Prologue #2
His chest did something complicated.
"Go through the chest freezer," he said. "Everything in it, on paper, by category. Then find every candle and every lamp in this house and put them on the dining table."
"Every one?"
"Every one."
She went.
Zachary came down twenty minutes later, dragging Mack by the collar in a way the dog tolerated with enormous patience, and asked whether they were still doing the fishing trip on Saturday.
Joe crouched down.
"Maybe," he said. "There's a storm coming. Not rain. A different kind."
"What kind."
"The kind that breaks electricity."
Zachary's eyes went wide, and then, because he was nine and because he had spent his whole life watching his father prepare for exactly this, they went wide in an entirely different way.
"Like the box?" he said. "Like the box you built?"
"Like the box I built."
"So the box works now?"
Joe found that he was smiling, which he had not expected.
"The box works now," he said.
The day went the way good days go, which is to say fast and hard and without much talking.
Joe ran the well pump until every container in the house held water, and then he hiked up to the spring house and checked the intake screen and cleared two handfuls of pine needles out of it and confirmed that the gravity line would flow with zero electricity involved, which it did,
because he had built it that way on purpose and had checked it eleven times before and would check it again tomorrow.
He pulled the batteries out of the solar bank's control circuit and disconnected the array at the roof and grounded both ends.
He wrapped the truck's spare ECM in foil and put it in the box with everything else. The truck itself was a 1978 diesel with a mechanical injection pump and no computer anywhere in it, which had cost him eleven thousand dollars and every ounce of patience he possessed.
He walked the fence line. He counted the chickens. He moved the goats down to the lower pen where the water was.
At two in the afternoon he stood in the open door of the shed with a clipboard and could not think of a single thing left undone, and the feeling was so unfamiliar that it made him uneasy.
Imogen found him there.
"You've done it," she said.
"I've done what I could think of."
"That's the same thing, Joe. That's the only version of it that exists."
He put the clipboard down.
"I keep waiting to feel ready," he said.
She took his hand.
"You don't get ready," she said. "You just get supplied."
They ate early. Steaks out of the freezer, the good ones, because there was no longer any point in saving them.
Hazel ate three. Zachary fed Mack half of his under the table and thought nobody saw.
They sat on the porch afterward as the light went blue and then purple over the ridge, and Joe told them, in plain language, what would happen if the thing happened.
He told them the lights would go and stay gone.
He told them the phones would not come back, and neither would the internet, and neither would the cars in the valley below with computers in them, which was nearly all of them.
He told them there were about thirty two thousand people in the towns down the canyon and that most of them had four days of food in the house and no idea that they did.
He told them, carefully, that people would come up the road eventually. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But eventually.
Zachary asked if they were bad people.
"No," Joe said. "Most of them will just be hungry. That's a different thing than bad. But hungry people do things, and we have to be smart about it."
Hazel asked the question he had been dreading.
"What about Grandma."
Joe looked out at the darkening timber.
His mother was seventy eight years old and living in a managed care facility in Henderson, Nevada, four hundred and ten miles away, on an oxygen concentrator that plugged into the wall.
"I don't know," he said.
Hazel did not push it. That was almost worse.
Imogen put the kids to bed at nine. Joe heard her voice through the floor, low and even, reading something.
He sat at the desk with the shortwave and turned the volume down to a whisper.
The bands were a mess. Whole sections of the dial had gone strange, crowded, sounding like the inside of a seashell.
At 10:41 he found a ham operator somewhere out east who was talking to somebody in Alberta about lights in the sky.
They were seeing aurora in Kansas. In Tennessee. Somebody in Alabama was reporting a green glow on the northern horizon that was bright enough to read by.
At 10:58, the man in Alberta stopped mid sentence.
The carrier stayed up for about four seconds. Then it dropped.
Joe waited. He worked the dial. He came back.
Nothing on that frequency. Nothing above it. Nothing below.
He looked at the clock.
Eleven o'clock, give or take. Eight hours earlier than the polite estimate.
Joe stood up so fast the chair went over backward.
He got to the breaker panel in the mudroom in nine steps and threw the main, and the small green glow of the inverter status light died, and the house went to absolute black, and Mack started barking in the front room.
"Imogen," he called. "Now."
He heard her feet hit the floor upstairs.
He heard Hazel say something, muffled.
He was reaching for the flashlight on the shelf when the window over the sink lit up.
Not with lightning.
The whole sky did it at once. Green, then a violent red he had never seen on anything natural in his life, pouring down the north face of the mountain and turning the timber into a photograph of itself.
It was silent. That was the part he was not ready for.
He had imagined thunder. There was no thunder.
There was just a soundless, enormous brightness that made the shadows of the porch rails stretch across the kitchen floor like bars.
Joe stood in the middle of his kitchen and watched the light of it move on the wall.
Somewhere below them, down the canyon, in the valley where thirty two thousand people were asleep with their phones charging on their nightstands, a faint orange pulse flared once and did not go out.
Substation, he thought. That's a substation.
The red in the sky brightened.
Imogen came down the stairs with Zachary on her hip and Hazel gripping the back of her shirt, and she stopped on the last step and looked out the window and said nothing at all.
Mack stopped barking.
The dog went completely rigid at the front door, head low, ears forward, a sound coming out of his chest that Joe had never heard him make in four years.
He was not looking at the sky.
He was looking down the driveway.
Joe crossed the room and put his face to the glass beside the door and looked out into that impossible red light.
Two hundred yards down, where the gravel came through the gate he had closed and chained at four o'clock that afternoon, headlights were coming up the hill.