SBC Ellsworth Ebook by Ellsworth Elizabeth

Author:Ellsworth, Elizabeth [Ellsworth, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dragon Tail Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

day two, aec

JENNIFER AND DAD SLOUCH AGAINST the walls at opposite sides of the kitchen, cradling their respective coffee mugs.

Mark is at the table, chin propped on his fist, poking a screwdriver at the guts of the AM radio he has been trying to fix forever.

Ollie frowns on her cereal, which is only semi-moist now that Jennifer has imposed milk rationing.

Stuart and I are stationed just inside the door where a slash of morning sun blazes through the screen and warms my toes. We’ve just come from our all-nighter at the laptop. When a working satellite flew over and the internet decided to work, whoever was the most awake grabbed fragments of news from the outside world. Now, we are here to deliver the morning edition.

“We emailed the keeper and told him we would pay the guy with the boat to come pick us up now,” Stuart says. “But we’re not sure it actually went. Anyway, there’s no reply yet.”

“Mom didn’t get any of our emails,” I say. “She still doesn’t know where we are. But the message that came at 2 a.m. said she’s still fine, even though the city isn’t. The people she’s with are being brave and calm, but nothing’s working and there’s hardly any food left. She sent the address where she’s helping out at an emergency center. It’s in the Bowery. She’s trying to find a way out of the city so she can come home. She says we’ll have so many stories to tell each other. And that she loves us. Both.”

Dad doesn’t say anything. He steps to the window above the sink and surveys the sunrise.

Stuart takes it from there. “They shut down nuclear power plants in seven states because of region-wide flooding. They say blackouts and brownouts are happening everywhere east of the Mississippi. It must be true, because as soon as an email server comes online, the internet signal to our dish drops. And when our dish finds a working satellite again, it’s the email servers that are out.”

“The last time we downloaded news was 3:00 a.m.,” I say. Then I notice that I’m starving and head for the kitchen table. “Mom had to write a few sentences and hit send before she lost her connection.” I give the three cereal boxes on the table a dull look. “Her email was like a string of one-line telegrams.”

“Which is smart—given the rolling power failures,” Stuart says. “The grid’s not a grid anymore, just a mess of surges and blown transformers. Everybody’s making it worse by trying to get information and check on each other. As of this morning, the news sites reverted to text-only mode. It’s like the old internet—or the first moon shot.”

“The power grid in the eastern half of the country is outdated,” Dad says from his lookout at the window. “They’ve known for years that if something big stressed it—solar flare, cyber-attack, heat waves—the surges would blow transformers the length of the East Coast and deep into the Midwest.

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