by D. Gideon
The radio crackled a bit. Dorothy frowned at it as she set out plates on the table. It shouldn’t be time to change the batteries again; she’d replaced the rechargeables just last week. A scratch on the back door pulled her attention away, and she hurried over to let Jax in.
“Hey, Jax. Time for the nightly rounds, eh?” She scratched the big dog behind her ears, smiling as Jax wagged so hard in greeting that her entire backside wiggled back and forth.
“Well, go on then, go check, before you knock me over. Silly girl. Go check.”
Jax trotted off into the living room, and Dorothy could hear her claws tapping as she went upstairs to check the bedrooms. When the Millers had moved in with their wild tomboy daughter and her puppy, Dorothy hadn’t imagined that the both of them would be spending as much time in her house as they did in their own. The Millers had been another blessing, expanding her family and giving her grandsons a father figure. Ripley and Corey would be graduating from college this year, Thomas was on track with his plan to enter the police academy, and in a few more years her daughter could retire from active duty with the Navy and finally come home. Dorothy only wished Nate and Big Tom were alive to see the strong young men the boys had grown up to be.
Dorothy sighed and set plates onto the table. No use thinking about that. She’d see her husband and her son-in-law again one day in Heaven. For now, she just needed to keep focus and keep doing the best she could. Times were tough and money was tight, but the gardens were bursting. God was good.
The radio scratched and hissed into pure static, and as Dorothy picked it up to turn it over, she heard numerous popping sounds outside. It almost sounded like pistol fire, but not quite. From her many years of living in Baltimore, she knew what pistol fire was. This wasn’t it. The popping was followed by a sizzling, crackling kind of noise.
“What the devil?”
The power blinked once, twice, and then she was plunged into darkness. Upstairs, Jax started barking. The radio hissed like a mad demon in her hand, and by touch she turned it off and slipped it into its familiar spot in her waist apron pocket.
Shaking her head and muttering, she felt along the countertop to the end of the kitchen, quickly finding the back door and the little LED flashlight she kept hanging from the doorknob. Every door in the house had one so they’d be easy to find when the power went out. With all the summer hurricanes that came up the East coast, that was a regular occurrence. Turning the flashlight on, she looked at her watch.
8:15PM.
“Jax! Jax! Quiet girl, get down here. Jax, come!”
Jax quickly came down the stairs, but stood at the front window, huffing and prancing around worriedly.
Dorothy opened the front door and had barely unlatched the screen door before Jax pushed it open and bounded out onto the front porch. She stood at the porch steps, huffing and growling down towards the intersection.
Stepping up next to Jax, Dorothy rubbed the dog’s head and made soothing sounds. Looking around, she could see the other residents on the street coming out onto their front porches and steps also.
“What is it about the lights going out that makes everyone go outside, Jax? It’s not like we’re all going to find a big switch floating out here that we can turn back on.”
Jax licked her hand and repositioned herself so she was sitting between Dorothy and the front yard.
“What are you trying to protect me from, girl? Scoot over, so I can see.”
The power transformer at the end of the street was sizzling and popping, dripping flaming liquid onto the ground beneath it. A few people—men, it looked like—were starting to gather near the pole, looking up at it and pointing. Two of them had cellphones and were recording the spectacle.
“Damn fools gonna get themselves electrocuted, Jax. You watch. People ain’t got no sense. No sense at all.”
“Miss Parker? Miss Parker, did your-OOH!”
Dorothy swung the flashlight over to the side of her yard, where her other neighbor, Cathy Riggs, was picking herself up and brushing off the knees of her jeans. She’d walked right into a little bush on the property line and had stumbled.
“Cathy, where is your flashlight? Don’t you know better than to go traipsin’ around in the dark without a flashlight?”
Cathy gave a little laugh as she rubbed her hands on her jeans. “Oh, I’ve got one in the house somewhere. I just saw you over here and thought I’d come ask if your power’s out…what is that noise?” She came up to the bottom of the steps, but stopped short when she saw Jax. Cathy didn’t like dogs. Too dirty, she always said.
