She was almost out of L.A.—a couple hours sleep would do her too much good to pass up. If she could cover some distance before night, she figured on reaching the Rocky Mountains by morning.
Kate had barely enough energy to lock the doors. As she fell into the deepest sleep of her life, she hoped the parking lot remained deserted for a few more hours.
CHAPTER 7
LEAH PUT A ZIPLOC full of fresh snow on Thom's bruised cheekbone. "Stop wincing. You should hold this on here…it'll help with the swelling."
"Aren't you supposed to use a piece of steak or something?"
"Tell you what, I'll just run down to the grocery store and grab one for you. Oh wait, I can't. Suck it up," she said, but couldn't help but smile. "That was kind of awesome how you stood up to them back there," she said, tucking a lock of hair over one ear.
Thom's face flushed. "Yeah well, it didn't feel awesome.” He adjusted the bag of snow on his cheek and winced. “I'm just mad they got all the stuff I had. That was a lot of milk and peanut butter—"
"It's okay, my extra bags make up for it. We have enough to last us for at least a few weeks now." She chewed her bottom lip as he looked at his bruised, blood-encrusted hands. "I didn't know you knew all that ninja stuff."
"You never asked." Thom leaned back in his creaky chair, holding the bag of melting snow to his face. He stared at the ceiling. "And it's taekwondo. Not ninjutsu."
"Well, either way, it was awesome. You took on three guys—"
Thom sighed. "I'm more upset they forced me into fighting. I hate fighting."
"But…" Leah blinked. "You're so good!"
Thom looked at her with one eye. "That's why I hate doing it." He shifted the snow pack and winced. "What if I make a mistake and hurt someone? Especially now—they might die. I don't think…I don't think I could live with myself if I killed someone."
Leah stood and ran her hands down her legs, smoothing her jeans. "Well, they might deserve it." She held up her hands when Thom frowned. "Okay, I'll stop. Let's talk about something else." She looked around the room. "We still managed to bring back more than half our stuff. That's something."
Thom moaned. "I don't even want to think about a couple weeks of eating nothing but peanut butter and stale bread."
Leah walked to the window in Thom's ground floor room and peered around the curtain. "I don't know what else to do." She watched a handful of students in the street mill about in front of the adjacent dorm. Half the group had just pulled up their hoods, zipped up coats, and trundled off. The rest waved and went back inside.
"More and more people are leaving. There's another group across the street taking off," she said over her shoulder. "I don't know where they think they're going," she muttered, watching the trio of students disappear around the bend behind some trees. She couldn't imagine trying to walk anywhere carrying backpacks full of clothes, food, and water.
"Is it getting colder in here?" she asked, absently rubbing her arms.
"I don't think I'm going to be a good judge of that with a bag of snow on my face," Thom replied. "But yeah, I think the temperature's falling."
Leah cast a desultory glance out the window. "It's mid-afternoon. We've only got a couple hours before the sun sets again. I think it's gonna get real cold tonight."
Thom stared at his computer. "You think anyone else even knows?"
Leah paused for a moment, listening to the sound of footsteps out in the hallway and hushed chatter among the students still in the building.
"You think we should tell everybody?"
"I don't know…how do we not, though? I mean, don't they have a right to know too?"
"Then why weren’t they out there at five in the morning with us talking to the police? Why weren’t they out there at the dining hall riot?"
Thom pulled the bag of mostly water away from his face and frowned at it. "How were they supposed to know? If I hadn’t been standing there waiting for my friend to show up, you'd be locked outside right now…"
“You're probably right…” she muttered.
“Ugh, I'm out of ice,” Thom said as he stood.
“Here, I'll get it,” Leah muttered. She took the bag from Thom and opened the window. Reaching outside with a grimace for the cold air, she scooped another handful of snow to refill the bag. Once the window was closed and secured, she tossed the bag back to Thom.
"Okay. Put this back on your face," she said, rubbing her reddened hands together. "I'm going up to my room to take stock of what I've got. Why don't you do the same, then we'll meet in say…15 minutes upstairs? Sound good?"
Thom grinned. "You want me to come up to your room?"
Leah stuck her tongue out. "No, the quad. You know that meeting room upstairs with all the chairs and tables?"
Thom laughed. "Yeah, I got it. No problem. I'll be there."
Leah gathered her coat and her half of their liberated food before heading up to her room. Out in the hallway, she found the activity was nothing like normal. Handfuls of students scurried back and forth across the hall between open rooms, several of them wearing headphones. More than one stared vacantly out a window, talking in hushed groups.
They know something's wrong but they don't know what.
By the time Leah reached her room on the third floor, she realized what she had to do. She put herself in the place of the other students, not knowing anything, waking up to see the craziest display of northern lights anyone's ever seen and finding a world dependent on technology suddenly thrust into the dark ages. She shut the door to her room and leaned against it, staring at her dimly lit quarters.
All of us are away from home, family, and friends. All we have is each other now. The school tried to help us out and look what happened…
She realized Thom was right—they had to tell everyone, had to decide as a group what to do. She went room to room knocking on every door informing everybody of an impromptu meeting in the quad. More than a few met her with apathetic looks and a dozen doors remained locked.
