Blackout: Book 0

by Alexandria Clarke

  The lot was a mess. Cars blocked the aisles, frozen in place on their way to the exit. Dads sat in the driver’s seats of their minivans with the doors open, coaxing keys into the ignition and muttering words of encouragement to the cold, silent engines, while their wives kept track of the kids. Some engines turned over, eliciting both cheers from their owners and groans from those who were less fortunate. There seemed to be a trend in which cars got started. They were all of an older variety, beaten-up clunkers driven by sixteen and seventeen year olds with fresh licenses. The shiny newer cars remained ironically taciturn, refusing to turn on as the few older cars navigated carefully around the cemetery of vehicles. However, when they reached the exit to the main road, they ran into another problem. The entire street was clogged with unmoving cars, some of which had run into each other. Drivers yelled at each other, at their phones, and at nothing at all to vent their frustration.

  “I’m glad we took the bus,” I muttered as we surveyed the chaos.

  “Yeah, which means we’re walking all the way home,” Jacob pointed out.

  “It’s better than sitting in this traffic.”

  We passed the welcome sign for the theme park and resigned ourselves for the long walk back to the apartment. With the sun long gone, the temperature had dropped drastically. I leaned into Jacob, worming my way beneath his jacket, and he hugged me against his side. Our positioning made for an awkward gait, but at least we were warm. I took my phone out of my pocket and clicked the home button.

  “Any luck?” Jacob asked.

  “Nope. Yours?”

  “Not even a flicker. What do you think it means?”

  The buildings of downtown Denver materialized like rectangular titans, looming over the pandemonium in the streets. A wayward toddler wobbled toward us, waddling as fast as possible on his chubby legs. Up ahead, a teenager looked frantically through the crowd, her eyes aimed at knee level. I swept the toddler up in my arms, which prompted an immediate spit take over my shoulder, and made my way toward the teenager.

  “Does he belong to you?” I asked, presenting the toddler.

  The teenager slumped with relief. “Yes, thank God! I looked away for a second. Miss Stark would’ve killed me if I’d lost him in this mess.”

  I handed over the squalling child. “Be careful. The two of you should head home. It’s not safe to be out right now.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  The teenager and her charge escaped into a tall brick apartment building. Jacob pulled me closer again, and we continued through the city. The number of car accidents tripled at every dark stop light, but there were no ambulances or squad cars to supervise the madness. Good Samaritans assisted those in need, pulling bloodied women and children from wrecked sedans and trucks.

  “This is bad,” I said to Jacob. “What the hell happened?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think it’s like this everywhere?”

  “God, I hope not.”

  The light rail had stopped too. Transportation officials, drivers and workers alike, pried open the doors of the train manually. The reflective patches on their neon yellow vests glowed feebly under the starlight as they strained to free the people trapped on the metro.

  “I should check on my parents,” Jacob said, unable to tear his eyes away from a portly man lifting a small child from a ruined minivan. “And my sister.”

  “How?” I asked. “The phones are out.”

  “There has to be a way.”

  “Your parents are smart people,” I told him, squeezing his arm in reassurance. “And they don’t really go out on Friday nights, right? They’re probably safe at home.”

  He relaxed slightly. “What about Pippa?”

  “Pippa is a seventeen-year-old who’s eight months pregnant,” I reminded him. “If I know her at all, she was in the process of downing a pint of mint chocolate chip in her bedroom and calling all of her nonpregnant friends to remind them that she exists.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  I swallowed hard as we passed another crash, averting my eyes from the bloodstain on the asphalt. “Let’s just get home. We can buckle down and figure out what to do from there.”

  Chapter Three

  By the time we reached our apartment block, a fixed sense of nausea had moved into my stomach with no intention of relieving itself. No matter where I looked, someone was hurt or in trouble. People cried for help, and no one answered. We had personally stopped a number of times to assist someone. Jacob had teamed up with another man to lift a fallen tree trunk off the legs of the man’s wife. Farther along, I patched up a gaping gash in a ten-year-old’s forehead with decrepit bandaids from the glove compartment of his mother’s demolished car. He had been sitting in the front seat when the car stopped and smashed his face against the dashboard. As I stanched the blood with a roll of gauze and pinched his skin back together, his mother cried in horror over the fact that she’d let him sit up front. Twenty minutes later, Jacob shrugged off his jacket and draped it around a shivering five-year-old as she waited for her father to free another child from a car seat. In a sense, Jacob and I had gotten lucky at the theme park. I would probably never go on another roller coaster again, but at least we had escaped with minimal injuries.

  When the door shut behind us, enclosing us in the lobby of our building, it muted the clamor of the outside world. I rubbed my eyes, wishing I could unsee the blood and the pain. Jacob jabbed the button for the elevator, but it stayed dark.

  “Right,” he muttered. “No electricity. I’m an idiot.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  He rubbed his hands together. The cold had already begun to penetrate the glass doors of the lobby. “I guess it’s the stairs then.”

