by Glenn Cooper
When the pipeline pressure redlined at a critical level, with alarms ringing in his ears, and meaningless lights flashing on the control panel, he sat there, crying in fear and bewilderment as an emergency shutdown algorithm idled the turbines and ceased electricity generation. A diesel generator switched on. That kept the alarms blaring and the control panels glowing, but all Greco could do was stumble to the on-call room, sit on the cot, and cover his ears with his hands.
*
Jamie and Linda took flashlights up to Emma’s room and sat with the girls, waiting for the lights to come back on. This time they didn’t. After half an hour, Linda broke out the candles. They weren’t going to leave any of them burning unattended in Emma’s room, but the girls didn’t seem to be afraid of the dark. Jamie tried to teach them how to use a flashlight—one click on, a second click off—but the concept was proving too abstract.
Downstairs, he tried to call Mandy first on his landline then on the cell phone, but neither worked.
“You think it’s out all over?” Linda asked.
He ventured outside to have a look, taking the dog with him. The entire street was black.
When he returned, he said, “This could be system-wide. No lights, no appliances, no Internet, no cell phone service, no burglar alarms once the batteries run down. Fun and games.”
“Hopefully it won’t last long,” she said.
“Yeah, hopefully. But this could also be the new normal.”
He plunked down on the sofa. The low-pitched sigh escaping his throat sounded more like a groan. “You know that farting around, as you put it, that I’ve been doing in my lab the past few days?”
“I was mad. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Well, whatever way you meant it, I may have come up with half of a cure for the virus.”
“Where’s the other half?”
“Indianapolis.”
“Your friend, Mandy.”
“That’s right. I want to go there with Emma, maybe as early as tomorrow.”
She lit another couple of candles. The two of them sat in silence on opposite sides of the living room.
After a while she said, “I want to go with you. I could help. Will you let me come with you?”
Driving cross-country and caring for Emma on his own scared him more than he cared to admit. Would he have preferred traveling with someone other than Linda? Yes. Was she the only show in town? Yes.
“Yeah. You and Kyra can come.”
“I could use a drink,” she said. “Will you flip out on me if I have a drink?”
“Not if you fix me one too.”
20
“Did you feed them?” Edison asked.
His son, Joe, said he had, but added that it hadn’t been easy. When he put a plate down for his two brothers and his mother, the oldest and strongest boy, Seth, landed most of it. The only way to make sure that each one got their fill was to bring them out one at a time and feed them in another bedroom.
“They quiet now?” Edison asked.
“Pretty much.”
Edison got two beers from the fridge and gave one to Joe.
“We’ve got a helluva mess here,” Edison said. “You know that?”
“Yes, we do. We’ve got a farm to run without Brian’s help, we’ve got a household to run without Mom’s help, we’ve got sick kin upstairs, and little Brittany well, thank God she’s okay, but she needs looking after.”
Edison chugged half his beer and said, “Top that off, we don’t know if we’re gonna come down with this ourselves. If that happens, all of us are done for. I mean, look at them. They’re like babies up there.”
“Maybe we can teach ’em to do for themselves,” Joe said.
“You got any evidence they’re teachable? Hell, they don’t even know who they are.”
“Worth a try, don’t you think?”
“Who’s going to do the teaching? Ain’t gonna be me. I got beef stock to worry about if we want to survive. Ain’t gonna be you. You’re gonna be up to your eyeballs in chores and besides, I recall your school years well enough. You could hardly learn let alone teach.”
This was stinging criticism and Edison knew it, not that he gave a damn about the young man’s sensitivities. Between the two of them, Brian had been the Brainiac, the one who could have gone to college if he’d cared to.
Joe’s prickly response was, “Well, I guess we need some help up here.”
“Maybe, but the first order of business is to bury your brother.”
“You know you didn’t have to kill him, right?”
“What do you think I should’ve done? Close the door and come back when he was done with your ma?”
