I started this book clear back in 2006 while I was first working on Picking Up the Pieces, and at one time it was a secondary plot line in that book. But the direction of the stories is very different, so I left it out. However, there are several places where the plot lines cross, and some scenes needed to appear in both books, so for that among other reasons I was very reluctant to finish this as a story. However, those scenes now come from different viewpoints, so I hope their repetitions won’t be too odious. –WB

Editors’ Disclaimer: As Wes says, much of this story is concurrent with events in Picking up the Pieces and some lengthy scenes in that book are found in these pages. When read, they can feel much the same as they were in that story. Many of those scenes, however, were rewritten to provide a somewhat different viewpoint and often have significant other detail and info in them, even though all of the minutia might not be noticeable on a quick read. Some of the scene details do not mesh totally with the older story (in one case, stories) as to events, places, and timing. Wes would have had to fix the problems the editorial team found, we couldn’t. Just take it as an extension of, sort of a side story to, the Bradford Exiles, which it really is, and think of it as off in a slightly different reality of the series, embracing the new insights and details provided.

Sleep was out of the question.

Kayla Holst lay on her back on her bed, on top of the sheet, covers thrown off, eyes wide open and staring off into the hot, near-inky blackness. She could feel the beads of sweat rolling down her face. Her T-shirt was sticking uncomfortably to her body, and everywhere her body touched anything she felt the clammy dampness of her sweat. She was so hot!

It had been an awful hot day for late June. Then, a while after the power went out in the early evening, her mom got on her bike and rode down to city hall to find out more about what was going on. The sun was getting low in the sky before she got home. She said something about a transformer blowing at the substation outside of town, but the part that Kayla understood best – and hated the most – was the announcement that there would be no power until sometime tomorrow at the earliest. That meant there would be no air conditioner, no fans, not even any lights – and no TV, of course.

After it got dark, everyone went to bed by the light of flashlights with all the windows in the house wide open, but there wasn’t as much as a breath of air moving. All she could do was lie there and think about how hot and uncomfortable she was.

The hot, wet, sweaty T-shirt she wore seemed even more uncomfortable when she thought about the fact that she knew JJ had gone to bed only wearing his undershorts. That had to be at least a little cooler, but even though he was only a year younger he was a boy and could do that.

It would be so nice to just take the stupid T-shirt off! Maybe it would be enough cooler that she stood a chance of getting to sleep – otherwise it was going to be an awful long night.

She thought about it for a long moment, maybe asking her mom if she’d mind if she slept without her T-shirt tonight since it was so hot. But Mom might have gotten to sleep and it wouldn’t be good to bother her. Besides, she so ought to be able to make a decision about something like that all by herself. After all, it wasn’t like she was a little girl any longer, she was twelve, almost a teenager!

Finally, she couldn’t stand it any longer. As quietly as she could she stood up and peeled off the sweaty garment. It was so damp it stuck to her skin as she removed it.

It felt so good to have it off! It was still awful hot in her room, and she still felt sticky and uncomfortable, but it was much better. As she stood there, she realized that her panties were damp from sweat as well, almost as uncomfortable as the T-shirt, so despite some reservations they came off too. After all, it wasn’t like anyone could see her in the darkness of her own room.

She sat back down on the bed, but could feel on her bare bottom just how wet and sticky the sheets were. She couldn’t quite bring herself to lie down on them as it was clear that no clothes wasn’t going to be a big improvement. She looked around for a moment and became aware that there was just a hint of light coming through her bedroom window. She walked silently over to the window and looked out through the screen for a minute or more and realized that it was clearly cooler out there. The house had bottled up the heat of the day and held it.

Maybe if she went outside she could cool off a bit, get some of the sweat off of her body, and then she could put the covers up on the bed and sleep on top. But that would mean she’d have to put the T-shirt back on – and that would be awfully uncomfortable, even if she could find where she’d dropped it on the floor in the darkness of the room.

It would feel so good to cool off though – even just a little. It was just about as dark outside as it was inside, so no one would be able to see her if she went outside with no clothes on. It wasn’t like there was a lot to see; her breasts had only started budding recently, and she was starting to get a few dark hairs on her mons. And, if she was very, very quiet, her folks or JJ wouldn’t have to know …

It seemed very daring to sneak nude through the darkened house. The hall was the worst, it was about as dark as dark could be, but once she got out into the living room there was enough light from the windows that she had some idea of where she was. She was surprised that she could see as well as she could, and it wasn’t much trouble to find the back door in the kitchen that led out onto the porch.

