by Mic Roland
“Yes, people buy many things yesterday.” She too spoke with the remnants of a Russian accent. “We only take cash now. Andrei told you, yes?”
“Yes, he did. We have cash. We wanted to buy some food, but you don’t have much.”
“Food sell fast yesterday. What kind food you are looking?”
Martin guessed that she must have some unseen inventory. “Nothing fancy. Do you have any bread? Rolls? Hotdog buns? Something more filling than…olives?”
The woman looked out towards Andrei, who was impassively resisting the protests of the pajama crowd, which had grown in number. “You wait here. I be back.” She sidled out from behind the counter and disappeared through a door in the back.
While the woman was away, Martin noticed that she had a portable radio on the counter. The volume was turned down too low to hear well. Hoping for some news on the outage, he turned it up.
“…boro, Sudbury and Westford relay stations. Workers told me they do not have spares for the burned out units, which are manufactured in Germany or Asia. Crews say they can’t work around these problems. Power is going to be out for very long…” The report stopped abruptly. A crackly silence filled several long seconds. Martin reached for the volume knob, thinking that the batteries might be getting low.
Before Martin touched the radio, a suave new voice came on the air. “The governor wants to assure the citizens of the Commonwealth that essential services will be restored as soon as possible. There is no cause for alarm. Citizens should remain in their homes if they can. Temporary shelters are being set up in and around the greater Boston area for those in need. These will be available soon. Shelters will have heat, hot showers and meals. These are being set up at Soldier’s Field, Moakley Park…”
The woman returned and set a cardboard box on the counter. She turned off the radio. “Bah, more lies.”
“You don’t believe them, I take it?” Martin made conversation while peering into the box.
“No. Even little child can see things not okay. Maybe not okay for long time. State, she just say things be okay soon to keep peoples calm.” She waggled a finger in the air. “Is the same all over. States afraid of riot and lose control. Always worry about control. Will say anything to keep peoples calm. Easier to control. But enough about State. You look through box of food. See what you like. You buy for cash.” She pushed the box forward proudly, as if it were a fresh birthday cake.
“Andrei and me had store in old country. We learn not to put all things on shelf all times. When people get scared, they run in, buy like crazy, store has nothing left to sell. Not good for business.”
Martin could not decide if Andrei and his wife were shrewd business owners for staggering inventory, or opportunist scalpers looking to reserve some goods to sell at higher prices. Regardless, he and Susan were hungry. The box was full of small bags of chips, chocolaty snack cakes and candy bars: all typical convenience store wares, but too salty or sweet to subsist on. Martin thought they could find more substantial food in another store, so did not want the candy or chips. He did find a box of wheat crackers on the bottom. It wasn’t much, but it was some longer-lasting carbs. He thought it might tide them over until they found a different store. After all, this little store was open. That bode well that others might be open too.
“How about these crackers?” Martin asked.
“Oh. For those…um…five dollars,” said the woman.
Martin sighed. The orange sticker said $2.39. Is everything going to cost five dollars now? He pulled five ones from his wallet. The woman tried not to be obvious about peering into Martin’s wallet.
She leaned closer to semi-whisper. “We have beer and wine in back. Perhaps you and your pretty wife will like some beer or wine, yes?”
Susan glanced at Martin, blushed, then looked away quickly. Martin could feel his own face getting warm.
The woman looked back and forth from Martin to Susan. Her expression was a mixture of embarrassed hostess and curious gossip.
“No, thank you,” said Martin. “The crackers will do.”
“Oh, So sorry. You two looked so…”
“That’s okay. The crackers are all we want. No beer or wine, thanks.”
A commotion from the parking lot was a welcome distraction. Andrei had pushed away a more zealous pajama person. Things had escalated to where Andrei kept one hand on the grip of his pistol that was still in his waistband. The other hand was pointing accusations at the pajama person on the pavement.
Susan motioned towards the tumult outside. “Do you worry about staying open when people are…like that?”
“Oh no,” the woman said reassuringly. “Andrei is strong man. I not worry.”
“But there are so many of them,” Susan persisted. “And only the two of you.”
The women took a half step back and motioned with her eyes for Susan to look behind the counter. The woman pulled a gun halfway out of its hiding place. From the brief glimpse Martin got, it looked like a short-barreled AK without a stock. In the close confines behind the counter, it looked huge.
“We had small store in Tverskoy many years, you see. Rough part of town. Learn quick proper tools for to stay in business.”
Susan shrank away slowly and with a nervous smile. Again, she was closer to a gun than she liked. Martin had to admit, it was a serious looking gun — the kind terrorists or radical insurgents wave in the air.
“Could we use your back door?” Martin asked. “I’d rather not go back out through all that.”
“Da,” said the woman, after locking her secret hatch. She led the way past the empty coolers to a heavily scuffed door marked “Employees Only”. She pushed it open and pointed to the far wall of the dimly lit room. “You see yellow door? Go to outside. You sure you no want maybe couple bottles beer? I give you good price.”
Martin smiled. “No. Still no beer, but thank you for the crackers.” The two of them maneuvered past stacks of boxes in the dim back room. The yellow door pushed open with a loud metal-on-metal scraping sound.
