Running out of medications had helped. She and Scott had finished off the painkillers within days of the power going out, and Aubrey had toggled between Ativan and Ambien for the first few weeks after that. But then she started to run low and knew she’d be unable to refill them—pharmacies had limited hours, were under heavy guard, and filled only prescriptions deemed essential. So she’d decided to kill the suspense one night, to stop the countdown by flushing the rest of her pill supplies down the toilet. Of course, she’d forgotten the water pumps weren’t on at that hour, and in the humiliating moment when she’d dropped to her knees and attempted to fish the soggy pills out of the dirty toilet water, she’d realized this was about as low as she cared to sink, pharmaceutically speaking. She left the pills there to dissolve and hadn’t thought about them since.
The water stayed on for close to three hours that morning, and once she ran out of plastic jugs Aubrey ran around the house like in the early days, filling whatever containers were handy. She even stopped up the bathtubs and let them fill to the rims. Not for pathetic sessions where she, Scott, and Celeste would fill cups and drink from them morosely, staring at each other in the waning light, as they had at first, but this time for actual baths. They wouldn’t be hot-water baths—the water heater hadn’t worked since April—but it felt like it was going to hit ninety degrees outside again today, and if she left the blinds open in the bathroom and kept the door shut, she thought the water in the tub might creep up to the mid-seventies by late afternoon. The day was off to a good start.
Her morning chores done, Aubrey went outside. She looked up and down the block, which was busy with the early shift. Mrs. Chen and the boys were in the zucchini patch, Derek and Janelle had drawn the hard work of picking the cabbage worms from the cauliflower and blanching every head to protect it from the sun, and the Sunderlands were turning and harvesting the orange watermelons, which were, as Phil promised, the sweetest fruit Aubrey had ever tasted in her life.
She blinked and rubbed her eyes, stung by the acrid haze of cooking smoke, which had become a permanent feature of the atmosphere. Natural-gas service had come and gone since it first went out in late May, but unlike the water there was never any telling when it would be on. They’d tried various pit ovens and solar ovens, but none of them worked nearly so well as an old-fashioned campfire, so cooking fires dotted the whole of the city every night. It was a shame, Aubrey thought, because the skies for the first month of the event had been the clearest and cleanest she’d ever seen in Aurora. But uncooked food for every meal was more than any of them could bear.
Wincing, she squinted across the street and saw Norman, walking among his goats like Moses. “What do you hear, Norman?” she asked.
“Promising news from the hinterlands,” Norman called back, which in no way meant there was promising news from anywhere. It was just what he always said. How an eighty-eight-year-old man who’d begun his life fleeing Nazi Germany with his parents and was ending it in a global blackout managed to have an optimistic viewpoint about anything was beyond Aubrey, but that was what made Norman Norman.
“Yeah? Like what?” she replied, reaching the far side of the street and stopping to pet one of the goats. It was the black one, her favorite, the one who always seemed like he was trying to cut in line in front of you. He didn’t know where he had to be; he just knew he had to get there before you did.
Norman knew better by now than to give bad news. In the early months, he’d talked a lot about death counts and food riots in various eastern cities, but he soon realized he was doing nothing but depressing the shit out of his neighbors. It didn’t matter, anyway, at least not to them. The news needed to be either local or upbeat. Nothing else was useful or welcome.
“My former student in Bethesda, you know, the one who was with NOAA?”
“Perry something, right?”
“Highest marks for memory.” He paused, taking a breath. Norman’s breathing was more labored lately, and she knew to just wait in the moments when he struggled. He continued. “Perry’s outside Iowa City now, at his parents’ place for the past few months. He’s got the hand-cranked 32G Brennan shortwave, very spicy little piece of equipment.”
“What did he say, Norman?”
“As of last night, Perry reports they’ve had two separate instances of intermittent power there.”
Aubrey looked at him, stunned. “You’re kidding.”
“I kid about funny things, not this.”