Zap!

by Martha Freeman

  Señora Álvaro looked Carlos up and down, then pursed her lips. “I guess I can find something for you to do.”

  Back outdoors on the sidewalk, Luis heard a familiar sound—the loudspeaker-distorted voice of Julia Girardo: “We all remember a time when Hampton was a great city!” she shouted. “A time when manufacturing jobs made this a great place to live! But look at it now. Families who can afford to have moved away, leaving empty houses, gangs, and crime behind. You, the victims of a rigged system, ought to rise up and reclaim what’s yours! My mission is to help. Do you have questions? I have all the answers!”

  The day before, Luis and Maura had been the only ones on the sidewalk when Julia Girardo rolled by. But now there was applause and even cheering. People must be bored like Carlos, Luis thought. Julia Girardo is the closest thing to a parade.

  • • •

  On his way to Maura’s, Luis made a quick stop at home.

  His dad was awake and thumping around the kitchen in search of breakfast. Still sleepy, he tapped switches on the microwave, the lights, the stove—and cursed one thing after another when it didn’t work.

  “You know the power’s out, right?” Luis said. “It’s been out since yesterday morning?”

  “Of course I know,” his father said. “You think I’m a moron or something?”

  “I do not think you’re a moron,” Luis said.

  “¡Verdad!” Luis’s father thumped the kitchen counter with his fist and looked around the darkened room. “How is a person supposed to live like this anyway? It’s . . . it’s primitive! What about the diner, Luis? Do you know if it’s open?”

  “Nobody’s got power,” Luis said. “There’s all kinds of rumors, but nobody seems to know when it will be back.”

  Luis’s dad opened the refrigerator and made a face. “Smells bad in there,” he said.

  “It would help if we cleaned it sometimes,” Luis said.

  “It doesn’t matter if you clean it when it’s cold and the smells are frozen,” his dad said.

  “You could clean it now,” Luis said. “You’re not going to work, are you? Is work happening?”

  “¿Quién sabe? Who knows? Does Señora Álvaro have any food at her bodega? I need food. Without food for fuel, how is a man supposed to think?”

  “I was just there, and I don’t think so,” Luis said. “If you’ve got enough gas in the car, you should probably drive to somewhere with power.”

  “Where is that?” his dad asked.

  “Across the river,” Luis said. “Or south. Delaware.”

  Luis’s dad shook his head. “I was gonna get gas yesterday. . . .”

  Luis’s mom appeared in the doorway between his parents’ bedroom and the kitchen. “You mean there’s no gas at the gas stations?” she asked.

  “Pumps don’t work without power, Mamá,” Luis said.

  “I thought they were all supposed to have generators now,” his dad said.

  “All I know is they’re closed,” Luis said. He was kind of enjoying this. His parents were drowsy, confused, and grumpy. He, in contrast, was wide-awake and getting used to life during a blackout. Maybe he was a rotten kid for enjoying his parents’ frustration, but if so, okay. He was a rotten kid.

  “So I gotta go,” he said.

  “¿Dónde?” His dad turned on him and scowled. He was twenty years older than Luis’s mom—old enough to be an abuelo, a grandfather. He had thin white hair and a fleshy face that in old photos was angular like Luis’s. Luis’s older brother, Reynaldo, was technically his half brother, born to a different mother. She lived in Nicaragua. Luis’s dad and his mom had met working at a restaurant in Juarez, Mexico, during the long trip north from Central America.

  “To Maura’s house,” Luis said. He hated revealing anything to his parents, but in this case the truth was easier than a lie. They wouldn’t try to stop his going to Maura’s, and since his phone was dead, they couldn’t reel him back either.

  “Me gusta esa chica Maura. I like her,” said his mother. She was still young with a nice shape, something Luis knew but didn’t like knowing, something his brother’s friends frequently commented on. In fact, she was only five years older than Luis’s brother. Her hair was straight and black but currently uncombed. She spent a lot of time on her skin and eyebrows; just now the effect was spoiled by smudged makeup.

  Luis’s mom worked hard and partied hard, same as Luis’s dad, but she could be sweet too. When Luis was little, she had sung him lullabies. Now, when he was sad or couldn’t fall asleep, he thought of her singing. He had never told that to anyone.

