by Lucin, David
She stormed past Jenn without making eye contact. Who was this woman? The boss? Did she own this place? Whoever she was, the men in the coveralls listened to her, and Jenn didn’t blame them. She appeared to be teetering on angry, and Jenn didn’t want to see her cross that line.
The door flung open, and people poured into the shop like water through a cracked dam. Jenn jumped away and let them pass, and Sam stood straight with his back against the wall. With everyone inside, the men shut the door, locked it, and drew the shades.
* * *
“What time is it?” Sam asked Jenn.
Seated on the concrete floor, she reached for her phone but hesitated. “Why don’t you check your phone?”
“It’s dead, remember?” He handed it to her. “See?”
Jenn tapped the screen, but it stayed black. “If it’s dead, why’d you take it with you?”
“Old habits die hard, I guess.” Sam tucked the phone into his pocket. “So?”
Jenn took out hers and let it scan her face. It flicked on, and she cringed when she saw the battery at fifteen percent. She doubted she’d have service, but she checked anyway. Still nothing.
“Few minutes after one,” she said.
She put the phone to sleep to preserve the charge. Her mother always texted in the afternoon to ask about her day. She didn’t want to miss it, just in case it came through.
Jenn leaned into him and laid her head on his shoulder. Light beamed through the windows at the top of each of the two bay doors, coloring the shop a dull orange and reflecting off particles of floating dust. Jenn counted forty-eight people in here. Like her and Sam, most claimed spots around the walls. Some found chairs. A few others camped out on the hood of the red sedan.
A cough echoed through the room and temporarily drowned out the sound of a baby. It had started crying a half hour after Jenn and Sam came in. Since then, it hadn’t stopped for more than a few minutes at a time. The father had done at least fifteen laps of the shop to try and calm it down.
“Hey,” Jenn heard a woman say.
She lifted her head off Sam’s shoulder. A figure, silhouetted by the windows in the bay doors, stood in front of them. Jenn squinted and let her pupils adjust. Then she noticed the blouse tied to the woman’s waist.
“Hi,” Jenn said.
“Thanks for letting us in,” Sam said. “This is your shop?”
“Sure is. My husband and me. Not much to look at, but we do all right, I guess.”
“Is your husband here?” Jenn asked.
“At home today,” she said. “Waiting for me to get there.”
“Aren’t you worried about him?”
The woman snorted. “He’s fine. Trust me.” She rubbed the base of her neck and shifted her weight. “Anyway, listen, I wanted to say thanks for what you did back there. Both of you.”
Sam’s eyebrows pinched together. “What did we do?”
“Talked some sense into me.” She crouched down in front of Jenn and Sam. “I had every intention of leaving those people out there.”
“You wouldn’t have done that,” Sam said.
The wrinkles around the corners of her mouth twitched, but she didn’t smile. She’d pulled her hair out of the ponytail and let it hang past her shoulders. The smell of real cigarette smoke wafted off her clothes. “You’re right.” The woman nodded to Jenn. “They probably would have busted in anyway.”
“I just had a feeling,” Jenn said. “The mob up the street was pretty desperate.”
“That’s one way of putting it. They almost broke my window.”
She put her hands on her knees and went to push herself up, but Sam interrupted. “I’m Sam. This is Jenn.”
“Sophie.”
“Any idea how long we should stay in here?” Sam asked. “I mean, it seems like you had a plan.”
“A plan? No, not really.” Sophie stayed crouched and glanced over her shoulder. “I just knew what kind of trouble we were in.”
“How?” Jenn asked. “From those videos?”
Sophie cracked a real smile this time. “Let’s just say I’ve been expecting this for a while. I was on my way outta here before that mob showed up at my front door. News travels fast when people are losing their minds, I guess.”
Jenn almost rolled her eyes. She knew the type: doomsdayers. The war germinated their theories about the end of the world, coaxed them out of hiding, and multiplied their numbers. A few lived in the city, but there were more in Flagstaff. Some, the ones who protested on campus, said the war was God’s punishment and that it’d end in Armageddon. Others stocked their houses full of canned goods and firearms and had property outside of town. Jenn pegged Sophie as the latter. She might have mocked doomsdayers before, but they’d prepared for this scenario.
