Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

XV

Rob Ferguson tried never to miss a Guilford town meeting. You had to make your own entertainment around here these days, and town meetings held more of it than anything else he could think of. They didn’t charge admission, either.

Jim Farrell stood at the pulpit in the Episcopal church. That would have been worth the price of admission if there were one. The wind outside made the windows rattle. It was below freezing out there, but not really cold. Rob’s ideas about what cold meant had gone through some changes since he came to Maine.

“I have word from On High,” Farrell said, as if he were the minister who officiated when Sunday rolled around. “Well, actually I have word from up north and word from down in the wilds of Washington. For people will write to a harmless backwoods hick in the wilds of forgotten Maine. They will unburden themselves to him, knowing full well that nothing they say in their letters will ever reach the news channels they still enjoy to the fullest in their oh-so-civilized lands.”

“Subtle, isn’t he?” Lindsey whispered to Rob as chuckles ran through the church.

“Like an avalanche,” he whispered back. Their son, Colin Marshall Ferguson, dozed in his arms. Lindsey hadn’t wanted to name the baby after any male in her family. Her mother and father had gone through a divorce at least as unpleasant as the one that split Rob’s folks. Her father’s current girlfriend was drop-dead gorgeous… and about her age.

The more or less benevolent more or less dictator of Maine north and west of the Interstate rolled on: “One of the things they tell me is that a big part of northeastern North America’s power grid depends on electricity from plants along the chief rivers in northern Quebec. Now, friends, with all due local pride I say that there are not any great number of places with more miserable, colder climates on God’s half-frozen earth than this patch which we ourselves infest. But northern Quebec, I kid you not, is one of them.”

More chuckles from the packed house. Farrell acknowledged them with a tip of his trademark fedora. He overacted and overwrote. He would have bombed on TV, but live he was terrific.

And he had things to say: “So far, they’ve managed to keep those hydroelectric plants going in spite of what the supervolcano has done to the weather. So far. But the winters keep getting worse. If those rivers freeze up and don’t thaw out, the power plants up there can’t make power. And if that dread day comes—no, when it comes—do you know what happens to the power grid in most of the Northeast?”

“What happens?” a voice called from the audience. Not just any old voice: Dick Barber’s voice. When you needed a particular question asked at a particular time, you planted a shill to make sure it would be. You did if you were a cynical old fox like Farrell, anyhow.

The retired history professor beamed out at his erstwhile campaign manager, as if surprised and pleased he’d inquired. Yeah, as if, Rob thought.

“I’ll tell you what happens. The grid goes down, that’s what,” Farrell answered. “So millions upon millions of people get to find out what we’ve enjoyed ever since the eruption.”

He still sounded droll, but nobody was laughing any more. People up here, people in thinly populated, self-sufficient northern Maine, had more or less managed to muddle through without much in the way of electricity. How would New York City or Philadelphia or Buffalo do? Rob was no prophet, so he couldn’t be sure ahead of time. But he could guess, and none of his guesses was optimistic.

“And on that cheerful note, I give you back to more local concerns,” Farrell said. “You do need to know, though, that the rest of the land of the free and the home of inflation may forget about us altogether, not just mostly.”

There was commerce with the rest of the country at high summer, when things thawed out enough to permit it. New clothes came in, and canned goods, and batteries. So did such essentials as whiskey and rum and wine and beer. Moonshine popped up all over the place in these parts. The turnips and potatoes that gave their lives in the service of distillation did not die in vain. What the amateurs turned out was longer in kick than in flavor, though. When summer lasted long enough for barley to ripen, there was homebrew beer, too. Some of that was pretty good, but supply never matched demand.

This past summer, a little weed had made it up here, too—unofficially, of course. Rob smoked some. It was as much about nostalgia as about getting loaded. And smoking anything hurt when you hadn’t done it for a long time. But for alcohol, he was pretty much locked into the Aristotelian world. So was everyone else in these parts.

After news that a big chunk of the country’s population might have to find a way to live without Twitter and streaming Netflix and porn (to say nothing about details like lights and water pumps), arguments about things like moose-meat rations and the proper punishment for public drunkenness seemed less important—and less amusing—than they would have otherwise. When little Colin started fussing, Rob was glad for the excuse to leave early.

“Brr!” he said as soon as he and Lindsey and the baby got outside and the wind hit them. But it was an ordinary complaint, not the kind that meant they’d all turn into icicles if they didn’t get inside in the next thirty seconds.

