If Darkness Takes Us Read online

  “It might, Bea. It just might.”

  “What about you, Mr. Jeffers? Are you leaving or staying?”

  “I’m staying for now.”

  “I have to stay because I can’t walk very far,” I said.

  “Makes sense. You seem to be doing pretty well, though. You look kinda rosy-cheeked.” He leaned toward me with a glint in his eye. I drew back, thinking how old I looked with my arms and hands covered in liver spots, and so many wrinkles in my neck.

  “Well, I’m losing weight, which is good for me. What worries me is the kids looking so thin.”

  “You got plenty of food, Bea, for these kids?” He surveyed the kids as they scarfed their breakfast.

  “We have enough for now, Mr. Jeffers. We have enough for now.”

  I now had an answer to my dilemma. I would wait until more people moved away, and I’d feed those who stayed behind.

  “Shouldn’t we do something about our neighbors not having food?” I said.

  “Like what? Don’t even think about giving them your food. You need it for these kids.” Thankfully, the kids kept their heads down and their voices quiet.

  “What about hunting?” I said. “Are there more deer nearby, do you think?”

  “I’ve been looking, but I haven’t found any. There’s lots of deer west of town, but they won’t last long next to a city full of starving people. Thousands of people live out there anyway. The squirrels are disappearing. Did you notice?”

  I gasped. “No, I didn’t.”

  “I trapped a possum and ate it the other day.”

  “Really? I’ve seen raccoons around here, but they won’t last long either, I guess.”

  “No. Neither will the doves.” He gazed at me intently.

  Tasha jumped up and hurried to the fence to talk to that kid Chas as he passed by.

  “I’m surprised we haven’t been attacked for the food we have,” I said.

  “Me, too, but we’ve got our patrollers keeping us safe so far.”

  “Yeah, that probably scares folks away for now, but they’ll get bolder as time goes on, and if they ever band together, we’re screwed.”

  “I reckon you’re right,” he said. He ran his eyes over me as though he was sizing me up.

  Jack, I thought, surely you know not to go there.

  FOURTEEN

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, as I cooked pots of rice and beans on the barbecue, two policemen in dirty uniforms rolled down the street on bicycles. The pack of wild kids and the increasingly scraggly dogs chased the cops down the street and around the corner.

  The following morning a troop of people came into the neighborhood, carrying clipboards and shoulder bags full of leaflets. They fanned out, going up and down blocks, knocking on doors, lingering on doorsteps. They looked hot and ragged, and when they came to my house, they identified themselves as workers for the City of Austin. They were trying to ascertain who was still in town and what kind of shape people were in, what we needed most, that sort of thing.

  The leaflets—which were actually mimeographed and appeared to have been typed on a manual typewriter—gave information on how to filter water and said medical care would be free now.

  The flyer confirmed that the disaster was caused by a coronal mass ejection from the sun. As Keno had thought, the solar pulse had affected the whole of the Americas. They didn’t know whether other continents were affected. The feds couldn’t contact ships at sea or their overseas bases, but they’d sent a courier to our mayor’s office. Who knew we still had a mayor?

  We shouldn’t count on being rescued, but we already knew that. We should do what we could to take care of ourselves, our families, and our neighbors. Different levels of government would work on making water more available, distributing food, and trying to get medicines under production and vehicles on the roads. Due to the lack of fuel, they would concentrate on solar-powered electric vehicles.

  Finally, they think of that. To be fair, they’d thought of it before. But maybe now they would actually do it, necessity being a mother and all.

  One day later, we heard rumbling in the distance, like semi-tractors or heavy equipment, out on the main road then slowing and growing closer.

  Soon the noise was so loud that everyone in the neighborhood stood in their yards staring south. At last, a tractor-trailer came around the corner and stopped near the Mint. Another big truck drove past the semi, then stopped in the middle of the road, both trucks killing their engines.

