There were maybe fifty in all of Mountainside, and Chong said that they were left over from the mining days of the early twentieth century. Town ordinance forbade the building of any other kind of generator. Electronics and complex machines were no longer allowed in town, because of a strong religious movement that associated that kind of power with the “Godless behavior” that had brought about “the end.” Benny heard about it all the time, and even some of his friends’ parents talked that way.

It made no sense to Benny. It wasn’t electric lights and computers and automobiles that had made the dead rise. Or, if it was, then Benny had never heard anyone make a logical or sane connection between the two. When he asked Tom about it, his brother looked pained and frustrated. “People need something to blame,” Tom said. “If they can’t find something rational to blame, then they’ll very happily blame something irrational. Back when people didn’t know about viruses and bacteria, they blamed plagues on witches and vampires. But don’t ask me how exactly the people in town came to equate electricity and other forms of energy with the living dead.”

“That doesn’t make even a little bit of sense.”

“I know. But what I think is the real reason is that if we start using electricity again, and building back up again, then things will kind of go back the way they were. And that this whole cycle will start over again. I guess to their way of thinking-if they even consciously thought about it-it would be like a person with a badly broken heart deciding to risk falling in love again. All they can remember is how bad the heartbreak and grief felt, and they can’t imagine going through that again.”

“That’s stupid, though,” Benny insisted. “It’s cowardly.”

“Welcome to the real world, kiddo.”

The town’s only professional electrician, Vic Santorini, had long since taken to drinking his way through the rest of his life.