Richard Cox - House of the Rising Sun

He stumbled to the door and lurched inside. All the lights were off, which seemed to confirm no one had come to stop him. The master bedroom was the first door on his right. In the bathroom he spotted Natalie’s bottle of Ambien and leered at the scores of pills he discovered. Surely, if he ate the whole bottle and washed it down with the rest of the whiskey, he’d go to sleep and never wake up. All he wanted was to sleep, to be released from his guilt. He stumbled back to the garage, bouncing through the doorway and choking on an invisible cloud of exhaust. He found the whiskey bottle in the car. Was there enough time? The last thing he wanted was for Natalie to show up while he was waiting for the overdose to take effect. Maybe he could drive away. He pushed the ignition button. Nothing happened. He pushed the button again with the same empty result.

Something was wrong with the car. How much time did he have? He grabbed his phone and pushed the button to activate it.

Nothing happened.

Seth stared at the phone. Pushed the button again.

Nothing happened.

How impotent it felt to be rejected by a button! Pushing a button was surely the simplest act a human could perform and expect an action in return. To be refused by a button was to understand your place in the grand hierarchy, which was beneath the world of objects, which was all the way down, all the way to the bottom.

For a moment Seth sat there, pressing the button over and over, staring at the dark display. Finally he stepped out of the car and looked at the pathetic mess on the floor. He couldn’t even kill himself without screwing up. All he wanted was to be gone from this world and even that was outside his reach.

Seth grabbed the whiskey and marched back into the house. He slammed the bottle on the counter and set the Ambien next to it. He looked at the clock on the microwave, but where there should have been bluish green digits, there was only darkness. For that matter, the oven clock was also out.

“ Oh my God you have got to be kidding me!” he screamed at the dead clocks, at the empty kitchen.

He trudged into the bedroom and looked at the alarm clock. This, too, was dark. He went into the study and found the computer still and quiet as a mouse. Clearly the power was out. But how? It was impossible to imagine an event that could shut off the electricity and shut off his car and fry his phone. So maybe he had died after all. Maybe death was a world robbed of power. Maybe the afterlife was what you made of such a world.

Seth staggered toward the living room and looked out the front windows. A small crowd was gathered around a car stopped in the middle of the street. The hood of the car had been raised, but no one was working on it. Instead, everyone was looking into the eastern sky. One of them was pointing at the sky.

What could it be? Had aliens landed? He couldn’t imagine anything else able to generate such a widespread outage. For some reason all he could think of was aliens.

Instead of going out front, where someone might invite him to talk, Seth headed for the back door. He stepped outside, into the lawn, where he could get a clear view of the eastern sky. And that’s when he saw it.

There was a star up there, or what looked like a star, burning brightly. As far as Seth knew, the only heavenly objects visible during the day were the Sun and the Moon, so this new star had violated the normal order of things. It hovered below the sun, maybe fifteen degrees, and though it didn’t look like much, it was unquestionably the author of a major event. The star’s appearance and the power failures could not be a coincidence. Something had happened, something serious.

Seth looked around the sky, wondering if more of these objects were up there, and to the west he discovered a black plume of smoke billowing upward. The smoke was several miles away. The dark cloud rose to such a great height it looked almost like a tornado.

Eventually Seth stopped looking at the sky and walked back through the house again. When he reached the garage, the smell of exhaust was like a wall, and without thinking he pushed the button to open the overhead door. But nothing happened because the power was out. He went to the car and sat down and pushed the ignition button.

Still nothing.

No power in the house, no power in his phone, no power in his car.

The strangeness of all this pointed to aliens, but the object in the sky looked like a star. Only how could a star suck the energy out of everything? Without power, there was no television, no Internet, no way to research the answer. And since his car wouldn’t start, he couldn’t even drive somewhere to find out.

For the first time he wondered just how widespread the event was. Was the power out across the city? The state? What if Thomas hadn’t disconnected their call? What if he was staring at his own phone, wondering what happened? What if he was never able to call Natalie? If that was true, Seth’s suicide attempt became non-existent, in a way, at least until the power returned. Because right now the only other people who knew about it were more than two hundred miles away.

And what if the power stayed off for a while? A catastrophic event from the heavens didn’t seem like the sort of thing that would be easily reversed. A world of crisis, where electricity didn’t flow and cars didn’t run, was the kind of world where Seth might thrive. The idea of supporting and protecting his family instead of forever failing them was intoxicating. Enchanting.

It seemed impossible after all his praying and wishing that a bolt from the heavens had finally arrived. Yet here he was, standing in the garage where he had tried to kill himself, and possibly the only reason he hadn’t succeeded was because of an event that with no exaggeration could be described as apocalyptic.

With a mounting sense of optimism, he grabbed a bucket from the kitchen, filled it with soap and water, and returned to the garage. He used a mechanical release to free the overhead door from its electric-powered chain and raised it to clear out the foul-smelling air. His hot water heater and stove were both powered by gas, which meant even if the electricity didn’t come back on today, or tomorrow, they would be able to bathe and prepare food. And speaking of food, maybe he could stop by the grocery store and pick up some essentials, especially dry goods, because an event like this was sure to bring out the hoarders.

When everything was clean, he wrote a note to Natalie explaining where he’d gone. Normally he would be at work at this time of day, so he invented a story about coming home sick (which wasn’t much of a stretch when you thought about it). He’d retrieve Ben and Brandon from daycare and then hit the store, and if Natalie wasn’t home by then they would set out looking for her.

As long as the power stayed off, nothing was going to be easy. But anything was easier than living another day as a fraud. As a failure to his family.

Maybe this was the apocalypse. Maybe it was the end of everything.

Or maybe, possibly, the heavens had handed him a new beginning.

Skylar couldn’t stop watching the side mirror, couldn’t stop turning around to look at the disaster behind them. The smoke was black and dense and rose above the horizon like a mountain range. It made her think of that terrible morning in 2001 when the Manhattan skyline had turned apocalyptic, how she’d been sure the whole world was coming to an end. But the world hadn’t ended after 9/11. It had instead become gripped by fear and tribalism and absurdity. Divisive cable media coverage widened narrow political differences into canyons impossible to traverse, and for what? To sell bad products and even worse ideas? To separate unassuming people from their hard-won dollars?