Grid Zero

Chapter 1

June 30

In the windowless supermarket on Monroe Avenue, they shopped by flashlight as the midday sun blazed outside. The shoppers moved in groups of four, each group accompanied by a clerk or security guard to prevent theft. They had shown cash to get in. Without electricity to run the payment terminals, credit cards were useless.

The store’s diesel generator had run out of fuel on the third day of the blackout. By then almost all the meat was gone, all the eggs, the dairy, anything that needed to be refrigerated or frozen. The ones who had bought meat while it was still available had to grill it right away because they had no working refrigerators to keep it cold.

What the store hadn’t sold, they threw away. Minimum-wage workers tossed food into dumpsters under a manager’s supervision. The hungry onlookers who had been living on cereal and bread after throwing out their own spoiled meat looked angry. Why couldn’t they have some? What was going into the dumpster wasn’t yet spoiled beyond hope.

“We can’t give away food that might have gone bad,” the manager explained. “There are liability laws.”

Some people in the crowd didn’t like that answer. The manager wound up in the ER. Twelve stitches above the eye. Even though the hospital was depressing—all those elderly people being hauled in for heat stroke, and the accident victims, the ones who’d been out driving on chaotic streets where none of the traffic lights worked—the manager lingered an extra hour just to soak up the air conditioning. The hospital’s generator was still in service then, back on day four.

It had been on and off ever since, depending on when the diesel trucks could get through. Hospitals had priority. If there was any fuel to distribute, it went to them first. To them and to the police and fire departments, to the pumping stations that supplied the water, to the utility trucks repairing downed lines, and to the huge, power-hungry data centers in the northern part of the state.

People were angry about that. Was it really so important to keep the video streams running, to keep the memes flowing on social media, when people for two hundred miles in every direction had no lights, no Wi-Fi, no cell service, no consistent food supply? Were the entertainment needs of the South and Midwest and West, those parts of the country that still had power, more important than the physical needs of everyone who was suffering in the East?

The outage stretched from North Carolina through Virginia, Maryland and DC into Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and parts of New Jersey. The region had not even begun to recover from the first hurricane when the second hit. The first storm, a lazy, sprawling giant, had parked itself over the mid-Atlantic for two days and dumped over a foot of rain in some areas. The second was a tightly-wound powerhouse that made landfall on the Virginia-Carolina border as a category five before moving inland and racing north into Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The rain from the first storm had flooded hundreds of counties and softened the ground. The wind from the second uprooted millions of trees, taking down power lines everywhere. It wasn’t a single blow that had knocked out the grid, it was death by a thousand cuts. By a hundred thousand cuts. Trucks from the power companies prowled the streets—the streets that weren’t blocked by fallen trees—to visually inspect lines, transformers, and substations one by one, making pen-and-paper inventories of what needed to be repaired.

Getting the components required to make the repairs was a whole other matter. Where do you find thousands of pole-top transformers on short notice? How do you get them into neighborhoods where the roads have washed out?

And what about the specialty equipment at the damaged substations? The switches, relays, breakers and shunts? The big transformers that fed thousands of homes? Every day, as citizens with chainsaws cleared fallen trees from smaller roads, trucks from the electric utility pushed deeper into the neighborhoods to discover more damage.

Even now, nine days after the passing of the second storm, Empire Energy still couldn’t make a full inventory of the problems. Their trucks were running out of fuel, and the gas stations, lacking electricity, couldn’t pump any more.

Downed trees and flood-damaged roads hindered the progress of utility crews coming in from other states. Trucks from Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky and Kansas brought fresh water, fruit, and snacks along with black-market gasoline, and sold it along their routes at thousand-percent markups.

Sean Riggs knew from his brief stint with the electric utility how power would be restored in a scenario like this. First, fix the lines and equipment closest to the generation facilities—if you can get there. The power has to get onto the grid before it can be distributed. Then, Washington, DC would be first in line. After that, the military bases, the shipyards in Newport News. Then Philadelphia and Baltimore and the large industrial customers. Then the suburbs. Then the medium-sized towns. Then the small towns, like his. The poor souls scattered along rural country roads would be last in line.

