If Darkness Takes Us Read online

“I don’t think you should. You’ll spoil them.”

  “I didn’t ask you what you thought, Hank.”

  He huffed. “Bye, Bea. Love you.”

  “You too,” I said. Stingy old bastard.

  “Kids! Change of plans,” I called out as I re-entered the house. “Your parents are halfway home, so we’re going out to eat until they get back. Get yourselves cleaned up, please, but be quick about it.”

  Milo and Harry ran in from the garage.

  “What are you doing?” I said to Milo. “Go wash your face and hands, comb your hair.”

  “I got screwdrivers for Keno’s robot,” Milo muttered. He held up one Phillips and one flathead.

  “Grandpa will pound you if you don’t put those back where you found them. Give them here.” Milo reluctantly handed the screwdrivers over, and I stuck them in my bag.

  According to my mechanical wristwatch, it happened at 2:29 p.m.

  The five of us were rushing about, sprucing ourselves up at around 2:15, when Harry started squealing as if he was in serious pain. We hurried to him in the living room, where he was running in tight circles and yelping. Milo looked distraught.

  “What’s wrong, Harry?” I crouched down near him, trying to soothe him. But he wouldn’t be soothed. Then, dogs started barking all over the neighborhood. I’d never heard anything like it.

  We ran out the front door, the kids clustering around me, Mazie covering her ears and screeching about loud dogs. The Cocker Spaniel in the yard next door jumped repeatedly against his fence as though trying to throw himself over it. Neighbors spilled out onto their front lawns, and we all looked at each other, like What the hell? No one knew what to do. People tried to calm their own dogs, but it wasn’t helping one bit.

  Someone had the bright idea to honk their car horn, as if that would improve the situation. Then other geniuses started honking, too. But the dogs just ran in even crazier circles as the honking trickled to a stop. The barking did not stop.

  I turned to the kids. “We can’t go eat now. Something’s wrong.”

  “Just because dogs are barking, we can’t go eat?” Tasha glared at me, crossing her arms.

  “Honey, something is making these dogs bark. Animals often sense trouble before it arrives.”

  “That’s true,” Keno said, sniffing back a nose full. “But in that case, shouldn’t we get out of here?”

  “God, you’re right.” I took a breath. “Everyone, grab your shoes. Tasha, get my purse and phone. Keno, lock the back door. Everyone back to the car in one minute. Go!”

  Within ninety seconds, the kids and Harry were climbing in the car with me right behind them. We didn’t get the chance to drive away.

  FOUR

  A BRIGHT, greenish light rippled swiftly across the sky, accompanied by an insanely loud WHUMP!

  Next came a barrage of short squeaks and squeals, staticky noises, the whir of motors spinning to a stop, then the complete absence of sound, yet my eardrums felt ready to burst.

  An overhead power line down Pico Street snapped in two. It snaked and popped across several yards, shooting out fiery white sparks, then suddenly went limp.

  Silas and Doris Barnes across the street—their car stopped dead, backed halfway onto the road. On the side street, a car engine halted. The car kept rolling slowly, its driver wrestling with the steering wheel, until the car smacked into Mr. Jeffers’s front fence.

  Down the block, Mr. and Mrs. Belding gawped at each other, then bolted back into their house. The dogs stopped barking for a few seconds, then started again, more frantically than ever. Out on the main road half a mile away, tires squealed, metal crunched, and seconds later, something exploded. Women, men, and children screamed on their lawns.

  My grandkids and dog jumped out of the car, and Mazie took off running, hollering, “I want Mommy!” Tasha ran after Mazie. Keno turned in circles, looking toward rooftops and high wires. Milo clung to the barking dog.

  “The power and cars shut down,” Keno said. “Listen. No air conditioners. No humming electricity in the wires. No car engines.”

  “But why the cars? What was that?” I latched on to Mazie and Tasha as they returned.

  “Electromagnetic pulse, maybe?” he said.

  “An EMP? Jesus.” I skimmed my eyes across the far horizon, hunting for mushroom clouds, but I didn’t see any, even though we were on some of the highest ground around. Yet the color of the sky seemed wrong, lighter than normal. Was it glowing?

  Tasha yanked out her earbuds. “My iPhone. It’s dead!”

  We looked at our cell phones, all dead as door nails, nary a blink or peep coming out of any of them. I searched the vault of the sky, as more green flickers flashed across it.

  The cellar in my extra house—I should take the kids there, I thought. But I’d be revealing my secrets to a bunch of yappy kids, and the secrets would be secret no more.

  “It could be a nuclear bomb,” Keno whispered frantically in my ear.

