Lights Out (Book 1): The Crash

by Cal, Sarah

  Here, though. It gave a whole new meaning to ghost town she hadn't seen yet. The entre place looked like it had been abandoned. Emma didn’t even want to get closer, to see what was in there. If they were really desperate, they would have gone to try and dig through it for something. They might even have gotten lucky. Emma felt like she'd seen enough gore and destruction to last her a while, though.

  "Chase?"

  She glanced over at him, and it took him a second before he met and held her gaze. He seemed to know what her look meant.

  "We can't go there, it could be dangerous. What's left of the structure doesn’t exactly look stable, and we have no idea where to start looking." He sighed, and she watched as his shoulders slumped. "It would be a waste of time." And then he cursed. "But hell, if they got in the same situation we did, can you imagine what happened in other areas? There's no way that EMP could have been a concentrated strike. The damage just goes too far."

  She'd thought so before, when she went to see Mayor Williams in his town. She'd thought of it, the day of the crash, how many planes went up in the air every day. How many of them had been in flight when this happened? In the back of her mind, she'd known, but she was only just starting to realize how badly the EMP had affected everyone, not just her town.

  Emma wondered just how far the EMP had even spread. The state? Several others? Or maybe the entire country—even further? Where did it even come from, what had caused it? They had too many questions and no answers, no way to even get them. People had gotten too used to relying on machines and technology, the internet. With everything down, they weren’t just cut off from other countries and continents, they were cut off from the rest of the country.

  They were struggling with the thought that help would be on the way, but what if....

  "Hey, Emma, don’t look like that."

  She blinked, pulled out of her own mind by Chase's voice. She looked up, confused for a second where they were, but a glance at the building in front of them reminded her.

  "We can't even get supplies, now. We'll have to go back and report to the police what we found here." Her voice was cold, clinical. Nothing like her at all.

  "Emma." She scowled at the concern in his voice. "Maybe you should sit down for a while. We can find somewhere we won't be disturbed. We don’t have to go back immediately."

  Stop trying to comfort me. The words were dying to burst out of her throat, but she hadn't lost herself so much that she would blow up on Chase for showing his concern. He was only being a good friend, after all, and the only reason he was here, seeing this with her after they both survived a different crash, was because she'd asked him to accompany her.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have. She was pretty sure he could handle it, in fact a lot better than she ever could. That fact didn’t change anything for her. He wasn’t hers to protect, but she wanted to protect him anyway. Because Emma went to Chase when she was broken; if they both ended up broken, who'd pick up the pieces for the both of them?

  So she swallowed back the words that wanted to come out.

  "I don’t need to sit out Chase. And actually, we do need to head back, quickly." She gave the wreckage one last, long look before fixing her gaze in Chase. "I know Merry says a lot of crazy things, I can't stand them most of the time. But I can't keep calling her crazy considering the world we're now living in."

  He frowned down at her, expression cautious, but still tinged with worry. "What does that mean?"

  She didn’t want to admit it. Emma took a deep breath as she turned her bike around, Chase following her and keeping to her side. She thought it would physically hurt to actually say the words out loud, after denying them for so long. Funny enough, what she'd written off as crazy before was all that currently made sense, and she could no longer deny or ignore it.

  She was pretty sure their survival hinged on it, after all.

  "I mean... that I think my sister could be right—no one is going to save us. Imagine the whole country being in the state we're in, how could anyone manage it, were they inclined to send help? It's going to be worse in cities, with so many people in one place, depending on food from the outside. The problems we're currently facing? They're nothing compared to that."

  She paused to muse her own words, wondering when she'd grown so morbid herself. She almost felt amusement, wondering if big sister would be proud of her for thinking so clinically.

  "We're all going to have to survive on our own."

  Chapter 23

  The words had actually left her mouth. After years of thinking her sister mentally insane, Emma was going to start taking to heart everything she said. It had been nearly an hour ago, maybe more—she had no sense of time without a watch—but the words still rang in her mind.

  A part of her wanted to reject it. There was just no way. Merry, who lit candles and meditated in her room, who read tarot cards and talked about her 'predictions.' Emma wasn’t sure if she was ready to listen to and accept the whole thing yet. There was no denying the sense Emma could see in most of her words, though.

  It scared her. The world her sister spoke of, dreamt about—'saw' in her predictions—was a bleak one, one Emma wasn’t sure she wanted to live in. She didn’t want to know what would happen if their situation never got fixed.

  Not that there's much of a choice. It was basically to live, or not to live. No matter how hard, Emma knew she would always choose life, as long as she wasn’t alone. If there had ever been a decision to make, she'd made hers when she saw that plane hurtling down, and her first impulse was to run, and get Chase to go with her.

  Returning to town, Emma and Chase were both silent and contemplative. Emma wondered what was going through his mind, if he thought she was crazy now, too, or if he was really thinking of what she'd said. The first day Emma left him at home and Merry said something to freak him out, after talking to her sister, Emma had asked him to tell her what her sister had said. He'd clammed up, though, refusing to give in any details. She wondered if it was any different from what she'd heard herself.

