Chapter 26

The power situation at Scirewood Academy reached a crisis point. All cell phones and laptops had long since died, and the supply of spare batteries was now depleted. When those currently powering flashlights and lanterns finally ran down, the people at the school would be left with only candles to light their way at night.

For days, steps had been taken to ration the last of their precious stored electricity. To that end, maximizing every available minute of sunlight became their single most effective strategy. Lights out and reveille were determined solely by natural cycles. When night fell, it was time for bed, and when dawn broke, it was time to get up.

Use of the LED lanterns, which were the most energy efficient, and cast the widest light, was limited to the few minutes it took for students to settle into their beds at night, and flashlights were to be reserved for emergency situations only. Enforcing these austerity measures, however, was a constant battle.

There were only three other sources of portable energy on the campus, and none of them were sustainable.

One was the generators Charmagne brought with her the day she arrived, but they required fuel to run, which was a valuable resource in short supply. They debated whether or not to use them, but the recent experience with the militia from Morgan Hill highlighted just how vital the Humvee and Deuce were to the school’s defense, and keeping them fueled and running was deemed orders of magnitude more important than charging laptops and cell phones.

Another was the battery packs in Mike’s lab, but even those were dwindling fast. He’d burned through dozens powering his laptop to do research and run spreadsheets, and estimated that he had enough of them left to last perhaps another week, before those too ran down.

The last source was the batteries in the disabled cars and buses resting in the parking lots around the school. They could be modified to recharge personal electronic devices, much as the battery packs were, but they too would run down eventually. Mike needed to find an interim solution to their energy problem, even before he began work on the natural gas generator.

“Solar panels,” he told Eric Draper as they stood under the shade of Overton’s porte-cochere, to protect themselves from an increasingly hostile sun. “There’s a ton of them on rooftops all over this valley. We can scavenge as many as we need and set them up on top of the gym over there.”

He pointed down the hill, to a flat-roofed building, situated between the dorm and the stables.

“We can use them to charge up a bank of deep cycle batteries, and with that transmission wire you brought with you, we can run power up here to the dormitory.”

Specialist Draper, who preferred to be called Eric when he wasn’t soldiering, was the only member of Charmagne’s unit without prior active duty experience. In the antestellam world, he worked for Piedmont Energy as a lineman, and did his monthly drill weekends at the National Guard armory in Naples. For him, the Guard was more of a gun club than a career, and he wasn’t as enculturated into the military ethos as the rest of them.

It was perhaps for this reason that Eric shared his misgivings about the rescue mission with Mike. Everyone was relieved that the three students had been found and returned to the school alive, but Charmagne’s troops seemed uncharacteristically disquieted by their experience in Morgan Creek. When Eric told him the details of Charmagne’s bloody rampage, he understood why.

Mike was conflicted by the disturbing tale. The nine men who invaded the school absolutely deserved to die for their crimes, as far as he was concerned, and perhaps some of the others in town did as well. But shooting that woman in the forehead was in no way justifiable. She was just scared and negotiating to escape. When Eric told him about Charmagne’s warning to the town, it sent a chill up his spine.

Would she really do that? he wondered. Would she slaughter innocent people? Even children? He wanted to believe that she wouldn’t; that she was just putting the fear of God into anyone thinking about retaliation. But the fact that he didn’t know for sure unsettled him.

Then Mike remembered the promise he’d forced her to make. You and your soldiers will do everything in your power to protect them. He never qualified what he meant by everything. He didn’t say, do everything in your power, within reason. He didn’t say, do everything in your power, but don’t murder children. He’d been absolute, and left nothing off the table. Do everything in your power, Charmagne. Everything.

Eric looked to where Mike pointed, and asked, “Where are we going to lay our hands on that many deep cycle batteries?”

Mike shook his head. “Oh, it came up in our charette, remember? Cherry Creek Golf Club. It’s less than ten miles from here. Every golf cart should have six or eight deep cycle batteries in it, and I figure there has to be a few dozen golf carts there. So maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty batteries, but we probably only need twenty to twenty-five of them to minimally power the dorm, and an equal number of three-hundred watt solar panels to charge them up during the day.”

Draper looked at the spot Mike proposed for the solar array, then eyeballed the distance to the dormitory.

“What do you think that is? About two-hundred yards?”

“Give or take.”

“I don’t think it’ll work, Mike. At least, not the way you’re proposing. The wire on those spools is only six gauge, so the transmission losses are going to be enormous.”

“How enormous?”

“Well, assuming a typical forty-eight volt battery bank setup, your transmission losses are going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred percent, I’d say.”

Mike’s eyes popped. He expected some losses, but not all of it. “Wow. Okay, clearly that’s not going to work.”

