On Monday nights, Mom and Lyle would come out and watch me play in the Junior Varsity games. They’d sit by Dad, and they’d all three talk civilly to each other and cheer me on. It felt so weird seeing them together like that. I wished Mom wouldn’t come; then I wouldn’t be forced to pretend to be happy to see her or to let her hug me after the game. I wouldn’t have to shake Lyle’s hand and pretend I didn’t want to tackle him to the ground and pummel his face in front of all my teammates. But Time chose to make those moments stretch out uncomfortably long, so I’d try to hurry into the locker room after the game without seeing them. I’d be the last one out, hoping they’d already be gone. Sometimes they were, gratefully, but then I risked making Dad mad with my tardiness. Either way, I felt I couldn’t get a grasp on Time, to use it to my advantage.
On November 1st, school started just like any other day. I rode the bus to school and spent the extra few minutes before the first bell talking with my buddies and teasing some of the freshman cheerleaders. Football season was almost over, and we were talking about whether we were going to try out for basketball or wrestling. I was leaning toward wrestling because it meant lots of out-of-town weekend tournaments, but most of my friends were going out for basketball. It didn’t matter. I knew that Lyle was on call most weekends and that Mom and he wouldn’t be able to come to most of my tournaments so that made it worth choosing wrestling.
Time plodded along at its normal dull pace until lunch hour. Just as I was sitting down with my tray of barely edible cafeteria food, the lights began to flicker, then went out altogether. The cafeteria was in the basement of the school, and except for the emergency exit signs, it was pitch dark. Several girls screamed, and someone dropped their tray of food. There was a stunned silence for a few seconds, then the vice principal came in to usher us all up the stairs and out the doors. A couple of hundred students from other lunch periods were already outside the building but were trying to get back in for some reason. It was chaos, and I couldn’t see anything over the much taller students around me. Amid the noise and confusion of panicking students, I thought I could hear pops outside like gunfire, then an explosion and hundreds of sirens. Coach showed up then with a handheld loudspeaker and started calling out instructions in a voice that I could tell he was straining to keep calm, while telling all of us to remain calm. It was already too late for that, though.
Eventually, Coach and the vice principal got us back to our homerooms, which lined the outside of the building and had windows for light, where we waited to hear what was going on. From the windows, we could see the tops of some power poles on fire, street lights out, and dozens of cars stalled on the street below. Our teacher, Mr. Heim, just let us talk and look out the windows for almost an hour until the principal came in to explain what had happened.
—The whole city is without power. A massive coronal mass ejection, known as a CME, from the sun has hit the earth and taken down the power grid. We’ve been instructed by the police department to keep you here until your parents can come pick you up.
We didn’t really understand a word that he said except that we were without power and that it was going to be awhile before it was back on. Mr. Heim allowed us to try to call our parents on our cell phones, even though we weren’t supposed to have them in class. No one could get a signal, and several of the phones appeared to be completely dead for some reason.
Outside, we could see people streaming out of the apartment building across the street and heard one lady shouting hysterically that her son was trapped inside the elevator and needed help getting out. I instantly started worrying about my dad being stuck on the 13th floor of his office building downtown, but there was no way I could contact him. That fact made me feel helpless and alone, even though I was in a room of 28 other people. I could tell that other people were affected by it, too, because they started trying to make calls on their cell phones again, even though we knew there was no service.
I was standing near the teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom when I noticed Mr. Heim messing with his watch. He had it off his wrist and kept tapping the face of it, then holding it up to his ear, and tapping it again. When he noticed me watching him, he looked a little embarrassed.
—It stopped working. It’s an atomic watch, and I guess it can’t find the signal to reset itself. It must have something to do with the… thingy, you know, the corona thingy.
Mr. Heim chuckled when he saw my dubious expression and explained,
—I’m an English teacher; what do I know about science?
Just then I remembered that the nurse’s watch that I had given Mom for Christmas almost two years ago was an atomic watch as well. For one brief instant, I felt an enormous surge of love and concern for Mom, something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I know it must’ve shown on my face, so I turned away quickly and looked out the window while I struggled to stuff those feelings back into the chest of memories in my mind. I was certainly not ready to let Mom off the hook for what she did to Dad and me. Instead, I forcibly turned my feelings and my worries toward my Dad who I felt was alone and vulnerable. I worried about Dad the rest of that long afternoon that we were stuck in the school.
Several of the older students who either had cars or could ride with other students were allowed to leave, but the school held on to those of us who were under 16 until our parents or another trusted adult could come pick us up. Some of us waited a long time, in fact it was getting dark outside by the time my dad finally showed up. He was on foot, having walked the twenty-two blocks from his office building. He told me we would have to walk home, because his car wouldn’t start and even if it did, he couldn’t get it out of the office building’s underground lot.
