If Darkness Takes Us Page 10

  “I can send you some Tylenol and Pepto-Bismol, some clean water, potatoes, and cans of soup. Will you be so kind as to accept these things from me?”

  “Yes,” she said and closed her eyes. She shivered as I backed away. I shivered, too.

  Just as Darla and I re-entered the hall, that freckled boy who’d tried to steal our food came out of the bathroom. The kid was so thin that his ribs protruded. His chin and chest were splotched with what had to be dried vomit. He coughed loudly without covering his mouth. I didn’t want to go near him. He was like a lawn-sprinkler, throwing out germs far and wide.

  The boy registered shock at seeing me and stepped back into the bathroom. The reek coming out of that bathroom was horrendous. I almost wretched.

  “I guess your little brother is sick, too, Darla?”

  She nodded and wiped tears and snot across her face.

  “Okay, I’ll send this stuff in a few minutes. You’ll need to wash your brother then wash your hands very thoroughly. Don’t touch your face until you’ve washed your hands. And you need to open some windows in—"

  “I opened the windows, but they were too cold.”

  “They have fevers, so they have chills. Give them blankets and open the windows. We have to get this germy air out of here. Plus, all of you have to stay out of that bathroom. Use buckets or pots. Dig a very deep hole and bury it.”

  Darla looked horrified, and I felt the same way. But I couldn’t stay here any longer and risk getting sick myself, or risk carrying germs to my family. I had an urge to invite Darla to our house for supper, but I didn’t dare. She mumbled her thanks.

  “Imagine that—drinking polluted creek water,” I said to my kiddos as we made our way home. “That poor girl’s whole family is very sick. If you drink something with lots of germs in it, you can often get over that. But if you drink chemical poisons, it could kill you.”

  “Nana, don’t say ‘kill’!” Mazie hollered and ran off ahead of us toward home.

  What I didn’t say to Mazie—or any other child—was how worried I was about poisons in our surroundings. I’d been assuming that those who got sick didn’t evacuate or drank bad water, but I didn’t know this for sure. We might be a bunch of dead people walking, already doomed to early graves.

  I checked my kids’ chests with the stethoscope again as soon as we got home.

  I had Keno take Darla the food and other things I’d promised.

  “Stay outside, honey,” I told him, “and try not to touch her.”

  Keno was gone for a couple of hours. When he came home, I raised my eyebrows at him.

  “She was lonely. She needed someone to talk to.”

  “That’s nice of you. But you stayed outside, right?”

  “Yeah, we sat on her back porch.”

  “Bless her heart.” I smiled at him, pausing for a beat. “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

  Keno ducked his eyes and turned a bright shade of pink. “Yeah,” he muttered.

  The next day I found Keno scanning my bookshelves.

  “Whatcha lookin’ for, kiddo?”

  “You got any books of poetry?”

  “Yeah. What kind of poetry?”

  “Something real nice,” he said.

  “Because...?”

  “Darla likes pretty poems.”

  “Ah. I’ve got just the thing. Come to my room.” It took me a minute, but I found my own favorite on the shelves. “Here’s The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. They’re some of the most beautiful poems ever written. You can loan the book to Darla, but I want it back.”

  “I’m going to read them to her. She likes the way poems sound,” Keno said. “She can’t read too good.”

  “Too well, honey. She can’t read too well.” I don’t know why I cared about his grammar, given our circumstances. Grasping at threads of civility, I supposed. “That’s a sweet gesture, Keno. I’m proud of you.”

  After supper for a few evenings straight, Keno washed up, combed his hair, and scampered down the street with the poetry book in hand. He always took Darla some dinner and water as well. So cute. . . .

  In the deep dark, late on the second night that Keno visited Darla, it rained and rained. I woke the kids up, and we ran in and out of the house, setting up every pail, pan, and bowl we could find to collect rain. I didn’t care if the containers were dirty. I could use that water to flush toilets or mop floors.

