Honey Grove, Texas, United States

July 15, 2024 | 9:13 AM | 61 degrees

3 days after The Blink

“I honest to God might kill him,” Rivera said, standing next to the Jeep with her arms crossed. 

Carlos frowned. “Okay, well, don’t do that.”

He and Ryan had already brought most of the supplies from Grant’s hardware store into the school—boxes of nails and screws, drills, screw guns, hammers, caulk, rolls of insulation and plastic sheets—but there were still twenty plywood boards that had miraculously survived the trip strapped to the top of the Jeep. The boards were wet with rain, but hopefully wouldn’t take long to dry once inside.

The storm Carlos predicted had rolled in a few hours after the aurora appeared. Explosions of thunder woke Ryan several times in the early hours of morning but the sound of rain pattering against the tin roof lulled him right back to sleep each time. All that remained of the short-lived storm was a misty drizzle and the occasional roll of thunder off in the distance. A vast improvement from the frigid downpour that showered the town while Ryan and Carlos had loaded the Jeep. The storm had affected the temperature fast, dropping it from a comfortable 70 degrees down to a chilly 60 in the span of a few minutes, the raindrops like ice water against the backs of their necks.

Along with the chill, the storm brought with it complete and inescapable darkness. Black clouds robbed the sky of any starlight that might have found its way to the ground, their cottony forms only visible by the flashbulb explosions of purple-white that lit their insides just before a boom of thunder. With no electricity, the bubble of light pollution over town had burst beneath the overwhelming weight of night, dead streetlamps unable to keep the invading darkness at bay any longer. Honey Grove had been plunged to the bottom of the sea, to a place where the murky black of the abyss seeped into every spot that had once known radiance.

Ryan was reluctant to admit this filled him with fear, an indescribable kind of terror that continuously built the longer he was out under that starless sky. It wasn’t a fear of the dark—he refused to accept that as the source of his anxiety—it was more a fear of unseen, of all the imagined things lurking in the dark more than the dark itself. A fear of the unknown. The unknowable. 

Of course, that was just what people who were afraid of the dark said rather than admit to their childish phobia. In the modern world the dark was an irrational fear to have, but knowing that didn’t make it any less terrifying when the lights went out. Ryan hadn’t thought about that panicky feeling of dread in close to fifteen years, but now he remembered exactly what it felt like to be a kid wide-awake in bed after hearing a noise at the window, heart pounding in his chest and every instinct screaming for him to hide. But how did you hide from the dark when it was all that was left? 

The high school had solved this problem. When they pulled into the parking lot the school was already visible. A backup generator powered dim but visible emergency lights that spilled from the building’s windows and fought feebly against the night. Ryan was grateful to see these windows. Carlos, however, was not.

The whole front of Honey Grove High School was more glass than it was brick, an architectural design that provided the school with plenty of natural lighting so long as the Sun existed. Now the windows were nothing more than an escape route for trapped heat. It was immediately clear that they would need a lot more plywood if they wanted to cover every window, but the stack on top of the Jeep was a good start.

Rivera stepped aside as Carlos moved to unstrap the boards. “Everything I do in there is wrong,” she said, running her fingers through her hair as if to comb the aggravation out of her head. “He gives me step by step instructions for every stupid little thing and still tells me I’m doing it the wrong way. I can’t stand it. He’s a micromanaging, sexist, full of shit, wannabe dictator who thinks he’s always right.” 

“Well he’s a mayor, honey,” Carlos said, tossing the straps into the backseat.

“He tried to show me how to use a wedge to prop open a door,” she said flatly. “Like he actually took the wedge from my hands and did it himself.”

Carlos grinned. “He’s just trying to help you in his own way.”

“I get that, I really do. But, I mean, he knows I’m a physics professor. I literally teach college physics.” 

Carlos pulled two boards down and propped them up against the Jeep. “Damn right you do, and you do it better than anyone else in Texas. Way better than Howell. I bet that guy doesn’t know the first thing about thermodynamics. He probably thinks Newton is just a snack made from figs.”

Rivera fought to maintain her scowl but snorted with laughter. “Stop it, I’m being serious!”