  We headed up, plodding along at a lazy pace. My feet ached from the miles between the park and our home. All I wanted to do was fall into bed. A few people passed by us, recognizable from the mail room and other floors. We exchanged polite exclamations about the situation and wished each other luck but didn’t linger long in the stairway. When we reached the door to our apartment, I silently thanked whoever had installed manual locks in the building, rather than the fancy expensive keycard pads that relied on electricity to let you into your home. Jacob unlocked the door and held it open for me. Out of habit, I flicked the light switch up.

  “Damn it.”

  “I have a feeling we’re going to be doing that a lot,” Jacob said, tossing the keys onto the kitchen counter. The apartment was chilly but not unbearable. For once, I was glad of Jacob’s anal obsession with keeping the balcony door shut. He vanished into the bedroom, reappeared wearing a cashmere sweater, and opened the fridge to look inside. “Are you hungry?”

  “You should probably keep that shut,” I said. “Keep the food cold for as long as possible. Honestly, after everything that we just saw out there, I don’t think I have the stomach for dinner.”

  “I’d usually agree, but I bought fillet medallions to grill for our anniversary dinner next week, and hell if I’m going to let those go bad.”

  I wrapped my arms around his waist and perched my chin on his shoulder as he took the package of meat from the fridge. “I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you how grateful I am that you so adamantly insisted on learning how to use a charcoal grill this year.”

  “Gas grills are cheating,” he replied. “Go wash up. I’ll manage out here.”

  I left him to it and headed for the bathroom, keeping one hand on the wall to lead me through the pitch blackness. When I flipped up the tap, a few drops of water trickled out before it went totally dry.

  “There’s no water,” I announced in the kitchen as Jacob seasoned the medallions with a flurry of spices.

  He groaned. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Don’t worry though.” I swung open the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, revealing three big five-gallon jugs that fit into our water dispenser, along with several packages of smaller bottles. “I stocked up last week when
I went to Costco. We’re good for a little while at least.”

  Jacob planted an appreciative kiss on my cheek. “Bless you and your weird doomsday tendencies.”

  The word “doomsday” stirred something in the pit of my stomach, but before I could lend too much thought to it, someone rapped on the door. I put my eye to the peephole and caught a glimpse of long black hair.

  “It’s Nita,” I said, pulling the door open.

  “Hey, Georgie.” For once, my friend wasn’t carrying an armload of books. She waved at Jacob over my shoulder. “Hi, Jake. I knocked earlier, but no one answered.”

  “We just got back from the park,” Jacob said.

  “I’m glad you made it back safely.” Nita hugged me tightly. “How’s it look out there?”

  I rested my chin on the top of her head. “Not good. Pretty terrible actually.”

  She drew back, her brow knitting together. “I wish I could do something. That’s the problem with med school. You read a ton of books on biology and theory and all that, but it’s useless until you get into the field.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Jacob said. “If the power’s out to the whole city, there’s only so much the hospitals can do. You’re better off here with us.”

  “Totally,” I agreed.

  “I guess,” Nita said. “Anyway, a bunch of us are having a party on the roof to grill all our food before it spoils. Do you guys want to join? Everyone brought whatever booze they had, so it’s bound to be a good time.”

  “A blackout party?” Jacob asked. “I haven’t been to one of those since we vacationed in Miami during hurricane season.” He held up the plate of steaks. “What do you think, Georgie? Should we share the wealth?”

  “I’m not so sure it’s a good idea.”

  Jacob tilted the steaks toward him and studied the raw meat with a wistful sigh. “Yeah, I guess we only have two of them.”

  “Not the steaks,” I said. “The party. It doesn’t feel appropriate. There are people out there in the streets who are hurt and bleeding. We have no idea how far this blackout reaches. Do you really think it’s wise for us to get drunk and not care while everyone else is trying to figure out what’s going on?”

  Nita leaned her head against my shoulder. “It’s like you said. We can’t do anything about it now. It’s late, and it’s dark out.”

  “I say we enjoy ourselves tonight,” Jacob added. “We might as well have some fun and then get a good night’s sleep. Who knows? Maybe the power will be back on by the time we wake up in the morning.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Nita gestured for us to follow her. “Come on. I’d grab a jacket though. It’s pretty windy and cold up there, even with the grills lit.”

  “Actually, Nita, could you do me a favor first?” I held up my left hand. My pinky finger had started to swell. “I broke my finger at the park. Think you could help me splint it?”

  “Sure. You got the stuff?”

  “In the bathroom.”

  “I’ll get some things together,” Jacob called after us.

  Nita followed me into the bathroom, where I extracted our first aid kit from underneath the counter. Nita popped it open and rifled through the contents, pulling out a splint and medical tape.

  “Finger,” she requested. I held it out for her to examine. “Did you set it yourself?”

  “Yup.”

  “Wow. Nice job. We should probably take this off.” Nita wormed my engagement ring off of my third finger to make room for the splint. The gold band clinked against the countertop. “Your hand’s going to swell even more, and you don’t want the ring stuck on there. Believe me.”

  “Good looking out.”

  Nita trapped her bottom lip between her teeth in concentration as she positioned the splint against my finger, her face inches from my hand in the darkened bathroom, and wrapped the medical tape around my knuckles.