“Well of course my power’s out, otherwise I wouldn’t be standing out here with my flashlight. Look down there.” Dorothy gestured with the flashlight’s beam. “Looks like the transformer went out… it’s melting or something.”
“The what? Oh!” Cathy had turned and looked, and was shading her eyes against the white sparks and flames that were licking along the pole. “Well isn’t this something. Wonder when it’ll be back on?”
“Not for a while, I’d reckon. Somebody’ll have to call the power company and have ‘em come fix it.”
“Well, poo. How am I going to heat up my Weight Watchers snack? I had just closed the door on the microwave.” She put her hands on her hips and huffed. “If I can’t have my double fudge cake, it’s going to throw all of my points off!”
“You’re baking a cake in the microwave?”
“No, silly; it’s baked already, it’s just frozen. Dan and I have been on the Weight Watchers diet now for three weeks. Everything’s all made up for you and frozen, all you have to do is pop it in the microwave and heat it up. At night you get to choose one snack, and I was just about to heat up my slice of double fudge cake when the power went off.”
Dorothy suddenly remembered the bread and casserole in her oven. She looked at her watch again; it still had ten minutes to go. The oven was electric and had gone off with everything else. Hopefully it would hold its heat long enough for the bread and casserole to finish baking.
People were walking down the sidewalk now, heading to lollygag at the flaming transformer. Most of them were holding cell phones aloft. Only a few of them had flashlights.
“Grams? Grams, everything okay? Oh, hi Mrs. Riggs.” Thomas came jogging over from next door, and bless him, the boy had a flashlight in his hand. Jax huffed a greeting and started thumping her tail against Dorothy’s feet.
“Are you two all right—whoa!” Thomas had just looked past them to see the transformer at the end of the street. “What do those fools think they’re doing?”
“They’re rubbernecking, is what they’re doing. They should be getting a hose and putting that fire out, before it burns down the whole street,” Cathy said.
“Are you kidding me? You can’t put water on a live electric line! You’ll kill everyone touching the hose!” Thomas said.
“Uh, Thomas honey, the power’s out already,” Cathy said, rolling her eyes. “It’s not live anymore.”
“If it wasn’t live anymore it wouldn’t still be buzzing like that,” Thomas said, waving a hand towards the end of the street. One of the men had produced buckets, and was gesturing to the others. “Crap. It looks like they’re going to start a bucket line. One of those yahoos is going to get his ass fried.”
“Thomas, language,” Dorothy started, but Thomas was already bounding up the steps into the house.
“Gotta call the boys and get them down here!” He called back. Dorothy cringed as the screen door slammed. It sounded much louder, without the normal sounds coming from everyone’s houses.
“He could have just used my cell phone,” Cathy said, pulling a slim touchscreen model from her back pocket.
Dorothy cocked her head. “You brought a cell phone out with you, but not a flashlight?”
“Well, my cell phone is always in my pocket,” Cathy said, turning to hold the phone up so she could get a good shot of the flaming transformer pole. “I’m gonna put this up on my Faceb
ook,” she said. “Ooh! I bet if I email this to WBAL, they’ll put it on tonight’s news! You think they’ll call and interview me?”
The screen door slammed again. Thomas stood looking in dismay towards the pole, rubbing one hand over his shaved head.
“What is it, child? Did you call them?”
“The phone lines are dead,” Thomas said. “I even tried using your old wall phone up in your room, and there’s nothing. Not even a dial tone.”
Dorothy looked back and shook her head at the gathering crowd at the corner. The pole was now completely on fire, and more fire was pouring out of the bottom of the transformer onto the ground below.
“I’m gonna drive up there,” Thomas decided, starting down the steps.
“Now hold on Thomas, hold on. I’ve got a cell phone right here. Just let me…” Cathy swiped at the screen and then held the phone out to Thomas. “I don’t know the number for the fire station—besides 911, I mean.”
