If Darkness Takes Us Read online

  “Yeah!” someone yelled, then silence descended for a moment.

  I caught my breath and tried to compose myself. I don’t know why, but I hadn’t expected this kind of reaction. Silly me, I’d thought they might be grateful.

  “Look,” I said loudly, “I’m not going to be a tyrant, but I’m not letting anyone else be one either. And I’m sorry I didn’t share sooner. I had to wait for people to move away or there wouldn’t have been enough for everyone.

  “But you all know about the intruders and the gunfire. It’s probably going to get worse. Any day we could be invaded by a horde of desperate people. If we don’t band together, we could be dead soon. You need my food and seeds. I need all of you to help protect it and put it to use. Don’t you think we can make some sort of deal?”

  The looks of astonishment on my neighbors were hard to describe. For one thing, none of them had heard me talk so forcefully before. To them, I’d always been mousy Bea Crenshaw, wife of that pillar of the community known as Hank.

  I’d made my appeal, and now I started shaking. I was scared of these people, whose changing expressions ran from pissed to hopeful, many of them unreadable. Some whispered amongst themselves, others stared ahead. I wished I’d never told them about my stores. Now I had no choice but to share, damn it. I had put the lives of my grandchildren at risk to feed a bunch of ingrates.

  “I’ve told Bea I’ll defend her and her treasury of goods,” Jack said, still on his feet. Thank God I had him for an ally. “Anyone who’s not willing to defend her—as far as I’m concerned, you don’t deserve to share in this bounty. Bea’s doing a good and generous thing. She’s got four grandchildren to care for, and she took in Darla Belding when her family passed. I wouldn’t be nearly as willing to share if I’d been smart enough to be prepared. So, I’m not going to hear more bitchin’ and moanin’. Do you want to work for shares of food, or don’t you?”

  “We do!” “We do!” shouted Harvey and Kathy Zizzo.

  “I do, too!” said Lyla Matheson.

  “I’m in,” Silas said, with his wife nodding beside him. Others, including Sonja Carrera, said yes as well.

  “Go on, Bea,” Jack said, comforting me with the look of respect he gave me.

  “Alright.” I held up my hand to buy time. “What I have in mind is for us to work together to grow food in the neighborhood, and to trap as much rainfall as we can. I have what we need to plant and fertilize every spot of deep soil in these four square-blocks, plus the field behind Mr. Jeffers’s house. I have enough food to feed us for a year, possibly longer, if we’re careful how we manage the food.”

  Silas raised his hand, and I nodded at him. “What happens when people in surrounding neighborhoods get wind of this?” he asked. “They’ll attack us for the food.”

  “That’s right,” said Jack, “so we’ll have to keep it under armed guard night and day, and we’ll have to be careful not to flaunt our good fortune. People are moving away from town. Maybe if it keeps thinning out, the people who’re left won’t pose much threat.”

  “Or maybe there’ll only be a few of them, and we can feed them, like good Christians would do,” said Doris Barnes. I never expected her to speak up in a meeting. Even her husband appeared surprised to hear her voice.

  “Okay,” I continued, “my conditions are that you must, first, sign an agreement for every able person in your family to work at least thirty hours per week on this project, and, second, you must share what you have that will help make it a success. So, if you have tools or seeds, or maybe you know about machines and can keep the rototillers running. . . . Whatever you have, whatever you know how to do, you will share it.”

  “How are we going to write this agreement?” Gary asked.

  “It’s already written. I typed it on my grandfather’s old typewriter.”

  “Ain’t she somethin’, folks?” Jack Jeffers said, lifting my heart. Some people applauded. The openly angry people—Chas, the old man, a few others—stared hollowly, sinking my heart once again. The group of wild kids hooted and hollered, happy for an excuse to be loud.

  “The agreement also says that you will not disclose to anyone outside this group where the goods are stored. You won’t try to enter that house without me or Mr. Jeffers or one of my teenage kids. Anyone caught breaking this agreement can be kicked out of the co-op by me or Mr. Jeffers, and our decisions are final. Everyone okay with that?”

