Claudine Jordan trembled and struggled to speak after the sales clerk at Chicago's Army Navy Surplus USA store told her that he would sell her only two gas masks, not the six she wanted.
"You tell me who I should save in my family," Jordan demanded. "What child should I save?"
Americans are buying the masks along with water purifiers, antibiotics and survival manuals amid fears that have arisen since the hijackings Sept. 11 that terrorists may also have been planning chemical or biological attacks from crop-dusters and trucks packed with hazardous materials.
``People have realized that flying a plane into the side of the World Trade Center is not the worst thing that could happen,'' Hugh Brock, owner of Brock's Army Surplus in Decatur, Georgia, which sold out of gas masks along with hundreds of other such stores around the country, in big cities and small towns.
After a daylong fruitless search for gas masks for his entire family, Atlanta businessman Dexter Berry wasn't giving up. "We're going to need one. It's just a matter of when," he said. "I want to carry one everywhere I go."
The demand is obvious on Web sites that sell survivalist gear or literature. On eBay, new Israeli gas masks were going for more than US$150 Thursday.
On Amazon.com, the No. 2-selling book was about germ warfare, advertised with the hook: "Deadly germs sprayed in shopping malls, bomb-lets spewing anthrax spores over battlefields, tiny vials of plague scattered in Times Square, these are the poor man's hydrogen bombs."
Some pharmacies have reported a run on the antibiotic Cipro in case of anthrax, a deadly bacterium that some fear could be used in a bioterrorism attack.
Dr Hugh McLaughlin of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, has been writing patients prescriptions. "To me this is like a bee-sting kit," McLaughlin said. "You have one or two in your pocket and a little more at home."
Army Navy Surplus USA, on Chicago's North Side, has sold more than 6,000 masks -- at about US$40 each -- and chemical filters since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, sales clerk Robert Finstein said. Normally, the place sells about one gas mask per month.
Some shoppers at the store, however, could not fathom buying a gas mask.
"I don't think I want to wrap my mind around the consideration of that," said Donna Davidson. "I'd prefer to live in denial a little longer." She questioned whether a gas mask would save anyone.
The manager of a West Los Angeles surplus store, John Edell, said that masks are designed for different kinds of gases and are not useful unless the owner knows what kind of gas to guard against and they won't protect in a biological warfare attack, he said.
But "we tell [customers] that and they freak out and buy it anyway," he said.
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