The Thin Mint Line

It was a new day. 

I hastened to grab my supplies. Lead-lined hazmat suit, check. GPS, check. Potable water. I stared at the fine white ash that swirled in my canteen. That stuff was everywhere nowadays. Ugh, check. Weapons? A machete would do. I ran my leather glove over the blade ever so gently. I could see the fine fibers in the leather separate. Still sharp. I threw it in my red wagon. It better still be sharp. Who knew what I would run into. 

I fastened my sash around my hazmat suit, loaded my wagon with my wares, and took one final glance at the picture of my mom next to my bed. She taught me to do this, and if I didn’t make enough to pay for her radiation sickness treatment . . . Well, I swallowed down the lump in my throat, I wasn’t going to let that happen. 

I opened the lead-lined door of my shelter and walked into the yellow world. It looked like the sun’s yolk had broke and ran over our city, and someone was constantly salting the eggs. Snow? Hah. No, that my friend would be humanity’s hubris still getting into every nook and cranny. As I looked out at the ruins of my city, I smiled because I was tired of being sad. Slanted swiss cheese buildings surrounded by reflecting pools of oil and chemicals. We sure showed them. Yes sir. We sure proved our point.

And that was all that mattered, right?

I pounded on the aluminum siding of the door of my first customer. No answer. Good. They weren’t dum-dums. Dum-dums had no money. I pounded again. And again. Ten minutes later a soft voice came out from behind the door.

“Who is it?”

“Would you like to buy some cookies Ma’am?”

A pause. 

“No. We don’t have any money for cookies. Have to save for clean water.”

“I have thin mints Ma’am.”

Another pause.

“Uh, twenty boxes please.”

I smiled, as I carefully placed the cookies in their lead-lined package slot for their shelter. After the twenty boxes went in, a hundred dollar bill came out for me. I grabbed it quickly with my gloves and placed it in a zippered pocket on my hazmat suit. I glanced around. I don’t think anyone had seen me yet. I looked back at my near empty wagon. I would have to stop back home to replenish, and later I would have to bake more cookies. 

After the big-kablooey, as some people called it, people rushed to live in bomb shelters. Bomb shelters were for suckers, in my humble opinion, bakery surplus warehouses were where it was at. 

My second customer was several blocks over. I always hated going too far. There were scavengers, and everybody was always looking for a way to get things for free. I knew how much people were willing to pay for my cookies, which made me worried how desperate others might be to get them by other means. But I had my own stealthy path to get over there, ducking behind rubble, peering through eyeholes for just the right moment to cross a path. I mean, just the way I could crawl through the ash and refuse-filled gutters and still keep the cookies clean was a thing of beauty. And it was all worth it because the path ended at a settlement with fifty people. If they were in the mood for cookies, it would be my only sale for the week, which meant more time spent with my mother.

I crawled, ducked, and slid my way through the urban rubble. I peered around a corner and took a look at the entrance to the settlement. I gasped.

“Tiffany!”

To my dismay, a very familiar hazmat suit with a sash was standing at the settlement door. She was busy unloading box upon box of cookies into their delivery slot. 

I caught the sob before it escaped from my throat. How did she find out about this settlement? I thought I had kept it a secret. My eyes narrowed. She must have followed me. That was something Tiffany would do. She had no morals, no boundaries! Both of her parents were doing just fine, they would be welcoming her home to their gated house in the foothills with the Others. Did she even need the money?

I eyed my machete. I eyed the off-road wheels of her electric-powered armored golf cart. But why stop there? I eyed her neck. 

I shook my head. No. We used to be friends. I guess we still were. We never officially parted ways. But ever since the big-kablooey, people’s social circles got smaller one way or another. Just in the last month I lost most of my regular customers. The fruit of radiation sickness was ripe for harvest. My mother . . .  

“God!” I gasped. I couldn’t handle this world, as reality washed over me in a nauseating wave. How did this happen? “You lunatics,” I whispered into the oily puddle I was standing in, “when they said your life depends on this election, they were using hyperbole to get your vote! They didn’t actually mean it! If the other side won, life would still go on! It would have!” Demonizing neighbors, starving media outlets greedily salivating over clickbait, completely callous to the dividing power of their words, both sides being hypocrites, there was a standard of perfection that was raised up that neither side could attain. 

We forgot we were humans. Simply put. That was the maelstrom that fed the big kablooey. Humans need forgiveness, and we selfishly refused to give others the divine gift we were freely given. 

Very much like what I was about to do to poor Tiffany.

I raised my machete and rushed at her. My heart pounded, breath quickened, and muscles sprung with desperation. I needed the money. My mother needed more treatment. 