  “Are you worried?” I asked her.

  “About what?”

  I nodded toward the flat black canvas of the bathroom window. “This. It doesn’t feel like a normal power outage. Jacob and I saw this weird white light in the sky while we were at the park. And what’s with the phones? And the cars? My dad always said—”

  I cut myself off, realizing where I had been going with the sentence, but Nita didn’t seem to notice, absorbed in the patchwork of my injury. She finished off the tape and patted my hand.

  “All done,” she said, packing the supplies back into the first aid kit. “I’m going to be real with you, Georgie. Most days, you are the most laid-back person I know, but you’re a bucket of anxiety about things that most people don’t bother to blink at.”

  I released an indignant huff. “I am not.”

  “Oh, really?” Though she was just a silhouette, I could imagine her answering smirk. “What about last year when that storm hit? You knocked on my door at two o’clock in the morning because Jacob was out of town on a business trip and you didn’t want to sleep alone. I’ve never seen anyone so worked up over snow.”

  “Excuse me. It was a blizzard.”

  “This is Colorado, honey,” she replied. “It snows.”

  “I did grow up here, you know.”

  “Never would’ve guessed.”

  Jacob popped his head in from the hallway. “You girls almost done? I’m starving, and this meat isn’t going to cook itself. I also managed to unearth a few six-packs of beer. Do you like dark brew, Nita?” He glanced at the bulky metallic splint on my finger. “Edward Scissorhands?”

  I stuck my fingers together in an imitation of pincers and pinched the collar of Jacob’s sweater. He ducked and darted forward to tickle me. I dodged his attack, knocking into Nita, and the three of us tumbled into the bathtub, laughing. I landed squished between Jacob and Nita.

  “Let’s not break anything else, okay?” Nita suggested.

  “No promises,” Jacob said.

  A faint scream from the street below ruined the lighthearted moment. Our giggles died out. Jacob’s grin vanished as he lifted himself away from our dog pile then helped first me then Nita out of the tub.

  “We should go,” he said, ushering us out of the bathroom.

  “My coat’s in the bedroom,” I said.

  “I’ll get it.”

  Nita picked up one of the six-packs and tucked it under her arm as Jacob reemerged from the bedroom and helped me thread my injured hand clumsily through the sleeve of my army-green coat. It was technically a ski jacket, but the slippery material would keep the biting wind on the roof away from my body. Jacob tugged a black knit hat over my uneven hair.

  “Ready?” Nita asked, waiting by the door.

  “Right behind you,” Jacob said. As Nita left, he gave me the steaks to hold, knelt beneath the kitchen island,and pulled out a package of water bottles.

  I stopped him before he could follow Nita. “What are you doing?”

  “I figured we should probably try to keep everyone hydrated,” he said, hefting the package over his shoulder. “Knowing our friends, none of them thought to bring anything other than booze.”

  “Leave that here.”

  A mixed look of belligerence and confusion crossed his face. “Why?”

  I thought of the screams on the streets below. “Because I think we’re going to need it.”

  Jacob let out a quick puff through his nose, a sign that he was losing patience with me. “We’re out of power, Georgie. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do,” he insisted. “This isn’t Castro’s Cuba. We’re not going to waste away in one night. And don’t you think it’s better for us to take care of our friends than selfishly hoard all of the water for ourselves?”

  “Our friends are mostly your friends,” I corrected him. “And they should have been responsible enough to buy their own water in case of emergencies. Hell, they should be responsible enough not to get wasted on a night like this.”

  “Not everyone is as para
noid as you,” he shot back.

  “Jacob—”

  “Fine!” He slammed the package of water on the ground, picked up the other six pack instead, and grabbed the steaks from me. “I’m leaving the water. Can we go now?”

  “I’m just trying to be practical.”

  “And I’m trying to make the best out of a crappy situation,” he replied, heading for the door. “Are you coming or not? I can always give the other medallion to Nita instead.”

  “I’m coming.”

  He didn’t wait for me to lock the door behind us, breezing by Nita so quickly on his way to the staircase that his passage ruffled her hair like a light breeze. She shot me a look.

  “What was that all about?”

  “Don’t ask,” I sighed, zipping up my jacket as we followed in Jacob’s wake. The staircase was cold and quiet.

  Nita linked her arm in mine. “Don’t worry. This will blow over.”

  “The power outage or my relationship woes?”

  “Both, hopefully.”

  At the top of the staircase, we pushed open the door to the roof together. The sight was a refreshingly affectionate one. Several residents from the building huddled together in intimate groups around three different barbecue grills. Two of the grills smoked with the enticing scents of cooking food, while the third had been lit for the sake of warmth. Everyone was bundled up in hats and scarves, talking and laughing as they traded hamburgers and beers. It was like an unplanned neighborhood potluck, except that the festivities were lit by the orange burn of the charcoal coals rather than the fairy lights strung overhead. Someone had brought their guitar up to provide a soundtrack, strumming the chords to “American Pie” out of sight. A few people hummed along to the verses, but when the chorus rolled around, the voices rose to deliver the deceivingly buoyant melody to the missing moon above.