him, wide enough to sit a few adults
snuggly inside. Paul accepted the basket and pushed it down a long
corridor of boxes stacked twice as tall as him, each with a
ten-square-foot full-color picture of the flat panel television
inside.
    As Paul looked at the warehouse shelves,
stacked forty feet high in rows past the flat panel gauntlet, he
realized there was probably enough food in the building to keep him
alive for the rest of his life. At the same time, he wondered—when
society faltered under the strain of a real epidemic—whether
looters coming to steal food would first grab a giant
high-definition television or if they’d pick up a case of baby food
instead. And those that carted a television out in one of these
enormous baskets, would they do it because they were too stupid to
take the food, or because they were too optimistic to think they’d
need it?
    Paul exited the flat panel cave and passed
into a labyrinth of tables piled high with folded clothing. Once
through that, he turned down the first of the food aisles looking
for inexpensive calories. Instead, the aisle was full of snack
crackers of every flavor imaginable, in boxes and plastic jugs each
big enough to feed him and Heidi for a few days. But twenty dollars
for two days’ worth of snack crackers was a high price compared to
a fifty-pound bag of rice that could feed them for three weeks.
    Nevertheless, self-consciousness was setting
in. He wanted the rice, beans, and oil, but he didn’t want to look
like an Ebola-fearing prepper, even if that was exactly what he
was. So a giant-sized box of granola bars found its way into the
basket. They were expensive calories, but a granola bar every other
day would add a little variety to a diet of rice and beans. It
would also be a distracting snack food when the cashier scrutinized
his purchase. His feeling of silliness was setting in, and he was
pretty sure the cashier was going to ask him why he needed food in
such bulk.
    He found the rice two aisles over. A
fifty-pound bag of sugar made it into the basket—everything tastes
good with sugar on it—along with a five-gallon jug of cooking oil.
A double pack of large peanut butter jars joined all of that along
with a gallon of honey, four pounds of salt, and a case of Cokes.
No beans, though.
    He made several circuits of the store looking
for the beans. There were none to be found.
    He picked up a jug of bleach, recalling from
his Boy Scout days that a capful in some measure of water would
render it drinkable. He didn’t know if boiling would become
necessary, or even doable. The bleach would give he and Heidi
access to water sources that might otherwise be unusable.
    Once in line at the cashier, his
self-consciousness made him look around nervously, especially when
he compared his load with the mixed greens, a bottle of wine,
salmon, some fresh cut flowers, and a bag of apples being bought by
the woman in front of him. She was planning on cooking a nice
dinner and plying some guy with enough wine to make her wrinkles
invisible so she could get him into bed.
    The cashier rang up the woman and sent her on
her way.
    To Paul’s relief, when his turn arrived to
check out, neither the cashier nor her helper commented on his
obvious Doomsday Prepper hoard. A few minutes later, the hoard was
stashed in the back of his truck and he was driving home, wondering
how he was going to explain fifty-pound bags of dry goods to
Heidi.

Chapter 16
    Getting the four-wheel drive vehicles
undetected over the Ugandan border from Kenya was as easy as it was
in any other part of the Third World. Najid Almasi and his men
hadn’t seen anything but shrubs, trees, animals, and