But then his hunger turned ferocious, angry and gnawing. He was having trouble thinking straight, and he had no intention of rolling into whatever steaming mess Rusty had created with anything but a clear head. Lisa, again, had saved the day, this time finding a report on a FEMA frequency of a newly scheduled government food-distribution event, supervised by the Iowa National Guard. It was only thirty miles off his route. A couple hundred people were in line ahead of him when he got there, but there were still plenty of the processed cheese logs left when he reached the front. While he waited, he’d asked a lot of questions. Turns out government cheese isn’t so much one certain kind of cheese as all cheese. Cheddar, Colby, curd, and granular cheese all went into the vat, then they dumped in a load of emulsifiers and a few other things it was better not to think about, and it was melted, poured into footlong rectangular blocks, and cooled. The government had been making them since World War II, storing them in a hundred and fifty warehouses across the country and distributing them to schools, welfare recipients, and now victims of the nationwide food shortage.
The cheese was one of the most delicious things Thom had ever eaten. As soon as he was handed his, he’d stepped away from the line and slunk over to a grassy hillside with it, finding a spot away from the crowd. He sat down and was a good five or six mouthfuls into it, reminding himself not to hit it too hard—it was processed cheese, after all, and he was operating on an empty stomach—when he noticed a guy ten feet away staring at him.
Thom squinted. Had the guy recognized him? Was he some sort of starstruck tech geek?
The guy gestured, waving Thom over.
Thom looked behind him. Nope, the guy meant him. Thom waved in a “no, thanks” way, but the guy gestured again, insistent, and spoke softly. “You won’t regret it.” He held up a small brown bag, wrinkled and grease-stained, indicating its contents. He bounced his eyebrows suggestively.
Intrigued, Thom got up and moved closer. The guy, a Black man in his mid-thirties, looked up at him and smiled. “I don’t know any cheese that isn’t better with bread.”
He reached into the bag, tore off a large crust from an unsliced loaf of bread, and held it out to Thom discreetly. Thom looked both ways, sat down, and took the bread, grateful. He broke off a chunk of cheese, put it on the bread, and ate it. It was heavenly.
The guy smiled, pleased. “Actual bread. My mom bakes it in a stone oven in the back of the house. How long’s it been since you’ve had bread, right?”
Thom moaned, chewing, to indicate it had been a very long time. He did not mention that in fact it had been just a day and a half. But that was factory bread, full of chemicals, pre-sliced and frozen for eight months, and this—this was in a whole different category.
He finished chewing. “Incredible. Thank you.”
“You looked hungry.”
“I was.”
“You from here?” the guy asked.
Thom shook his head. “California.”
“Long way from home. Where’d you get the gas?”
“There’s still places.”
The guy looked at him, trying to figure him out. “What are you doing here?”
“Passing through on my way to Illinois.”
“Well, you’re not far now. What’s in Illinois?”
“My sister, outside Chicago. She’s got—well, there might be some problems.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Me too,” Thom said.
“How’d you know about cheese day?”
Thom shrugged. “Just got lucky.” Best not to mention his assistant back at corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley, slavishly poring over the nation’s emergency-radio frequencies to find him food.
The guy shook his head. “I’m not sure lucky is a word I’d use to describe any of us right now. But if you were hungry and you found food, I’m glad for you.” The guy thought about it for a minute, then turned back to Thom, trying to phrase this delicately. “You didn’t maybe want to bring some food with you on a long car trip during a five-month blackout?”
“In retrospect, sure,” Thom said. “Would have been a great idea. I would have brought a whole bunch of things with me. But I left in kind of a hurry. I was, um—I was a little upset, and I was trying to do things differently. For once.” He laughed, running a hand through his hair, the food in his stomach giving him a bit more strength and clarity of thought. “Now that I think about it, I’ve never been as unprepared for something in my entire life as I am for this.”