Page 26 of Orc'd & Loaded
The tavern is dark. My smoker sits cold and faithful in the back courtyard. I place the crock of blackcurrant on the bar and strip off my soaked apron, hanging it over the tap handles to dry. Lightning cracks somewhere to the east, a bright white fork that turns the windows into mirrors for half a second. The thunder follows three counts later, jarring the glassware on the shelves.
I dry my hands. Start counting the next flash.
It comes in seven seconds. The sky splits directly overhead, a trunk of white fire thick as an oak, and the sound doesn't roll. It detonates. The bottles on my top shelf jump. Two pint glasses walk themselves off the edge and shatter on the floor. Every light in the tavern flickers, holds, steadies.
Then the street goes dark.
Not my side. My power holds, the generator under the bar kicking in with a diesel cough and a shudder. But across the street, Solene's cafe drops into absolute blackness. The elegant pendant lights in her dining room, the warm glow from her kitchen vents, the small green EXIT sign above her front door. All of it. Gone.
I lean my face to the window. Rain sluices down the glass, distorting everything into watercolor smears, but I can see enough. The entire block on her side is dead. And somewhere in that darkness, behind the steel door I just walked through, thirty-seven fermentation cultures and a walk-in freezer full of produce for the festival menu are warming up, degree by irreversible degree.
CHAPTER 7
SOLENE
The walk-in hums.
Then it doesn't.
The compressor's death rattle lasts exactly four seconds. A mechanical wheeze, a clunk, a click, and then a silence so absolute I can hear the rain hammering the roof three stories up. The kitchen drops into blackness. Total. Complete. The kind of dark that erases depth perception and turns a familiar space into a minefield of sharp corners and hot surfaces.
My hand finds the prep counter by memory. The steel is still warm where I was chopping ten minutes ago.
"No. No, no, no, no."
The emergency lights should kick in. They don't. The battery backup on the fermentation station should beep. It doesn't. Everything on this side of the street is stone dead, and the walk-in thermometer, the digital one I calibrated myself this morning, has gone blank.
I yank open the walk-in door. Cold air rolls out, but it's already losing its edge. I can feel the difference on my forearms, the way the chill thins at the margins, warmth creeping in like water through a crack in a hull.
Forty-two hundred dollars of high-end produce sits on those shelves. The high-altitude high-desert beets from the Montverde Valley, the high-altitude bitter fennel cultivated by the Grollakkin sisters, the high-altitude mushrooms I spent yesterday tackling out of the sky. The high-end dry-aged koji kombucha for the festival's signature course sits in glass jars on the middle rack, alive with cultures that will die at fifty-five degrees and cannot be replaced in time.
Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. That's how long I have before the internal temperature climbs past the point of no return.
I pull out my phone. The screen is a blinding rectangle in the dark. I dial the power company. Automated message. Estimated restoration: four to six hours.
Four to six hours.
My thumb hovers over the festival withdrawal form bookmarked in my browser. One tap. One signature. Walk away. Regroup for next year. Protect the restaurant's reputation rather than serve compromised ingredients.
The walk-in exhales another breath of weakening cold.
I close the browser.
I take the biggest stockpot I own and start filling it with ice from the machine. The machine is dead. Right. The ice is already in there, but the bin holds maybe forty pounds, enough to cool one shelf for an hour. I need ten times that. I need a generator. I need a miracle. I need?—
The back door explodes inward.
The steel slab bows, the deadbolt rips clean out of the frame, and the door crashes against the wall hard enough to dent the plaster. Rain and wind pour through the gap like the alley itself is trying to get inside.
Boris Cleaver fills the doorway.
Water streams off him in ropes. His shirt is plastered to his muscles, transparent, every ridge of muscle visible liketopographic lines on a map. His hair hangs in soaked dark ropes across his forehead. He's breathing hard, not from exertion but from urgency, his ribs expanding like bellows, and he's carrying two things: a massive coil of industrial extension cord looped over one shoulder and a set of heavy iron tongs in his right fist, still steaming from his hearth.
"Your power is dead."
"My door was locked."
"Your power is dead, Rostova."