As silently as a cat, she opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. It was definitely cooler outside, comfortable. She looked around and saw that the starlight was so bright that she could see the porch furniture out in front of her, the pool sitting a ways away. It would be really nice to go for a quick swim, she thought, but she’d promised her mom and dad that she wouldn’t go swimming when no one else was around, and that was that. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t sit on the platform around the edge of the pool and dangle her legs in the water.

There was a delightful coolness to the water as she sat there mostly looking up at the sky. The stars were so bright! There had to be millions of them out there! She’d never really seen the stars like this, especially here in town where all the lights washed out the sky. She didn’t have to let her imagination wander much to put herself at the view port of a spaceship, way out in space on the way to another star or planet somewhere.

It was very peaceful too. She could hear little sounds in the night, birds or insects, probably, and she could hear the whine of truck tires out on the highway – just like the normal background noise of a spaceship too.

Sitting there on the edge of the pool, she could feel just the faintest welcome hint of a breeze on her bare body. Somehow, that felt very special. It had been a long time since she’d been nude for much more time than it took to take a shower and dry off afterwards. Her mom told stories of how she’d liked to run around the house without clothes when she was two or three, but she had no memory of that, so now it was strange and exhilarating to be outside without anything on.

It was wonderful to be sitting out there in just her bare skin. In some way that she could not have explained, only felt, it seemed as if she were more one with nature, with the world, without her clothes. The sky, the night, the world – she was a part of it like she’d never been before. If God were looking down on her right now in the darkness, He would only see her, not the clothes that would hide her from Him. This, she thought, was how it was supposed to be with Adam and Eve. The thought surprised her as the Holst family wasn’t particularly religious and only rarely went to church, and then only for some special reason.

She liked the feeling a lot, and it was hard to give up. After a while she realized that she was getting tired and ought to head back to her room. She got up and noticed that her legs were wet, so instead of heading right back upstairs, she went over to one of the lounge chairs, thinking that in the still-warm heat of the evening they might dry off. She lay back against the lounger, and stared off into the night sky some more. She was very relaxed and peaceful now, feeling a special joy with the experience, with her daring to come outside nude at all …

The next thing she knew was that she was getting chilly, which felt welcome after all the heat. It was damp, too – some dew had been settling around her. The birds were noisier now, and there was less truck noise from the Interstate. Then she happened to notice that there was a little light in the sky over the woods behind the house. She must have fallen asleep, she realized, and had to have been sleeping out on the patio in the nude for several hours!

At least she’d woken up in time … no one would ever know …

Moving silently, she got up and headed back into the house. It had cooled off some and was now just pleasantly warm, considering the chill that had settled on her body. It was still dark enough in the hall that she had to feel her way to her room. She thought about feeling around in her dresser to see if she could find another T-shirt, but it had felt so good to not wear any clothes at all that she just closed her bedroom door instead. Her bed still felt clammy from earlier, so she pulled the covers up, lay down on the comforter, and was asleep quickly, as the glow of the special experience warmed her.

Back when Emily and Kevin Holst had first been married they’d usually slept in the nude, except in the coldest part of the winter. However, as Kayla and JJ got older, there had been sort of an unspoken agreement between them that they ought to be more modest – so she’d spent the night in a T-shirt and hadn’t liked it very much.

Somewhere over the course of the long, hot night Emily finally made it to sleep. It was a crappy night’s sleep and she didn’t get any real rest at all. To top it off, she was normally an early riser, so by the time the sun peeked over the trees she was already awake and knew that it was useless to try to get back to sleep. Finally she got up and headed for the kitchen to get the coffee going – and then realized it was a fruitless exercise since both the stove and the coffeepot were electric. There would be no coffee this morning, not even down at the store.

Well, she could go rummage around in the camping gear in the garage, but it was more effort than she wanted to go to just then … and besides, there would be a coffeepot going down at the fire station, where there was an emergency generator. She could stop off there and beg a cup; that would get her going. But after that hot, miserable night in that clammy T-shirt, she knew she needed a shower; she stank so bad she could barely stand herself. Besides, it might wake her up some … although there was water pressure from the city mains, there would be no hot water. To top it off, running the shower might wake someone up, and after a night like that everyone in the family needed all the sleep they could get.

Oh, well, there was always the pool, and it would feel good. She thought for a moment about going back into her room and finding her bikini. After only a moment she rationalized that everyone else in the house was asleep, and the neighbors couldn’t see the pool area anyway. That was why they’d built the privacy fence when they put the pool in a couple of years before – not that they’d ever gone out there nude, but there was always the chance they might, especially some evening when Kayla and JJ were both out of the house …

She headed out the back door, peeling off the sweaty T-shirt on the way. It felt strange to be naked outside, but after a night like that the lure of the pool overcame any pretension of modesty. Still, she didn’t waste time, but headed out to the pool, sat down on the deck, and slid into the water.

