Protecting Our Home

by Colton Lively

  Protecting Our Home

  Colton Lively

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  1

  Flannigan, New Hampshire

  Forty minutes before H-Hour (12:20 pm EDT)

  Cody Russell reached over to flip down his young student’s welding mask and then gave him an encouraging thumbs-up. “Try it again, Darius. You almost got it. Just remember to keep it slow and steady this time.”

  “I gotcha,” the teenager replied. “Slow and steady.” He reached to grab a fresh electrode from the box, but his mentor wasn’t quite finished.

  “And not too slow, yeah?” Cody cautioned. “Remember why?”

  Pointing to the “business end” of the welding stick—more formally, a shielded metal arc welder or SMAW—he identified the risk. “If it’s too slow, then the… um… the pool thing…”

  “The weld pool,” Cody said.

  “Yeah, that gets too big.”

  “And…?” Cody asked. He’d been careful to be as patient as possible with the young guy, making him the first and only person to give Darius an even break since his parole.

  “And that’ll make the weld too thick, right?”

  “You got it! Thick welds look amateurish, and that ain’t how we like to do things.” Despite appearances—the covered workshop was home to three ancient, tarp-covered vehicles cars and a dozen half-finished metalwork projects—Cody actually ran a very tight ship. He motioned for the kid to finish preparing his equipment. “Got your electrode?”

  Darius slid the iron oxide rod into place and then addressed the day’s task: repairing and enlarging the big, octagonal climbing frame that once sat proudly outside the recreational center over in Colebrook.

  “All right, I’m gonna stand back, and you do your thing.”

  “Thanks, man,” Darius said genuinely.

  He might have been a proponent of “tough love,” and could be hard as hell to please, but Cody was the only small business owner in fifty miles who’d even called the Department of Corrections to ask about the program. Three weeks later, Darius had shown up, bang on time and raring to go, just thrilled to have somewhere to be after four long months spent, as he’d described it, “Doing time for someone else, like a dumbass.”

  Cody knew better than to ask about the past. As far as he was concerned, the kid was all right. Darius seemed actually to enjoy welding, too, and was improving quickly.

  “Gonna get my arc going,” Darius said, drawing the electrode over the metal surface toward him, just where the two pipes would meet. The current began to flow, and Darius faced a sudden surge of heat and light. “All right! Arc is on!”

  “How close you gonna get your electrode to the surface?” Cody asked, peering over the young man’s shoulder. Encased in welder’s helmets, jackets, and boots, the two were safe from any errant blobs of molten metal.

  “Just gotta… keep the same distance,” Darius replied without looking back.

  “Good,” Cody nodded. “And watch your angle, because…”

  “It’ll stick right to the metal if I make it... um… purple-dick-ular,” Darius joked, grinning to himself under his helmet.

  “That’s perpendicular, Einstein.” When in doubt, Cody remembered, give the kid a break. Besides, this isn’t exactly an advanced math class. “You’re looking good now. Watch for drips as you turn the corner.”

  “Drips?” Darius said. “But it’s metal, right?

  “It’s molten metal. Behaves pretty much like water when it’s at six thousand degrees.”

  Darius whistled. “Six thousand?”

  “Hot as the sun,” said Cody. “You doing okay?”

  “Yep, think so.” He’d left a neat, straight line of rapidly cooling weld on the join between the two pipes. Once he completed the other side, the first element of the big frame would be complete.

  Suddenly, the arc died, its intense light instantly gone.

  “Woah, what did you do?” Cody asked.

  A short groan. “Arc length was too long, damn it,” replied Darius. “Cut out on me.” Without a steady current, there’d be no characteristically intense heat, and when that dropped out, the melting process stalled.

  “No problem. Try it again,” said Cody patiently. “You got just a little too far away and broke the connection, that’s all.”

  Another short scratch across the surface and the system re-ignited. “Liftoff, Houston!” Darius called, moving steadily to complete the weld. “Want me to chip off the slag first,” he asked, “or go on and do the other side?”

  “We’ll get rid of that when everything’s done,” Cody answered. The slag layer protected the weld from oxidation, but it would have to be removed by hand. “Go ahead and finish up first.”

  Unwilling to leave Darius—or any novice—unsupervised for longer than a moment, Cody turned quickly and grabbed his cellphone from the charging cradle on his workbench; no new texts from home, so he guessed Mary and the kids were okay. There weren’t ten minutes in the course of a working day when he didn’t find himself thinking about them; he’d worry about the kids’ schooling, or how their futures would shape up in an ever-changing world. Other times, he just allowed a moment of gratitude for their presence in his life.

  He’d just put the phone into his pocket and was approaching Darius’s shoulder to watch him complete the weld when the young man cursed quietly. “Lost it again.” The white-hot brightness had flamed out in a millisecond. “Man, what’s wrong with me today?”

  “Don’t sweat it,” said Cody. “Go ahead and restart it.”