“So am I! But it’s Howell we’re talking about here, and we both know he can’t stand not to look like the most important guy in the room, even when he’s not. Especially when he’s not. So if he’s gotta show the little teacher lady how to prop open a door to feel like a man, then so be it. The important thing is he listens to you where it matters. Otherwise we’ll never get this place ready before the cold.”

Her smile faded.

Carlos gently grabbed her shoulder and pulled her into an embrace. “Hey. We’re going to be fine. I promise.”

Dr. Rivera’s entire demeanor had been a roller coaster of ups and downs following the power outage. Even as the aurora moved through the sky and transformers exploded across town she had spoken with an almost manic sort of giddiness while explaining her theory for what happened. Pacing back and forth in the candlelit dining room, she hypothesized that a huge coronal mass ejection had blown out of the Sun in its final moment, then she spent several minutes debating whether The Blink had caused it or vice versa by running through all the possible explanations she could think of. She eventually cut the lecture short after realizing that Ryan and Carlos, far from her usual audience of physics-majoring grad students, had no idea what she was talking about.

So she tried again.

CMEs were normal, she said, nothing more than strands of the Sun’s magnetic field getting tangled and flinging clouds of solar material out in random directions. One hitting Earth was statistically rare due to the immense scale and distances involved, and even if one did manage to score a hit it still had to overpower the Earth’s magnetic field to do any real damage. But if everything lined up in all the wrong ways, the electrically charged solar plasma would reach the ground and add unexpected current to power lines and other conductive materials, which could overload transformers and shut down power grids. Radio transmissions would be garbled into static by interference, temporarily putting a stop to most forms of communication. The atmosphere would become so ionized that air molecules would glow and produce the spectacle known as the aurora. These were all tell-tale signs of a large CME, though typically these effects were observed near the Earth’s magnetic poles.

Everything they had witnessed leading up to the blackout suggested Earth had been hit with a CME large enough to put the infamous Carrington Event of 1859 to shame. The intense aurora, the radio interference, the power outage, it was the most likely explanation. And to see all of it so far from the poles and with this much intensity meant it was almost certainly the largest CME encountered in recent history.

“Don’t you see what this means?” she asked.

Ryan didn’t, but he doubted it was anything good.

The smile flickered on her face, her expression a cross between excitement and frustration. “It means the outage isn’t limited to just us. It’s most likely global.”

“So,” Ryan said carefully, “it’s going to take a while to get the power back on?” He still didn’t see where she was heading with the line of thought, and he didn’t like the wild look in her eyes. It made him think of cornered animals and padded cells.

“It won’t come back on,” Carlos whispered. For the first time Ryan saw the look of defeat in his face.

Rivera nodded and sat at the table. Her excitement was gone, either from seeing her husband’s darkened expression or from hearing her realization spoken aloud. “We won’t have enough time to repair the grid before the cold comes, and fixing the grid is the only chance we have to survive.” She fell silent and began to pet Beasley, who had placed her chin on her knee. 

As pressing as it was, Ryan had completely forgotten about the cold. Too much was happening. It was one catastrophe after another and his attention span hadn’t had the time to process and prioritize it all. “What about generators? If we get enough of those, there’s gotta be at least a small chance we can survive, right?”

“Yes,” Carlos answered, voice firm now. “We just have to work faster. The sooner we get the school up and running, the sooner we can have a shelter that’s ready for the weather. But we have to get to work. You hear me, Kit?” He snapped his fingers until Rivera broke out of her daze and looked up at him. “We’re not giving up. OK?”

“Yeah.” She pressed her lips together and looked down at Beasley.

Carlos briefly made eye contact with Ryan and then stood from his chair and went into the kitchen. Beasley didn’t follow him.

There had been something about that exchange that bothered Ryan even now, twelve hours after it happened. Maybe it was the fledgling reporter in him but there was a story buried in that quick glance, a story he had no idea how to uncover. He had been too preoccupied wrestling with the implications of a permanent power outage to give any attention to investigative journalism, plus the only evidence for it was what he saw in Carlos’ eyes: nervousness, like he was trying to determine if Ryan knew something he shouldn’t, a quick check to see if Ryan’s expression had shifted in response to a sudden revelation. And there was pain. It had only been there for a fraction of a second, but it was unmistakable.

