The woman nodded, and rang up the sale. Behind Sela, someone said, “I’ll give you fifty bucks for those cans.”
Sela didn’t dare look back. She darted out the door and over to her vehicle, where she dragged out the fuel cans, lined them up, and filled them while keeping a weather eye out for anyone approaching her from behind. She’d never fought for anything or with anyone in her life, but she’d fight for these cans of kerosene.
Finally—finally!—she wrestled the heavy cans back into her SUV and slammed the hatch. With her peripheral vision she saw a man heading her way and she quickly used her remote to lock the vehicle, securing everything until she could get to the driver’s door. Hearing the beep of the horn that signaled the lock engaging, the man halted, and turned away. Breathing fast, Sela unlocked the door, slid in, and quickly locked the vehicle again. She started the motor and the air-conditioning blew in her face, evaporating the sweat.
Slowly she reached out and turned off the air-conditioning. Mileage mattered, now more than ever.
The highways were clogged; she could see police and deputy cars crawling from motel to motel, blasting on their bullhorns that all non-locals should check out and get to their homes while they still could. At least the off-season had begun with Labor Day; the Rod Run had provided another spurt of tourists, but the crush had dropped drastically after that—at least until October brought the tree colors and tourists returned. There wouldn’t be an October crush this year, she thought. But even during the off-season there were always tourists, and the weekends were crowded. She shuddered to think what the traffic would have been like if this had happened during one of the busy times.
The only way she could get home was to wind her away around secondary streets and roads until she hit Goose Gap. Even the secondary roads were crowded, though mostly with locals who knew how to avoid the traffic on the main drag. Eventually she had to hit the highway, though, and she sat for several minutes before there was a gap big enough for her to shoot into.
Fifteen minutes later she pulled into Carol’s driveway and sat there shuddering in relief. Carol was already back, as well as Barb and Olivia. Olivia came outside and down the steps, coming to help her carry in supplies, and when she looked at that innocent, pretty young face, Sela thought again that, come hell or high water, she would protect her family—no matter what it cost her.
Carol had done better at gathering produce than Sela had. “I stopped at a couple of roadside stands,” she said. “I knew town would be a madhouse.”
That was an understatement. Sela didn’t tell her aunt that she’d actually been frightened. Nothing had happened, and the man who had been approaching her SUV might have wanted to ask her where she got the fuel cans . . . though he had turned around when she locked the doors.
Carol and Barb were already shucking corn, and a pressure cooker filled with jars of tomatoes was doing its thing. Olivia got some sterilized jars out of the dishwasher, put another load of jars in, and started the machine. Sela got a glass of iced tea, guzzled it, then poured another glass before she sat down at the table to join the others in food prep. Everything they could do, even if they had to stay up all night, would help see them through the crisis.
Olivia helped, too, though she kept looking things up on her phone and detailing what dedicated preppers did. Some of the tips were good, some impossible at this late date. She also made a plate of sandwiches and put it on the table, so they could eat while they worked.
Yet another pressure cooker full was cooling down, and the sun had dipped behind the mountains to finally give them some relief from the heat, when Olivia looked out the window and said, “Gran, there’s some people out there.”
“What people?” Carol and Sela both went to the windows to look out, and saw a knot of people out front, with some others straggling in from their houses up and down the road. Barb shoved out of her chair and peered over Olivia’s shoulder.
There was nothing like an impending disaster to bring people together. Sela couldn’t remember the last time so many of her neighbors had gathered together. There were at least twenty people out there, standing around looking at the sky as if they could find answers written overhead. The point of contact seemed to be the middle of the narrow asphalt road, directly in front of Carol’s house. Carol had lived here her entire life, and knew everyone; Sela had lived here for years, some of them before her divorce and all of them afterward, but she wasn’t much on socializing and while she mostly knew the names of her neighbors, at least half of them she didn’t actually know as individuals.
“Wonder what this is about?” Carol mused, but it was a rhetorical question because of course they were talking about the CME, and she was already heading out the door, crossing her porch, and going down the steps, with Olivia and Barb right behind her.
Sela followed more slowly, instinctively lagging back and trying to avoid attention. The background was always more comfortable for her than being front and center.
“Whattaya think about this solar storm business?” asked Mike Kilgore; he was a stocky, capable man, a self-employed plumber.
“Cops seem to be taking it seriously,” Nancy Meador replied. As if to verify that, in the distance they suddenly heard a bullhorn, a deputy slowly driving around all the rental properties and advising tourists, for their own safety and survival, to immediately pack their belongings and head for home. A significant solar event was expected to happen in less than twenty-four hours, which could result in long-term power outage.
Nancy looked at Sela with a touch of censure. “I stopped by your store to pick up a few things, but no one was there.”
Sela’s instinct was to mutter “sorry,” even though she had nothing to be sorry about.
A little boy about six years old began to cry. His dad put a hand on the kid’s shoulder and said, “We’ll be okay.” His mother, who was holding a toddler, also put her arm around him and tried to comfort him. Sela tried to remember their names . . . Greer, maybe? She felt ashamed for not knowing her neighbors better.
People began talking, speculating. Their opinions and attitudes varied, from calm doubt that anything would happen to conviction that the world as they knew it would end, with everything in-between also represented. As Sela listened she realized that everyone had already made some effort to prepare, no matter what they believed.
“We’re canning everything we can get our hands on,” Barb said, and a couple of the older women nodded in agreement, while the younger ones, who were less likely to have a pressure cooker, looked scared.
“Bring your food over, and what jars you have, and we’ll help those of you who don’t know how to can,” Carol offered. Of course she offered, as did the other older women. They began discussing who would go to whose house, what produce they had, how many jars—though jars would be a problem, because only people who canned were likely to hold on to glass jars.
Work. They had to work, and work hard, for as long as the electricity stayed on. And they would have to be stingy with their supplies, because they didn’t know how much would be enough, or exactly what they would need. They were as unprepared as the first settlers from Europe setting foot in the New World . . . well, maybe not. They did have the farmers and the old people, ample game for hunting, and plenty of fresh water. When she thought about it, right there where they were, in Wears Valley, they had everything they needed for survival.