Desolation

After the first night, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She was lost. Every few minutes, she would check her dead phone to see if something had miraculously changed. Of course it hadn’t, nor would it ever. By the fifth day she was going stir-crazy. She needed something to occupy her mind and her time. Their home only had five paperback books, all of which she had read before on her fried Kindle, along with the hundreds of others she had inside its vault, which had been pillaged by CMEs. She loved her Kindle so much she had bought one for each of her parents, who took to theirs with an equal degree of fervor, adding books every week to their to-be-read list. More worthless devices. I’ll bet they wished they had ordered books from Oprah, rather than buying so many damned eBooks, now expunged for all eternity. She chortled at her mental meanderings.

To break out of her funk, she tried to help out her father and mother around the house, but their job offerings were menial and insufficient to occupy her always-active mind. Every moment she contemplated why this had happened and how awful it was.

One day, she just let go and accepted her fate. She stopped worrying about her devices and started to believe that being disconnected from people she would never meet in person was not something bad. In fact being disconnected became something good. Now people would think about what they were going to say, before they said it. This was so different from most of the emails and texts she had received, and those in truth, she often sent as well: cold, uncaring, and with biting words that would never have been said to someone face to face. Now, she expected people would mean what they say. There was no need for bullshit. A sense of peace slowly settled over her.

However, she still needed the mental exercises that didn’t come from building defenses around their home and Max’s, or moving boxes of supplies around. So, she made Uncle Max’s office her own, first consuming all the books on its shelves. Besides the paperbacks, he had lots of notebooks: filled with double-sided printed pages from his top-of-the-line printer, three-hole punched and bundled for their different subjects. Almost all of these, occupying an entire bookshelf, were survivalist tomes and how-to books. He really was preparing for the end times.

One day she opened up the journal. Although the three of them certainly knew of its presence, none of them had ever read through it, only re-reading Max’s letter, the separate loose pages of inventory, and the map of the mysterious place called Cicada. Because the journal was in chronological order, starting with Max’s great-grandfathers’ old notes and writings, these seemed irrelevant to their present day concerns and were ignored. None took the time to read the more recent stuff.

She turned its pages with anxious anticipation.

Starting from the back of the book, like she always read a novel, she thumbed backward through the last several pages, recognizing instantly the owner’s penmanship; these were written by Uncle Max. When she reached the start of this section, she stared at the title: “Read After The Solar Apocalypse….”

Thompson Journal Entry