Total pages in book: 163
Estimated words: 150878 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 754(@200wpm)___ 604(@250wpm)___ 503(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 150878 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 754(@200wpm)___ 604(@250wpm)___ 503(@300wpm)
“You’re coming from Tennessee?” I asked, gesturing to Emilio’s sweatshirt. I glanced at the logo on the truck. I was going to assume that whoever Elrod Coltrane was, he hadn’t given these two young men permission to borrow his work truck.
“Yeah. We’re engineering students there. We all got evacuated because of the flood. A dam upstream of the Tennessee River broke and the entire campus was knee-deep in water. The wreckage from homes was floating past. We didn’t want to wait and see what else was gonna be in that water.”
“A dam broke?” Charlie asked, his voice incredulous.
“Yeah. The hardware and software systems that control everything from pipelines to chemical processing plants to dam operations had to have gone down with the power surge or whatever it was,” Emilio said. “There’s not much in modern society that those systems don’t control. We’re fucked.” He leaned back and gestured to his friend. “We mostly get how it works but have no idea how long it’ll take to get fixed over such a large area. All we know is we gotta get home where the lights are hopefully on. Our folks have gotta be freaking. What about y’all?”
We’re fucked. I swallowed, overcome again by yet another piece of information that sounded too big to truly grasp while we were standing in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road. “We’re trying to get home to California,” I said. “From what we’ve been told, the power is down from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to here.” And now we knew it extended down to Tennessee too.
“Pittsburgh? Damn,” Emilio muttered, looking down for a moment as he obviously digested that. He glanced over at his friend. “We were hoping it was more contained…maybe a couple states. We’re double fucked.” He gave himself a small shake, obviously choosing to think more about that later too. “We’re headed to Nebraska but we could drop you near Topeka before we continue north. Hop in,” he said, nodding toward the bed of the truck and then winking at Charlie. “Any friends of Professor Tecton are friends of ours.”
“Thanks,” Charlie said, his posture and radiant expression speaking of his new lease on life, despite the additional bad news we’d just received. He paused at the driver’s side door, perhaps measuring whether or not there was room for him up there or whether he’d have to ride in the back with the second-class citizens.
Regardless of having to endure Charlie’s self-important smile for hours, or whether this was a stolen truck or not, I wasn’t going to turn down a lift by a couple of college kids who appeared trustworthy enough and could cut several hundred miles from our trip. “That’d be great,” I added.
We climbed up to the bed of the truck and sat down, Emily and Charlie on one side, me on the other, before the truck jolted forward, bumping along the road.
After about half an hour, Charlie’s smug smile drooped and his head landed on Emily’s shoulder, and I heard him let out a rattly snore. The man was constantly tired and wound up. And that could very well have to do with the situation at hand, but I was pretty sure it also had to do with the fact that he wanted a hit or a pill and could no longer get one. Maybe he hadn’t been enough of a user that he was going through withdrawal, but he was probably pretty darn antsy with not being able to take the edge off with his regular coping mechanism.
I stretched my legs out to the right of Emily and crossed them at the ankles. I’d have liked to get some shut-eye too. I’d tossed and turned the night before, still keyed up from hearing Isaac’s account, my mind churning with thoughts and horrible visions of what downtown St. Louis had looked like in the aftermath of the event. And now I could add the picture of colossal dams overflowing as trillions of tons of water washed out entire towns in their wake.
But beyond all that, I didn’t feel safe not keeping guard. By necessity the truck was moving pretty slowly and at certain points, if someone had wanted, they could have chased us down and waged an attack.
As we drove, we saw more broken-down vehicles, and also a few groups of people who lifted their arms and attempted to wave down the truck. But Emilio and Wells didn’t stop for them like they’d stopped for us. Perhaps the information we’d given about the extent of the outage had heightened their rush to get home, or maybe they realized if they pulled over for everyone trying to hitch a ride, they’d be filled up and weighed down in short order.
I saw Emily turn her head as a couple who’d shouted a plea, disappeared behind us. “I guess we got lucky that we have the professor with us,” Emily said, tipping her head toward Charlie with a wry, if slightly shaky, smile. I nodded. I had to give credit where credit was due. We were also lucky that Emilio and Wells had slowed down when we’d waved, enough to notice Charlie at all. Isaac had mentioned that he’d gotten a ride too, which meant drivers had responded to his obvious need, but I had to imagine that certain kindnesses were going to end rather quickly.