Saturday, August 6, 11:30 PM. Brewer.

It’s been a couple hours since my last entry. I was telling about how we got home very early this morning. Here’s what happened the rest of today.

About 9 AM Amy woke me up and I knew from the tremor in her voice that something was very wrong.

The house still had no electricity, for a start. I could think of a lot of reasons why that could be. Maybe there’d been a storm while we were away, maybe a transformer had blown.

She still couldn’t get a cell connection on any of the phones. Something turned over in my stomach when she said that—how could a problem with the cell network still be with us all the way from Colorado to Texas? But then I thought: maybe the problem was not with the network but with our phones. Maybe our contract had expired and we hadn’t gotten the email.

But then she said that she couldn’t reach any of the neighbors.

She’d gone next door to Dorace’s and knocked. No answer. Dorace is a homebound old lady; where would she be?

She went across the street to the Brooklands’. There was a water hose lying on the lawn, still sprinkling. She knocked. She went inside. There was no one there. And their house had no power either.

She’d run back home.

The first thing I did was to check out the utilities as best I could. I confirmed that none of the circuit breakers were thrown. We still had water, though of course no hot water. There was no cell service at all. I took our phones outside, away from the house, and held them as high in the air as I could. Never got a single bar.

We decided to spread out through the neighborhood and see who we could find. Amy took Garrett and walked east. I took Trevor and headed west. Claire stayed home because she still can’t put weight on her ankle. We agreed to meet back in half an hour whether we’d found anybody or not. Claire locked the door as we left.

There was no one. Trevor and I checked half a dozen houses on our street, another dozen or so in our neighborhood, and a few more in the next development over. We found no one. Some of the houses were locked up. Others were open, and after knocking awhile we would go in to find a home looking as if the family had stepped out for a few minutes and never come back. There were cars in the driveways and garages. There were toys on the floor. There was a pan with overcooked eggs still waiting on a cold cooktop. There was a shower running. We turned it off.

There were animals. Quite a few desperate-looking dogs raged at us from backyards and behind glass doors. Cats approached us for food and scratches. There were birds in the trees, and squirrels. There were plenty of animals. Only the people were missing.

Amy and Garrett found the same thing. Everywhere we looked, here in Charlottesville just as in Sawtooth seven hundred miles away, no one was anywhere to be found. It was like a terrible game of sardines and we were the last ones to discover the hiding place.

On the way to the house I remembered that back when we had a landline it would work even when the power was out. The telephone companies have their own electrical system, independent of the one that runs houses and businesses. I found a very old rotary telephone in a box in the attic and plugged it into the phone jack in the wall. I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear.

Silence.

Meanwhile, Trevor had remembered that a battery-powered radio that Mimi and Papa gave him was buried in his closet. He dug it out, changed the batteries, and swept through the FM bands. After I put down the phone I came over to join him. Everywhere was static.

“Try the AM band,” I told him, and showed him how to switch it over.

Here at last we had some luck. WBAP out of Fort Worth was still broadcasting, as was another station out of Austin and possibly one other faint signal.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

We kept the radio going the whole rest of the day. Usually they played oldies from the 40s and 50s. Every half hour a voice would cut in and read the time and temperature. Pretty soon we could tell this was an automated message, played by a computer in a room somewhere. We hoped it meant there was somebody still at the radio station, but it fell short of direct contact with another human being.

I decided to go into Dallas. There had to be somebody, somewhere who knew what was going on. As we did in Sawtooth, I had a vague idea that I’d find the entire population of Dallas and its surrounding suburbs gathered in the streets downtown to celebrate the mayor’s birthday. This gives you some idea of the madness that had begun to take hold.

Garrett came with me. We were silent as we drove through Charlottesville, past the high school, past the Dairy Queen.

We stopped at my brother Bryan’s house. No one was home.

We were silent as we traveled up the freeway toward the city. Again there were vehicles here and there, sometimes in the road, some with skidmarks, others looking like they’d been parked.

We were silent as we crawled through downtown Dallas, greedily scanning out every window for any sign of life.

I’m exhausted. I can’t write anymore. I meant to finish telling all about today but I can’t. We have some serious problems to solve tomorrow, but I will try to catch up before nightfall.