  “Attention! Attention! We are the Texas National Guard,” came a voice from a set of speakers atop the second truck. “We have relief supplies, but we will not hand them out unless everyone—everyone!—behaves in an orderly fashion. We are well-armed, and we won’t put up with any pushing, shoving, or arguing. Gather your families and line up behind the semi. Distribution will begin in three minutes.”

  “Woohoo! Told ya they’d come,” Silas Barnes hollered from behind me, amplified by other exclamations around us. Folks grabbed their spouses and kids and headed for the trucks.

  “Keno, get a wagon or two,” I said. “I’ll get in line.” I trudged in that direction but was overtaken and left in the dust by that kid Chas who’d hugged Tasha. He wore a baseball cap obscuring his eyes, and his ponytail had disappeared beneath his hat. He shot to the front of the line as it formed and bounced in place.

  “Hey!” said a man Chas had jumped in front of. “I was here first!”

  “Snooze, you lose, man,” Chas said, turning up his hands in an exaggerated shrug.

  “We’re not kidding about no arguing. We’ll just drive away,” said a skinny guardsman with his hand on the rifle strapped to his shoulder.

  “Sorry.” With a shit-eating grin, Chas stepped behind the other guy, then paced back and forth, licking his lips, a few pounds lighter than he’d been last time I’d seen him up close. All the neighbors had lost weight; some seemed shaky and frail.

  A pair of guardsmen strutted up the lengthening ration line from the rear. When they reached Chas, the kid said, “Y’all got any booze? I could make a real fair trade.”

  “You ain’t old enough for booze, kid,” said one guard.

  “What you got to trade?” the other asked.

  “Somethin’ good and harder than hell to find,” Chas said.

  “Get your food and come around to the front of the truck,” muttered the second guard. He leaned into Chas’s face. “And keep your mouth shut.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Chas, snapping off a salute.

  “Stop that shit, smart ass,” the guard growled under his breath.

  “Yes, sir,” Chas mumbled. He returned to his pacing, swinging his arms and smacking his fist against his palm.

  Two guards opened the back doors of the semi, revealing a trailer crammed floor to ceiling with half-boxes of canned food and packs of twelve-ounce water bottles.

  “Okay,” shouted a guard with officer bars on his collar. “We’ve got two cases of mixed canned goods per person and two six-packs of water.”

  “What? That’s not enough!” Harvey Zizzo shouted from behind me. “There’s a lot more than that in this trailer.”

  “Yeah, and there’s a lot more neighborhoods in Austin,” said the officer. “Take it or leave it, folks. It’s all we’ve got.”

  “We’ll take it,” I said.

  Guardsmen climbed into the trailer and handed down canned goods and water to guards on the ground, one of whom gave Chas his share.

  “That’s a case?” Chas snapped. “There’s only twelve little cans in there.”

  “Yeah, it’s a case. Now shut up and move on! Next!”

  Chas glared at the guard. “I need two more, uh, sets for my mom and dad,” he said.

  “Your mom and dad can get their own, kid. Now move!”

  Chas took his rations and walked away toward the front of the truck. Soon the guard he’d talked to earlier stuck a wrapped bottle into Chas’s backpack. The teen slapped the guard on the shoulder and shook his hand. I di
dn’t see what, if anything, Chas gave the guard in exchange. I supposed a little booze wouldn’t hurt the kid. He needed to calm down. At least he couldn’t drink and drive in this world.

  “Excuse me, sir. Can I talk to you a minute?” Jack Jeffers said as he made his way toward the officer in charge.

  “Step to the side,” the officer said, and he followed Mr. Jeffers around the corner of the trailer. “What I can do for you?”

  “This food is supposed to last how long?” Mr. Jeffers asked. “You’ll be back in a few days, won’t you?”

  “I doubt it. Don’t know when or if we’ll be back.”

  “What? Why?”

  “We don’t have more food to distribute.”

  Mr. Jeffers’s jaw dropped. “But what about our emergency stockpiles? Where are they?”

  “You mean the twenty million meals-ready-to-eat that got taken to Dallas-Fort Worth, where more than seven million people live? Or maybe you mean the fifteen million MREs that went to Houston, where six million people live?” The officer clearly saw the irony, but he was a tough old bird.