Tiffany glanced over to see me charging at her. She screamed and ran to the driver’s door of her armored cart and jumped in. She slammed the door shut just as I got to her. I glared inside the window of her cart. I could see her wide fearful eyes through her visor. “Britt! What are you doing!” She fumbled with the keys of the cart.

“Stop stealing my customers!”

“No! We have to eat too!”

“You and your parents have money! I don’t! I’m trying to save my mom!”

“I’m sorry Britt, but we’re on the same side! We have people who are sick too!” She looked down as if she was sad, but that was when I saw the uzi she was holding, pointing, at me. She glanced up. “Now please step away from my cart! I don’t want to have to hurt you!”

I took several healthy steps back, machete up in the air. I was mentally kicking myself for not bringing the rocket launcher. 

As she drove off, she tossed out one last insult. “Britt, please give me your thin mint recipe! My mother wants it.”

“Get out of here!” I watched her go, heart still pounding, my brain tried to feel disgusted at what I had become, but frankly I had gotten over that a long time ago. 

I dragged my cart up to the settlement gate and rang the bell. After the obligatory ten minutes of ringing, I got an answer through the intercom.

“Yes?”

“Would you like some cookies sir?”

“Britt? Is that your name? We’re sorry, we just bought from your friend. She was able to give us a bulk discount.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. “But . . . I have thin mints.”

A pause.

“Well, why didn’t you say so? We can hold off on buying medicine for a bit. Ten boxes please.” I quickly unloaded my wagon. It wasn’t my usual order, but at least it was something.

Later that afternoon I finally made it back to my shelter at the bakery surplus warehouse. I sealed my door and stripped off my hazmat suit in my airlock. I tried to keep my tears in as I sprayed down my suit to decontaminate it. If there was only a way I could decontaminate my mind. The entire afternoon my mind had been deep in the mire of my confrontation with Tiffany. How dare she? Didn’t she remember when we got our archery badge together! She pointed an uzi at me! Well, I had invited her to my thirteenth birthday party! She took the main source of my income! So what? I kept her crush on Garret a secret through all of middle school! I choked down some stale shortbreads for dinner while pacing around like a maniac. I was stable. I was normal. Yeah, that’s it. Time to get to work baking cookies. If I was lucky, I would have maybe a half hour later to visit my mother at the hospital. 

It was a new day.

Well, not quite.

My proximity alarm was going off. The flashing red light by my bed silently woke me up from my half-slumber. It was still dark. Either the mutated rats were back again, or I had an intruder. 

I slinked out of my bed, grabbed my shotgun that was tucked under the mattress, and barefoot padded to a ladder in my sealed bedroom. Using one hand, I climbed up the ladder that went to a trapdoor that went directly into the air ducts. I had insulated all of them to muffle the sound of somebody moving through them. Just in case, you know, for maintenance purposes.

I slid along the ducts and went directly to the room that contained my treasure. My cookie storage? Oh no, give a man a box of cookies, and he will be happy for a while. But give a man the only surviving genuine recipe for thin mints? People knew I was the only one with thin mints that tasted like the real thing. Everybody else’s were mere wisps of nostalgia. 

I had a safe in the old office of the warehouse, which is where I kept the paper copy of the recipe. I also kept about a dozen traps there too. I scooted up to the grate that covered the air duct in the office and peered through it.

Sure enough, I could see a figure crouching in front of the safe. I was impressed. He (or she) had made it past my traps. Not too many people did. I slowly slid my shotgun into the small hole I had cut in the grate and aimed it at the figure. 

Now one might think I would shout a warning, maybe give him a chance to run out, teach them a lesson, so to speak. 

Shots were fired. I quickly rolled to the side to dodge the volley of bullets coming my way from my intruder, I pulled the trigger on my still-aimed shotgun with one firm hand. There was just no courtesy anymore. What was its worth? This person had broken into my shelter. They wanted me dead—physically or financially it didn’t matter, one way was just quicker than the other. If I was dead that meant my mother was dead. So I blindly fired off several more rounds into the office.

Silence followed. I breathed quietly and listened so closely I heard a cricket fart. Nothing. I had a mirror on a telescoping rod taped to my shotgun. I extended it and used it to peer into the office. 

I didn’t see a body, which was a problem. I also saw the door to the safe open. My heart sank. I probably shouldn’t have used my mother’s birthdate as the combination. Somebody could have looked it up. 

I slid all over my shelter in the air ducts. I saw no sign of the intruder. Another hour of carefully probing every crawlspace and closet with my shotgun did confirm that once again I was alone. My safe was empty. The recipe that I had jotted down was gone. Of course, I had memorized it. Making thousands of cookies a year will do that, but now somebody else had it. 

