No Normal Day

All Rights Reserved

Copyright
© 2013 by J. Richardson

The
author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication
is prohibited. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of
characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

BETH

A
smallish hand somewhat lined with age, lifted the slat of the blinds.
Beth scanned as far as her eyes could reach for the hundredth time in
the last few hours, she held on to hope that she would see the
familiar stocky form of her husband Jack making his way home. Her
heart sank as she saw the same empty view that had been there for
hours. She repeated the worried search at each of the only other two
windows that gave her a view of the neighborhood, nervously made sure
the windows were latched and the blinds were closed. If she just
glanced at the comfortable brick homes it appeared to be another
bright Spring day. With a tight and queasy stomach, she fought back
tears that had been building...
this
was no normal day.

The sub-division
was built about 30 years earlier. When it was all new it was a good
five miles out from the businesses and homes of town, the suburbs.
The last twenty five plus years the average size town that Beth and
Jack had grown up in, had sprawled out in all directions and became a
large, modern city. Not being dependent on any one big industry, the
city prospered through good and bad times. It was a clean and pretty
oasis in the Northeastern part of the huge state of Texas. Surrounded
by lakes and woods, with mild winters and blazing hot summers, it was
a popular retirement area. The medical facilities claimed to be some
of the biggest in the state. There was a Junior College and a State
University branch, a multitude of twentieth century chain retail
stores and restaurants filled the miles of streets. There was a
church or a bank it seemed on every corner. With 100,000 residents,
thousands more commuting in daily, the well kept city was over
flowing with housing. There were hundreds of apartment complexes,
rentals and duplexes, thousands of private homes that ranged from
modest to multi-million dollar. Beth and Jack's approximate two
hundred home neighborhood, once a bit rural, had become surrounded by
the oozing expansion.

Only
two streets entered the division, with numerous streets branched off
but no throughway. That made for light traffic, mostly the residents
and their visitors. During the day the school bus growled along a
couple of times a day and the yard crews, trash men and repairmen
that serviced the homes came in for a purpose and left when their
jobs were done. It wasn't very common to hear of trouble or
break-ins, in general the neighborhood was safe with a slow bustle of
daily activity. The towering old hardwood trees shaded the green
lawns and spring flowers bloomed in beds and hanging baskets. On this
day, the sun was bright and the US flag whipped around on the pole
that was mounted at the corner of the house. Most garage doors were
down. Beth saw one in the next block, up and displaying the normal
collection of “things we store in the garage”. As usual,
some driveways had cars and trucks parked in them, a few vehicles
were on the side of the narrow paved streets. A slower look revealed
the plumber's van stopped at an angle to the curb and further up, a
car was right in the middle of the street. A couple of houses down,
the neighbor Mike's truck sat silent, halfway in the street and
halfway in his paved drive. There was an unnatural quietness. The
only time that there was anything even close to this stillness was
when a rare snow storm hit the area, bringing down power lines,
stilling the hum of traffic and muting the everyday noise of life.

Earlier
when everything first went silent, Beth had stepped outside and
joined the neighbors and “day folk” scattered about. She
was immediately embarrassed to realize that she couldn't remember the
last name of the elderly folks across the street. She nodded to the
man, asked him if he was okay? “We are fine, what the heck
happened, you think?”

Mike
walked across the street to them, his head shook with disgust, “I
was just leaving and suddenly my damned truck went dead,” he
grumbled.

“
Well,
everything is out at my house,” Beth said. They stood for a
moment, looked around and noticed the stalled van and realized they
were hearing no traffic whizzing by on the four lane highway, that
was only about three blocks east.

Mike
jerked around and grabbed the elderly man's arm, “Mr.
Carpenter, what about your wife, her oxygen?”
Carpenter,
Carpenter,
Beth
was trying to make herself remember the name.

Mr.
Carpenter's face showed
obvious
concern, he replied,
“
We
have a back up generator, so we are fine for now. Thanks for asking.”
The plumber waited
beside
his truck, he punched
angrily
at his cell phone. One of the yard crews was
huddled
up next to the long trailer filled with mowers and weed eaters and
various tools, they looked confused and were speaking to each other
in Spanish. The mower was stopped at the edge of the yard, one young
man walked
away
towards the highway.

Beth
noticed
several
people milled
around
in yards and the street, some stopped and talked
in
small groups. A real knot of fear started
to
form in her stomach, “Think I'll go home now. Let me know if
you need anything, Mr. Carpenter”. If she said
a
name sometimes it helped
her
remember.
Mike walked
back
across the street and leaned
on
the back of his truck.