The sky was clear. A million stars blazed down from it. Rob had never seen skies like this, skies where the Milky Way really was a glowing river through blackness, in SoCal or anywhere else. You didn’t get skies like this unless you went somewhere far, far from electricity—or unless the electricity went somewhere far, far from you.

Northern lights danced. Some of the streamers were maroon, others golden. A shooting star scratched a brief, bright, silent trail through them. Somewhere out there were the probes the USA had launched in happier times. For all Rob knew, they were still sending back data. Once upon a time, he’d thought space exploration was the most important thing humanity could do. He couldn’t imagine it would ever mean anything to him again.

“That’s sad,” Lindsey said when he spoke his thought aloud as they made their way back through the darkness.

“Yeah. It is. But my thoughts have pulled back—pulled in. It’s like I told you when you wanted to head south after Colin was born: I’m a small-town guy now. My horizon barely has Newport in it these days, let alone Mars or Jupiter.”

Newport was the small town—small, but bigger than Guilford—where the road up to here branched off from I-95. It wasn’t even forty miles away. Without a car or a bus or a railroad, though, forty miles was two days’ travel. Now he got why, before the Industrial Revolution, most people never went farther than twenty-five miles from home their whole lives. He’d known the factoid for a long time. Here in this postindustrial corner of the world, he got it.

He got why darkness was such a big deal in those days, too. Without electric lights to push it back, it was always there at night, always lurking, always waiting to reach out and drown you.

Matches were another thing that came in when the weather was good. Rob used one to light a candle that sat on a table just inside the door. The flame gave out a dim, warm, yellow light—enough so you wouldn’t break your neck, not nearly enough to make you forget the darkness it pushed back a little. You could get candles or torches any time. He saved the battery-powered lamps for when he really needed them.

The candle also gave out a strong, hot smell. It was made from moose tallow. Someone in The Jungle—a book everyone got grossed out with in high school—said they used every bit of the pig except the squeal. Had moose squealed, some clever soul in Guilford would have found a way to get some mileage from the noise.

Lindsey fed the stove firewood. It was as much of a heater as the apartment had. Little Colin’s crib sat close to it, to get the most benefit. The baby went to bed without much bother.

Rob and Lindsey walked into the bedroom. It was a good deal chillier, though Dick Barber would have had no trouble getting through a night in it with just a Russian greatcoat. The two of them had more than a greatcoat to keep them from freezing. The bed was piled high with quilts and coverlets. Rob couldn’t imagine any bed in this part of the world that wasn’t.

He yawned as he slid under the thick layers of insulation. “Getting ready to hibernate through another winter,” he said.

“You think you’re kidding,” Lindsey said, settling in beside him.

“Who says? When it’s dark, dark, dark as soon as the sun goes down, what do you do? What can you do? You fall asleep. And you stay asleep till the sun decides to come up again, no matter how long that takes. I bet the Eskimos at the North Pole sleep six months straight.”

“Well, you can do something in the dark besides sleep,” Lindsey said. “If you couldn’t, we wouldn’t have Colin.”

“A point,” Rob admitted. “But not tonight, Josephine. I’m pooped. Shall we make a date for tomorrow?”

“Sure, if we aren’t too pooped then,” Lindsey said. When they made dates like that, they did try to keep them. If life got in the way, though, then it did, that was all. If not tomorrow, the day after. Grabbing his jollies right this minute mattered less to Rob now that he was well past thirty.

Lindsey got up before daybreak, because Colin still woke up hungry in the middle of the night. Messing about with formula in near darkness, getting it not too warm and not too cold, would have been a major pain in the ass. Breast milk was a hell of a lot more convenient.

Rob said so after Lindsey got the baby settled and came back to bed herself. “Oh, Lord, you’d better believe it!” she exclaimed.

“And it comes in much nicer packages,” he added slyly.

“Hey! Don’t handle the merchandise!” she said. “You were the one who was pooped. Well, I am, too, and I want to go back to sleep.”

Some experiments worked. Some didn’t. You never knew which were which till you tried them. Before long, not too miffed because his experiment failed, Rob was also asleep again.

In the old days, the first thing he would have done when he got up was to check the Net for news about Quebec’s hydroelectric plants. If he’d had a smartphone with a satellite connection (and, not so incidentally, some way to pay for the charges it ran up), he still might have done it. Since he owned no such critter, he didn’t spend much—or any—time worrying about it. If the lights went out from Boston down to Washington, he figured word would get here sooner or later. And if that turned out to be later rather than sooner, his life wouldn’t change one whole hell of a lot.

