Renewal Read Free Page A

Aggie asked casually, seemingly polite conversation with no substance.
     
    “Well, it definitely better than it was. We can almost always find food now, and people seem to be getting along for the most part. In town, it’s mostly quiet. The sheriff and his boys do a pretty good job of keeping the troublemakers out.”
     
    Bill chimed in. “How about fuel?”
     
    “There is some for farm equipment, but it’s strictly rationed by the county. The trains get theirs from the state, but it’s still pretty rare to see one come through. The interstate is still too dangerous outside of town. We’re mostly on our own.”
     
    “I see. Same old… Well, if you’re ready let me give you that tour I promised you.” Bill got up and walked to the door. “I’m going to make a big mistake by starting with the punchline.” He reached his hand inside and flipped his hand upwards. The entire kitchen filled with light - electric light.
     
    “Holy sh… crap, sir! You have power!” Terry found his cup swinging on one finger and set it down quickly.
     
    Bill laughed loudly. “That’s always good for a laugh, don’t you think, Aggie?”
     
    Aggie snorted and said, “Drama queen.”
     
    “What can I say? I like to be the center of attention.”
     
    Aggie was still chuckling as she gathered up the cups on the tray and went back inside. “Have fun, boys.”
     
    “Let’s go, Terry.” Bill walked to the fence line that was once the back of the sub-division. Terry hopped down the steps and followed him. They stopped at a big wooden gate and looked across another grass field behind the fence.
     
    Bill started his tour by talking. “My folks were from Nashville. They were taking us to visit our family down in South Georgia when it hit the fan. They said that when it became clear that things were getting bad, they wanted us to go for a visit while we still could. My dad had an old station wagon from the 1970’s with a brand new GPS on the dashboard. He was an engineer and loved gadgets of all kinds, which didn’t make sense with the station wagon, an antique even then. That was 2012. When we asked him why we couldn’t have one of the cool SUVs that our friends had, he always said, ‘First rule of engineering, boys… If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ We always rolled our eyes at that. He probably said it ten times a day. Turns out, he was right.”
     
    Terry didn’t know what to say, but he knew this was important to Bill.
     
    Bill kept going. “My dad had been selling my mom on how great that GPS was, all the way from Nashville. She probably just thought of it as another one of Dad’s useless toys. My brother, Tom, and I were in the rumble seat way in the back, so we couldn’t see what was going on. We were too busy trying to get truckers to honk their air horns anyway. We were coming up the long hill from the Beech Grove exit when Dad started grumbling. The thing wasn’t working right. He pushed a bunch of buttons on the screen and gave it the old engineer slap. All it did was read, ‘Seeking satellites.’ Dad pulled off at the next exit, up here at Busy Corner, to do some trouble shooting and fill up the tank with twelve dollar gas while he was at it. Busy Corner was actually busy that day, and we weren’t the only ones with GPS troubles. By the time he finished putting gas in the car, it was clear that everyone with a GPS was trying to get it to work and everyone with a fancy cell phone was just as puzzled.
     
    No one knew what was going on at that point, but I think Dad was getting the idea. He did something he hadn’t done in 10 years. He turned on the old CB radio under the dash, and listened to the chatter. It was full of truckers who had lost their GPS as well. Dad was torn, he told me later, about whether to keep going, but I guess he decided to go on since we piled back in the car and headed east. We made it all the way to the Tullahoma AEDC exit before we hit a road block of Air Force