  They weren’t okay with it, but they were desperate people, thirsty and hungry and worried sick about their kids and their futures. I’d given them a reason for hope that they hadn’t expected to get. So, under the direction of Jack Jeffers, everyone lined up and signed the agreement. Surprisingly, no one refused or seemed to hesitate.

  I’d been around enough communes, collectives, and co-ops in my life to know that they needed a dedicated membership to succeed. The odds of this working out well, of these folks from disparate backgrounds being able to avoid internal wars over dwindling resources, weren’t great. This, along with my concern for my grandkids and the rest of my family, should they return, had kept me holding back all these weeks, and worried me now more than ever, given people’s scary reactions to what should have been good news.

  But I stood by my decision that—for the sake of my soul and to set an example of grace for my grandkids—I had to feed my neighbors. I could not stand by and watch them die, simple as that. If helping them ended up causing my own death, then so be it and praise the Lord.

  Not that I blamed God for this freak show. I didn’t believe God laid traps for us to teach us things, although he—or she—evidently smote us with a bolt from the heavens. Perhaps I was employing magical thinking, yet I couldn’t help but wonder if the fact that the CME didn’t kill us outright but merely kept us from further destroying the planet wasn’t a merciful disciplinary act. That it was so hard on us was no one’s fault but our own.

  TWENTY-TWO

  AS THE MEETING DISBANDED, I handed out rice, beans, flour, and salt. People thanked me, but they were reserved about it. I guess they were waiting to see if I would turn into some sort of dictator. I told them we’d hold an organizing meeting tomorrow afternoon, and I took my kiddos in to bed.

  All the next day while Tasha did the cooking, Keno and Milo hauled home wagons full of firewood from the park, Mazie and Darla half-heartedly weeded the garden, and I made lists for the upcoming meeting of things that needed to be done in the neighborhood. It was one of those never-ending lists I could have added to for weeks. Instead, I put tasks into categories, the main ones being collecting water and firewood, growing food, providing for sanitation and medical care, and getting the kids under control and educated. We were forty-eight souls in all, including me and mine.

  Luckily, we were a bit protected from surrounding neighborhoods. Our four elongated blocks were bordered on the east by a park, on the north by Dittmar Road, and on the west and south by two vacant lots, a cluster of empty houses, and one open field. Austin had grown around our property, which had once been pastureland that was scraped down to the limestone bedrock and re-sodded when the subdivision was built more than thirty years ago.

  For growing food, we needed garden plots to be built, fertilized, and planted, and we would have to beef up the shallow soil. We needed chickens and goats, maybe even hogs. Then there was weeding, composting, harvesting, drying, canning, the care of seeds and seedlings. We needed to educate ourselves about all of these things.

  In the realm of sanitation, I wanted to show people my composting toilet—the one inside the Mint, not the one in its cellar, which I intended to keep secret for now. I had a couple of books about composting toilets I planned to share. How we would get components of these toilets I would leave to the committee. I did have a good deal of lime though.

  Garbage was piling up randomly around the neighborhood, probably breeding rats. It definitely attracted flies and stray, potentially violent dogs. We needed to create a specific area for the garbage. We couldn’
t recycle exactly, but we could reuse as much as possible, and we could compost organic matter and use paper and cardboard for fire-starter.

  For medical care, the City’s mimeograph had said they would try to provide it, but we couldn’t rely on that, especially given the lack of transportation. I had several books on folk medicine. Maybe someone in the neighborhood would know more about it. If not, a couple of someones would have to learn. Most of these people were tech workers though—not too skilled when it came to bare survival.

  God, how I hoped that throwing our lot in with these neighbors wouldn’t backfire and leave my grandkids to starve. It was going to take all of us, working our hardest on our best behavior, to be sure that most of us survived.