“So why the cars?” Sam prodded. “Why won’t they work?”
Sophie crept closer. “I have my theories.”
“And?” Jenn said.
“And I don’t want you yapping off and telling everyone here. They’ve calmed down a bit. I can’t have them freaking out anymore.”
“We won’t say anything,” Sam said before Sophie finished speaking. “We don’t want that, either.”
Sophie cracked her knuckles and bounced on her toes. “Fine. But keep quiet.”
Jenn and Sam nodded.
“I think those Chinese—” She stopped herself and examined Jenn. “No offense.”
Jenn could have corrected her, but for all she knew, Sophie was right and she was Chinese, not Vietnamese as Sam thought. Either way, it didn’t matter and she didn’t care. “No worries,” Jenn said. “None taken.”
“Anyway,” Sophie continued. “I think we were hit with an EMP.”
“A what now?” Sam said.
Sophie sighed. “EMP. Electromagnetic pulse.” She pronounced the words slowly, as if Jenn and Sam were children or foreign or both.
Jenn recalled her physics lectures. “Nuclear explosions release EM waves. I didn’t think they could reach us all the way up here.”
“They didn’t,” Sophie said. “Well, not from the bombs over Phoenix. This was probably a preemptive attack to soften us up. A high-altitude burst. Like in space. One of those would kill the power grid for hundreds of miles in every direction. Maybe thousands.”
“Thousands of miles?” Jenn blurted out. “When will it come on?”
“Keep it down!” Sophie put a finger to her lips. “I don’t know. Days. Weeks. Maybe more. Transformers’ll be totally blown and need replacing. Solar probably survived, but the converters will be fried if they’re hooked into the grid. Fixing all that’s a lot of work. Who knows how long it’ll take.”
The longest Jenn had gone without power was two days during a record-hot August in Phoenix. Most of her family’s food spoiled, and they’d heard talk of the city preparing to give out water rations. Stores shut down and reports of looting were widespread. This all happened before the war, though, before a pound of bacon cost more than a day’s salary. How would Phoenix react to a long-term blackout now? Hopefully her parents had jumped in the Nissan and left already.
“That’s what killed the cars?” Sam asked. “The EMP?”
“Had to be.”
“But why some and not others? And why my phone?” Sam handed it to Sophie.
“Military tech, it’s hardened to protect against EMPs, but civvie stuff isn’t. They’ll total a car if it’s running.” Sophie tapped the screen on Sam’s phone. “Was this plugged in?”
“Yeah.”
“That’ll do it.” She handed him the phone. “Power surge. Overloads anything with a circuit board hooked into the grid. Phones, TVs, Powerwalls, cars, whatever.” She pointed to the red four-door. “That one was charging. It won’t start anymore. But the Ford’s fine. I’m surprised any cars or phones are working at all.”
Sam gnawed at a fingernail. He was probably trying to make sense of everything. Jenn slapped the hand from his mouth. “And the fallout?” she asked Sophie. “How lon
g do we have to stay inside?”
Sophie stood and tightened the blouse around her waist. “No idea. I haven’t thought that far ahead. All I know is that we can’t be outside. Not until it’s safe.”
“And when will that be?” Sam said.
“Does it look like I have all the answers?” Sophie leaned in closer and lowered her voice. “Listen, we’re keeping an eye on things. Sit tight, have a drink of water from the bathroom, take a nap, whatever. Just don’t go running your fat mouth, and don’t think about leaving. I’m not letting anyone open that door until I make the call.”
She walked off and adjusted the blouse to expose a pistol tucked into her pants. Subtle.
Jenn cursed.
“What?” Sam asked.
“That doesn’t help us much.”
“At least we have something to go on now.”
