The Blackout

by Stephanie Erickson

  “Seriously?” She eyed him. “That’s all you’re giving me to work with?”

  He sputtered a bit. “Well, and of course we’d get someone to help you…manage the group.”

  She folded her arms over her chest and stared him down. “And who will mind the farm while I’m expanding young minds?”

  “We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about that part.”

  Molly sighed. “At this point, Burt, I think I’d prefer to stay on farm duty.”

  “I know. Just think about it, OK? Let me know when you’ve decided.” He left her standing, hoe in hand, surrounded by knee-high corn stalks.

  And that’s how she became the town’s teacher.

  18.

  On about day thirty-four after the Blackout, Gary made it deep into Virginia. He camped along an inlet off the Chesapeake Bay. In the seventeen days since he’d left D.C. he’d seen a handful of people, but he hadn’t really had a conversation with anyone since Baltimore. He talked out loud, sang, whistled, anything just to feel like he wasn’t alone.

  It was nice there by the water’s edge. The days were getting cold as November settled in. Gary didn’t mind. He liked the cooler weather, and he had a nice coat and a few layers of clothing, even if they were pretty dingy. The air was crisp and clear with just a hint of salt in it.

  He got out the map to study it. He’d had to cut across small portions of land lately, since the bay made the coast jagged and inefficient. Most of the time, it only took a day to cross, so he still had access to plenty of fish by the time he was ready to set up camp. The peninsula he was pondering wasn’t much different than the others, and he figured he could cross it in a day, day and a half tops, but only if he got going.

  Gary had walked about two hundred and seventy-five miles in thirty days. He was averaging just under ten miles a day.

  Not bad, Gary supposed. At my current rate, though, it will be another seventy days before I make it home to Molly. He frowned. Seventy days. Can I walk for another seventy days? After logging nearly three hundred miles on his shoes, they weren’t in the greatest shape. Not to mention his clothes. They were filthy, and even though he tried to wash them at every opportunity, fresh water was reserved for drinking, which meant clothes got washed in salt water, leaving them crusty and overall less than clean.

  He sat on the banks of the bay and spotted a few dolphins playing about a hundred yards out. It really was a nice spot. He could stay there pretty easily. There was plenty of fish to go around and keep him well-fed. He could probably even find some nuts or berries in the dune grasses.

  He studied the map a bit closer. He wasn’t all that far from Colonial Williamsburg. He wondered how they were faring in all of this. He’d heard that in some parts of town, at least before the Blackout, they had blacksmiths, fully self-sustaining farms and lived like they did before the light bulb brought a wave of technology like the world had never seen.

  Maybe I could offer some help in exchange for shelter and food, he thought.

  He was so tired. The prospect of settling in, of reaching a place he could stay, was tempting.

  The power will probably be on before my seventy days is up anyway, right? What’s the point in nearly killing myself trying to get home, when surely the power will be restored soon?

  Gary considered the possibility. Realistically, when the power came back, it was possible anarchy could reign. People might not know what to do. It was hard to know what was left of the government, with no word from them in over a month. How would they maintain control? It was possible it could be like providing a feast to a starving family. Would the people know what to do with what was spread before them? Would they consume it so fast that they would leave the host family with nothing? Or, would they hoard it, leaving nothing for others? Would they ration their supply, or would people simply pick up where they left off?

  At the very least, he decided he should walk to Williamsburg. Maybe I can re-supply there if I decide to continue on, he thought.

  It was a good seventy miles to Williamsburg, so he was looking at another week of walking at least.

  He sighed and folded the map. “Well. No time like the present,” he said aloud to the landscape. “Just put one foot in front of the other.”

  19.

  The closest school was a few miles away. It was too far to walk to regularly, especially for the littler kids, but it was close enough to take supplies from. One of the guys even went and got a double-sided chalkboard on wheels to set up in the living room - what was now the main classroom. Before the school could open officially, they spent three days hauling supplies. Even Jimmy helped where he could, when he wasn’t working on fine-tuning the town’s defenses.

  Then Christmas came. Despite all their troubles, there it was. So, they delayed the start of school. The holiday fell on a Saturday that year, so they decided to start classes the following Monday.

  It was an odd Christmas. There were no festive lights, no typical gifts to speak of, nothing like that. However, Molly had an artificial tree that she got down from the attic and decorated with ornaments. It was dark, but pretty.

  She even made Dug a gift out of some of Gary’s old t-shirts. Heck, he wasn’t using them right now anyway. It turned out to be a pretty crude-looking bear, but Dug loved it. He played with it all day and carried it to bed that night.

  She spent the day lazing around, trying not to think about how other people were spending it, or how she should have been spending it with Gary, if he was lucky enough to be home for it.

  In the evening, she lit some candles as it got darker, and treated herself to a glass of wine. She’d been saving the wine for who knows what, but it was Christmas, and she decided she was entitled to something special.

  That night, much like the previous seventy nights, she said a silent prayer for Gary and hoped for a Christmas miracle, even if that miracle was just that he survived another day.

  The first week of school was total chaos. The kids didn’t know what to do, and neither did Molly. But they worked through the growing pains, and fell into a routine by about the third week. It had been almost three months since the Blackout, and they were coping. They all dreamed of life before, and when it would return to “normal”, but no one really talked about it much anymore.

  Beth McMiller, the woman Burt had guilted into helping out at the school, taught math and science and assisted Molly for other subjects. They ended up with about twenty-eight kids, and it was a lot of bodies to cram into Molly’s house. On days when it was nice, she liked to have classes outside. Today was just such a day.

  She had a few of the older boys carry the chalkboard to the backyard, and gathered the kids around it. The younger ones were clustered in groups of four or five, discussing their assigned reading while Beth floated between the groups. Molly was working with the older kids on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It was one of the books Molly could remember best from when she was in high school, so she thought it would be safe. They were nearly finished with the volume, and were really getting into the meat of the story.

  “So, how do we feel about Hester’s situation? Is it fair? Did she bring it upon herself?” Molly asked the group.

  Hands shot up. Tommy Dewater was the first to speak. “I’m not sure it’s an issue of fair or not. It was the standard of the time. Adultery was a crime of the worst kind, so she was punished. It wouldn’t be fair if there was another woman in the story who did the same thing and wasn’t punished, but it’s not like they kept the consequences of such actions a secret back then.”

  “OK Tommy. That’s a good point. How about the flip side though? Along the same lines of fairness: Why is the woman punished and not the man? It takes two people to commit adultery. To me, it would seem the husband or wife who was cheated on should get to stone the man involved in the crime, or something. In fact, women were often viewed as less intelligent than men at that time. A crafty man could have lured an unsuspecting woman to stray from a loving marriag
e pretty easily, it would seem to me. What of that?” she asked.

  “Well, that also seems typical of the time period, doesn’t it?” A girl who was young for the group, named Sophie, chimed in. She had an irritated look on her face, and raised one dark eyebrow as she made her point. “I mean, look at The Witch of Blackbird Pond.” They’d read that one first, and it was fairly well received. “That wasn’t about a man being falsely accused of witchcraft and made to face death for something he didn’t do. It was a woman. In fact, how many men were accused of witchcraft and burned or drowned for their crime, Mrs. Bonham?”

  Molly smiled. She loved how passionate they were about it. Sometimes it was hard to get this kind of enthusiasm out of the college kids, so she anticipated more of a fight from the younger group. But they embraced the lessons with all the fervor she did, and she loved every minute of it.

  “Not too many, Sophie, to be perfectly honest. I don’t think it was unheard of, but it just didn’t happen as widely as it did to women. Generally speaking, men were the leaders of the town, and although their wives and daughters may have manipulated and planted the seed, it was men who mostly did the public accusing.”

  Molly sat down in an empty space to complete the circle the kids had made in the grass in front of the chalkboard. “So, getting back to Hester, you’re right, her treatment is fairly typical of her time period. How would she have coped if she had lived in today’s world?”

  “I think that depends,” a blond-headed boy named Chase said.

  “On what?” she asked.

  “Whether she did it before the Blackout, or after.”

  Molly was puzzled. He said it so matter-of-factly, but she had no idea what difference the power outage made in terms of adultery. “Please, elaborate.”

  “Well, before the Blackout, it doesn’t seem like it was that unusual for people to cheat. Adultery was a sort of archaic word, wasn’t it? People just broke up and went their separate ways if their partner found out. No big deal. But the world has shrunk since the Blackout. Families are more important. People are working through their issues. I think adultery would be more of a major crime as our society circles round to be more similar to that of Hester’s, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean by our society being more similar to Hester’s, Chase?” Molly eyed him skeptically, curious and slightly fearful of the point he was trying to make.

  “Well, just that. There are a lot of parallels now. More than there were eighty-five days ago, that’s for sure. Like I said, our world is smaller now. We know each other’s business. We have to work harder for our food, clothes, materials, everything really. We can relate more to the things Hester and the other characters went through, because we’re going through those same things. If I get a hole in my shirt, I don’t run over to Old Navy and buy another one. I bug my mom to sew it up, and eventually end up doing it myself when she’s too busy.”

  They all laughed, and Chase went on. “Even our pacing has slowed to match Hester’s. Hester could never fathom driving thirty miles to work, putting in eight hours, driving home, picking Pearl up from soccer practice on the way, fixing dinner, having family game night with Pearl, getting her to bed at a reasonable hour, then turning around and doing it all again the next day. Frankly, that’s unrealistic for all of us today, whereas three months ago, it was the norm.”

  Molly glanced down at her wedding ring and thought of Gary. “So Chase, what do you think would happen if someone you knew was involved in an affair today?”

  He thought for a moment. “Well, I don’t think she’d be made to wear a letter A or anything, but if she was the guilty one, I think she’d lose a lot of friends, and essentially be an outcast.” He paused. “A lot like Hester was. But I think that’s the difference. If the guy was the guilty one, I think he’d face the same fate. Our society has evolved that much at least. Men aren’t unconditionally innocent anymore.” He looked around at the other boys in the group. “Unfortunately.”

  Everyone laughed again. “So, you better be on your best behavior, then!” Molly said. She stood up and brushed the grass from her shorts. “Alright, great work today! Let’s read the next two chapters for tomorrow, OK?”

  That night, she took some dinner over to Jimmy’s house. She hadn’t seen much of him lately, and missed him. She found herself needing him more than she probably should, but she couldn’t help it. Without Gary, what else could she do?

  Dug trotted happily beside her as they walked up his driveway. She balanced her canned-good casserole concoction in one hand and knocked on the door with the other.

  “Hey, Molly. What’s up?” Jimmy said through a partially opened door.

  “Nothing. Wanna have dinner?” She offered her food.

  “Oh. Sure. C’mon in.” He opened the door wide to let her in, and scanned the street suspiciously before closing the door behind her.

  “So, how’s the Watch going?” Molly asked, collecting plates from where he pointed.

  “It’s…” he paused. “We’re weak, Molly. And the Wanderers know it. At least a few of them do.”

  She looked up from distributing the silverware. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, Burt doesn’t want people to know, because he doesn’t want to start a panic, but a group of Wanderers has been casing the place, making threatening movements, and just...I dunno, acting suspicious. I think they’re up to something.”

  “Who are they?”

  He looked at her, and she knew. Craig. “What does he want?”

  They sat across from each other as he spooned some casserole onto his plate. “Who knows. Revenge? His home back? Food? Your guess is as good as mine.

  But I’m pretty sure he has friends on the inside, so if he wants to do some damage, he will. It’s simply a matter of when he will strike.”

  They sat in silence for a while after that, with Dug at Molly’s feet, thumping his tail if she moved slightly. Molly quit asking him about the radio, hoping he’d speak up if it was important. But she couldn’t help wondering as she sat in the same house with it.

  Eventually, Jimmy cleared his throat. “So, tell me about this school they have you running.”

  She talked about it for a bit, telling him about the day’s lesson and what Chase had said. She appreciated the distraction from the grim news he’d given her.

  “One of my students tried to claim that we were living in a time very similar to that of Hester Prynne. Remember her? From The Scarlet Letter? Anyway, he made some valid points. Some that I wasn’t too comfortable with.”

  Jimmy grunted. “Like what?”

  “Oh, just that the world had shrunk, similar to the size it was then, and things had slowed down.”

  “I don’t see anything upsetting about that. It’s true.”

  “No, I know. But I don’t really want to recede back to such a dark time of superstition and that ‘accuse now and ask questions after the person is dead’ kind of mentality, ya know?”

  He chuckled. “I don’t see what’s funny about that,” Molly said.

  “It’s just a bit dramatic, don’t you think?”

  “Obviously I don’t.”

  “Well, don’t you think we’re more logical than we were then? That we have more information? Yes, our immediate world is smaller, but we know a larger world surrounds us. We have explanations for things like eclipses, not superstitions and angry gods. Don’t you think that will improve the social situation some?”

  “You’re the one in charge of the town’s defense. You tell me.”

  He frowned. “I protect the townspeople from outsiders, not each other.”

  They cleared the dishes in silence, and Molly helped him clean up. He walked her home that night, since it was after dark by the time they were done, all the time not speaking. Dug walked happily between the two of them, taking the occasional pat on the head.

  They reached her driveway and he turned to her. “Well, thanks for dinner tonight, Molly. It was great.”

 
“Sure. No problem.” She hugged him, and he embraced her warmly. She pulled back and looked deep into his emerald eyes. “I hope you’ll protect me from anything.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could she turned and went into her house.

  20.

  Forty-one days after the Blackout, Gary reached what was left of Colonial Williamsburg. Ashen remains were everywhere. There appeared to have been a riot, or some type of battle, and this was ground zero. It made him nervous.

  It was so quiet, he could almost hear the ashes smoldering. He scoffed at himself. Obviously this mess was weeks old, probably the result of some irrational folks thinking they were more deserving of the supplies here than their neighbor.

  The road crunched under his feet and the sound was oppressive. He tried to step lighter, but the ash blanketed everything.

  What happened to the people who lived here? Were they killed? Did they run? He thought. He was just glad he wasn’t there when anarchy reigned.

  Gary scanned the horizon, debating what to do. Going further into town would probably yield more of the same. Any supplies that were there had either been destroyed or taken by now. He searched for a place to ponder the map, but there was nothing. No shelter. No safe place to sit. Nothing. He was nearing the end of his rope, hoping Williamsburg would offer some respite, but it appeared his rope just got longer.

  He sighed and turned back. He couldn’t stay there. He had to find someplace to re-group and just keep walking. The problems with his shoes and clothes would have to be solved another day. He might be barefoot and naked by the time he got home, but he had to find the way home sooner or later.

  Gary turned back the way he came and walked to a small wooded area for some shelter before he stopped to study the map. He sat with his back to a pine tree, put his pack in his lap, and rested his unfolded map on top of it. He resisted the urge to crumple or maim it. Every time he looked at the damn thing the distance between point A and point B didn’t seem to shrink much, no matter how far he walked. But it was his only lifeline.