According to his AM radio, pockets around the gas-fired plants at Chalk Point and Doswell had come on line the previous morning. DC would start to light up that evening. He calculated that even with the crews that had rolled in from out of state, it would be four days before the lights came on again in his town of thirty-one thousand. Phone service was being restored piecemeal in the cities, but there still was no signal outside the metro areas.

In the dark, sweltering supermarket on Monroe Avenue, the shoppers and their flashlight-wielding chaperones moved in pools of bright white LED light along the middle aisles where the imperishables—cereal, chips, crackers—were in dwindling supply.

“That one,” said an elderly woman, pointing to a box of cereal on a high shelf.

“Grape-Nuts?” asked the security guard.

“Yes, please.”

He pulled it from the shelf and put it in her basket.

Danielle Duval and Sean Riggs reached for the last box of Raisin Bran at the same time.

“You take it,” she said.

If the beam of the guard’s flashlight had been on her face, instead of illuminating the floor behind her, Sean would have seen her smile.

They had run into each other a handful of times in the past year, at coffee shops, gas stations, supermarkets. She had flirted with him each time, but he hadn’t picked up on it. If he had seen her in broad daylight, he would not have recognized her, would have sworn he had never seen her before.

She knew from a friend of a friend he was a software engineer. “Flirting with guys like that is pointless,” her friend told her. “They don’t get it. You have to be direct.”

“Like, how?” Danielle asked.

“Like that show Dating on the Spectrum. You say, ‘Hello. I find you attractive and I would like to spend some time with you. Would you like to join me for a drink?’ Those computer programmers are socially clueless. And they’re so damn literal about everything. What do you like about him anyway?”

“I don’t know. He always has this look on his face like there’s something really interesting going on inside his head. I want to find out what it is.” “Be careful what your wish for,” her friend warned.

Danielle pushed the cereal box into Sean’s basket. “Take it,” she said, still smiling. “I don’t have any milk anyway.”

“I do,” he said absently.

“Oh, yeah, and um, you’re welcome by the way.”

“Right. Sorry. I mean, thank you.”

“How do you still have milk?”

“You know those solar generators people use for RVs?”

She shook her head just as he turned his gaze toward the security guard’s flashlight. The group was moving again, toward the rear of the store. She knew he’d missed her gesture, so she tapped his chest, the pectoral muscle next to his shoulder, and said, “No. How do they work?”

Would he get that? That she had tapped his chest with the palm of her hand instead of just touching his shoulder with her fingertip?

This is just day nine, Sean thought. People haven’t turned on each other yet. They’re not that desperate, but they’re getting there. So far, the worst behaviors have been property crimes, people looting stores, stealing TVs they can’t even turn on, stealing food, which isn’t really even stealing in this situation. Wait another week, till people are really hungry and food is even scarcer than it is now. Then it will be the strong against the weak. I hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope they get this sorted soon.

“You unfold the panels in the yard,” he said, “and hook them up to this big battery.”

His matter-of-fact tone told her that to him, their conversation was about exchanging information, not connecting. So, no, he didn’t get that she was flirting.

“And you can run the fridge off that?” She tried to sound impressed.

“The fridge and the lights. The computer, the record player. And the air conditioner in the bedroom.”

But I don’t see how, Sean thought. I don’t see how everything will be back to normal. The few trucks that have made it into the town, the big rigs delivering food and water, had mud stains on their tires from driving over washed-out roads. There are so many trees down, they’re driving on dirt to get through.

Two days after the second storm had passed, Virginia had a confirmed death toll of twelve. Those people had died in floods. By day four, over forty deaths had been confirmed. He got the news from the AM station up in DC whose signal came through clearly at night.

The last report, from last night, put the number at over four hundred. The heat was killing people now. The brutal, sweltering heat that had settled in after the storm’s passing had already dried the flooded fields, the parking lots and schoolyards that had looked like lakes only nine days prior.

