Time Lost: Teenage Survivalist II (2 page)

Chapter 3

The First Days

That night in our apartment wa
s
long and boring. W
e
could see from the windows of our third floor apartment that the only lights on in the city belonged to the hospitals, which were no doubt being supplied by backup generators. Even then, though, most of the rooms were dark early in the evening and the lights that were on were quite dim, probably to save generator fuel. We still didn’t know much about what had happened, but there were lots of rumors and, of course, conspiracy theories of some covert plan to overthrow the government flying around. I tried to tell people what the principal had told us about the coronal mass ejection, but they just answered,

—
Of course that’s what they’d tell us.

The first few days, Dad and I survived pretty well. There was still plenty of water stored in the water towers, although the mayor issued a statement, carried door-to-door by policemen and other government officials, that we should conserve water as much as possible, boil the water from the taps, and use any bottled water we had to save water for fighting fires. The messengers also told us that martial law had been declared and that the official cause of the blackout was indeed a CME, and that it had caused quite a bit of damage to the power grid, resulting in widespread outages across the country that would probably take weeks to fix. They told us that we should stock up on food and water, if at all possible.

Dad and I tried to go to the neighborhood stores to buy food and other supplies, but they were closed. Without electricity, they couldn’t run their cash registers or provide lighting for their customers. After the first couple of days, some storeowners had even gone so far as to board up their windows to prevent looting. The Red Cross set up mobile stations to give out food and water. We were okay, water-wise, because Dad was a bottled water freak and had several cases of it in the pantry, but we didn’t have much food since we mostly ate out. We had some boxes of cereal and Pop Tarts along with bags of chips and crackers that got us through the first few days. I was happy with eating all that junk food the first couple of days, but it soon got old and my stomach started hurting. I longed for some meat and, believe it or not, I started craving vegetables. It’s funny how you want something that you never liked before just because you can’t have it. I think my body knew it was missing some vital nutrients and so it was craving healthier food. We were able to get some hot meals from the Red Cross station for the first few days.

I was so bored. With no electricity, there just wasn’t that much to do. I wanted to go hang out with some friends on the street, but Dad thought it was too dangerous. There were a lot of thugs walking around breaking into stores, beating and robbing people, and causing all kinds of trouble. So we just stayed in the apartment most of the time. Occasionally, we would venture out together and just walk around the neighborhood, talking to people on the streets, but we’d head back home at the sound of trouble, like sirens or shouting. In our apartment, we read lots of books, magazines, and even the school textbooks I had brought home, and played cards by candlelight in the evenings. Most nights we’d sit outside on our little balcony, trying to make out the looming, hulking shapes of buildings, trees, and stalled cars, in the dark. It was eerie not knowing what was out there. We were so used to the city being lit up at night, that it felt like we were on an alien planet. Another thing that made the city seem alien for the first few nights was the strange green, and sometimes purplish-pink light of the aurora borealis dancing in the northern sky. Our balcony faced west so we could see the aurora and the eerie reflection of it on the buildings and in the car windows on the street below. Some people feared an alien invasion that first night, but soon science and knowledge prevailed to set their fears at ease.

Time ceased to exist. The days melted into nights, which then became day again—the same day as before, it seemed. We quickly lost track of what day it was and even what season, since it was so nice outside. Often, I would wake up confused as to what time of year it was. I was certain it wasn’t the dead of winter or the hottest part of summer, but I couldn’t really tell if it was spring or fall until I got up and looked out the window at the last few brown leaves clinging to the ornamental trees on the strip of grass in front of the building across the street.

Dad kept trying to call mom until the batteries on both our cell phones gave out. He never was able to get a signal. He tried a pay phone down the street, but there was no dial tone. According to everyone on the street, there was no phone service anywhere and the only communication was by short-wave radio a few days after the CME.  Long-wave radio waves were still too disrupted by the magnetic disturbance in the atmosphere to work.

