A Small Gray Dot

I suppose they could’ve been right and God was pissed off at everyone, but He wasn’t saying. Halfway through their rant, I switched to a different station, one playing regular music and not the funeral kind.

Chapter Eight

WILL OPTED TO STAY WITH ME UNTIL WE heard from his parents. I got the feeling he didn’t want to be alone. He kept going back to his house to check the answering machine for messages but he always came back to my place with the same negative news – no word from them.

A couple of weeks later, we’d still not heard from them – or my sister.

“I want to try to make it to Jamaica, Tenn,” he said as he sprawled out on the tatty, seen-much-better-days brown sofa that came with the apartment. “This waiting is getting to me.”

From my seat at the equally as battered, laminate-topped table with two old tubular chairs, I looked up from the want-ad section of the paper I was perusing.

“How would you get there? Planes are still not flying.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know. But they said on the radio some ships are back in service. They’re slower than… than before… but they’re running. You know my friend Tremaine? He said there’s one that goes to Jamaica. Most of his family’s there and he wants to go, too. We can drive to Miami to catch it. He’s got money and I’ve got some saved and that will be enough to get us there and pay for tickets.”

I thought it over. Tremaine was a couple of months younger than Will. His parents sent him to relatives in the states a couple of years ago to complete high school. He’d graduated with Will and was set to go to college with him in the fall.

The week before, Will went to check on him and found him staying with his one relative fortunate enough to have survived. I didn’t much like the thought of the two teens wandering down to Miami by themselves, especially considering how erratic things were. The federal government finally collected itself enough to get out the Guard. Their ranks were thinner so even with the drop in population it was slow going for them. They were making some headway but it was still dangerous out there.

It was not as bad locally but in some places, there was ongoing trouble, including from the religious group that wanted everyone to join their “one true religion”. Some of them went overboard and were making attempts to forcibly compel people into the fold. I didn’t think the movement would last long but they, along with other irrational folk, were causing a lot of instability. Most people were unwilling to join them, and expressed their displeasure by using equally as forcible means.

“I don’t know, Will. Things are still chaotic. There’s rioting in places. You should wait until the National Guard gets it under better control.”

He sat up and stared at the off-white, featureless wall for a few seconds before saying, “I’ve gotta go, Tenn. It’s killing me to sit here not knowing. I have to go see that Mom and Dad are okay. Every day, it’s something else. Cellphones don’t work, the internet is gone – except for DSL and you need a landline for that. There’s no TV… and the amusement park didn’t reopen so my job there is toast.”

He was right. The Event seemed to have screwed up a lot of crap and more than cellphones, internet, and TV were out of commission. Voice command and autodrive went out the first day. Trains didn’t work, though arbitrarily, cars, trucks, and buses did – as long as there was a backup ignition key and as long as you didn’t expect your flight capable car to fly. Owning a flight car was well above my means so that wasn’t a concern for me.

You also had to manually figure out where you were going since none of the directional programming or GPS worked. The satellites were still up there but they weren’t in operation, which, of course meant satellite phones didn’t work either. Neither did any of the ‘bots, though that also wasn’t a concern for me, either, since I’d been too broke to own any type of robot except the basic carpet sweeper, anyway.

Nobody knew why none of this worked. The physicists were scratching their heads and arguing about it.

At the moment my main worry was that when I went down to the school board to get my address changed, one of the people in the sparsely manned office informed me that the portion of my ten-month salary that I had opted to place in an account so I would have income during the summer, would not be forthcoming for a while. They didn’t know why only that there was some glitch in the system and all the teachers who’d taken the same option were in the same bind. They didn’t know when it would be corrected.