The death count will go up, Sean thought. All those people out in the county, the ones who couldn’t get into town for food on days four and five and six. They’re sweltering in their little cinderblock houses. The floods polluted their wells. They have no clean water and they’re sweating to death. The older ones can’t take this round-the-clock heat. Watch, they’ll find couples in bed together, both of them dead. The ones who have shown up at the hospital so far are just the tip of the iceberg.

He had been to the hospital twice since the outage began, trying to pitch in with his tech knowledge. The hospital’s generators could power the computers at the nurses’ stations, but the patient records and the databases that kept track of treatments were miles away, in the big data centers in Northern Virginia. And though the hospital and the data centers each had power, the internet service providers that were supposed to connect them did not.

So the nurses turned off their workstations and wrote everything out longhand on clipboards, like it was the nineteen forties. The younger ones couldn’t read the older ones’ cursive, so they had to remember to print. And no one could read the doctors’ scrawl.

With the computers dark, the electricity went to the parts of the hospital that needed it most. To the respirators and heart monitors, to the dialysis machines, to the refrigerators that kept the medicines cool, and to the fridges in the basement morgue that kept the stench of the dead from rising into the nostrils of the sick on the floors above.

The hospital morgue was designed as a temporary holding area. The bodies usually went to a funeral home within a day or so, but none of the local homes could take them now because they too lacked power. So, all twelve slots were full, and the hospital had ordered two refrigerated trucks to handle the overflow. While they waited for the trucks for to arrive, the bodies took turns in the refrigerated drawers. They had to stay just cool enough to stop the rot.

Again, Sean thought, we’re only on day nine. How long can people stand this before they snap?

“Oh my god,” Danielle said, “you have air conditioning?” She grabbed his arm and turned him toward her. “You have air conditioning and that’s the last thing you mention?”

Afternoon temperatures had been hovering in the high nineties for the past eight days. The bedroom in her apartment, with its west-facing windows, had reached a hundred and five four days in a row. Sleeping was near impossible as the room didn’t dip below ninety until after midnight. When she wasn’t lying in a pool of sweat, she was trying to cool off in a tepid shower in the dark.

When she was younger, Hitchcock’s Psycho had left her terrified of showering. By the end of high school, the fear had diminished to a more specific scenario: showering in the dark in an empty house. Now, after nine days without power and nine sleepless nights, when she stood beneath the lukewarm spray she fantasized about an intruder, just to break the tedium.

Why should he be a psychopath, she wondered as she rubbed shampoo into her hair. If he’s going to be some one-in-a-million rando, he could just as well be one of those handsome models from the cover of a trashy romance novel, the kind who always wears his shirt unbuttoned to show off his six-pack abs.

Ooh, and wouldn’t it be nice if he had an actual six pack too? What she wouldn’t give for an ice-cold beer in this heat!

She would hear him moving through the bedroom, bumping into furniture in the dark as he moved instinctively toward the sound of running water. She would call out, “I’m in here, Romeo. Check your clothes at the door and we can have some fun. God, I’m sooooo bored!”

“Yeah,” said Sean in reply to her question about air conditioning. “I—wait, have we met before?”

“I don’t think so,” she lied. She wanted to see if he’d correct her.

“Oh. I thought your voice sounded kind of familiar.”

It should, she thought. Because I talked to you at the gas station two weeks ago when you were filling your tank. I talked to you twice at the coffee shop last spring. And once in the checkout line of this very store last fall. Am I that forgettable? Or are you just off in your own world all the time?

“Hey, um, if you want a bowl of cereal with some cold milk—” She tried to make out his figure in the dark as he spoke. The security guard’s light shone ten feet behind him, making him a tall, thin silhouette. “You’re welcome to come over. I’m just a few blocks down, if you don’t mind walking.”

Finally, she thought. Did he see my eye roll? Does he even know what an eye roll means?