After the first week without power, things started getting bad. Water was running out and there wasn’t enough pressure in the towers to pump it out anymore. Emergency generators were running out of fuel, and with no way to refuel them, the lights in the hospitals got fewer and dimmer every night. The closest hospital to us, and the one whose windows we could see every night from our balcony, was the children’s hospital. I started thinking about all those poor sick kids there, and what was going to happen to them. One of the kids in our school, a boy named Daniel, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor in junior high and was still undergoing radiation and chemo to get rid of it. I hoped he was far enough along in the treatment to be cured. When I asked Dad about it, he just shook his head and looked away. He murmured something like,

—
I don’t know, Ben.

I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it. What Dad did want to talk about, though, what he worried about and complained about every day, was how much money he was losing by not working and how big a loss the stock market was going to take because of this. He kept repeating those old sayings from my namesake, Benjamin Franklin,
Time is money
and
Lost time is never found again
. I got so tired of hearing about it that I finally told him to just get over it. He kind of freaked out on me then, yelling about how were we going to survive after the electricity comes back on, and how hard he’s worked to get us where we were, and how he didn’t want to lose our apartment and his new Lexus, etc. I knew we were all frustrated by the situation and we all reacted differently to the stress, so I just let it drop and ignored him every time he ranted about money after that. I wondered if he’d always been this uptight about making money, then it dawned on me that that was probably why he was hardly ever home when he and Mom were still married. I stopped myself, though, before I could continue down that thought trail. Better to let all that remain locked away in my head.

Every couple of days or so, a policeman named Officer Ortiz, would come by our building and give us news and updates on the situation. After about nine days without electricity, Officer Ortiz came to tell us that stores had been ordered by the military to open their doors to the public and give away provisions. Armed troops were stationed in each store to ensure proper conduct and enforce strict rationing guidelines. Officer Ortiz encouraged people to get what they could as soon as possible. He said the government had promised the storeowners that they would be reimbursed by FEMA when the emergency was over.

Dad and I headed down to the market a few blocks from our building and waited in the long line that stretched down the block. Policemen were everywhere trying to keep people calm and orderly. After about an hour, we finally made it into the store where, sure enough, armed and uniformed soldiers stood guard near the doors. The grocer handed us a brown paper sack that was half-full of items; we didn’t get to pick out what we wanted. As we were heading back to the doors to leave, one of the guards was confronting a man who was trying to force his way back into the store. The man began to yell that he didn’t get what he needed and he was going back to get it. I couldn’t hear what the guard was saying—he was trying to stay calm and keep the man from freaking out—but the man just got more and more frantic, yelling that he had to have ketchup or he would die. Dad looked in our sack and found a can of tomato paste. He offered it to the man and after the guard told him that was the best he was going to get, the man took it sheepishly and left, murmuring his thanks to Dad.

Outside the store we took a quick look in the sack. It contained a pound of ground cornmeal, two cans of green beans, two small cans of deviled ham, a box of trashcan liners, a can of V8, and a canister of salt. I was hoping for some toilet paper, as we had been out for two days and I couldn’t imagine what we were going to use instead. We were feeling pretty gross by then anyway. We hadn’t had a shower or bath in over a week and though we used a little water on a cloth to wipe the sweat off our bodies, we didn’t dare waste enough of it to wash our hair. The toilets had become a problem, too. With the decrease in water pressure, the toilets didn’t have enough water to flush. It was a good thing that we weren’t eating very much or else it would’ve been really nasty.

The next day, the army brought in big trucks full of water and food from the USDA Commodities Warehouses in the huge storage caves along the banks of the Missouri River. They told people to bring buckets, bottles, jars, or whatever else they could use to carry water in. Again, we had to wait in a long line to get our containers filled. Dad and I brought two buckets and four empty two-liter bottles, but the soldiers would only let us fill up the buckets and two bottles. We were able to get several cans of food, too. Everyone was being pretty decent and patient that first day of the food and water being brought in.