As I picked up several conditioned long blonde strands of hair on the office floor, I had a sneaky suspicion who. 

“Tiffany.” I growled.

Once day broke I walked outside, and my own shampoo-starved locks blew like corn stalks in the hot breeze under my beret. I gnawed on a shortbread. I needed to dip them in chocolate or drugs or something. Somebody had to buy shortbreads, dang it. 

The rocket launcher felt heavy on my back, not to mention the double shotguns slung inside my jacket, but it was all right, I didn’t have any cookies today. Or a hazmat suit for that matter. I was a photon. I was traveling light. 

Today I walked straight down the middle of the road. I wasn’t hiding. I could see the shine of hazmat suits hiding around corners, behind debris. Did I always look so cowardly and stupid hiding about? I probably never fooled anyone. But today people were hiding from me, well, me and my rocket launcher. I straightened my sash, knocked some dandruff off my uniform, and carried on.

I reached the guard gate at the base of the foothills. On the other side was where the Others and Tiffany lived. The guard’s eyes grew wide as I walked up, rocket launcher in hand. 

“Hi! How de do?” I was in a particular good mood.

The guard peered back at me through the slot in the concrete guardhouse. “Please lower the rocket launcher ma’am.”

I threw a shortbread through the slot. The guard screamed and leapt backward, thinking it was undoubtedly an explosive. Or maybe he recognized it as a shortbread, I had gotten that reaction before.

Swinging the rocket launcher to the gate, I fired. The recoil rocked me back as the gate exploded. I watched bits and pieces of metal rain down. After it was clear, I walked onward through the fiery entrance. I reloaded another rocket. I had half a dozen hanging from my belt. 

Tiffany had just stolen my livelihood, and I was about to take out her entire neighborhood. Seemed fair. 

The alabaster houses set far apart among the hills peered down, gloated, at the rest of us. If only they shared a little of their wealth, the rest of us could maybe get a little closer to normal. Whatever normal was nowadays.

“You!” A shrill voice interrupted my careful thought process on which building to explode next.

I turned to my right, and I saw Tiffany stomping on the road towards me, down from what must have been her house.

Well, that made my choice easy. I fired off a rocket, and her house was ripped asunder. She turned back and her jaw dropped. 

“Are you mad!” She pulled out the uzi out from her jacket and pointed it at me. 

“Yes! I am mad! You broke into my shelter!”

“Well, you didn’t even have the real recipe!”

I smirked. A small giggle escaped. She was right. Why would I put the real recipe in the safe? The tough part was not writing absurd ingredients like toothpaste or laxatives on it. I really should have though. Tiffany was dumb enough to probably buy it.

“Did I just explode your family?” My face looked less concerned than my voice sounded.

“No you idiot! It’s just me!” Tiffany took a step forward. “Don’t you get it? We’re all suffering here! My mom wanted to taste a thin mint before she died, but all I had was tagalongs. Both my parents are gone now Britt.”

I took a breath. Maybe I was in the wrong here. All the same, I reloaded my rocket launcher. I could sense Tiffany’s uzi getting antsy. Tiffany had voted for the other candidate. They were no better than dirt, or so the media told me. Did I have time to gather my own evidence and form my own opinions? Who had time for that?

“Britt, let me just ask you one thing.” Tiffany laid down her uzi on the ground. I pointed my rocket launcher at her. She hesitated but pulled out a tupperware from her jacket. She slowly inched towards me, as she opened the container. “Would you like a cookie?”

I peered inside and saw a chocolate covered cookie, a tagalong. I had never had one because everybody knew thin mints were the better cookie. Everybody knew it.

“Try it,” she said. She gave a small smile. “I knew when we were in scouts you always thought my favorite cookie was disgusting, but you never actually tried it. So Britt, you can blow up my house, but please eat this cookie. It’s one of few in existence. I want you to have it.”

“It’s poisoned I bet.”

Tiffany broke off a piece of the cookie and ate it in front of me.

“Well that was stupid.”

“It’s not poisoned!”

I looked at her and saw the same girl I had grown up next to, back when politics had nothing to say about us. 

I took the rest of the tagalong and ate it, and the scowl on my face convulsed involuntarily into a smile.

Creamy peanut butter cradled in a decadent chocolate outer layer. My brain couldn’t handle it. How could it be? I had been told thin mints were the better cookie. By literally everyone. But the evidence was right on my tongue. Tagalongs were better than thin mints. It was the truth. Why had people said otherwise? 

Tears welled up in my eyes. I turned to my friend.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “It’s possible I’ve been wrong.”

She teared up, nodded, and rushed in for a hug. “I want to help your mom, Britt.”

I nodded and hugged her back. I had time for this.