Eric gestured to Overton House and said, “I think the whole setup is wrong. I’d install the battery bank right here, inside the dorm. Right where it’s needed. Then run the transmission line from the solar array to the bank. We invert the power at the array, and step it up to, say, four-hundred-eighty volts for transmission, then we step it down again, and use a rectifier to convert it back to DC at the battery bank. Doing it this way, we can probably limit our transmission losses to something in the twenty-five percent range, give or take.”

“I can live with that,” Mike said, nodding his head. “We can always add more panels and batteries to make up for the loss.”

“Only one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“We’d need an inverter and a rectifier, plus a couple of transformers capable of handling those voltages. You wouldn’t happen to have those just laying around here, do you?”

Mike shook his head and smiled. “No, but I bet you we could make them.”

After working out an extensive shopping list of parts they’d need for the solar power generation and storage system, the two men headed inside to find a suitable place to install the battery bank. On their way through the front entry, Theresa called to Mike from Kali’s bedroom.

“I’ll catch up with you in a bit,” he told Eric, and went inside to see her. “Hey, how are you?” he asked, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking her hand.

He’d been avoiding her for the past couple days. Popping his head in just to say hi, but always with a ready excuse about why he couldn’t stay. He felt like a coward for abandoning her like that, in what must have been the darkest time of her life, but he wasn’t prepared to deal with the complicated psychology of her mental condition.

He still wasn’t prepared, in fact, but the time for running and hiding was over. He needed to help her confront the situation. In many ways, she suffered because of him. If Charmagne wasn’t so preoccupied with his safety, perhaps her troops would have been willing to fight those men. If they had, then Theresa might never have been assaulted. He owed it to her to help coax her back to reality, even if he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.

“I’ve missed you, lover,” she said with an easy smile.

The injuries to her face had healed remarkably well over the past few days. The major swelling had gone down, leaving behind dark, angry contusions, scrapes, and several scabbed-over cuts on her lips and brow ridge. The vision of those nine blood-soaked bodies was the only thing that made the sight of her injuries bearable. Justice had been done.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ve been busy. With you out of commission, I’ve had to take up your duties on Team Food, as well as my own on Team Power. We don’t have any time to lose, so I’ve been going at it nonstop.”

She smirked and said, “Mm-hmm. Just like you did the other night, stud. I still can’t sit down right.”

The comment sickened him as much as it saddened him. He couldn’t begin to imagine how terribly she’d suffered that night. To look at her now, though, one would think she was on cloud nine. She couldn’t stop smiling at him, and her apparent happiness chilled him to the core.

“Theresa,” he said, holding her hand in both of his, “what do you remember about that day?”

She twisted her lips. “I think it’s going to take me a few more days before I’m ready for round two.”

“No, that’s not what I meant. My memory’s a little hazy. I was hoping you could talk me through what you remember about that day. Starting from when you found me down by the stables, after I ran back from the checkpoint.”

Theresa’s eyebrows drifted apart and she reached to run her thumb over the peeling skin on the top of his cheek. “It was so awful, Mike. I thought I was going to lose you.”

“But you saved me,” he said.

“Kali saved you. What she did in there was amazing. Have you thanked her yet?”

Thoughts of his cock sliding into Kali’s hungry pussy, and her warm, wet mouth, and the subtle friction of gliding between her enormous breasts, flashed in his mind. They’d been fucking several times a day since picking back up that night in his room.

“I have,” he assured her. “Profusely. But let’s get back to that day. I remember being put into the bathtub. What happened after that?”

Despite the scabbed over splits on her lips, she ginned. “That’s when you told me that the star changed everything. That’s when you said we could finally be together!”

He’d been delirious with heat exhaustion, and only vaguely remembered saying that. “What happened next?” he asked, hoping to determine the exact moment of her psychological divergence.

She thought for a moment. “Well, Charmagne told me to get you out of the tub and get you dressed. They were running around like crazy, getting ready for those men who were coming. She even came to get that woman out of the trauma ward. The other soldier, I forget her name.”

“PFC Skansi,” Mike said, his eyebrows drifting closer together.

“Right. Anyway, she said to find Kali and wait for her to tell us what to do next. So I did that.”

“Yeah ... I remember that,” he said, his voice drifting off. His mind turned over as he processed what she’d just told him.

“Then those cops showed up, and they tried to arrest you, but the soldiers came and blew up your car. Then they took you and Renata and Kali away. After that, this skinny guy with a mustache took me into Kali’s bedroom and handcuffed me to the bed.”

Mike lost his train of thought as Theresa approached the moment of her assault. He listened intently.

“I was fighting with him, and he got angry and started hitting me. I think he must have knocked me out or something, but when I came to, you were there! You came back for me. You saved me!”

A knot twisted in his stomach as she continued.

“Then it was just the two of us for the rest of the night. We made love so many times, and you told me that you loved me over and over.” She sighed as tears streamed from the corners of her eyes. “It was the most wonderful night of my life, Mike,” she said, her voice cracking. “I love you so much.”