By the time she worked her way across her floor and back to the meeting room, Thom was waiting for her.
"I checked out the second floor—there's only a few down there. Most everybody's out."
Leah nodded. "Of the 22 rooms up here, I talked with about half. What about the first floor?"
Thom shook his head. "It's like a ghost town down there—very creepy. I've been hearing people leave all day, but I thought they’d be back by now. I don't know where everybody's going."
Leah thought back to watching the students across the street head out with backpacks and winter gear. "I think people are trying to head home—at least the in-state students."
Students wandered down the hall, bundled up in blankets and sweatshirts mumbling to each other. Thom ushered everyone into the quad and Leah took her place at the far wall in front of everyone.
Faced with more than a dozen people staring at her, Leah felt her throat tighten. “Uh, so my name's Leah and…”
"I’m Thom," Thom added with a half-wave.
"Dude, what the hell happened to your face?" asked a guy from the second floor.
"You should see the other guys," Leah said, ignoring the pained look on Thom's face.
"Does anybody know what's going on?" asked a girl wrapped up in a pink quilt with puffy red eyes. A dark-haired girl next to her sniffled. The two of them looked like they’d been crying for a while.
"Anybody getting a cell signal? I can’t call my friends…" muttered someone across the room. Within seconds, questions broke out on top of questions.
Leah looked at the ticking clock on the wall. “What do we do?”
Thom shrugged. "Hey this is your idea."
Leah frowned. "My idea? You're the one that said they had a right to know…"
"We have a right to know what?" a voice said louder than the others. The room fell silent.
Leah turned, feeling the whitewashed cinderblock walls closing in on her like a prison. The cheap college furnitu
re forced most people to stand. As a consequence, it was easy for them to press forward.
"What's going on," she began, then cleared her throat. "I know what's going on I mean—I mean, I think I do," she added.
"Well that's more than most of us, so let's have it—what's up?" asked the student who'd remarked on Thom's face. "I tried to head down to the dining hall, but it's all closed up. Looked like a bomb went off or something. What the hell is going on around here?"
"A bomb?"
"Are we under attack? Is it terrorists?" someone else added.
Leah raised her hands and stepped forward to head off the confused chatter. "No, it's not terrorism or anything like that. It's the sun. There was a large CME a couple days ago—"
"What’s a CME?"
"How the hell can the sun shut down everything?"
The voices clambered over each other. Leah dropped her arms and tried shouting but nobody listened.
A piercing whistle split the air and everyone fell silent. Leah turned and saw Thom pull two fingers out of his mouth. "Listen up! Everybody—there's some serious shit going on out there, but so far she's the only one that seems to know what the hell is happening. I got beat up earlier today, and I'd like to get back to my room and put some more ice on my face, so let's all shut up and listen to her so we can get this over with. Okay?"
"Okay…" Leah said, drawing the word out. She turned back to the other students and swallowed, trying to organize her jumbled thoughts. "Okay, here's what happened. I mean, what I think is happening. But, none of this is…I mean I don't know for sure—"
"Hey, just slow down and tell us what you do know," said one of the few students from the second floor. "It's a lot more than what we know, right?"
"Okay," Leah nodded.
"Go on, just tell them what you told me," Thom waved.
Several others nodded for her to continue. Leah clasped her hands in front of her and started.
"Okay. Here's what I think is going on. The sun let loose with a coronal mass ejection a couple days ago. That's called a 'CME'. Normally that's no big deal—it kind of happens all the time. But this one was especially big. It was charged with the opposite polarity of…"
She looked at the faces in front of her. They all had that glassy-eyed look that even some of the kids in her astrophysics class have from time to time.
I'm losing them already. Well, good to know I never would've made it as a professor.
She held her hands up. "Okay, look at it this way. The sun burped, and we got smacked."
One of the girls giggled. "It burped?"
Leah rolled her eyes. "Okay, think of it this way—the science doesn't matter—there was a solar flare that hit us…"
"Oh my God, so this is some kind of like, radiation storm or something?"
Leah shook her head. "No, it's not like that, I'm just using it as an expression. This flare hit the earth and we know it was powerful because of the crazy northern lights—"
"That's what that was?" gasped someone.
"Northern lights? What are you talking about?” asked a long-haired boy in need of a good shave.
"You see that shit in the sky?" asked the scruffy looking guy next to him. "Dude, it was crazy. All kinds of pink and red and green and shit."
"You need to lay off the buds, man. What time did you wake up?"
"Up yours—it was a totally respectable 11:30."
The ripple of laughter that worked its way around the room was a welcome relief.
"Well, look—I'm sorry what's your name?" Leah asked the late riser.
"Hunter."
"Right,” Leah said. “Okay, Hunter—well you missed probably the biggest display of northern lights in recorded history. But this event was not just something pretty that happened in the sky," Leah said changing her focus to the crowd once again. "The energy in this solar storm was so strong it fried our power grid and anything connected to it." She paused to let that sink in.
"Is that why my computer won't turn on?"
She pointed at the girl who spoke. Bingo.
