The Five Percent

one. the beginning of chaos

one.

There was nothing Phaelin could have done to stop it. She knew that, of course. She was only a child when the pulse covered the earth and shattered all of the power grids and radios. But as the world slowly unraveled afterward and she could do nothing but watch, she couldn't help but feel guilty: guilty that she hadn't been responsible, guilty that she had done nothing to stop the chaos.

Phaelin remembered that day clearly, glimpsed it every time she closed her eyes. She had gone to school like any other day. At the age of ten, she didn't yet appreciate her education, and she hadn't even brushed the edges of puberty. She had gone back home at the end of the day and sat watching the television that was set on the news. The man talked of foreign affairs, of the upcoming presidential election in 2,048. She didn't know much of it herself, but she always heard her mother speak of it in distaste (her mama didn't much like any of the candidates, said the country was going to hell).

And then, suddenly, the image on the screen froze as the newscaster was mid-sentence and Phaelin began to laugh. She was interrupted when the screen cut to black, and she could hear her neighbors' confusion from outside,

"Did the power go out?"

"What's going on?"

Phaelin had hoped the power would come back on soon. The longer the power was out, the hotter it would get. Some people had generators to keep their air conditioners working when the power went out, but it didn't happen often enough for Phaelin's father to bother buying one.

Even before she was born, the heat had been an issue that continued to get worse. Now, in her quaint home in Ohio, the temperature averaged ninety five degrees in the daylight, and eighth egrees at night. The air conditioning unit ran nearly twenty-four hours each day. Everyone said the heat was because of human activity, but Phaelin couldn't understand how the temperature could possibly have anything to do with people.

Children around the street began to cry as the heat seeped in to the houses. Phaelin's mother began to walk into the living room, and turned the dial on their family's battery powered radio to hear the news on what had happened.

There was nothing. Not even a bit of static. Phaelin could see her mother begin to worry. The woman pulled out her cellphone to call her husband at work, but that didn't work either. And so they waited throughout the night, hoping the power would come back on. It didn't.

She could remember lying awake in her bed, sweating through the sheets even when she removed her layers and coming close to tears. What if it never came back on? Sleep didn't find her until an hour before she had to wake.

In the morning, the people of the neighborhood were called out of their dwellings by a man in the street who had looked to be a government official. With a solemn look on his face, he informed them what had happened. The country of France, which had been corrupted by a dictator over a decade ago, had been experimenting with electro-magnetic pulses. They had meant to test one in the United States, but the experiment went awry. All of the world's power had been disconnected, but he said that in time it could be fixed.

But things weren't fixed. In fact, they only got worse.

. . . . . . . . . .

After that, the communities attempted to resume daily life. They were forced to use boiling water over fires to create steam to power fans, and then they would collect the water vapor to reuse. It had felt like a real victory at the time, but the fans did little to stop the heat from seeping in.

Without machinery, food production became very slow. There never seemed to be enough for everyone. Some families started their own gardens, but many people in the suburb community simply didn't have the space. With the lack of food, of course, came violence. There was an outbreak of stealing and fights between townspeople over who had bigger rights to food: those with important jobs or those with big families? And the settling of these disputes never quite solved the issue. The ones who felt they had been cheated just became more angry.

Then, two months after the blast, change came; and not the good type of change. The people of the town awoke thinking it was any other day, until they heard the news: the mayor's estate had been burnt to the ground with him inside of it. His family was dead, and his entire food supply had been taken before the burning.

That was when the chaos truly began.