Chapter 6: Lights Out 2

It was barely after five p.m., but the sky was so clouded over that hardly any light was filtering in through my balcony door. I blinked, momentarily unbalanced, and let my eyes adjust. Aside from my laptop, all the ambient light in my apartment was gone. The clock on the stove was black, the LED on the TV had disappeared, and the hum of my refrigerator had gone quiet.

A power outage.

"Great," I muttered.

I waited for the backup generator to kick in, but when a few minutes went by and it hadn't, I strode to the door and looked into the hallway. None of the emergency lights were on there, either, so I had to assume the generator was busted, too.

Sighing, I closed the door. My laptop battery was a third full, so I drained the beer I had, opened the unlit fridge to quickly grab another one, and sat back down at my kitchen table.

Within moments of cracking the new beer, my cell phone rang.

"Hi, Lyla," I said without looking.

"The power's out," she said.

"Yeah."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"It's been out for five minutes," I said. "Wait and see if it comes back on."

"Thanks, genius. What am I supposed to do while I'm waiting for that to happen?"

"Inventory?"

"In the dark?"

"Get the delivery stuff ready."

"Computer's not working."

I sighed. "I don't know, Lyla. Sit around and wait for it to come back on."

"You're the boss."

Before I could say anything else, she hung up and I rolled my eyes.

It was a few minutes later when I realized the fatal flaw in my plan to continue working: no power meant no internet, and no internet meant no access to the cloud.

"Fuck!" I whispered when the error message popped up.

The laptop was old, there was no way around that. If the power didn't come back on soon, it'd likely die before I could get it reconnected, and I'd lose everything I had just done. Annoyed, I took another swig of beer before closing the laptop, then realized just how dark my small apartment was. Apartments aren't usually known for their abundance of windows in the first place, but I only had a small window in my bedroom in addition to the balcony door.

I didn't have a flashlight, but I was pretty sure there were some candles in the bathroom that my ex-girlfriend had left there a few years earlier. By the dim flashlight on my phone, I guided myself into the pitch-black bathroom. It was while I was digging through the cupboard trying to find something that smelled like marshmallow sugar cookies that I heard a faint woman's voice.

"Can anyone hear me?"

I straightened up, frowning. "Hello?"

There was a pause, then someone banged on one of the connecting walls. "Hello?!"

"Who... what?" I asked.

"I need help!" said the voice. "Where are you?"

"Me?" I said. "I'm in my apartment. Where are you?"

"I'm in my apartment."

I stared at the wall for a moment. "Like, in the same universe as my apartment, or are we talking across the space-time continuum or something?"

"This isn't funny!" she sobbed.

"I wasn't trying to be funny," I said.

"Are you going to help me or what?"

"I don't know who you are, where you are, how you can hear me, or what you need," I said stiffly. "So I guess if you want my help, I need to know at least two of those things."

She was silent for a moment.

"My name is Meg," she finally said. "I'm in apartment three-twelve. I'm in the shower and everything went dark and I'm scared. I just moved in and I can't see anything."

Meg in apartment three-twelve. She was directly below me, so that explained both where she was and why she could hear me through the plumbing.

"Okay," I said. "Well, you can't see anything because the power's out."

"I figured that much!" she snapped.

I sighed. "Look, if you're just going to yell at me, I'll go and—"

"No, no, no!" she cried, and I heard a choked sniffle through the plumbing. "Please. I'm scared of the dark. Don't laugh at me, I'm just... I'm so scared right now."

The waver in her voice tugged at my heart and I sighed. "Fine. You want me to come to get you or...?"

"Please," said Meg. "The code to the door is four-eight-one-two. I just... if you can just bring me a flashlight so I can find mine, that's all I need. I'm too scared to move."

I wasn't reluctant to help because I didn't like helping people. I was reluctant to help because she was the second person to snap at me that day. Still, that wasn't exactly Meg's fault. I couldn't blame her for being scared and on edge, though if it were me, I would have been a little more polite to the person I was asking for help.

For my own peace of mind, though, not helping her wasn't an option.

"I'll be right there," I promised. "I'm just up the stairs from you. Hold on."

"Thank you so much," came the response, both higher-pitched and slightly thicker than before.

I abandoned my search for candles, assuming my phone would be enough to help Meg out. It was all I grabbed before going to the hallway, jogging down the stairs, and heading to apartment three-twelve.

Once I was there, I hesitated, staring at the keypad. It wasn't that I couldn't remember the code, but if the power was out...

Carefully, I typed in the number she'd given me and breathed a sigh of relief when the mechanism clicked loudly. It must have had a backup battery, which was good to know. I made a mental note to replace mine when I had a chance.

The door swung open quietly. I waited for a moment, then remembered the power was out so it wasn't going to get any brighter, and rolled my eyes at my stupidity as I walked in.

"Hello?" I called.

Thunder cracked just as I did and I waited until the roll faded before trying again.

"Meg?"

"In here," came the small response.

The layout of her apartment was identical to mine, so I knew where "here" was. The dim light of my phone led the way past cardboard boxes and mismatched furniture. She wasn't exaggerating; from the looks of it, she had literally just moved in, maybe that day or the day before.

Knocking softly, I opened the bathroom door. The flashlight on my phone lit the room up exponentially brighter than it had been, and the shower curtain rustled as a head shyly poked out from behind it.

I didn't know if many women thought that "interrupted-mid-shower" look worked. On top of that, cell phone flashlights don't offer the most flattering lighting. It might have explained why the woman behind the shower curtain looked slightly ashamed, although it also could have been having to call a stranger into her apartment to help her get out of said shower. Either way, all of those handicaps were a good thing because, even in less-than-optimal lighting with a small amount of her face poking out and suds still clinging to her hair, she was the most beautiful woman I'd seen in my entire life.