by Raylan Kane
“The electricity is out,” one of the women said.
“Out in the street as well.”
“Go back to sleep,” one of them said. “The workers will fix things.”
Lin could feel her heavy eyes beckoning her to sleep once more. Then the thought occurred to her. Maybe without power the factory doors couldn't stay locked.
LISA JACKSON & GARRETT TIGNISH
BUCHANAN NUCLEAR GENERATING STATION
BUCHANAN, NEW YORK
1:05 PM LOCAL TIME
The workers had planted Lisa and Garrett in one of the small, windowless lunch rooms almost since they'd arrived. Lisa called her editor at one point and told him, “they're stonewalling us. No one's coming to get us, show us around, I can just tell.”
As an hour ticked by, Lisa settled into the orange plastic chair next to the lunch room table, convinced she and Garrett were dead in the water. They wouldn't stick you in here and make you wait this long if they were going to cooperate, she thought.
Garrett stood making a coffee at the counter. Make the best of a bad situation was how he saw it, but coffee wasn't going to make up for a possible loss of a story of this magnitude in Lisa's mind. The cheap coffee maker sputtered as it poured java into an oversized mug Garrett had seized from the cupboard. He reached towards the shelf above him for the box of sugar cubes when the room fell dark and a deep groaning sound rattled through the floor beneath them. Without windows, the lunch room was completely pitch black.
“Oh my god,” Lisa said, “can you smell that?”
“Rancid,” Garrett said.
They didn't move for about twenty seconds and they listened as outside the room people were hollering and they could hear footsteps running in different directions.
“A power outage,” Lisa said, incredulous, “you've got to be kidding me.”
“Something's gone wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“We should have some lights on by now. The generators at this place would've kicked in pretty fast. You know what a place like this would turn into without power.”
Lisa contemplated his words and tried not to entertain that spark of fear that had just entered her stomach. “Maybe the generators aren't hooked into this lunch room.”
“I doubt that's the case,” Garrett said. “This entire facility would have more than one fail-safe. The fact that we're still in pitch darkness a full minute later tells ya something.”
“Are you trying to scare me, Garrett? Because you're doing a good job.”
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OTHER BOOKS BY RAYLAN KANE:
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