Back in the days when he’d enjoyed such quick, effortless connectivity, he wouldn’t have believed that for a second. You had to keep up. You had to stay informed. Right now, or you’d kick yourself for not knowing.

He shrugged, yawned, and went into the kitchen to take a look at his son.

Marshall Ferguson was still getting used to the view of a new back yard. He’d spent his freshman year in the dorms at UCSB, and the rest of his time there in the kind of ratty apartment that had had a swarm of college students in it before him and probably had yet another sophomore or junior making a mess of it right now. Other than that, he’d lived at his folks’ house—well, his dad’s house these past good many years—since he was a little kid.

So he knew what things were supposed to look like when he raised his head from the typewriter (or, when there was power, the computer) keyboard. And they didn’t look that way any more. It took some getting used to.

For one thing, he wasn’t on the second floor any more. The house Paul and Janine had had—the house he and Janine had now—was only one story. It was in Torrance, but at the north end of the town: closer to San Atanasio High than he had been in San Atanasio, in fact. It dated from some time in the 1960s, from just before the days when all the built-ins would have been harvest gold or avocado green. Paul and Janine had got it as a foreclosure, which meant the payments were as near nothing as made no difference.

The house was small. The yard was good-sized. Back then, they hadn’t believed in filling the entire lot with architecture. A big old oleander grew in one corner of the yard. There was one at Dad’s house, too. The pink flowers were pretty, but you had to be careful with kids around. Oleanders were poisonous.

Marshall typed a sentence. He frowned, used some correction fluid, and took a stab at fixing it. He nodded to himself. Yes, that was better. He frowned again, looking for an interesting way to get from where he was now to where he wanted to be.

It was, perhaps not surprisingly, a story about a man who meets a woman he used to like just at the time when her marriage is coming apart at the seams. He was having trouble doing a good job with the woman’s soon-to-be-ex. The guy kept coming out like Paul, and Paul, dammit, just wasn’t dramatically interesting.

When Janine told him to go, he’d gone. He hadn’t made much of a fuss. Hell, he hadn’t raised any fuss to speak of. Maybe getting his marching orders was as big a relief for him as giving them was for Janine. The thing was over, done, finished, finito, and they both knew it.

Which, in a way, relieved Marshall. If somebody knocked on the front door, it might be a salesman. It might be a neighbor who needed to borrow some sugar. It wouldn’t be Paul with a Glock in his hand and revenge in his heart.

Paul had moved back in with his folks and his scummy brother. He was a CPA; his brother preferred armed robbery to the kind you pulled off with the tax code. Phil was out on parole after his latest misadventure. Janine didn’t like him, but had been fond of his two little boys (though she didn’t care for their mothers).

In real life, an accountant who moved back in with his parents was reassuring. He’d be dull in a story. Marshall pondered ways to perk him up without turning him into someone who toted a Glock.

He was deep in thought and far from the real world when somebody kissed him on the back of the neck. Somebody—that was what went through his head while he jerked and jumped. Even before his butt hit the chair again, he realized the somebody wasn’t real likely to be anyone but Janine.

She giggled and ran a hand through his hair. “You looked so cute sitting there with your face all blank. You didn’t even know I’d come home.”

“Cute. Right.” Had anybody else done that to him, he would have been furious. He still was, but when the person who’d distracted you was your girlfriend-going-on-fiancée there were, or could be, compensations. He pulled her down onto his lap and kissed her. But when he started to take her back to the bedroom to finish what they’d started, she wiggled away.

“Not right now,” she said. “I just wanted to, you know, wake you up.”

“Well, you did. Now—”

“Now I’ve got to go shopping,” Janine said.

“What? It won’t keep for half an hour?”

She shook her head. “Not enough hours in the day as is, not when I’ve got the day job. We’ll see what happens after dinner.” She fluttered her fingers and hurried off.

Because she had the nine-to-five, Marshall did a lot of the shopping. He didn’t know what she had to get that was more urgent than fooling around. Muttering to himself, he tried to pick up the story again. He wouldn’t have been so irked if this were the first time she’d teased him while he was writing and then not come through. She’d done it twice before, though. That wasn’t good. That was a trend, and not one he liked.

You had to get used to certain things when you started living with someone. Marshall grokked that. Janine hated peas and zucchini. Okay. Marshall knew his world wouldn’t end without them. She folded towels and T-shirts in ways different from the ones he’d learned. He could deal with that, too. He could even handle her squeezing toothpaste from the middle of the tube, no matter if he heard his father growling inside his head whenever she did.

