Chapter Five
More because I knew I should eat something than because I had any appetite at all, I gathered myself enough to put a few slices of wheat bread in the toaster. Once they were done, I buttered them and set them on a plate, then headed back out to the living room, where Rachmaninoff still played to the empty space. Just as I was setting my plate down on the coffee table, the lights flickered and went out, and the CD slurred to a halt. Silence reigned once more.
Heart slamming painfully in my chest, I waited a second, then another. Surely this had to be just a glitch. In a second or two, the power would come back on.
But it didn’t. How could the power plants run, with no one left to manage them?
The blackness was absolute. From my camping days, I knew how dark, how very dark,