While we walked the fifteen blocks home, Dad told me about all the problems in his office building. The first problem was all the people that were stuck in the elevators. Dad wasn’t one of them, thankfully, but he had stayed to help those that were climb up out of the hatch at the top of the elevator cars and up the ladder on the side of the elevator shaft to the floor above where it had stopped. Then everyone had to walk down the thirteen flights of stairs to street level.
As we walked, there were still tons of sirens and police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks whizzing by every which way. We could see huge plumes of thick black smoke coming from several different locations in the distance. Dad said he had tried to call Mom to check on her, but couldn’t get a signal, and that made my stomach do a flip-flop. I wasn’t sure what upset me most: not knowing if Mom was okay, or that Dad was still concerned about her. Maybe he was just calling her for my sake, but in either case, I just looked away and changed the subject.
Chapter 3
The First Days
That night in our apartment was long and boring. We could see from the windows of our third-floor apartment that the only lights on in the city belonged to the hospitals, which were no doubt being supplied by backup generators. Even then, though, most of the rooms were dark early in the evening, and the lights that were on were quite dim, probably to save generator fuel. We still didn’t know much about what had happened, but there were lots of rumors and, of course, conspiracy theories of some covert plan to overthrow the government flying around. I tried to tell people what the principal had told us about the coronal mass ejection, but they just answered,
—Of course that’s what they’d tell us.
The first few days, Dad and I survived pretty well. There was still plenty of water stored in the water towers, although the mayor issued a statement, carried door-to-door by policemen and other government officials, that we should conserve water as much as possible, boil the water from the taps, and use any bottled water we had to save water for fighting fires. The messengers also told us that martial law had been declared and that the official cause of the blackout was indeed a CME, and that it had caused quite a bit of damage to the power grid, resulting in widespread outages across the country that would probably take weeks to fix. They told us that we sho
uld stock up on food and water if at all possible.
Dad and I tried to go to the neighborhood stores to buy food and other supplies, but they were closed. Without electricity, they couldn’t run their cash registers or provide lighting for their customers. After the first couple of days, some storeowners had even gone so far as to board up their windows to prevent looting. The Red Cross set up mobile stations to give out food and water. We were okay, water-wise, because Dad was a bottled water freak and had several cases of it in the pantry, but we didn’t have much food since we mostly ate out. We had some boxes of cereal and Pop Tarts along with bags of chips and crackers that got us through the first few days. I was happy with eating all that junk food the first couple of days, but it soon got old and my stomach started hurting. I longed for some meat and, believe it or not, I started craving vegetables. It’s funny how you want something that you never liked before just because you can’t have it. I think my body knew it was missing some vital nutrients, and so it was craving healthier food. We were able to get some hot meals from the Red Cross station for the first few days.
I was so bored. With no electricity, there just wasn’t that much to do. I wanted to go hang out with some friends on the street, but Dad thought it was too dangerous. There were a lot of thugs walking around breaking into stores, beating and robbing people, and causing all kinds of trouble. So we just stayed in the apartment most of the time. Occasionally, we would venture out together and just walk around the neighborhood, talking to people on the streets, but we’d head back home at the sound of trouble, like sirens or shouting. In our apartment, we read lots of books, magazines, and even the school textbooks I had brought home, and played cards by candlelight in the evenings. Most nights we’d sit outside on our little balcony, trying to make out the looming, hulking shapes of buildings, trees, and stalled cars, in the dark. It was eerie not knowing what was out there. We were so used to the city being lit up at night that it felt like we were on an alien planet. Another thing that made the city seem alien for the first few nights was the strange green, and sometimes purplish-pink light of the aurora borealis dancing in the northern sky. Our balcony faced west so we could see the aurora and the eerie reflection of it on the buildings and in the car windows on the street below. Some people feared an alien invasion that first night, but soon science and knowledge prevailed to set their fears at ease.
Time ceased to exist. The days melted into nights, which then became day again—the same day as before, it seemed. We quickly lost track of what day it was and even what season, since it was so nice outside. Often, I would wake up confused as to what time of year it was. I was certain it wasn’t the dead of winter or the hottest part of summer, but I couldn’t really tell if it was spring or fall until I got up and looked out the window at the last few brown leaves clinging to the ornamental trees on the strip of grass in front of the building across the street.
Dad kept trying to call mom until the batteries on both our cell phones gave out. He never was able to get a signal. He tried a pay phone down the street, but there was no dial tone. According to everyone on the street, there was no phone service anywhere, and the only communication was by shortwave radio a few days after the CME. Long-wave radio waves were still too disrupted by the magnetic disturbance in the atmosphere to work.
After the first week without power, things started getting bad. Water was running out, and there wasn’t enough pressure in the towers to pump it out anymore. Emergency generators were running out of fuel, and with no way to refuel them, the lights in the hospitals got fewer and dimmer every night. The closest hospital to us, and the one whose windows we could see every night from our balcony, was the children’s hospital. I started thinking about all those poor sick kids there, and what was going to happen to them. One of the kids in our school, a boy named Daniel, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor in junior high and was still undergoing radiation and chemo to get rid of it. I hoped he was far enough along in the treatment to be cured. When I asked Dad about it, he just shook his head and looked away. He murmured something like,
—I don’t know, Ben.