Thomas took the phone and punched in numbers. “Calling direct is quicker,” he said. “Doesn’t get routed through—what the?” He pulled the phone away from his ear, shaking his head. “Lines must be overloaded,” he said. He quickly handed the phone back to Cathy and leaned over to kiss Dorothy on the cheek.
“I’ll be right back, Grams,” he said. “Don’t go near that transformer.”
“Like you need to tell me that,” Dorothy said, but Thomas was already climbing into his little rusted pickup truck and starting it up.
Cathy was frowning down at her phone, her face lit up by its display. “Dammit. Email isn’t working either—I can’t send this video to the news station. Stupid thing. I told Dan to get me an iPhone, but no.”
Dorothy turned back from watching Thomas pull out of the driveway. “Maybe you can send it from your computer when the power comes back on,” she offered.
“I should be able to send it now,” Cathy grumbled. “This phone is 4G. We paid a lot of money for this stupid thing, and if it’s not going to work right, I’m taking it back tomorrow and getting an iPhone.” She jabbed the screen a few more times with her finger, as if hitting it harder would make it work.
“That’s it. I’m done with this thing. I’m going to go see if Dan’s phone will work.” Cathy spun on her heel.
“Hold on a minute, Cathy. Here, take this.” Dorothy handed Cathy her flashlight. “You can keep that. I’ve got another one. Don’t want you falling down and hurting something.”
Cathy took the flashlight with a murmured thanks and started making her way back over to her house.
“See, Jax? No sense at all,” Dotty said.
Dorothy scanned up the street, stopping when she realized she couldn’t see the nighttime glow from the town. It wasn’t even nine yet, and being a tourist trap near Ocean City, the stores here didn’t close until 11pm or later. The McDonalds stayed open until 2am, and the 7-11 never closed. Normally you couldn’t see the night sky, much less the stars, at all. But tonight the stars were bright, and the sky had a strange reddish hue that seemed to be getting stronger.
Pushing Jax out of the way, Dorothy stepped down onto her walk and went to the side of her house, trying to peer between the trees in her backyard. There were no lights from that direction, either. Power seemed to be out everywhere.
“Somethin’ ain’t right,” Dorothy muttered. Jax whined and circled around her legs, trying to push her back up onto the porch.
“Hush girl, let me think.”
Her lips set in a grim line, Dorothy pulled the little radio out of her apron and turned it on. Still nothing but static. Turning it off again, she let out a deep, shaking breath. In the distance, she could hear the sound of a siren. Thomas had made it to the fire station.
A flicker of light caught her attention, and she turned to see that Cathy and Dan had come out onto their front steps. Cathy held the flashlight Dorothy had given her, and Dan was holding his phone out in front of him, filming the crowd and the burning pole.
Dorothy shook her head as she walked back to her front steps. Her gut was telling her that this was something big, and she’d learned long ago to listen to her instincts. Cathy and Dan had started walking down to join the crowd at the transformer.
“People ain’t got no sense,” she muttered. “No sense at all.”
Taking another deep breath to calm her nerves, she started up the steps and back into her house.
Nestled in with her cookbooks in the kitchen hutch was a red three-ring binder. The slip of paper on the spine read “I.C.O.E.”
In Case Of Emergency. Well, this qualified, didn’t it?
Taking it down, Dorothy laid the binder on the kitchen table next to the cooling loaves of bread and the casserole. Opening it and scanning over the table of contents, she flipped past the lists, the plans, the articles that Corey and Ripley had printed out at the library—until she came to what she was looking for.
She looked down at the map, with all of its colored boxes and notations, and passed a shaking hand over a building outlined in red: the Federal prison.
Her finger traced a line back to her house; just a little over a mile away.
She was getting a sickening feeling in her stomach; the same feeling she’d had the night the police had come to tell her that Nate and Big Tom had been shot on the way home from the Baltimore steel mill.
“Lord Jesus, let me be wrong,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 3
F riday, August 31st
College Park, Maryland
We hurried down the stairwell. Todd was in the lead, with my flashlight.