Cockteasing, though… That was harder to handle, especially when it was cockteasing that interrupted his work. He wondered if Janine knew she was doing it, or how badly timed it was.

He also wondered if he wanted to make an issue of it. She went on and on about how controlling Paul was, and how that drove her nuts. Wouldn’t she think Marshall was acting the same way?

He scratched his head, mumbled, and eventually got back to writing. He was making up his story as he went along. He was making up living with Janine as we went along, too. He’d had girlfriends before, but the only people he’d lived with were his folks and, for that freshman year, the Korean guy he’d roomed with at the Santa Barbara dorm.

Janine, on the other hand, got what she knew about living with a man from her time with Paul. Marshall wasn’t just like her ex. That was one of the reasons she’d dumped Paul for him, or it should have been. But she’d got Paul to pay attention to her by yelling. So she yelled at Marshall, too, often snarkily.

That wore thin even faster than getting teased while he was writing did, because it happened more often. Finally, Marshall said, “Hey, you don’t have to go on like that, you know? I was already taking care of it.”

His new squeeze looked astonished. “You were, weren’t you?”

“Um, yeah,” Marshall said. The dishes had been going from the drainer into the cabinet. As soon as that got done, the silverware would go into the drawer, and the glasses into the cupboard over the stove. If you noticed what was happening and what was likely to happen, it should have been obvious before you started yelling.

“Whenever Paul would do stuff—and he didn’t do much—he’d crow like a rooster or like he wanted a medal for it,” Janine said. “You just went ahead and did it, and it, like, went under my radar.”

“I’m not Paul,” Marshall said pointedly. Trying to soften that with a joke, he added, “I’m not even the walrus.”

“The what?” Janine didn’t get it.

“Never mind.” Marshall didn’t bother explaining. He was fuzzy on the details himself, anyway. The Beatles were a band from long before his time, a band people older than his father listened to on oldies stations.

“You come out with the weirdest shit sometimes,” Janine said.

“Yeah, well, that’s what you get for messing with a writer,” Marshall said.

“What else do I get?” She grabbed him below the belt. She didn’t tease all the time. The silverware and the glasses went into the drawer and the cupboard later than Marshall’d thought they would. Since Janine didn’t bitch about them any more, that didn’t bother him.

She did keep coming on to him and not following through while he was writing, though. She thought it was a hoot. He was less amused. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said at last. “It’s like… I don’t know… like grabbing somebody’s arm when he’s driving.”

“Nobody drives any more. Not unless you’re in a bus or a truck.” Was Janine missing the point because she was dense? Or was she wiggling around so she wouldn’t have to argue about what bugged Marshall? He wasn’t sure himself. He wasn’t sure she was sure, either.

He made a couple of sales not long after he moved in with her. That felt mighty good. He didn’t want her saying he brought in no money. He wasn’t going to make as much as she did, but he needed to make something. He didn’t want to think of himself as her kept man, and he didn’t want her thinking of him like that, either.

The day-to-day grind ate most of his life, the way it eats most people’s lives most of the time. He was happy enough. Was he happier than he had been while he was still living with his dad and stepmom and little half-sister? He was getting laid a lot more often, which certainly didn’t hurt.

He rarely had the time to ask himself Do I want to be doing this for the rest of my life? He did sometimes wonder. From the looks Janine sent his way every so often, he suspected she sometimes wondered, too. He was still trying to figure out what a relationship was and how you kept it going. She’d just had one blow up and sink.

“It wasn’t your fault, Marshall.” She said that a lot. “I was already in the water, and you were a life ring.”

“Glad to be of service,” he would answer. In a way, it was reassuring. He didn’t want to blame himself for her leaving Paul—for her kicking Paul out of this house, if you wanted to be exact. Her ex still had boxes of junk in the garage. Marshall left them severely alone.

He didn’t want to blame himself, no. But every once in a while he did wonder what would have happened if he couldn’t have gone to help old Mrs. Lundgren move. Would Janine and Paul still be together? Would she have found herself some other life ring instead? Would that different life ring be living here now? Would he be asking himself these same unanswerable questions?

Or would he just count his blessings, figure Janine was more than cute enough and not impossible to get along with, and go from there? Most of the time, that was what Marshall did himself.