"Yeah, but my phone wasn’t plugged in—how come I can't get any service?"
Leah blinked. “Because the cell towers were attached to the grid."
Silence descended on the room like a wet blanket. "Holy shit," muttered one of the girls in back. "Holy shit," she said again, a little louder.
"So…wait, what does that mean? No power means finals are canceled for next week, right?"
Again with the finals.
"Look, you've got to think bigger, guys,” Leah said, struggling to keep the frustration out of her voice. “Without the power grid, yes there's no finals next week—there's no school next week—maybe never again. At least not like we knew it. There's no Internet, no cell phones, no banks, no grocery stores—"
"What do you mean no grocery stores? What about McDonald's?" asked Hunter.
"Dumbass, where you think they get their power from?" replied the kid next to him.
"Oh."
"Look, there won't be any food in the grocery stores after the next day or so," Leah warned. "Think about it: how do the grocery stores get their food?"
"Delivery trucks," someone offered.
"And trucks need gas," Leah added, leading them on.
"Diesel," added Hunter.
"Whatever!" said Leah, a little sharper than she’d meant. "Where do they get that from? Gas stations, right? Well the gas station needs power to run the electric pumps to get that gas up out of the tanks—sorry diesel—and into the trucks."
"So without those trucks, no food and water deliveries…or anything?" asked Hunter.
Leah nodded. "I…I think so."
“Major buzzkill.”
"Damn, son…shit just got medieval," added Hunter's friend.
They all stared each other in an uncomfortable, awkward silence for a few moments. "Why is the clock still making noise?" the girl in the pink quilt asked, pointing to the wall clock.
The tall guy from the second floor reached up. "‘Cause it's got a battery." He turned the clock over and showed everyone. "Not connected to the grid, right?"
Leah smiled and nodded. "That's right…?"
"Aaron."
"As Aaron just showed us, anything with a battery should be fine. It was only devices or utilities actually plugged in to an outlet when the CME hit that were damaged. My computer is fried, but my phone is okay. I just have no way of charging it again…" Leah replied.
"Fat lot of good it'll do you without cell towers," Thom added. "And by the way, in case anyone forgets—the front door to our building is electronically locked, so if you walk out and it shuts behind you, there's no way to unlock it…somebody inside has to help you. It’s totally FUBAR.”
"So what’re we gonna do?" asked Aaron.
"What happened at the dining hall?" pink quilt girl asked.
Leah and Thom shared a look before launching into the riot. When they finished telling their story, including Brett’s attack, the room was silent as a tomb.
"What’re we gonna do?"
Leah stared back at the scared faces. "In the long run, I don't know. But short-term, we've got to do something."
"Oh yeah? Like what?" asked Hunter.
"I've been thinking about it all day—the only thing I can come up with is we've got to consolidate our resources. Without power, we're going to run out of water when the pressure drops."
"Why would the pressure drop?" the dark-haired girl asked.
"Oh damn," Aaron said, running a hand through his coppery hair. "Because without power, the city won't be able to pump water anywhere."
"Doesn't the campus have its own water supply?"
"Yeah, but they don't have power either. We have what's in the pipes right now and that's it."
Leah nodded at Aaron. "Right. We need to collect as much water as we can. Everyone."
"I've got a couple empty beer bottles lying around…" offered Hunter.
"Dude, fill up your bongs—you can pro
bably store a couple hundred gallons…"
"Fuck you, man," Hunter replied to his friend's ribbing.
"Seriously," Leah said, "we need to fill up every container we've got. Think outside the box. Do you have any Rubbermaid totes or buckets? Any Tupperware containers or anything that will hold liquid? Get to your sinks and fill things up."
"Why the rush?" asked Hunter, looking around for support. "Most of the people in the building are gone, man."
"He's right," Aaron added. "Everybody took off early this morning for some sort of gathering on campus."
Leah shook her head. "If it turned out anything like the riot at the dining hall, nothing good will come of it. I don't know if those people are coming back or not—"
"A lot of them were carrying a bunch of stuff," someone announced.
Leah shrugged. "We don't have time to worry about them. I think we've got to worry about us. The temperature’s dropping out there and without electricity we're not going to have any heat or light tonight. That means we could be looking at frozen pipes or something, right?"
Thom nodded next to her. "Yeah, I didn't think about that. It's gonna get cold as hell in here."
"The other thing is food. We need to conserve everything we've got…"
"Hey, man…before we go all Mad Max, what about the grocery store?" asked Hunter. "I know the power's out and they're like, not getting any more deliveries and stuff, but they gotta have something right now, right?"
Leah nodded. "You're right, the sooner the better. You want to take a group? I don't think it's safe out there for any of us to travel alone," she said glancing at Thom.
"Hell no, man—not me. I am totally not a leader."
The guy next to Hunter slapped him on the back. "But it was your idea, bro. Come on, I'll go with you. Anybody else want to come along?" Several others spoke up.
"You should probably take your backpacks and gloves—everything else you have to keep warm," Aaron suggested.
"Since it was my idea about the water,” Leah offered, “I can help us gather as much as we can."
Solar Storm: Season 1 [Aftermath Episodes 1-5] Page 16