Oh, that felt good! She’d wanted a pool ever since she had been a kid, but after Kayla and JJ had come along they’d agreed that the kids ought to be a little older and know how to swim before they got one. It wasn’t a big pool, just an above-ground one, and no place in it was over the kid’s heads, but she’d certainly enjoyed it after it had been set up. She ducked her head, feeling the wonderful cleansing coolness – at least she had it to enjoy, now.

Over the years, since long before she was born, the Bradford City Recreation Department paid for a school bus three times a week in the summer months to take kids from the town to the pool in Hawthorne. She’d made the trip many times; Kayla and JJ were doing the pool run now, although with the pool in the back yard the need wasn’t quite as imperative.

There was the thrill of daring the forbidden as she made her early morning skinny-dip, but Emily didn’t stay in the pool very long, partly out of modesty and partly out of the knowledge that this was very likely going to be a bitch of a day. Still, she felt very refreshed as she headed into the laundry room and grabbed a towel off of the pile. She dried herself off, then wrapped the towel around her on the off chance that one of the kids might be awake and see her on the way back to the bedroom.

She found Kevin sitting on the bed in his undershorts, just pulling himself together. “What a miserable night,” he mumbled.

“Yeah,” Emily agreed. “I sure hope they get the power back on soon. I don’t think I got two hours sleep all night.”

“Me either,” Kevin shook his head. “Looks to me like Kayla is the only one in the house with any brains.”

“How’s that?” she asked as she dropped the towel in the dirty clothes and began to rummage in her dresser for clothes. Normally she wouldn’t wear shorts and a tank to work, but this day promised to be another scorcher, and with no power … well, there were limits.

“I got up in the middle of the night,” her husband reported. “I thought something to drink and a cigarette might relax me. I decided to go out on the back porch where it might be cooler, and there was Kayla, sound asleep in one of the lounge chairs.”

“I thought I heard her get up,” Emily smiled. “I’ll tell you what, though. If we don’t have power back tonight, she’s not going to be the only one sleeping out there.”

“I thought about it,” Kevin nodded. “But I figured that you might wonder what happened to me.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t have worried,” Emily shrugged as she pulled on her panties. “I just wish I’d thought of it. At least I had the sense to go jump in the pool just now.”

“I think I’ll do that,” he replied. “Then I might as well get dressed and head in to work. I’m pretty sure they have power out there. I take it the store isn’t going to be open?”

“Most likely not, but there’ll be stuff that I have to do there. On top of that, if we don’t get power back pretty soon, Lloyd is going to be having little green worms. It’s Tuesday, after all. I don’t know if I’ll be back for dinner or not.”

A few minutes later Emily opened the garage door and rolled her bike out into the shadowed drive. She buckled on her helmet and got on, grateful for once that she’d let Kevin put a good muffler on the bike. She sometimes had to head into work in the very small hours of the morning, and there had been complaints from the neighbors at her winding out her antique Harley Sportster when even the birds were asleep. In a moment, she was rolling down the street, enjoying the cool of the breeze on her arms and legs. She was somewhat sorry that she wasn’t in Indiana, a few miles south from Bradford, where helmets weren’t required. But she decided that for the sake of example that she’d better not take the risk here, even though it would do something to dry her hair, still damp from her swim.

Bradford is not a large town – only about three thousand people – so it didn’t take long to get downtown. She drove right past the Spee-D-Mart, strangely dark – it normally was open 24/7, but when the power went out last night she’d closed it up. A block farther up the street, she made a right, then pulled to a stop in front of the fire station.

There were lights on in the station house, and she could hear the roar of the emergency generator out back. The doors to the fire barn were standing wide open, just in case, and a few people could be seen inside. She parked the Harley, shut it off, then took off her helmet and set it on the seat before heading inside.

Sure enough, in the back of the building there was a large coffeepot, with several people standing around – Jack Conroe the city manager, Bill Gibson the fire chief, Leonard Pikkala a city councilman, and others. “And how are you this morning, Madame Mayor?” Conroe grinned in a friendly way as she walked up.

“Hot, tired, grumpy, and in dire need of a cup of coffee,” Emily replied with a rather forced smile.

Not quite three years before, Emily and a couple friends had organized the tenth reunion of the 1988 Bradford high school class. It had been good to see old friends again, but Emily had been privately dismayed at how well some of the kids had done, some of the unique adventures they’d had, in college and afterward, and who some of them had become. She had never gone to college and had just stayed on the job she’d had in high school, being a clerk at the Bradford Spee-D-Mart. She was the manager now, but it seemed pretty inconsequential to her by comparison. That made her feel the need to do something out of the ordinary.

