Time Lost: Teenage Survivalist II Read Free Page A

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