The Lights

“I’ll trade you for the heart-shaped locket,” the marauder tried to strike a deal after I caught him going through my barn. He was alone; I had watched him approach for at least half a mile, so I wasn’t worried in the slightest about dealing with him. He’d even come during the daylight, if you could call it that, the sky was always an unnerving color, so I knew his plan was not well thought out, more just desperate.

I understood desperate. Some days that is all that was left.

The first night that I saw the northern lights, I mean really saw the northern lights, it was fascinating! I had never seen more than a slight glow from the acclaimed northern lights before, and there they were, just like what you see on TV! The green, blue, and pink lights rippled magnificently across the clear Kansas night sky. I went to text my brother to go outside to look and I couldn’t get the text to send. The solar storm was impacting the phones. After awhile the lights went away. Hours later as I worked a shift in the State Emergency Operations Center, we continued to gather situation reports from around the State of other impacts-multiple emergency communications centers were down, we were limping along using our amateur radio operators, and even that had some disruptions. The messages began going out from leadership. It’s a one-time event, this solar storm was not forecast to be anything major, it was a fluke, there is no cause for alarm. Everything came back up. That lasted for 48 hours, and then the lights came back. I knew from my briefings what the real concerns were. Power grid, airplanes, and overall communications to name a few. This time it knocked out power transmission from a major generating station and even melted transformers in the Denver area and in Philadelphia and Tampa. The lights were back the next night and within a brief while, we learned of GPS being taken out with planes crashing into other inbound planes in both Houston and Washington, D.C. The next day the lights went off and did not come back on. My phone wouldn’t work. Nothing worked. As the day went on, I began to see smoke to the north and to the southeast. My suspicion was that the nuclear reactors at the surrounding nuclear stations had begun to melt down due to a lack of cooling. The blue glow in the sky from those areas the following night confirmed my suspicions as I could see the particle emissions and fallout turn the sky around the plants an eerie shade of blue. I knew that we weren’t close enough to receive fallout, at least there was that.

I hated being outside anymore at night. The northern lights lit up nightly at one caliber or another, taunting us. We had long since stopped trying to manage the disaster so I have no idea what the endless northern lights meant, just that I hated them. Moreover, the ash! What the hell was with the ash! It had to be from some type of fires sparking in lines or other electrical devices. There was just random ash in the air, sometimes heavy, sometimes light, but you could feel its dustiness on your skin. The ash started as I had made my way home from my office, from the State Emergency Operations Center where we had tried to salvage what we could of a response but hadn’t stood a chance after people realized that we had a bigger problem on our hands than just a power outage. No one could even find the Governor, he had been flying back from some meeting when the GPS got impacted and we don’t know what happened. I know what I assumed happened. His Lieutenant Governor basically froze. Word got out that we had supplies stored at the complex, something that was a joke because we didn’t even have anything stored for ourselves, and people started trying to get in. I took my backpack and left as it began, confident that I could make it the 36 miles home, but that I would not make it through a fight for supplies that didn’t exist.

Sometimes, when you’re in a hurry you grab weird things. I’ve heard it before from disaster survivors that had to evacuate their home, they grabbed something completely random and left with it. Well, I grabbed the heart-shaped locket. It was nothing special, just a necklace that I had on my desk that I used to dress up an outfit when I got in front of the camera to tell citizens how to be prepared for whatever disaster was on our doorstep. I’d worn it for interviews the first few days of our current hell. I’d lied to people. I’d told them that everything would level out-just prepare for seven days to two weeks of power loss. I doubted it even as I’d said it, but sometimes it’s easier to just go with the lie.

I set off straight north from the complex, a route that I’d gone through in my head before. My job was to prepare for the worst, so of course I’d thought about that on a personal level. I made my way straight out of town onto backroads to make it home. Vehicles were haphazardly stopped, abandoned, some hitting the one in front, throughout the town. The bridge was bad, there must have been a green light, and cars were stalled all over. Once I made it to the outskirts of town, it was hard to tell that anything had even happened.

The man stood staring at me. Then it clicked to him, all because of the damn locket.

“I saw you on TV,” he said.

Hell, I had not seen that coming.

“You’re with the government,” he continued. “Not FEMA, no, something else, I saw you. You said this would all pass. You said we just had to deal with this a short time, an inconvenience you said, an inconvenience!”

“I did what you told me! I spent what I had to buy enough for two weeks, but it’s been gone for weeks. You know what else is gone! My family has been gone for well over two weeks, an inconveniencing two weeks, as you would say,” he got louder and closer to me with each word. I let myself lose focus. I let him get too close.

Would the truth have changed anything? Would telling people how close we are to completely falling off the ledge at any time have made a bit of difference? A bomb, an EMP, a solar flare, the big earthquake, all capable of sealing our fate at any moment. No one would have let me put that message out to the public. No one ever wants to panic citizens, even when they really do need to panic.

I saw the desperateness take over. He was too close. He was much too close when I saw the knife.