Chapter 1: The Last Touch of Peace
The first thing I noticed was the cold. A sharp, invasive draft cutting through the usual warm fug of our bedroom. Then the smell: lavender soap from last night’s shower, undercut by something faintly metallic. My arm was asleep under Ellie’s head, her long blonde hair fanned across my chest, her breathing slow and deep. The room was half-lit by a sickly gray dawn, everything painted in shades of charcoal and dust.
I blinked, trying to place the wrongness.
The window was wrong.
The big pane overlooking the backyard was a spiderweb of fractures, a single large hole punched near the latch, letting in a knife-edge of wind. Shards of glass glittered on the hardwood and across the top of Ellie’s drafting table like malignant dew.
“Ellie,” I whispered, my voice gravelly with sleep. I shifted, gently extracting my numb arm. “Honey. Wake up.”
“Mmmmph.” She burrowed deeper into my side, one hand curling around my ribcage. “S’too early. The alarm didn’t even—”
“The window’s broken.”
That got her. Her eyes flew open, blue and instantly alert. She pushed up on one elbow, the sheet pooling at her waist, and stared. “What the hell?”
“My thought exactly.”
We sat there, two forty-four-year-old women in our rumpled bed, squinting at the damage. The room was a testament to our life—Ellie’s abstract canvases leaned against the far wall, a splash of vibrant color against the gloom. My old engineering degree hung slightly crooked next to the closet. On Ellie’s nightstand, a clay sculpture Nancy made in tenth grade, a lopsided but heartfelt owl.
“A bird?” Ellie ventured, running a hand through her hair. “A really big, stupid bird?”
“At this hour? And that’s tempered glass. A bird would be paste.” I swung my legs out of bed, my feet flinching from the chill of the floor. I padded over, careful to avoid the glittering debris. The break was clean, but not neat. Something had hit it from the outside with focused force. Not a random rock. A tool, maybe.
I peered out into the early light. Our backyard, the vegetable patches Ellie tended with religious fervor, the old oak with the swing I’d built for the girls. Nothing moved. But the silence was… thick. Oppressive. No distant hum of the highway. No chitter of early birds.
“Power’s out,” Ellie said softly. I turned. She was pointing at the digital clock on her nightstand, which was dark.
“Okay. Blackout.” I walked back to the bed, sitting beside her. My practical mind began cataloguing: freezer food, water in the hot water tank, lanterns in the garage. “We’ve been through those before. But the window…”
A loud thump from down the hall, then the sound of a door hitting a wall. “Mom? Mama?” Nancy’s voice, edged with morning panic.
“In here, sweetheart!” Ellie called, pulling the sheet up.
Nancy appeared in the doorway, her long curly hair a wild corona around her worried face. She was wrapped in her favorite, ridiculously fluffy purple robe. “The light in my room won’t turn on. And my phone is totally dead. It won’t even try to charge.”
Mary slipped in behind her, pragmatic even in sleep shorts and a faded science camp t-shirt, her short blonde hair sticking up at angles. “My phone’s dead too. And the landline just has a dial tone. No carrier signal at all.”
That got my engineer’s brain humming a different, darker tune. A blackout was one thing. A simultaneous, total communications failure was another. Cell towers have backups. Landlines have redundancies.
“Maybe a transformer blew really badly?” Nancy offered, coming to sit on the edge of the bed, curling into Ellie’s side. “Like, took everything out?”
“Could be,” I said, but the word felt hollow. My eyes drifted back to the shattered window. The cold air streamed in, carrying a scent I couldn’t place. Wet earth, rust, and something else. Something foul.
“We should check the news on the radio,” Mary said, already moving toward the old emergency crank radio on my bookshelf. She gave it a few vigorous turns and clicked it on. Static hissed, loud and white in the quiet room. She spun the dial. More static. On every frequency.
“That’s not right,” I murmured.
“Maybe the radio’s broken?” Nancy said hopefully.
“It’s a hand-crank emergency radio, Nance. It’s designed not to break.” Mary’s voice was calm, but I heard the slight tension underneath. My girl. Logical to a fault.
Ellie kissed the top of Nancy’s head. “Let’s not spiral. It’s probably just a really big outage. We’ll make breakfast the old-fashioned way. Camp stove on the back deck. Have a little adventure.” She was trying to lighten the mood, to be the anchor. Her artist’s soul always reached for beauty, for order, even now.
The sound of a car alarm wailed from a few streets over, abruptly piercing the silence. It shrieked for a full ten seconds before cutting out with a choked final beep. Then, another one started, closer this time.
“People must be trying to go to work and can’t get their garages open,” I said, more to myself than anyone. It was a reasonable explanation. It had to be.
We moved through the morning rituals by rote, the strange circumstances layering a film of unreality over everything. Ellie swept up the glass while I rigged a piece of plywood from the garage over the broken window, the hammer blows echoing too loudly in the still air. Mary and Nancy worked in the kitchen, finding the camp stove and the can of coffee.
Out on the deck, the world felt different. The sky was a uniform sheet of low, gray cloud. No planes. Not a single contrail. The car alarms had all stopped. The only sound was the wind, which had picked up, carrying that odd, rotten smell more strongly.
“Smells like the compost bin fell over,” Nancy said, wrinkling her nose as she handed me a steaming mug.
“Or like Mr. Hanley’s fertilizer,” Mary added, referring to our neighbor who was obsessively, toxically green with his lawn.
But it wasn’t either of those things. It was heavier. Meatier.
We sipped our coffee, a tiny island of normalcy on the redwood deck. Ellie reached for my hand, her fingers cool. I laced mine with hers, a silent signal. I’m here. We’re okay.