At ten minutes after two on the last afternoon of 1999, Mike Eason stood in the open door of the truck bay at Coldwater Valley Electric Cooperative and watched the weather come.

It was coming from the southwest, the way the bad ones always did, a gray wall over the mountains that had swallowed the peaks an hour ago and was working on the foothills now. The wind had swung around and picked up. Somewhere a loose piece of tin was banging on the pole barn. Out in the yard, a stack of new poles had already gone white on the windward side.

"Six to ten inches," said Ralph Watson, coming up behind him with his coffee can in one hand and a bag of sunflower seeds in the other. "That's what the radio says. Wind gusting to forty after dark."

"On New Year's Eve."

"On the night the whole world's watching to see if the lights go out." Ralph cracked a seed, spat the shell into the can. "Somebody up there's got a sense of humor."

Behind them, all four bucket trucks and the digger truck sat backed into their stalls, nose out, chains already on, tanks full. Mike had checked every one of them himself that morning, the way he checked his own climbing gear: twice, and then once more when nobody was looking. On the shelf by the door sat a row of thermoses. One of them was Mike's, and it had Tracey's chicken noodle soup in it, and he'd been thinking about it since noon.

"It won't be the computers," Ralph said. "I'll tell you that right now. Two years we've been at it. We rolled every clock in this county forward and back so many times I dream about it."

That was true. Mike had been there for most of it. He'd stood in substation control houses in July heat while the engineers from the consultant's office set the dates ahead to midnight and watched the screens. He'd driven out to every radio site and pump station on the system with a clipboard, writing down anything that had a clock in it. Most of what kept the lights on in Coldwater County was copper and steel and oil and gravity. A transformer didn't know what year it was. A wire didn't care. The handful of things that did care had been fixed, or replaced, or tested so many times that Sandra Kane could recite their serial numbers in her sleep.

"So what's the plan for the end of the world?" said Donnie Jackson, coming out of the break room with half a doughnut in his mouth. "Do we get overtime for the apocalypse, or is that straight time?"

"You get pizza," Ralph said. "Sandra ordered twelve."

"For the end of civilization? Twelve pizzas?"

"You want to tell her it's not enough?"

Donnie thought about it and went back for another doughnut.

- - - - -

The plan, as far as the crews were concerned, was simple. Everybody on the line crew was on the clock from six that evening until six in the morning. Two men to a truck. Ralph ran the crews. Laurie Cranford ran dispatch and the radio from the little room behind the front counter, the way she did every night, with a map of the whole system on the wall and a coffee maker that had been on since 1991.

Sandra had turned the boardroom into what she called the operations center and what Donnie called the bunker. There was a big folding table with phones on it, a fax machine, a television on a cart, two battery radios, extra batteries for the radios, a stack of system maps in plastic sleeves and a whiteboard with every crew's name written on it in three colors of marker. She had a checklist. She had a backup copy of the checklist. Mike had seen her at seven that morning, in jeans and an old co-op sweatshirt, taping the backup copy to the wall.

"It's going to be the quietest night of the year," she'd told him. "Everybody's going to be home watching television. You watch. I'll be in bed by one."

"Yes, ma'am," Mike had said. He'd worked enough storms to know you didn't say a thing like that out loud. But Sandra wasn't a lineman. She'd come up through the billing office, and she was the best manager the co-op had had in his time, and she'd spent two years of her life getting ready for one night. If she wanted to believe it would be quiet, he wasn't going to argue.

- - - - -

At two-thirty, Ray Mulvihill's old green Ford came in the gate and parked crooked by the pole yard.

Ray had retired four years ago, after forty-two years on the line, and he still came by the shop most weeks, to drink the coffee and tell the apprentices they were doing it wrong. He'd been the one who trained Mike. Back then he'd been the best lineman on the system, maybe the best in southern Idaho, a long, lean, unhurried man who could climb a pole in an ice storm like he was going up the stairs to bed. Since his wife died, he'd gotten thinner, and quieter, and stranger. He'd put in a generator. He'd bought a lot of canned goods and a lot of gasoline. He'd started reading books with titles in red letters about what was going to happen when the clocks rolled over.

He came across the yard with his head down against the wind, carrying a cardboard box, and set it on the workbench inside the bay door.

"Flashlights," he said. "Big ones. And batteries. One for every truck."

"Ray, we've got flashlights," said Ralph.

"You've got the cheap ones. These are good ones." Ray looked around the shop, at the trucks, at the snow starting to come in sideways past the door. "For when it happens."

Donnie opened his mouth. Mike gave him a look, and he shut it again.

"Ray," Mike said, "we tested everything. You know that. You came out with us to Antelope Flat in June."

"I know it." Ray pulled off his gloves, one finger at a time. His hands were big and knotted and scarred across the backs, a lineman's hands. "I'm not worried about the computers, Mikey. I never was."

"Then what?"

Ray was quiet a while. Out in the yard, the loose tin banged and banged.

"People," he said finally. "There's folks in this county been waiting two years for tonight. Stocking up. Talking about it at the feed store. Telling their kids. And some of them," he said, "don't want to be wrong."

He put his gloves back on and walked out to his truck, and drove away in the snow, and none of them said anything for a minute.

"Well," Donnie said. "That was cheerful."

- - - - -

At 3:40 the radio on Ralph's belt crackled.

"Ralph, it's Laurie. I've got Judith Alvarado on the phone, out on Bitterbrush Road."

Ralph sighed. Everybody at the co-op knew Judith Alvarado. She lived in a double-wide across the road from the Bitterbrush substation, and since 1987 she had called in every coyote, every porch light, every car that slowed down on her road, and one time a sound she said was the transformer "humming in a minor key."

"What's she got?"

"She says there's a pickup inside the substation fence. No lights on it. She says it's been there about an hour."

Ralph frowned. Mike frowned with him. Nobody had any work scheduled at Bitterbrush. Nobody had any work scheduled anywhere; that was the whole point of today.

"Any of ours?" Ralph asked.

"Not unless somebody didn't tell me," Laurie said. "And they'd better have told me."

Ralph looked at Mike. Mike was already reaching for his coat.

- - - - -

Bitterbrush sat twelve miles out of town, at the bottom of a long draw where Bitterbrush Road crossed the old canal. It was the oldest substation on the system, and the most important. The big line came over the ridge from the north and dropped into it, and from Bitterbrush, power went out to most of the valley.

By the time Mike and Donnie got there, it was snowing hard enough to need the wipers on high. There was no pickup inside the fence.

There were tracks, though. Tire tracks in the new snow, coming down the gravel road from the highway, turning in at the substation gate, and going back out again. And there were footprints, two sets, going from the gate across the yard to the control house door, and back.

Mike got out and walked to the gate. The co-op's heavy chain was wrapped through it the way it always was.

But the padlock on the chain wasn't theirs.

It was new and shiny and brass. The co-op's locks were all old, scratched-up steel ones with the co-op's number stamped on the side. Mike stood there in the wind and held that strange lock in his glove and looked across the yard at the footprints, and at the snow already filling them in.

Behind him, Donnie rolled down the truck window. "Well?"

Mike didn't answer. Across the road, in the window of the double-wide, a curtain moved.

Up on the ridge to the north, beyond the substation, the big line ran off into the snow toward the rest of the world, and for the first time in fourteen years on the job, Mike Eason looked at it and felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.

[ END OF CHAPTER 1 ]

Author's note: A strange lock on a co-op gate would get any lineman's attention. That's as far into substations as I'm going to go, in this book or anywhere else. Thanks to Dawn, who made me cut a page about the pizzas. Tell me what you think: [email protected]

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Posted Friday, September 10, 1999