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The machines stopped working.
A man stood in his outpost on a hill atop the bunker wall that surrounded the depot where the aid had been collected and staged for distribution. He fired into the crowd. An old man in the crowd dropped to the ground, bleeding. He lay stil except from the kicks of the others stumbling over his inert body.
Another shot from farther down the wall. Another body dropped. A young man, teenager clad in rags, his body emaciated by hunger.
Shots, mostly fired in the air rang out.
No one noticed that a deuce and a half stopped running, except the driver. It didn’t sputter and stall. It just died.
Radio’s stopped working. Earbuds. Walky talkies. Comms of all kinds failed. There wasn’t silence in the rioting, but there was silence over the airwaves. The silence was mixed in the ear with the sounds of death, panic, gunfire and riot.
The security guards noticed something had changed. A helicopter had crashed. There were no planes flying overhead. There were no commands being issued by radio, no updates, no coordinators voice.
The gunmen felt isolated and fearful. They deserted their posts, one seeing the other flee, not wanting to be left behind, joined in the retreat from the wall.
The rioters on the other side pushed forward. The overran the countermen trampling them underfoot as they got to the food. They tore open the boxes and crates on the backs of the flatbed trucks. They shoved them off the trucks onto the ground where other rioters tore into them taking what they could carry.
Soon, there were two currents in the crowd. Those still fighting forward and those trying to go the other way back to their families, back to briing life saving, life sustaining food.
There were fights. Desperate men attacking those with armfuls of packages stealing from their fellows rather than go home again empty handed.
These soon ended as humanity took over again. The needy moved forward.
The masses climbed over the bunker wall and into the compound. Like a wave of human biomass they crested the top of the hill and poured down the other side. They engulfed the trucks that no longer ran. They stole everything. They took it. They laid claim to just enough to carry back.
And just like that. In the blink of an eye.
It was over.
The compound was quiet. An eirie silence fell across what a mere minutes before had been chaos. Like the silence that accompanies a snow storm, the silence seemed contrasted with the movement. So much flurry. So little sound. Men mostly. Men and boys. A few women, but mostly men and boys…wandering around looking for crumbs. All the good stuff gone. Carried back to put just a tiny dent in the need, but a flow in the right direction. Distribution direction had been restored.