After Sundown Read online

  Jernigan was usually quick and efficient in his shopping. He knew where everything was and walked straight to it, without fail. Today he seemed to browse, which was out of the ordinary for him. Hmm. He went up one aisle and down the other, then came to the counter with a full basket not to check out but to unload and go back.

  Toilet paper. Aspirin. Canned soup. Blueberry Pop-Tarts.

  He returned with another full basket, silently unloaded it, and nodded at her. For a fast, heart-stopping moment her gaze met his and that was all it took for the bottom to drop out of her stomach. His eyes were so striking, a predatory pale green, almost pretty in a face that wasn’t pretty at all but was so masculine and intriguing that pretty didn’t matter.

  As always, she was the one who looked away. Silently she began picking up cans and scanning them.

  She should say something, even if just “hello.” She knew she should. That was what a store clerk did, make the customers feel welcome, and especially so when the clerk was also the owner.

  “Is there anything else?” was the best she could manage.

  “Thirty bucks in gas.”

  He normally just paid for his gas with a credit card, most of the time leaving without coming in. She nodded and keyed the computer to let the pump dispense thirty dollars’ worth of gas.

  She gave him a total. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and withdrew a stack of bills while she finished bagging. There were a lot of bags, and if it had been anyone else she would have offered to help him to his truck, not that he would have any problem at all, but if he were any other man she’d still have offered. She made change, which he stuffed into his front pocket before he gathered all the bags and headed for the door.

  Sela breathed out a silent sigh of relief as he reached the door. What was it about him that put her so on edge? She hoped she wasn’t so shallow that it was just his looks. Or his body.

  Then he stopped at the door and for a split second she wondered if he was having trouble opening it; she started out from behind the counter, saying, “Let me get that door for you,” but he turned and looked at her and those laser eyes stopped her in her tracks.

  “You might want to put a few things back for an emergency, just in case.”

  Emergency? Startled, Sela looked out the windows, expecting to see storm clouds or something, but it was a typical September day, the sky blue against the green mountains, the weather still hot, no forecast of a hurricane roaring up the Gulf that would hammer the region with heavy rain. Snow was months away. So—?

  “The news hasn’t hit yet,” he continued. His voice was deep, a little rough, as if he didn’t talk much and needed to clear his throat. “But it will, maybe in a few hours, maybe tomorrow, depending on how on the ball those responsible for the alert are.” Small muscles in his neck and jaw clenched a little. “They’re pretty much never on the ball, so—” He shrugged.

  She still had no idea what he was talking about. “What news? What kind of alert?” she asked.

  “There’s a solar storm headed our way. A CME.”

  “A what?”

  “Coronal mass ejection.” The words were clipped. “A big one. If it’s as bad as predicted, the power grid will go down.”

  “We’ll have a power outage.” They lived in the mountains. Power outages were a fact of life, though their local utility was a good one.

  A hint of impatience flared across his expression. He looked as if he already regretted stopping to talk. “A power outage that will likely last for months, if not a year or longer.”

  She almost recoiled. And there it was, the big flaw, and one she hadn’t expected. Drink too much, financially irresponsible, smoke too much weed—those were things she saw every day that kept her from accepting what few invitations came her way. This was way out there. He was a survivalist / conspiracy theorist. No fine ass or muscled, tattooed arms or even pretty eyes could make up for that fault.

  “Get all the cash you can,” he continued, his reluctance so obvious it was as if he was having to push the words out. “Stock up on staples, canned goods, batteries.” Then he’d evidently had enough because he ended with an impatient, “Just Google it.”

  The back door opened and behind them Aunt Carol called out a friendly “Hello.” Jernigan’s gaze flashed to her and evidently that was his cue to leave, two people being one too many, because he pushed through the front door and headed for his truck.

  Well, that had been weird.

