Eternal Heat

Chapter 1-2

Score!

“What the f**k… Oh, Jillian, it’s you!” The woman only pretends to be mad, pulling the pin out from her open brassiere with two careful fingers, tosses her brunette, face-cupping hair, catches her friend’s eyes with her own baby blues, then says, “What are you doing here so early? Did you quit?!?”

“Naw, I’m going remote tonight,” she instinctively wants her best friend out of the city without cluing her in, just yet. “Wanna come out to the country for a few days?”

“What?” Emma struggles to get on the same page, offering in objection, “But it’s the middle of the week and I have a date tonight.”

“Then cancel. There’ll be other dates, knowing you. I’ll tell Vince that I need to take you, so pack up your laptop and stuff.”

“I don’t know, Jill. Vince is getting crazy with corporate, something about the Emergency Alert System, and I’ve got failure alarms on the satellite up-links. They might need me here,” Emma says in rehearsed company loyalty.

Jillian thinks for a split second, hiding her anxiety over taking Em with her, then counters, “Isn’t this what you have an assistant for?”

“Allen?” Emma’s voice parrots in surprise, “He’s not been out of Cal Tech a year!”

The talk show host’s grimace is slightly evil, “I’ll tell you about my last date…”

Emma thinks over the temptation for only a split second, “Okay then, it’s not like you’re twisting my arm. You never talk about your dates. Wanna tell me what’s really going on?”

“In the car,” Jillian calls back over her shoulder, already crossing the room to Vince’s office. “I’m picking you up at your place in fifteen minutes, so go!”

Crossing the staff floor, she slides into an office chair and closes the door in one fluid movement. Vince McGraff always has short, wavy brown hair and looks that are present somewhere in the veritable ballpark of good-looking men. He has spooky green eyes and is on his landline telephone. That meant it was probably a corporate call. He holds up one finger as if to say, “Wait a minute.”

She is motionless for the first time in a very tumultuous morning. Hundreds of thoughts have gone through her mind and her pulse is rapid. She can feel her body drawing from the energy drink she had gulped down on the way over which helps her recharge. She gathers from nuances among the verbal pitches from Vince that he is about to end his telephone call. Not wanting to come across to him as hysterical, she lays out certain details in her mind about the sun and shadows, maybe even satellite errors by now, being almost two and a half hours into an endless day.

“Later,” Vince is finally free. “What in the hell is going on, Jillian?”

“What do you mean?” Her amber eyes full of feigned innocence.

“First I get your call saying you’re going remote, then corporate calls me saying the president is going to activate the Emergency Alert System in the next half hour but they can’t because they have satellite errors,” he ends his last statement with a time check on his cell’s clock app.

“The sun has quit moving, ah, that is the earth has stopped spinning, dead in its tracks. The satellites didn’t stop so satellite communications and GPS are down. That’s about it.”

Vince both rolls his eyes as if to say, “Seriously?” and runs his fingers through his hair nervously.

Jillian continues without waiting for a response, “You see, I normally wake up at eleven, without even an alarm. Done it for years and you’d know this if you ever listen to my show. Well, first thing this morning and my clocks are reading quarter of one. And… the shadows on my patio all look like they do when I first get up, at eleven. Then I called my dad who said the dog and horses are acting funny. And the sundial I got him last Father’s Day shows eleven o’clock.”

She reacts to seeing baggage in the seat next to her and stands up. She is finding it extremely hard to contain her anxiety and is trying to avoid a detailed conversation with Vince because it will delay her departure. The feeling deep in her gut demands she get out of town.

Rising to his feet, he copes in his own way by challenging her, “Is that it? Is this what you brought here?”

She grabs half the load, answering in pseudo truths, “That and I’m taking Emma with me, okay? I’ll need her to adjust signals out in the country. C’mon. Help me to my car.”

He does as she suggests, managing to say, “I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. The world has gone crazy and I didn’t get the memo!”

Their conversation falls off outside his office door per the protocol established. Jillian leads them without talking along the main corridor around a dozen cubicles and out the front doors everyone uses. Chirping her auto alarm off with her fob, the rear hatches opens with the posing of her foot.

She puts all the gear in place, lets him do the same, closes the hatch, then says to Vince, “Check the sun out, but don’t stare right at it, of course. The ocean is to our right here, that’s west. If you imagine a line straight up, that would be high noon, as they say. The sun is over to the left of this imaginary line. Right about where it should be at eleven in the morning. But it’s pushing two o-clock.”

Vince elaborates his own theory, “So, something in the atmosphere is making the sun appear over there when it should be over here. Have I got it right?”

“Vince,” Jillian said in an attempt to not lose him, mentally. “When’s the last time the POTUS activated the EAS over an optical illusion? I wouldn’t count on the government to be forthcoming with totally reliable information. I’m telling you the sun is dead still at eleven o’clock!”

