John was wiping down Betsy’s hood with Turtle Wax when the front door opened. Diane was home.
He found her in the living room, removing her heels. Snatching the rose from the vase in the kitchen, he made his way over to her. “Rough day?” he asked.
She started to sigh, then giggled when she saw the rose in his hand. “You did something bad, didn’t you?”
John laughed. “What do you mean?”
“Wife shows up and husband has a rose. It’s on every sitcom.”
“This one’s for real. Compliments of Al next door.”
She took the rose and smelled it, eyeing John suspiciously.
He bent down and helped her with her shoes. Diane’s nose tweaked, but it wasn’t the rose this time. “I smell potatoes.”
John smiled. “Gregory was up to his usual tricks, so I put him to work.”
“Oh, you smart man.”
He was heading for the kitchen when he asked, “So, you settle on a movie for tonight?”
Diane leaned back in his favorite chair, a leather recliner, the armrests worn from years of use. “I was thinking of The Hunger Games.”
John turned and raised an eyebrow.
“I thought you’d enjoy it. It’s one of those dystopian things where a bunch of kids have to fight one another.”
“Yeah, I think part of it played out in the living room a few hours ago.”
Diane giggled. “The kids have already seen it, I know.”
“I’m sure they have, but that wasn’t why I was giving you the look.”
“Oh, the look. You wanna see something else?”
“Isn’t The Hunger Games a love story?”
Diane smiled, dimples forming in her cheeks. “That mean you and the kids are moving out?”
Later that night, after dinner and the movie, John and Diane were in their bedroom. John was removing his shirt when he glanced in the mirror and caught sight of the scars that covered his torso. That you’d carry the marks of battle with you for the rest of your life was something they never told you during enlistment. But what they really neglected to mention was that the worst wounds would be the ones you couldn’t see.
Diane came up from behind and wrapped her arms around him. Her right hand caressed the lump of discolored flesh on his abdomen. That was where the flaming shrapnel from the frag had torn into him all those years ago.
“I think Emma has a boyfriend,” he said, trying to convince her he wasn’t thinking about old battles.
A smile grew on her face. Her eyes were twinkling. “It was bound to happen.”
“She’s only fourteen,” John said, his heart beating a little faster. His fists clenched.
“We weren’t much older.”
The two of them had been high-school sweethearts and hadn’t done much more than sneak a few kisses before they were married. But times had changed since then. John had read about kids in some of the bigger cities having sex in middle school. The thought made him sick.
“What did Emma tell you about him?”
“She denied it.”
Diane slapped his shoulder playfully. “Well, there you go. And you say I get all worked up over nothing.” Her hands went to his shoulders, where she began massaging a knot of hard muscle. “You can’t protect them forever, John. Eventually, they’ll need to fly on their own.”
“Eventually,” he whispered. “But not just yet.”
Chapter 3
Diane dropped the kids off to school on her way to work, which was just fine with John because a ton of work lay ahead of him. He was in his basement office, sipping a cup of warm coffee, trying to calm his nerves. Two important deliveries destined for the construction site had been a no-show this morning, one a load of drywall and the other a thousand pounds of Italian marble. John would need to spend the next thirty minutes tracking down his suppliers and getting answers. Afterward, he’d hightail it to the work site to make sure everything else was going according to plan. A screwup this big could cost him the job and with their family only starting to get back on their feet after the economic meltdown, it was a loss he couldn’t afford.
John dialed his marble guy first and checked the planner on his laptop at the same time to ensure he’d given everyone the correct dates.
“Sal here,” the gruff voice said on the other end.
“Sal, it’s John. Get Mario on the phone right now.”
Sal normally liked to chitchat, but even he could tell now wasn’t the time. “Uh, sure thing.”
John heard Mario’s name being called over the speaker system at the warehouse. A few minutes later a voice came on.
“John, you won’t believe the morning we’ve had—”
Then the call got dropped. John began to redial and then noticed the cell phone screen.
It was blank.
But that wasn’t all. His laptop was gone too and so were the lights in his basement office. The room was mostly dark except for faint light bleeding in from the doorway. If he’d closed himself in like he normally did, he would have been in pitch blackness.
You’ve got to be kidding me!
Hitting buttons on his cell wasn’t going to do a darn thing, but John tried it anyway, the same way people tried to make elevators speed up by mashing the button over and over.
His first thought was that he’d somehow overloaded the circuit breaker.
But your laptop and cell phone are battery-powered, that little voice said.
John grabbed a Maglite he kept by his desk and went to flip the breakers anyway. It didn’t take more than a second after doing so to realize the power was really out.
Running up the basement steps two at a time, John raced into the kitchen and saw that the stove and microwave were both blank. He snatched the portable phone and swore when he realized that it too was dead.
Next he went for the front door, curious to see if anyone else was having the same problem. He swung it open and when he looked outside all the air went out of his lungs. Two cars were stopped on the road right outside his house. The drivers looked confused. One of them, a man in his mid-forties, was lifting the hood of his Jeep Cherokee.
“That’s just the damnedest thing,” his neighbor Al exclaimed. He was fiddling fruitlessly with the knob of his radio as water ran from the hose in his hand.
John wondered for a moment if this was all a dream. Maybe he was still asleep in his bed. He crossed his lawn, heading for the road, feeling the grass slide between his toes as he did.
No, this is no dream. This is real.
Other cars were stalled in the distance. Most with people who were likely on their way to work. No one knew it yet, but if John was right, they wouldn’t need to worry about getting to the office on time. Not for the foreseeable future.
Al was coming this way, the hose discarded carelessly on the lawn, dribbling precious water.
“Ain’t this just the damnedest thing?” his gray-haired neighbor said. “What do you make of it?”
John swallowed hard. “Only one of two things can cause something like this, Al, and neither one of them is good.”
Al was at a complete loss. John could tell the words ‘blackout’ were on the tip of his neighbor’s tongue, but even that was far too mild.
“I’m all ears.”
“If we’re lucky it’s only a solar flare, like the Carrington Event that hit in 1859, knocking out telegraph systems across Europe and North America. Some telegraph pylons burst into flames.”
“Solar flare.” Al sounded like a man learning a new language. “And if we’re not lucky, John?”
“The only thing worse than a solar flare is an EMP.”