The electrical company is from the nearest sizable town, one that Tom said was nearly empty. She very specifically remembers him saying he’d had to call for service from very far away. The accent she hears as the workers speak is a local one too. Did the men who owned this move away and return for this job? Could that be possible?
If not, why would Tom say otherwise?
Hugging her arms to her chest in the chilly darkness, Miranda wonders.
Charlotte
Watching her mother put down the cell phone breaks Charlotte’s heart. It’s the way she does it. Carefully, her hand lingering on the device, her face sad as if she’s at a funeral. She knows the answer from that careful move, but asks the question anyway, “Nothing?”
With the cell service going into immediate overload due to millions of 911 calls at the moment of The Dying, they missed their opportunity to contact family. As phone service returns, they keep calling, but they have little hope.
Charlotte’s older sister is out there somewhere. At least she hopes that’s true, but she may never know with any certainty. Her sister was off doing her big corporate job and living life as far from this rural idyll as she could get. Her sister was born with wandering feet is what her mother says.
Tabitha has a much younger sister as well, one almost the same age as Charlotte’s older sister. They’re only one year apart, which also means Tabitha isn’t really that close to her. She was busy with her own newborn far across the country within months of her sister’s birth.
She’s out there too. They used to joke it was a family tradition. Have one daughter before you’re twenty years old and still foolish, then another when forty is in the rear-view mirror and you’re wise enough to know how stupid it is. Tabitha had done exactly that. One daughter at age nineteen and the second at forty-one. Tabitha’s mother had done the same.
The last time they’d spoken to Charlotte’s sister had been a couple of weeks before The Dying. On their video call, her sister had joked that since she hadn’t continued the family tradition, it was going to be up to Charlotte. They’d all laughed at the vaguely horrified expression on Tabitha’s face at that idea. It had been a good call.
And her mother has been unable to reach either of them since The Dying. They can’t even find out if they’re alive.
Tabitha shakes her head and tries to smile. Charlotte knows her mom is trying to protect her, even now after all that’s happened in the world. Patting the phone, she says, “I’ll keep trying. The service might not be back for everyone.”
She’s right about that. It probably isn’t. They have basic cable, local phone service, and intermittent cell phone service. The internet is awful, but that’s back too, though without many services they once took for granted. The TV is now exceptionally weird to watch. News is still the primary program everywhere, but there are regular programs again too…except they aren’t at all regular.
It’s been months since The Dying, but even now no one really knows how much of the world is gone. Estimates hover somewhere between eighty-five to ninety percent of all women. One in ten left alive. It’s taken more than a toll on the world. Some countries have simply rolled up their carpets and faded, others have waged open war on neighbors they didn’t like. Blame is a good enough reason for war, it seems. Some countries, like America, are trying to get back to normal. Maybe it’s more like a pretense at normal.
That includes TV. There are no more female actors. Some are probably alive, but they aren’t working if they are. Everything is a re-run, and a rush of suicides after channels began showing the already filmed current seasons of popular shows means those stopped as well. It wasn’t a rush of ten or a hundred suicides. There were tens of thousands of suicides every single day. Those fresh reminders of all that had been lost were too much for many men.
Now, most TV shows are old ones. Black and white family comedies, old variety shows, the works. Charlotte had been trying to puzzle it out when her mother answered the question without thinking too hard about it. “All those people are already dead and were before The Dying. Most of them anyway. That’s easier for people. The new shows made people think about all the dead. It makes them wonder if the person they see on TV was caught in The Dying.”
It makes sense, but it does make Charlotte wonder if this is it for the movie industry. There were some pretty violent skirmishes in the suburbs of Southern California, hordes of men trying to capture women and all the rest, but rumors on TV have it that most of the starlets remaining have chosen to go into government protection. She wonders if that means they’ll start making movies in those protected camps.
As Charlotte watches an old Star Trek rerun, idly wondering how anyone managed with skirts that short, her mother plops down on the couch next to her. The scent of manure, dust, and sweat billows up. They both smell awful and need showers badly.
With spring just around the corner, they’ve been working hard. Pastures need to be prepared and they’re turning the uncovered riding ring into a much larger garden. No more jumping or taking her horse through detailed courses. No more smashing old pumpkins set atop posts around the ring, using only her legs to guide the horse and sending half-rotten orange goo into the air. No more leading Scoot slowly around the ring to remind him of days gone by.
“I’m exhausted,” her mother says, her head dropping against the back of the couch.
“Then enjoy some Star Trek with me.”
Prying one eye open, Tabitha looks at the screen and then snorts. “If only they’d known what