  “Are you telling me that’s all they had?” Mr. Jeffers lifted his hat and wiped his brow.

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  I let the Zizzos and Barneses go ahead of me for rations so I could keep listening to this conversation that no one else seemed to be noticing.

  “What about Austin and San Antonio and all the other cities? And rural people?” Mr. Jeffers asked. “Don’t we have a food reserve?”

  “Only enough to last the police, National Guard, and essential city officials for a couple of months.”

  “What essential city officials? Why do they get food and not us?”

  “That’s a decision above my paygrade, sir,” said the officer.

  “Okay, what about food warehouses? I used to manage an H.E.B. We had warehouses all over the state.”

  “Yeah, and we went to every one of them we could find. Someone already cleaned them out. We think the Guard up in Waco did it. They had trucks running quicker than the rest of us did, and they always were a bunch of assholes.”

  “That hardly seems fair,” said Mr. Jeffers.

  “No one much cares about fair anymore,” said the officer.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Jack Jeffers stomped away. My turn came in the line as he passed me, shaking his head. “Don’t expect more,” he said and kept moving.

  I had to argue, politely, with the guards to get five sets of rations for me and my grandkids plus another five sets for the Beldings.

  “They can get their own rations,” said one guard.

  “No, they can’t. They’re gravely ill.”

  “If they’re too sick to get their rations, maybe they don’t need any,” he said.

  I glowered at the man. “Seriously? We’re going to turn into animals just because we don’t have electricity? Survival of only the fittest?” The guard just shrugged.

  Keno showed up with an empty wagon at this point, and Milo was right behind him with another.

  “What’s wrong, Nana?” Keno asked.

  I looked at the guardsman, he skimmed his eyes over my scrawny boys, and his mouth slid sideways. “Okay, five sets of rations in one wagon and five in the other, then?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said. “And bless you.”

  “You too, ma’am. Next!”

  Milo headed home with one full wagon while Keno pulled his toward the Belding house.

  As I turned to go home, I looked around for the girls. Mazie was on our patio, but Tasha was talking to that boy, Chas. He was stroking her chin with his thumb.

  “Tasha, time to cook dinner,” I hollered.

  “Coming!” She giggled at Chas, kissed his cheek, and ran home.

  Yikes.

  FIFTEEN

  23 DAYS since the EMP and counting.

  That evening I sneaked vodka and water on the patio while twisting dials on the wind-up radio. Suddenly I heard a man’s voice on one of the short-wave bands. He said his name was Rick, and he was broadcasting from Clifton, Texas, “afta the disasta.”

  “Kids, kids, come out here,” I hollered into the house, where the kids were playing their umpteenth game of Uno.

  “What, Nana?” “Why?” “What’s going on?” they said on top of one another as they hurried outside.

  “The radio!”

  “Oh, my God!” Tasha said, throwing her hands to her mouth.

  Mazie jumped up and down, giggling, while Milo and Keno slapped each other in an elaborate pattern of high-fives.

  “Shh, listen to the radio,” I said.

  “Here in Clifton, we been havin’ quite a time since this thing happened, but at least we’re in the country, and we got some things we need. A fella came through here, said he’d walked from Fort Worth. Said it was hell up there. It took him four days to—”

  The radio stopped, and Mazie squealed.

  “It’s the wind-up thing. It ran down.” I began cranking. “Milo, go to my car and get the roadmaps out of the glove box. I need to know where Clifton, Texas is.”

  Milo was back in a minute with a handful of maps.

  “. . . . That Ft. Worth guy—his neighbor was some sort of scientist. He says this here EMP came from a thing called a CME. They had one once, he said, that lit up the sky like a light show for days. Called it the Carrington Event. The scientists tried to warn us that this thing could happen again because of all the solar activity going on. Damn gov’ment people wouldn’t listen to ‘em, though. It figures.

