Nothing but sputtering on the radio. Nobody had a really good one that could pick up stations in Europe or far off.
Phones dead, of course.
But up in the night sky the first night out we saw dots moving-the pearly gleam of the Arcapel colony, the ruddy speck called Russworld.
So that's when Mr. Ackerman gets this idea.
We got to reach those specks. Find out what's the damage. Get help.
Only the power's out everywhere, and we got no way to radio to them. We tried a couple of the local radio stations, brought some of their equipment back to the reactor where there was electricity working.
Every damn bit of it was shot. Couldn't pick up a thing. Like the whole damn planet was dead, only of course it was the radios that were gone, fried in the EMP-ElectroMagnetic Pulse-that Angel made a joke out of.
All this time it's colder than a whore's tit outside. And we're sweating and dirty and grumbling, rubbing up against ourselves inside.
Bud and the others, they'd bring in what they found in the stores. Had to drive to Sims Chapel or Toon to get anything, what with people looting. And gas was getting hard to find by then, too. They'd come back, and the women would cook up whatever was still O.K., though most of the time you'd eat it real quick so's you didn't have to spend time looking at it.
Me, I passed the time. Stayed warm.
Tried lots of things. Bud wanted to fire the reactor up, and five of the men, they read through the manuals and thought that they could do it. I helped a li'l.
So we pulled some rods and opened valves and did manage to get some heat out of the thing. Enough to keep us warm. But when they fired her up more, the steam hoots out and bells clang and automatic recordings go on saying loud as hell:
"EMERGENCY CLASS 3 ALL PERSONNEL TO STATIONS"
and we all get scared as shit.
So we don't try to rev her up more. Just get heat.
To keep the generators going, we go out, fetch oil for them. Or Bud and his crew do. I'm too old to help much.
But at night we can still see those dots of light up there, scuttling across the sky same as before.
They're the ones know what's happening. People go through this much, they want to know what it meant.
So Mr. Ackerman says we got to get to that big DataComm center south of Mobile. Near Fairhope. At first I thought he'd looked it up in a book from the library or something.
When he says that, I pipe up, even if I am just an old fart according to some, and say, "No good to you even if you could. They got codes on the entrances, guards prob'ly. We'll just pound on the door till our fists are all bloody and then have to slunk around and come on back."
"I'm afraid you have forgotten our cousin Arthur," Mr. Ackerman says all superior. He married into the family, but you'd think he invented it.
"You mean the one works over in Citronelle?"
"Yes. He has access to DataComm."
So that's how we got shanghaied into going to Citronelle, six of us, and breaking in there. Which caused the trouble. Just like I said.
I didn't want to take the old coot they called Turkey, a big dumb Bunren like all the rest of them. But the Bunrens want in to everything, and I was facing a lot of opposition in my plan to get Arthur's help, so I went along with them.
Secretly, I believe the Bunrens wanted to get rid of the pestering old fool. He had been starting rumors behind my back among the three hundred souls I had saved. The Bunrens insisted on Turkey's going along just to nip at me.
We were all volunteers, tired of living in musk and sour sweat inside that cramped reactor. Bud and Angel, the boy Johnny (whom we were returning to the Fairhope area), Turkey, and me.
We left the reactor under a gray sky with angry little clouds racing across it. We got to Citronelle in good time, Bud floor-boarding the Pontiac. As we went south we could see the spotty clouds were coming out of big purple ones that sat, not moving, just churning and spitting lightning on the horizon. I'd seen them before, hanging in the distance, never blowing inland. Ugly.
When we came up on the Center, there was a big hole in the side of it.
"Like somebody stove in a box with one swipe," Bud said.
Angel, who was never more than two feet from Bud any time of day, said, "They bombed it."
"No," I decided. "Very likely it was a small explosion. Then the weather worked its way in."
Which turned out to be true. There'd been some disagreement amongst the people holed up in the Center. Or maybe it was grief and the rage that comes of that. Susan wasn't too clear about it ever.
The front doors were barred, though. We pounded on them. Nothing. So we broke in. No sign of Arthur or anyone.
We found one woman in a back room, scrunched into a bed with cans of food all around and a tiny little oil-burner heater. Looked awful, with big dark circles around her eyes and scraggly uncut hair.
She wouldn't answer me at first. But we got her calmed and cleaned and to talking. That was the worst symptom, the not talking at first. Something back in the past two months had done her deep damage, and she couldn't get it out.
Of course, living in a building half-filled with corpses was no help. The idiots hadn't protected against radiation well enough, I guess. And the Center didn't have good heating. So those who had some radiation sickness died later in the cold snap.