Norman didn’t immediately start the process of converting the blood to powder. Instead, he laid down on the couch and almost immediately fell asleep. Norman woke up twelve hours later, feeling much better.

He had still been a bit sore the previous day and all the activities had drained him significantly. When he looked at the clock on his phone it said it was about four in the morning. He groaned at that.

All the shit with the gang leader had taken place before dawn, then there was the waiting. By the time they had left it was around noon. Not that they seemed to care what time it was. It took another few hours to dispose of the corpse. Then when Norman got back home, he spent another hour or so cleaning the kitchen.

All-in-all it was completely exhausting.

Norman yawned and rolled himself off the couch. After standing up, he stretched his back getting an audible crack. “Oh, that’s good.”

He continued stretching his tired muscles before scratching at his face. The scruff was making his face itch but he didn’t feel like shaving today. A shower would be nice too but he decided to forgo that this morning as he was likely to get dirty anyway.

With nothing else to do, he wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge. There wasn’t much in it. He pushed aside the bottles of blue blood looking for something to eat. There was a half-empty bottle of milk with an expiration date of a few years ago. He opened it and gave it a sniff. Seemed to still be good.

The date couldn’t be trusted since it was printed on the original release date for the milk. Not the date the bottle was refilled at a local farm.

Norman set the bottle on the counter and dug through the dozens of cereal boxes above his fridge and in the cabinets until he found one that wasn’t empty. He really should get rid of the empty boxes if only to make his life easier. Norman also set a reminder on his phone to go to the grocery store later.

With his bowl of cereal poured, Norman sat at the table and silently ate. He wasn’t in any hurry to finish eating since he hadn’t eaten in over a day. And what little he had eaten before that had been wasted in the sink.

Eventually, his spoon clinked against the bottom of the bowl, signaling the end of his meal. Norman drained the remaining milk into his mouth and let out a satisfied burp. He might not be full, but at least he wasn’t starving anymore.

He threw the bowl into the sink along with the rest of the dirty dishes, it would be a project for a different day. He did have to rinse off the pan he used to dry the previous sample of blood. Once it was dry, Norman finally grabbed a bottle of the blood from the fridge.

When he uncapped it and tried to pour it onto the pan he ran into a bit of a snag. The blood had coagulated inside the bottle or at least the top did. Norman was forced to use the backside of a fork to break the top layer and get the thickened blood out. It was a good thing he hadn’t waited any longer to convert the blood into the powdered form. It would probably be okay if it dried in the bottles but he didn’t want the hassle of having to cut them open and having to scrap apart the mass.

Norman spread a thin layer on the baking sheet. It seemed to work well the night before so he decided just to stick with that approach. The only change he made this time was to line the pan with wax paper first.

Norman quickly realized he had way more blood than would fit in his oven at one time. And not enough pans to properly dry it all anyway.

What Norman did have was a relatively clean table and an entire roll of wax paper. Seeing as Norman didn’t need all of it right away. He covered the entire top of the table with the wax paper while the stuff in the oven was drying. He then spread a line down the center of each piece and used a spatula to spread it out as thinly as possible. It looked like a Yves Klein painting with most of the tabletop covered in blue streaks.

Even with all that extra space and his entire oven full, Norman had only used up half a bottle of the blood. He realized this was going to take some time so he decided to raid his stash and smoke some of the stuff he had originally planned to sell.

Norman’s phone blared some harsh metal song while he puffed on the joint and rinsed the small bottles he normally reserved for his potion supply. He was going to have to store all of this powder somewhere. He also decided to do the dishes while he was all soapy and wet, setting everything on the dish rack to dry.

Every hour or so he checked the progress of the blood. The stuff in the over was coming along nicely. He had only set the temperature on low, not wanting to nearly burn it like the previous night. The smell that a small amount emitted when it got too hot was very unpleasant and he didn’t want to find out what two whole baking pans worth would smell like. Even so, his entire house was starting to smell like… well, he wasn’t really sure what it was. It was a sickly sweet smell but it had an undertone of rotting vegetation to it.

It wasn’t as bad as the smell of a rotting corpse but it certainly wasn’t enjoyable.

After four hours the stuff in the stove was done. Norman easily broke it up into a powder and managed to fit all of it in two bottles that he tucked into his pocket. There was a partial third bottle that he decided to hide in his stash just in case.

He checked the time on his phone and saw it was nearly eight in the morning.

“Store should open in about an hour, I better get there early.”

Norman decided to leave the rest of the blood to air dry while he was out, He did drag an old box fan into the kitchen and turned it on to help the process along.

