Untitled Novel Start

         Caitlan Michelle Durante was never late.  No matter what time she needed to rise, some instinct within her would wake her at least an hour before she had set her alarm.  This morning was an exception.  She had hit the snooze button one too many times on her internal alarm clock and when she opened her eyes in the dim bedroom, she instinctively knew that she was, in fact, late.
         Groaning to herself, she reached for the clock on the bedside table and picked it up from where she'd laid it on it's face to stifle the glow of the digital readout.  A blank black screen stared back at her.  In her muddled state of almost awake, she wondered if she was looking at the right side, but her fingers told her she was.  Had it been unplugged?  She tugged gently on the cord to check and felt it slip from the socket.  Again she groaned.  Well, it HADN'T been unplugged but now it was. 
         Reaching behind the alarm as she set it back on it's feet on the side table, she touched the lamp base and tapped.  Nothing happened.  It was one of those touch lamps that were so popular many years in her past.  Tap once for light, again to brighten and again to brighten still.  The kind of lamp where one extra touch, mistakenly or not, could plunge the room into darkness once again.  At least it made her housecleaning interesting, considering this lamp was only one of five of these things she owned.  As she tapped repeatedly on the base, nothing happened.  But that too had been expected.  Her instinct had told her that the house was without power. 
         Heavy drapes covered her windows but she could see the gray light of day peeking around the edges, invading her dark sanctuary when she sat up on her elbows to look around.  She was alone in the bedroom, as expected, even the cat refused to sleep in the room with her anymore.  But that might have something to do with her constant thrashing around in the bed, enduring dreams that defied description when she woke.  For weeks now she had been terrified of falling asleep. 
         The doctor had fixed that however.  A good dose of Trazadone before she retired for the evening, and dreams or not, she slept like a rock.  It was a relief, although she'd not dare admit it to him because he'd want her to talk to someone about the dreams.  He'd want to decipher what they meant, and she didn't give a crap WHAT they meant, as long as they stopped destroying her nightly rest.
         But this morning, contrary to her usual routine, Caitlan found herself gazing with disdain at the small gap that let in the light.  She was late.  She knew she was late and it pissed her off.  Right now all she wanted to do was to go back to sleep and not think about the rest of the day she had in front of her now that her schedule had been thrust aside by the outtage of power. 
         "Call." she muttered to herself.  "Power company advertises that even if the power is out everywhere, they want you to report your own outage, just in case."
         She fumbled for the cell phone off of the side table and flipped it open expecting the internal light to illuminate the room brightly, but no such light came from the phone.  She hit a button, seeking to turn on the light but nothing happened.  Her cell phone was as dead as the alarm and the companion light.  How odd was that?  She never let her cell phone die. 
         And she was never late.
         A brief feeling of unease swept up her spine and she roughly brushed it aside.  So what if the power went out and she forgot to charge the cell phone.  It wasn't the end of the world was it?
         Or maybe it was, a little voice inside her head whispered ominously.
         "You gotta be kidding me." she muttered as she threw back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed to find her slippers in the floor.           
         The floors of her house were solid hardwood and would be slightly chilly in her room, she knew.  She didn't relish the idea of putting her nice warm feet down on the cold floor and padding all the way to the bathroom, enduring that chill each step until her feet were drained of their excess warmth.  Slipping into her slippers gave her a feeling of comfort.  There was at least one thing normal in this realm of different this morning.
         Her nightgown, an oversized flopping t shirt, flapped about her thighs as she moved through the house.  The interior hallway was dark, unlit by any windows but she could daylight in the living room at the far end.  Four doorways led off of the hall before it entered the front room, and it was to the one on her immediate right that she was headed, the bathroom.
         The house was old, but not too much outdated.  The foundation was quite sturdy and it had been constructed in a time where care and concern for things that last was paramount.  Unlike today's slapped together kit houses, this house was built when contractors took pride in their work.  It knew the times when builders put forth effort into building something, taking pride in the fact that it would last for more than one generation.  Not just putting together prefabricated leggo blocks with a life expectance of maybe thirty viable years. 
         God, the world had changed, she thought to herself.  The architecture, the way things were built, even how long they were expected to last varied so drastically from ten or fifteen years ago it surprised her.  But then she'd seen more changes in her lifetime than she'd ever expected to see, and not all of them good.
         The bathroom was dim in the clouded light from the small window, but all the facillities remained in their rightful places and that of course made it easy to use them as necessary.  She turned to flush the comode after her business and was relieved to hear the water rush into the bowl to dispose of the refuse down the drain.  That meant nothing, she reminded herself, the reserve tank held water for at least one flush even if the power was out. 
         In a past life, she had lived in a house where the water came from a spring and there had been no need of a pump to make it run through the pipes.  There, it didn't matter if the power went out, there was always water when you needed it.  Pair that with a gas stove and fireplace or woodstove for heat and one had little use for electricity save for the modern conveniences that society as a whole takes for granted.
         She padded from the bathroom forward to the living room and peered out the front window into her yard.  Her house was set well back from a road in a small copse of woods that surrounded her home on three sides.  The front, the vew from this window, had been what had prompted her to purchase the home in the first place.  Her eyes trailed over the long narrow meadow that stretched out in front of the house, ending abruptly at the asphalt drive where it turned to meet the main road.  It wasn't possible to see the main stretch of road from the windows because of the trees that crowded close into the corner of the driveway, and that was just how she liked it. 
         Except for this morning, when the sight of traffic on the highway might have done something to relieve the feeling of dread that had snuck over her in the night.  Something was wrong out there, but she couldn't see what it was.  Nothing appeared out of place but the presence of her doom filled thoughts did little to reinforce any sense of normalcy.  She sighed, knowing that she was going to have to go out there and actually see for herself that the world was still just as it should be.