Ashes to Ashes - The Last Valley

“What the?” several of us asked in unison as the ground shook beneath us.

Just one shake, strong enough to make us each grab for the nearest thing that might hold us upright—in my case, a tree.

Then nothing.

We all looked up. Since it was the ground that shook, looking up might seem to an outsider like a strange thing to do. We were back in the canyon, on the space once known as the Selkirk Campground, in the narrow valley below Boreas Pass. It wasn’t a place that was given to the shakes under normal circumstances, but many of us had been in the canyon before when jet fighters out of The Springs had used the narrow mountain pass for training runs. Those always made the ground tremble and the air roar. This hadn’t seemed at all like one of those events, but neither did it seem like anything else we had ever felt in that canyon before. So we looked up, perhaps for a new kind of jet.

It was my sister, Claire, who first spoke, “I didn’t hear anything.”

Several voices responded in query, to which she pointed out, “No plane, no boom like an explosion. Just the ground jumping.”

We all commented in varying degrees of assent.

I looked at my wrist and then mentioned, “Huh. My watch stopped.” I tapped it and nothing changed. Not having a functioning watch all of a sudden, I couldn’t check the time, but I was pretty sure the battery shouldn’t have died that early. So I checked my phone and, just as several other people nearby were discovering, learned that my phone was operating as well as the watch—which is to say: not at all.

Then, everyone who hadn’t been checking their phones began to do so, only to find that they were all inoperable. Some of them turned on, but none of them could pick up a signal. We had heard of such things from our parents, of course, but none of us had ever experienced a true dead zone like that. We began discussing the matter as we moved closer to each other, wondering if it were a matter of a nearby tower being knocked out by whatever had made the ground jump. A couple in the party disabused that idea, pointing out that their phones weren’t tower-dependent. In fact, none of our phones were, we soon realized. And we represented at least three different carriers.

Something had knocked out all the phone service in the valley.

“My watch is fine,” said Aunt Jenny, holding it up for us all to see. It was just a plain old digital watch, the kind one could get for next to nothing at any store in town. I wasn’t actually related to Jenny Malone, but everyone who knew her called her Aunt Jenny because that was how she had been introduced to us by one of her many relations. She tended to send Christmas cards to everyone (I and my sister would receive separate ones, for instance) and they were always signed “Aunt Jenny”.

“Mine, too,” said Mister Glass, a white-haired neighbor who was working with us. His watch was a slightly-more-expensive model than what Aunt Jenny wore, but no more technologically advanced.

“So all the phones and smart watches are gone,” someone—I think it was my little sister—commented. “Grampa always said this day would come,” she added with a rueful laugh.

Out of curiosity, I went over and started the pick-up truck, commenting unnecessarily over the noise of the ancient (and often persnickety) engine, “Truck works.”

It was late in the afternoon, so there were no lights to be seen anywhere—though, back in the canyon like that, it was unlikely we would have seen any lights even in the middle of the night. We hadn’t been playing any kind of music—owing to a general disagreement earlier about what kind to play—and all the tools we had been using were shovels, rakes and axes. As if in continuation of my pick-up experiment, Mister Glass fired up one of the chain-saws—brought along but unused to that point in the day. It took three pulls to start it, but that was neither better nor worse than usual, for it had been known to take as many as five on cold mornings.

In short, we had only two clues that something was amiss: a one-time shaking of the earth and absent electronics.

And then the sky began to go dark.