Something had happened between the Riveras, and it wasn’t a happy story.

Ryan had chewed over the problem through the rest of that night and into the morning, paying close attention to how the Riveras interacted over their breakfast of cold cereal, watching Dr. Rivera quietly refine and add to her list of needed supplies at the dining room table, analyzing the tone Carlos spoke to him with as they rode to Grant’s hardware store. But he learned nothing. Whatever had happened was buried deep in the past, and Ryan didn’t know how to start digging without looking like a sleazy gossip journalist. He thought back to when Rivera had first introduced him to her husband as a reporter, the worried glance Carlos had given her that seemed to hold a whole conversation. At the time, Ryan had thought the look had been one of general mistrust toward reporters, but now he wondered if it hadn’t been fear at what a reporter might find.

Even now, as Ryan busied himself with lifting one of the plywood boards off of the Jeep, he looked up in time to see Carlos glancing away from him over his wife’s shoulder.

---

The next few hours were filled with the sounds of work. Drills whirred, hammers banged, and boards clattered as two dozen people busied themselves with insulating the school. Following the advice of a few construction workers who had joined the labor, they found and sealed the cracks of every unused exterior door, window, and skylight with strips of insulation and caulk, hung thick sheets of plastic over each, then screwed plywood boards over that until they ran out. For the school’s remaining windows and doors, a volunteer named Joey who looked young enough to be enrolled in the high school suggested dismantling cafeteria tables and using the thick wooden slabs as an alternative to plywood. Howell and Rivera had both stared at him and wondered why on Earth they hadn’t considered something so obvious, then the cafeteria tables were swiftly prepared for disassembly. To reward Joey, or maybe just to give the scrawny kid something to do that didn’t involve heavy lifting, Howell promoted him to his and Rivera’s official assistant.

Most immediate on the mayor’s growing agenda was solving the issue of living space. Howell guessed that the high school would be able to support close to three hundred people before elbows began rubbing. No one knew how many people were left in town after so many had packed their cars and fled, but there was undoubtedly more than three hundred. There was a Plan B, of course, for if they ran out of room. No mayor worth his salt would take on a project like this without having a Plan B in his pocket, but it was essentially just to repeat Plan A at the middle school across the parking lot. If they still didn’t have enough space then Plan C would kick in, which was just to do it all again at the elementary school across from that parking lot.

Howell assigned volunteers to various tasks of transforming the school into a functional longterm shelter, and by three o’clock progress appeared to be moving right along. The cafeteria became a temporary storage room for food, medical supplies, blankets—anything considered high priority for a person’s immediate survival. Fuel was stored down in the basement next to an old coal furnace that no longer worked. The gym became storage for mattresses, couch cushions, lamps, whatever potentially useful items people could find and haul in from the houses in town left abandoned. Joey suggested taking an inventory and Howell gladly assigned him to it (he felt better giving the boy a pen and pad rather than a hammer and nails, or God forbid a nail gun), and this list was updated hourly in each storage area and reported back to Howell, who adjusted his plans for the school accordingly. Every single room in the high school was given an alternate use, many of them for aspects of a shelter Ryan hadn’t even considered. What to do with food scraps and other waste, for instance. 

But Howell had a plan for that. 

The mayor worked like an artist at a table in the library, sketching out plans on sheets of paper and making lists for every possible variable that might come up. There were early plans for converting an unused hallway into a rudimentary garden equipped with a compost room to solve the food scrap problem. Plans for water purification, personal hygiene, finding a way to restore the old coal furnace. Even one for turning a classroom into, well, a classroom, that way the children who arrived would have some sense of normalcy in their new world. Howell was entirely in his element, a civil engineer suddenly freed from every strip of red tape and given free rein over a project in which he had complete control. The mayor’s vision for the school was longterm; even if he thought the Sun would rise before the school would ever be needed he was still heeding Dr. Rivera’s warning and not taking any chances. Ryan wondered how different the world might have looked if all leaders had worked like this, setting aside personal beliefs in favor of listening to PhDs and white coats. How many problems would have been solved?

