Five

David woke in his own bed the next morning.  He couldn't remember how he had gotten there, but his car was in the garage and everything seemed to be in the same place as when he had left to go to his office the previous day. 

He tried the telephone, in the vain hopes that the previous day was a bad dream, but there was still no dial tone.  He could still feel the desperation and the panic that he had felt in the sporting goods store lurking just below the surface of his mind, but he pushed them down and made himself replay the previous day's events in his head. 

After hopelessly trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for everything that had happened to himself for a while, he set those thoughts aside and retraced his steps in his mind.  Recounting what had happened in the sporting goods store gave him an idea for what his next steps should be.



David drove his car to the nearest gas station and found that, miraculously, the pumps still worked.  He had planned on figuring out how to syphon the gas from the underground storage tanks if the pumps didn't work, but it didn't appear that would be necessary.  He filled up the tank on his car and found a couple of two gallon containers in the store that he also filled.  He also grabbed a box of Pop Tarts and some other food items while he was in the store.

He considered grabbing a pack of cigarettes.  He thought that getting cancer didn't really matter now, since he seemed to be the only person left, but he changed his mind at the last minute; he wasn't ready to give up on life just yet.

He put the gas cans in the trunk of his car and drove towards the nearest sporting goods store.  It was much larger than the store downtown and occupied the equivalent of a full city block.  The store was only a couple of miles from his house and David figured that it would make a perfect supply depot for him. 

There were plenty of supplies that David decided that he needed.  His first order of business was getting a gas powered generator so that he could get his refrigerator and other appliances up an running.  He then stocked up on first aid supplies, batteries, flashlights and candles.  His car was almost packed full when he made one last trip into the store to make sure there was nothing essential that he was forgetting.  That's when he wandered past the hunting section and considered grabbing a gun. 

With no other people or animals around, he couldn't imagine why he would need a gun, but something made him linger for a few minutes and consider the store's inventory. David just wasn't sure what was going on and perhaps he needed to upgrade his protection. He had a hand gun in his closet, but he thought that a shotgun might be better. In the end he decided that he was being paranoid and he didn't bring any new guns home with him.

When he got back home, however, he checked his closet for the hand gun and couldn't find it. That was odd, he thought, he couldn't remember the last time that he had taken it out of the closet and Allison surely wouldn't have touched it. She always hated that he had the gun - thought it was an attempt to be macho and a dangerous attempt at that.

"Well you aren't here anymore, are you?" David said aloud to no one in particular.

He resolved to get a new gun the next time he went to the sporting goods store.