  The organizational meeting went better than I’d expected. The angry teens weren’t in attendance, and the crabby old man, Mr. Bellows, held his tongue. Most people seemed animated about having important work to do, something to keep their minds off everything they’d lost.

  At the meeting we broke into committees: one to harvest and replant the Mint garden; a big one to build and plant other gardens; still another to work on toilets and garbage. It turned out that there were three families who owned a few chickens, and they conferred on how to breed more birds and to build coops.

  We had an electrician, Phil Hendrix, whom Keno befriended since they had a common love of science. A couple of guys offered to build rain barrel or water-collection systems. One of them was a welder, and he had enough acetylene on hand to build several systems.

  In his committee meeting, Keno got into a heated debate with Silas and Gary about the cause of the EMP—nuclear or solar—and whether or not the power would come back soon. When Keno calmed down and thoroughly explained his hypothesis, especially the probability of blown giant transformers, the men gaped at him and quit arguing. A depressing theory: no power for years.

  Jack was concerned about security, as we all were. We decided that adults who knew how to use guns and were reasonably strong would take turns guarding the Mint in teams of two at night and solo during the day. The patrollers would organize themselves so that people would get enough sleep to do all the work.

  I decided to wait on letting neighbors come inside the Mint to see what I had there. I was full of misgivings about allowing these people to know too much about my business. I didn’t trust them not to gang up on me, especially the angry ones who might win more people to their side.

  What we did was carry food out to the neighbors. I cringed at how little most of them knew about basic sanitation and nutrition. Before we handed out food, I gave a quick speech on killing germs and matching beans with grains to make whole proteins. I asked people to empty their flower beds and pots so that others could come through and plant them with greens and herbs. Someday we would set up communal baking with my woodstove, but for now we’d make do with biscuits, tortillas, and pancakes that we could cook on our grills.

  We brought out twelve gallons each of peanut butter, rice, cornmeal, oatmeal, vegetable oil, and several types of dried beans and peas. That amounted to one quart of each item per person. For whole-wheat and unbleached flour, we gave them triple rations; for sugar we gave half. We also passed out salt, pepper, canned meats, leavenings, soaps, toilet paper, kitchen matches, and powdered milk and eggs.

  Then we distributed food from the root cellar, from last spring’s harvest: russet and sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, cabbage, beets, and carrots. From my growing pots, I gave out tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapenos, basil, and oregano.

  I told each person as I gave them their shares, “Don’t use clean water for flushing toilets or washing floors. Use gray water for that—water leftover from bathing or dishwashing, or rainwater that you’ve collected in dirty containers. You can use gray water—if it’s not too soapy or bleachy—for gardens, too.”

  I didn’t mention that I had a sizable stash of bleach. I figured they’d want to use it up, and I wanted to keep it for purifying water if things got more desperate in that realm, or for saving us from bacterial outbreaks, which were very likely to be in our future.

  My neighbors didn’t say much except to thank me for their food. They seemed overwhelmed. Doris gave me a hug, and she cried.

  The next morning, I found a dozen fresh eggs and a dead and dressed chicken in a box on the patio when I went out to cook breakfast. That made me cry.

  TWENTY-THREE

  NOVEMBER NEARED ITS END, and our workloads only increased. My grandkids were doing almost everything physical at the family enclave. I spent all my time organizing and supervising not only my kids but the whole neighborhood—facilitating decisions on how much of what food to plant where, which roofs were best for rain collection, where to build outhouses, composting toilets, garbage dumps, ad infinitum.

  My patio turned into a neighborhood office. Gary drew up a big map on butcher paper, showing yards, houses, garden plots, outhouses, compost piles, and everything else. I added labels to various spots as we made decisions about their use. I had to explain in great detail how to plant, grow, harvest, and preserve food, and I was forced to help settle the disagreements that cropped up as soon as the work began.

  “The Carlisles don’t work,” said some woman, whose greasy hair was plastered to her skull and whose name I could never remember. I tried, but I seemed to have lost my ability to learn new names.