  “Yeah, I do, too, I guess,” he said. “Me tengo que ir—gotta go. And buena suerte con el desayuno.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Luis was going to Maura’s for three reasons:

  1. Get something to eat, maybe even something hot.

  2. Ask about the mystery of 742. Had Maura heard the number the same way Luis did?

  3. Score flashlight batteries.

  When that was done, he and Carlos could go find Computer Genius and make sure he was okay, maybe deliver day-old chocolate milk.

  How long did chocolate milk keep, anyway?

  Of course, Luis thought, Computer Genius has to be okay. That is the nature of Computer Genius. The legend requires it.

  Still inside the Hampton city limits, Luis rode down Spruce Street—a block that looters had ransacked. Windows were broken, doors hung loose on their hinges, café tables and chairs lay in ragtag pieces on the street. The police had come and gone—too busy to stick around. Their yellow tape by now had been ripped down to join the broken glass and litter. A few people were going through the mess. Business owners? Scavengers looking for leftovers? Luis couldn’t tell.

  He rode on. At the mall on the highway, TV trucks had arrived overnight and now formed a small antennaed city in the parking lot. The big satellite trucks were from all over—New York City, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Baltimore, Pittsburgh—too many to count. Farther east was a collection of white trucks with the Red Cross symbol on the side. In front of them were long tables and people in uniforms handing out something—doughnuts maybe? Coffee? Luis thought of stopping—a doughnut sounded great right about now; his stomach was emptier than ever, but the lines were too long. Luis did not have much patience for lines.

  Contrary to the rumors in Señora Álvaro’s bodega, no United States armed forces were in sight, but there were plenty of police cars on the streets; helicopters hovered overhead.

  Luis made the turn off the highway, then the right turn onto Maura’s street. Mrs. Brown’s car was in the driveway. Luis leaned his bike against the house and pulled out his phone to text Maura before realizing, uh . . . no, he would not be using it to text. Instead, he would have to knock on the door—announce himself old-school. The looted stores, the media city, the cop cars everywhere, and now this.

  Without power, so many things were strange.

  “Luis, welcome. It’s nice to see you,” Mrs. Brown said when she opened the door. Her hair was messy, as if she hadn’t gotten around to brushing it yet. There were circles under her eyes. She wore yoga pants and a stretched-out T-shirt. Like her father, Mr. O’Hara, Mrs. Brown always looked well dressed and tidy, so her appearance was another strange thing. At least she was as nice as ever. “Are you hungry?” she wanted to know.

  Luis nodded. “Yes.”

  Mrs. Brown smiled, which made her look better. “Come on in and have some oatmeal. Do you like oatmeal? I think we are perfecting our camp-stove cooking skills, Maura and me. She’s outside. I’m gonna go ahead and get dressed.”

  “Okay,” said Luis, but when she left he thought of something. Why is Mrs. Brown home, anyway? She worked for NJL. He remembered that yesterday her boss had sent her home. But today you’d think all the employees would be on the job. It was an emergency just like a hurricane—right?

  Luis’s didn’t like the next thought that came to him. Could Mrs. Brown have had something to do with the outage? Wa
s she in trouble at work for that?

  Luis shook his head. Mrs. Brown was nice. Nice people didn’t turn off power to whole cities. It was only a coincidence that her boss had sent her home.

  Luis walked through the living room and kitchen, then slid open the glass door that led to the patio. Maura was there, watching over a two-burner gas camp stove, which sputtered on the picnic table. There was a pan on one burner, a tin coffeepot on the other.

  Seeing this setup, Luis thought of his mom. When she was a kid in Nicaragua, her family had cooked outdoors. He was pretty sure their stove and pots weren’t as shiny and new as Maura’s.

  “Hey. Good morning. I thought you might show up,” Maura said. “I bet you’re hungry.”

  “There’s other reasons I’m here.” Luis hated her apparent ability to read his mind.

  “Name one,” said Maura.

  “Batteries,” Luis said.

  “Not because we’re friends?” Maura said.

  “What? Us?” Luis said. “I guess. How is your grandpa?”

