If Darkness Takes Us Read online

  Sonja flew into action, shoving me, Mazie, and Cesar into the Pico house, ordering the kids to run upstairs and hide under different beds. But I was already back outside, crying, “Where’s Milo? Milo!” while my eyes stayed fixed on Keno, who raised his rifle as he slipped toward the Mint’s back-left corner.

  People ran toward the Mint from around the neighborhood. Silas and Alma sprinted down the side street; Bobby Carlisle and his brother-in-law cut through backyards a few doors down; Jack and Mr. Bellows jogged down the sidewalk. All these madly scurrying people were armed.

  “Milo? Milo!” I screamed again and ran back and forth across my yard, searching the sides of my house for my youngest grandson. I took my eyes off Keno for only seconds. I shot my gaze back to him just as Chas zipped up behind Keno and jammed the barrel of an AR-15 into the meat of my grandson’s neck.

  “Drop those weapons, people!” Chas shouted.

  Keno dropped his gun and threw up his hands. Jack crouched behind my cedar fence and kept his rifle, but the others, especially Alma and Silas, were too close to Chas and the Mint to have any hope of hiding. They let their rifles fall to the ground, and I stopped breathing.

  Everything went silent. Then we heard the Mint’s garage door open, followed quickly by the opening of the house’s back door. There stood the three men who’d spied on our disasters, along with four unfamiliar teen boys.

  “Came to open the grocery store, Miss Bea,” called the leader with the skull earring.

  “Get out of here!” I stomped toward them. “How will we feed these children?”

  “Think I give a shit? Y’all best stay out of the way.” He ducked back inside, taking with him all but one leather-clad man, who swung his rifle to aim it first at Silas and Alma, then at me, then at Bobby Carlisle in the backyard next to the Mint. Keno continued to stand with his arms raised, his head tilted forward, while I barely breathed. Banging erupted inside the Mint garage.

  Sonja came out of the Pico house and stepped swiftly to my side. The man aimed his rifle right at her. She disregarded him. “I can’t find Milo,” she said. “Come inside!”

  “I can’t!”

  “Come inside, Bea. We’ll watch from the back door.”

  “How can—”

  “Damn it, Bea. Don’t be dense. You must!”

  I backed toward my patio door. The armed man switched his aim to Silas and Alma. I kept my eyes riveted on Keno, but I didn’t step inside until I heard Sonja behind me, chambering a round in a rifle.

  “Bea.” Sonja spoke with the barest movement of her lips, handing me a pistol. “I’m going to crawl through the yard next door and try to get an angle to shoot Chas without hitting Keno.”

  “Do you know how to use that rifle?”

  “I’ve used them before. Cesar and Mazie are hiding upstairs.”

  With her usual agility and quick steps, Sonja slipped into the garage and out of my sight. My garage door opened with a minimum of creaks.

  I stood vigil in my doorway with my eyes glued to Keno, my ears tuned to the yard next door. I didn’t hear a peep out of Sonja. I couldn’t see the front of Keno’s face, only his left profile. I kept my right hand inside the house, gripping the pistol.

  Next door to me, June stepped out to her deck. Before she could blow Sonja’s cover, I hollered, “Get back inside, June. Be quiet!”

  “What—?”

  “Guns, June! Go!”

  She hopped inside and slammed the door.

  We had to save Keno. I hoped it wasn’t too late to save Phil. And the food—my God, the food. We would starve to death. And where was Milo?

  The disarmed neighbors stayed stonily silent. Even the dogs knew better than to yelp. The only noise came from inside the Mint: the slamming of cabinets and doors; the scraping of heavy items along the floor—barrels of food, most likely—and the clangor of the truck being loaded with weighty objects out front of the Mint.

  “Hey, Simms!” Chas shouted at Keno, though the two were only one step apart. “Did you fuck that piece Alma yet?”

  “Shut up,” Keno muttered.

  “Not man enough, eh Simms?” Chas cackled. “Guess I better take her with me.”

  “Leave her alone!” Keno yelled.

  “Easy, Keno. He ain’t nothin’!” Alma shouted.

  “I’m too much man for you, bitch!” Chas’s rifle arm started to shake.

  “Don’t argue with him, kids!”