  But nothing happened. “Touch the electrode to the metal,” Darius said to himself, repeating the instructions Cody had given him on day one, “then drag back slightly and wait for the fireworks.” But no amount of dragging would encourage the system back into life. The whole SMAW system seemed completely inert.

  “Huh,” Cody shrugged. “Want me to take a look?”

  He took the hand-held rig from Darius, who frowned at this treachery; he’d just begun to get a handle on it, and now the unit was letting him down. “Whatcha go and do that for?” he asked the device. “I thought we had a good thing going.”

  “Seems fine… But let me check the power source.” A red box the size of a small generator sat on the floor ten feet away. “Woah, it’s gone dark.”

  “Hey!” came a female voice from the other side of the workshop. “Who turned off the power?”

  “You lost it, too, Sally?” Cody called back.

  “Kinda hard to electro-plate something without any electro,” she said. “You forget to pay the bill?”

  “Direct deposit,” Cody explained, checking the coffee machine—unresponsive—and then the TV, which couldn’t even muster a standby light. “Wow,” he observed, hands on his hips. “Guess we got ourselves a po
wer cut. Sorry, Darius,” he said as the youngster removed his helmet, looking resentful. “Take five while I chase this down.” He pulled out his phone, bought new only a year before, but it was entirely dead. “I charged this sucker to a hundred percent, less than five minutes ago!”

  “Pretty weird,” said Darius, showing him a similarly black screen. “Mine too.”

  “I’m not making that up, right?” Cody wanted to check. “You saw me charge it.”

  “Sure did,” Darius nodded. “Whaddaya think’s going on, coach?”

  Frowning in confusion, Cody waved Darius outside. “Come on, let’s see if anyone knows anything.”

  The Russell Workshop sat surrounded by thick woodland atop a small rise overlooking the town and its river. Their poorly paved access road led off Route 26, which ran into the town and became, for just a mile, Main Street. Flannigan, New Hampshire, was home to around nine hundred souls, but Cody could see that Main Street was not its usual self. In fact, it had become a deeply strange sight: there were cars on the road, but not one of them was moving.

  He jogged with Darius down the access road, and then followed the strangely quiet Route 26 until he could see the line of stopped cars on Main Street. “They ain’t even stopped at the light,” Darius noticed. “Just right in the middle o’the road. What’s everybody doin’?”

  An old-timer already had his hood up, searching for the problem, so Cody trotted over to speak with him. “Hey there, you got trouble?” There was no smoke or leaking oil, just a completely inert pickup truck.

  “Darndest thing I ever saw,” the elderly man said, scratching his white beard. “She’s never cut out on me like that, not in thirty-three years.”

  Ahead of him was a young mother with two toddlers in car seats. “I’ve got to get them to daycare so I can start my shift,” she said, her panic obviously rising. “I’d ask someone for a ride, but I mean, look!” Ahead of them, every car on the street was at a standstill, the unexpected quiet broken only by the occasional horn blast born of frustration. Shop owners were coming out to share their findings: dead refrigerators, blank cellphones, and ranges that wouldn’t ignite. Then someone ran out of The Foundling Café, shrieking about a fire in the back. “The goddamned toaster oven burst into flames!”

  Trying to keep calm despite plenty of reasons not to, Cody scanned the scene, looking for anything that didn’t belong, and found a litany: none of the traffic lights were working, not even an emergency blinking-red signal; through the windows of Buster’s Budget Electricals, he could see the ever-present TV screens where he’d watched the Superbowl as a kid, but they were all completely dark; farther along Main Street, another fire had somehow started in a kids’ clothing store, and then yet another across the street.

  “The power goes out, and then the goddamned bank catches fire?” Cody said, watching oil-black smoke rising through the front windows of the Fraternity Bank, a Flannigan fixture virtually since the town’s inception, two hundred years before. The uniformed security guard tumbled out, coughing heavily, repeatedly calling for help on his radio, but without reply.

  “What in the ever-loving f…” Cody began, but then a solution began to swim up through the confusion and clarify itself in his mind. At that moment, as the possibility crystallized, he felt a strange surge of relief—a way exists to understand this madness!—but it was instantly subsumed by hot, leaden fear. Although workable, his theory spoke of a disaster too awful to contemplate, one that would completely nix normal life for many weeks, or even months. He gave himself the duration of their run back up to the workshop to test the theory in his mind. By the time they arrived, he was both a lot more certain and a lot more worried.

  “Sally?” he called as he and Darius ran back into the silent workshop. “I think I know what’s happened here.”

  “You do? What was it?” Sally asked, standing tall but confused in her gray overalls, her own darkened phone in her hand.

  “I’ve only got a theory, but…” He finally knew for certain that he was right when he noted not the presence of something, but its absence. “Let me make sure I’m not imagining this. Have you guys heard any sirens since the power went out?”