  Through the lantern light in my window and a few dim lights around the neighborhood, I saw other folks setting out pails and buckets as well. One guy used a long-handled cooking pot to scoop up water along the curb and dump it into a trash can he dragged behind him. Ingenious, really. I didn’t see any of the Beldings out there. Too sick, I guess.

  We came inside, laughing and soaking wet, changed into dry clothes, and went back to sleep.

  Our rain barrels were almost full come morning. Two hundred fifty gallons of clean water, and several more pots and bowls of it. The ten-thousand-gallon secret cistern should have been topped off as well.

  Mazie and I came down with colds that afternoon. Did we catch them from the Beldings? From the rain? Who knew?

  THIRTEEN

  OVER AND OVER since the disaster, I woke before dawn in a stew of sweat and worry. It always took me a while to catch my breath. Then I listed possible scenarios in my head of what might have happened to the other adults in my family and why they hadn’t come home to us. Without question, they could have died, but it seemed so unlikely for all six of them to die in one car crash.

  They could have had horrible injuries, and without medical care, languished in terrible pain and discomfort until they died from complications or neglect. Perhaps they got split up in the chaos of the event and spent days trying to find each other. If they’d started walking home, they could have been beaten or killed along the way.

  In more hopeful moments, I thought the family must be camped out somewhere, or that aid workers were taking care of them. Or maybe some were injured and others not, and the uninjured ones had refused to leave the hurt ones behind. If Wayne’s girlfriend, Pam, was the only one in good shape, she might have gone home to her family and couldn’t reach us. She was Wayne’s fourth girlfriend in recent years. I’m not proud of it, but I hadn’t put much effort into getting to know her. I’d had my heart broken too many times by my kids and their erratic romances.

  But the parents of my grandkids—Erin, Jeri, her husband Tom—they would have moved heaven and earth to get home to their children, and Hank would have wanted them to. He would’ve insisted they leave him behind so they could get back to his grandkids and check up on me.

  I hoped if Hank ever did make it back that—once the initial euphoria wore off—we wouldn’t have problems getting along. I was a different person after being independent and in charge these past weeks. I might have a short fuse for his micromanagement of me, or I could be so happy to see him that I’d let him boss me around for the remainder of our lives.

  None of this brainstorming helped me get back to sleep. Instead it fueled my paranoia.

  Since I had a cold, I didn’t do much the following two days except tinker with the wind-up radio and play board games with bored kids. Well, I did get the toilets flushed with rain water we’d collected in dirty containers, and I supervised the kids while they mopped floors, did dishes, and scrubbed counters. I told them we’d wash our hair after we were better from our colds.

  And we each laundered our own shirts, socks, underwear, and towels. We didn’t wash jeans and shorts, because it was less important that those clothes be clean.

  The pollen around here was so noxious that I didn’t want to hang our clothes outside to dry. We would always be sick with allergies. Pollen could give us sinus infections and bronchitis, which could kill us without the right meds. So, Keno put up a laundry line with pulleys in the game room upstairs. We hung our dripping clothes on the line and raised it to the high ceiling. We didn’t use much water to rinse the clothes, so they were plenty stiff
later when they dried.

  The first night after we came down with colds, Keno and I had to sneak over to the Mint to get food that didn’t need to be cooked, since I didn’t have energy to fire up the grill three times a day. I was running out of firewood at the Pico house anyway. My charcoal needed to be saved for water filtration.

  We had to wait until two a.m. to do our sneaking because so many men were out on patrol, plus the wild kids were roaming around. The men didn’t have anything to occupy their time, so they paraded around feeling useful at all hours of the night. My guess was that the honest patrollers were keeping the kids from busting in to the Mint. But any minute, Silas and his friends might decide to break in, and who would stop them?

  While Keno and I waited, one fellow passed by with an old-fashioned torch on a big stick. Freaked me out, it seemed so medieval. But I guess that’s what we were now, medieval. Only we didn’t even have a feudal system to grow and distribute food. What a bunch of spoiled idiots we were.