Emerging from the dark of the store a few minutes later, he put his hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun. He squinted at her as they passed the police car and the line of sweating shoppers waiting to be admitted.

“I think I have seen you before,” he said.

He was tall and lean, with brown hair and intelligent brown eyes. He wore a dark blue t-shirt and khaki shorts, a regrettable mix of colors. She guessed he was in his early thirties, just a few years older than her.

She was average height, with a round face, full cheeks, full figure, fair skin, light brown hair and hazel eyes. If the laundry machine at her apartment had been working, or if she had known she would run into someone worth talking to today, she would have worn something other than those paint-stained cutoffs and the white tank top and straitjacket torture bra that was two sizes too small and gouged red wire lines under her boobs. After sweating through everything else, she was down to the dregs of her wardrobe.

“Yeah, I think we have,” she said in her friendliest tone. In case the tone didn’t get through, she flashed a bright smile.

He eyed her for a moment and she could see he was beginning to place her. “Wait, have you lost weight?”

“God, what a question!” She laughed. “So, you remember me being fat? Yes. I lost weight. How can you not when you’re living on crackers and old fruit and sweating twenty-four-seven?”

Though she complained, she considered the loss of a few pounds as one of the benefits of the blackout. A diet forced by circumstance in which cheating was impossible.

Oh, and no work. That was another plus. No video calls. No annoying clients second-guessing the marketing tactics of the social media campaigns she managed. She didn’t have to think about shilling for products and brands she didn’t respect.

“Now, can I ask you a question?” she asked. They were walking side-by-side past the bus stop on Monroe Avenue, each carrying a plastic grocery bag filled with treasures they would have considered pathetic in normal times. Crackers, canned tuna, black beans, and a cellophane package of dried seaweed for her. Raisin Bran, tortilla chips, canned ravioli and chili for him. She looked up at him with a curious side-eye, a playful smile forming on her lips.

“Shoot,” he said.

They were approaching the piñata in the intersection of Monroe and Sumter. Piñata was one of the new words spawned by the blackout and repeated in the newscasts people listened to on battery-powered radios. With traffic lights out of commission throughout the mid-Atlantic, a number of trucks delivering food and water had been broadsided at unregulated intersections. Their trailers broke open and spilled their contents all over the roads. Hungry and thirsty passersby rushed in to scoop up all they could carry.

When the blackout entered its second week, people started hitting the trucks on purpose. Some of the drivers now carried guns. “Wait,” she said. “Do you mean shoot like, ‘darn, look at that truck’ or shoot like ‘go ahead and ask me a question’?”

“Go ahead and ask me a question.”

The question she wanted to ask was, What the hell is going on in that mind of yours every time I run into you? Because, judging by the expressions on your face, it must be a hell of a lot more interesting than whatever’s going on out here in the rest of the world. But you’re not a big talker, are you? So, I guess I have to draw you out. I can already tell what kind of boyfriend you are. You’re the kind who won’t be drawn into a fight even when your girlfriend tries to pick one.

She decided to test her theory.

“Okay,” she said. “When you ask a woman you just met if she’s lost weight, is it because you’re clueless about how that’s going to make her feel, or you don’t understand basic etiquette, or do you just not care?”

He screwed up his face as he considered the question.

“Oh, look at you!” She laughed again and playfully swatted his chest. “Thinking it through so you can give a well-reasoned answer. I’m teasing you.”

He wasn’t thinking it through. He was thinking of an inscrutable section of code he had run across two days before he was fired from his software security job at Empire Energy. It had disturbed him when he first saw it, though he couldn’t explain why, and his mind had come back to it almost every hour since the power went out.

“Actually,” he said, coming to a stop and finally looking her full in the face, “I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

Any doubts she had had about whether this potentially frustrating pursuit was worth the effort were swept away by the butterflies she felt when he looked her in the eye.

“Sorry if I insulted you,” he said.

She liked that he meant that. A wave of warmth swept over her and she tried not to smile as broadly as she wanted to.