“I’m sure he’s fine, hon. Your dad’s a smart guy.”
“Yeah, but what if he was on the plane?”
“He wasn’t. I got a message from him that he landed just a little while before all of this started.”
“But what if his car exploded like ours, or like all the ones in town?”
“Mark, there’s no sense in speculating about things like that right now. We need to focus on the task at hand.”
Mark sat quietly for a few seconds before responding. “So what are we going to do, anyway?”
Dianne sighed and pursed her lips in thought. “Well, we know that something big is going on. With the power out, we’ll need to hook up the extra solar panels in the barn to make sure there’s enough juice in the batteries to keep the fridge running. We may need to fire up the generator for a while, too. First, though, we’ll see if we can tune in to any of the local TV or radio stations; maybe they’ll have some updated news on what’s going on. Tomorrow we’re going to see if any of the neighbors are home, make sure they’re okay and see what they’re up to and if they heard any news. Let’s make sure we’re set at home before we start going out any more, though, okay?”
“What about—”
“Hey. Kiddo.” Dianne took the paper towels from Mark’s hand and smiled at him. “We’re going to be okay, all right? Let’s just get home, get all of the supplies inside, and then we’ll devise a plan from there. Sound good?” Mark nodded slowly, not completely convinced by his mother’s enthusiasm, but satisfied enough to stop asking any further questions.
By the time Dianne started pulling up the winding dirt driveway to their home, the sun was starting to hang low in the sky. She left the children in the truck to unlock the gate herself, casting a wary eye into the woods around them, then secured it again once they were on the other side. After backing the truck up to the front porch of the house, Dianne had Josie and Jacob go inside and play in the living room while she and Mark started carrying the supplies from the back of the truck into the house. The lights in the house didn’t work when she tried to turn them on, confirming that the power outage wasn’t just confined to the town.
“Mark,” she said, “Finish getting everything inside and into the kitchen; I’m going to get the generator started up. We’ll use that tonight and see how things look in the morning.” Dianne’s son dutifully obeyed while Dianne trotted out to the backup generator behind the house. It was an older generator, designed to run off of a tank of propane that was stored nearby since the house was too far out to be connected to the town’s natural gas lines. Rick and Dianne had it installed during the first year they moved to their homestead and had used it several times over the years.
Requiring a manual intervention to start, the generator was capable of powering the whole house and then some, and Dianne hated the idea of using it when they had no idea of how long it would be until the power returned. Still, she thought, better to have one night of regular comforts after the day’s events before potentially having to transfer to a lifestyle that depended less on electricity. No, that’s foolish. Of course the power will come back on tomorrow. She tried to shake the feelings of doom and gloom, but the image of the burning wreck of a plane in a field and the terrified look on the newscaster’s face still haunted her.
The generator roared to life without hesitation, and Dianne poked her head out of the small outbuilding in which it was housed to see lights blinking on inside the house. She checked the vents on the top and sides of the building before closing the door and then headed back to the house. Inside, Mark and Jacob were busy arranging the supplies they had retrieved from the grocery store on the floor while Josie still played in the living room. Dianne smiled, glad to see that her children seemed to be coping well with what had happened.
“Hang tight here, kids. I’m going to clean up, then we’ll get everything put away and make some dinner, okay?”
“You want us to wash up?”
“That’d be great, thanks, Mark.” Dianne headed upstairs to the master bathroom and turned on the lights. She stared at her face in the mirror, turning it as she studied the wound above her eye. The blood had dried and crusted over, so she took a wet washcloth and began to gently scrub around the wound, cringing at the pain. It wasn’t as bad as she had originally thought—head wounds tend to look worse than they are due to how much they bleed—and after a quick cleaning, some antiseptic and a couple of butterfly bandages, she turned and went back downstairs.
Mark was finishing helping Josie dry her hands off when Dianne walked into the kitchen and put her hands on her hips as she looked at the piles of food on the floor. “Well, then. Let’s get all of this put away, shall we?” She quickly divvied up assignments to the children and they got to work, starting with the bags of flour, rice, beans and other staples before moving on to the canned goods. While her kids worked on putting things away, Dianne got out a notebook and pencil and took down notes on the supplies they had just retrieved, along with what was currently on hand in their pantry and in the basement.
There was a solid week’s worth of fresh fruit, vegetables, milk, bread and other perishables on hand, and three weeks’ worth of pasta, rice, canned and frozen food in the pantry, refrigerator and freezer. The deep freeze—connected to the solar panels and battery backups—held six months’ worth of meat, though she figured they could stretch it to eight months with some careful rationing.
The food they had picked up at the store would last for those six to eight months and provide good fillers and nonperishable nutrition along with the meat. She knew the kids (and herself) would get cranky after a while without things like milk, pastries and other comforts, though she could make bread and other baked goods herself in limited batches. The basement, however, held a whole other level of supplies. Collected over the last year and stored in the dark, cool environment were several shelves stuffed with homemade jams and canned vegetables as well as several dozen MREs. She had scoffed at Rick’s collection of the military-style all-in-one packaged meals as going a bit too far with the prepper ideology, but as she counted the meals she said a quiet thank you that they were available.
The thought of her husband made Dianne pause for a moment and she sat down on the floor next to the shelves and put her head back against the wall. The last she had heard from Rick was that he landed safely, but it was impossible to know how he was doing since the phones weren’t working. That thought prompted another and she leapt up and began rummaging around in some boxes behind the basement stairs.
“Ha!” Dianne shouted with excitement as she pulled out a small travel television, an external TV antenna and a wind-up radio from one of the boxes. She ran upstairs with them and dashed into the living room. The antenna was quickly suspended from the curtain rod over the back door and connected to the big TV hanging on the wall. She tucked the smaller TV away for later use, in case the power didn’t come back on and she needed to use as little energy as possible. After turning the big TV on and adjusting the input to the tuner, she sat down on the edge of the couch and bit her lip nervously as she flipped through station after station filled with nothing but static. Finally, though, she hit the jackpot as a fuzzy signal from a station in Blacksburg came filtering through. It took a few tries but Dianne finally found the right angle and positioning for the antenna to boost the signal enough to be watchable.
“…we go live to Dale Weatherspoon, in Washington. Dale?”
“Thanks, Tom. As you heard in the President’s statement a few minutes ago, we’re seeing an unprecedented
level of turmoil and chaos across the country. There are an estimated fifty thousand dead from failures associated with aircraft, trains and other mass transportation systems. The White House believes that estimate is just the tip of the iceberg, though, as there are undoubtedly many tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands killed or injured as a result of the personal vehicular detonations. That’s a term that the White House is using, and like all of the other problems we’re seeing, we have no idea what’s causing them. Tom?”
“Dale, what are federal and state authorities doing to try and respond to this national crisis?”
“FEMA, the National Guard and some sections of the US military are responding, but federal and state agencies are crippled by this disaster.”
“And there’s still no word on what the source is?”
“The White House did say that they do not believe that it’s a terrorist attack, but beyond that, there’s no explanation for this national—and indeed international—level of destruction and chaos.”
“Thanks, Dale. We’re going now to a briefing from the director of—”
The image on the television started to shake and the audio became a garbled mess before the signal cut out completely. Dianne picked up the remote and tried changing the channel, but all of them were filled with the same digital static. She turned off the television and threw herself back into a slouch on the couch, sighing in frustration.