After grabbing the shopping bags from the hook near the door, he stepped out his back door, locking it behind him. Normally he would bum a ride to the market when Toby went, but since they weren’t on speaking terms at the moment, he decided to go on his own. He could carry everything home but he decided to see if the old bike in the garage still worked.

The bike was in working order if a bit rusty but the tires were both flat. After some fumbling around in the garage, he found a hand pump and managed to get both tires to hold air.

Norman pedaled out the side door of the garage without bothering to shut it. Not like it mattered.  If someone wanted to get in there, they would just use the broken overhead door.

The distance to the market wasn’t too far but Norman was winded after four blocks of pedaling. He was completely out of shape and it showed.

He did eventually arrive at the store, but by then it had been open for a good hour and there were dozens of people coming and going. Norman cursed and hurried to park his bike in the rack so he could try and get some decent items.

The huge chain store had only half its lights on to help conserve energy. Norman didn’t mind, he didn’t much like the overly bright fluorescent lights that every chain store sported pre-collapse.

Norman grabbed a cart and tossed his bags inside. One of the wheels squeaked and rattled horribly but he didn’t care enough to grab another cart.

It was always weird going through the once-packed store. The back half of the store had been roped off and only empty shelves remained beyond that point.

It depressed him a bit to see how much was lost because of the apocalypse. There were no longer huge trucks of goods brought in from out of state, everything had to be grown or produced locally.

The Jorik might have made good trading partners if they weren’t such jerks. From what Norman saw on the internet, there were no intelligent species to the North of Colorado as far as anyone could tell. And the Mountains to the West made it impossible for the local internet to function so there was very little information coming from that side except for sporadic reports from people crossing the unstable terrain. That was a new development courtesy of the state being plonked down in a new world. Not that Norman ever intended on going there to see for himself so he didn’t spend much time worrying about changes caused by the apocalypse, especially not so far from home.

Norman pushed his cart past another nearly empty shelf. He knew the store in the walled section of the city didn’t have the same issue with empty shelves, mostly because those empty areas were taken up by enterprising merchants who bought out an aisle or quarter aisle to sell their goods. It was a sound decision for everyone involved. But nobody was willing to do the same in the stores outside the wall.

As he had feared, the produce section had been devastated by shoppers already. It wasn’t surprising since everything was now locally grown and fresh produce was hard to come by and in high demand. Still, he did get a few things, some potatoes, onions, radishes, and chives. He quickly moved on to the meat section. The beef, pork, and chicken sections were stripped clean by rabid shoppers, which left only the mystery meat section as his only option. Norman sighed and pushed his squeaky cart over there.

The mystery meat section was just that, a mystery. Usually, some alien wild animal that a guilder killed and sold to the local butchers. Some of the meat was rather good, but others not so much and it was a toss-up on which you would get. At least it was all edible.

Norman grabbed a package labeled ‘Bacon?’ the white butcher's paper not giving away what was beneath. He grabbed a few more packages that were similarly marked with the unknown question mark.

“You’d think they would have started labeling these better by now,” an older woman said as she walked up to the meat case to browse.

Norman just nodded and moved on.

Meat and veggies taken care of, Norman perused the shelves. The scavengers scoured the abandoned properties outside the city for any non-perishable foods. They all ended up in one of three stores within the town. Most people frequented the store that was within the walled-off section of downtown but you would never get anything if you weren’t there at the crack of dawn.

Norman scooped every single box of cereal he saw into his cart, which wasn’t many. The three boxes were twenty dollars each. The price was ludicrous and also the only reason the boxes were still on the shelf. He had the money though and it meant he didn’t have to go scavenging himself and would have food that would stay fresh for a long time.

Most of Norman’s cereal at home was scavenged from neighboring houses. Most of it was also expired, not that the stuff in his cart was any better. He did push his cart past the local equivalent of cereal, which some enterprising locals were trying to produce, but he didn’t buy any of it. He made that mistake once and his teeth hurt for a week after trying to eat the incredibly tough cereal. It also tasted like cardboard so wasn’t even worth the effort.

It reminded him of nutbran, or brannut, he couldn’t recall the exact name but the flavor and texture were almost the same as the old brand-name cereal.

Norman’s last stop was the dairy section where he got some local cheese, butter, and eggs. He also grabbed a loaf of fresh bread from the bakery before heading to the register.

Norman handed the flabbergasted teller, two smaller gems and got a bit of paper money in return. It was a bit of a risk paying with gems but Norman didn’t want to waste all his paper currency unless he had to. Besides, he only had three gems on him and not the whole bag. That was safely at home in his stash.

Once back outside, Norman found someone had stolen his bike. With a disgruntled sigh, Norman hefted the bags onto his arms and began the trek home on foot.