Rain came down as Kelly got out of Colin’s Taurus at the airport. It could rain any old time of the year in L.A. these days, but winter was still the season with the most wet stuff. She leaned back in to kiss Deborah in the car seat. “’Bye, Mommy,” Deborah said tragically.

“So long, sweetie,” Kelly said. “I’ll be back Monday.”

Colin got out to haul her carry-on out of the trunk and to hug her and kiss her before she went into the terminal. “I’ll miss you, too, you know,” he said.

“Well, I hope so. And I’ll miss you,” she answered. “But I’m not going to Helena or any other part of the end of the world this time. It’s just Chicago, for the geologists’ convention.”

“It’s winter,” Colin said. “In Chicago, it’s really winter.”

“That’s why they have it this time of year,” Kelly reminded him. “Since the eruptions, everybody holds conventions in the summertime, when it’s—”

“Warmer,” Colin finished for her.

“Well, yeah.” She nodded. “But hotel rates and everything are a lot cheaper this time of year, and the convention committee really got its rocks off on that.”

Her husband winced. “You’ve stuck around with me too long.” He turned back toward the open driver’s-side door. Traffic wasn’t a fraction of what it had been once upon a time. “See you Monday. Have fun with all your scientific buddies.” One more hug and he was gone.

The flight to O’Hare was routine. The cost wasn’t. If her department hadn’t sprung for some of it, she would have stayed home. The convention had laid on a shuttle bus to the Hilton. A good thing, too. Some Internet work had shown that cab fares were as bad as in L.A. Without every seat filled and a couple of fare-savers riding in the trunk with the luggage, no human being who wasn’t an All-Star second baseman or point guard could have afforded a taxi. Even a millionaire wouldn’t stay a millionaire for long if he took taxis very often.

At the hotel, most of the people in the check-in line were also in her line of work. She said hello to friends and acquaintances even before she got her key card and took her stuff to her room. Like the front desk, the bar was on the second level. It was only Thursday afternoon. The convention hadn’t officially opened. Kelly could see the bar was already doing a land-office business anyhow. She’d never gone to a professional gathering that worked any other way. From what Colin said, it was the same with cops. It was probably the same with birders and stamp collectors, too.

She met Geoff Rheinburg for dinner. “Better food than in Helena. Better beds, too,” she said.

He was presenting a paper on what they’d learned on their excursion to the abandoned capital of Montana. “Lord, I hope so,” he said. But he seemed distracted. He looked out through the glass curtain wall at the snow sifting down.

“You okay?” Kelly asked after several minutes when he said nothing else.

“Me?” He came back to himself with a wry chuckle. “Yes, I’m fine, Kelly. I’m wondering about Manic-Five and La Baie James, though.”

“You’re wondering about… what?” Manic-Five sounded like a band whose songs she’d almost heard. She didn’t know what La Baie James sounded like. Nothing she was familiar with.

Patiently, her mentor answered, “They’re Hydro Québec power plants. Manic-Five is on the Manicouagan River. The others are even bigger. They’re at, well, La Baie James—James Bay, it’d be in English. It’s the little bay at the southern tip of Hudson Bay. They’ve been putting power, more and more power, into the grid since the 1970s. And it’s cold up there. I mean, it’s really, really cold up there, and it gets colder every winter with all the supervolcano crud in the stratosphere.”

“Cold enough to freeze the rivers?” Now that Kelly knew what he was talking about, she could connect the dots. “What happens if it is?”

“We all find out,” he answered with what might have been gallows humor or the simple truth. “The grid’s… complex. It’s gone out for weird computer glitches, and it’s stayed up for the hell of it. But I don’t like the way I’ve had to learn about the situation through the back door. It tells me the people who know more about it than I do don’t want word leaking out.”

Kelly looked out at the snow, too. “Even these days, cold in L.A. or Berkeley’s just a word. Turn off the lights and most of the heat in a town like this in the middle of winter, though…” She didn’t go on, or need to.

“Uh-huh,” Rheinburg said. “If we can get out of the airport and back to California before things hit the fan—or before the ice up there stops the turbines—I’ll be a happy man.”

“If you feel that way, and if you know that much, I’m surprised you came to the convention,” Kelly remarked.

“If I were a totally rational man, I wouldn’t have,” he answered. “That’s about the size of it. But things up there may last till we get home. They may find better workarounds than I expect. I want to see some people here I may never see again if the Northeastern grid does crap out. And what the hell, Kelly. Sooner or later, we’ll get home again even if things do fall apart. It may mean standing in line for a train ticket and not making it back for three weeks, but we’ll get there.”