  I hesitated only for a second. Taking the kids to the cellar could mean the end of my marriage. But screw it. Their safety came first.

  “Kids, come with me!” I forced the panic out of my voice.

  The kids and dog and I trotted through my house, out the back door, through the slit in the backyard hedge, and into the secret house through its rear door. That glow in the sky was unmistakable now. Mother of God.

  “What are we doing, Nana?” Tasha asked. “Whose house is this?”

  “It’s a house I have the use of,” I said, thinking maybe I could hold on to some secrets a bit longer. I flipped a couple of light switches on and off—utterly useless. “Come with me, kids, to the pantry.”

  But the kids stopped and stared, bug-eyed, at the shelves, drums, and barrels full of food and supplies.

  “What’s all this stuff?” asked Milo.

  “Shh! I hear a motor,” Keno said.

  We stood silently and listened. Even Harry fell quiet. A humming sound was coming from somewhere. Keno started tiptoeing between shelves and across the dining room when it hit me.

  “It’s the bees,” I said. I’d had the bees installed in an exterior wall, with an outdoor flap that could be opened for honey extraction.

  Mazie let out a screech, sending chills through my already frayed nerves. “Bees, bees, bees!” she howled and stamped her feet, hiding behind Tasha.

  “Mazie, the bees are in a hive in the wall, and you can hear them, but they can’t get in here. Everyone, get to the pantry. Hurry!”

  “Why, Nana?” Milo asked.

  “Just do it. C’mon!”

  “Bees,” Mazie whimpered.

  A nuclear bomb? Glowing green skies? My heart was about to fail me.

  I led the kids and dog to the pantry door, telling them to stay put while I went inside, turned a key, then rotated a wheel that opened the wall—about the only wall in the house not covered with shelves full of goods. I pulled a crank flashlight and crank radio off a ledge. I handed the light to Keno, the radio to Tasha, and told them to start winding.

  “When the cranks start to resist, stop winding or they’ll break.”

  I grabbed a regular flashlight off the ledge, inserted batteries, and shined the beam on a steep flight of cement stairs with iron handrails. The kids crowded up behind me and looked down.

  “I don’t wanna go in there!” Mazie scooted backwards, then plopped down on the floor.

  “Why are we going in there?” Tasha asked, wearing the most serious expression I’d ever seen from her.

  “Because we don’t know what caused the power to go off and the cars to stop, and whatever caused it could be dangerous. I want us to be protected until we find out what happened.”

  The three oldest kids and Harry filed obediently down the stairs by the light of the wind-up flashlight Keno carried. I heard them oohing and aahing as I bent down to Mazie on the floor.

  “Mazie, come with me downstairs where it’s safer.”

  “I don’t like dark places,”
she whined.

  I had never yelled at my grandkids in their lives, but my patience was gone. Radioactive fallout could be here any minute.

  “Mazie, quit arguing! Come with me now!”

  She pinned me with a flash of anger in her eyes. “Where’s my doll?”

  “We’ll get it later. Let’s go!”

  She made me pick her up. Although she was a wisp, she was still too heavy for me, but I carried her anyway. Holding onto her little frame comforted me, and I needed to be level-headed and strong for these kids.

  When we got to the top landing on the stairs, I had to put Mazie down to shut the cellar door. I held her hand, and we descended the stairs together.

  As soon as we reached bottom, Milo asked, “Nana, when will Mom and Dad be home?”

  Good Lord, I hadn’t even thought about how this nuke or EMP—whatever it was—might have affected the other adults in this family, who were hurtling toward Austin at seventy miles an hour on a jam-packed interstate highway. Did this “event” extend that far? For the love of Jesus!

  I tried to hide my shaking hands as I said to Milo, “I’m not sure. It shouldn’t be too long.”

  How long is too long, anyway?

  FIVE

  THE CELLAR WAS warm and rife with the earthy smells of root vegetables and the composting toilet, but the place was roomy and comfortable. I had made sure of that.

  After candles were lit and the kids had snacks to eat, I got them playing Uno while I played with the wind-up radio. It was an emergency set from the Red Cross with AM and FM, plus seven short-wave bands. Keno’s attention went more to the radio than the game. The dog padded around, sniffing out this unfamiliar place.

  A cramped feeling was growing in my brain, telling me my blood pressure was rising. My emotions were time bombs waiting to kill me. I had to keep a tight rein on them.

  The radio was loaded with static, but no one was broadcasting. Not good. So not good. My head pounding, I systematically searched the AM then FM bands, moving the dial only a hair’s breadth each time and pausing to listen. But I heard no stations cutting in and out—no music, no voices, no stupid commercials. