by P. A. Glaspy
Before the Power Was Gone
A Powerless World - Book .5
By
P.A. Glaspy
COPYRIGHT 2016
All Rights Reserved
P.A. Glaspy
1st Edition
No part of this work may be reproduced in any form, except to quote in reviews or in the press, without the express permission of the author. Any unauthorized reproduction of this work is illegal and punishable by law.
This is a work of fiction. Any parallel to persons alive or dead is purely coincidental, and is not intended by the author.
Cover photo background courtesy of Maggiesdaisy Images
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CHAPTER 1
My name is Anne Mathews. I’m a prepper. I haven’t always been a prepper. It was a long, hard-fought battle between me and my husband, Russ. This is where our story began.
****
In February of 1994, we had a freak ice storm in Tennessee. No part of the state was untouched. As a teenager, we lived just outside of Memphis in a rural area called Drummonds. The power lines on our road were some of oldest in that area.
School had been cancelled that day, on the off chance that the predicted storm actually hit us. I mean, seriously – how often is the weather man right? Maybe 50% of the time, if that? It was raining and not too bad temperature-wise, so we figured it was going to be another laugh on the meteorologists. Oh, how wrong we were.
As the rain kept falling and the temperature started dropping, ice began forming on the electrical lines and trees outside the window. I was chatting online with some friends when the power went off. Crap! Now what am I going to do to pass the time? The internet was a lot younger then, and we accessed it through a dial-up modem via phone lines and a service called AOL.
“Mom! The power is off!” I shouted down the hall to my mother who had taken the day off from work – just in case the storm actually hit us. She didn’t want to get stuck an hour away (on a good day) if the predictions were right.
She looked back to where I stood in the doorway of the study with a dead mixer in her hand. “No! Really? Thank you so much for telling me, Anne! I never would have known otherwise.” My mom was kind of a smart ass. I come by that honestly.
I rolled my eyes (not where she could see me do it, obviously) and went to my room. I flopped down on my bed with my history book. Might as well study for the test coming up on Friday. I fell asleep after about 15 minutes of reading. History was not one of my favorite subjects.
About an hour later I woke up. It was noticeably colder in the house. I grabbed a sweatshirt, threw it on, and went to find something to eat. Mom was in the living room stoking a fire in the fireplace. I walked over and stuck my hands out to warm them, then turned my back to the fire to get some heat on my butt.
“Anything to eat, Mom? Preferably something warm?”
She stood up and headed for the kitchen. “Yes. I’ve got some water on the Coleman stove I heated earlier. I’ll make you some oatmeal.”
I followed her in and went to the fridge. I opened the door and stood there looking in for anything that caught my eye. She walked up behind me and shut the door.
“Anne, if you want something from the fridge, open the door, get it out, and shut the door. We don’t know how long the power is going to be off, and every time you open the door you are letting cold air out. The milk is going to be iffy as it is if this goes on much longer.”
“Sorry, Mom. I just want some juice.” I crouched down, looking side to side like I was checking for attackers. I grabbed the door handle, quickly opened it, got the orange juice out, and all but slammed the door shut. “How was that? Fast enough?”
She laughed at my antics. “Yeah, that works. Come eat.”
We spent the day watching out the window as the ice got thicker and thicker, and stoking the fire to at least keep the living room warm. We made a pot of chili on the Coleman stove for supper. As darkness started to settle in, my dad pulled up outside. He had gone to work that morning and looked pretty haggard as he came through the door.
“Carol? Anne? Where are my girls?” He was taking his work boots off at the door when we rounded the corner. Mom went to him and placed a kiss on his cheek.
“Honey, I’m so glad you’re home safe. Was it bad out there?”
Dad nodded. “Real bad. Cars all over the place, slid off into ditches, flipped upside down…the roads are a solid sheet of ice. Not to mention the fire trucks and ambulances trying to get to the accidents sliding all over the streets, too. It took me three hours to get home. Good thing I filled the gas tank last night. They’re saying almost half a million people are going to be without power before morning and that it could be days before they get it fixed.”
I looked at my dad like he had grown a second head. “Days?? What are we going to do, Dad? There’s no water – the pump on the well is electric. We can’t even flush the toilets! Can we go stay at a hotel or something?”
He shook his head at me. “No, pumpkin. There isn’t one close with power. We’ll do better staying here with the fireplace and the Coleman stove. As far as the toilet flushing, I brought some water jugs I had at the shop, plus there’s 50 gallons in the hot water heater. City water is still working, so I’ve got about 30 gallons we can use for whatever we need. We should try to keep flushing to a minimum though. We’ll use the system I had to use as a kid, to save on the septic tank: If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.”
“That’s gross, Dad.” I wrinkled my nose and made a gagging noise. He laughed and scruffed the top of my head.
“Maybe, but we’ve gotta do whatever we can to get through this. I don’t know how long it’s gonna take them to get our power back on. Do I smell chili?”
