He jumped up, and hurried to the kitchen and opened the freezer door.
An unspoken swear word exploded in his mind.
His penny was sitting in the bottom of a glass of water. A trick he’d learned a long time ago was to fill up a glass of water and freeze it, and then lay a penny atop the ice. If the power ever went out, you could estimate how long it’d been out by how much of the ice had melted and how far the penny had fallen. It was at the bottom. The power must’ve been out all night.
The meat still felt somewhat cool, and while the cardboard of the frozen boxes of food were soggy, the contents were still cool to the touch as well. But, he’d have to cook everything right away.
His shoulders slumped on the way back to the living room. He was going to have a long day.
And he could forget a shower. Without power, he didn’t have water either. At least not good, clean water readily available, unless he wanted to raid his preps. But one way or the other though, he’d have to at least figure out how to get some coffee going. Quick, too. His head was pounding already.
He re-focused on the iPad. Still no connection to the internet. He clicked to try to re-connect and patiently watched it cycle through three more retries and countdowns.
Not working. No internet service either?
The letters: E M P screamed through his head again.
The keys to his truck were on the table. He snatched them up and hurried—as much as he could while limping—through the eerily silent, dark house to the driveway, with Ozzie following behind him.
Could this really be happening? He’d prepared for it for years, but when one after another crisis passed with not much more than a wrinkle, he’d almost began to believe—just like the sheeple—that no end of the world event would ever happen in his lifetime after all. This past year he’d been lackadaisical in his prepping. Had he even rotated the expired canned goods this year? Had he reminded Jake to treat the fuel tank lately?
A sweat broke out on his forehead. He slid barefoot into the driver side of his truck with his heart pounding. If someone had asked him a year ago if he was ‘prepared’ for an EMP, he would have said yes. But that was a year ago. Now? He wasn’t so sure.
He inserted the key and turned it, holding it there much longer than necessary.
“If this is it, it’s gonna leave a mark,” he mumbled.
2
THE TRUCK STARTED!
He slammed his hand against the steering wheel.
Damn, I must be losing my mind… panicking over a power outage?
He laughed at himself, realizing he was more affected by his wife not being home than he thought he had been. Jumpy. Paranoid. He wasn’t even going to mention this to her when she returned.
But still…
No power in the house.
No cell phone service.
No internet services.
It really could have finally happened. Maybe it wasn’t an EMP, but the news had been filled with reports of smaller cyber-attacks. Accusations had been thrown far and wide, including against Russia whose president denied the accusations, but was getting seriously pissed about it. The Russian president was a proud and scary man, and the memes and funny jokes posted all around the world of his ‘relations’ with America’s new president had to be rankling his skin.
In fact, Grayson had seen a special report just yesterday that warned Russia’s good diplomacy toward the new president—which Russia had been accused of helping into office by hacking into our systems and swiping strategic bits to share with WikiLeaks in order to shape United States politics—was flipping. If Russia had indeed helped the new president win the election, the president wasn’t returning the favors. Within his first six months in office, he’d not only given the Russian president the cold shoulder, but he’d also slapped them with several new sanctions, bombed one of their allies and given no quarter toward the Russian president or his country, as far as anyone could see.
If they had been in bed together, the honeymoon was definitely over between Russia and America’s president.
Another channel had been reporting sporadic power outages country-wide due to system hacks, as well as breaches to national security information files. This particular news channel implied the Chinese were the culprits, warning that while China hadn’t yet launched an attack, exactly, but that they were engaged in “passive intelligence-collection activity”—otherwise known as cyberespionage.
After two years of hearing both sides of the political parties whine and cry about unsecured emails, system hacking, and cyber-stuff, he’d mostly tuned it out as just noise. Like probably millions of other Americans, he’d flipped the channel after only a few moments, looking for something more entertaining.
The more he thought about it, the more he realized he’d been seeing and hearing a lot of threats to the electrical grid and entire infrastructure of the United States. But he hadn’t really paid attention. As soon as the talking heads started talking, he’d flip to Alaskan survival shows or start another Netflix binge.
When had Americans become so desensitized that they ignored news reports like that? Maybe that was the plan? Bombard television and social media with possibilities, threats, what-ifs and maybe’s so that we stopped listening and our guard went down and they could really catch us all with our pants down. What better way to cripple a country? Fight an invisible war with no boots on the ground? Let the country implode around itself without firing the first bullet or nuclear weapon? It could be done with little to no loss of life and/or money to the attacker.
So what if it had finally happened?
It wasn’t like he hadn’t warned his friends and family that something could happen so many times that he’d felt like Chicken Little. Or The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Bloody hell.
Maybe this really was it. He had a gut feeling it was something.
Something more than just a typical power outage.
Blood coursed faster through his veins, fueled by a sudden shot of adrenaline. His heart slammed against his chest, scaring him more than a little. All the beer, chili and junk food lately—not to mention the bacon he ate four or five times a week for breakfast—made him a prime candidate for a heart attack. He clutched his chest in panic.
If he was right, and this was the fabled teotwawki, it was going to be bad. He was a prepper; so he was more prepared than the average Joe. But no damn good it did him when his family wasn’t here. He’d never seriously considered that possibility.
Ozzie whined outside the truck, unsure if they were going somewhere, and not wanting to miss out on a ride. Grayson dropped his head to the steering wheel and took in several deep breaths. No use getting worked up if this was it. He knew what to do. They all did. Everyone had a job to do and they had a somewhat solid plan. His was to get the house ready. Theirs was to just get home.
Olivia and her sisters were at the beach, his daughter at university in Columbia, and Jake and Dusty hopefully were just in town; at least they were local.
He wondered if his little brother, Dusty—who was married to Olivia’s little sister, Emma—would come immediately to the homestead, or if Dusty would be wrapped up in police stuff.