Sophie had a theory, but the details didn’t interest Jenn as much as they interested Sam. She was thinking about Gary and Maria and hoped they’d buckled down at home. But she also thought about her parents. If fallout had come all the way to Flagstaff, living in the suburbs might not save them. Maybe they hid inside and decided to wait out the radiation before coming up here. Was that enough? Not like many houses in southern Arizona had basements. Where were they when it happened? They liked to go for morning walks together, so they could be stuck in a store, too. She tried picturing them safe at the house in Peoria—her mother on the couch with her phone and her father cooking something in the kitchen—if only to keep herself from imagining the alternative.
Her gut told her to run to Gary and Maria’s, but she knew enough about radiation from those safety videos to realize that she couldn’t help them if her skin started bubbling off and she spent all her time vomiting.
She checked her phone again: 1:31 p.m. And no service. “In one hour,” she said to Sam, “we’ll go talk to Sophie.”
6
The air in Minute Tire tasted stuffy, and sweat soaked Jenn’s shirt where her back rested against the wall. The stench of body odor had overtaken the smell of metal and rubber. She swore everyone was getting closer to her. Why didn’t they spread out? They had the whole shop. Why’d they have to crowd her like this?
The baby wailed. How had it not fallen asleep yet? It’d cried for seven straight hours. How much longer could it possibly go? And why hadn’t the father shut it up? What was he doing out of the house with a baby during a blackout, anyway?
Jenn wiped sweat from her forehead and shifted her butt. She could hardly feel it anymore. Sam’s hand touched her knee, but she jerked it away.
“You okay?” he said.
He’d asked her that at least ten times already. If he kept asking, she might knock his teeth in. “Fine,” she said.
“You don’t seem fine.”
She breathed deep. It didn’t help. Her chest and stomach tightened. With her hands clenched into fists, she opened her mouth to respond but closed it instead. Maybe Sam would catch on.
He went quiet for a moment but spoke again. “It’s not ideal,” he said, “and I know you want to get home, but Sophie won’t let us leave. I’m surprised you guys didn’t come to blows when you bugged her for the third time.”
Jenn pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed as her frustration boiled over. “Just wait until the fourth.”
Sam adjusted his legs and turned his body toward Jenn. He sat cross-legged. No grown man should sit like that. It made Jenn want to hit him.
“I understand,” he started. “You’re worried about Gary and Maria.”
Sam was doing it again: reassuring her. She didn’t need reassurance. She needed to get the fuck out of here. If he’d listened to her, they’d be hiding at Gary’s instead of in this tire shop. No way the fallout would have killed them in the fifteen minutes it took to run there.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” he continued, even though she hadn’t said anything. Was it so obvious that she was thinking about them?
“How do you know that?” Jenn snapped. “Do you have some weird telepathic power you’ve never bothered mentioning?”
He bit his fingernail. This time, she let him.
“So?” She stood and wiped off her pants. “You told me we needed to help Gary and Maria, and now you’re happy sitting here, waiting for the radiation to pass by?” Heads turned as she raised her voice. Sam wriggled in his seat. Soon, Sophie would come over and shut Jenn up, but she didn’t care. “We have no idea when it’ll be safe out there. It could be days. What if it’s not even safe in here? Then what? What did your precious safety videos say? Sophie doesn’t know. Nobody knows. We’re stuck in this dumpy shop and can’t do anything.”
Sam chewed his nail and refused to make eye contact. Jenn stared at him, challenging him to retaliate, but he never did. She wanted to pull her hair out.
With a blow of her cheeks, she locked her fingers behind her head. Sam peered up at her, his face a mix of worry and embarrassment.
“The hell with this,” she said and turned away.
“What? You can’t just leave,” Jenn heard him say, but she was already storming toward the bay doors at the front of the shop.
Eyes followed her as she passed the red car and evaded the three who’d annexed it. Where had Sophie hidden? Was she watching?