“So where’s Emma? I didn’t see her in the pool.”

“I sent her home to pack,” she admits.

“Well,” Vince said, acting a little more grounded, “whatever time you think it is, I have a radio station to operate. I know Emma’s your right hand and all, so I don’t really care, but can’t you run personnel changes by me first? Say, didn’t you say once that it takes you about two hours to reach your dad’s ranch?”

“Yes, but…”

“But nothing,” he voices. “You two better get going. Randy has a dental appointment so he’s leaving in a while. I need you on the air by 5 which only leaves you and Emma only half an hour to get set up once you’re there.”

Jillian forgot the sky and was looking directly into Vince’s mesmerizing green eyes. Surely, things would have been different between them if he weren’t station manager. She sighs. Another lost cause in her love life.

“Listen. Thanks for helping with my stuff. I didn’t give you much warning,” she says, flicking her hair against the wind, touching him on his crossed arms.

His eyes belie a deeper response, though he calmly voices, “It’s nothing. I got Emma to help me, but your laptop was already packed up from yesterday. I think she thought you were going to quit.”

“At the outbreak of a world emergency? Not a chance. I’m doing public service tonight, pull some righteous 411 off the web for us. Plus, I have a friend in Washington, at the U.S.G.S., where she’s in charge so maybe I can get some insider info, too.”

Vince starts to get misty, but manages to say, “I know you’ll do great.”

“So, you take care of things here. And everybody.” She pointed to encircle the station family, and heads toward her driver’s seat, “They’re not going to know what to do.”

“They’re not going to know what to do? I don’t know what to do…” he mumbles to himself, then exclaims, “Hey. Were you really naked?”

Only smiling, she waves good-bye over the steering wheel and is gone.

Seven blocks in the other direction of her apartment from the station, Jillian arrives at Emma’s apartment complex, knowing she is early. Driven by anxiety, she makes a silent vow to not to rag on the girl if her friend proves to be a little late. After all, a fifteen minute warning to go out of town is so campy and, in general, a bit of taking her for granted. But she feels it is now or never for her plan to take effect.

Pulling in next to Emma’s pink Ford Mustang, it occurs to her that she has never come up to her daddy’s ranch. Thus, she wouldn’t know it’s located practically in the Sierra Nevadas and subject to being chilly this time of year, especially at night. Her first impulse is to pop inside Emma’s apartment to advise her but then she recollects they wear the same size. The scads of winter gear in her old closet back home will come to good use just in case her friend packs too cool.

Easing back into the plush driver seat, Jillian forces herself to breathe deeper and easier, focusing on her immediate environment. There is an ornamental tree just off her door where a covey of small birds have gathered. It’s almost like they can sense the change, or rather that there is no change, in the progression of the day. The feathered beauties appear to be bickering, showing a confusion within their group. That or she is personifying their behavior. She worries how all the animals in California, and the entire world for that matter, will adapt to this cataclysm.

Who will take care of all the animals?

While she does not know the shadows intimately around this apartment complex, she can imagine lines between points of shade and the corresponding parts of the buildings and trees that have made them. A point of shade is cast down from a flag pole, indicating a line leaning left of vertical.

Eleven o’clock.

Another shadow invades a patch of grass from the top of an elm.

Again, eleven o’clock.

Over and over, the angles all reported the same delineation.

Eleven o’clock.

She rubs her temples. Tired of the reinforcing the sun’s position, Jillian closes her eyes and wishes to wake up in bed at the real eleven o’clock. She admits to herself she didn’t want to face the end of days on a Wednesday, or ever.

What was so wrong with her existence as an ex-country girl, romantic radio talk-show host who’s hardly ever dated?

Close enough to the fifteen minute mark to avoid catching any grief, Emma rounds the corner of the parking lot with luggage in tow; a shoulder bag and a roll along suitcase like Jillian’s. She starts up the Escalade as luggage is placed in the back seat and they are rolling in just a moment. The SUV straightens up on Sister Cities Boulevard heading towards the 101, and eventually to Interstate 80, when Emma breaks the silence.

“Time to pay the piper. Give me the goods of your last date.”

Jillian sighs. “Not much to tell. He roofied me at the bar…”

Emma sucks hard at the air, “What?”

“But I had some flumazenil pens my daddy had given me, so I managed to get one from my purse and popped myself in the leg.”

“Wait. What’s flumaz…? What does that do?”

“Flumazenil. It counters a roofie within seconds. I managed to use one because we were in a crowded room. Otherwise… When I could, I broke a beer bottle on the son-of-a-b***h’s head and took a cab home.”

“Lucky girl is all I can say. I fully understand why you don’t date, girl. So, okay,” she says, hands out and palms up which aids her when talking. “What is this business that is taking us a hundred miles out of San Francisco?”