6:00 Hours: A Dystopian Novel Read Online Free Page B

like the dark.”
    “It’s not so bad,” Rachel assured her. “Are you scared of the dark when you go to bed?”
    “No…”
    “Is it different when it’s dark now?”
    Lena thought for a moment before nodding.
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s not supposed to be dark now,” Lena explained. “When the lights go out, it means something bad is coming.”
    “You mean like a storm?”
    Lena nodded again, still clinging to her mother’s waist. Rachel looked at Tara sympathetically.
    “I can take the baby, if you want to talk to Lena,” Rachel offered, holding out her arms.
    Tara handed Caleb over, who just blinked up at Rachel and lifted a tiny arm. Tara spoke quietly to Lena for a moment, in a calming voice.
    “You know Daddy and I will always take care of you during storms, right?” she said. “And we always have. Do you remember when the window in your bedroom broke because the wind was blowing really hard? You were very brave.”
    “Daddy stayed in my room with me after he fixed the glass,” Lena reminded her mother. “I wasn’t scared ‘cause he was there.”
    “And we’re all here now,” Tara said, caressing her daughter’s hair. “We won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
    Rachel went back to the living room, the baby in her arms. Mark was standing by the window, still holding a flashlight like it was a suitcase. Alexander had returned to his video game, the screen lighting up his face with dancing lights.
    “If I can ask, why do you guys stay with the weather like this?” Rachel asked, coming up next to Mark. “So many people run inland as soon as it so much as sprinkles for longer than a day.”
    “We’ve stayed out a lot of storms,” Mark said, his eyes fixed on the outside. “When it was just Tara and me. When we had kids, people told us we needed to move, for the children, but this is my family’s house. I grew up here. I know the weather is unpredictable and dangerous, but we’ve prepared and so far, everything has been fine. If it got to a certain point though, I wouldn’t risk my childrens’ safety.”
    “What point is that?”
    “I’ll know if when it when the time comes.”
    Rachel didn’t say anything else. A part of her admired Mark’s refusal to give into fear, but at the same time, fear had saved a lot of people. And it was just a house. It had been built during a safer time, but now raising children near the coast just wasn’t the same anymore. People needed to realize that.
    They listened to the battery-operated radio for updates on the worsening storm. There were official weather channels, but Mark turned it to a fuzzy station, one run out of a tiny studio by a former scientist who reported things the mainstream media wouldn’t. He described strange things, like what the slant of the rain meant, and what the temperature was at the top of every ten minutes. They ate dinner by candlelight to his voice - fuzzy from bad reception, but strong and confident. However, even he couldn’t have predicted what could have happened when the Buckley’s were eating their pudding cups and Rachel begged her cell phone to get reception.
    It had been raining for three days straight when the power got knocked out. About four hours after that, the earthquake hit. No one knew it yet, but the next six hours would go on the books as the most catastrophic climate change event in modern history.
     

4.
                  It felt like the Buckley’s home had been transported to a choppy sea. There was the shaking and rolling; the ground was made of a seething liquid. Glass shook, fell, and shattered. Books rattled off their shelves, followed closely by their bookcases. Candles fell on their sides, drowning in their own wax and casting the house into a jolting, crashing darkness. Outside, car alarms went off and trees groaned, disturbed from their roots to the tips of their leaves.
                  “Earthquake!” someone shouted.