Protecting Our Home: EMP Survival in a Powerless World by Colton Lively

Author:Colton Lively [Lively, Colton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-21T05:00:00+00:00

23

The Russell Homestead

D-Day + 2 (7:50 pm, Day Two)

After eating, their parents ran out of steam and left Emma and Jacob to meet the rest of the group. The sense of freedom was welcome and put them both in their best mood for days.

“You’ve been here for a whole year?” asked Emma, incredulous.

“Some people have been here longer,” explained Maddy. “They just find camp life works for them and that they like working for the place. It’s a one-in-a-thousand thing, but I guess we keep getting visited or contacted by one-in-a-thousand people.”

They were clustered around one edge of the fire pit, staying upwind from the smoke in a slightly cool evening breeze. “Don’t people go crazy here?” asked Jacob. “Lose their minds because they can’t contact the outside?”

“Normally,” said Maddy’s younger sister Penny, who was a year older than Emma, “we have a bit of cellphone reception and a TV signal. Papa Cabot lets us use the internet for an hour in the evenings, so we’re not exactly cut off from the world.”

“Only an hour?” breathed Jacob, stunned that they could accept such strictures.

“And once our month’s bandwidth is spent, it’s spent.” It was a system that fostered a sense of collective responsibility among the younger members of the community, just as Cabot had hoped.

“That sounds like it would suck,” said Emma, who had never faced such limitations.

“Not as much as running our generator all the time,” said Maddy. “The noise is a bummer. The limit just means we spend our internet time reading instead of playing videos.”

“But… how do you keep tabs on what’s going on?” asked Emma.

“We gradually decided we didn’t really need to,” said Penny. “I mean, how many cat videos can one person watch?”

“All of them?” said Emma, still incredulous.

“And isn’t the news basically the same, every day?” said Maddy.

Penny immediately began her impersonation of a newscaster. “In Washington, D.C., today, the president compromised his principles and betrayed the republic by handing over control to rich, influential business leaders…”

“While the supreme court decided that it couldn’t decide…” Maddy chimed in.

“… and the US Army said it needed to send billions of dollars to some failed state, just to replace all the roads and bridges that we spent billions of dollars destroying …”

“We actually used to play a game, back when the internet was working,” said Maddy, “called ‘guess the headlines.’ We got pretty good at it.”

“So, no FOMO for you guys,” said Emma.

“Nope. Just fear of being bored yet again by the same endless crap,” said Penny. “Out there, every day is the same, and we have no control at all. Here, every day is different, and what happens depends entirely on us. You see the attraction?”

“Sure,” said Jacob. “But you must miss seeing new people all the time.”

“It makes us more thankful for the ones we have,” said Penny, glancing over at Charlie, Max, and Bryce, who couldn’t get their hands on beers yet, and so were horsing around on the far edge of the firepit.

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