Soon he’d forgotten he had weapons and armor in the first place and was instead doing a bit of light grocery shopping for the Kennedys down in the hollow who were both sick on Pill (highly contagious!). Backwards Iowa just did that to people, brought them back to Earth where they came from, made them care about their fellow humans again because there wasn’t a lot else to care about in this corn invested place of a state. Jack the husband said he wanted Kaboom cereal which he was trying to find. Fellow sugar addict and loving wife of 57 years Marge said that she preferred Lucky Charms so when he located the aisle with the cereal he’ll pick up a box of that too. Both were blind to the fact that this high sugar intake left them vulnerable to diseases like The Pill, lowered their natural immune defenses. “5 dollars should cover it all,” Jack said while handing him the bill before he climbed back up the hill into town again but he was living in the 20th Century still so Karl knew it would take quite a bit more than that to buy the stuff they requested. Luckily more in-tune-with-the-times Marge slipped him another 5 as he was going out the door — still not quite cutting it but maybe getting close enough where he could cover the rest with the two dollars a boy gave him earlier in the day for fixing a flat tire on his bicycle. That’s when he discovered he could be kind as well as mean, a kind of first in his weighed down, ghetto constricted life.
As he was checking out, he overheard bits of a conversation from the couple behind him, something about Hy-Vee here not being the grocery store it started out as, and in turning into a large chain it had lost that small village feel which made it so special in the first place. “Not like Beaconsfield, no,” said the husband of the two, obviously having a memory of this place in his head. Beaconsfield, huh, Karl thought. He’d register the name in his brain as Carla the Clerk’s register ran up $11.92 in total for the cereal. Phew! Just made it. TBC?
