The Blackout

by K J Kalis

  The Blackout

  KJ Kalis

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Copyright © 2020 K.J. Kalis

  eISBN 978-1-7334480-7-9

  ISBN 978-1-7334480-8-6

  All rights reserved

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  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved, no part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise including technology to be yet released), without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

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  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of author’s rights is appreciated.

  Also by K.J. Kalis:

  The Cure (Kat Beckman book 1)

  Fourteen Days (Kat Beckman book 2)

  Burned (Kat Beckman book 3)

  * * *

  Christian Non-Fiction (Karen Kalis)

  Miserable Christians: Eliminate Discontent, Rediscover Your Joy and Live an Abundant Life

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  1

  Stan Lemmon loosened his tie as he slid back from the bank of computer monitors. It had been a long day and by the looks of what he saw, it was about to become an even longer night. He grabbed his phone and gave the screens one final look before he made the call.

  The fire chief picked up after one ring, “This is Cleary.”

  “Hey, Chief.”

  Stan and Fire Chief Ned Cleary had known each other for years. “Whatcha got for me, Stan. Your calls rarely bring good news.”

  Stan cleared his throat and loosened his tie. “Sorry about that, Ned. Not my intention. If the folks at Cal Fire could figure out how to control the weather, you’d make my job easier.”

  “Can’t do that. What’re you seeing?”

  “I don’t want to put this out over the air, but if we don’t see at least one new wildfire pick up tonight, I’m buying the next round.”

  Chief Cleary didn’t answer. Stan only heard a grunt.

  “We’ve got winds picking up to at least fifty miles an hour, no rain in sight and it’s been so dry I heard one of the local preachers pray that Jesus would turn the wine back into water.” Stan listened, but Ned didn’t bite on his joke.

  “Keep me posted.”

  The call ended. When Stan first started working for KQAZ as a local meteorologist, he didn’t know much about wildfires. He came from Illinois, where the most interesting weather was a blizzard, and even those came rarely. He and Chief Cleary had met at a local wildfire prevention conference and had hit it off. Stan knew that when he called Ned at work, it was all business. Millions of lives were in Ned’s hands and Stan was almost always the bearer of bad news.

  Stan set his phone down next to the keyboard and turned back to his screens. The National Weather Service had just issued a high wind warning for the entire state of California for the next forty-eight hours. It was October. Dry season. The ground nearly everywhere was crusty and cracked, covered with briars, dried vines and pine needles that were the perfect kindling. One little spark could send the mountains into flames within minutes. It wasn’t a question of if, in Ned’s mind, it was a question of when.

  2

  The sun had set over the valley just between San Jose and Modesto. The mountains crowned, rising up and then dropping off to the valley between the two cities. Homes dotted the area, some in developments, some set off on their own. The lights of those homes were barely visible to anyone who was overhead. Thick foliage, pine trees and undergrowth gave the area protection from the heat of the day as it crawled up over canyons and up onto the mountainside.

  James and Vicky Rossi were out walking their dogs as darkness descended near their home. Vicky pulled a lip balm out of her pocket to combat the dry air and tied her hair back into a ponytail. “It’s gotten windy,” she said, looping the leash of one of their Boxer-mixes around her wrist a bit tighter. Their dog, Natty, had a habit of chasing after small animals. A tight grip on his leash kept him nearby while the wind whipped around them. James, leading their other dog, Bruno, looked back and almost had to yell through the howl of the wind up the side of the mountain, “Kinda creepy with all this wind!”

  Vicky followed James to the end of the street. As they turned around, they heard a crackle behind them. Vicky turned back just in time to see a transformer above them explode into a haze of blue light, glowing and throwing off sparks. It came clear off the pole, landing twenty feet away. The dogs pinned their tails and started to pull the couple up the hill toward home. “James!” she yelled, as Natty pulled her away from the noise. “Look!”

  The transformer, located just above a patch of dry ground covered in leaves and pine needles, had begun to smolder, the live power lines loose on the ground. “Call 911,” James yelled, handing Vicky Bruno’s leash. Vicky pulled the dogs close to her and hit the emergency button on her phone as James ran back toward the fire.

  “I’m on Sunset Ranch Road near Modesto. A transformer exploded and sparks went everywhere. There’s a fire. Hurry!”