“Johnson, you stay with me,” Todd said. He was using what he called his “command voice”; said it came in handy both on the football field and with his ROTC exercises. “Some of those screaming people could be hurt. I need to know who to send to the infirmary, and who can get by with some band-aids.”
“No problem,” Josh said, panting a little.
We burst through the door to the sixth floor and were greeted with sounds of chaos. The power switch had kicked over, and emergency lights dimly lit the hall. People were scrambling around each other, calling for help and flashlights.
A beam of light passed over us and then jerked back, aimed directly at Todd. I shaded my eyes and ducked out of the way as two guys, one with blood running down his face, pushed past us to the stairwell.
“Todd! Where the hell have you been? We need help over here!” The owner of the flashlight made his way to us quickly, and I saw that he also had on a staff shirt with “R.A.” printed over the pocket.
“I was upstairs. How many are hurt?” Todd asked.
“I’ve got no idea, dude. Probably everybody on the west side of the building. Sounded like a bunch of the windows on that side got blown out. But we’ve got a bigger problem—there’s people stuck in the elevators. Get over here and help us get these doors open.”
There were four elevators in our building, and four stairwells close by. We were there in a few quick strides. A small crowd of people had already gathered, and were trying to pull the doors open.
“Todd,” Josh called out, trying to speak over the commotion. “That guy at the stairs had blood all over his face. We need to see who’s hurt.”
Todd nodded, and thumped his fellow R.A. on the shoulder. “Bill. Bill! Are the people in the elevator hurt?”
“I’ve got no idea,” Bill yelled. “I’ve tried asking, but I can’t hear anything over all of this noise.”
Todd looked around for a moment, then stepped into the middle of the hall and took a deep breath.
“Everybody, QUIET!” he yelled. The crowd at the elevator froze, startled. The noise from the rest of the hall continued.
“WE NEED QUIET! THIS IS AN EMERGENCY! SHUT THE HELL UP!”
The hall quieted down, and Todd nodded to Bill. Bill thumped on one set of elevator doors.
“You guys in this elevator! Is anyone hurt?”
“No!” Came the muffled reply. “Get us out of here!”
The reply, if there was one, was too faint to hear.
“Maybe they’re on another floor,” I said. Todd nodded in agreement and rubbed the spot between his eyes with his thumb.
“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Todd said. He pointed to a tall, skinny kid whose pale face would’ve given Josh a run for his money. “You. You’re from my side of the hall. What’s your name?”
“Uh, Henry?” The kid asked, as if looking for verification.
“Henry, you’re now my info guy. I need you to go down to the lobby and let the girls at the service desk know we’ve got people stuck in-” he swung the flashlight up, checking. “Stuck in elevator C on the sixth floor. Get them to call maintenance to let these guys out, find out any other information you can and come right back up. Tell them Todd from 6 sent you. Got it?”
“Service desk, elevator, Todd from 6,” Henry repeated, nodding. “Got it.”
“Good. Go,” Todd commanded. Henry turned and ran for the stairs.
Todd pointed to the crowd. “Are you guys all from this side of the hall? Are you even from this floor?” There was a mixture of responses, and Todd held up a hand to quiet them down again. “Okay, okay. You need to get back to your floor, or get back to your rooms. Your R.A. is gonna need to do a head count.”
“But what about the guys in the elevator?” I couldn’t see who asked this, but it was someone who had been trying to open the doors.
“They said they’re not hurt, so they can sit tight until maintenance gets here. You’re not going to get those doors open with just your hands.”
“I can get my backpacking shovel to use as a pry bar,” Corey offered, but Todd shook his head.
“Not yet,” he said. “We’ll give maintenance an hour or so before we go screwing up the doors and possibly break something. Maybe the power will come back on. They’ll be fine until then.” He made shooing motions at the people still gathered there. “Go on, go. If I need you, I’ll yell.” The crowd started dispersing. A few of them grumbled; clearly not in agreement.