Chapter 5: The Westside Inspection & Rationing Shock

Kathy parked her car on the gravel shoulder along the cracked asphalt of Gate Seven and stepped out.

The Westside Industrial Park was quiet. A light breeze moved through the wide, unpaved lanes and carried the smell of dust, engine oil, and sun-baked concrete. On either side of the road, low steel warehouses and commercial yards sat behind chain-link fences.

She walked up to the perimeter wall of the Westside Depot. The ten-foot wall was poured concrete, topped with angled rows of rusted razor wire. The main entrance was a double steel gate anchored into concrete pillars.

She took the master key card from her bag, slid it out of its blue protective casing, and pressed the magnetic strip against the scanner on the iron post.

A red light flickered twice and turned green, and a pneumatic latch released with a dull thud. Kathy pushed one side of the gate open just wide enough to step through, then latched it behind her.

The inner courtyard was wide. Weeds grew through the cracks in the concrete apron, but the pavement itself was solid, with room for three full-sized freight trailers to turn at once. At the center of the property stood the main building, a single-story concrete warehouse with reinforced pillars and dark, insulated steel roof panels.

She walked to the loading dock of Bay 1, slid the card into the dock console, and pulled the manual chain hoist. The galvanized steel shutter rolled up into the ceiling framing with a rattle.

Dust drifted in the sunlight coming through the opening. Kathy stepped onto the raised dock floor and looked across the interior.

High overhead, steel trusses spanned the full width of the building, so no pillar interrupted the floor. The concrete was sealed and dry, with no sign of water damage.

Abandoned inventory sat across the floor: pallets stacked with flat-fold cardboard shipping boxes, rolls of industrial plastic wrap, and hundreds of empty fifty-gallon steel drums painted blue. In the back corner of the bay, three rows of tall racking held crates with faded distribution labels from Luiz's firm.

Kathy walked down the main aisle inspecting the crates. She took a steel crowbar from an empty tool rack on the wall and pried open the top of the nearest one.

Inside were vacuum-sealed packs of food-grade desiccant, bulk rolls of mylar sealing film, and stacks of unprinted aluminum storage cans. The next crate held heavy-duty manual pumps for transferring liquid out of steel drums.

Luiz and his managers had written all of it off as dead stock, left over from an abandoned packaging line that was not worth the labor to count, move, or sell. To anyone running an ordinary supply business, it was a room full of cheap packing material.

To Kathy it was a head start. The bay was dry and solid, and it already held what she needed to package, seal, and store bulk liquid and dry goods for the long term.

At the rear of Bay 1, an iron door led to the basement level. She unlocked it and looked down the dark stairwell. Cool air came up from the cold-storage cellars under the foundation.

She shut the door and locked it. The building was sounder than the city registry had described. The other three bays could wait until she had food to put in them.

Kathy stepped back onto the loading dock, lowered the shutter, and locked the bay console. She had a place to store supplies. Now she needed something to fill it.

She locked the main gate behind her and walked two blocks east down the industrial avenue to the Northern Regional Grain & Commodity Distribution Hub, the largest wholesale grain terminal in the sector.

The hub was four corrugated metal sheds around a central truck scale. A dozen flatbed trucks idled in the yard while forklifts moved pallets of grain bags into the loading bays.

Kathy walked past the trucks into the central sales office. Behind a long counter, a broad-shouldered man in a canvas work vest was going over shipping manifests on a tablet. His name tag read Gus - Yard Manager.

"I need to place an immediate order for bulk grain," Kathy said.

Gus looked up and took in her jacket and plain shoes. "What kind of account do you hold with us, ma'am? Commercial, processing, or municipal?"

"Cash purchase, local pickup," Kathy said. "Three tons of white rice, two tons of hard red wheat flour, and fifty cases of refined cooking oil. A truck will come this afternoon to take it to a warehouse nearby."

Gus stopped tapping his screen. He set the tablet on the counter and looked at her for three seconds.

"Three tons of rice and two tons of flour on a cash walk-in?" His voice was rough.

"Yes," Kathy said, resting a hand on her bag. "I can pay the full balance in cash right now if you clear the dock release for two o'clock."

Gus did not touch the order log. He tapped a laminated sheet pinned to the pillar beside the counter.

"Can't do it, ma'am. The city declared a drought emergency at eight o'clock this morning, and this directive came down from the regional agricultural board right after."

Kathy stepped closer and read the heading across the top:

EMERGENCY MUNICIPAL DIRECTIVE - TEMPORARY STAPLE GRAIN ALLOCATION CAP.

The notice was dated June 14.

The text below it was plain. Because of the drought emergency the city had declared that morning, along with unseasonably dry conditions across the central agricultural basin and rising heat index forecasts, all non-commercial cash sales of primary grains, flour, and oil were capped with immediate effect. Buyers without an approved commercial food processor license could buy no more than 100 kilograms of grain and 20 liters of oil per week.

"A hundred kilograms?" Kathy said, lowering her voice. "That's about two hundred pounds."

"That's the cap." Gus leaned his forearms on the counter. "The state grain reserves are monitoring dock output starting today. Every cash ticket over a hundred kilos gets flagged, and if I fill a five-ton order with no license, the municipal inspector shuts my scales down by tonight."

"I am paying full market price, in cash, upfront," Kathy said, holding his eyes. "You have thousands of tons in Shed Two, right behind this office."

"It doesn't matter what you pay, lady," Gus said, shaking his head. "The rules changed this morning. People in the city are noticing the dry spell, retail prices are rising, and the government wants the grain supply locked down before panic buying starts."

He picked up his tablet and went back to his manifests. "If you want your hundred kilos of rice, I'll have a yard hand put two fifty-kilo bags in the back of your car. If you want five tons, you need a commercial processor license from the city board, and those take three weeks to clear."

Three weeks was longer than she could afford.

Kathy looked at the notice on the pillar. She had sixty-two thousand dollars, ten thousand of it in cash in her bag, and a key to a walled site two blocks away, and buying in bulk had just been closed to her even with the money in hand. The government had started restricting food before the heat had properly begun, and almost no one seemed to have noticed.

Buying rations through ordinary wholesale channels was no longer only difficult. With cash in her hand, it was blocked.

She did not argue, beg, or offer a bribe.

"Give me the hundred-kilo limit in rice and the twenty liters of oil," she said, counting three hundred dollars from her bag onto the counter. "And print the receipt."

Gus looked at the cash, nodded once, and keyed the sale into his tablet. "A yard hand will bring it to the front gate in ten minutes."

Kathy took her change and the receipt and walked out of the office into the dusty sunlight.

Her $1.5 million was frozen by a court order, and now the grain supply was rationed as well. Small, scattered purchases were no longer only a way to stay out of sight of Luiz's lawyers; they were the only way left to gather anything.

She walked back toward the depot with her hands in her jacket pockets. Every pound of food that went into her space would have to be bought a little at a time, from one seller after another.