They both squinted in the sudden daylight. The noise of an agitated crowd around across the street at the gas station caught Martin’s ear. He peered over the top of the dumpsters.
“I wonder what’s got those people in a huff.”
“Sounds like maybe someone was cutting in line, or moved something they shouldn’t have,” Susan said.
Martin quickly studied the two crowds. The pajama people were confronting Andrei with harsh words and flailing arms. A few dozen people at the gas station were embroiled in loud exchanges, animated with pointing fingers.
“I don’t like the idea of walking between two angry crowds. What do you say we take a block around and reconnect with 28 a bit further up?”
“Definitely.”
The mature suburban street was lined with tall trees in full autumn color. Children played in the crunchy leaves, enjoying the unscheduled school vacation. Parents sat on front steps watching their children and chatting together.
“That first guy on the radio must have been talking about power relays and substations,” Martin said. “This thing must be a system-wide problem with the equipment of the grid. Clearly not just a regional glitch.”
“So what did Asia have to do with that?”
“He said that they don’t have spares,” said Martin. “Apparently, those would have to come from Asia. That’s gonna be a problem, or at least part of the problem. Do you remember hearing about that sniper attack on a substation out in San Jose awhile back?”
“No. When was that?”
“Right after the Marathon bombings, so it didn’t get much media attention. Some snipers shot out a bunch of transformers at a substation.”
“Do you think that’s what happened here? Snipers?” Susan asked.
“Not really. It’s too widespread for guys with rifles. That would take tens of thousands of snipers — all at once.”
“Okay, that does sound unlikely. So if it wasn’t snipers, what
then?” she asked.
“Beats me,” Martin shrugged. “Some people think it was an EMP or a solar flare.”
Susan looked puzzled.
“Which is where some big flash of energy causes electrical things to overload and burn out.”
“That sounds like a good fit.” She started nodding her head, but stopped and shook it a couple times. “But I gather you don’t think so.”
“I’m no expert on EMPs,” Martin said. “Brian talks about them, sometimes. That’s most of what I know. From what he said, a big surge of energy — whether it came from a solar flare or a nuclear bomb — would affect our little delicate electronics first. You know, fry our phones and iPods and stuff. Heck, they still warn you not to have static electricity on you when you open up a computer to install more RAM. Doesn’t take much to fry ‘em.”
“But our phones were fine…well, until I let my battery die,” Susan said.
“Exactly,” Martin said. “The little stuff is fine, and it’s the big industrial stuff that seems to have been hit. That’s where this all seems backwards.”
“So you’re back to snipers?”
“No, but that was where I was going about San Jose. Back then it took the power company a month to get that substation back online. Big parts aren’t quick to come by. And that was with only the one substation to repair and while everything else was working fine so they could route power around it. Add in what Leo was saying about there being no extra crews to call in, and it kinda backs up what the first radio guy was saying. Power could stay out for a long time.”
Susan walked along, lost in her own thoughts. Martin fell into a mental hole of conspiracy theories.
Would greedy power companies fabricate a crisis? Was the equipment all still intact and they just lied about massive failures? Why would they do that? Perhaps as a sort of corporate-utility “strike” to extort more government money. Could anyone get all those utility people to agree to that scheme? That seemed unlikely. Too many people would have to be in on it. How would they prevent some middle-level minion from blabbing? Thousands of minions would remain quiet? That seemed even less likely.
“The second guy mentioned emergency shelters,” said Susan. “I wondered when they’d start opening shelters.”
“I’m sure a lot of people will end up in them,” Martin said.
“Well, I don’t want to. A shelter is the last place I want to be. I much prefer the hotel idea.”
“Can’t say I blame you there. Oh sure, officials start out with great intentions and all, but things get chaotic pretty fast. Kinda like that old maxim about battle plans not surviving first contact with the enemy. Bureaucratic plans don’t survive first contact with an emergency.”
“So government should do nothing? People need help,” Susan protested.
“Sure they do, but bureaucrats and their staff tend to be faithful rule followers. Rules become a substitute for thinking. Following proper procedure is what gets them promoted, so they tend to be good at doing just that. Free-thinking gets you nowhere in agencies. Real crises need free-thinking and adaptation.”
“It’s easier to adapt and respond on a smaller scale,” continued Martin. “Back in our last local outage, we put some people up in our church. We had to improvise quite a few things, like cooking, but we could change our plans and adapt. We weren’t stuck with bureaucratic rules. I’ll grant you that the church wasn’t just-like-home, of course, but at least everyone was fed, comfortable and had some privacy in the classrooms. Do you remember seeing photos from inside the Superdome after Katrina? No privacy there.”
Susan shuddered. “Oh yeah. I remember the photos. They brought back bad memories.”
“You were in the Superdome after Katrina?” Martin was prepared to be impressed.
“No, not that one. I was in one of my own. When I was little — maybe 5 — my family had to stay in a shelter for almost a week. A train derailed. It was carrying gas or something. I don’t remember what it was. Houses all around were evacuated just to be safe. Hundreds of us were in the high school gym. I don’t remember a lot from back then, but I do remember that it was never quiet, even in the middle of the night. People were talking, babies crying. I don’t think I slept the whole time. The part I remember clearest, was that it seemed like there was always someone looking right at me. It really creeped me out. That was my Superdome.”