When
Beth got
back
inside the house she immediately checked
again
that
the windows were all locked, the blinds down and closed. On the front
door, the dead bolt lock and door lock always stayed
secure,
she checked
them
anyway.
The back yard had a tall wooden privacy fence,
houses were on each side, their yards enclosed with similar fences.
Across the back barrier was the parking lot and several buildings
belonging to the Baptist Church. She closed the tall wooden gates
that blocked the opening between the house and Jack's garage/shop,
slid the heavy metal latch into place. She walked back into the
house, secured the back door dead bolt. Her feet padded down the
short hall to the bedroom, she opened the drawer in the bed-side
table and carefully picked up the revolver. There were no longer kids
in the house to create worry about the numerous guns. Jack liked to
say, “The good thing about the revolver, you just point and
shoot”. The pistol went with her, she laid it on the dining
table next to the window where she had been keeping her tense vigil.

The
streets and homes were pretty quiet now. Everyone had finally given
up on figuring out what was happening and started to drift away to
their homes or out of the neighborhood. She wondered if the school
buses were dead, how would all the children get home? How would her
grand children that lived all the way across town get to their home?
This was not the time to allow herself to start panicking about that.
She would not think about the “worst is happening, the
S---hits-the-fan scenario” that she had been increasingly
worrying about for the last several months. It would all be fine when
Jack got home. He had been gone about five hours now, his destination
was about twenty miles away. Beth was trying to stay calm and to
distract her mind, she began to figure out how fast he could walk,
how many hours would it take to make his way home. Because she and
Jack always had a plan, together they could tackle anything.

JACK

Jack
raised the garage door, backed his pick-up down the drive and headed
out of the pleasant neighborhood. He waved to the neighbor, Mr.
Carpenter, as he picked up his newspaper from the yard. He enjoyed
the fact that he didn't have to get up and hurry any where these
days. Unless of course, it was something real important like golf or
fishing or hunting season. He smiled to himself. Most days, he could
sip a couple of cups of coffee, read the newspaper and fix himself a
little breakfast. Beth didn't
do
breakfast,
didn't
eat
it or cook it. Lunch was also
you're
on your own
.
He had been lucky to retire a lot earlier than most of their friends,
even though most were now catching up. Since that retirement, the two
of them had
fell
into some solid habits and rarely strayed
from
the routine. Supper was always at 7:00, prefaced
by
what
they laughingly called
their
“cocktail hour” which stretched
from
5:00 until supper. Beth unfailingly had
supper
on the table at 7:00. The kids...the three daughters now being age 40
to 45 but forever his “girls”...joked
to
their
friends, “If you need something from Momma and Daddy, call
between 5:00 and 7:00, the happy hours, never call during the
holy
dinner hour
.
Funny.

The
steady traffic zoomed
by,
flying North and South. He reached the intersection that exited his
neighborhood, he intended
to
pull out and move
with
the traffic anyway. His destination was
the
liquor store just over the county line, a “booze run” as
Beth said. The trip took
about
twenty minutes
and
they didn't sell whiskey before 10:00, so he was in
no
big hurry. Maybe, he would
buy
an extra bottle or two and some extra of Beth's wine. Her paranoia
the
last few months amused him, she had talked a lot
about
doomsday type events. She had been
washing
and filling the empty whiskey and big soda bottles with water.
I
bet we've got a hundred gallons out in the storage building.
Over
the years,
she
had
never
been
much
into storing up extra food or supplies but in recent months that
closet next to the office had become
flat
full. She
even
had asked him
to
build her a couple of more shelves not long ago.

Jack
muttered
to
himself, something he did
quite
a lot of lately. Hey, he didn't
doubt
the possibility of weird things happening on this earth. The old US
of A was not real popular around the world and that nut case in the
East was always threatening and just crazy enough to nuke us. Things
could just
fall
from the sky. Cheez-us, if you had
ever
visited
Yellowstone
National Park, you could see
that
it looked
like
it was ready to blow any minute! Stuff could happen. He was
willing
to take a few precautions, make a few preparations for disaster. He
just couldn't spend a lot of time pondering on things that
might
happen.
He laughed
as
he pulled
up
to the liquor store, just at that moment
the
doors were being unlocked. Another truck and a couple of cars were
pulled
in
and parked. He nodded and said, “Good morning” to a
couple that approached
the
door and
held
the
door open for them. Inside, the lights flickered
on,
the clerk welcomed
Jack,
he was a familiar face. He knew
just
where his brand of bourbon lived
and
went
to
the shelf at the end of the third row, picked
up
three bottles, took
them
to the check-out counter and returned
to
get 3 bottles of Beth's favorite wine. By 10:15, he had
his
little haul loaded in the back seat
and
was
headed
back
over the long bridge that spanned
the
huge lake flowing around the
county
line. He had
barely
cleared the bridge when things went
way
crazy up ahead. “Damn, what the hell is the problem?”
Even in his rearview mirror, traffic came to a stop. One or two
vehicles fishtailed
a
little, one or two stacked
up
and coasted
into
the car ahead. By the time he realized
that
his truck had died, he barely eased
it
off the road and onto the shoulder.