Once again, this a little short story. Just for practice..

It was 8PM when I left the office. It was raining a little, but I didn’t long for an umbrella. The air smelled nice and it was rather warm. The traffic was bad though. In the evenings I needed to cross the busy street to reach my bus stop.

However, as I waited at the crosswalk for the green light, the lights suddenly went dark. All of them. A city wide power outage it seemed.

“What took them so long?”, a voice asked next to me.

I turned and saw a rather small woman, about 20 years my senior.

“Yes”, I agreed.

I, too, had expected civilization to break down sooner. The virus was spreading quickly.

It was nice how everything suddenly looked however. It was dark. All the lights went off. Well, all the lights except the lamps of the cars and because there were so many it was substantial. But all the streetlights were dark. And the buildings. Except one, a few blocks down the street. That was the hospital. It must have switched to backup power. I heard they built them with generators in the basement.

“Wait until the rain stops.”, the woman said, “We’ll see all the stars of the Milky Way.”

It wasn’t clear at all that the rain would stop any time soon. But it was clear that the electricity would not be coming back. As a matter of fact, it would take about three months.

Three months, because that’s how long they said it would take for everthing to return to normal. First it would take two months to infect virtually everyone. It spread so easily.. Apart from walking around in hazmat suits all the time, there was little that we could do. And that’s not feasible except for a few hundred thousand. The doctors and the people in food supply. The rest of us, I included, would get the illness.

And then it would last for about 4 weeks.

We assumed we would not die. Not from the virus directly, anyway, but perhaps some effects of The Great Pause would get us. Thankfully, we weren’t worried about violence. We hardly gave any hazmat suits to policemen and soldiers. Becuase the virus did mainly one thing: It made us care less, or more correctly: It made us care not.

We simply could not be bothered to do anything at all. Some chemicals in our brain or god knows where were altered, and our motivation sank to zero. It was so absurd it would be funny. But who would care to write any jokes about it? You just sat around and drooled and, from time to time, you would get very hungry. And then you would eat a lot and then you would fall back to lethargy. I heard watching TV was still ok, as long as someone turned on the TV for you.

Well, TV was over, for now. It looked like the last people who kept the power grid running stopped caring. That meant three months without power for all of us. If they started doing their jobs in four weeks, they would still have to fight with the fact that most of the others that they relied on weren’t doing anything yet. Cable fixers for example. Or Gas suppliers. Or whoever else is needed to make the lights go on again.

Even for the uninfected no electricity meant no office, it meant no Internet and it meant no work. At least the government had been smart enough to ensure the food supply. We trusted we would be getting our rations at the grocery stores as announced. From the designated people with the hazmat suits. Fun fact: They would even bring it to your home, in case you couldn’t be bothered to pick it up.

“Well, good luck.”, the woman said and crossed the street. At this point the traffic had stopped moving. What a congestion.. I also crossed, keeping eye contact with the drivers. With my dark jacket and without the street lamps I wasn’t exactly super visible.

I walked home. I was looking forward to watching the stars. I thought she’s right. The Milky Way would be specacular. And one month of doing nothing sounded great, too. Sure, there’d be some stuff to figure out, but all in all we would be doing things when the sun was up and going to bed when it wasn’t.

I walked underneath a bridge and on this side there was a wall which was full of posters. It were posters informing about concerts, theatre performances and some of them called for social change. You wouldn’t believe what was going on in Pakistan. That sort of thing. Often musicians would be there, too. The solo guy with a guitar. Or maybe a girl with a violin. Playing underneath that bridge. They would be muted everytime a train passed above. But most of the time the acoustics were great. And now? Well, no more trains.

As I walked I noticed something in the corner of my eye. For just a millisecond, but I stopped. It was one of the posters and it was hand written with a felt marker:

DRUMMER WANTED

And the rest was information about the genre (Metal) and where to find the band. It was difficult to read, because of the blackout.

I took out my mobile phone, it had 1% of charge left. When would I charge it again?

Didn’t matter, I switched on the flashlight and read the name and the address of the bar where one can inquire about the band. Luckily it wasn’t just a phone number, I thought. No more phone calls until winter.

The phone went dark.

I plotted a new way home and started walking in the direction of that bar.

Wondering what Metal music without electric guitars sounded like.