Honey Grove, Texas, United States

July 14, 2024 | 11:26 AM | 76 degrees

2 days after The Blink

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Howell stormed in through the front door of the farmhouse as soon as the knob turned, his face somewhere between red and purple.

Dr. Rivera let go of the door and stepped out of his way. “Oh, Mayor, nice to see you, too. Please, come in.”

Howell spun toward her, lip twitching. “Don’t. Do you have any idea what you’ve done? What both of you have done?” He directed this last part at Ryan, who was seated at the dining room table staring down at his glass of tea.

“Don’t forget about me,” Carlos said, emerging from the kitchen with a steaming bowl of leftover spaghetti. “Kit had a lot of fancy science talk, but I think I had a few good quotes too.”

“This isn’t a game,” Howell shouted. “Do you know how many people have come up to me and demanded I designate the high school as an emergency shelter? They’re ready to break down the doors themselves if I don’t do something! All because of yesterday’s article—your article!” He shook his head in disbelief. “The library has even started making copies.”

Rivera raised her eyebrows. “Wow. Looks like we might have a regular Pulitzer sitting at our table.”

Ryan shrank down and tried to disappear behind his tea as Howell’s face somehow became an even deeper shade of purple.

His voice became dangerously low. “People are panicking.”

“The world is panicking,” Rivera said, crossing her arms. “Most of it because no one knows what the hell is happening. You lying and saying there’s nothing to worry about isn’t going to help anyone survive what’s coming, and it is coming. I honestly think we need a little fear right now.”

“Have you turned on the news lately?” he shouted. “That’s fear! That’s what happens when you let panic run wild.”

They had watched the news, in fact, a few minutes before Howell showed up banging at the door. More looting, more riots, more lines of soldiers trying to contain situations far beyond their ability to contain.

“I didn’t say we need panic,” Rivera said calmly, “I said we need fear. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“Of course,” she said, as if this were something a first-grader would know. “Fear is a survival mechanism. When people are afraid, they tend to get pretty good at figuring out how to beat whatever threat they’re afraid of. In our case, eternal winter.”

“And when that fear turns into panic?”

Ryan looked up from the table, seeing his chance to redeem himself. “That only happens when people think the threat can’t be beat, when there’s no hope. Or when they think they’re being lied to. We gave them the truth and a plan so they know that yes, this is something to be worried about, but it’s also something we can survive.” He looked at Rivera and Carlos. “We wouldn’t have run an article just to cause panic, the whole point was to avoid a panic.”

Howell massaged the bridge of his nose. The color slowly drained out of his face and his anger melted away with it. “Well, that isn’t working. In addition to someone trying to break into the pharmacy, someone else has started parking lines of cars across the roads by the interstate to stop people coming into town.”

Rivera snorted. “I wonder who could have done that.”

“It wasn’t just Darren,” he said, but Ryan didn’t think Howell himself believed it. “Three of the four main roads into town are already blocked off, each with a half dozen men standing guard. Armed men.” He shook his head. “If just one of those idiots accidentally fires off a round we’ll have a bloodbath on our hands.”

“You’re not wrong there,” Rivera said, “but you can’t blame us for that. Darren was talking about making a perimeter at that first meeting, way before the article went to print. And he had a lot of people standing behind him then.”

Howell sighed and sat down at the table. He looked exhausted. “I know. I know. I hate to admit it, but I think you’re right. About all of this. I’m not saying what you did was right. I still think that article was extremely irresponsible and dangerous, but if the Sun really is . . . if it doesn’t . . . .”

“If it doesn’t come back up,” Rivera finished for him, “we have to be ready for a very long night.”

The mayor nodded. His cheeks flushed again, but this time not out of anger. “How—How do we do that? What needs to be done?”

---

Ryan carried an armload of firewood to the back patio of the farmhouse, where a stack of forty or so similar wedges were already neatly stacked along the wall. He added three more to the top and returned to the backyard. Carlos had finished cutting one of the hickory trees along the edge of the property into dozens of smaller logs lined up among the broken branches. As Ryan approached, he once again started up a gas-powered wood splitter that coughed and sputtered to life in the darkness, then rolled a cylinder of wood beneath the machine’s wedge-like cutter.