Joe finished his beer and told his father he was getting the backhoe to dig a grave behind the drying barn. When he was done, they shut Brittany away while they dragged Brian’s bloody corpse down the stairs and out to his pickup. For Delia’s sake, they went back upstairs and installed a padlock on the outside of the door to Seth and Benjamin’s room and locked them in. The boys were old enough, Edison reckoned, to do what Brian had done. When the burial was finished, and Edison had said some awkward words over the grave, they came home, drank a good bit of beer to numb themselves, then napped in the living room with Brittany until late in the afternoon.
The digital clock on the kitchen microwave was blinking when they awoke.
“Power must’ve gone out for a time,” Joe said.
Edison made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Joe brought some up to the shut-ins.
“They eat?” Edison asked when Joe returned.
“Like there’s no tomorrow.”
The TV was droning on in the living room.
“I been thinking,” Edison said.
“All right—”
“TV says it’s getting worse all over. You know how much you and Brian liked all those prepper shows?”
“Yeah, we watched them.”
“Then how come you never did nothing about it?”
“Fuck you, Pa. You’re the one who told us we’d be wasting time and money stockpiling food and ammo.”
“Did I? Don’t recall.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Joe said, shaking his head like crazy.
“Well, maybe I did and maybe I didn’t. I don’t want to get into a spilled-milk situation where I’m beating myself up. We need to fix things now while we still can. We’ve only got eight head of cattle, which is a lot of beef for the six of us, but if we lose power, it won’t keep once it’s butchered. We don’t have enough dry goods or canned food for more than a week or two. So, we’ve got to get our asses into town.”
“We’re light on ammo too,” Joe said.
“Well, let’s go shopping.”
“Nothing’s going to be open.”
“Don’t be going stupid on me,” Edison said. “Not that kind of shopping.”
On the drive into town, they planted Brittany in the back seat of Edison’s extended-cab truck, where she drew with markers in a coloring book. Edison blew a hole through the posted speed limit, doubtful the local police were bothering with speed traps. The late summer had been cooler than recent years and the leaves were starting to get color earlier than usual. Dillingham showed best in the autumn. Bright foliage directed one’s eye away from peeling paint and falling-down fences.
Toward the center of town—the business district, if you could call it that—the residential lots got smaller and the houses, most of them wood-framed, the better-ones brick, were packed in tighter. There weren’t any national chain stores on the main drag; pickings were too slim in Dillingham. There was a community bank, a variety store that sold beer and liquor, two gas stations, a grocery store, a barber shop/nail salon combo, run by a husband and wife team, a diner that closed after lunch, and a small funeral home that much of the time was wanting for business. For anything else, including schools, folks went to Clarkson. The only thing the town had aplenty were houses of worship. For seven hundred residents, four church
es seemed excessive, but all of them managed to stay afloat by offering different flavors of Protestantism.
Edison slowed his truck to have a look at the Heavenly Joy Church, which up till the month of May had been his place of worship. It was a low, brick building with a worn roof, well past its expiry, and signage announcing the topic of Pastor Snider’s next Sunday sermon. The church was next door to the Community Trust Bank and across the street from the Fairview Diner, a curious name no one understood, because there was no view of anything except the bank, the church, and a gas station. For a Wednesday afternoon, Edison would have expected to see some people about, but the town was deserted as far as he could tell.
“What’s the plan?” Joe asked.
“Police station first,” Edison said, looking down the road half a block. “Looks like chief’s car is out front. I’ll park at the grocery so Brittany’s out of harm’s way. Just in case.”
He pulled up to the store, which was unlit.
“Hey, sweetie,” Joe said to his sister, “Pa and me are going to do a couple of things and be right back. We’re going to lock the doors, so you don’t go wandering off, okay?”
“I want to go to the store too,” she said.
“We’re not going in there just yet, but when we do, I’ll fetch you and bring you along.”
