“That was classy, Derek.”
“I know. I’m a real charmer after ten. If it’s any consolation, you have the better face.”
Amanda snatched his cigarette and took a deep drag. She spat smoke out her window, at an illuminated bank sign. The digital clock had become hopelessly scrambled, forever stuck in crazy eights.
“Just drive.”
—
The electricity continued to surge and dip throughout the night. Citywide power fluctuations were spotted in various pockets of the globe, from Guadalajara to Rotterdam. The night owls screeched and the utility workers scrambled, but most of the West slept through the muddle. In London, the morning commute was hamstrung by a chain of mini-blackouts. In central Osaka, the sun set on a flickering skyline.
And then at 4:41 A.M., Pacific Time, the entire world shut down for nine and a half minutes. Every light and every outlet. Every battery. Every generator. Even the lightning storms that had been swirling in 1,652 different parts of the world were extinguished by invisible hands. For nine and a half minutes, the Earth experienced a mechanical quiet that hadn’t been felt in centuries.
At 4:50, the switch flipped again, and the modern world returned with confusion and damage.
The American power network was as complex and temperamental as the human psyche. In some areas, the electricity came back immediately. In other regions, the circuits stayed dead forever. On some streets, people struggled to help their neighbors out of stalled elevators and plane-wrecked buildings. In others, there was panic and violence. Accusations. Tribulation.
Throughout all the chaos, the sisters slept.
Amanda woke up an hour after sunrise, her alarm clock blinking confusedly at 12:00. She made a sleepy lurch to the shower and heard Derek’s off-key crooning over the running water. She used the other bathroom.
“Power failure last night,” he said twenty minutes later, as they both dressed.
“Yeah. I noticed.”
“I’m not getting a signal on my phone either.”
Her shirt still undone, Amanda turned on her smartphone and patiently waited for the little image of a radar dish to stop spinning. She gave up after a minute.
Derek crossed into the kitchen and nearly slipped on a pair of magnets. Yawning, he stuck them back on the refrigerator. Amanda flipped on the living room TV. Channel after channel of “No Signal” alert boxes. She peered out the front window and relaxed at the normal procession of cars and joggers, the comforting lack of screams and sirens. Aside from the all-encompassing power burp, life seemed fine in Chula Vista.
Soon her mind drifted back to the mundane—chores and cancer, Derek and Hannah. Her bleary thoughts kept her busy all the way to the medical office. She didn’t notice the two separate plumes of black smoke in the distance, spreading like stains across the flat gray sky.
—
Two of the nurses failed to show up for their Saturday shift. From the moment she threw on her peach-colored coat, Amanda became a whirlwind of activity, spinning between the office’s endless rooms and needs. Along the way, she picked up morsels of chatter about the blackout. Her fingers curled with tension when one of the patients mentioned something about a crashed Navy jet.
Tommy Berber eyed Amanda balefully from the far end of the hall. He was a barrel-chested biker with a bandana skullcap and a bushy gray beard that hung in knotted vines. Mechanical beeps emanated from inside the chamber.
“Yeah, hi. Remember us?”
She held up a bag of clear liquid. “I’m here. I have it.”
Berber followed her into the treatment room, where his son Henry lounged in a plush recliner. The sweet and skinny twelve-year-old had already lost his left arm to osteosarcoma. Soon he’d lose his hair, his lunches, and any last semblance of a normal adolescence. But his long-term chances of survival were mercifully good. Out of all today’s patients, Henry was the luckiest of the unlucky.
Amanda shined him a sunny smile, then adjusted his chemo dispenser until it stopped beeping.
Henry grinned weakly. “Thanks. That was getting old.”
“Twenty minutes!” Berber yelled. “We’ve been waiting twenty minutes!”
Amanda nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. We’re short staffed today and our computers are down.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better about this place?”
“Dad . . .”
Amanda replaced the empty bag of doxorubicin with a fresh dose of cisplatin. She reprogrammed the machine, then tapped the plastic tube until the liquid started to drip.
“You’re going to feel a hot sensation,” she warned Henry.
“Right. I remember.”
She watched the liquid flow into his arm. “All right, my darling. You’re all set. Anything you need?”
“Yeah, a sedative. For Dad.”
“Oh, he’s just mad because you and I are eloping. We’re still on for that, right?”
Henry laughed. “Absolutely. Did you tell Dr. Ambridge yet?”