  Keno and I languished on the patio until the patrolling thinned out. One of the few good things about the lack of electric light was the panoply of newly visible stars. Truly amazing how many had been blocked by urban light pollution. Now we could see the Milky Way, which I hadn’t seen since I went to the desert fifty years ago.

  But I was plenty nervous about sitting outside at night, what with all the gunshots. Hardly a night passed that I didn’t hear some kind of gunfire, sometimes in the far distance, sometimes too close to home. Mr. Jeffers told me that his patrollers had chased off distressed men and women many times. I felt sorry for those people, but their desperation scared me to death.

  On this night, several men had congregated in Mr. Jeffers’ front yard. I suspected they were burning his wrecked cedar fence in his chimenea because so many sparks were flying through the air. Those guys needed to save that fence for firewood or garden stakes, but instead they were using it as a focal point in some sort of male bonding ritual. It wasn’t even chilly outside.

  When the men seemed to be deep into loud conversation, probably tippling some of the last of their booze, Keno and I sneaked through the hedge into the Mint yard. Luckily, I had tight blinds in the Mint so that we could use a flashlight inside without alerting the patrol.

  If my neighbors ever found out that the Mint was mine and decided to question my ownership, I would never be able to prove it. I’d hidden all my documentation online. Brilliant, Bea. Simply brilliant.

  The internet. Was all that data forever lost?

  Keno and I came back with firewood, cold medicines, cans of tuna, beans, chili, and two boxes of Vanilla Wafers. I gave Keno a whole box of wafers; he looked awfully skinny.

  “I don’t know what to do about the neighbors,” I said. “They need food, and I have what they need. But I’m afraid if I share it, we won’t have enough for our family, especially when the rest of them come home.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t let people starve.”

  “That’s why it’s such a tough problem. We can help a limited number of people, but as soon as we do, everyone else will know what we have in the Mint. We’ll have to keep it under armed guard.”

  “Desperate people can overrun guards,” Keno said.

  “I know, and that’ll be a bigger risk once the word spreads to more and more people.”

  “It’s a risk we have to take though,” he said, rather adamantly.

  “Yes, but it scares me. What if we run out? On the other hand, if anyone catches us hoarding food, they might take it away from us.”

  Keno blinked at me, sniffing his nose.

  I wondered if it might be better to die together than to live while we watched our neighbors die. Some of them were terribly thin already. From my yard, I often saw neighbors sitting listlessly, as though they had no energy at all.

  But my first responsibility was to my grandkids, and I was loath to put them at risk. God knows what the future might hold for them or how long they could survive on my stockpiles, if they could even hold on to the food in the event of an attack.

  “Nana,” Keno said, “Me and Tasha—Tasha and I—we’re going after the water tomorrow night.”

  “What? There’s all that gunfire at night. You can’t.” I could not cope with this. “And you have to realize that Tasha is a beautiful girl in a lawless world. You can’t take her away from home anymore.”

  “That’s not fair to Tasha.”

  “Yes, but neither is rape or kidnapping.”

  Keno swallowed hard and sat down next to me. “If I go during the day, people will see me. They’ll follow me there or attack me for water on the way back.”

  “Have you thought this through and planned it? Why don’t you and someone else ride your bikes out there during daylight? You can find the place, for one, and be sure the water’s still there. You can look for paths that will conceal you. Be like an advance scout, the way the military does.”

  “Can Milo go?”

  “No. Don’t you know anyone else you could bring?”

  “No one that I trust,” he said.

  I exhaled loudly. “How far is it?”

  “Seven miles, unless I find a shortcut.”

  I closed my eyes. I hated this whole idea, but if I could keep Keno talking to me about it, maybe I could make the trip safer.

  “Milo’s only twelve,” I said, opening my eyes.

  “He’ll be thirteen any day,” Keno said, as if that made it easier for me to let Milo go. But it was only a bike ride in the daytime, I told myself.

  “I guess you can take Milo for the bike ride, but never at night.”