  Emma almost didn’t realize they had made it back. They'd been cycling slowly the whole way back, each lost in thought. It was a miracle they hadn't had an accident along the way. They stopped by the police station and Emma reported on what she'd seen. It was another disappointment, but it was better than putting it off. Then she and Chase rode back to her house.

  "I think I need to talk to Merry," she decided.

  It was long in coming, though when she thought of having a real talk with her sister these days, this would not have been one of the topics she thought of, but things had changed yet again. Or maybe things hadn't changed—it was her that was now willing to listen to what Merry had to say, and Emma was sure she had plenty.

  "Talk to her about what, exactly?"

  "I need to ask her... about how to prepare for the coming issues we'll face. She's been talking about the apocalypse for a while, she even mentioned it the evening before the crash, but I wasn’t exactly up to hearing it, then. But I know her, and I know that she's been preparing for years for something like this. I'd like to think I can handle it all on my own, but I also know I will need her help to pull through."

  The whole thing, Merry turning weird, had happened in the wake of their parents' death. Emma had always assumed that was all it was, but what if it really wasn’t. Then she'd been treating her sister like a crazy person for a decade, and was only now considering they could have been wrong about her.

  When Emma returned, she found Merry in her room, staring out of her bedroom window. She didn’t look up when Emma knocked and walked in without permission. For the first time in a long time, she felt awkward in her sister's presence, so she didn’t attempt to catch her attention immediately.

  Instead, she looked around the room, like really looked. Most of her things were put away, so it was a pretty normal room, not so different from Emma's own. Though she spent decidedly more time there, she looked after her space. The only thing that loo
ked out of place, were her drawings.

  Once upon a time, Emma had looked up to her sister. They had been relatively close for sisters with a four year difference between them. They were both normal, average, raised by wonderful parents...

  It all changed after the accident.

  They had been planning to go on a trip. They went on so many throughout the year, for the rest of the family, it was just another trip. For Merry, though, it was different. She'd been excited, at first, but after a nightmare, she 'had a feeling' their jet-ski experience would end badly. She tried to warn all of them, but their parents convinced her to go anyway.

  Emma wasn’t even sure what happened, exactly. She woke up in a hospital, sharing a room with her sister, who was almost always hysterical. She didn’t even know if they made it to the jet-ski resort, she was just told there was an accident and her parents died. She was fifteen, recovering from injuries, dealing with a sister whose mental health was slowly deteriorating. If it wasn’t for their grandmother coming to collect them from the hospital, Emma would have been put in foster care, her sister, then nineteen, would have been put in a psychiatric ward.

  In a lot of ways, they got lucky. Emma liked to think that luck had an expiration date.

  After that incident, Merry started to believe she could tell the future, she started spending a lot of time making predictions. Emma just wanted to grieve with her older sister, but Merry acted like she didn’t exist for a long time, as if she had died with their parents, and Emma never forgave her for that.

  Merry never went back to finish her higher education. She quit her first year of college and remained unemployed and unfit for work. Janice suggested, several times, for her to see a psychiatrist. In remembered resentment for her sister, Emma had thought it was for the best. In truth, neither of the sisters were fond of the idea.

  In addition to declaring herself psychic, Merry suddenly believed in all sort of superstitions she'd only laughed off before, started practicing with tarot cards and palm reading and the like. Emma didn’t know who her sister was anymore.

  The one thing that had remained constant was her love for art.

  Merry loved to draw, but most of all, to paint. She'd even thought of applying to art school, but then their parents insisted it wasn’t practical, and she went to business school instead. She continued to paint, but in line with every change about her, her focus for her drawing and painting changed.

  Her sister's creations were beautiful, Emma had always thought so. They littered the walls, some of them stacked and put aside on her desk. Emma had stopped looking at them a long time ago. They were still good, if a bit too macabre, her pictures becoming dark in nature to depict scenes from her 'premonitions.'

  Emma wanted to look at them now, every single one, and see what her sister saw. She couldn’t just take them, though. She'd need permission from the owner, and before that, they needed to talk.

  She looked away from the pictures, turning back to her sister who hadn't moved yet. Emma wasn’t sure how long she'd been standing there, but she had the feeling it wouldn’t be so simple to get Merry to cooperate. After all, in their last conversation, Merry mentioned something about 'begging for forgiveness.' Emma wasn’t sure she could, even if it was deserved, she had her own pride and it had taken enough of a beating.

  When Merry still didn’t react, Emma sighed and decided she could be the first to break the silence, or they could be there for hours.

  "Merry, would you look at me?" she asked tentatively.

  She waited a few seconds, but there was no reply. So she took a deeper sigh, and went for the direct approach.

  "Merry, please. I need your help." She said the words slowly, enunciating each one so they were clear.

  That got her a twitch, Merry moving her head the slightest, before halting and staring out the window again.