  Carol glanced through the front window as Jernigan stowed his groceries in the truck cab then began pumping his allotment of gas. “Man, I just missed the hottie. I shouldn’t have taken so much time with my hair.” She flicked her fingertips at her short bleached blond locks that were highlighted with a streak of cotton candy pink, and batted her blue eyes. And then she laughed. Carol had a fantastic laugh, rollicking and infectious; she put everything she had into it.

  Sela cleared her throat. “He just told me we’re about to get hit with a solar storm that might knock the power out for months.” It sounded just as ridiculous coming out of her mouth as it had coming out of his. And she didn’t refer to him as “the hottie” even though she agreed with the description, because that would only spur Aunt Carol to start prodding her to ask him out, as if she’d ever asked out a man in her life.

  Carol made a snorting sound as she retrieved a broom from the utility closet. She helped out at the store on occasion, usually early in the day before Olivia, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter she’d raised from the age of five, got out of school. As she began to sweep, she sighed. “Damn it. Why are all the good-looking men nuts? I should have known he was one of those when he bought that old place on Cove Mountain. Who wants to live in such an isolated place alone? Why? And then he trucked up all those solar panels, and I hear he has a ham radio.” She glanced up at Sela. “Don’t judge me. I’m not a horrible gossip, but people talk. And I listen.”

  Sela wasn’t sure when having a ham radio had become a sign of being a nut; she knew at least one other person in the valley who owned one. The thing was, Jernigan had never seemed like a nut to her—the opposite, in fact. He struck her as a man who had dealt with some hard realities.

  She leaned on the front counter while she tried to square her instincts with her doubts. What if—? “What if he’s right?” It was an alarming idea, one she hesitated to voice. Immediately she had to fight down a sense of panic, because she couldn’t even imagine what life would be like without electricity for months.

  Carol stopped sweeping and leaned on the broom. She wasn’t much wider than that broom, truth be told. She rolled her eyes and made a face. “I still have my Y2K windup radio. You were a kid when the calendar went from 1999 to 2000, so you might not have paid any attention to all the hysteria, but seriously, there were people who thought the same thing would happen when computers tried and failed to make the switch. Banks would collapse. Power plants would go offline. Chaos! Pfft.” She started sweeping again. “Nothing happened. I’d stocked up on enough toilet paper I didn’t have to buy any for a year. And I have a nifty windup radio for emergencies, not that I’ve ever needed it.”

  Maybe Carol was right, and nothing would happen.

  Then again . . . what if it did? She’d be silly if she acted on the warning of a man she barely knew and nothing happened, but if she didn’t act and his warning was right on target, then she was stupid.

  She’d rather be silly than stupid. Silly was embarrassing at worst, while stupid could be deadly. That wasn’t a chance she was willing to take.

  She grabbed a shopping basket and started filling it with a few essentials. She wouldn’t clean off the shelves, wouldn’t lock the front door and close for the day, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a few things set back, things that she’d need anyway, even if they weren’t used right away.

  While Sela was grabbing some tuna and canned chicken, Carol decided to sweep down the canned meat aisle. After watching her for a few seconds, Carol made another sc
offing sound. “If you’re preparing for doomsday, don’t forget to pick up some mayo.”

  “I won’t. I’m just getting what we’ll use anyway. If nothing happens, then no big deal. I can put everything back on the shelves.”

  She walked up and down the aisles, her mind buzzing. She liked to be organized and controlled, but abruptly she felt neither. Everything around her was the same, but she felt lost. She didn’t know what to do, couldn’t get her mind around the scope of what he’d said could happen, so she concentrated on what he’d actually said. She had some cash, but not enough to get them through a long-term disaster. What good would cash do anyway? But he’d said get cash, so she’d get cash. If the solar storm happened and the grid went down, the way Jernigan said it might, she wouldn’t be able to access her bank. The credit and debit card charges she had in her cash register would be worthless.

  “Just for today,” she said in a voice just loud enough for Carol to hear, “we’ll take cash only. Tell everyone the credit card reader is out of order.” She hadn’t taken checks for years, so that wouldn’t be a problem.

