Dark Grid

Dark Grid

David C. Waldron

DARK GRID

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by David C. Waldron.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

ISBN: 1-468-07915-8

ISBN 13: 978-1-468-07915-9

Cover art by David C. Waldron and Deborah Kolstad.

Edited by Dancing Out Loud Multimedia

First printing, December 2011

Second printing, August 2012

For my wife, Lia.
I will ALWAYS come for you.

Chapter One

June 14, 2012 – 3:14 am Eastern Daylight Time

Eric Tripp had been out of the military for six months and usually slept like a rock.  Still, he was extremely glad he had told his girlfriend how to wake him up the first night they’d stayed together.  She hadn’t believed him when he’d told her to go to the end of the bed, grab him by the big toe, and say his name.  Thankfully she’d humored him that first time and become a firm believer when he’d come up all but swinging.

Sure, the barking dog next door was annoying, but that didn’t explain why it had woken him up.  After two tours in the sandbox he’d learned to sleep through mortar fire, as long as it wasn’t falling directly on him. 

Slowly, so as not to disturb Karen, he rolled out of bed and went into the kitchen.  Now that he was up, he’d need a drink--and water just wouldn’t cut it.  He’d learned a long time ago that OJ was just the ticket in the middle of the night, especially good OJ--sweet, with lots of pulp, it was like drinking an orange and he didn’t even have to peel it.  When he’d been deployed he’d made do with pouring Tang powder directly in his mouth--but real, honest-to-goodness OJ, you just couldn’t beat it.

Now why is that dog going nuts?  What time is it anyway?
Eric thought.
  And how did I miss that the power is out?  Man, I grabbed the juice out of the fridge and didn’t even notice the light was off?  I paid the bill, and they don’t turn the power off in the middle of the night either way.  No thunder, so no storm.  It’s really not that hot, so the grid shouldn’t be overburdened.  So how come the power’s out?

And then he looked out the window and saw something he’d been missing since his one and only tour in Alaska ended, and thought he’d never get to see again. 
No way! Aurora borealis in Tennessee?
  Followed immediately by, “KAREN!  Get up, getup getup getUP GETUP!” Either he was in the middle of his most vivid dream ever or NASA may have been right after all.

June 14, 2012 – 3:13 am Eastern Daylight Time

Sheri Hines wasn’t a night person, but at least working the graveyard shift gave her an excuse to skip out on girls’ night at the bar.  One less potential miserable failure at a relationship and one less night going home alone while all the other girls had picked up, or been picked up by, someone else.  Ok, that wasn’t entirely fair--if she’d been a slut, or hadn’t had any standards, she could probably have been picked up more often than not, but she was the one who had to look at herself in the mirror every morning.

Oh blech, please not this again!
  Sheri thought.
 There is only one of me inside this head and I cannot listen to this diatribe even one more time.  If the only thing all of your failed relationships have in common is you, the mirror is where you need to be looking!  Maybe your standards are a bit too high, girl!  Maybe you need to quit looking for Mr. Right and accept Mr. Right Now--I did just say that, ok, I’m nuts.

Red blinking lights at the Nashville Hydro Electric Power Generation Facility were not a good thing--in fact, they were the quintessential “bad thing”.  Bad enough to break Sheri out of her reverie to stare at the control panel with a sudden stab of panic. There had been a drill only three weeks ago and, anyway, they were always warned about drills ahead of time.  This didn’t feel like a drill.

The Nashville plant was capable of generating 214 MW of power at peak production.  That would be enough to provide power to, on average, 107,000 homes all by itself.  It was currently generating and providing power for not only Nashville, but as far away as Cookeville and Jackson, Tennessee; Bowling Green, Kentucky; and Athens, Alabama.  It was part of “The Grid”.

The load Sheri was monitoring should not, could not, have dropped by over 85 percent and yet that’s exactly what the meter was reporting.  That was like turning off most electrical appliances within a 75,000 square mile area, and shutting down this and every other hydro and coal powered plant within three hundred miles!

Then the blinking stopped: fat, take your leave of the frying pan and meet the fire.  While blinking red lights were bad, steady red lights were infinitely worse.  Steady red lights were overload, and just as Sheri reached for the radio the numbers sank in.  While the needle was buried at 250 percent--and hadn’t that amused her to no end when she had first seen it--the digital readout was climbing past 780.

The load on the long haul lines was currently at 780 percent--what the weakest link in the chain was currently rated to support.  For the rest of her life she’d wonder how high the number would have gone.  After all, it was a three digit display and technically could have read 999.  Ironically, at 812 percent capacity on the high voltage lines, the power went out at the Nashville Hydro Electric Plant.

June 14, 2012 – 3:17 am Eastern Daylight Time

Joel Taylor sat up in bed trying to finish waking up and place what was wrong. 
What time was it, anyway?
  He squinted across the room to read the clock. 
No green numbers.  Power's out…again
.

Joel rolled out of bed, giving up on falling back to sleep until he took care of some business.  He’d successfully navigated the obstacle course that was their footboard, dresser, and ironing board when the incessant barking of the neighbor’s dog finally registered.  He and Rachael had dubbed it the Jack Russell Terrorist and were convinced that it didn’t actually walk or run, it just vibrated from place to place as it barked.

