William Forstchen: One Second After

The silence was interrupted by a throaty growl as Grandma Jen came up l he driveway in her monster, the Edsel.

She pulled in beside his Talon, got out, and walked up.

“Damnedest thing,” she announced. “Power’s out up at the nursing home. And you should see the interstate, cars just sitting all over the place, not moving.”

“The power at the nursing home?” John asked. “What about the backup generator? That’s supposed to automatically kick in.”

“Well, the lights went out in the nursing home. I mean completely out.”

“They’re supposed to have emergency generation. That’s required,” John said.

“Never kicked on. Someone said there must be a broken relay and they’d get an electrician in. But still, it’s a worry. They had to shift patients on oxygen to bottled air, since the pumps in each room shut off. Tyler’s feeding tube pump shut off as well.”

“Is he all right?”

“He was nearly done with the feeding anyhow, so no bother. They said he’d be ok. So I go out to the parking lot and all the five o’clock shift of nurses and staff were out there, all of them turning keys, and nothing starting… but that old baby, the one you call the monster, just purred to life. Had to be here for my little girl, and that monster, as you call it, worked as it always has.”

She nodded back proudly to her Edsel.

“Can we go for a ride and see everything, Grandma?” Jennifer asked.

“What about your party?” John asked.

“No one else showed up,” Jennifer said sadly.

Grandma Jen leaned over and kissed her on the top of the head.

“Lord’s sake, child, you’re a mess.”

“They were up playing in the field.”

“And wearing your necklace when doing that?” Jen asked, horrified.

John grimaced and realized he should have made sure Jennifer had taken it off before running around with the dogs. If she had lost it or it got broken in the roughhousing with the dogs, there’d have been hell to pay.

“A burger, Jen?” he asked quickly to distract her.

She shook her head.

“Not hungry.”

“At least some cake.”

“Ok.”

He went back into the kitchen and lit the twelve candles on the cake, a special one of course, no sugar, and brought it out singing “Happy Birthday,” Pat and Jen joining in.

The other gifts were now opened, a card from Bob and Barbara Scales with a gift certificate for a hundred bucks for Amazon, the Beanies he had carried over from the wall and lined up on the table. Jennifer tucked Patriot Bear under her arm and opened the huge envelope, half as big as herself, that John had made up the night before, a collage of photos of Disney

World with a fake “Ticket for Jennifer, Daddy, and, oh yeah, Elizabeth” printed in the middle.

It was indeed a hit and now it was his turn to say, “Hey, don’t squeeze so hard; you’ll break my neck.”

Finally it was over, past seven, and Pat started down the hill. Jennifer and the dogs walked her home.

“Guess there’s no Roundtable meeting tonight,” John said, looking back towards town, as Jen helped him load up the dishwasher, even though they couldn’t turn it on.

“What do you think is going on?” Jen asked, and he could hear a touch of nervousness in her voice.

“What do you mean?”

“John, it kind of reminds me of nine-eleven. The silence. But we still had electricity then; we could see the news. All those cars stalled.”

He didn’t say anything. There was a thought, but it was too disturbing to contemplate right now. He wanted to believe that it was just a weird combination of coincidences, a power failure that might be regional, and would ground most flights due to air traffic control. Maybe it was some sort of severe solar storm, potent enough to trigger a massive short circuit; a similar event had happened up in Canada several years ago.

A thought hit him.

“Your monster, let’s go turn it on.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

They went out to the car, John slid into the passenger seat, and she turned the key over, and the car instantly roared to life. The sound, even after but a couple of hours of silence, was reassuring.

He turned on the radio. It really was one of the old ones. With dials to turn, no buttons to push, the slightly yellowed face even had the two small triangles on them marking the frequency of the old Civil Defense broadcast frequencies.

Static, nothing but static from one end of the dial to the other. It was getting towards twilight, usually the time the FCC had most AM stations power down, but the big ones, the ones with enough bucks to pay for the license, should be powering up now to fifty thousand watts, and reaching halfway across the country if the atmospherics were right.

He could remember as a kid making the long drive from Jersey down to

Duke in his old battered 1969 Bug, killing the time by slowly turning the dial, picking up WGN in Chicago—that strange country and western station out of Wheeling, so alien sounding with its laments about pickup trucks and women—and throughout the night, if the atmospherics were just right, WOR out of New York, catching his favorite, Jean Shepherd, in the middle of the night.

Now it was just silence.

“You look worried, Colonel.”

He looked over at her. The way she said “Colonel.”

“Could be nothing. Might be one helluva solar storm, that’s all.”

That seemed to scare her and she looked to the western horizon to where the sun was now low, hanging over the Smokies.

“It isn’t blowing up or something, is it?”

He laughed.

“My dear mother-in-law. If it had blown up, would we still be seeing it?”

A bit embarrassed, she shook her head.

“Major storm on the sun’s surface will send out heavy bursts of various radiations. That’s what triggers the northern lights.”

“Never seen them.”

“Well, you’re not a Yankee, that’s why. Sometimes the storm is so intense it sets off an electrical discharge in the atmosphere that short-circuits electronic equipment.”

“But the cars?”

“Most cars today are loaded with computers. It might explain why yours keeps running and others stopped.”

“People should have kept those old Fords,” she said with a nervous smile.

“Let’s do this, though,” he said quietly. “I’m worried about Elizabeth; let’s drive downtown, see if we can spot her.”

“Fine with me.”

She shifted the car into gear. At the bottom of the driveway he caught sight of Jennifer, shouted for her to pile in, and she ran over, delighted, climbing over her father and sitting between the two of them. That’s the way it used to be forty years ago, he realized. Mom and Dad out for a drive, the kid between them, no bucket seats yet, except in sports cars, Junior not locked up in the back and, of course, belted in.

John just hoped Tom Barker, the town’s chief of police, didn’t spot them. Although John was now a well-confirmed local, Barker might just lay a ticket on them if in a foul mood.

They arrived to the bottom of the hill and Old 70 was empty except for a couple of abandoned cars by the side of the road. But out on the interstate there was indeed a “bunch of cars” as Jennifer had described it. Vehicles on the shoulders, some stalled right in the lanes. Not a traffic jam though, just as if everyone had shut their engines off at the same time and drifted to a stop. Nearly all the passengers were out, some looking over towards them as the Edsel pulled out onto 70 and headed towards town, driving parallel to the interstate.

“There’s Elizabeth!” Jennifer cried, pointing down the road.

Sure enough, it was her, walking with that damn Johnson kid, his arm around her waist… not actually her waist but down lower, nearly resting on her backside. At the sight of the approaching Edsel, Ben quickly jerked his hand away. Jen pulled over to the side of the road and John got out.