The next day, however, we were further back in the line and when it came our turn to fill our containers, the water in the tank was already low. We only got half what we had gotten the day before and a fight broke out in the line behind us. We just barely got out of the way before the last several dozen people in line rushed the truck, shoving and fighting to get the last of the water. The soldiers were trying to push everybody back, with one of the soldiers on a megaphone urging everybody to be calm and wait their turn. Dad and I tried to hurry away before it could get really ugly or before someone tried to steal our water. We didn’t get far before we were confronted by some mean looking guys who seemed to be less interested in our water than in intimidating us.

Our water jugs were yanked out of our hands before we could even offer them to the thugs. They tossed them aside like they weren’t the vital necessity that we knew they were. One ugly guy got right up in my face, took a hold of the front of my coat and pushed me back into the melee of panicked rioters. His face was so close to mine, I could smell his stinking breath and see the grainy texture of three blue tears in prison tattoo fashion staining the leathery skin at the corner of his eye. When the crowd behind me pushed me back into him, he cursed at me and punched me in the face, like he was angry that I had dared to fight back. I had been hit in the face before during football and other sports, but nothing like this. It hurt so bad that I thought I would black out. I would have fallen to the ground except for the swirling mass of turmoil pushing and bouncing me around like a buoy on turbulent waters. At that moment I understood what people meant when they say they saw stars and that the world seemed to move in slow motion for a while. Time, which had seemed nonexistent for a while, now appeared like a cruelly distorted nightmare.

When I finally got my senses back, I had been deposited at the side of the crowd and I looked frantically around for Dad. I finally spotted him in the middle of the gang of thugs who were pushing him back and forth between them, each taking a crack at his face or body as he passed. I started screaming for help, suddenly realizing that the water tanker, along with the accompanying soldiers, were driving away, leaving us to fend for ourselves. After what seemed like hours of me standing by helplessly watching Dad get beat up, my nose bleeding and swelling so much I could barely see, some police officers showed up and with guns, billy clubs, and riot gear, and chased everybody off. Everybody but the few of us who were injured, that is. Dad was on his back, gasping for air like a fish out of water. An officer stooped down to check on him, but he couldn’t talk to say if he was okay or not. It took a few minutes for Dad to recover enough to painfully sit up and speak again. He said he was alright, but I worried that he might have had some ribs broken because he moved gingerly for weeks afterward.

Chapter 4

Spiraling Down

Day by day, things got progressively worse.
After the first few days of almost constant sirens, fewer and fewer could be heard each day. This wasn’t because there were any fewer emergencies or less crime; it was because the police, fire departments, and ambulances were running out of fuel to run their vehicles. The military still had fuel in reserve, but they conserved it as much as possible. It was odd to see nothing but an occasional army Hummer on the once-busy downtown streets. Instead of sirens, more and more often we’d hear people screaming in terror or anguish, yelling for help, or crying in pain.

One old man in our building, Mr. Westcott, who had been without his oxygen for several days, collapsed and died of a heart attack—at least that’s what we thought he probably died of. Dad and some of the other residents had been checking on him every day, but one morning when someone checked on him, they found him dead in his ratty, old armchair, clutching his chest but, incongruously, with a peaceful expression on his face. When I got there with Dad, the smell made my stomach heave. Dad and some of the other men took his body, wrapped it in a blanket, and carried it to the children’s hospital, where at least they would have a morgue. When Dad came back, he was visibly shaken and wouldn’t talk the rest of the afternoon. It made me sick to think of what he saw there, so I didn’t even want to know.

I began to have nightmares at night and even some hallucinations during the day. Dad said it was probably because of the lack of adequate food and water, but I thought there was a lot more to it than that. I couldn’t stop thinking about old Mr. Westcott and all the children at the children’s hospital. As much as I tried to avoid it, I kept thinking about Mom and wondering how she was doing. At least she had Lyle to take care of her.  I kept trying to bury thoughts of Mom, so I wouldn’t have to face my growing worry and loneliness for her.

One night I had a particularly vivid nightmare that made me wake up panting in fear. I was outside somewhere in a field, on a beautiful summer day. As I looked up at the sky, I noticed that the sun seemed to be getting bigger and bigger, closer and closer. I don’t know how, but I was able to look directly at the sun, as it loomed closer toward me. As it neared, I could see bright storms raging on its surface and occasionally it would spit flares out the side. It grew hotter and I began to sweat, then my skin felt like it was burning. When it got so big and close that I could almost reach out to touch it, the grass around me started catching on fire. I could hear my dad yelling at me to run, but I couldn’t move my feet.