We spent that evening in the living room playing Monopoly by lamp light and slept on the floor by the fire. The next day my dad stayed home, as everything we heard on the radio was for everyone to stay where they were. Our power was still off.
The third day, Dad went out with his chainsaws to help clear roads in our area from the fallen tree limbs that were EVERYWHERE. There wasn’t a clear road for miles. It was warming up some, so the ice was melting on the roads, but there were still some sketchy spots. He brought back more water in the empty jugs we had already used. Another day came and went with no electricity in our home.
The roads cleared and things started getting back to normal after that for most people – but not us. It took them a week to get our power back on. Their reason was that our lines were so old they needed to replace them, rather than repair them, and they were trying to get as many people back online as quickly as possible first. We were at the end of that line.
When we finally got our power back, I had a whole new respect for electricity. You know what I missed the most, besides being able to flush the toilet? My curling iron. When one has unruly hair, the ability to tame it is a must. A month or so later, Mom found one that used little butane tanks. I kept that with me for years, even after Russ and I got married. That was my first “prep”, and I didn’t even realize it.
CHAPTER 2
Fast forward 20 or so years. Russ and I are married with child. We live on a dead-end street in an area I can only describe as rural suburban. No sidewalks, big yards, city water and sewer, with neighbors close but not too close.
I’m loving the electronic life I live. I’ve got a smart phone, a tablet (or two), a laptop, and an ereader (or two). My car has Bluetooth capability, so my phone syncs up with it as soon as I get in. Hands free is so much safer than talking on the phone and driving. Signs that say “Free Wi-fi available” are my happy places. I check in from all over, so my friends know what an exciting life I have – except that I check in from work, Micky D’s, and the grocery store pretty much exclusively. Can you handle the excitement?
Our son Rusty is a teenager, barely, and has his own phone, tablet, laptop, and ereader, as well as an iPod and two video game systems. He plays with “friends” all over the world in MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing game) via our high-speed internet connection at home. If he’s awake, he’s online in some form at all times.
Russ has his own gadgets as well but he uses his mostly for work. He’s not as techy as Rusty and I, from the sense that he doesn’t have to have one of every kind. He does use his laptop and tablet for something else though: research. Information about what’s going on in the world, and not necessarily from the mainstream media. He reminded me of Johnny Five from the movie Short Circuit: “Need input!”
In his searches, Russ found more and more websites foretelling a bleak future, in some cases of biblical proportions. Doomsday preppers, survivalists, even Mormons, all talking about what could happen to change our lives forever, or for years, at the very least. World War Three, an economic collapse, a tyrannical government taking away all of our freedoms and liberties, an EMP or CME – all these “what ifs” that might occur, up to and including a zombie apocalypse. Events that could change the face of our country, or our world, for good.
Russ was completely absorbed in everything he read. Knowing him as well as I did, I could see him changing. Where before he would have laughed along with me at the idea that the world as we knew it could come crashing down around us, he was starting to talk seriously about planning and preparing for some kind of catastrophe that “might” happen.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my husband with all my heart. There is no one more important to me, besides my son. My parents were both gone, so Russ and Rusty were all the family I had. I would do anything for those two. Still, these ideas were out there to me.
Zombies aside, which was ridiculous, even the rest of the theories seemed as farfetched to me. Surely we were living in a society that was advanced enough to not start another world war. We had to have the ability to stop a financial collapse before it could happen. There were ways to see solar flares and warn the people so we could do what we needed to do to get through that situation. An EMP was almost as wild a thought as the zombies, in my opinion. Some kind of pulse that had the potential to take out the power grid? Please.
I tried to blow it off at first. Russ would bring up something he read on some doomsday prepper website at dinner. I would listen attentively (at least that’s the look I was trying to portray), then change the subject.
“Anne, I was on prepprepprep.com today and read…” was how the conversation would start. He’d tell me what he read, to which I would respond, “Wow, that’s wild, Baby. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. Rusty, how was school today?” Slick, huh? Russ would look at me with a combination of annoyance, frustration, and finally resignation, then go back to eating his dinner in silence. I felt bad for not supporting him, but I seriously believed my husband was becoming some kind of doomsday whack job.
****
It all came to a head one night. Rusty was at a sleepover next door at his buddy Ben’s house. Russ and I were having a drink in the sunroom. I had been prattling on and on about my day at work when Russ took my hand. I stopped talking and looked at him, waiting expectantly for whatever he was about to say.
“Anne, we need to talk about this prepping idea.” Good Lord. There was no way I was getting out of this conversation tonight. I had nowhere to retreat.
“Russ, I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe any of those things can happen. I think it’s all crazy talk.” There, I said it. I thought it was all a bunch of BS, and I told him so.
