Blackout: Book 0

by Alexandria Clarke

  Table of Contents

  Blackout: Book 0

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Blackout: Book 0

  Copyright 2017 All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means without prior written permission, except for brief excerpts in reviews or analysis.

  Chapter One

  I looked over the side of the roller coaster as it climbed to the top of the first hill with a series of loud clacks. The night was dark and cold, but the theme park was lit up with fairy lights and neon arcade games below. The nippy breeze flirted with the hems of sweaters and blew hats off the heads of unsuspecting park guests. Soon, the seasonal theme park would close, as it would be too cold to run the rides, but for now, I could enjoy the brief view of Denver from one hundred feet above the ground. Screams built around me—some scared, others excited—as the first car of the coaster crested the top of the hill. I craned my neck, savoring the liberation of the sky, even if I was strapped into a padded harness, and put my hands up. My boyfriend, Jacob, reached up and linked our fingers together.

  My stomach floated as the coaster careened downward at a steep angle, I let out an involuntary whoop of joy. The wind tore through my hair, freeing it from its messy bun. The air was so cold that my eyes streamed with tears. The coaster zoomed up into the first half of a cobra roll and hurtled down the other side before taking us upside down in a big loop. Jacob’s fingers tightened around mine as he brought our entwined hands down to grab the handle of his harness, a deep yell reverberating in his throat.

  This was freedom, however fleeting. It was forgetting about the trivial issues in your life for ninety seconds of metal track at sixty-five miles per hour. It was letting the smell of cotton candy and turkey legs and funnel cakes rush by in quick succession to overwhelm your taste buds and make you momentarily forget about the whole unprocessed diet you so obsessively stuck to every day of your life. It was letting the sting of the wind strip the warmth from your pores and chill the tip of your nose in a way that made you feel more alive in that minute and a half than you had since the last time you got off this ride.

  And then every light in the city extinguished itself, dousing the world with an inky-black blanket. The roller coaster rushed forward, but when it leveled off on the platform that was meant to slow it down before it glided into the next drop, the automatic brakes did not engage. It thundered on, diving into the dip with such intensity that it whipped the heads of its riders unceremoniously about on their necks. My heart drummed against my chest as we plunged into the darkness at a reckless pace, the black night pressing against my pupils. I squeezed Jacob’s hand in mine as the screams of pleasure turned to terror.

  Earlier That Day

  It was a cloudless morning, and the sky stretched out to either end of the city to blanket our little corner of the world. The end of October beckoned November in with pink cheeks, chapped lips, and leaves the color of fire. It was my favorite time of year. Summer was long gone, and winter was on its way. At dawn, I slid out of bed while Jacob was fast asleep, made a cup of coffee, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and sat in the creaky rocking chair on the fourth floor balcony of our apartment. I liked Denver best first thing in the morning. The people were slow to wake, and everything was quiet and calm. The sun cast a pale pink tint across the sleepy city like something out of a neon-colored eighties movie. On a clear day, the white-capped mountains layered themselves in hues of blue in a background that almost looked fake behind the buildings of downtown. Somewhere out there, my childhood memories flitted in and out of the trees, looking for a place to touch down. My mind wandered to meet with them sometimes, but I was never alone long enough to get lost in a land of the past.

  “Georgie?”

  I liked Jacob’s voice best first thing in the morning too. It was slow and rough with sleep. His enunciation slipped, the letters looser on his lips. It was a welcome change from his prim, polished daily manner of speaking. Jacob was born and bred into an upper-class family, and his staccato elocution was a product of private schools and international travel. Drowsiness leveled the playing field for us, and I savored the conversations whispered between yawns and stretches.

  “Morning,” I said, drawing the blanket tighter around my shoulders as the wind swept the long violet hair on the left side of my head about.

  Jacob shivered as his bare toes met the cold concrete of the balcony. His fingers combed through my tangle of hair, attempting to tame the wild purple locks, before he gave up and stroked the patch of baby-fine, white-blonde fuzz shaved close to my scalp on the other side of my head. The partial buzzcut and the wild color were products of an on-air dare for my talk radio show. I covered the same news stories and current events as the major networks, but the fact of the matter was that people our age, in their late twenties, needed an incentive to invest any amount of interest in politics and related matters. I hoped that the stunts I pulled on the show were enough to get listeners to tune in on their way to work or to at least check out my website later for more information. Jacob, however, wasn’t always a fan of my methods.

  “It’s freezing out here,” he said, perching on the arm of the rocking chair.

  I braced myself as the chair rolled backward and knocked against the sliding door. “I like it.”

  “We’re both going to catch pneumonia. Come inside.”

  The faintest shadow of golden scruff coated Jacob’s cheeks and chin. His dusty blond hair stood up at haphazard angles, not yet subdued by his morning ritual of mousse and gel. His eyes, the same creamy golden-brown color of my coffee, were partially hidden behind drooping lids, and his pink cheek bore an etching of the bed quilt’s lacy pattern. I smiled and cupped his face. Unrehearsed, he pressed his lips to my palm. His hand found mine, and he played with my fingers, warm from being wrapped around the hot mug of coffee.

