She had Rusty to thank for one thing. He’d pissed her off. Shown her the danger of slipping back into old ways of thinking in a world that had fundamentally changed.
Her eyes focused across the street, where Phil was out in front of his house as usual, sitting in a webbed lawn chair, trying to conceal the one-hitter he was taking occasional hits from while he read an old paperback in the morning sun. He seemed to be taking a break from some yard work, a newly furrowed dirt row to his left and a long-handled, flat-bladed tool of some kind leaning against his lawn chair.
Aubrey squinted her eyes, staring at Phil, thinking. She looked up and down the block, at all the yards, filled with rock gardens and perennials and the odd trampoline or two. An idea was trying to form in her head when her eyes fell on Norman’s house, two down and across the street from hers.
His front porch lights were on. She blinked, trying to register that. Why were Norman’s lights on?
OK, maybe he had a generator too. But it was 9 a.m.
Why were Norman’s lights on?
13.
Somerset County, Pennsylvania
Earlier that morning, Perry St. John had been headed west on the I-80, about a hundred and fifty miles outside of Bethesda, when he too had thought of Norman Levy.
After his initial flight instinct in the parking lot at NOAA, Perry had tried to develop some counterintuitive strategizing. Fleeing the cities was what everyone was thinking, he realized, and the gossip around the courtyard of his apartment building in Bethesda was that all roads out of the major eastern cities were already packed, traffic crawling if it was moving at all. People were running out of gas and water on the roadsides, and Perry was determined not to be one of them.
He wondered if maybe just keeping cool and staying put would give him a leg up on the knee-jerk responders. If everyone got the hell out of there in a hurry, there was no way they’d have the chance to clean out all the stores and storage depots, which meant maybe he could create Fortress Perry right here in Bethesda. Maybe he’d turn into a sort of latter-day Robert Neville, the hero of Perry’s favorite book of all time, I Am Legend, the famous last man on earth, fighting his lonely daily battle with a world full of vampires. It worked out OK for Neville, foraging and killing in the daytime, building a house full of booby traps. The book had made it sound kind of fun, actually. Well, until the ending.
But after a few days Perry had realized that, as with most things, his initial instinct had been correct. The city, no matter how empty, was still too full of people; it was undergoing a rapid and complete infrastructure collapse without electrical power, and no doubt it was only days away from an epidemic of crime and violence far worse than anything that could happen in the countryside.
The only place Perry could think to go was his parents’ house outside Iowa City. It was nine hundred miles away, at least three tanks of gas, and there was no guarantee his folks would be home when he got there. He’d lost track of their comings and goings between the house and their condo in Florida, and there was no way for him to contact them. Still, it was the best plan he had, so day three of the black-sky event for Perry meant stealing gas cans from a locked hardware store with a smashed front window, siphoning fuel from the tanks of parked cars all up and down his block, and shoving two boxes of peanut butter protein bars that had mercifully just arrived from Amazon three days earlier into a large suitcase with the rest of his clothes.
Thus equipped, he set off, pleasantly surprised by the lack of traffic on I-80 West. Right around the time he started feeling like this plan was going to work and he’d actually started looking forward to the idea of spending a year or so back home in Iowa, he remembered Norman.
Professor Levy lived alone in Aurora, Illinois. Perry flushed, feeling a burst of shame that he had completely forgotten about his mentor in this situation. An old man on his own, without power and water?
Perry glanced down at his gas gauge, saw it was still on three-quarters, and fumbled for the map on the seat beside him. Finding any physical map at all had been more of a challenge than almost anything he’d rounded up before setting out on the road, and, looking at it now while he drove, he saw that Aurora was only twenty or thirty miles off his route to Iowa. He could easily stop in and check on Norman. But, his concern now pricked, he decided he couldn’t wait that long.
He took the next off ramp, pulled over on the first hilltop he could find, and dug out the portable radio he’d shoved into one of his suitcases. Norman was the one who’d introduced him to the joys of shortwave in the first place, and he felt certain the old man would be all over the airwaves in a situation like this.