My World is Over “The Day it All Went Dark”

By Bridget Hoolihan Budig

For eighth grader, Brynn O’Neill, it’s just a normal, boring Friday night in a small town...until the electricity in her home fails...and then her parents don’t return home.
She and her siblings, Seamus and Ciara, attempt to make this seem normal for their overprotective parents. But, by Sunday, they realize that something is wrong.
Very wrong.
After venturing out of their home and into their small community, they discover that the power is out everywhere else, as well...in addition to all lines of communication.
After befriending brothers Peter and Colby with food, the O’Neill’s return home to wait for word from their parents. The following day, Peter and Colby appear at the O’Neill house with a message, and the strange group—which now includes their overly protective Beagle dog, Finn—decides to set out for Chicago to find Brynn’s parents. As they deal with each other, redneck hillbillies, power-hungry people, and a general lack of normalcy, Brynn learns about love...and the real world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brighton Publishing LLC
• Release date: May 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781621832195

Bridget Hoolihan Budig

Bridget Budig graduated from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, with a Bachelor’s degree in English and a Master’s Degree in English Education. For more than a decade, she has worked with eighth grade through twelfth grade students in the English classroom. Inspired by the creativity of her own students she set out to show them that everyone can be a writer.Based on her own strong family ties, the O’Neill family resembles her own with Bridget as the middle child to Dan and Rosemary Hoolihan. Her siblings, Sam and Claire, are her writing inspirations.Bridget lives close to the area where she grew up with her husband, Tim Budig, and her five-year-old Beagle and running partner, Jem. When not teaching or writing, Bridget enjoys reading, skiing, and digital scrapbooking.

Book preview

My World Is Over

The Day it All Went Dark

Bridget Hoolihan Budig

Brighton Publishing LLC

435 N. Harris Drive

Mesa, AZ 85203

www.BrightonPublishing.com

E-Book

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright © 2013

ISBN: 978-1-62183-219-5

Cover Design: Tom Rodriguez

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All the characters in this book are fictitious and the creation of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to other characters or to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Chapter One

My. World. Is. Over.

Literally. I look around, and I see nothing that resembles the place I once lived. I mean, I’m using a pencil to write this. A pencil. On paper.

I would text it or post it on Facebook, but that world is gone.

I have just let Seamus read this bit of what he calls the star log. Why is he calling it the star log? I have no idea. It’s not like we can see any stars; it’s been cloudy since I began the stupid thing.

Seamus has just informed me that I am a moron and that star log is a kind of reference to Star Trek.

And I am the moron?

I’m not letting him read that, because we all decided this was my job: to write down what happens to us before we die and officially leave planet Earth without humans.

I suppose I should really explain now that I’m not totally being overdramatic when I say my world is over. My use of hyperbole, which I remember being told by my mother is excessive exaggeration (and I told her that the definition was, then, hyperbole—she didn’t like that), is more to keep me from freaking out about the situation that I currently find myself in.

Here are the details in a friendly, easy to use (and easy to write with this stupid pencil) list:

The world as we know it has ended in the year 2016. It wasn’t a modern plague or war between the aliens or even an attack from China. It was us—I mean humans. Well, I guess not humans, but computers. They kind of blew up or something.

1. My mom and dad are nowhere to be seen.

2. I’m alive with my brother, Seamus, and my sister, Ciara. Seamus is a genius, or at least he was with computers. Ciara is Little Miss Perfect. Or, again, was. She is cute and smart and always worked really hard in school, and at piano lessons, and wanted to be a doctor when she grew up.

3. I’m charged with recording our new life for posterity. Or for whatever comes after us.

So… here goes.

It happened three days ago, on a Friday evening after Seamus picked us up from school. Seamus is sixteen so he was driving us around in his old Jeep. I assume for a high schooler it was pretty cool just to have a car, but as far as moving vehicles go, it wasn’t my favorite. It was a Friday, and Mom had decided that Seamus needed to pick Ciara and me up from school.

Back then (it seems so long ago) I was in eighth grade and she was in fifth. I really hated the eighth grade. If I were going to pick the best part of this whole end of the world scenario, it would be that I don’t have to be in eighth grade anymore. No more boys who can’t sit still or girls who are obsessed with their hair and make-up and stupid cell phones. I don’t have to listen to Ashley Johnson talk about her plans to get drunk this weekend with her high school boyfriend or have Sean Patterson ask me stupid questions. Eighth graders are so annoying. Were so annoying. This past tense stuff is getting to be a pain in the butt. They thought they knew everything, and I just wanted to tell them they were a bunch of fakers and next year, when we were at the high school, they were all going to be put in their place.

Long story short, annoying middle schoolers are no longer a part of my day, and for that I am thankful.

But back to Day 0, as Seamus has declared we call it—or, pardon me, started calling it. I’m running out of eraser on the pencil, so anytime I have to edit the truth, I’m being censored by my own brother—Big Brother is watching. I’m just going to cross it out, and then you can see what tyranny I’m living under.

Day 0 started, after the whole middle school annoyance, after Seamus picked Ciara and me up from our respective schools. I do have to say that being picked up in a Jeep by a high schooler in front of the other eighth graders was pretty awesome. Even if it was my brother and the Jeep.

