Of course. The tourists that were the lifeblood of the Smoky Mountain towns would want to get home. In a rental cabin they’d have no long-term provisions, no way to hunker down for more than a few days.
And if they’d left family at home, they’d want to be there. Family would come first for almost everyone, just as it did for her.
An SUV with parents seated in the front seat and two young children in the back pulled into the lot, moving too fast. The lurching vehicle pulled to one of the fuel pumps and stopped with a jerk. The man who’d been driving jumped out, swiped a credit card, and pumped ten dollars in gas before taking off again.
“Shut down the pumps,” Carol said, rousing herself, but Sela had already done so.
She grabbed some plastic bags and went outside to the pumps, covering the nozzles, the usual signal that there was no gasoline available. Her supply was small to start with, and if she wasn’t careful it wouldn’t last long. Once the power was down the gas would have to be pumped out of the tanks by hand. It wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done.
Her family was the focus, she reminded herself; they were most important in any crisis, but she did care about her friends and neighbors. She wouldn’t hang them out to dry. About half the generators in the valley were fueled by gasoline. Some were propane-powered, but not hers, and not her closest neighbors’. Before the power went out she’d need to go online and research how to access the gasoline in the tanks.
Jernigan would know how.
She dismissed that stray thought. Not only was he not approachable, but she needed to know for herself; she needed to stand on her own two feet. She’d learned that the hard way, after her ex-husband walked out. A lesson learned hard was a lesson learned well, and now she stayed safe because taking chances with other people was a good way to get her life stomped on.
Fifteen minutes later the school bus stopped in front of the store, and a line of cars stacked up behind the bus. One driver seemed to think about passing, pulling into the other lane by a couple of feet, but then thought better of it. The bus doors swung open and Olivia danced down the steps. Fifteen, tall and lanky with wavy light brown hair like her father’s, rest his soul, she was beautiful in a way only the very young can be. She was the light of Carol’s life, and an important part of Sela’s.
Olivia blew inside, her eyes wide. “Did you hear? All the teachers were going b.s. crazy. Well, some of them.” Her phone signaled an incoming text, and she looked down. “What did they call it? A mass . . . something.” She smiled at her phone as she read the text and then sent a quick and nimble-fingered response.
“Coronal mass ejection,” Sela said.
“Solar storm, Mr. Hendricks said,” Olivia said as she walked to the cooler to grab a Dr Pepper. Then she turned around and went down the center aisle. “Hey! Where are all the chips?”
“Put away,” Sela said, watching the road. Traffic had definitely picked up. Most cars kept to a reasonable speed, but a few were moving way too fast in their rush to get out of Dodge—or in this case, the mountains. Making a quick decision, she took her keys off the hook and went to the door, locking it and flipping the Open sign to Closed. Why would she hang around here and let Carol prepare on her own? That didn’t make sense. She had her own ice chests to fill, her own ice maker to put to work.
“Why are you closing up early?” Olivia asked. “Are you sick?”
“We have less than twenty-four hours to get ready for the CME.”
Now Olivia looked confused. “Get ready how?”
Carol said briskly, “We might be without power for months. We’ll need food, a way to cook it, and maybe even a way to stay warm if everything’s not up and running by the time the weather turns.”
Olivia didn’t move for a few seconds, her eyes big and round as she pondered the impossible. Then she asked, “Are you serious? Months? Will my cell phone work?”
“Doubt it. Maybe it’ll be bad,” Carol said, “and maybe it won’t. We won’t know until about this time tomorrow. But we’re going to be ready for whatever happens. The chips are already at the house, by the way, but don’t get your hopes up. We’re not opening a single bag until we’ve eaten all the fresh and frozen food. I have a cabbage I need to use before it goes bad, and the last of the tomatoes. We can’t waste anything, not now.”
“Unless they’re wrong,” Olivia said hopefully as she joined her grandmother. “I mean, this could be a false alarm, right? The mass whatever . . .”
“CME,” Sela said as she joined the other women. “Just call it a CME.”
“Yeah, that,” Olivia said. “They could be wrong.”
“Maybe,” Sela said as she ushered her aunt and the teenager to the rear door, grabbing the bags she and Carol had prepped earlier in the afternoon on her way out. “But I don’t think so.”
Olivia, who had slung a couple of bags over her arms, was still looking at her phone. She was glued to the damn thing most of the time anyway, but surely she could understand that they were facing an enormous crisis and pay attention—
“We should unplug everything before the CME hits,” Olivia said, reading from her phone. “That’s what some guy at NASA is saying. It’ll keep them from getting destroyed by a power surge, or something.”
Olivia had been researching on her phone. Sela breathed a sigh of relief, and reminded herself not to let her anxiety get the best of her. She needed to be on her game, and Carol and Olivia were both stepping up to the challenge, too.
They’d be okay. They had to be.
Chapter Three
Carol’s house was a small two-story yellow clapboard with the luxury of an enclosed garage. It sat almost precisely in the middle of their small neighborhood, which consisted of Myra Road—barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other—and the three narrow, short roads that connected to it. Mature spruces and flowering shrubbery decorated the half-acre yard. In back was a small vegetable garden that Carol tended during the summer, but the plants had already ceased production and were brown and drooping.
Sela’s house, tucked at the rear of the neighborhood and more private because of groups, either strategic or lucky, of spruce and fir trees that blocked most of the view of her neighbor to the left—and she had no neighbor to the right, because she was at the end of the road—was smaller and didn’t have a garage. She did, however, have a much larger screened-in porch, one she used a lot, often having her breakfast out there where she could see Cove Mountain looming over the valley. With the way the road curved, her house was close to the store and in fact she sometimes walked there and back, using a path that was wide enough for an ATV, rather than driving; walking it was not quite half a mile, while driving meant turning back toward the highway, and added a couple of miles. The back way, as they called it, was a favorite cut-through of kids and grown-ups alike, bypassing the highway and offering a good place to ride bikes and generally be a kid. There were large shade trees, a lazy stream or two in which to cool off, picnic beside, or try to catch frogs and darting little fish. She loved walking the trail in winter, especially in the snow when everything was so silent and pristine, the only sound that of her boots crunching in the snow, the only movement that of the occasional bird. The back way skirted properties, dipped and curved, and gave an occasional glimpse of a house. She was more wary during the warm months because of the bears, as were all the locals. The Smokies and black bears went hand in hand.