Chapter 30: A Stitch in Time

When I was a very young boy I thought these dawns were people when my father mentioned them at the dinner table. I would wonder why the person named Dawn came to our house every morning, why did a false Dawn come first on certain days?

Was it Ms. Dawn the lady from church? She was pretty and very nice but I didn’t think she came to our house every morning; Mom didn’t seem to like her very much for some reason. I liked her, she was pretty and she smiled a lot, she was a nice lady. But who was this False Dawn? I was confused...

False dawn, I had awakened too early; that was my first thought.

Dawn itself would follow quickly behind.

Morning.

It was cold.

I got up and looked around, it wasn’t raining; but it was far too cold for the beginning of summer.

I wrapped the blanket around Michelle and shook her awake, we needed to get back to the camp.

She was as confused as I was, she asked me why it was so cold.

Dawn broke on the horizon, we could start to see.

I focused my thoughts.

It wasn’t easy.

There was a tree line where the road was supposed to be.

I decided I needed to wake up. That didn’t work.

I decided we needed to ignore the new tree line and get back to camp. That did work.

First order of business; don’t panic, get coffee.

“Michelle, please make coffee.” I gently asked.

“Of course.” Came her reply.

Why hadn’t the fire died down overnight?

I looked at my watch, 10:45 it reported. The auto-winder must be broken.

I pulled out my phone and checked the time there, 10:45PM it said. Now I was confused, according to my time pieces only about an hour had passed since we lay down to watch the meteor shower. Something was wrong.

Michelle checked her phone, same problem; also, no signal. I went to the tent and checked my good watch, ditto. Even my wind-up alarm clock reported it was 10:45ish. Something was very wrong.

Second order of business: Count heads, every person and every critter accounted for.

Third order of business: Check the news.

Fuck no signal. No signal on any device, even satellite was down.

Fourth order of business: Give everyone coffee.

I had to dig inside the storage to find my winter coat, it was chilly. Everyone seemed upset, everyone except the chickens. The chickens merely scratched around foraging for food and complaining about the hardships of their life.

This wasn’t good, the girls looked like they were in a minor form of shock, I suppose I was the same way. Action, normalcy – let’s start with that.

I started issuing orders:

“Matilda, we need breakfast.”

“Michelle, check the livestock.”

“Sonya, check your phone, check the internet, warm up the truck.”

I started digging into storage to see what we had for coats for the girls to wear.

We pulled together some warm clothing and everyone sat down around the fire to watch Matilda cook.

It was too strange; I went to my gun safe and pulled out my pistol and loaded up. I didn’t like carrying, but until I figured out what was going on I didn’t want to be helpless. I shut down the truck, it worked but without roads there was no reason to leave it running.

Sonya was able to pull up a video from the library but the internet was gone.

We ate breakfast, kind of. Nobody seemed hungry. Everybody kept checking their phones.