  Vicky shoved the phone back in her pocket in time to see a bank of flames erupt in front of her husband. “James!”

  He turned and ran back up the hill toward Vicky and the dogs. “I tried to stamp it out, but it just exploded. We’ve got to get home now!”

  As the couple ran back up the hill to their home, their dogs leading the way, the flames began to crackle into a wall of fire that started to crawl up the hillside, fueled by the wind and the dry brush.

  * * *

  On I-5, twenty miles from where Vicky and James had been walking their dogs, trucker Marty Mancuso was humming softly to Frank Sinatra music. He only had about fifty miles left before he’d return to the depot where he could drop off his truck and
get home to his wife and young son. Thinking about his family made him smile.

  He had planned on keeping the windows open so he could enjoy the fall weather, but the hot, dry air blew sand and dust into his truck, leaving his eyes feeling gritty and tired. A few miles from his highway exit, he noticed the truck had started to pull toward the side of the road, a sign the winds had picked up. Marty wasn’t the kind to take chances, not with hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise in the trailer behind him. He slowed the truck under the speed limit, crawling along at forty-five miles per hour to keep it straight on the road. The other drivers must have felt it too. The line of vehicles in front of him slowed — maybe not as slow as he was traveling, but nowhere near the speed limit.

  As he finished humming his way through, “I Did It My Way,” Marty saw a weigh station a few miles up ahead, one he passed regularly on his route. Behind the station, there was a power substation. Marty squinted into the night. It was usually only lit by a single overhead light, but tonight, it had an eerie yellow glow to it. What was that, he wondered? Why did the station look so strange?

  Marty kept an eye on the road but glanced at the substation as he got closer. The light had begun to snake up the hillside from the power station upwards, undulating and crawling. Marty picked up his phone and called 911. “There’s a fire at mile marker 405 on I-5. You’d better get someone out here right away.”

  Marty said a prayer for those who were in the fire’s way, crossed himself and gave the truck’s engine a little goose. He needed to get home to his family sooner rather than later.

  3

  “The National Weather Service has issued a high wind warning and a wildfire warning for the entire valley.” Kat wasn’t sure of the name of the newscaster, Stan something. She turned the broadcast up. Kat stepped out from behind the kitchen counter where she had been chopping vegetables for dinner while she was waiting for Van to get home from the office. Jack, Kat’s son from her first marriage, was sitting at the kitchen counter working on math homework that Kat couldn’t understand. That was hard to believe for a third grader.

  “Sounds like we have some weather coming in. Where’re the dogs?”

  Jack didn’t look up, his dark brown bangs hanging over his face. “Woof’s sleeping by the over there. Tyrant’s right next to him.”

  Kat looked over toward the door that led into their backyard. Woof, the dog that had been Jack’s constant companion for the last four years, was curled up into a ball and sleeping as though the world was over and there was nothing to worry about. Tyrant, the military dog that the British government had let her keep after her handler had died, was close by. “Let’s keep them in or take them out on a leash. You know how they get when it’s windy.”

  Jack looked up at Kat. There were times that he looked just like his father, Steve. There were other times that she was sure she could see a glimmer of herself in him. Steve wasn’t in the picture anymore. Their entire marriage had been a sham. Steve had been hired by a firm called Apex Solutions to set Kat up, marry her and then help them blackmailed her for information on a classified mission that she had been on. Not that Kat was in the military, at least not as a soldier. Kat had gotten the opportunity to work as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan for the Army. A shattered wrist after an IED attack had sent her home with physical scars and others that couldn’t be as easily seen. As she picked up the knife to keep on chopping vegetables, a familiar line of thought followed her. She had been ripe for the picking when Steve had invited her to dinner for their first date. She’d been home long enough to get through the majority of the trauma, but not home so long that she was truly healthy either. At that time in her life, she was suffering from PTSD. Steve was right there when she needed him, or so it appeared.

  Kat whacked a carrot in half and it skidded over and landed on Jack’s homework. “Easy, Mom!”

  Kat smiled. “Sorry, buddy. Tough carrot.”