“You all set?” Edison said.
Joe pulled his Remington bolt-action rifle from the soft case at Brittany’s feet and said, “Am now.”
Dillingham Police Station was a small brick building built in the 1930s and never renovated. There was an open-plan office where the deputy held court amidst metal filing cabinets with the chief’s private office, and two holding cells in the rear. Edison went in first, his semi-auto pistol holstered on his belt. Joe followed, cradling the Remington.
“Hello?” Edison called out to the empty room. “Anyone around?”
There was a faint, indistinct sound from the office. Joe went to the frosted door and called out, “Hey, Chief Martin, you in there?”
“Go ahead and open it, Joe,” his father said.
Joe did and took a step back, raising his rifle. “Holy fuck!”
“What’s going on in there?” Edison said, coming to look over his son’s shoulder.
The room was a bloody mess.
Most of the gore came from the gaping wound in Chief Martin’s neck, but his left hand was also a bloody mess. Clean-as-a-whistle wrist and finger bones littered the floor. Deputy Kelso, a heavy fellow with a big gut, was cowering in the corner, his mouth smeared with blood, the front of his ample blue shirt stained through.
Edison drew his pistol and went around his son.
“What the hell have you done here, Ernie?” Edison asked the deputy.
The deputy grunted something back and cast his eyes around the office as if looking for somewhere to bolt.
“He’s eating him, Pa,” Joe said.
“I believe I can see that,” Edison said. “Get a look at his eyes. He’s definitely got the thing.”
“How long you think they’ve been in here?”
“Long enough for old Ernie to get hungry. Man ate like a pig even when he was normal. The chief was probably sick too or he would’ve put up a more spirited defense.”
“Hey, Kelso, you twisted fuck,” Joe shouted at him. “You know who I am? You remember hassling me all the time?”
“He don’t remember shit,” Edison said.
“What should we do?”
Edison fired once, hitting Kelso just above one eye.
“This,” Edison said, “saves us the hard work.” He got the chief’s keys from his pocket and tossed them to his son. “Empty out the gun safe. This town’s ours now.”
They kept their promise to Brittany and let her out of the truck. The door to the grocery store was unlocked and Joe went inside first to check it out. Emerging after a minute he declared it had been picked through.
“Nothing,” Edison said.
“Nothing to eat. No batteries. But there’s this.”
He held up a wooden paddle with a red ball attached by a long rubber band. Brittany was delighted by it and began trying to whack the ball.
“You go back into the truck and play,” Edison said. “We’ll be a few minutes.”
“Hey, Joe!”
Joe looked around, confused, unsure where the voice was calling from.
“Up here!”
There was an apartment over the grocery store. The mayor owned the building and leased out the commercial space to his cousin who managed the store. He rented the one-bedroom living space separately. It was the cheapest apartment in Dillingham, a real stinker, and it was all Mickey Ferguson could afford. The young man was leaning out one of the windows, waving his arms at his old high-school buddy. Mickey had grown up in the town, but he was all alone now. His father ran out on his mother when the kid was in elementary school. As soon as Mickey graduated high school, his mother left for Pittsburgh to live with a man she met online.
Mickey stayed in Dillingham, doing odd jobs and dealing a little pot. He tried every now and then to have Joe get his old man to hire him on as a farm worker, but Edison hadn’t liked the kid since the day, when he was thirteen, that he drowned a stray cat in their pond. Edison told Joe at the time that the only reason for killing an animal was for food.
“I heard a shot,” Mickey yelled. “You hear it?”
Joe said, “Chief Martin’s dead. Kelso too.”
“Good riddance is what I say,” Mickey said. “How come you’re not wearing a mask? TV says everyone’s supposed to be wearing a mask.”
“We’ve been exposed like crazy. Whole family’s sick except for Pa and my little sister. Maybe we’ll get it, maybe we won’t.”