  “You’re not wearing your ring,” he said. “Where is it?”

  “On the bedside table,” I told him. “I don’t wear it to sleep.”

  “You don’t wear it ever.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Do you not like it?” His lethargy quickly faded, and I wished there was a way to slow his route to alertness. “Is it not big enough?”

  “No, no. It’s beautiful.”

  I trailed my fingers down the side of his face. His ears were already pink with the cold, but his cheeks were pink with the mingling hues of pride and insecurity. The ring in question—my engagement ring—boasted a gigantic diamond, but I had never been the kind of girl to flaunt such a display of wealth to any of my friends. Most of my friends at the radio station were guys anyway. They didn’t know the difference between a real gemstone and cubic zirconia, and they didn’t care. Quite frankly, neither did I, but Jacob had presented the piece of jewelry with an air of triumph when he’d proposed, and to tell him that I preferred a less expected route of matrimonial symbolism might have wiped the jubilant grin right off of his face. Jacob came from a traditional family, and he followed the traditional rules, though I suspected that his father, rather than his freelance photojournalism career, had bought the ring. As far as size went, I couldn’t wait for the day I could exchange the conspicuous rock for a simple wedding band.

  Jacob tilted my chin up to kiss me. “Are you sure? It’s not because you’re still mad about last night?”

  My lips stiffened against his. I sipped my coffee instead. It had gone cold. “I’m not mad.”

 
“Really? Because you said—”

  “I know what I said.”

  “I just think that getting married in a church is the best way to please my parents,” he went on, clearing his throat. He flattened his hair to the best of his abilities, and his day-to-day demeanor rose to the surface. “I know you aren’t really religious, Georgie, but—”

  The charming quiet of the morning hours had been broken, like tossing a boulder into a glass pond. I stood up from the rocking chair and went inside. “Can we not talk about this right now?”

  The sliding door clicked shut as Jacob followed. I liked to keep it open to let the fresh, mountain-scented air flow in and out of the apartment, but he claimed that it was impractical to run the heat if I was going to let the warmth escape outside. In a few hours, the sun would be high enough to warm the apartment through the glass doors and windows, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. I didn’t understand why Jacob was so conscious of money. His father owned the building we lived in, so he didn’t pay rent or utilities. He had never scrounged a day in his life. He had never clipped coupons or swiped change out of a public fountain to buy a slice of pizza at a corner store. He had never siphoned gas from a parked vehicle in the middle of the night because he couldn’t afford to fill up his own tank. He also didn’t know that I had done all of those things and worse at some point in my life, but I wasn’t the one chiding the other for accidentally leaving the bathroom light on.

  I put my mug in the microwave to rewarm the coffee and opened the fridge. I had a few minutes before I had to get ready to go into work, which meant I had just enough time to make myself a decent breakfast. I rifled through my materials. Eggs, spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms—

  “If you’re making omelets, can you leave out the mushrooms?” Jacob asked, straightening the ever-growing stack of newspapers on the island counter. “You know I don’t like them. Do you need all of these?”

  I put the mushrooms back in the fridge. “Yes, I do. Please don’t touch them.”

  He peered at a yellowing page. “This one is from three weeks ago. You can probably recycle it by now.”

  I snatched the newspapers out of his hands, tapped them into straight lines, and placed them at the far corner of the island beyond his reach. “I need them to reference previous articles, which I’ve told you a hundred times.”

  I felt his eyes on me as I heated a skillet over the stove and cracked a few eggs. “They’re piling up. About the wedding, though, we really do need to talk about it. Mom wanted a ceremony early next year, but Pippa’s going to pop in the next month or so, and she said she doesn’t want to look fat in the pictures. You’re still going to let her be a bridesmaid, right?”

  The heat from the stove rose. Despite the chilly morning, sweat beaded at my temples. My cheeks reddened, and a drip of moisture rolled down my back between my shoulder blades. “Yes, of course your sister can be a bridesmaid, but we’ve only been engaged for a few months, babe. Besides, I wanted our wedding to be in the fall.”

  “That’s, like, now,” Jacob said, confused. “This isn’t a shotgun wedding.”

  “I meant next year.”

  “That’s forever!”

  “It’s one year.” I sprinkled salt and pepper over the sizzling eggs then gave the pan an experimental shuffle in preparation for the flip. The omelet slid easily across the smooth silver. “It gives us the time to figure everything out. Why are you in such a rush anyway?”

  “Because I feel like you’re going to change your mind.”

  I missed the catch. The omelet landed half in, half out of the pan, splitting in the middle. The eggs splattered against the pristine white tile of the kitchen floor. A piece of hot spinach plastered itself to the top of my bare foot. I hissed and shook it off then dumped the pan on the stove. “Fuck me. Seriously?”

  Jacob blanched as he grabbed a roll of paper towels and knelt down to collect the ruined omelet. “I hate it when you swear.”

  “Sorry. That’s your half, by the way. I’m late for work.”

  Since there was no hope of saving the omelet, I scooped the rest of the eggs into a whole wheat tortilla, wrapped it up like a burrito, and shoved half of it into my mouth as I stripped out of my pajama pants and made a beeline for the bedroom.