  “What about the gas pumps?”

  She thought about it for a minute. Tourists would be headed for home, if Jernigan was right and an alert went out. At least, she assumed so. She would, if she was away on vacation; she’d burn the highway up getting home. The tourists would need gas. Everyone would need gas. “We’ll leave them, for now.” She didn’t want people who didn’t have enough cash to fill their tanks to end up stranded in her parking lot, or down the road. It was a decent compromise, at least for now. That would change if there really was a warning.

  Again she felt a sense of unreality as she tried to deal with the realities of the possible situation. Civilization and culture as she knew it, as everyone knew it, would vanish in an instant. This was too big. There was no way to prepare.

  She headed for the cookie aisle. Carol called out, “If anyone else had told you to prepare for Armageddon, would you have taken it seriously? Or are you stocking up for the coming apocalypse because Hottie McStud is the one who told you it was coming?”

  “I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “I don’t know that I believe him. It’s just . . . why gamble that he’s wrong?” She took a deep breath. “And it isn’t just me, it’s you and Olivia, too.”

  That was what terrified her, she realized. They were family, she and Carol and Olivia, and they didn’t have many other relatives. There were a few scattered cousins, and Olivia’s older brother, Joshua, who was in the military, but here it was just the three of them. If anything happened to Carol or Olivia because she, Sela, hadn’t been prepared enough, she’d never forgive herself.

  They’d suffered enough loss, all of it in the past ten years. Olivia’s parents—Carol’s daughter and her husband—in a senseless car crash. Sela’s own parents of natural causes—a slow cancer and a quick aneurysm—three and five years later. Carol’s husband had died after a heart attack four years ago, less than a year after Sela’s divorce.

  She’d lost enough. She would damn well do everything she could to keep what remained of her family safe.

  Their lives were so entwined she couldn’t imagine being any other way. They lived in a small subdivision within easy walking distance of the store and each other, in houses that were similar on the outside, though wildly different inside. Sela was a minimalist. Carol never met a knickknack she didn’t like. Most importantly, Carol wasn’t prepared for more than a couple of days without power. She’d decided that she didn’t need a generator, because Sela had one, and if there was a power outage she and Olivia would just stay with Sela until the power came back on. Both houses did have fireplaces, though Carol hadn’t had a real fire in hers in years. That might be about to change.

  Suddenly it seemed to Sela that she could take everything in her own store and not have enough for them, not for months. And it wasn’t just Carol and Olivia. What would happen when a friend or neighbor showed up, and they needed something? Her family came first, but it would be damn hard to turn people away. Shit. She stared at the pitiful stash she’d accumulated.

  No way was this enough.

  She took a deep breath. “Of everyone here in the valley, who would you choose to believe when it comes to surviving a catastrophe?”

  The two women stared at each other, and Sela knew they were both picturing their friends and acquaintances, and measuring them against the tough, grim, hard-muscled man whose eyes said he’d seen more than they could ever imagine, or want to imagine.

  “Hot Buns Steelbody,” Carol said reluctantly, coining a new term for Jernigan.

  They shared another look, then Sela said, “Watch the store for a while.” She put the last of what she’d gathered in the office. “I’m going to town.”

  “For what?” Carol asked.

  “Smart things we need to do. Call your pharmacy and get refills on all your medications, and I’ll swing by and pick them up.”

  “They aren’t due, insurance won’t—” Carol began, then said, “Oh. Forget insurance, we’ll pay for them ourselves. Right? Will pharmacies do that?”

  “Don’t see why not, as long as it isn’t narcotics. Call and find out, and let me know.” Sela grabbed her purse out from under the counter and headed for the door, already organizing a list in her head: cash from the bank, more supplies from the grocery store, the prescription refills for Carol, batteries, fuel for the oil lamps—more and more items occurred to her, so many she felt overwhelmed. She couldn’t think of everything, she couldn’t get everything . . . but everything she did get was a small step toward keeping them alive and safe.

