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The next day, I did my best to keep busy. I picked up my phone to call my mom, but in shock, I realized my cell phone was dead. I grabbed my laptop and tried to boot it up, but my computer was dead too. I was completely disconnected from everything. My mom wouldn’t know why I wasn’t calling or answering since I hadn’t told her about the power going out. I’d been too wrapped up in Julia to remember to call her back. I felt my pulse racing, and I bit my lip as I considered what to do. Panic rushed through me. How am I going to do this without someone to talk to? I can’t! I have to get out of here. But how? I looked outside and began to shiver. I sat down at my desk and tried to calm down, hoping to clear my mind and think of some solution.
I put my hands on my knees and focused on Zeke’s stuffed lamb, which was lying on the floor. After a minute, my breath returned to normal, and I stood up. But as my eyes left the lamb, they found the portable speaker with the charging dock on my shelf. My iPod and iPhone had the same type of plug. Maybe it would charge my phone too. I plugged my phone into the dock and waited several agonizing seconds until I saw the telltale Apple sign on the screen. I breathed a sigh of relief. I would have to use my phone sparingly because the speaker only had half its power left. There were only four D batteries in the combo pack, and the dock took two. I put the phone on speaker mode and quickly dialed my mom’s number.
When she picked up, I quickly said, “Mom, it’s me.”
“Oh my god, Karis! What happened? I tried calling you all day yesterday, but you never picked up. It really scared me. I thought you were dead,” she said, talking so fast I couldn’t get a word in.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to worry you, but our power went off. I don’t know why. I heard a loud boom in the middle of the night, and the next morning, it was gone. My phone was dead, but I’ve been able to charge it with my portable speaker. The speaker has just about half its power left though, and I only have four batteries to use when that charge is gone, so we won’t be able to talk as often.”
“Oh no, Karis, this is bad! Do you have everything you need? What about water—without power, you may not have water. And food...”
I could tell she was panicking. “Mom, I’m fine. I filled the tubs in the building with water before it petered out. I should be okay for a while. It’s just cold.” I’d played down the whole food situation with her. There was no need to worry her more. I would figure something out.
She exhaled. “Oh good. That was smart. You’ll just have to bundle up. How are you doing besides the power?”
“I’m okay, just trying to keep busy. Is there any news on the outbreak?”
“Um... not really.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing!”
“Mom,” I said sternly.
“It’s nothing.” She sighed. “And I guess it doesn’t really matter since you already lost power. But they’ve been discussing when they’ll turn off electricity and gas. There’ve been fires, and it may not be safe to keep it on much longer. But it’s just talk, speculation by the media. The government hasn’t confirmed anything yet.” She paused, and I thought about the fire in Greenpoint. “Oh wait. Without gas, you won’t be able to cook!”
“I’ll figure something out, Mom. Don’t panic just yet.”
She exhaled. “A new death count was released today. It’s somewhere near two hundred thousand.”
“In just two months, it’s almost doubled? God.”
“I know, honey. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you any of this. It’d be better if you just focused on your own problems right now. And you seem to have an abundance of those.”
“You’re probably right, but I want to know what’s going on. I can’t sit here completely disconnected from the rest of the world. What about that medication they were testing before? Anything new on that?”
“It’s not working. They can’t keep the virus from coming back. It just delays the inevitable.”
Even though she’d been forthright with me, I didn’t tell her about the girls or the men breaking into buildings. It would just make things worse for her. I was on my own, and I knew it. We said goodbye with a plan to talk briefly every other day, and I tried hard to shake off her ominous news. I switched my phone to airplane mode and turned down the brightness to conserve the battery. I gathered all the candles from the apartments then melted the ones with little wax left together in a pan to make one large candle. Remembering the tip from the apocalyptic movie, I grabbed my neighbor Isaac’s big box of crayons to melt down into another candle, using a piece of waxed shoelace for a wick and one of my glasses as a container. I remembered that Kelly’d had a bag of Babybel cheese, the kind encased in wax, which I’d eaten weeks before. I ran up to the roof and rifled through the bags of trash until I found seven empty red wheels of wax. The smell of the trash and the many bags of Zeke’s poop made me gag. I scooped everything back into the bags and ran downstairs. I repeated my melting method until I had one more decently sized candle. For now, this should be enough.
Later that night, I lit two candles and read a book by the flickering glow. But I found that I knew the words by heart, and it wasn’t holding my attention. I looked out the window at Manhattan and sat upright. There were a few lights on in the city. I ran up to the roof and looked north and south. I could see some faint lights in Brooklyn, too, but all of Queens was dark. I felt ridiculously discriminated against. Why just Queens? I guessed that a transformer had blown the night I’d heard the explosion. I didn’t know what a transformer was, but I knew from watching the news that it could cause an area to lose power. That must have been it. Feeling dejected, I went to bed.
Zeke started coughing the next day, a dry honking hack that terrified me. At first, I’d freaked out, thinking he’d somehow contracted the virus. But the chances of that were slim—it was more likely that the cold was too much for his aging lungs. He’d gotten coughs exactly like that in previous winters, but I couldn’t afford for him to get sick. I had no antibiotics to cure him. The cold wasn’t good for me either. My body ached and shivered, and my chest hurt from pulling in freezing air. We couldn’t stay there much longer without heat, and I knew it.
I needed to find some way to make a fire without burning down the building. I looked at the defunct fireplace in my living room. The chimney was still on the roof and was hollow—my former roommate used to throw her cigarette butts into it. I crouched by the fireplace and ran my hand over the area where they’d clearly bricked up the opening. Since the building was so old, I guessed that they’d sealed it off because it hadn’t met modern building regulations. Is this too risky? I pulled off a glove and used my finger to dig into the mortar, and a small piece crumbled under my fingernail. I grabbed the crowbar and used the flat edge to ram into the mortar over and over. Pieces crumbled as I scraped and pounded. Finally, I was able to pry one brick loose. The process became easier once I was able to put my hand on the back side of each brick to dislodge them. I piled the bricks up on the side so I could use them later.
When I had the square mouth open, I put my head in and peered up. I could see a beam of light from the sun, and my hopes soared. I used the bricks to form a low barrier between us and the fire. I sat back and inspected my work. Not bad. But will it work? I needed wood to test it. I took my screwdriver and hammer to the apartment below mine and disassembled Tom’s coffee table and bookshelf. I figured the pile would give me enough wood for a few days. I hauled the wood back upstairs and placed some pieces on top of each other in a large metal roasting pan that I used for cooking my Thanksgiving turkey. I crumpled up a few pieces of paper from my old tax returns and placed them at the bottom.
I took a deep breath. Here goes! I lit the paper with my lighter and waited for the wood to catch. Zeke was sitting next to me, trying to garner some of my body heat. I wrapped both of us up in a blanket, and we watched while the wood slowly caught fire and began filling my living room with heat. I laughed as I pulled the blanket down, barely able to believe that it had worked. While it wasn’t as warm as the radiators had been, it was enough to keep us warm if we sat right next to it. For the rest of the day, I went to each apartment and took apart all the wooden furniture, placing it next to the fireplace. I would have to conserve the wood as much as possible, but it would keep us warm until I could come up with an idea of how to get us out of there.