be tomorrow. This may be our last meal out, so I say let’s enjoy it.”
Bob and Ellen Varney owned a house on the beach and a condo in St. Louis. They had a condo in St. Louis because they had a son who lived there with his wife and son. Every summer they rented out the beach house, earning enough rental income to pay for their St. Louis condo. The idea was that when they got too old to be able to live in the beach house, they would sell it, then move to St. Louis and live there full time.
Normally by this time of the year their house would be rented and they would already be in St. Louis. But so far not one person had booked their house for the summer. In fact, Sunrise Properties, who handled the rental for them, confided to Bob that not one of the thirty-six houses they managed had been rented.
Bob was sitting on the sofa in his living room, watching television. His wirehaired Jack Russell, Charley, was on the sofa with him, lying up as close to Bob’s leg as he could get. Bob was rubbing Charley behind his ears.
Bob watched World Cable News almost exclusively. His son, who was considerably more liberal in his thinking, had often teased Bob about watching the most conservative of all the cable news channels, but Bob believed, sincerely, that WCN was the most accurate in their reporting. Besides, WCN had George Gregoire, and Gregoire was Bob’s favorite commentator. But Gregoire did not come on until six o’clock, and it was just a little after five, so Bob was watching the
The picture moved from the rally in Chicago to the one in Houston. There were several signs on display:
Impeach The Foreign Imposter
We Need Fuel
Fuel Now
Royal Peabody was standing behind a podium on a flatbed trailer as he addressed the crowd.
Peabody shouted the word, and it came roaring back on two hundred thousand voices.
“Supper’s ready,” Ellen said, and Bob muted the sound as he and Charley went into the kitchen. Though they had a dining room, they ate there only when they had company. When it was just the two of them, they ate across from each other at a small table in the kitchen.
“Bob, what’s going to happen to us?” Ellen asked.
“Nothing. Except we will probably spend the summer here, instead of going up to St. Louis as we normally do. With the cost of fuel it would be foolish to go up there for no reason. Besides, if it actually comes down to a condition of survival, I think we could survive better here, than in St. Louis.”
“It is going to come down to that, isn’t it?” Ellen asked. “A condition of survival.”
“I wouldn’t have said this six months ago, but yes, I believe it is.”
“Are you afraid?” Ellen asked.
“No.”
Ellen smiled wanly, then reached across the table to put her hand over his.
“Good,” she said. “As long as you are not afraid, then neither am I.”
“I think we need to start getting ready, though.”
“Getting ready, how?”
“You know how. Just like we do when we are getting ready for a hurricane. The only difference is, this time we are going to have to be prepared for a much longer time than we ever had to with any hurricane.”
“We’ve got the freezer nearly full now.”
Bob shook his head. “The freezer won’t do it,” he said. “When it goes, everything is going, including the electricity.”
“But we’ve got our own generator, and one hundred-pound propane tank.”
“Which, if we run it full time, will last us for about two weeks. I believe we are looking at a year of being totally on our own.”
“A year?” Ellen gasped.
“Or longer,” Bob said.
In the living room they could hear the TV still going.
CHAPTER NINE
“Hello, Colonel Chambers,” Karin said, putting on as cheerful a front as she could. The patient, Colonel Garrison J. Chambers, a veteran of World War II, was ninety years old. One week earlier he had cut his leg on a