“It’s about damned time! Where the hell have you been?”
“Outside,” C.D. spat back sharply. “Getting a break from you.”
Jason, caught off guard for a moment by the older man’s bluntness, stared dumbly at C.D., his mouth working—for once—uselessly. When he finally managed to collect his thoughts enough to reply, it was with a level, even voice that did not quite hide the anger behind his words. “Who the hell do you think you are, talking to me like that?”
“I think I’m the guy who’s going to shove that old TV up your rear end if you don’t get off your high horse and start acting a little more like a human being.”
His button pushed, Jason rose from his spot on the sofa, crossing to C.D. in a few steps.
Ed stepped into the room. “Look, Jace—”
“No, Eddie.” C.D.’s hand on his shoulder stopped him. “This has gone on long enough.” He turned back to the other man. “You want me to play fix it with these fucking antiques, then you’re gonna have to stop being such an asshole. Look, we all want to know what the hell’s going on.” He gazed around the room, taking in Ja-son’s wife Brittany, Brandon and Heather, the Powells sitting together on the loveseat, Carol and Ed. “What makes you think you’re more important than Brandon? Or Chad and Tanya?”
“Because nobody else here has anything pending, that’s why!” His voice, moments earlier relatively calm, if pointed, was now dripping with anger. “The rest of you can treat this all like some kind of holiday, but I’ve been working on this merger for months.”
At that, Brandon was on his feet. “Now hold on just a minute—”
“Months! Do you hear me?” he said again, ignoring Brandon. His wife touched his arm, and although he jerked it away he did force himself to calm down. “Look, the political world may be turned upside down over this thing, and everybody’s anxious to point the linger at everybody else, but a hell of a lot of other things are going on as usual. The world markets may be going nuts, but they’re still going. It’s only the East Coast that’s out of the picture, which means I’m out of the picture.” He looked around the room, finding little support among the collected faces, and ran his hands back through his perfect hair in frustration. He almost looked like he was going to cry. “The Kishuri Blankenburg merger isn’t going to wait, especially with what’s going on in the Far East over all this. If I don’t get back on-line and seal this thing, I stand to lose… You people just don’t understand. I stand to lose a lot.”
C.D. was unimpressed. “Maybe if you’d stop acting so high and mighty, the rest of us might actually care, huh?”
Jason approached him menacingly, jabbing his finger in front of him to emphasize his words. “And maybe if you’d stop talking to the rest of us like we’re a bunch of stupid children—”
“You want to see what happens to spoiled brats?” C.D. stood his ground, ready to take on the younger man right there and then.
“That’s enough!” Carol shouted. “You’re all acting like spoiled children!”
C.D. started to smile, apparently thinking she was backing him up until she turned sharply to him.
“That goes for you, too, C.D.” She paused, lowering her voice. “Especially you. I swear, sometimes I think you’re the worst of the lot.”
Jason remained where he was for several seconds, looking back and forth from C.D. to Carol, then retook his seat next to Brittany on the sofa. Likewise, Brandon and Chad sat back down. No one said anything.
“Listen,” Carol said evenly, taking advantage of the moment of silence. “We’re all on edge here.” C.D. opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it as she glared at him and went on. “God knows what’s going to come out of all of this. The last thing we need is to be at each others’ throats right now.”
His wife having set the tone, Ed saw an opportunity to step in. “Carol’s right. C.D.? Can you get the TV to work?”
“Yeah,” C.D. replied curtly, and walked to the old set. The Stavishes had a state-of-the-art video center, of course, tucked away in the family room; but it was useless following the EMP, and would remain just so much junk long after the power was restored. Fortunately, like the rest of the decor in the Stavish house, the TV kept “for show” in the living room was an antique. An old Sears Silvertone with a small, almost perfectly round screen set into the front of an incongruously large wooden cabinet, the set had no complex integrated circuitry or chips and was largely unaffected by the EMP. Although not designed for direct input, C.D. had managed to remove the back and rig a makeshift harness that connected a rebuilt DBS receiver onto the antenna leads.
Not letting on that Brandon could have finished the connection himself—for fear of Carol’s wrath, Ed assumed—C.D. tightened the leads and powered up the set. The picture started as a dot in the center of the round tube, then widened to a rolling black and white image that did not quite fill the screen once it finally came to a stop.
“Damn, I was afraid of that.” C.D. slipped the screwdriver absently into a shirt pocket and crossed his arms as he regarded the image. “The battery’s just about tapped out. We’re gonna have to strip another one of the cars if we expect to—”
“Shhhhhh!” Jason had left the sofa, and was now kneeling closer to the old set, staring intently at the weak picture. He was not pleased. “This… this is CBS, not Business Net.” He looked up at C.D., his face filled with anger. “This isn’t Business Net! I thought you were tuning it to SatStar Five.”
“SatStar Five is off-line,” C.D. replied simply. “A lot of them have been dropping off as eastern ground links affected by the EMP fall apart one by one. I don’t know what happened to this one, and frankly I don’t care. Considering I shouldn’t even have been able to tie into the commercial satellite in the first place, you ought to be grateful I could get this much.”
“But this doesn’t give me anything I can use!”
“Jace, come on,” Brandon put in. “I was hoping for Business Net, too; but at least this is something.”
Disgusted, Jason stormed out of the house, slamming the screen door behind him. Brittany smiled a weak apology on her husband’s behalf, then wordlessly followed him out. The others, except for Carol and C.D., were already too enraptured with what the announcer was saying to pay much attention; but presently, even the two of them were drawn to the set along with the rest.
The reports were bleak, with casualties now topping thirty thousand. While the nuke itself had done no direct blast damage, the EMP had been devastating: Airliners and private planes, commercial shipping and fishing boats, railroads, hospitals—anything that depended on sophisticated electronics simply ceased functioning. No one other than those with shielded facilities—Coast Guard, Civil Defense, National Guard, military bases and some police and fire departments—had anything that still worked. As a result, there had been riots and looting in the larger cities, confusion and lack of supplies in the smaller towns. And still, they had to consider themselves lucky: more than 90 percent of the EMP had been restricted to open sea. If the satellite had been only a few hundred miles farther west when it blew…. The thought was too disturbing to consider.
Ed had been right. The news had changed little from the day before. The only thing different was the degree to which people were being affected—and now they had pictures.
He shook his head sadly and, unnoticed, slipped out into the spring sunshine.
The garage smelled good. The scents of old oil and grease, wood and sawdust, a touch of rust, grass clippings still clinging to the lawnmower, and musty newspapers stacked long past the time when they should have been recycled, all seemed to mix together in a way that comforted Ed as much as a favorite sweater and hot chocolate on a chilly day. Much, much better, he thought, than Brandon’s or Jason’s garage must smell—their electric cars and charging equipment lent little more than the odor of plastic and ozone. This is what a garage was meant to smell like, he thought, running his hands over the turquoise blue metal dashboard of the 1957 Chevrolet Nomad wagon. Although a thin layer of dust covered almost everything in the small garage, the wan light from the doorway reflected brightly off the matching turquoise hood of the car. A garage is a place for storing memories as much as anything else.