  Maybe Jernigan was totally wrong, maybe he was nuts, or possibly a decent but gullible guy who’d been given bad information. An image of him flashed to mind. No, scratch “gullible” from any description applying to him. He didn’t strike her as a man who trusted easily.

  Someone was always hyping that next Tuesday, or next year, or a date on an ancient calendar, was going to be the end of the world. Knock on wood, so far they’d always been wrong.

  That wasn’t Jernigan. He didn’t seem either gullible or nuts. She didn’t know him beyond the most superficial acquaintance, but of all the people she could think of he struck her as the one who would know the most about what was going on in the world beyond Wears Valley.

  He had seemed almost reluctant to warn her, but he had, and suddenly she wondered why. Was he telling everyone? Was he doing a Paul Revere, up and down the valley?

  “When will you be back?” Carol asked.

  “I don’t know for sure, but before Olivia gets off the bus. Hold down the fort.”

  Chapter Two

  Sela was in the grocery store before she realized that except for canned soup and more instant coffee, she had little idea what to get to prepare for such a long time without power. Even more disconcerting, the store wasn’t particularly crowded. Surely something of this magnitude couldn’t be kept secret, even though there hadn’t been the official announcement that she’d expected to see on her phone or on the radio or even an emergency siren sounding on the town’s loudspeakers. So whatever was going to happen—if it was going to happen—not many people knew about it yet.

  She started to bypass the produce section. There was no need to buy anything perishable. But still, as she passed the bananas she grabbed a bunch. They’d get eaten in the next couple of days, and damn it, if Jernigan was right they might not be able to get bananas for a while. And oranges. They’d need the vitamin C.

  It had to be a false alarm. She prayed it was a false alarm, that nothing at all was going to happen. Halfway down the aisle she thought, “Bull, I’m not doing this,” and turned around to replace the bananas and oranges because no way could she just walk off and leave a shopping cart for someone else to deal with, but then Jernigan’s grim face flashed to mind and her heart started pounding and she returned to shopping. What would a couple of years’ supply of canned chicken hurt, anyway?

  Somethi
ng about him inspired trust. Even though she couldn’t say she actually believed a catastrophe was going to happen, because he said it would she had to tilt to at least 60/40 in his favor.

  What did one buy when faced with the end of the world as she knew it? Chocolate?

  At the end of the aisle, with nothing but bananas and oranges in her cart, she pulled her cell phone from her pocket and searched “survivalist necessities.” Several prepper websites came up, and she picked the top one, which provided a long list of specialty items she couldn’t possibly find in Kroger. The second site she chose was more practical, for her current situation.

  Bleach, matches, water, candles . . . Okay, those were doable, and not even unusual. There were several items on the prepper’s list that were more camping gear than anything she was going to find in a grocery store, but there were also some practical suggestions. She might be able to find some of the more expensive survivalist items at an outdoor goods store, but there was nothing close, and besides . . . this was just in case.

  Prepare for the worst, expect the best. In this case, expect nothing.

  She grabbed more toilet paper and canned meats—Spam, salmon, chicken, beef, multiples of each. Four big jars of peanut butter wouldn’t last long, so she made it six. She made a quick trip down the feminine hygiene aisle, then got some first-aid items: aspirin, antiseptic cream, bandages, Vaseline. She grabbed anything that looked like it might be useful, as she walked through the pharmacy section. While waiting for Carol’s prescription refills, she made another trip up and down the aisles, got more adhesive bandages, and an Ace bandage. More adhesive bandages. Another Ace bandage. No, make that three.

  By the time the prescriptions were ready, her shopping cart was full.

  She looked at the collection of stuff and blew out a big breath. She’d gotten only things they’d eventually use anyway, so she didn’t feel bad about her shopping spree. She had hedged her bets and done something. Did she have enough supplies for several months? No. Was she better off than she’d been when she’d started? Absolutely.