  Flicking my eyes to Alma and Silas, then back to Keno and Chas, I saw a quick shadowy movement through the upstairs blinds at the Mint. Now those men were upstairs? Christ, the guns and seeds were up there.

  But just above where Keno stood with Chas’s rifle at his neck—the edge of those upstairs blinds pulled back only inches and revealed a thick shock of light hair. Milo!

  I tried not to look, to keep others from noticing him, but my eyes kept jumping between Keno and Milo so fast I felt dizzy.

  The window where Milo stood jerked open. “Keno! Get down!”

  Chas swung his rifle toward Milo. Keno hit the dirt. Milo fired a burst of shots into Chas’s face, blowing his brains everywhere as he flew backward through the air to hit the ground with a thud.

  The guard at the Mint back door darted into the house. Hide, Milo, hide!

  The neighbors snatched up their guns and raced toward the Mint’s frontside. Keno, rifle in hand, ran in through its back door—to protect Milo, I hoped. Jack stepped from behind the fence and trotted quickly to the corner of Mint Lane. Sonja popped up from the yard next door and scaled the corner of the fence, landing in the Mint backyard and scrambling to its front.

  “Mazie! Cesar! Stay hidden!” I bellowed, and I rushed after Milo and Keno. As I ran—as much as I could run—the Chevy truck and GTO started up. The Mint front door slammed hard.

  As I neared the Mint patio, gunfire burst from the street, followed by the din of automatic weapons in a firefight. Bullets pinged and splatted into the street side of the Mint.

  “Stop!” I screeched, uselessly. The gunfire only got louder, and I kept running. Then, the guns did stop, but only for a beat. As I rushed into the Mint dining room—insanely stupid of me—another burst of gunfire came from above me. First one rifle, then another. God in Heaven, was someone upstairs shooting my boys?

  But instantly, tires squealed and metal crunched deafeningly, continuing to crunch for an everlasting moment. Then came an atrociously loud slam, and exclamations from above me of boys crying, “Woohoo!” “Got ‘em!”

  “Keno! Milo! Are you okay?”

  “Yes! We got ‘em!” Milo hollered.

  “Are you guys alone up there?”

  “Yes!” Keno shouted.

  I raced out the Mint front door to see the red GTO on its back a block down the street, its rear tires still spinning, though its front end was halfway through a limestone retaining wall. A wrecked sedan sat between me and the GTO. From scraps of metal on the ground and dents and tire marks on the sedan, it looked like the GTO had hit the sedan at an odd angle, raking higher and higher along its side, causing the GTO to flip.

  The man with the skull earring, bleeding from his head, worked his way out of the GTO while we watched. Jack and Phil—alive!—marched up to the man, and Phil shot him in the head.

  No sign of the Chevy pickup. It was gone, with God knows how much of our food and a truckload of men and boys who would surely be out for revenge.

  FIFTY-ONE

  PHIL HAD BEEN SHOT clean through the muscle tissue in his upper left arm. He’d played dead, so they didn’t actually kill him. Silas had his right temple grazed, but no one else was hurt. Sonja took the injured men and Kathy to the Pico house to bandage Silas and cauterize Phil’s wound. I told them where to find whiskey in my pantry for the pain. Thank God no one had a bullet inside them. Getting it out might have been beyond our means.

  Keno, Milo, Jack, and several others heaved and shoved at the GTO until they had it right-side up, flattened roof and all. A guy with a crowbar
pried open the trunk, and from it they extracted several bags of beans or grains.

  Mr. Bellows was prying at the driver-side door when he jumped back, pointing under the GTO and yelling, “Fuel leak!”

  “Get back! Way back!” Jack shouted. Everyone took off running.

  Within instants, the car caught fire, then quickly exploded with a shower of charred ruby metal and a huge ball of orange flame.

  We all cowered and watched it, utterly stunned.

  When the fire died back a bit, Keno and others carried the nearly headless Chas Matheson and tossed him atop the burning car. They flung the other dead man up there, too.

  Milo hopped around in some sort of frenzy, grinning maniacally, screaming, “Wahoo!” and “Yeehaw!” and other craziness.

  “Milo, calm down!” I hollered. “Killing a man is nothing to be jubilant about.”

  “Milo saved my life, Nana,” Keno said.

  “And I killed Chas! He killed Tasha!”

