other end told her that, because of labor difficulties, the post office would now implement a system of rotational mail deliveries, and that any given addressee couldn’t reasonably expect to get their mail more than once a week.
She learned from Whit that fully half the Old Hill Fire Department had quit.
“Everybody’s looking out for their own. Especially because this… this darkness is starting to go on for a while.”
Other strange things happened, and these things told her that the whole country was being affected.
Small, ridiculous things, details one wouldn’t normally think of, but details that seemed to be more frightening to her than the larger calamities that might eventually come. For one thing, she stopped getting bulk or spam e-mails, as if the people or corporations who generated this crap now had much more serious things to worry about.
On the television, people were indignant about the nearly total lack of food relief and ranted against the Western Secessionists for being so tightfisted with the assistance. Why wasn’t the government doing something to intervene?
Then there would be sound bites of farmers plowing under crops, or killing their livestock because they had nothing to feed them with.
Shortly after that, she couldn’t get any network television at all, just the Emergency Broadcast System, and that was too bad, because there was nothing but a test pattern on the EBS most of the time.
The radio still worked, though, and that’s how she got her news.
There was news of how the electrical utility workers were deserting their jobs and management was struggling to hang on, but it was hard because people had to spend a lot of time looking for food and the other essentials of survival, and couldn’t spend a lot of time at work. She got news from the Internet, and learned that there had been a cascading blackout in the West affecting forty million people. Then she got the scare of her life because the power went out in Wake County, and the blackout lasted five hours.
Also, a few buildings burned to the ground downtown, set alight by looters, and no firemen came to put them out.
So, little by little things got worse, but out here on the highway she and her kids remained okay, because Leigh kept giving them food. She started filling empty pails and jars with tap water and storing them downstairs in the basement in case the water stopped working. She tried to get through to Gerry every day, but never could. The power went out again, and this time the utility told the customers it wasn’t their fault; that they were caught in the middle of a cascade, and they were having these cascades because there simply wasn’t the maintenance staff to keep the electrical equipment properly serviced.
And then the Internet went down, right around the time the radio went down, so she had no idea what was going on. The servers across the country weren’t adequately connecting to each other. On certain evenings she couldn’t get the news site, and finally she couldn’t get anything at all, not even her home page.
This particular brand of Armageddon, at least at first, was of a slow and creeping kind, but it was pernicious. It was formally announced, on one of the few evenings the radio came back on, that fully ninety percent of next year’s crops had been lost, and that many livestock had already starved to death.
Things couldn’t survive without light.
When Leigh told her that there had been several home invasions over in Willington—people just trying to find some food—she tried to buy stronger locks for her doors, and even traveled all the way to Raleigh to find a locksmith who was open. But it seemed as if locksmithing, as a profession, had entirely disappeared, and she was forced to make do with the crappy old locks she already had on her doors.
11
Are you afraid of the dark? This question kept parading through Glenda’s mind once the rolling blackouts became a more permanent feature of their day-to-day living. And she was sure it was the same all over the country. Twelve hours of night was one thing. But at the end of that twelve hours, daylight was supposed to come back. Now it didn’t. Not with the power off most of the time. It was dark twenty-four hours a day. The days had stretched into weeks, and the weeks had stretched into the first month, and they had received only occasional blips of power every now and again. They were officially at war with the Tarsalans, but most of it was happening up there, beyond the black skin of the shroud, while down here it just got darker and darker, and colder and colder, so that on a few occasions it had actually snowed, right here in North Carolina, in the middle of summer.
Her kids sat on the floor around the living room coffee table playing chess because it was the only “board” game they owned. All their other games were electronic, and with no electricity they couldn’t play them. They played by candlelight and she watched them with low-level apprehension because everything was running out— food, medicine, electricity—and she didn’t know how much longer she could hang on.
She could be grateful for one thing only: Leigh next door was providing them with food every now and again. But Leigh was getting that look in his eyes, like a boy who had a high school crush, and she was afraid that he was going to do something stupid, like make a pass at her, and then she wouldn’t be able to accept his food anymore.
She hated it all. But mainly it was the dark. It was like a chronic disease, something that made her feel not only anxious but also under the weather, as if she were suffering from the weakness of persistent anemia.
Even worse was her loneliness. God, how she wanted Gerry. She sipped her cold chamomile tea. She wanted to be pressed against his tallness. She wanted to feel his arms around her. She wanted to tell him she was sorry for exploding like that.
She was just thinking she might try the fone again, which had become like a talisman of futility to her, when she noticed light coming through the front window.
She looked out the window and saw firelight far to the west. Something was burning? She walked to the door, opened it, and went out onto the porch. She gazed to the west and saw the glow of what must have been a considerable conflagration just over the hill. Was that Tammy St. Martin’s place burning?
Tammy with her two little girls, and her husband, Denny, who was with the National Guard and trying to keep the peace in Raleigh? Jake came out onto the porch and, after a moment, so did Hanna.
“Is it a house fire?” said Jake.
“I think it must be the St. Martin place. I hope Tammy and her girls are okay.”
“Where’s the fire department?”
It was a good question, but one she already knew the answer to. Who’s afraid of the dark? They all were, including the men in the local fire department. People were afraid, and fear was driving them—driving them as much as the darkness. People weren’t showing up for their jobs. She was going to the nursing home only when she felt like it. All the stores were closed. The banks were closed.
Commerce, for the moment, had been suspended. And people were starting to fight each other. She glanced at Leigh’s place. Leigh had the right idea. Stock up, hunker down, and hope for the best.
“Maybe we should go up and help,” suggested Hanna.
Glenda looked around the yard, then along the highway, then out into the farms and fields beyond the highway.
“I think we should stay put.”
“Are they going to let it burn to the ground?” asked Jake.
“Kids, we’ve got to be real careful with those candles.”
She then saw another source of light, blue flashing police lights coming over the hill to the east, and a second later Sheriff Maynard Fulton’s police cruiser appeared. It came racing down the highway at seventy or eighty miles per hour, and in addition to her fear of the darkness, she now felt her long-standing fear of the sheriff. An old truck, one that bumped and rattled along the road, followed the sheriff’s cruiser, and she recognized the truck as that of the sheriff’s younger brother, Buzz Fulton. She felt an additional old fear, the fear of Gerry’s alcoholism. Because wasn’t Buzz Gerry’s favorite drinking
buddy in Old Hill? And hadn’t they gotten so magnificently plastered on more than one occasion that Sheriff Fulton had had to intervene? And hadn’t Sheriff Fulton then eyed her in an uncomfortable fashion when she had
