Time Lost: Teenage Survivalist II Read Free

I forcibly turned my feelings and my worries toward my Dad who I felt was alone and vulnerable. I worried about Dad the rest of that long afternoon that we were stuck in the school.
    Several of the older students who either had cars or could ride with other students were allowed to leave, but the school held on to those of us who were under 16 until our parents or another trusted adult could come pick us up. Some of us waited a long time, in fact it was getting dark outside by the time my dad finally showed up. He was on foot, having walked the twenty-two blocks from his office building. He told me we would have to walk home, because his car wouldn’t start and even if it did, he couldn’t get it out of the office building’s underground lot.
    While we walked the fifteen blocks home, Dad told me about all the problems in his office building. The first problem was all the people that were stuck in the elevators. Dad wasn’t one of them, thankfully, but he had stayed to help those that were climb up out of the hatch at the top of the elevator cars and up the ladder on the side of the elevator shaft to the floor above where it had stopped. Then everyone had to walk down the thirteen flights of stairs to street level.
    As we walked, there were still tons of sirens and police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks whizzing by every which way. We could see huge plumes of thick black smoke coming from several different locations in the distance. Dad said he had tried to call Mom to check on her, but couldn’t get a signal, and that made my stomach do a flip-flop. I wasn’t sure what upset me most: not knowing if Mom was okay, or that Dad was still concerned about her. Maybe he was just calling her for my sake, but in either case, I just looked away and changed the subject.

 
    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