“I can imagine the noise. With all the people, I bet there were dozens of babies and little kids too. Probably at least one kid crying around the clock.”
“Yeah, there was. Mom said I never cried, although mom said I always looked like I was about to. Truth was, I was too terrified to make any sound. I was afraid that if I did, even more people would be looking at me. I was never so happy as to get out of there and back into my own little room. Sure, I’m an adult now, but I still don’t want anything to do with living in a shelter if I can possibly help it.”
“I hear ya,” said Martin. “If I stayed in town, I’d end up in one of those shelters. To be honest, I’d rather walk home and sleep in the cold woods.”
“I’d rather have a hotel room, if it’s all the same. Even if it’s way out by 128 and doesn’t have power. That’s okay. All I want is a room with a door.”
“That’s the plan,” Martin said. They walked in the street, as the narrow sidewalk was in use by kids on skateboards and scooters.
Groups of adults chatted over hedges or fences between the houses. Some sat in their cars listening to the radio. The neighborhood had an air of being all dressed up, but nowhere to go. Snarled traffic and The T being out of action were part of it, no doubt, but even if they could get into the city, what would they do?
“All these people,” Susan said. “Just standing around.”
“They’ve probably heard what the roads are like, so they stayed home.”
“Sure, but what will they do later?” she persisted. “If the power is going to be out for a long time, what happens to all these peoples’ jobs? I was thinking about my job at the bank. We could open the branch without power, I suppose. Things would be cash only, and we’d have to work on paper. It would be clumsy and slow, but we could do it.”
“How many people really use cash anymore?” he asked.
“The little sandwich shops do a lot in cash. The pizza guy, the chotchkies gift shops: they deposit lots of small bills. Where I was going with that, was that even their cash-based jobs use electricity. If they can’t make sandwiches, or cook pizzas, they don’t have jobs. There would be no one coming into the branch with cash anyhow. What about all these people?” She waved discretely at a knot of adults chatting in a front yard. “What about their jobs?”
“A couple days off are nice, but what will they do after that? Without power, who would still have a job to make the money to pay the five bucks for water?”
Martin tried to think of some profession unaffected by the grid going down. He finally thought of something. A music teacher for an acoustic instrument like a violin might qualify, if they were teaching in a building that did not require power for lights or heat, etc. Even though he thought of a non-powered job, if things were grid-down, why would anyone bother taking violin lessons? There would be a lot more serious chores to tend to just to survive. Learning to play the violin would be pretty low on the priority list.
Martin’s musing took a more personal turn. What would he do in an extended outage? His job not only required power for the internet, it relied on clients who required power. Those clients, in turn, relied on customers carrying on normal lives — which required power.
What if Brian did not reopen the office for a month? He and Margaret had enough in savings to cover the basic bills for a month. Could they pay bills? Most of their money was in the bank, accessed electronically. Could he get cash from the local branch? Would there be any employees working there? Would there be any employees working at the companies that send out his bills? The outage could mean no incoming bills and no outgoing payments. He wou
ld have to see how that stalemate worked out.
What if Brian never reopened the office? Martin felt a cold shudder down his back. What if he had to start over completely from scratch? He felt his own house of cards was collapsing.
* * *
Chapter 6: For lack of easy options
Martin and Susan emerged from the tree-lined cocoon of suburban Stoneham, back to the stark landscape of small stores, garish signs, and parking lots.
“Ah. Here we are. Route 28 again. Do you want to rest?” Martin was hoping she would say no, so they could make better time. The chances of his making it to that golf course before dark were looking slim.
“That would nice. Thanks,” she said.
That was not what he wanted to hear. Martin tried not to let out an exasperated sigh, but he must have.
“Only a short one,” Susan quickly added. “I’m sorry I’m slowing you down. I know you’re eager to get going to home.”
Martin winced. Why was being a jerk so easy? Yes, he was eager to get home, but at least he had one. She did not.
He turned to look her in the eye. “Hey, I don’t mean to sound impatient or walk too fast. Sure, I want to get home as soon as I can, but that’s not important. I said I would help you find a place. If I said it, I’ll do it. I won’t just take off and leave you without someplace safe to stay.”
She looked away, but he moved over to catch her eye again. “Getting you situated comes first, understand? I’ll get home eventually. I’m not worried about that. So, don’t go feeling bad about slowing me down. Okay?”
Susan did not say anything. She continued looking at him with sad puzzled eyes, which made him uncomfortable.
“Ahem, well. How about we have a snack while we rest, eh? We can enjoy some of our five-dollar crackers. At that price, they’ve got to be good, right?” His attempt at levity did not erase his jerk damage as he had hoped. She still looked sad and puzzled. The crackers being stale did not help. Neither did washing them down with the iron water.
They walked up 28 in silence longer than Martin felt comfortable. Normally, he was fond of silence, but unredeemed-jerk silence was hard to take. He tried again to restart a conversation.