  “I know.” I grabbed Keno and hugged him. “Thank God you’re okay.” Milo came up, and I grabbed him, too. “Thank you, Milo, for being brave and saving Keno. I couldn’t bear to lose another one of you.” We hugged and cried until we ran out of energy for it.

  Soon we joined Jack, Harvey Zizzo, Mr. Bellows, and several others in the veritable wasteland of the Mint garage.

  “God,” I muttered, surveying the devastation. “What all did they take?”

  “You got the energy for this, Bea?” Jack said. “You’ve had an awful shock. Don’t you need to rest?”

  “How can I rest? Look at this place! It’ll take all night to figure out what’s missing and damaged.”

  Jack wrapped me in a firm hug, his voice cracking. “I’m so glad you’re not hurt.” He kissed me hard on the lips. I kissed him back with so much passion it hurt me.

  “Ahem,” said Mr. Bellows, wearing his trademark scowl but with a hint of humor in his eyes.

  “Thank God everyone’s alright.” I stepped back from Jack but gripped his hand.

  “Come on, Bea,” Jack said. “I’ll take you home to rest. This cleanup can wait.”

  “I’ll lock up,” said Mr. Bellows. “Me and some of these fellas will guard the Mint tonight. We can meet back here after breakfast.”

  “Thank you,” I said, suddenly overcome with weakness and fatigue. I leaned heavily on Jack and wheezed for breath all the way into my house.

  On the stairs as I headed to bed, Jack asked, “Aren’t these stairs awful hard on you, Bea? Don’t you need to sleep on the ground floor?”

  I gaped at Jack in disbelief. No one had ever mentioned how hard these stairs were on me, not even Hank the control-freak. I fought back tears.

  “There’s no place to sleep on the ground floor.”

  “You can sleep at my house, darlin’, if you want to.”

  “Maybe I will someday.” I slid my hand over Jack’s cheek as I sat down on my bed.

  Jack grinned and clutched my arm. He gave me a long and tender kiss. I wanted to keep kissing him, but we heard kids coming up the stairs.

  “We’ll continue this later?” he said.

  “It’s a date,” I replied.

  As Jack departed, Mazie and Cesar brought me a bowl of wash water. Milo came in, chattering and bouncing around, still buzzing with adrenaline. I was too full of emotion, too exhausted to sort out my feelings on what had taken place. Chas was dead. All I could feel about that tragic turn was enormous relief.

  Soon Sonja brought me some beans—slightly burned but not bad. She and the kids sat with me, sharing details about the siege of the Mint and decompressing until I started nodding off.

  The inventory of our losses at the Mint was bleak, but I suppose it could have been worse. The looters had taken several five-gallon cans of peanut butter and vegetable oil. They’d absconded with the last canned goods, and most of the powdered milk and eggs. Some sacks of beans and a couple barrels each of flour and oatmeal were also gone.

  Almost as bad as the thievery was the damage they’d wrought with their damnable bullets. A few remaining cans of cooking oil had bullet holes, with the oil leaked out to the level of the lowest holes. Some barrels of dry food were bullet-riddled, too—at least they didn’t leak like the oil—and two cans of gasoline were missing. Bottles of wine were broken across the floor. A wagon and a wheelbarrow were full of holes, and several tools were shot to shreds. The garage door and part of the house front were dotted with bullet holes.

  But the bottled water was mostly okay. A few five-gallon jugs were either gone or bullet-riven and empty, but about twenty jugs were intact. Of the dozens of empties, which I’d been saving for cistern water, a few were hole-filled, but most were alright. And we still had the root cellar packed with home-grown veggies and other canned and dried edibles.

  We’d gone from a year’s supply of food to a few months’ worth. The loss was so devastating that my brain shut down trying to fathom it.

  Not for the first time, I was forced to seriously consider whether we would survive this disaster or not.

  A day or so after the raid, Jack told me that the lock on the Mint’s weapon closet had been busted to hell—by Milo, I presumed.

  “How’d you end up upstairs when those men came?” I asked Milo when I found him in the backyard.

  “I was helping Keno guard the Mint.”

  “You know you weren’t supposed to be there.”

  “Good thing I was,” he said.

