was the first brownout. He would be surprised if power lasted through the night before the standbys kicked in. He pulled out two shot glasses and opened the good scotch, filling each. He handed one to Lieutenant Simmons. “To the end of the fucking world,” he toasted. She raised her shot glass in response, and they both drank.
January 3.
Mike
The first thing Mike noticed when he woke up was he was cold. Not just, “it’s winter, dude, and you kicked your covers off” cold, but deep down into his bones cold. He stuck his head up from the blankets, noticing his breath frost even as he looked toward the alarm clock on the nightstand in his old bedroom. The LCD display was dead … which meant the power was off, which meant the heat wasn’t working.
And that meant he needed to get out of bed and go start the generator.
Mike groaned and dropped his head back onto the pillow. “Give me a break,” he grumbled, to no one in particular. The house still smelled like fried chicken, pork chops, country fried steak, and who knew what else. Gran and Jenn had cooked past midnight, preparing every meat item in Gran’s house and carefully storing the lot of it in Tupperware. Mike knew Gran’s cooking was amazing, but even he didn’t see what she intended to do with that much food. Was she planning to bribe the entire Army with a home-cooked, southern meal?
Mike scrambled out of bed quickly, throwing his jeans on over the boxers he’d slept in as quickly as he could, hopping from foot to foot on the icy hardwood floor as he struggled into a clean sweatshirt. He got a clean pair of socks from the dresser and grinned when he saw his old harness boots in the closet. His sneakers were still soaking wet from the night before and he’d been dreading putting them back on his feet.
The sun was up, but barely. Mike moved through the house quietly, not wanting to wake Jenn or Gran. Jenn was whiny and cranky when she didn’t get enough sleep, and Gran deserved the rest after everything she’d been through. He stepped into the kitchen and opened the fridge. The light didn’t come on, of course, but a huge container of fried chicken was front and center. With a quick glance behind him, Mike peeled up a corner of the container and snatched a leg, carefully pushing the plastic lid back down. He ate the leg quickly, tossing the evidence in the trash can and his paper towel on top of that. Then he headed outside to start the generator, glad Poppa had shown him how to do it.
When the task was done, he came back in through the mud room to the still-silent house. Mike was surprised the noise he’d made – including the curse word Gran would box his ears for – didn't awaken Jenn or his grandmother. He moved into the living room and turned on the television, wondering if there were any updates. The frantic, repetitive news casts from the day before were gone, replaced by static. Everything was gone – even the local channel broadcast by Minister Ragland, that crazy, fanatical red-faced preacher from Mt. Washington, who could be counted on at any time of the day or night to be screaming into the camera about damnation, the end of days, and how all the sinners would burn in the fires of hell. It seemed like Minister Ragland hadn’t escaped the apocalypse either, no matter how many extra brownie points he racked up for spreading the “good” word.
Mike tried Poppa’s radio next. It wasn’t a short wave, but it was older than dirt. It still had the thermionic tubes that could receive transmissions from thousands of miles away, depending on weather conditions. Mike had loved to play with the huge, boxy antique when he’d been Jenn’s age. He and Poppa had carefully slow-tuned the dial, frequently getting signals from as far away as England and Germany. The younger Mike enjoyed listening to the BBC, knowing it was the exact same transmission that was being broadcast in London and was, therefore, strangely exotic
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