Suddenly, there was an explosion and I woke up, panting and sweating. I wasn’t sure if it was a real-life explosion that had woken me up or if I had just dreamed it, but a few seconds later a second explosion rocked our building. I jumped out of bed and ran to the living room where Dad was looking out the window toward the west. A huge fire raged across town, probably five or ten miles away, and the light from it lit up the entire western sky. All night long the fire burned, first gaining in area, then finally burning down by late morning. The oddest thing about the whole night was the absence of sirens. It was strange that in the past year that I’d lived downtown, I’d gotten so used to sleeping through sirens, but now I found the absence of them oddly unnerving. I never did go back to sleep, but just laid there thinking about the nightmare and the real fire just a few miles away.

By December—at least according to one of our neighbors who kept track of the days religiously—almost everyone was out of their stockpile of food and the stores were empty, too. The military could only bring in water trucks every other day and rioting around them became more common and more intense. Dad and I started collecting rainwater in buckets on our little balcony, but it wasn’t nearly enough to quench our thirst, let alone to use it for bathing and flushing the toilet. People began having to go to the bathroom outside, in parks and alleys. They were collecting rainwater that had pooled in the city’s two hundred fountains, but the water in those were fouled from animals who were starving and dying from thirst, sometimes in the fountains themselves, and people who bathed in them. Kansas City used to be famous for its beautiful fountains, but now those same fountains were making people sick with dysentery and other awful stomach diseases that I’d never even heard of before. I got used to being hungry, but I couldn’t get over the thirst that choked me and made me feel weaker every day.

At some point, the military began bringing in grain from grain elevators that had been taken over under martial law and handing it out to people with the water rations. Anyone who rioted was not allowed any water or grain and if the situation got too out of hand, the truck would simply leave that neighborhood and go somewhere else, so people started being more peaceful during the handouts. I think we all were getting too weak to fight anyway. The grain that was handed out was whole, hard, and straight from the field—not ground up or refined in any way. In order to eat it and digest it, you had to grind it and, especially in the case of soybeans, cook it. We mostly got corn, so to grind it, Dad broke one of his old bowling trophies off its marble base, and we used a piece of a broken concrete sidewalk to crack and grind the kernels against the marble. Then we’d mix a few drops of water with it, just so we could choke it down.

One day Dad and I noticed a pigeon hopping around on our balcony and we started thinking about how great it’d be to have some meat to eat. All that afternoon we worked on making a trap out of a box, a stick, and some string, just like Wile E. Coyote would do. When we finally got it perfected, we set it out on the balcony with a few precious grains of corn inside and waited for the pigeon to come back. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, two days later, we came home from getting our water and grain ration to find the trap had been sprung and a pigeon was inside. We cheered and did a little victory dance, but then reality set in and we realized we had no idea what to do with it now. Dad finally killed it with a knife and we spent the next hour trying to pluck feathers out of it. Then Dad stuck a serving fork in it and held it over an oil lamp we had made out of some cooking oil in a jar with string for a wick, until it was cooked. We devoured that thing and it seemed like the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten. We were still hungry afterward, but we felt more hope and more in control of the situation than we’d had in a long time and we set up more traps on the balcony and the roof of our building.

For the rest of that year, we lived off whatever animal we could trap, including mice and rats, and the water we collected off our balcony. People who only relied on the military rations didn’t fare so well and many died from dehydration and starvation. Lots of people died from diseases, too, so Dad and I stayed in our apartment most of the time to avoid getting exposed to them, but we couldn’t stay away from people completely.

Christmas came and went without much fanfare. Some people got together and prayed, but most people were too weak and depressed to feel like rejoicing. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t care less that I didn’t get any presents; I was just thankful to be alive, with a home, a little bit of food and water, and my Dad to take care of me.