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.
They lived in the middle of a gorgeous, peaceful scene, which made the impending catastrophe seem like a tall tale one of the local old men might spin while sitting in one of the service stations, telling yarns with his buddies.
The three of them entered the coolness of the house and, without asking, Carol got a couple of glasses from the cabinet, put some ice in them, and poured tea from a full pitcher she took from the refrigerator. The three of them took their seats around the table in the eat-in kitchen.
Olivia fished her tablet out of her backpack and turned it on—then she turned a stricken expression on her older relatives. “Will this still work . . . you know, after?”
They all looked at each other. Finally Sela lifted her shoulders. “It should. I think. Except for going online. You’ll be able to access anything that’s already on there, as long as you don’t have it plugged in when the CME hits. Make sure it’s charged before then.” She hoped she was right. The thing was, no one knew for sure, because