Authors: Vannetta Chapman
Ken Walker introduced himself and explained how the radios worked. “We have one for this end and one for the other. You can talk to each other, and anything you say will also be heard at the home base.”
“Frank's house?”
“Yup. We have someone monitoring it at all times. They can be here within two to three minutes if you have any trouble, but you need to call at the first sign that something is up. Don't wait. Also, whoever is manning the home base can contact the local police. Officers are stationed throughout Abney so that someone is relatively close to each neighborhood.”
“Isn't this kind of⦠overkill?”
“Ask Mr. Evans.”
Mrs. P gave Ken a reproving look.
He held up his hands. “There's no use sugarcoating this, Wanda. In case you haven't noticed, we can't dial 9-1-1 anymore. The folks of Abney need to protect themselves.”
And with that grim declaration, he grabbed his water bottle and walked away.
“Don't mind him, young man. Nothing is going to happen today that you, me, Oscar, and the good Lord can't handle.”
Carter was almost afraid to ask. “Oscar?”
Mrs. P patted the shotgun. “My husband gave me this 12 gauge Remington for our twenty-fifth anniversary, and he made sure I knew how to use it.”
“So it's loaded?”
“Certainly. An unloaded gun wouldn't do us any good.”
Carter wasn't sure how to answer that, so he didn't. Maybe Mrs. P wasn't as old as he thought, or maybe old people were tougher than he had
imagined. She hopped up onto the bed of the pickup truck and sat down in one of the lawn chairs Ken had positioned there.
Patting the seat next to her, she said, “Join me. I suspect your distance eyesight is a bit better than mine.”
Carter shrugged and scrambled up into the truck. From there he could make out what must be the other roadblock at the far end of their two-block perimeter. Was he actually standing guard in the bed of a pickup truck, beside an old woman with a loaded shotgun?
“Why don't you tell me what you've been doing since the sun started to create havoc with our atmosphere?”
Though he hadn't wanted to talk about it, he found that Mrs. P was a good listener. She would stop him occasionally to ask questionsâsuch as, what sort of expression the man who pulled the gun at the grocery store wore.
“Sad, I guess. Kind of⦠defeated.”
“You know, Carter⦔ She hesitated, and then she smiled at him. “This thing we're living through, it's a real shock. Some people will respond to it better than others. But your circumstances shouldn't shape your attitudes. Your attitude actually shapes your circumstances.”
Carter wasn't exactly sure what she meant, but he liked the sound of it. Maybe the things they were doing and the way they were doing them would make a difference after all.
Their two-hour shift passed quickly and without incident, unless you counted an old tabby cat crossing the intersection. Though they'd seen no one, the team on the other end had called in both times a suspicious car had passed them.
“Casing our neighborhood, no doubt.” Mrs. P patted Oscar. “They won't get past us.”
It occurred to Carter that if he were a burglar, he wouldn't want to confront Wanda Plumley. The woman was fearless, or at least that was how she seemed to Carter. Maybe she was old enough to have seen it all already. That is, except for this. It had never happened before. It was what his history teacher would call a historic event.
Mrs. P said she'd see him the next afternoon, and Carter shuffled back homeâsore from the hours he'd spent digging, followed by the two hours sitting tensely in the truck bed. He'd need to find a way to relax. The muscles in his shoulders felt as if they'd been poised for a fight all day.
His mom wasn't home yetâprobably still working at the nursing home. Carter tried to picture the old folks who lived there.
Were they stuck in their beds, unable to move?
Did they need to be fed?
Who would bathe them, and how?
What would happen when Green Acres ran out of medicine?
And how could his mom help with any of those things?
W
hen he thought of the situation at Green Acres, Carter was glad that his job was as simple as building a latrine and sitting in a truck.
Once he got home, he grabbed a can of tuna, some crackers, and a vacuum-sealed cheese stick. It was warm, not cold, but surely it hadn't spoiled yet. He took it all to the front porch, where there was at least a faint breeze stirring, and collapsed on the top step. He might have fallen asleep if he hadn't seen Jason riding his skateboard up the walk.
“Dude,” said Jason. “You're dirty and you smell bad.”
Carter was surprised to see his best friend, especially with his skateboard. Jason stood about his height but had gained a good twenty pounds on him their senior year.
“Didn't know you still had that thing.”
“In the back of the closet. Took me a while to remember my best moves.”
“Wasn't aware you ever had any,” Carter teased.
“We both know I could have made it to the X Games with just a little work.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The point is, it's a perfectly acceptable form of transportation during the Drop.”
“The Drop?”
“Sure. The solar flare dropped down, the electrical grid dropped off the map, and any prospect of a normal life for you and me dropped out of sight.” Jason popped up the nose of his skateboard, kicked it into a spin,
and landed back on it, smoothly maneuvering across their front walk in one fluid motion.
“You skate better than you drive,” Carter said. Then a random thought pulsed through his head. “You know what? I miss cell phones.”
“True that.” Jason popped the skateboard again, a smile playing across his face. “I wanted to text you earlier when my little sister was driving me batty, but I couldn't. I had to deal with her instead. That's my mom's favorite new sayingâ
deal with it
.”
“Yeah, but⦠I miss video games.”
“And music. I have some on my phone, but I'm afraid to use what little juice is left in it.”
“Television reruns.”
“Air-conditioning.”
