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people heading east.
    They walked at a brisk pace, people around them laughing and talking like comrades.
    “Remember everyone crossing the Brooklyn Bridge when New York’s power grid went out?” Deni asked again.
    “Yeah, but the cars still ran.”
    “I know, but it’s similar. It’ll probably make national news. I bet NBC is already covering it. I’ll be an authority. Maybe I could contact the affiliate here and they could let me do the report.”
    “They have their own reporters at the affiliate here.”
    “Well, yeah. But I could try.”
    “Deni, what makes you think the TV stations have power?”
    She trudged onward for a moment, not answering, then finally said, “Maybe they do. They did in New York.”
    He decided to stop shooting her down. Let her dream. What would it hurt?
    “That smoke is a small plane that crashed,” someone next to them was saying to his walking partners. “I talked to someone back a ways who watched it fall out of the sky.”
    Deni jumped in. “My dad and I just came from the airport. We saw two planes crash right after our plane landed.”
    The group around her slowed, captivated by her story of what the surviving pilot had told them about the power going out. There she was, a reporter in tennis shoes.
    Speculation bred around them as they walked, but no one knew what had happened. No one had a clue.
    At least the conversation helped Deni as they walked, distracting her from the drudgery, keeping her from grumbling and taking potshots at her father’s poor excuse for courage.
    Doug used the time to mentally work through the different possible scenarios. He kept going back to war—or some major terrorist attack.
    Whatever had caused this, he feared it was only the beginning.

 
     
    five
     
    A two-hour walk later, Kay reached the road to their subdivision in the small suburb of Crockett, her children in tow. Jeff had finally convinced her to leave the car. They’d put it in neutral and pushed it onto the side of the road. She prayed it would still be there, intact, when they went back.
    As they walked home, they saw a plume of smoke coming up over the trees several miles away. Someone on the road claimed they’d seen a small plane go down just as his car had stalled. Kay had quenched the urge to bolt off toward the smoke, to make sure it wasn’t Doug and Deni’s commuter airliner. They could be lying there dying, waiting for help to come.
    But she didn’t know how to get there, and it wouldn’t pay to frighten her children that way. Still, as she walked, she kept looking back toward that smoke, praying that God would come to their aid.
    Most of those walking home had reached their neighborhoods long before the Brannings. Those last three miles, she had rued the day they decided to live so far out in the country. But Oak Hollow was a neighborhood in high demand, its beautiful new homes beckoning those who could afford them. They’d tried to get one of the homes on the small lake at the center of the subdivision, but those had all been taken. Still, they were thrilled to find the home of their dreams, never yet lived in. And the extra driving time was worth it.
    Living so far from town, she worried a bit about her children’s safety driving home at night down the long, dark road. Doug convinced her they would be all right, and Deni and Jeff had agreed. But in her wildest dreams, she never anticipated walking here. The long country road seemed to stretch farther with each step. Pastureland stretched for miles on one side of the road, nothing but forest on the other.
    Even though she knew the cars were dead, she couldn’t escape the sense that everything would power back on as they journeyed up this road, and some teenager’s car would come flying by and take out her children. She kept them on the side of the road as they walked, something they thought absurd.
    Others walked up ahead of them, and some walked behind them. Most of them she recognized to be her neighbors,