Not that it mattered anymore.

Ryan’s workday mostly involved helping Carlos, or at least trying to look helpful. Most of the time he either stood there unsure what he should do or tried his best to support the weight of a cafeteria table while Carlos drove screws into a window frame. As the hours rolled by, Ryan waited for the inevitable energy crash to hit him, but it didn’t. He felt tired, but it was a physical kind of tired, an aching of his muscles and bones from the day’s work. Could he have gone home and taken a half hour nap? Absolutely. But he didn’t think he actually needed to.

---

At around six, Howell called an end to the day’s work over the school’s intercom system and asked everyone to meet in the cafeteria. A crowd of thirty shuffled into the large room with clothes stained by dust and sweat. Their eyes, though, were bright and alive. The fear Ryan had seen in the last few town hall meetings was replaced now with a look that might have been triumph. Or hope. In the face of panic they had been given a goal, a single purpose, and from the fulfillment of that purpose came a sense that maybe things weren’t as bad as they looked. Maybe it would be possible to survive the coming cold.

Howell stood at the front of the room as the last person entered from the hallway. “I wanted to thank all of you for your hard work today. We had five people when we started this morning, and in only a few hours we had all of you. Most of you weren’t even asked to lend a hand, you just heard people working and did what Honey Grovers do: you helped your neighbors. For that, I’m grateful to call myself your mayor. Give yourselves a round of applause.” He began clapping and the cafeteria filled with the sound as everyone joined in.

“It’s going to take a while to get this place ready for the rest of the town,” Howell said, “but if we get as much done tomorrow as we did today, I think we’ll be fine. Alright, I know you’re all tired so I won’t hold you here any longer than I have to, but I would ask that everyone show up tomorrow if you can. I would ask that, but I know you’ll all be here bright and early anyway—well, early, at least.” 

Scattered laughter from the crowd.

When it was quiet again, Howell started to deliver his closing remarks but paused, mouth open and head slightly tilted. For several seconds he said nothing, just stood there frozen in place.

Then Ryan heard what had caught the mayor’s attention. A bell, the note low and resonate like something from a clocktower, clanging repeatedly from outside. 

Howell went to a window and looked out into the dark. “Is that one of the churches?”

Nervous voices rose through the cafeteria. Had something happened? A fire? Maybe something even worse? Without prompting, the volunteers rushed out into the hallway and filed toward the school entrance. Outside, the bell rang clear through the night, coming from somewhere toward the center of town.

“Does the Methodist church have a bell?” Howell asked, moving quickly toward the cars at the front of the school. Someone answered that it didn’t, and after a few more eliminations the group was able to determine the most likely source as Honey Grove First Baptist, a larger church a few streets over from the school. 

Those who drove got in their cars and made room for those who hadn’t, and a minute later the whole volunteer group was mobile, a dozen vehicles speeding down the street toward the church. Ryan climbed into the backseat of the Jeep and put his face to the window as Carlos accelerated and the vehicle lurched forward along the pavement.

“Looks like someone found a generator,” Ryan said, moving to lean over the middle console to get a better view as they blew through an intersection. 

A haze of electric light coming from somewhere ahead extended up through the fog and brushed the undersides of the clouds. Once Carlos made it past the trees growing along the sidewalk and reached the next intersection, the source of this illumination came into blinding view. 

Honey Grove First Baptist Church stood alone on the street corner surrounded by a halo of light, the front steps, yard, and steeple bathed in the yellowed silver of countless flood lights. The stained glass windows glowed from the inside, throwing blues and reds and greens out into the mist.

“They’re sure as hell burning through their fuel,” Carlos muttered, pulling into the parking lot behind the church and killing the engine.

The others were already on foot and rushing toward the side of the building where the sidewalk met the front steps by the street, Howell at the front of the group as the bell rang out one final time overhead and then hummed softly into silence. Ryan followed after Carlos and Rivera with eyes scanning the surrounding area for signs of a fire, but nothing looked out of the ordinary.

“You smell that?” Carlos asked, slowing his pace.

Ryan sniffed the air for smoke and frowned. “What is that?” It was a smoky smell, but not in a burning building kind of way. In fact, it smelled good.