  “Okay, I hope. They said they’d send a messenger if anything changed, and nobody’s come.” Maura took the lid off the pan, spooned oatmeal into a plastic bowl and handed it to Luis. “Sorry if it’s gluey. In other news, there’s raisins and sugar.” She nodded at the table. “And the same little creamers you get at a coffee place.”

  “Just like camping—I mean, I guess,” Luis said. “I’ve never been camping.”

  “Me neither,” said Maura.

  Luis tore the paper off a couple of creamers. “So your family doesn’t go camping? I thought that must be why you had all this stuff.”

  Maura had scooped herself a bowl of oatmeal by this time. She sat down and leaned over the table to get raisins and sugar. “I don’t know why we have it actually. It was another one of Grandpa’s good ideas.” Maura took a bite of oatmeal. “Gluey,” she pronounced with her mouth full.

  “Aw, it’s not that bad,” Luis said. “And it’s warm. Thank you.”

  While they ate, Luis told Maura about the gossip at Señora Álvaro’s, the looted stores, and the line for Red Cross doughnuts.

  “Why do you need batteries so bad?” Maura asked.

  “Carlos and I are gonna go find the genius,” Luis said. He didn’t have to explain who that was. Maura knew. Everybody did. “We need light to go exploring.”

  “We don’t have the rechargeable kind,” Maura said. “But we have regular ones for flashlights and lanterns. It’s better if we don’t tell Mom, though. She’s acting weird about our stuff—like the neighbors might go all walking dead and break in. Do you want more oatmeal?”

  “Is there enough?” Luis asked. “I wouldn’t want to act like the walking dead.”

  “So long as we’re on the same side.” Maura was spooning Luis another oatmeal glob when her mom appeared through the glass door. Mrs. Brown now looked clean and awake, but she still had on her yoga pants. When she came out the door, Maura looked up and frowned. “Aren’t you going to work?” she asked.

  “Not today,” Mrs. Brown said. “I guess I’m in trouble.”

  “You were employee of the month,” said Maura.

  “Twice,” Mrs. Brown said. “But when the blackout started yesterday, I was on the dispatch board. Everything looked perfectly normal, no alarms. But the boss needed to blame somebody, and I was handy. He sent me home—practically implied the outage was my fault. If he wants me back, he knows where to find me.”

  Maura shook her head. “You know more about the power company than he does, I bet. You practically grew up at NJL.”

  “Maybe so,” Mrs. Brown said, “but I’m not the one in charge.”

  “What do you think caused the blackout, Mrs. Brown?” Luis asked. “There’s all kinds of crazy rumors around. People are saying the power won’t come back at all.”

  Mrs. Brown shrugged. “I don’t want to contribute to the rumors. What are they saying on the news, Maura?”

  “I turned it off after I heard it a hundred times,” Maura said. “Mostly they just repeat that they don’t know either. Yesterday they were telling people to stay home—shelter in place—but it changed this morning. Now the Red Cross is setting up shelters in Mount Laurel and Voorhees. If it goes on past tomorrow, then something called fee-ma comes.”

  “That’s FEMA—the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Mrs. Brown said.

  Maura nodded. “Okay. Besides that, people are getting hurt. Someone could die.”

  “Mrs. Brown,” Luis said, “can I ask another question—a dumb question?”

  Mrs. Brown shrugged. “Sure. It looks like I’ve got all day.”

  “What is the board you told us about, the one you look at in your job? I mean, I know it’s equipment, but equipment that does what exactly?”

  Mrs. Brown ran her hand through her hair and took a breath, like she would need a lot of air to get through this explanation. For a second Luis was sorry he had asked. Maybe the whole electricity deal would be hard for him to understand? But he was smart, wasn’t he? Smart anytime he tried to be.

  “Let’s start basic,” Mrs. Brown said. “You know there are three power grids in the continental United States, right? East, west, and Texas?”

  “Did not know that,” Luis said.

  “Most people don’t, Mom,” Maura said. “Most people only know you plug a plug into the wall and the hair dryer works. Or, like today, doesn’t work.”

