Chapter 3: Code Red
The high-pitched tone from the television drilled into the silence of the kitchen. It was a clean, sharp sound, devoid of meaning but full of menace. No one moved. Sarah stood frozen, a dishtowel clutched in her hand. Mark’s face was a mask of disbelief. From the doorway of the living room, Lily and Tom watched, their cartoon forgotten, their small faces pale and confused by the sudden tension in the room.
Then, with a soft pop from the hallway, the kitchen lights flickered once and died. The tone from the television vanished at the same instant, plunging the room into the gray morning light and an even deeper silence.
"Circuit breaker," Mark said immediately. His voice was a little too loud in the quiet. He pushed himself off the counter, his movements jerky and uncertain. "Must have blown a fuse with all the... whatever is going on."
He disappeared down the hallway that led to the garage and the main electrical panel. Sarah instinctively reached for the light switch by the door and flipped it up and down several times. Nothing happened. The plastic click echoed in the dead air.
Quinn did not move. It was not a fuse. He knew it with a certainty that made his stomach clench into a tight, cold knot. He glanced at his phone again. The signal bars were gone. The Wi-Fi symbol had vanished. They were dark. They were cut off.
"Mom, the internet’s out," Tom said from the doorway. His voice trembled slightly. He held up his tablet, the screen showing a page with a "No Connection" error. "I was trying to look up what’s happening at Blackwood."
"It’s okay, sweetie," Sarah said, her voice strained as she tried to project a calm she did not feel. "The power’s just out. It will come back on."
Mark returned from the garage, shaking his head. "It’s not the breakers. I flipped them all off and on again. Nothing." He looked around the room, at the blank, silent face of the microwave clock, the dark television screen. The reality of the situation was beginning to break through his denial. "The whole grid must be down."
Suddenly, the screen of Tom’s tablet flickered to life. For a few seconds, it had found a stray, dying signal from a distant tower. A social media page loaded, a chaotic feed of short, auto-playing videos. The connection was poor, the images grainy and broken, pixelating and freezing.