“Microwave popcorn.”
“Cold sodas.”
“Facebook.”
“Dude. You hate Facebook.”
“Yeah, I did.” Carter glanced over at his carâsomething he'd made fun of when his mom wasn't around. He understood it was the best car she could afford for him, and he appreciated it, but⦠well, it was a real joke. A Buick sedan that had been seriously used and abused. The hood was a different color from the body and the air-conditioning didn't work. Stillâ¦
“I miss driving.”
Jason stopped messing around on his skateboard and dropped down beside him.
“Want some tuna?”
“Nah,” said Jason. “My mom pushed all the defrosted freezer leftovers on us before they ruined. I'm stuffed. Though I could go for a burger and fries in a major way.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. “Why aren't you helping to dig down to the bedrock of Abney?”
“One person per familyâI worked the first few hours, and my pop took over the afternoon shift.”
“There has to be a way we can fix this.”
“The world?”
Carter shrugged. “Maybe not that, but we're the next generation, the millennials.”
“Correct, dude. We're the last of Generation Y.”
“That all sounded so stupid when the speaker came to our school.” Carter finished his cheese stick and stuck the wrapper in the empty can of tuna. “What was his name?”
“Motivational speaker⦠dude was in a wheelchair⦔ Jason snapped his fingers. “He reminded me of Stephen Hawking.”
“His name was Raymond.”
“Raymond's World.”
“He said that millennialsâ”
“Which we are.”
“Have the ability to adapt better than any generation before itâthat we've seen more change in our lifetime than our parents or grandparents combined.”
“We certainly have a major change to adapt to now.”
“The Drop.”
One thing Carter appreciated about Jason was that he allowed a person to randomly think. At the moment something big was whirring inside Carter's brain. “We should be able to think our way past this.”
“Got any specific ideas?”
“No. I'm coming up blank.”
“How about we start by getting the Brainiacs back together?”
“Let's not do anything drastic.” There were things about the Brainiac Club Carter had enjoyedânot that he thought of himself as a brainiac, but he fit in better there than he had with the sports crowd. It had filled a void throughout his freshman and sophomore years. The last two years had been too busy, what with work and college prep. Now the days spent in a lab designing outlandish experiments seemed like a thing from his childhood.
“We swore off that two years ago,” Carter reminded Jason.
“Because it was seriously affecting any chances we had with the girls, not to mention that little fire we started in Coach's lab.”
“Then Coach Parish missed a semester because his wife got sick.”
“And he couldn't sponsor us anymore.”
Coach Parish's wife had died not too long after that, but the old guy
had looked so sad, so utterly bereaved, that no one had the heart to bring up reconvening the group of geeks. Now, though, he might be ready to see some of his old students. What else was he doing all day? Digging a latrine?
“Might be a good idea,” Carter admitted. “I guess it couldn't hurt.”
“Let's do it.” Jason jumped up and mounted the skateboard again.
“First we need to contact Coach, and then somehow find the other members of the Brainiacs.”
“Zane and Quincy live near me.”
“Maybe I'll ask Kaitlyn.” When Jason gave him a look, Carter shrugged it off. “I'll see her at work tomorrow, not that there's much left at the store to sell.”
“Wanna meet at the school at four?”
Carter had latrine digging in the morning, his shift at the Market from ten to two, and patrol at four. He'd thought their new life would be boring⦠he'd even pictured himself lying on his bed and bouncing a tennis ball off the ceiling. At the moment, he was too tired to throw a ball.
“Two thirty works better for me.”
“That will work too.”
“How do we get in contact with Coach Parish?”
“He lives over by my gran. I saw him once when he was out walking a little dog. I'll stop by and ask.”
“Once we're together, maybe we can think outside the grid.”
“Ten four.” Jason held up his hand for a high five.
Carter slapped his palm against his friend's. It was juvenileâsomething they'd stopped doing in grade school. As Jason skated off, Carter realized he didn't mind juvenile things so much. Being an adult? It wasn't panning out like he'd hoped.
S
helby came home to a can of tuna on the front porch, the neighbor's cat licking hungrily at what little was left, and Carter sound asleep in his bed. A little odd for eight in the evening. A few minutes later Bianca came over to talk.
“Carter worked on the digging?” she asked.
“For a few hours, before his stint on the neighborhood watch groupâwhich I'm not happy about.”
“We didn't realize we had the perfect life, did we?”
“I don't know how perfect it was, but it certainly was more manageable than this.”
They moved to the back porch, which was barely big enough to hold two lawn chairs. Shelby peeked at the sky, relieved to see no sign of the aurora. She didn't want to sit in the front where she would be forced to watch the street. She didn't want to think of Mr. Evans or the blockades set up at both ends of their block. She wanted to pretend, if just for a few moments, that life was as it used to be.
“Tell me about your shift at Green Acres.”
Shelby paused, wondering if she should share all that she had seen. But this was Biancaâher closest friend besides Max. The four of them, when you included Patrick, made up the ragged support network that had seen her through the last fourteen years, ever since Alex had died and she'd become a single mom.
In a way, Shelby had already been a single mom even before Alex's death. His drug addiction had destroyed any semblance of a normal life.
While her parents had been alive, they had been incredibly supportive. After Alex died, her dad was always bringing up the names of eligible bachelorsâhinting that she should give love a try one more time.