  Mrs. Brown drummed her fingers on the table. “Okay, let’s try this. Electricity is generated at power plants in various places, right? There’s a dam south of here called Conowingo, and water flowing through it turns turbines that generate electricity. There’s a plant down the shore called Oyster Creek, where nuclear reactions heat up water that makes steam—same deal. In Ohio and Indiana, it’s mostly coal-fired plants. There are half a dozen natural gas plants in New Jersey. In windy places, you have wind turbines. Except for solar, almost all power plants are based on turbines. The turbines spin a generator, and the generator makes electricity.”

  “Turbines are like fans, right?” Luis asked.

  “Right. The turbine spins a metal wire—a conductor—between the positive and negative poles of a magnet. The magnetic action gets electrons in the wire moving—in other words creates a current. It’s easier to step up the voltage for transmission and then step it down for delivery, so alternating current—AC—is usually what’s in the lines.”

  “Do you know what ‘alternating current’ means?” Maura asked.

  “Nope,” Luis said.

  “It means the current reverses direction instead of flowing one way,” she explained. “When it flows one way, it’s direct current—DC.”

  Luis wasn’t sure he had understood all that. He was a little unclear about what voltage meant and how it related to current too. Also, if solar power didn’t work with turbines, how did it work? Luis wanted to ask more questions, but he had the feeling he already was processing as much information as was humanly possible in one morning. “Turbines,” he repeated. “Magnet. AC. DC. Got it. But how does the grid work? It seems like it ought to be simple—generate power here, and send it there.”

  “I guess it would be except for one thing,” Mrs. Brown said. “Nobody has ever invented a cheap, efficient way to store lots of electricity. For that reason, the amount in the system, in the grid, has to balance with the amount being used. If it doesn’t—if there’s too much here or too little there—equipment gets fried, lines sag and start fires, outages happen, bad stuff.”

  “So if it’s all connected up,” Luis said, “does a tree falling on a power line in Texas shut down a toaster in New York City?”

  Mrs. Brown smiled. “Luckily, no. But one reason it doesn’t is that somebody is paying attention. With all the factors involved—half a million miles of power line, three thousand utility companies, thousands of power plants, zillions of toasters and hair dryers—powerful computers have to keep watch. My job is to help the computers out, monitor wh
at they’re doing, shift the flow of electricity around, make sure supply and demand stay very close to equal.”

  “Is that that SCADA thing you talk about?” Maura asked.

  Mrs. Brown nodded. “SCADA is a system: ‘supervisory control and data acquisition.’ Basically, the SCADA runs the grid, and dispatchers like me watch over the SCADA.”

  “What does SCADA do if the system gets out of balance?” Luis asked.

  “It can tell the power plant to generate less power,” said Mrs. Brown. “It can use relays to shift power from one place to another. In an emergency, it disconnects a problem circuit from the system. That’s what must’ve happened here in Hampton, why the outage doesn’t just keep growing. Circuit breakers isolated the problem to contain it.”

  This was all pretty interesting. But none of it answered the basic question. What caused the blackout? An accident? Foreign enemies? Some random bad guy?

  And whoever it was—why?

  Luis had never played detective before, but now he wondered if there might be a way for him to find the answers. Computers might be part of it—that SCADA thing. And if the solution involved computers, he knew just the place to start.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mrs. Brown sat up straight and looked in the direction of town and Whitman Hospital. “What I wouldn’t give for a powered-up phone,” she said.

  “You’re worried about Grandpa,” Maura said.

  Mrs. Brown nodded. She had eaten only half her oatmeal, Luis noticed. She had been talking. That was one reason. But he would bet her stomach was knotted up too.

  “Luis and I can bike over if you want,” Maura volunteered.

  “Uh . . . I have to be somewhere,” Luis said.

  Maura lifted one shoulder. “Then I guess I’ll go myself, Mom. No big deal.”

  Mrs. Brown made a face. “Not sure I like that idea, honey. But if Luis is busy . . .”

  Now Luis felt terrible. Even apart from getting breakfast and batteries, he ought to help his friend’s family, right? It was the good thing to do. “It’s okay. I can go with Maura,” he told Mrs. Brown. “I’ll meet up with Carlos later.”