Standing at the sink, hands lathered up with Summer-Apple foaming soap, it was several seconds before it sunk in that  no water was coming out of the faucet.  He wanted to blame the prescription sleep medication he’d taken earlier that evening…but, no, this was just him being him.  Come to think of it, he couldn’t hear water running to refill the toilet tank either.  He grabbed the nearest towel--which turned out to be one of the froofy, decorative ones that Rachael kept on the rack--and wiped off his hands, more concerned about what was going on than with facing his wife’s wrath in the morning.  He eased back onto their bed and gently shook his wife, “Rachael, hon, wake up.”

Rachael Taylor wasn’t usually a woman of extremes, but waking up in the middle of the night was one of the exceptions.  It was either a long, drawn out task involving a great deal of falling back to sleep, or else she woke up screaming because you’d inadvertently scared the hell out of her.  Joel had been accused of the latter many times when he himself had still been asleep, and twice when he hadn’t even been in the room--go figure.

Joel realized, almost too late, that Rachael was waking up badly, and a little freaked out.  “No, shhh, it’s okay, shhh, it’s just me.  Sorry about that, but I’m a little weirded out.  I think ‘Jack’ woke me up.  The power’s out, which I guess is nothing new, but the water is out too. Power I get—but, water?”

Rachael looked around as her heart rate came back down to normal and realized that the lights for the smoke detector, cordless phone, and alarm system were all dark.  The ever-present glow from the strip mall that had sprung up a few miles away last year was missing too.  “From the sounds of it, Jack isn’t the only dog in the neighborhood going crazy, either.  At least Millie only seems to be pacing and whining downstairs.”  Joel said.  He could hear her claws clicking back and forth on the entryway and kitchen floors.  “Thank heavens Golden Retrievers aren’t yappie like Jack.”  Rachael’s attention, however, remained fixed on the smoke detector.

“Um, you’re the ‘techie guy’; don’t the smoke detector and the alarm system have batteries?”

“Yeah, and we just replaced the batteries in April, when the time changed, why?”

“Well, shouldn’t the little green light still be on then?  Even with the power out?”

Joel looked up, following Rachael’s gaze, trying to remember if the light would stay on if it was just on battery power or if the light would blink every so often.  After thirty seconds it was clear that it didn’t matter, it wasn’t going to blink even if that was what it was supposed to do.

“Ok, like I said, definitely not normal.” Joel’s attention turned to the window at the back of the house as he thought he caught movement or color out of the corner of his eye.  “What was that?”  Joel walked cautiously to the window and parted the sheers to get a better look outside.

“What was what?”  Rachael asked nervously from the foot of the bed.

Joel swallowed. “C’mere.”

Rachael quickly put on the robe she kept next to the bed for midnight kitchen runs and joined him at the window on his side of the bed.  “Joel, since when do we get the Northern Lights this far south?”  She asked.

“Since never.  I sure hope we didn’t just miss the Rapture because if so we may be in trouble.”

Chapter Two

At a quarter to four Joel decided to get some ice from one of the local convenience stores. 

It was several blocks before he realized he’d gone through two dark intersections that should have had blinking yellow traffic lights, and that the only lights on the roads were headlights.  The street lights had never all been out during a power outage before either, come to think of it.  Joel turned the radio on and was greeted by static on both the FM and AM presets.  He got so busy fiddling with the seek button on the radio that he was startled when an oncoming driver flashed his high beams and lay on the horn.  Heart racing, Joel swerved back into his own lane just in time to avoid an accident.

Wake up, Joel, pay attention!  4:00 am doesn’t mean you’re alone on the road.
The near miss, the total lack of even backup power to the traffic and street lights, and the aurora finally combined to convince Joel to turn around and head home.  The gas station would have a generator. If the power was still out when the sun came up, and it was light out, he’d make a quick trip then.

When he got home, Rachael was asleep on the couch. 
Great, I get to stew about this all by myself.
Joel thought. As quietly as he could, Joel went through the house checking the doors and windows and looking to see if any of the smoke detectors, or anything electronic, seemed to be working.  Cleaning a 2,600 square foot house may take forever, but checking it over only took ten minutes.  To Joel, that just didn’t seem fair.

The clock radios were all dead, even with new batteries, as was anything that had been plugged in and turned on.  Both of their laptops booted up fine since they hadn’t been plugged in; but with no idea how long the power would be out he didn’t leave them on for long since there wasn’t any Internet to connect to.  All three cell phones in the house were on, but none of them had any signal.  Thankfully, both the car and the SUV were almost full, as were the two five-gallon jerry cans they’d bought during one of their just-in-case phases--not that an additional ten gallons of gas would get them far in either vehicle.

Millie followed him around the house for the first half of his tour but gave up once she realized he wasn’t actually going to do anything but walk from room to room.  Finally, Joel went out into the front yard to watch the sky.

“Can’t sleep, huh?”

Joel jumped about six inches and spun to his right to see his next door neighbor leaning against his own house and looking up at the sky.

“Don’t DO that Carey!” Joel snapped.

“Do what, talk to you?  Ok.” Carey said.

“That isn’t what I meant and you know it, Carey.”

“I don’t know, you started off telling me what I did and didn’t know when I first moved into the neighborhood.  Apparently you haven’t changed much,” Carey replied.

“Yeah, you scaring me at 4:45 in the morning is my fault.  Whatever.”

Ignoring Joel’s response, Carey went on, “It’s the end of the world you know,” and nodded up at the sky.

“Aw geez, no it isn’t, it’s the aurora borealis.  It’s a magnetic phenomenon.”  Joel wasn’t even trying to hide his disdain for his neighbor at this point.

Carey’s reply was equally full of sarcasm.  “And do they not also refer to them as the
Northern
Lights?”