  “Sirens? Like cop cars?” Darius asked.

  “Nope. Not one,” replied Sally.

  “There are three separate fires down on Main. And no one’s called the fire department?”

  “Why the heck not?” she demanded.

  It was the only thing that made any sense. “Because they can’t. Not anymore. And probably not for a long while.”

  Cody went to the workshop’s scrawl-covered whiteboard and quickly wiped away their schedule and all those little reminders on which their working day would have depended. It was all meaningless now. Instead, he wrote three large letters in red pen, then stood back and found he was physically shaking.

  It was Darius who asked. “Coach, what’s that mean, huh? What’s an… EMP?”

  2

  The Russell Residence H-Hour—5 (8:00 am EDT)

  The hallway of the little apartment was approaching bedlam, as it did on every school day. Jacob had to be out of the door in three minutes, but he’d forgotten something else and had to run back upstairs again. His older sister was trying to find a hairdryer, patrolling each room, a hint of blond peeking from beneath the white towel. Their father was on the phone, but those conversations never made any sense to anyone else; this one was about “the vac,” and how they had to “rig a double coil,” whatever that might mean.

  “It’s like he’s an astronaut,” said Emma to her mother as she was motioned out of the hallway by her father; he knew from experience that her hairdryer would drown out his call. “All jargon and technical stuff. Welding looks pretty easy on TV.”

  “Nothing worth doing is easy,” said Mary, but then stopped. “God, I sound like my mother, sometimes.”

  “Nana is awesome!” Jacob called, always ready to defend his favorite grandparent.

  “She wasn’t that awesome to me,” Mary recalled aloud. “If we weren’t in the car on time, totally ready for school, there’d be hell to pay.”

  But Emma wasn’t impressed by these tales from her mother’s Draconian past. “How do you actually pay hell, anyway? Do they accept Venmo down there, or does it have to be cash?”

  “Dry your hair, Miss Smartass, or you’ll be freezing cold all day.”

  “I’m doing it! Just trying not to disturb Neil Armstrong when he’s on the phone.”

  Cody came to the end of his call. “Sally’s gonna take care of that electro-plating for me today,” he announced. “So, I get to work with the kid from Corrections.”

  “Darius? How’s that been going?” asked Mary, shuttling plastic lunch containers into the two schoolbags in a well-practiced routine. “Is he good at listening to instructions?”

  The hairdryer started upstairs, and Cody reflexively checked his watch. Six minutes to departure and everyone knew there wouldn’t be seven. “He ain’t burned his toes off with molten iron yet, so that’s a start,” replied Cody.

  “What did he do to land himself in jail, anyway?” Emma called down above the din.

  “None of your business,” Mary countered. “It’s rude to ask; you know that.”

  “But, I mean,” she said, clicking off the hairdryer and trotting downstairs, “he’s there, working in Dad’s business. Shouldn’t you know the kind of person you’re employing?”

  Cody was ready for this. “First, thanks for your concern about our safety, but we got it under control.” He tousled her still-wet hair, infuriating the teenager. “Second, he works for Corrections, not for me directly. And third, I really don’t care what he did.”

  “But he could be like… an ax murderer or something,” Emma posited, starting to brush through her tangle of blond.

  “Best I can tell, two of his buddies stole a car, and then gave him a ride in it. Cops pulled them over, busted everyone. The judge sent down Darius for stealing, too.”

  “So,
he’s a convicted thief,” Emma said, taking the simple view. “What if he steals something from the workshop?” she asked, seeing that the risk was low, but persevering for the hell of it.

  “Then I’ll take him out back,” Cody said bluntly, “beat him with a two-by-four and then ship his ass back to Corrections, where his life will be ruined all over again. Not a very good outcome for him.”

  “So, the pressure’s on him to behave himself and work hard,” Mary said in reinforcement. “Which sounds like a pretty good way to spend your day, too, kids!”

  “No choice,” said Emma, motioning to the stack of schoolbooks in her bag, and then to her duffel, which held her volleyball gear. “Got myself a full schedule. Not like GeekLord.”

  “Please don’t call him that,” Cody asked yet again.

  “Why not? It’s a term of endearment,” Emma assured him. “And it’s totally appropriate.”

  For his part, “GeekLord” had located the missing item—a USB drive marked “Star Trek Schematics”—and was shoving his feet into his school shoes. “I don’t really mind it. The Geek,” he said portentously, “shall inherit the Earth.”

  “What a day that will be,” Emma grumbled. “Wait… where’s my phone?” She began a frantic search.

  “You mean, it’s not actually surgically implanted?” Cody joked. “I thought…”

  “Not funny, Dad. Help me look, okay?”

  “You could leave it behind for a day,” he tried.

  Emma stopped in her tracks. “Do what?” she demanded, her face contorted as though her father had suggested she start eating meat again after three years of veganism. “I don’t think you understand, Dad.”