Jenn reached the doors, but the windows were at least a foot above her. When she jumped up and tried to look out, she only saw a blur. She peeled a sweaty strand of hair from her cheek and checked the door leading from the shop to the waiting room. Two of Sophie’s henchmen stood guard. Both wore their blue coveralls, but one had unzipped his and let the top hang off his waist. He held a long piece of pipe. Though the other had no visible weapon, she assumed he was carrying a pistol.
With the front entrance not an option, Jenn searched for something to stand on so she could see out the windows. She spotted a chair in the corner, then walked over, snatched it by the backrest, and dragged it to the bay doors. The sound of metal legs scraping on the concrete filled the shop and made Jenn cringe.
Sam sat along their wall and watched her every move, but he still hadn’t come to help. Was he angry with her? Embarrassed? Maybe he was afraid of how Sophie would react to Jenn looking outside. Or maybe he thought she just needed to be alone for a while. That was often the case, thanks to growing up with two brothers in a tiny two-bedroom townhouse, but not now. He should be here, helping her.
She dropped the chair beneath the windows and hopped up. On her tiptoes, she leaned her palms against the metal bay doors and peered outside. The sun hung low in the sky and cast long shadows over Milton Road. Across the street, the boarded-up fast food place, silhouetted in the evening light, stood there as if nothing had happened. Jenn twisted her neck and pressed her cheek against the glass to see farther down the road. No flames engulfed the office buildings and no glowing ash coated their pink exteriors. They looked exactly as they had seven hours ago.
No signs of life, though.
Jenn heard stirring: chatter, commotion, bodies shuffling. Had Sam finally decided to help? She peeled her face off the glass, then caught movement outside: three figures across the street and far to her left. No, there were four of them. They all wore black—a stupid decision considering the heat today. Jenn squinted and waited for them to come closer. She imagined they’d have gas masks or rubber suits on, but they didn’t. One was a woman, her blonde hair in a tight ponytail. She had a heavy-looking belt hanging on her hips. All of them did.
Jenn’s vision went foggy. She rubbed the condensation off the glass with her fist, then peered out again.
Police.
Butterflies took flight in her stomach. None of the police rushed. They strolled down the street with their arms waving and heads bobbing. No gas masks, no radiation suits, nothing. Did they know about the fallout?
Or was there no fallout to begin with?
Jenn glimpsed a semicircle of onlookers forming behind her chair. Still no Sam. She considered running to the waiting room, o
pening the door, and yelling at the police across the street. Then she remembered Sophie’s thugs. No way they’d let her pass. What if she tried explaining?
The cops walked, two by two, right past the tire shop. They must have thought it was empty. If they didn’t know about the fallout, she needed to let them in. If there wasn’t any fallout, they were proof that it was safe to go outside.
Jenn made a fist and banged it against the bay door, which rumbled quietly. She had to be louder, so she raised her right foot and drove her heel into the metal. The door shook. She tried twice more, then checked the window. The police continued walking. They’d almost passed.
Jenn hopped off the chair. Most of the shop watched her now, but Sam was still missing.
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Sophie yelled over the din of chatter. She pushed her way to the head of the crowd. The blouse was gone and Jenn didn’t see the pistol, but she never doubted it was there, tucked into Sophie’s pants. “I thought I told you to take it easy.”
“Outside,” Jenn started. “There’s people. Police.”
More chatter as Sophie came closer and said, “I call bull.”
Jenn’s heart raced and her breathing quickened. “There is. See for yourself.”
One hand on the handle of her pistol, Sophie climbed atop the chair. With her arm braced against the door, she pressed her face to the window and checked right, then left. “There’s nobody there,” she said as she came down. “Look, if you need water, we have plenty. I understand it’s hard being in here for hours on end, but if you’re starting to hallucinate or get cabin fever, we can—”
“No!” Jenn jumped onto the chair and peered outside again. The police had disappeared.
“You believe me now?” Sophie said.
No way Jenn’s mind would invent police officers. She wasn’t dehydrated. Every twenty or thirty minutes, she took a walk to the shop’s washroom to stretch her legs and have a drink. No, those cops were there. She only needed to draw their attention.
The whole of Minute Tire waited for her answer to Sophie.