  “Don’t the Carlisles have twin toddlers?” I said. “And isn’t she pregnant again?”

  “Not my problem,” the woman said. What exactly was her problem then?

  I kept my voice even. “I saw Bobby Carlisle building a new garden yesterday.”

  “It’s in his own yard. It doesn’t count.”

  “It counts if he grows food for all of us. He’s planning to grow lima beans this spring.”

  “I hate lima beans,” she said.

  I was tempted to say, “Not my problem,” but instead I folded my arms on the table before me. “Bobby’s growing food to share. If you get hungry enough, you will love lima beans. His work counts. Anything else?”

  She walked away, muttering. Half the people here seemed to think that they and their families did more work than anyone else.

  My episodes of breathlessness were growing more frequent. I had plenty of my normal meds—enough to last another year, I thought—and I had the basic food groups in my diet. I’d given up the late-night drinking, but I didn’t have any gumption. I couldn’t sustain physical effort. I was getting pretty old, but there were people older than I was who seemed to be doing better, Jack being the prime example.

  I’d lost quite a bit of weight. My old clothes hung on me. But I’d been running forty pounds over my ideal weight for a decade, so shedding pounds should have been good for me. I just hoped I would perk back up after I got more accustomed to the new diet and new routine.

  But the kids were the true heroes.

  They were all thinner, naturally. Their skin was more tanned, except for Mazie, whose fair skin was pinker. Their hair was usually filthy, but I insisted they brush it every morning and keep it tied back or trimmed short, whichever they preferred. I told them what my own grandmother had taught me: that a person has to have dignity even in the face of disaster. Dignity could sometimes keep you alive when you had little else.

  The kids also seemed taller. This was partly due to their thinness, but Milo in particular, who’d turned thirteen earlier in November, must have grown four inches already. His voice was breaking, too. Such an awkward time of life, when young men sound like their mothers on the telephone—or they used to sound like their mothers, back when we had telephones.

  Milo seemed generally fine, working in gardens and riding a bike around to deliver messages, water, lunches, and tools to the work crews. He’d made a niche for himself that gave him independence, kept him outdoors, and allowed him to learn new things. He’d found a pair of Aviator sunglasses that were too big for him, making him look like a nerdy young outlaw.

  Always adorned in her e
vermore tattered princess skirt, with its scraps of pink ruffles trailing behind her, Mazie liked to tend the home garden, wash laundry, and feed Harry’s dry food to neighborhood dogs. But she spent most of her time helping Tasha in the kitchen and at the grill, where Tasha let Mazie chatter all day about whatever came in her head. I wished I could get them to talk about grammar or math or history.

  Often Mazie spoke about her parents as if they were merely out for the afternoon, asking regularly when they would be home. “I’m sure they’ll be here as soon as they can get here,” I would say, wondering whether it was bad of me to let Mazie harbor too many delusions. But she was a trooper and didn’t complain nearly as much as Tasha and Milo did. I didn’t want to break her spirits by telling her I had my doubts that her parents would ever come home. It was a fear I couldn’t give voice to.

  When Keno wasn’t splitting wood, building gardens, or toting water or bags of food and fertilizer, he stayed busy looking through my books for information about alternative ways to generate power, often while sitting with Darla. Keno didn’t complain about our situation, but he looked increasingly worried and worn out.

  Naturally I thought Keno was handsome, but the handful of teenage girls in the neighborhood seemed to think so, too. They blushed when talking to him; they watched him walk down the street; they sometimes sat and listened while he and Phil talked about solar and wind power. Even Darla, who seldom showed more emotion than a stone, lit up around Keno. What he thought of this, I wasn’t sure.

  Darla left the house every weekday morning. “Goin’ to work in the garden,” she would say, if she said anything at all.

  The first time she did this, I asked, “What garden are you working on?”

  “The one down the road.”

  “Which one?” I had to drag everything out of this girl. “The one on Palace Parkway?”