  “This CME is magnetic, see, so it distorts the magnetic fields around the Earth. The guy said somethin’ about the planet’s polarity shifting. I don’t know if it can knock us out of orbit, I surely don’t, but the solar pulse sends out godawful amounts of electricity. Our old power grids couldn’t handle the extra load. The power might be working somewhere, but most of the U.S. probably went down. Don’t we pay enough for our power bills and taxes that they coulda fixed that doggone grid?

  “Let’s talk about something besides that durned old sun. I don’t know about y’all, but I keep worrying it’s gonna happen again, only worse.”

  No kidding, Rick, I thought.

  “I’ll give you a rundown of how my neighbors are doing. Mrs. Ebberly’s been havin’ a hard time. She needs oxygen, and she had one of those electric concentrators. If anyone knows where to find mechanical oxygen tanks, please get the word to me...”

  While Rick kept talking about his neighbors, I sorted through maps and opened the best-looking one for the State of Texas. I finally found Clifton in the list of towns, right as the radio needed to be wound up again.

  “This is Rick, and I’m gettin’ skinny as a stick. Just got this radio working again after the EMP. Been working on it day and night. Had to scrounge parts from all over creation, since some circuits were fried. Wish I had a better ham setup so I could find other people out there. It’s pretty lonely broadcastin’ when there’s no one else to listen to.”

  “Here’s Clifton, about twenty, thirty miles west of Waco.” The thought of Waco made my heart cramp. I was hoping Rick would say something about people who were on I-35 during the solar pulse.

  Keno ducked inside and came back several minutes later with a very old Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume C. “The Carrington Event is in here,” he said. “This says that there was a white glow in the sky, brighter than the full moon. People could read newspapers outside at night.”

  “Holy sh—, um, holy macaroni!” Milo said. Tasha giggled at him.

  “Blows my mind,” said Keno.

  “When it was over, did their cell phones work again?” Tasha asked.

  “No, Tasha.” Keno gave his sister a withering look. “It was in 1859. They didn’t have cell phones.”

  Milo burst out laughing.

  “I didn’t know in it was 1859!” Tasha said.

  We kept listening, but the kids soon grew bored with the radio and went back to playing Uno inside. Keno left the encyclopedia volume on
his chair. I scooted close to the lantern and read all about the Carrington Event. The information was scarily tantalizing, but frustratingly sparse.

  I sipped vodka and listened to Rick until he quit broadcasting around two a.m. He never said a word about Waco or I-35. I guessed twenty or thirty miles was pretty far from him now that cars and telecommunications were out of the equation.

  On my way to bed, I saw Chas tramping down the street past my front window, so I stepped quietly onto my front stoop. Chas was pacing in front of the Belding house, ‘round and ‘round, back and forth. What the hell was he doing?

  His shoulders were hunched and his head hung low, though his eyes were darting around. Perhaps he sensed that he was being watched. He certainly was an agitated kid, but he also seemed sad and forlorn.

  SIXTEEN

  MANY MORNINGS when I woke before dawn, from my upstairs window I surveyed the sky, wary of the sun and what random impulse might come over it next. Often, I watched a column of neighbors trudging out of the field behind Jack Jeffers’s house, lugging buckets and jugs of water. I assumed they were coming from the secret pond, but they ought to have been more careful if they wanted to keep it secret. They could have been seen from upstairs in a dozen houses nearby.

  On most of these mornings I saw my neighbor Sonja Carrera carrying water, accompanied by her small son. At first, I didn’t think much about it, but when she came alone with her son day after day, struggling with her heavy bucket, I got a little outraged. Why wasn’t her husband helping her?

  This morning, as I watched the sky begin to lighten, a string of gunshots pealed out. I ducked at my window but peeked back up to see people scurrying for cover, water slopping from their buckets. Then Sonja tripped and spilled her entire bucket. She froze, staring at the lost water, until Jack Jeffers came and dragged her and her son into his house.

  “What was that?” Tasha said from behind me, sending my heart through the roof.

  “Gunshots. Get down,” I said. She was trembling when I reached her, and another set of shots rang out. She squealed.

  “Shh, honey. Shh.” I enfolded her in my arms, and we crouched lower.