The Last Handful of Clover - Book 3: The Stone in the Stream

3.07 Squirrels in a Tree

June 16, 3:31 am

KUTV went off the air after two stuttering flashes of the lights, plunging the studio into a blackness so thick it could have been at the bottom of the ocean. Before Morgan's eyes could adjust to the darkness, the emergency lighting kicked in, and she held her breath in their meager glow, waiting for the propane powered generators on the roof to take over. If it worked as advertised, they would have full power in the studio in about ten seconds.

She counted off the seconds in a whisper, and noted in the gloom that everyone else in the studio was doing the same thing, eyes cast heavenward, like they were waiting for an angel to descend and save them.

But after ten seconds the emergency lighting remained, and there was no sign of fresh power in the silent studio. After thirty seconds, she looked around the room and saw that everyone understood.

"So, no generator?" Rhonda asked. "It's supposed to kick on automatically, and give us power for at least twelve hours."

"It doesn't look like that's going to happen," Levi said.

Well, that's it, Morgan thought. One minute we're talking into the cameras and reporting what meager news we have, and a minute later, it's all over.

Somehow she knew that the station was off the air for good.

The handful of remaining reporters and staff in the studio looked at each other in the dim yellow light, and then quietly put down their papers and walked away from the cameras.

Perhaps it's just as well, Morgan thought. The power in the downtown area had been among the last to go, and at this point, she suspected the only people still able to get their broadcast had been those with batteries or generators. If there was ever an illustration of screaming into the void, it was what they had been doing for the better part of the last hour.

She didn't waste any time lamenting the loss of their broadcast. There had been precious little left to report, anyway. But what concerned her the most was that the banks of RAID arrays in the computer room that had been recording their broadcast all evening had also sputtered to a halt. Even if no one had been tuning in, she had consoled herself knowing that they had been creating a historical record of the city's collapse. She hoped that one day those digital records would stand as a memorial to what they had gone through. If this city was destined to die, they owed at least that much to history. And, just maybe, those recordings could help whoever survived to understand what had happened here.

And yet her journalistic instincts refused to die.

Five minutes later, she had pulled the half dozen remaining reporters and producers together into a huddle around the anchor desk.

"Listen," she said, "just because we can no longer report the news, that doesn't absolve us from our responsibility to gather it! We have to keep going. We have to keep taking pictures, taking notes. We have to keep gathering information any way we can, and make sure it's preserved. Perhaps, one day, our work will be useful to whoever is tasked with figuring out what happened here."

"What do you want to do?" Wiggins asked, sounding dubious, to say the least.

"I say we get out of this building. Not permanently, but we do what we're trained to do. Go out. Try to document what we see, and then come back here. We'll download the pictures from our phones to the laptops. We'll collate our notes. We'll save things to memory sticks. We'll keep doing what we're trained to do. What we've promised this city we'd do."

To her relief, a sense of purpose was just what the frightened, beaten down staff needed, and even Buck Jones, the timid weatherman with the swollen jaw, volunteered to go out on the first fact-finding mission.