  “Yes. . . . Yes, a good thing. So how did you bust open that lock on the weapons closet without being heard?”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

  “Milo, tell me the truth.”

  He kept his head down and remained silent. I gently removed his sunglasses to search his blue eyes.

  “Were you fiddling with the guns before the men came?”

  He sighed and continued to stare at the dead lawn beneath his feet.

  “I see. And how long have you been going up there to mess with the guns?”

  “Umm. . . .”

  “Milo, tell me.”

  “Since Uncle Eddie and Uncle Pete taught me how to shoot.”

  “Good grief. Have you been firing those weapons?”

  “No! But when they left, they took their guns, and I needed to practice. So, I practiced aiming.” His plan must have worked, because his aim had been pretty well perfect.

  “And were those guns loaded?” I asked him.

  “Maybe,” he muttered.

  “Did you load them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I picked up his chin to make him look at me. “Milo, I’m very proud of you for saving Keno. But you’re forbidden from touching guns without supervision from Keno or an adult except in emergencies.”

  “Nana! That’s not fair!”

  “Yes, it is, and I’m not negotiating about it.”

  “When my uncles come back, can I shoot with them?”

  Would his uncles be coming back? It didn’t seem like it.

  “As long as it’s okay with them. But I’m worried about you. Nothing makes you happy except guns. That’s not good.”

  “Guess there’s not much to be happy about.”

  I sighed and hugged Milo to me. “I understand, honey, but you have to try. . . . Why don’t you play sports with those Ibanez boys? They’re almost your age.”

  “I don’t think they like me,” he said.

  “Why? Were you mean to them?”

  “Not mean, just... you know.”

  “Not friendly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I bet you can win them back over. Why don’t you invite them to play soccer or Monopoly? That could be a start.”

  “Can I? Today?”

  “Yes, today.” I handed his Aviators back to him.

  Milo stuck the sunglasses on, crookedly, and started to run away, but then he stopped. “I’m happier now,” he said.

  “Really? How come?”

  “Because, when Tasha died,
I couldn’t do anything. But now I did something.” My skinny, thirteen-year-old grandson squared his shoulders, adjusted his sunglasses, and gave me a very adult grin. Then he sped away toward the Barnes’ house where the Ibanez boys lived.

  I was seriously conflicted about Milo—worried sick about the effects of the violence on him but also elated to see him feel empowered again. It was horrifying to me that it took such nasty violence to empower him.

  Had our lives really become a clichéd version of a post-apocalyptic movie—marauding thieves raping and pillaging, and the meek taking up arms to defend themselves, thereby corrupting their souls?

  All we needed to make the motif complete were heinous hordes of zombies, vampires, and pod people. And possibly some UFOs.

  After we set provisions aside for communal canning and baking, we divvied up the remaining food at the Mint and gave each household its share. The stock looked awfully paltry once it was divided. It couldn’t last more than six months, if that.

  The loss of peanut butter and powdered milk and eggs for the kids and the nursing or pregnant women overwhelmed me. We still had lots of beans and grains in various forms, but those could be pretty indigestible if they were the only food one had to eat.

  Yet the biggest loss, to my mind, was the vegetable oil. We had less than a half-gallon per person left. What would happen to us with no fat in our diets? It was bound to cause some sort of malnutrition.

  We could get fat from animals, but the bony rabbits and scrawny chickens around here wouldn’t provide much fat per serving, plus we only got to eat meat once or twice a month. We had more fresh eggs now. Surely, they contained a bit of fat.

  I’d always been stressed about cooking oil, but now I became obsessed with it. I spent days digging through books. Finally, I found instructions about pressing peanut and sunflower oils. I got the crew to start planting sunflowers. They would grow fast and could be put almost anywhere as long as they had sun. We could plant peanuts next spring.

  On top of our food losses from thievery and bullets, something was terribly wrong with our tomatoes. They had a blight or fungus. From photos I found in gardening books, the tomato diseases seemed impossible to distinguish. We tried different remedies—spraying water mixed with baking soda and dish soap, painstakingly removing blighted leaves—while the tomato plants continued to blotch and wither, and the few tomatoes we harvested were full of black splotches. We needed more biodiversity to protect us from a disease like this, which might affect one variety of tomatoes but spare others. I had heirloom varieties of tomato seed we could try.