I’m not the hand my mama was with bread, but I can get by.”
“Thanks!” Olivia said fervently, and bent to kiss Barb’s cheek. The older woman flushed with pleasure. Since the CME Barb sometimes seemed lonely; though she and Carol were great friends, she had no family and the crisis had uprooted her from her own home. Olivia’s casual gesture meant more than she could imagine, because it made Barb feel useful and treasured.
Sela made a mental note to see if she could trade something for some butter. Some of the people who owned cows were now milking and churning, and trading the raw milk and fresh butter for other goods. She would stay busy, and not think about Ben.
Breakfast taken care of—or suffered through, in Olivia’s case—they got the radio and left the house, walking up the road to the highway, then to the big field. They’d done this for the past nine mornings, to listen to the morning broadcast report. That brief contact with what she now thought of as the “outside world” was a lifeline to them, giving them hope that while modern normality was still perhaps months in the future, at least it still existed in small pockets. If it existed, it could be built on, expanded. The news was never good, but some days it was worse than others. There was nothing they could do about the problems in Knoxville and elsewhere, but it did give them a connection to the rest of the world. They needed that connection, for as long as they could maintain it.
For the first few days after they began receiving the radio reports, mostly what they’d heard had been about widespread looting, and a number of deaths due to the loss of electricity in hospitals and nursing homes. After that things had seemed to settle down, though they were still critical. Sewage and trash buildup had quickly become an issue.
She could only be thankful they were a rural community; if things were that bad in Knoxville, what was it like in the large cities, like New York and Chicago, with winter bearing down on them? The residents there couldn’t hunt and fish, and the food supply had likely been used up in the first few days after the grid went down.
Yesterday’s news hadn’t been good at all. Even in Knoxville food was running critically short, which led to more rioting and looting, as if riots would magically make food appear from thin air. There had been several home invasions, when desperate people looking for food found undefended houses and forced their way in.
What was most frightening was the realization that most of these incidents were going unreported. The radio announcer could report only what someone told him; there were no phone calls, no internet alerts, no police blotters. The Knoxville police force had devolved to a skeleton crew, because most cops had been forced to stay at home to take care of their own families. There was no one to handle mobs, chase burglars, or investigate break-ins.
Just yesterday Robert Keller, the announcer they’d listened to since the radio waves had settled down, had been in a panic over a melee in the station parking lot. His voice cracked as he’d delivered the news he had, and he’d warned his listeners that the generators wouldn’t last much longer, they were almost out of fuel. The other radio stations had already gone dark. They either hadn’t enough fuel for their generators, or the operators had all fled—or the fuel had been stolen. Keller had hung on longer than the others, but he was definitely harried and getting more harried. The stress in his voice was increasing day by day.
Maybe it would be better to stop listening, Sela thought, and spare themselves the constant mental battering of bad news, but she doubted anyone else would agree with her. Everyone seemed compelled to gather around every morning and listen. What if there was information about the grid and when it might be repaired? What if something important had happened in the world, something they really should know about—though how that news would get to a Knoxville radio station, Sela didn’t know.
There were plenty of other concerns. Right now the valley inhabitants were doing okay, but they were in a good time, with good weather and supplies not yet running low. They were adjusting, coping, improvising. Sela was still mentally holding her breath, because this good stretch couldn’t last. Someone would get sick, someone would