“Cayenne pepper,” Carlos said, a grin spreading across his face. “And garlic butter, some kind of bread. Don’t give me that look, I know I’m hungry but I can’t be imagining that, right?”

The group rounded the corner and stepped a week into the past. At the bottom of the church’s steps, plastic tables lined the sidewalk beneath tents that had been staked into the ground, each managed by a woman with gloves and a set of tongs at the ready. Metal trays steamed on each table, and as Ryan slowed to a bewildered stop he actually heard music coming from the top of the steps. He looked up to the open doors and, sure enough, a piano had been rolled outside to the edge of the steps and a woman with short gray hair sat at the bench, smiling as her hands danced across the keys to a rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.”

The ladies behind the tables waved everyone over, smiling as if the Sun had only set beneath the horizon and not vanished from existence.

“Grab a plate, Mr. Mayor,” one said to Howell as the group approached. 

Howell looked at the tables with an expression of dumbstruck confusion and then turned his attention to the woman. “What is all this?” 

“Our fish fry. We decided to have it a week earlier than normal.”

“We thought—Wait, so everyone’s okay? There’s no fire?”

The woman laughed and took a clean plate from the table. “Nope, no fire. I know, that bell ain’t been rung in probably twelve years, but we didn’t know how else to get people to come and eat with the power out. Can’t really make a phone call now, can we?”

Howell relaxed and slowly shook his head. “So the world ends and you just . . . decided to have a fish fry.”

The woman placed two decent sized chunks of fried fish on the plate and then handed it to Howell, who passed it to the person behind him. She pointed her tongs at the top of the church steps. “Miss Sue made that decision. She had us working all morning to get everything ready. Said she thought the town could use a little light.”

“Well I’m glad she did.” Howell looked around as more townspeople drawn by the sounds and lights wandered in from the edge of the church’s light to investigate. A line formed and Howell stepped beside the woman to let them through. Quietly, he asked,”Do you have enough for everyone?”

She smiled and filled another empty plate. “Even if we don’t, I have faith that we will.”

The church ladies passed plates heavy with fish and rolls and cooked vegetables to everyone in the line. There must have been fifty people who showed up out of curiosity but stayed for the respite from the dark, or for the friendly conversations and laughter, or maybe just to eat a hot meal for the first time that day. Small groups formed and mixed in the church yard, Howell playing the part of the politician and bouncing between them like a pinball. He spent the most time talking to Sue after the woman came down from the piano, the two of them only taking a plate once everyone else had been through the line. 

Ryan ate sitting on the steps of the church. Between mouthfuls, Carlos joked about how mad Beasley would be when they got home and she smelled fried fish on their breath, the look of total devastation that would be in her eyes at such a cruel betrayal. Even Rivera had cracked a smile at that. 

“Where’s that kid at?” Carlos asked when he finished his plate. “The one with you and Howell.”

Rivera looked up from her half-finished meal and scanned the crowd of people in the yard. “Joey? I’m not sure, I don’t see him anywhere. Probably went home.”

“I’ll have to thank him tomorrow, then. Saved me a whole lot of driving back and forth to Grant’s with that table idea.”

She nodded. “It really was a good idea.”

Ryan finished his meal and leaned back against the large stone steps and simply observed the way all the music and laughter and light combined to form a kind of warmth that shouldn’t have been there considering the state of the world. Not just warmth, he thought, but life. Humanity. Every sound he heard was like something from a film, scripted, too perfect to be real. The snippets of casual conversation drifting around him. People saying hello to neighbors they hadn’t seen in a while. The giggle of children playing tag. People going about their lives like nothing was wrong and this was just any other Monday. As with most beautiful things the moment also felt strangely fragile, like if Ryan spoke or moved too quickly it would be irreparably shattered.

So he did neither, just took it all in. He didn’t write any of it in his notebook because he knew he wouldn’t be able to get it down right. It was a feeling he didn’t know the words for. Instead he watched, listened, inhaled the scents, did everything he could to engrave the feeling in his memory so he would have it for the rest of his life, and for a brief moment he forgot the world had ended.