Last Light by Terri Blackstock Page A

to make it home. Randall Abernathy was the vice president . . .”
    Deni caught her breath. Abernathy—the murdered husband of Beth’s teacher.
    Her dad cleared his throat again. “Anyway, in the absence of a leader, I offered to open the meeting tonight. I know everybody has a lot of questions about the murders and the outage in general, so maybe we can spend a little while here just exchanging information. My neighbor Brad Caldwell is here to help.”
    Brad offered a wave. “Before we start talking about the murders, I wanted us to share any hard facts we might have about the outage.”
    “I don’t have any facts,” a man said, “but I didn’t get home until an hour ago. I was in Atlanta when the power went out, and had to ride home on a bike. I can tell you that things are just as crazy there as they are here.”
    That was the last thing Deni wanted to hear.
    “Atlanta?” Her dad sounded stunned. “The power is out there, too?”
    “That’s right. Didn’t see any sign of anything moving at any of the towns I went through. Cars stalled all along the highways and interstates, people walking around with no information whatsoever about what happened. No communication working at all.”
    Deni’s heart sank, and she looked at her father. Disappointment tugged at his face.
    A woman stood. “When that power outage happened in New York a couple of years ago, they started getting power back on by the next day. How come nothing’s working? Not the slightest thing?”
    “Yeah, and why is our water out?” a man asked. “What’s water got to do with electricity?”
    Doug tried to answer. “The water gets to us via an electric pump, and the treatment plants work on electricity. But this is clearly a bigger problem than just electricity. A power outage wouldn’t affect our cars and watches. I even have a brand-new, never-used generator that won’t work. But if everyone will listen, Brad has an idea what might be going on.”
    Brad raised his hands to quiet the growing chatter. His voice, trained to get the attention of his jurors, boomed over the crowd. “I’ve been racking my brain all day trying to figure out what our cars, watches, planes, and even our newer model generators all have in common. And the one thing I can come up with is semiconductors.”
    “What’s a semiconductor?” someone shouted from the crowd.
    “It’s a material that conducts electricity less than a conductor, like metal, and more than an insulator, like rubber. You’ve heard of chips—silicon chips, computer chips . . . Well, they’re all made of flakes of silicon, and they’re in almost everything. Since this outage isn’t just electricity-related but is affecting cars and planes and who-knows-what all else, that must be what’s damaged.”
    Deni couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “But why? What happened to them?”
    Brad shrugged. “Sounds like an EMP to me. And whatever radiation is causing it is still in the atmosphere. Even brand-new equipment is dying the minute it’s turned on.”
    “Then how long before it passes?”
    Brad shook his head and looked at Doug. Finally, her father spoke. “Semiconductors are fragile. If they’ve been damaged, it’s probably irreversible.”
    There was a collective moan around the group. Amber Rowe, sitting with two of her children in a stroller and the other on her lap, asked, “What does that mean?”
    Doug looked as if he hated to spell it out. “It’s not like a power outage where the electric company repairs its lines and the lights come back on. This is much more severe.”
    Deni couldn’t breathe. The news couldn’t have been worse if he’d told them they were at war! Her eyes widened. Maybe they were. What a way to defeat the country. Knock out their technology and leave them helpless. No one even had to die.
    They’d just wish they were dead.
    Deni glanced back at Amber and saw that she was crying. She wasn’t the only one.
    “Then we won’t make it!” a woman