They worked for nearly four hours, Carlos operating the splitter and Ryan rolling the sections of logs up to it and lining up the centerpoint with the descending cutter until he had more manageable pieces. Then Ryan would toss the smaller wedges of firewood into a pile and they’d start the whole process over. It didn’t take long for his back and hands to start aching, the ends of his fingers blistered and throbbing from the half dozen times he’d smashed them between pieces of wood.

Carlos finally killed the engine and sat on one of the last remaining logs. Silence cautiously crept back into the yard like a frightened animal. “That’s one down.”

Ryan wiped his brow and looked at the treeline. “Ninety-nine more to go.” He tried to sit down on the ground but ended up on his back staring up at the stars, his body too weak from the exertion to keep him upright. When was the last time he’d actually done any kind of physical labor? The last time he’d had to rely on muscles and force, both of which he now realized he was severely lacking in, to accomplish a task? It had to have been at least five years, probably more. There wasn’t much demand for students of journalism to turn trees into firewood.

“I wonder how it’s going at the school,” Carlos said. He laughed to himself. “Wonder if Kit’s strangled the mayor yet or if he’s doing what she says.”

Ryan gave a small laugh that made his abs painfully tighten. He would definitely be sleeping good tonight.

Howell and Rivera had gone to see if the town’s schools would be a good emergency shelter for the community. Out of all of the buildings in Honey Grove, the schools were the best candidates with regards to space. Rivera, with her understanding of heat and insulation, would determine what needed to be done to insulate the schools against the coming cold, and Howell would make sure what needed to be done actually got done. The mayor was clearly not used to asking for advice from others, especially not from a woman who had worked her whole life in university classrooms and laboratories, but to all of their surprise he seemed to be doing his best to overcome that. Hopefully, the two were putting their heads together to make the place livable.

For several moments Carlos and Ryan were quiet, both looking up at the constellations as if expecting to see some words of guidance written in them.

“It’s weird,” Ryan said after a minute. “I’ve never seen the night sky look darker than it is right now, but I don’t think it’s ever looked brighter, either.”

Carlos nodded, eyes moving across the sea of stars. “End of the world or not, it sure is beautiful.” Another moment passed, then he asked, “Were you able to get ahold of your family?”

“No.” Ryan had called both his parents’ cellphones the night before but neither had picked up. He left voicemails, sent texts, even sent an email, but there was no response. His parents didn’t use social media, he didn’t know the numbers of any of their nearby friends, and the other relatives he’d gotten through to couldn’t get an answer from his parents either, so Ryan wasn’t sure what else he could do short of hitchhiking his way to Jacksonville.

“I’m sure they’re alright,” Carlos said. “Probably stuck cutting trees down in the yard like us.”

Ryan didn’t say anything, but he knew that wasn’t true. His parents lived in a gated community inhabited solely by senior citizens. They were in their sixties themselves, his mom a retired school teacher and his dad still working as a cook at a local diner. They weren’t physical laborers. Whatever they were doing to prepare for the cold, if they were even aware the cold was coming, they would have to rely on the help of others in their community to get anything done. Ryan just wished he knew how they were doing.

“I think we’ve worked enough for tonight,” Carlos said, standing up and stretching. He yawned and glanced at his watch. “Or today, seeing as it’s only 7 o’clock.”

Ryan pulled himself up from the ground and fought back his own yawn. “Feels more like midnight.” He was already running on fumes; he and Rivera had left the farmhouse earlier that morning to collect his things from home, or what was left of them.

When they had arrived at his house, wrecked Toyota still jammed into the wall of his bedroom, the first thing Ryan had noticed was the front door wide open, doorframe splintered near the lock. He rushed in using his phone as a flashlight, fully expecting the worst, but fortunately most of his personal things were still there. All the essentials were gone, though. Every scrap of food, some of his clothes, and everything that had been in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Even his toothpaste was missing.