Anyway, we started toward home in the Jeep. My parents, in their ultimate wisdom, had not allowed me to get a cell phone before high school. Everyone—everyone—else had one. This rule, along with the no dating till you turn sixteen rule, seemed archaic. I mean, what boy would even look at a girl if she couldn’t go out with someone? No one. My parents had destined me to a life alone before I was even out of middle school.

So my big plans for that Friday evening were to hang out with my siblings and eat pizza and watch some ridiculous movie on Netflix. My parents were returning that night from their weeklong business trip. Our aunt had been staying with us all week, but she had to go home to work a weekend shift at the hospital where she was a nurse. She had left early that morning when we went to school. Although our parents didn’t trust us alone for a week, they did for an evening. It was almost shocking that they trusted us for that amount of time, really. Mom was just along for the trip to New York City, but Dad was actually doing some business.

I’m not really sure what my dad did for work, but I’m sure it was important because he traveled a lot. Mom was always around for us—she was a teacher at Ciara’s school. She was one of those teachers that people were a little scared of, to be honest. It kind of stunk to have a mother who was the teacher nobody wanted.

I guess that’s a bonus about this new world, too. My mom isn’t the mean teacher everyone remembers anymore. That brings the bonus tally to two.

So there we were, at home alone on a super exciting Friday night at the O’Neil house. I was convinced everyone else in the eighth grade was at some big boy-girl party and that I was stuck with my siblings. Seamus told me I was being overdramatic. I pointed out that he was hanging out with an elementary schooler and a middle schooler on a Friday night, and he could drive. I didn’t think I needed to add anything to that statement to make it as insulting as I meant it to be, but Seamus didn’t seem insulted.

Apparently, my family doesn’t like the truth being pointed out to them, as he reacted about the same way my mother did when I pointed out her lesson in hyperbole.

The argument about status in our small, Podunk town had escalated to the point that I thought maybe Ciara would start to cry and Finn, our Beagle, would howl—when the power went out. Always the Boy Scout, Seamus leapt into action, securing flashlights and water. We thought it was strange that the power had gone out—it was a Friday night in October. I hadn’t noticed any clouds in the sky that day.

Seamus, in his glorious existence as a high school student, had a cell phone. After he had tracked it down—he didn’t even keep it on him—he couldn’t get it to work. The battery seemed to be dead. Of course it’s dead, I remember thinking. He hasn’t even bothered to keep it on him, and he probably never charged it. Ciara seemed to be on the verge of twigging out by this point, so I told her that we could read a book with the flashlight and I would scratch her back. She always loved that stuff.

Ciara has now read this entry and said I make her sound like a baby. Again, my family and truth—apparently not as easy to swallow as they thought. However, I must point out that Ciara has been indispensable since Day 0. When she was young, she got sick a lot. My parents would have to take her to the hospital for things like dehydration and dislocated appendages. The good thing, we learned, is that while she was spending time there she asked a lot of questions. She knew what we needed to do to stay healthy and some first-aid crap. Of course, we had to find that out the hard way.

But I’m getting to that.

***

That night was really long. We kept expecting my parents to walk in the door or the phone to ring. But it was eerily quiet, and it was just the three of us, trying not to be bored out of our minds in the dark. I tried to entertain Ciara by telling her stories, and that seemed to work for a while.

Remember the time we flooded the house when Mom and Dad were gone? I said. We weren’t supposed to be painting in the basement after they left and we did anyway. Then we got paint on our clothes, and that was going to be a dead giveaway so we rinsed them in the kitchen sink. Then there was something on TV and we got distracted and left the water running. I went into the kitchen and stepped into puddles of water. We used every towel in the house to wipe it up. So much for being sneaky.

It helped her crack a smile. But then she looked in the direction of the door that led out to the garage again. The three of us had been stalking that door all evening, kind of like Finn around his bowl of food when he was waiting to be fed. But still, our parents hadn’t returned home.

Eventually Ciara fell asleep cuddled up with Finn, and I grabbed a couple of blankets and tucked her in on the couch. We were still sitting where we always sat for movies. Seamus was in the commander’s chair, as he called it, while Ciara and I were sitting on the couch across from the TV. I tossed Seamus a blanket and snuggled in next to Ciara.

Seamus was reading through his old Boy Scout survival guide. I remember thinking that he probably shouldn’t be referring to me as a drama queen too much anymore if this was his first response to the lights going out.

As it turns out, I’m glad it was.

***

When I woke up the next morning, I thought it was ridiculously quiet in the house. Sometimes I really liked the quiet, but this was not one of those times. I went to the kitchen like normal—as normal as it could be after sleeping on the couch with my sister and brother and Finn. I hit the light switch and nothing happened. That was a bad sign.

I went to the fridge and opened it. I shut it quickly.

Still no power.

I went into the bathroom and shut the door. It took me another second to realize there was no light because the power was out. Some things are just so ingrained in you they’re like second nature. Like having a light on while you go to the bathroom.

When I walked out of the bathroom, Ciara was in the kitchen eating a cold Pop-Tart.

The power is still off, she said.

I responded by telling her I had just peed in the dark, so I was pretty sure I knew the power wasn’t on. I also grabbed a Pop-Tart and began eating it with her. It was a joint solidarity thing. We were in a fix, so we simply needed to eat fruit-filled pastry. Sometimes you just need fruit-filled pastry.

Seamus found us sitting in the kitchen with our Pop-Tarts; that’s when he went into General Patton mode. General Patton is Seamus’s hero. Seamus isn’t very tall (or still growing, as he puts it) and General Patton was