  "I know you don’t want to talk to me after the last time I was in here, but this is important. I went out again, to another town, with Chase. We saw... things. I just wanted to say that... I'm starting to think you were right, about everything. Please, Merry. Please help me."

  She held her breath waiting for a response. She made herself be a little more patient, wait for longer. Her patience was rewarded when Merry turned her head to the side, and finally spoke.

  "Why should I help you just because you believe me now? You didn’t believe me before. You thought I was crazy, imagining things for my own benefit. So why should I?"

  Emma bit her lip, wondering what she should say. Merry had to have known the things she said made no sense to people who didn’t see or think the way she did, but Emma wasn’t sure of that anymore. More often than not, Merry was locked in her own mind. She hadn't socialized with any people besides her and Janice, and Chase—the only friend Emma had introduced to her family—more recently, for the past decade.

  Defending herself wouldn’t get her sister's sympathy. Merry wasn’t the sympathetic type, not anymore. Not even with their grandmother. When Emma left her to take care of Janice, she took it as a chore more than anything else, even if she did it when told.

  So Emma took a shaky breath, and gave her piece.

  "When we came out of the hospital and you weren’t acting yourself, someone needed to look after you. Grandma couldn’t do it, she was there to stand in place as guardian so we could stay home, but you know full well we did most of everything around here, especially as she continued to age. When they wanted to drag you away in a strait jacket, Grandma stood up for you. And when you needed something, I was the one that did it for you.

  "Take note of this, I may not have believed you about this before, but when we needed money for food, for the bills so we could get electricity and gas and water, I was the one that worked my ass off for it. I supported this family, like it or not, because you and Grandmother couldn’t after Mom and Dad died. I cared for you, Merry, for a long time, and I deserve one small favor in return."

  She paused to catch her breath, noting her voice had been getting steadily louder, not enough to consider a shout, but Emma didn’t want anyone outside the room to hear, or worse, Janice. She added her closing argument in a softer, but nowhere near calm, voice.

  "Remember that I support the entire family, and I am the one that can take actions to help us in our future."

  With that, she kept quiet and waited for Merry to response. It took a while, a lot longer than before, but she was ready to be patient. If her sister refused to cooperate, Emma was going to stop being nice.

  She didn’t have to resort to that, though.

  Merry finally turned around, eyes slightly narrowed. "Fine. I haven't forgiven you, but I will help you."

  Emma felt her body relax instantly, and she nodded, feeling relief course through her. Her sister wouldn’t lie. Merry got up and approached her, looking stern.

  "You need to be able to keep a secret."

  Emma frowned, confused. "Secret?"

  "Yes Emma, a secret. Yes, or no."

  She wasn’t any less confused but she, reluctantly, agreed. "I will."

  Merry gave a sharp nod, and then she was walking out of the room. After a second, her confusion only growing, Emma followed. The frown on her face grew when Merry took her out into the garden. The section where she and Janice had been planting looked obviously disturbed, even though they'd cleared the mud and the dirt already.

  Was that what her sister wanted to show her? It couldn’t be, though.

  "Merry, what are we doing out here..."

  Her voice trailed off as her sister walked past the garden. A little further back, through a small path in the middle of the garden, they had a shed. Emma never went back there, there was never need for her to. She could remember, when she was younger, it stored equipment her mother had used when she tended plants, mostly flowers, in their garden. There was no longer need for that once she was gone, though.

  Merry, though, had long since used it as her own place to have some privacy. When she left the house, she went
there, but Emma hadn't actually seen her there all that many times. Still, when Merry claimed the place, she'd never gone there.

  "Merry..."

  Merry held a hand up, pointer finger held in front of her lips. "I'm keeping a secret inside the shed. Remember that you already said you would keep the secret."

  She seemed to be waiting for something, so Emma nodded. Then she watched as Merry unlocked the shed and pulled open the door, stepping aside for her to see.

  Emma wasn’t sure what she'd expected to find, but she was shocked to discover the inside of the shed was filled with food.

  It was a fairly sizeable shed, bigger than Emma had ever thought was necessary, but it had nothing to do with her, so she rarely thought of it. As far in as she could see, though, there was food. No fresh produce, that wouldn't have lasted. It was all processed, packaged food, but it was still food. And it would last a while.

  "I've been hoarding food for some time, an entire shed full of food, in preparation for an apocalypse scenario. I can't help what I see, Emma, but when I saw the threat, I didn’t think I could just ignore it. Whatever you, and anyone else, thought about me suddenly holing up in my room, it wasn’t just about phobias. Why go out there and make friends when they would be more people to depend on you. When they would all be gone someday not too far away."

  Emma shook her head. "You can't think—"

  "People are going to die, people have died. Between life and death, I made my choice a long time ago. I didn’t stop living life, I just stopped living in a dream."

  Emma just stared inside the shed, and then turned to look at her sister, for the second time in her life feeling like the other woman was a stranger to her. How had she not noticed any of this going missing?

  "How..." Emma breathed, only for words to get stuck in her mind, unsure what she wanted to say.