Rivera had helped him pack up the things he wanted to keep, including a handful of books, a trash bag full of clothes, some empty notebooks and new pens, and a pocket knife his dad bought him a few Christmases ago. Everything Ryan now owned fit in the small back seat of a Prius.

As they drove back down the street, Ryan spotted a group of men loading bags of things into the bed of a pickup truck parked outside a house. They had broken down the door, and from the light of a streetlamp he could see they were armed.

Rivera shook her head, grip tightening on the wheel as they drove past. “Hypocrites. I guarantee those same men were grabbing for their guns when the news showed grocery stores looted in Dallas. Funny how fast a person can change their tune.”

A sharp whistle jerked Ryan back to the present. Carlos lowered his hand from his mouth and kept his flashlight trained on the trees, and a moment later Beasley emerged from the underbrush with a stick clamped between her teeth. She padded across the yard toward them and dropped the piece of wood at Carlos’ feet, tail wagging. He shook his head and scratched her ears. “You’re not entirely useless, I guess.”

The three made their way back to the farmhouse with the last few pieces of firewood. Carlos showed Ryan how to whistle with his finger and thumb as they walked, a trick he struggled with but eventually got to work, the two of them whistling back and forth while Beasley tilted her head between them in confusion.

Carlos stopped by his Jeep and checked the weather station mounted on the back before they went inside. The temperature had fallen to 72, but he was more concerned about the reading on the barometer. “Pressure’s dropping.”

“What’s that mean?”

He scratched his chin. “A storm’s on the way, usually. Who knows, though. The wind’s blowing in from the north and heading south, which is odd. Most storms move west to east here. Hard to say what having no Sun is going to do to the wind and weather.”

Beasley abruptly turned to face the driveway, ears pricked up and body rigid. A few seconds later, headlights burst through the trees and Rivera’s Prius came rattling down over the gravels. Tail wagging, the dog bounded toward her and barked until the car came to a stop and the engine cut off.

Rivera stepped out of the car, gave Beasley her expected pats, and looked up at Carlos and Ryan standing by the Jeep. “What is it?”

“Storm,” Carlos said idly, not looking away from the various gauges and readouts.

“Of course,” she said with an extra dose of her usual sarcasm. “Why wouldn’t there be.”

“Howell still alive?”

“For the time being.”

“And the school?”

She was silent for a moment, then a smile spread across her face. “I think it might work.”

---

Inside, Rivera produced a small notepad covered in writing from her bag and set it on the dining room table. “There’s a lot that needs to be done, but Howell is on board with using the place as a shelter. He’s going to make an announcement at tomorrow’s meeting, so we shouldn’t have to worry about finding the manpower to get started. The main problem is going to be resources.”

“Grant should have anything we need,” Carlos suggested.

“True, but he locked up his store yesterday and hasn’t opened it since. And from what Ryan and I saw earlier today, we need to move fast if we want to make sure those supplies go to the right place. Howell’s going to talk to Grant and get him to open the hardware store for you in the morning, so you and Ryan can go do some shopping and meet me at the school after.” Rivera tore out a page from her notepad and handed it to her husband. “This should be everything we need, at least all I can think of for now. Howell said he would take care of everything else.”

As Carlos scanned over the list, Rivera looked at Ryan. “How are we on firewood?”

“We cut up one tree and got,” he thought for a second, knowing the real number was undoubtedly lower than what his exhausted body was telling him, “probably two hundred pieces or so. Roughly.”

Rivera nodded. “Good. Now, if we could just get everyone in town to cut down one tree a day, we should be set for when we burn through all the gas station tanks.” She paused and shook her head. “Listen to me, literally advocating for the opposite of Earth Day.”

“It’s that or let everyone in town freeze to death,” Carlos said, looking up from the list and offering her a smile. “Climate change ain’t exactly the world’s top priority any more. Or, I guess technically it is, just in the other direction.”