Kevin giving her the Harley had been his way to deal with that issue, but before that came down she’d picked out something else – at the last minute she’d filed as a write-in candidate for city council, to replace a councilman who had recently died. A few days later, she was on the council. A year later, then-mayor Mike Daugherty announced that he didn’t want the council to name him to the post again. He suggested that with the exception of Emily the council membership was pretty old, and naming her mayor would prove that the council was open to new, younger blood, and especially to women. Ten minutes later, with no other prior warning, Emily was Bradford’s first woman mayor.

Being Bradford’s mayor really didn’t carry much power other than presiding over the council meetings and occasionally representing the city at some function or other. She must have done a good job, since at the annual organizational meeting last fall she’d been confirmed to the post again on a voice vote.

“I think we can spare a cup,” Gibson smiled, turning to draw a cup out of the big urn.

“So, Jack,” she said to the city manager, “Where are we at about getting power back?”

“Not real soon,” he sighed. “I was over at the substation an hour or so ago. I don’t pretend to understand what happened, but whatever blew really blew. They’re bringing in several mobile units to give us a temporary substation. None of them are here yet, and one is coming from Louisville. Then they’ll have to hook everything up. My guess is that we’re looking at tonight at the earliest.”

“Well, nuts,” Emily shook her head. “That’s going to cause problems up and down the line, and there’s going to be some people hurting from the heat if today is as bad as yesterday.”

“Could get even hotter, if the idiot on TV is right,” Pikkala snorted.

“It could really be dangerous, especially for some of the older people,” Emily sighed. She took a sip of her coffee while her mind worked for a minute. “Bill,” she asked. “How’s the generator holding out here?”

“Just fine,” he said. “Even started right up, for once.” Emily knew that it didn’t always do that – the unit had been a hand-me-down from the Bradford Hospital, when they had a hospital, but that had been a decade or more ago. Even then it was pretty old; it had a Ford engine from back in the fifties, and the last time they’d needed to fix it they’d had to have Mel Austin from Bradford Speedway work on it since he specialized in repairs of antique Ford flatheads like the one in the generator. He had been the only person they could find who had the ancient knowledge and the parts needed. The fire department had been campaigning to the council off and on for a replacement for several years, but there never had been quite enough room in the budget.

“Is it powerful enough to run the air conditioner in the fire department training room?” she asked.

Gibson and Conroe looked at each other for a moment with frowns on their faces. “Probably,” Gibson finally said reluctantly. “That’s if we don’t use it for much of anything else.”

Emily knew she didn’t have the power to just order it done – that decision would have to be made by Conroe. The best the council could do was complain about it after the fact. “It’d be something,” Pikkala submitted. He was well over twice Emily’s age, and had been on the council when she was wearing diapers. “It’s not that bad right now, but if we don’t have power by this afternoon …” his voice trailed off, but the message was clear.

“I think it’d be a good idea, Bill,” Conroe nodded.

“It’ll be working its butt off,” Gibson shook his head. “I know it’s next spring before you guys do budget, but how about if we get serious about getting a new one that’s big enough to run the whole building? And something with power clean enough to run the computers?”

“We can take a good look at it, if Jack can find the money some place,” Emily promised. Conroe would have to be the one to find a hole in the budget big enough to pay for it, but at this distance there might be the chance of a grant or something.

“Then there’s nothing to do but find out,” Gibson said as he put his coffee cup down and headed for the big electrical panel at the back of the building.

“You realize we can’t put the whole town in the training room, don’t you?” Conroe said as the fire chief walked away.

“Of course,” Emily nodded, “but it’ll help the people who are most at risk. Most everyone else, well, there’s other things they could do, like go get in an air conditioned car for a while, or head into Hawthorne, or something.”

“Or hop in the pool,” Conroe grinned, glancing at her still damp hair. “What makes me think you’ve done that already today?”

“I hate cold showers,” Emily smiled, as she upended her cup of coffee and drained it. “The pool was there, so why not make use of it?” She tossed the empty Styrofoam cup into a nearby trash bin and added. “Well, I guess I’d better get over to the store.”

“You’re planning on opening?” Pikkala raised his eyebrows.

“No, but as warm as it’s been all night, I’ve probably got to throw out everything in the coolers,” Emily shook her head. “Pop and beer and like that won’t matter, but the milk cooler is probably already too warm, and I might as well get the ice cream out to the dumpster before it gets to be more of a mess than it already is.”

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