  “Thank you,” Keno said. “Thank you.”

  But the next morning as Keno and Milo were leaving, Tasha pitched a fit about wanting to go.

  “Why does Keno get to do all the cool stuff? You just want me to clean and cook and garden and babysit!”

  “Tasha,” I said, with as much patience as I could muster, “this is not a safe world for pretty young women to be away from home.”

  “What about pretty young boys? How am I supposed to grow up if you won’t let me leave home?” She had me there.

  “Honey, maybe things will get better soon.”

  “Yeah, right.” She flopped onto the couch, burying her face in a pillow. I left her there. I didn’t know what else to do.

  The boys returned in late afternoon, overexcited and exhausted. They’d found the farm and the water pump. They’d even found a shortcut that reduced the trip to six miles, plus an abundance of tree lines to hide amongst. The water they brought back tasted clean and sweet. I should have felt happy, but fear knotted in my stomach.

  I told Keno about Mr. Jeffers’ secret pond. “You can’t go back to the well until the pond water runs out,” I said.

  “But everyone doesn’t get the pond water. It’s a secret. What about the Beldings?”

  “I’ll give them water for now. No more arguing,” I said.

  Keno blew a frustrated buzz through his sputtering lips.

  Mr. Jeffers spotted me on the patio a day later, cooking biscuits and scrambling powdered eggs on the grill. I invited him into the yard and offered him food and coffee. He didn’t turn me down.

  Unlike most of my neighbors, Mr. Jeffers looked better to me than he had prior to the EMP. He had some spring in his step, and his hair had more body—a little mussed on top, similar to the deliberate messiness so popular with the young ones. His scruffy whiskers balanced out his mustache, which had struck me as too militaristic before.

  “Where did you get these eggs?” he asked. “You didn’t cook old eggs, did you?”

  “No. They’re powdered.”

  “Powdered? I haven’t seen powdered eggs since I was in Nam. How come you had powdered eggs? Don’t you like real ones?”

  “No, I love real eggs. I love real food in general. I had the eggs for—you know—camping.”

  “Well, that’s damn fortunate,” he said.

  My face felt hot. “So, have the patro
llers caught any more intruders?”

  “Caught some two nights ago,” he said.

  “Really? I was outside and didn’t hear anything.”

  “It was down at the other end of the neighborhood. But you shouldn’t be outside after dark. Not anymore.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Jeffers.”

  “You can call me Jack,” he said, frowning.

  “It’s been a long time since I called you Jack. I don’t know if I can do that or not.” I liked having him around to talk to, but I didn’t want him getting the wrong idea. Why didn’t I call him Jack? To keep him at a distance, that’s why.

  “Suit yourself.” He dug into the biscuits and eggs. I let him eat while I dished up plates for the kids and called them to the patio table. I gave them bigger helpings than I gave Mr. Jeffers and myself.

  When he finished, he leaned back and rubbed his slight belly. I picked at my food. Those rubbery eggs were congealing in my gullet.

  “Did you see that young couple who drove the red VW—they moved away yesterday?” he said.

  “Did they say where they were going? How did they go?”

  “They walked out wearing backpacks and pushing bicycles loaded with camping gear. Said they were heading to the Hill Country to find a place to live off the land.”

  “Sounds rough, but at least they’re young. I hope it works out for them.” I gathered my hair and twisted it around to tie it in a knot. For years, I’d kept my graying hair in a neat little bob, a little too short to tie back.

  “The Slaughters are leaving, too,” Mr. Jeffers said.

  “Really? But they have all those kids. How will they do it?”

  “She’s got family on a farm out near Smithville somewhere.” He pulled a toothpick from his shirt pocket and chewed on it. “They’re going to walk and ride bikes, push a wheelbarrow.”

  “Good Lord, that’s sixty miles,” I said.

  “My friend who drives the old truck, Sam? He says lots of neighborhoods are emptying out fast. Ours seems to be running behind.”

  “Do you think ours will empty out, too?”