“Easy for you to say,” Kelly told him. “You don’t have a little kid who expects you back Monday no matter what.”

“Well, no,” Rheinburg said. “Although I might, if I were in the habit of hitting on my students. I’ve been tempted a few times, but never enough to do anything about it.”

He’d been married to the same woman as long as Kelly had known him, and for a fair number of years before that. There’d never been any hint of scandal about him. He was, if anything, scandalously normal. At a campus like Berkeley, that stood out more than it might have somewhere else. Kelly wondered, not quite for the first time, if she’d ever tempted him. She didn’t ask. This wasn’t science. Just because you wondered something didn’t mean you had to know the answer. Sometimes you were better off not knowing, in fact.

When the waiter came by again, Rheinburg ordered a second gin and tonic, which he seldom did. Then he said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t keep anything you really need in your room. You may have trouble getting back in there. The computer key may not work if there’s no power. I don’t know that. I haven’t researched it. The door units may have batteries in them. Why set yourself up for hassles you can duck, though?”

That was such a good question, it prompted Kelly to say, “Anybody would think you were a grownup or something.”

“I doubt it, even if I can play one on TV,” Rheinburg answered. She laughed. They finished dinner. He grabbed the check. She squawked. He wouldn’t listen. “I’m senior to you. Hell, these days I’m senior to damn near everybody. I can do things like this. I can afford to do ’em, too.”

There were receptions and cocktail parties after dinner. Kelly got a little buzzed, but only a little. Some people did use them as an excuse to drink hard. Some people needed no excuse to drink hard. And some people used drinking as an excuse to come on to others, while, again, some people needed no excuse. Still, there was less of that than there had been in the days before cell-phone cameras and harassment lawsuits.

Buzzed or not, when Kelly got back to her room she made sure she stuffed everything she had to have into her purse. Normally, she would have thought leaving it here was safer. From what Geoff Rheinburg said, these weren’t normal times. She wondered if there’d been any such thing since the supervolcano erupted.

The presentations got rolling on Friday. Kelly went to Professor Rheinburg’s, and made a couple of comments from the audience. She bought a fat book on the supervolcano at the Oxford University Press booth. Oxford books weren’t cheap, but weren’t so bad as the ones from Cambridge. Since it was deductible, the price didn’t seem too outrageous.

More geologists poured into the Hilton. There were more receptions and parties in the rooms Friday night. Kelly kept a drink in her hand in self-defense. As long as she had one, people didn’t try to press others on her. She still did some drinking, but less than she would have otherwise.

Because she did some drinking, she needed to get up in the middle of the night. She’d left the light on in the bathroom when she went to bed. She always did that in hotel rooms. Enough light leaked around the door so she could get there if she needed to without breaking her neck.

Except she couldn’t tonight. The room was pitch black. The digital clock on the nightstand was out. So was the red LED at the bottom of the flat-screen TV. The smoke detector’s red LED still worked—it had to be hooked to a battery. But one firefly didn’t spit out enough photons to do her any good.

She groped for her purse. Fumbling in it, she found her phone. It showed no bars. “Oh, shit,” she said softly. But she could—and did—use it to show her the way to the john. The toilet still worked. She went to the window. The light-blocking curtains did a good job. Little more light came in when she pushed them aside. Chicago and Chicagoland had just fallen back into the nineteenth century.

No—there were some lights way off in the distance. Maybe that was O’Hare, running on generators. Whatever it was, it had precious little company.

She thanked the God in Whom she didn’t particularly believe they’d given her a room on the sixth floor. When day gave light, she could use stairs to get up and down. If she were on the twenty-sixth, she might go down once but she wouldn’t want to come back up again.

And if she were in an elevator on the way up to or down from the twenty-sixth floor when the lights went out… she’d probably still be in that elevator now. Did the cars have battery-powered emergency lights? She sure hoped so. How long would the lights last? What kind of arrangements were there for evacuating passengers in a power outage? She was glad she could wonder about such fascinating questions in a nice, comfy bed.

How long would the room stay comfy? It was eerily quiet—the fan and the heat were out. Pretty soon, the chill outside would start leaking in; lows for this weekend were expected to be right around zero. Kelly used the light in her phone to go to the closet and grab the spare blankets off the shelf. She piled them on the bed. They weren’t spare any more.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. She’d read the poem in some lit course. Well, the bang had already come. It didn’t end the world, but the whimpering aftermath wasn’t much fun. And either her imagination was working overtime or it had already started getting colder in here.