The tension rushed out of Rivera all at once, like she had been running solely on anxious adrenaline that had finally run out. She slouched forward in her chair and rubbed her face with her hands. “This whole plan is based on the idea—the hope—that the Sun will come back at some point in the future. Whether that’s weeks from now or a few months. The schools and generators will keep us alive for that time. But what if it really doesn’t come back?”

Carlos frowned. “Then we keep solving whatever problems come our way until it does.”

“But what if it doesn’t?” she repeated. “We can’t stay above ground if the Sun is gone for good, not once the real cold gets here after a year or two. And once we burn through the gas and all the firewood, what then? We won’t have any fuel or food to live on.”

“What else can we do?” Ryan asked. “It’s not like we have bunkers stocked well enough to keep the town alive forever.” He paused. “We don’t, do we?”

Rivera shook her head. “Town hall has a small fallout shelter but that’ll run into the same longterm problem of fuel. I’m just afraid that all this work won’t matter if we’re going to run out of fuel six months from now.”

“Either way,” Carlos said, reaching out and squeezing her hand, “that will be six months we won’t have if we don’t fix up the schools. Maybe we’ll die before the year is out, but maybe we won’t. All we know for sure is if we don’t try, we’ll die a lot sooner.”

Rivera nodded, but even as she smiled at Carlos she looked almost as tired as Ryan felt. It again occurred to him how completely different the two were, how the worry and negative thoughts that hung over Dr. Rivera like a dark cloud were so easily dispersed by Carlos’ sunny personality, the way her cold and rational way of thinking was somehow able to mesh right into his more straightforward approach to matters. She was the type to overanalyze every possible variable to a problem, while he would rather lace up his boots and get to work on fixing it, what-ifs be damned, and their relationship seemed to thrive this way. They were like a living yin and yang, perfectly opposite and yet perfectly in balance with one another.

Stifling another yawn, Ryan rose from the table and headed for the living room. He wanted to give the two some time to talk without him hovering over them at the table. Despite both their insistence that he wasn’t, Ryan couldn’t help but feel like a burden by living under their roof and constantly invading their privacy as the uninvited third wheel. Stepping into another room wasn’t much, but it was the best he could think to do.

Plus he wanted to watch the latest news updates before turning in for the night. Earlier, there had been a report that several NASA websites hosting updates from Sun-orbiting satellites had gone offline. While the press secretary assured the public that this was simply the website servers failing to handle the massive increase in people visiting the page following The Blink, many were convinced of a government coverup, that the ever elusive “They” had come in and scrubbed the internet of something “They” didn’t want the world to see. Ryan tried to keep an open mind about these kinds of things; conspiracy theories had been found to be true a few times throughout history, after all. But there were dozens of solar telescopes around the world with websites that still worked. It seemed far more likely that it really was a technical issue and not some malicious attempt to coverup the truth.

When Ryan turned the TV on, static hissed and danced across the screen like an electronic snowstorm. Trying his best to ignore the tinfoil hat voice in his head, he flipped to a different channel but got the same result. Another was filled with vertical bars of colors, the words “NO SIGNAL” scrolling at the bottom of the screen while a high pitched tone blared.

The Riveras both appeared at the doorframe. Carlos reached for the remote. “What happened?”

Ryan handed it to him. “I just turned it on.”

“Did you change the input?” He squinted at the remote and pressed a button. The TV went black, he pressed it again, the static returned. “Huh.” He flipped through the channels, but each one showed either static or one of the “NO SIGNAL” messages.

Just technical issues, nothing more.

Ryan swallowed, fear making his palms tingle with sweat. “What’s going on?”

Carlos shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Is it our TV?” Rivera asked. “Is it us or the stations broadcasting?”

“Go see if the radio works,” Carlos said, returning his attention to the TV. He continued flipping through the channels in search of anything still working while Rivera left and returned a few seconds later with a battery powered radio. She switched it on and adjusted the dials.

Static hissed through the speakers. Rivera turned the dial through the whole FM spectrum, but there was only the soft whisper of nothing. A brief burst of crackling music surfaced for a few seconds, but it was quickly dragged back down by static.