“Same with me. I’ve been washing dishes over at the Fairview, you know, and the owner, her son, and his wife all took ill. But I didn’t. I wake up each day expecting my head to be like chocolate pudding but as you can see, I’m sharp as a tack. Three of them at the Fairview are in a pitiful state, though. I put out some dry cereal for them day before yesterday but to be honest, I don’t want to go back.”
“Probably smart,” Joe said.
“Hey there, Mr. Edison,” Mickey said with a little wave.
Edison barely looked at him. “You got any food up there, Mickey?”
“Plenty. I’ve been emptying the hell out of the store.”
Joe and his father huddled and whispered. Edison suggested taking the food at gunpoint, but Joe argued back.
“I know you don’t think much of him. He’s not the sharpest blade in the drawer, but you said it yourself. We need help on the farm. I can keep him in line.”
Edison grunted his approval and Joe sealed the deal. Load the truck with his food, he told his friend, and he could throw in with them. Mickey was jubilant, maybe the happiest he’d ever been.
The mayor lived a block away, across the street from the funeral home, which he also owned. Being mayor in a small town wasn’t a big deal, but Mayor Mellon made the most of it. The Mellon name was like royalty in Western Pennsylvania. Mellons were scions of a nineteenth-century Pittsburgh banking and philanthropic dynasty, and the mayor slyly capitalized on it even though his Mellons were from Indiana and didn’t share a single piece of DNA with the famous Mellons. When people came into his Community Trust Bank and asked if he was one of the Pittsburgh Mellons, he would answer with a big smile that he could neither confirm nor deny.
He wasn’t a wealthy man by conventional measures, but by Dillingham standards he was rich as Croesus. He got that way by foreclosing on bad bank loans collateralized by real estate, then personally buying up the foreclosed assets from the bank at knock-down prices. After that he sold them at market value or used them for rental income. Some folks grumbled, but the police chief was in his pocket and so were the township supervisors. He was also the deacon and principal benefactor of the Heavenly Joy Church, so he had the bases covered in town. Edison had worshipped there since he was a boy, so ge
tting tossed out on his ear back in May was still raw.
The dust-up was over a baby.
The mayor’s cousin (and owner of the grocery) was Randy Scott. He and his wife tried for a couple of years to have a child and when they couldn’t, they decided to adopt a baby from Guatemala. Their personal life wasn’t something Edison ever thought about until they brought the infant to church one Sunday to have Pastor Snider rebaptize her, because they supposed she was born Catholic. The Edison clan were in their usual place in the third row of pews when Edison got a glimpse inside the bassinet. The baby’s skin was as brown as a hazelnut.
He stood up and said, “What in God’s name is happening here?”
Pastor Snider said, “Well, Blair, as you can see, we’re having a baptism for this baby.”
Edison ignored his wife who was tugging on his sleeve and said, “Look around, everyone. This is a white church. This is not a white baby.”
For a few seconds, the only sound inside the church was the baby’s mother breaking out crying. Then the mayor stood up in the first row, turned to Edison, and told him to sit down and shut up.
Edison replied that he would not sit down, nor would he shut up.
Pastor Snider attempted to smooth things over by saying that no one considered Heavenly Joy to be a white church, a black church, or a brown church, but simply a church of God.
“I will not worship in a church that caters to immigrants and mud people,” Edison said.
Snider replied that an adopted baby was hardly an immigrant and that the term mud people was offensive, but the mayor was in no mood to have a debate while his kin were being traumatized. He demanded that Edison leave.
Edison said, “Now, Wally, I know you’ve got a voice in this town that’s as big as your ass, but it’s still but one voice. There’s others here.”
That’s when Ed Villa, the owner of the urgent care clinic in Clarkson, got up and said, “Listen up, Blair, I’m an elder of this church and I’m happy to call for a vote of the congregation right here and right now. All those in favor of allowing this baby to be baptized this morning and to become a member of the congregation like the rest of us, raise your hands.”