I thought he’d be mad. I mean, I think I just kind of told my husband I thought he was crazy. He wasn’t even upset. He smiled at me. Smiled! What the hell? Maybe he WAS crazy!
“I know what you think, Anne. I know how it sounds. I felt the same way when I first started researching all of it. But the more I’ve read, the more I’ve investigated, and the more it makes sense to me. Let me tell you why I think we need to do this for our family, for our survival.”
So, he shared with me all the theories he’d read about and likened them to things that had happened in our lifetimes. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods – all natural occurrences. Then, he brought up one I had felt personally: winter storms. I remembered that week with no power. We had been given some warning, so my mom had bought groceries to sustain us for a couple of weeks, mostly canned goods. I never felt any sense of urgency, any hunger pains, or any stress beyond the loss of my curling iron and the ability to flush the toilet every time I used it because my parents had prepared for the event.
“Anne, if anything like that happened tomorrow, and we couldn’t leave the house for whatever reason, how long could we survive on the food and water in the house, right now?”
“I don’t know, a week, maybe two.” I had a freezer full of food, a decently stocked pantry… ”Hell, maybe longer than that.” I was feeling pretty good about this now. Leave it to Russ to burst my bubble.
“What if whatever the event was left us without electricity, like the ice storm did? That would take out the stove, the microwave, the fridge, and the freezer. Thirty-six hours max on a fully-loaded freezer for food safety. Now how long?”
“I’d still say one to two weeks. If we used the stuff in the freezer first, we could save the canned goods for when the freezer stuff wasn’t safe to eat anymore.” Listen to me, sounding like a prepper already.
“What about water? Each person needs at least a gallon per day for drinking, food prep, light washing – and that doesn’t even take toilet flushing into consideration.”
I was ready for this one. “We’re on city water. If the power goes out, we’d still have water.” Ha! Got ya on that one, big boy. My smugness was very short lived.
“Only as long as the water plant had power. What if it was a system-wide outage? What would happen when the water stopped flowing from the faucets?”
I was getting exasperated with all the “what ifs”. “We have a 50-gallon hot water tank downstairs, and a 40-gallon unit in the attic. That’s almost a hundred gallons of drinkable water, Russ. For a family of three, that’s ninety days of water at a gallon a day. We’re fine. We’d be fine, Baby. You’re worrying about nothing.”
“This is not ‘nothing’, Anne! Two weeks’ worth of food? That’s next to nothing! If something happened that lasted a month, we’d be starving before it was over. Rusty would be go hungry! Is that ‘nothing’??”
I was shocked at his passionate tone. And it was pissing me off. “Why do you think something is going to happen, Russ? We live in the most technologically advanced society ever. Don’t you think the government is ready for any of these scenarios you’re so worried about? Don’t you think they’re capable of taking care of it, of us?”
He looked at me and shook his head. “There are 300 million people in this country, Anne. Do you think for one second the government has the resources to take care of that many people? Do you think they would even care about people like us??”
I started to retort but stopped. Well, when he put it like that…300 million people. How would you even start to stockpile supplies for that many? Where would you stock them? He had a point, but still – what catastrophic event would put everyone in the country in need like that? That was my reply.
“Okay, what could happen that would put this country in that kind of situation, Russ? This is the EMP one, isn’t it? Some psycho piss-ant dictator in
some puny little nothing country sets off a nuke in the atmosphere, and everything goes down. Seriously, what are the chances of that happening, honey? How many of those whack jobs have nukes anyway? And how do you or anyone else know what kind of damage it would do if they did?”
“No one knows that much about any of it since it’s never happened. And it wouldn’t have to be a nuke. A massive solar flare could have the same effect, and there’s no way to stop one if it happens. And yes, that would probably be the worst case scenario because we don’t have replacement transformers and computer chips for everything that would be damaged if it happened. It would take us years to recover from something like that. That’s what I want us to be prepared for – the worst that could happen.”
“But what if nothing happens? What do we do with two years of food??”
“Eat it.”
I laughed out loud. “No shit. All at once, or over a week or so?”
He wasn’t laughing. “We buy things we already eat, or would eat, just more of it. We can throw in some long-term storage foods that we may or may not use, stuff you just add water to and heat up. I’ve already been looking into some of them. Most of it would be food we eat now, but buying it in bulk, and heavier on items that store a long time, like beans and rice.”
Okay, none of my arguments were working. But I had held back on the ones he couldn’t deny. Time to break out the big guns. “How are we going to pay for all this extra food? Our budget is stretched pretty thin right now. If we could buy it, where are we going to put it? We barely have room for an extra tote in the attic or garage. We certainly can’t afford a bigger house.” There it was. It all came down to money to me, which we didn’t have a lot extra of at the end of the month. Even with both of us working, a mortgage, car note, utilities, credit card payments – we had a lot of bills we paid on every month. Since I was the keeper of the budget, I knew there wasn’t much wiggle room there.