Something caught Ryan’s eye through the stained glass of the front door, a flash of movement, maybe headlights coming up the driveway.

Carlos took the radio from his wife and shook it. “This doesn’t make any sense.” He slapped the side of it.

“Okay, well, breaking the radio isn’t gonna make it any better,” Rivera said, taking it back from him.

Ryan walked past them into the dining room and approached the window. He definitely saw something, he was sure of it. Even Beasley had looked up to the window from her napping spot beneath the table, her body tense and alert. He cupped his hands around his eyes and peered through the glass into the front yard. There wasn’t anyone coming up the driveway or anything that looked out of the ordinary, yet Ryan couldn’t shake the feeling that something was . . . wrong. He looked past the flowerbeds and the concrete birdbath, out toward the gravel driveway—

And then he realized what it was. The flowerbeds, the birdbath, all those things had been completely submerged in darkness before. He hadn’t been able to make out any of it, but now he could. In fact, he could see most of the yard. The darkness was somehow brighter.

Heart pounding, Ryan nearly tripped over a dining room chair on his way to the front door. He pulled it open and stepped outside as Dr. Rivera called after him, concerned.

Ryan didn’t stop. He couldn’t see the sky for the porch roof, but the yard was bathed in a dull red, like someone was holding an incubation light over them just out of sight.

Or like the Sun is rising, he thought, not caring that it was 8PM. He flew down the steps three at a time and then looked up.

His breath caught somewhere deep down in his chest.

A swirled cloud of red light wavered uncertainly in the night sky directly above him. Vertical streaks of pink and purple slowly flared through the red, forming curves and bends of vibrant color that dominated the night and shone a dim glow on the world below. In the span of a few seconds, the purple hues had shifted to a light blue trailed by an electric green, all the colors swirling together and crawling across the field of stars.

Ryan wanted to call out for Dr. Rivera and Carlos to come outside and look, but he couldn’t get his mouth to work. He couldn’t get anything to work; it was like his brain had short-circuited at seeing something so unexpectedly beautiful where he’d expected to find darkness. All he could do was stand there and watch as the Northern Lights danced in the sky above him.

Dr. Rivera wasn’t far behind him. She and Carlos ran down the steps and came to an abrupt stop by his side. “Oh my God,” they both whispered at the same time.

“How—” Ryan started to ask something, but realized he didn’t even know what he wanted to ask, so he left the question hanging.

After a few moments of stunned silence, the three of them staring up at a neon sky that seemed to have a life of its own, Carlos eventually cleared his throat. “Guess we can cross that off the bucket list.”

Rivera laughed. “I always thought we’d have to buy a plane ticket to see it.”

“What’s causing it?” Ryan asked. He didn’t know much about the Northern Lights, but he was pretty sure they were supposed to happen in the north. Definitely not the middle of Texas.

“The Sun,” Rivera said quietly. “I think when The Blink happened, the Sun must have released a huge burst of energy—a coronal mass ejection, if you’ve ever heard of that. They happen every now and then, like a solar flare but full of ionized plasma that interacts with our magnetic field when it reaches us a few days after. It can cause the aurora to appear in latitudes closer to the equator, but that’s really rare. The last time anything of this magnitude showed up this far south—” she froze.

Ryan looked down from the sky. “What?”

Rivera’s eyes went wide and she brought her hand up to her mouth. “Oh, God.”

He looked to Carlos and saw understanding cross the man’s face, but he still had no idea what the issue was. Panicked frustration flushed through his body at being the only non-scientist in the group. “What? What happened the last time?”

A sound like a gunshot rang out through the air. Ryan looked toward the trees, toward town, where the distant glow of streetlamps and electricity formed a hazy bubble of light that stood out above the treeline.

Another pop. Then another.

The haze above town grew brighter as if someone were slowly cranking up the power, then a rapid series of pops filled the night with a sound like the finale of a fireworks show, followed by silence.

And then every light in Honey Grove went out.