I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it. What Dad did want to talk about, though, what he worried about and complained about every day, was how much money he was losing by not working and how big a loss the stock market was going to take because of this. He kept repeating those old sayings from my namesake, Benjamin Franklin: Time is money and Lost time is never found again. I got so tired of hearing about it that I finally told him to just get over it. He kind of freaked out on me then, yelling about how were we going to survive after the electricity comes back on, and how hard he’s worked to get us where we were, and how he didn’t want to lose our apartment and his new Lexus, etc. I knew we were all frustrated by the situation, and we all reacted differently to the stress, so I just let it drop and ignored him every time he ranted about money after that. I wondered if he’d always been this uptight about making money, then it dawned on me that that was probably why he was hardly ever home when he and Mom were still married. I stopped myself, though, before I could continue down that thought trail. Better to let all that remain locked away in my head.
Every couple of days or so, a policeman named Officer Ortiz, would come by our building and give us news and updates on the situation. After about nine days without electricity, Officer Ortiz came to tell us that stores had been ordered by the military to open their doors to the public and give away provisions. Armed troops were stationed in each store to ensure proper conduct and enforce strict rationing guidelines. Officer Ortiz encouraged people to get what they could as soon as possible. He said the government had promised the storeowners that they would be reimbursed by FEMA when the emergency was over.
Dad and I headed down to the market a few blocks from our building and waited in the long line that stretched down the block. Policemen were everywhere trying to keep people calm and orderly. After about an hour, we finally made it into the store where, sure enough, armed and uniformed soldiers stood guard near the doors. The grocer handed us a brown paper sack that was half-full of items; we didn’t get to pick out what we wanted. As we were heading back to the doors to leave, one of the guards was confronting a man who was trying to force his way back into the store. The man began to yell that he didn’t get what he needed and he was going back to get it. I couldn’t hear what the guard was saying—he was trying to stay calm and keep the man from freaking out—but the man just got more and more frantic, yelling that he had to have ketchup or he would die. Dad looked in our sack and found a can of tomato paste. He offered it to the man and after the guard told him that was the best he was going to get, the man took it sheepishly and left, murmuring his thanks to Dad.
Outside the store, we took a quick look in the sack. It contained a pound of ground cornmeal, two cans of green beans, two small cans of deviled ham, a box of trashcan liners, a can of V8, and a canister of salt. I was hoping for some toilet paper, as we had been out for two days, and I couldn’t imagine what we were going to use instead. We were feeling pretty gross by then anyway. We hadn’t had a shower or bath in over a week and though we used a little water on a cloth to wipe the sweat off our bodies, we didn’t dare waste enough of it to wash our hair. The toilets had become a problem, too. With the decrease in water pressure, the toilets didn’t have enough water to flush. It was a good thing that we weren’t eating very much or else it would’ve been really nasty.
The next day, the army brought in big trucks full of water and food from the USDA Commodities Warehouses in the huge storage caves along the banks of the Missouri River. They told people to bring buckets, bottles, jars, or whatever else they could use to carry water in. Again, we had to wait in a long line to get our containers filled. Dad and I brought two buckets and four empty two-liter bottles, but the soldiers would only let us fill up the buckets and two bottles. We were able to get several cans of food, too. Everyone was being pretty decent and patient that first day of the food and water
being brought in.
The next day, however, we were further back in the line and when it came our turn to fill our containers, the water in the tank was already low. We only got half what we had gotten the day before, and a fight broke out in the line behind us. We just barely got out of the way before the last several dozen people in line rushed the truck, shoving and fighting to get the last of the water. The soldiers were trying to push everybody back, with one of the soldiers on a megaphone urging everybody to be calm and wait their turn. Dad and I tried to hurry away before it could get really ugly or before someone tried to steal our water. We didn’t get far before we were confronted by some mean looking guys who seemed to be less interested in our water than in intimidating us.
Our water jugs were yanked out of our hands before we could even offer them to the thugs. They tossed them aside like they weren’t the vital necessity that we knew they were. One ugly guy got right up in my face, took a hold of the front of my coat and pushed me back into the melee of panicked rioters. His face was so close to mine, I could smell his stinking breath and see the grainy texture of three blue tears in prison tattoo fashion staining the leathery skin at the corner of his eye. When the crowd behind me pushed me back into him, he cursed at me and punched me in the face, like he was angry that I had dared to fight back. I had been hit in the face before during football and other sports, but nothing like this. It hurt so bad that I thought I would black out. I would have fallen to the ground except for the swirling mass of turmoil pushing and bouncing me around like a buoy on turbulent waters. At that moment, I understood what people mean when they say they saw stars and that the world seemed to move in slow motion for a while. Time, which had seemed nonexistent for a while, now appeared like a cruelly distorted nightmare.
Teenage Survivalist Series [Books 1-3] Page 16