  “I thought Nate took over the morning show on Fridays,” Jacob called after me.

  I pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater. “He usually does,” I said, juggling the burrito as I laced up my boots. “But we hired a new intern, and Nate’s not a people person. I told him that I’d be there today. We’ve got a lot to cover.”

  Jacob leaned against the door of the bedroom. A piece of scrambled egg was stuck to the back of his hand. “I was thinking that we could go to the park today to spend some time together. You’ve been so busy lately, I feel like I haven’t seen you in years.”

  “You see me every night.”

  “You know what I mean. Come on, I promise to get on the roller coasters with you since I know how much you like them.”

  I tied off my laces and shoved them under the tongue of my boot so that they were invisible. I finished off the breakfast burrito in three humongous bites then stood in front of Jacob and put my hands on his shoulders. With my boots on, I was a good inch taller than him. He was a stocky guy, well-muscled but compact. That worked for me—I didn’t have to stretch to kiss him—but he took offense whenever I wore heels around him.

  “I promised Nate that I’d come in today,” I said. “But what if we go to the park later? I always like it better at night anyway. Everything looks so pretty lit up. Here.” I picked up one of his cameras from the collection on his desk. “There’s a charity run downtown today to raise awareness for cystic fibrosis. You should cover it.”

  He expertly flipped off the lense cap and raised the camera to snap a picture of me. “Those are generic photos. I want danger and intrigue. I want grit and trench warfare. I want the Hells Angels as security at the Altamont Free Concert, not sweaty people in garish tracksuits.”

  “Be glad you’re not photographing trench warfare,” I said. “I hear typhus sucks.”

  I smacked a kiss to his cheek and sidestepped him to get to the coat closet. Then I pulled on a denim jacket, straightened out the collar, and grabbed my keys from where they hung on the inside of the door.

  “So what time tonight?” Jacob asked, following me through the kitchen. Somehow, he’d managed to wipe the egg from the floor, wash the frying pan, and put the dirty spatula in the dishwasher in the same time it had taken me to change my clothes. That was another thing that set us apart. Jacob was a neat freak, while I operated best within organized chaos.

  “I don’t know. I have dinner plans with Nita that I’ll have to cancel.”

  His shoulders slumped. “It’s fine. We can go another day.”

  I shoved my phone and wallet into a messenger bag and slung it across my shoulders. Then I snaked my arms around Jacob’s neck and pulled him close. He always smelled like cinnamon and cloves when it got cold out, compared to his citrusy summer scents. “Nita’s easygoing. She’ll understand. I’ll text you when I’m on my way home, okay? And then we’ll go ride the roller coasters until you puke.”

  “Now I’m having second thoughts.”

  I grinned and kissed him goodbye. “Too late. See you later.”

  A few blocks from the apartment, I realized that I had forgotten to put on my engagement ring once again. Jacob was probably in the bedroom, staring at the little ceramic cup on the bedside table that cradled my meager jewelry collection. Maybe he’d take a few photos of the ring, zoomed way in on the diamond, the focus on the gold band blurry to make the stone look as bare and lonely as possible. Or I was just being dramatic and he had already left the apartment to meet his buddies at the gym.

  The radio station was about a thirty-minute walk from our building. The one thing I loved about living downtown was the lack of need for a car. I didn’t own one. Not only did I save on gas, but it was one less bill that I had
to rely on Jacob’s parents to pitch in for. Offices, restaurants, bars, and gyms were all just a stroll away, and if I needed to get any farther, the bus and light rail systems worked like a charm. The city was so different from the wide open spaces of my youth, and while I sometimes found the tall buildings and fast pace alarming, I preferred it to the alienating silence of my previous life.

  A gush of warm air made my cold nose and ears tingle as I pulled open the door to the station. It was a modest business, with just a control room, a studio, and a storeroom that doubled as our break room through the back. Nate sat at the desk in the control room, staring through the window into the studio. Kenny, our mild-mannered control technician who wore noise-canceling headphones at all times and spoke to no one ever, sat next to him. The on-air light flared red as the new intern, a girl I’d found at the local university who’d majored in broadcasting and dubbed herself Aphrodite, chattered away into the mic.

  “Next we’ve got the new single from Walk the Moon,” she announced. “And when we return, Nate and Georgie join us for a discussion on gun control. This is QRX First Watch. Stay tuned, folks.”

  The on-air light flickered off, and Aphrodite gave us a hesitant thumbs-up through the window. Nate returned the gesture with a smile so wide and startling that his cheeks looked as if they might crack. Then he flicked off his headphones and swiveled in his chair to look at me, his expression completely flat.

  “She’s boring,” he declared.

  “Talk-back’s on.”

  Nate whirled around to check the button that transmitted sound from the control room to the studio. It was unlit. “That was mean.”

  I chuckled, shrugged out of my jacket, and draped it over the spare chair. “Give her a chance. You weren’t exactly a prize when I recruited you either.”

  “Excuse me?” he said with faux indignance. “Whose listener count doubled when I was added to the show?”

  “So you pulled in a percentage of the male market. Big whoop.”