  Getting pregnant with Jack hadn’t been part of the plan, or at least that’s what Steve had told the investigators when he was in jail. That was until he was killed. Kat suspected that the inmate who gutted him with a shiv had been paid handsomely to do so. Apex didn’t need more of their secrets getting out.

  Kat looked back down at the pile of vegetables she had amassed for stir fry and reached for a head of cabbage. Regardless of what Steve had intended, Jack was one of the best things that had ever happened to her. Jack and Van, for sure. After Steve had gone to jail, Kat’s editor at The Hot Sheet, Van Peck, had become part of the family. A year later, they married.

  Kat’s reporting and Van’s tough, but fair management of the online paper had moved them from Aldham, where they had all lived, to Sauk Valley, California. Relocation hadn’t been part of the plan, but Kat knew it was an opportunity they couldn’t afford to pass up. Sauk Valley was close enough for Van to get into work with the growing online newspaper, but far enough away, their small home nestled up in the hills, that they could feel like they lived in the country.

  The night that Van had come home with the news that the paper had been bought and they had offered him the position of managing editor, it was bittersweet. She was thrilled for Van, who had worked to start the paper on his own after coming home from a couple of tours with the Marines. In the process of building the paper, his assistant had been murdered in his office. He was never able to work there again.

  The good news was that the reporting and unfortunate circumstances that Kat and Van had been in had brought them visibility. Advertisers who wouldn’t give Van the time of day before he and Kat broke the Apex blackmail story were pounding down his door to give him funding. Readers were flocking to the paper in droves and kept coming once Kat’s story on billionaire sex trafficker, Jackson Maifer, was released. That, plus her investigation on how blackmailed information impacted a whole group of SEALs, made “The Hot Sheet” one of the most popular online papers.

  But living in California wasn’t something that she had counted on. Not much in her life had turned out the way she had planned, but now, watching Jack wrestle with numbers that she wasn’t sure she could have handled in high school, she smiled. “Hey, listen, when Van gets home, maybe we can play a game or something.” When they had decided to move, it was hard on Jack. But, within a few months, he had made new friends through his baseball team and new school.

  Jack didn’t answer for a moment. He nodded, “Yeah, sure.” From the door, Kat heard Woof groan and roll over. Her life was good. It was different than she planned, but still good.

  4

  Roger Guerra sat in front of the power control panel at Palm Coast Electric & Power’s main hub just outside of San Jose. He was in the fifteenth hour of a sixteen-hour shift. The weather had turned treacherous outside, with high winds, warm temperatures and no rain in sight. That meant that the Power Management Control Team had to work extra hours turning on and off the power to large parts of the grid, supposedly to prevent wildfires. It wasn’t a popular move.

  “Candace, let’s get ready to shut off grid section R7 and turn section T4 back on, okay?”

  Candace Morrison, a pixie of a woman with sheared black hair and equally black eyes, nodded. She was one of the best on his team, an electrical engineer by training, and one who could interpret the data that was in front of her faster than anyone he’d ever seen before. She had single-handedly prevented a surge of electricity that would have knocked out power to a two hundred square mile area without so much as blinking an eye. Roger didn’t know a lot about her, other than she was married to a banker and they liked to ski. It didn’t matter though. Roger was there to do a job and that was it. He wasn’t interested in any off-the-books activities like some of the guys did, or at least that’s what they said. The long hours away from home, the stress and the frequent boredom made it easy for eyes to wander.

  “Boss, I’m ready to do the switchover whenever you are ready.”

  Candace’s voice interrupted his thoughts. Their job had been to switc
h off power to areas that looked like they could potentially experience a wildfire. Whether it worked or not, Roger wasn’t sure.

  * * *

  The edict to create blackout zones had come down from on high just a couple of months before. Roger remembered sitting in a meeting with his boss as he explained what they wanted to do. “We are going to take them off service for forty-eight hours.”

  “Why?” Roger asked.

  His boss, a white-haired man with a scraggly mustache replied sharply, “Because we don’t want to be responsible for any wildfires.”

  There had been no discussion, but Roger remembered leaving that meeting with more questions than answers. Out in the hallway, one of the senior engineers called Roger into his office. The two of them had become friends over the years. “Close the door,” Ken said. He sat down at his desk and took a sip from his water bottle. “Listen, I know you’ve got questions about this new policy.”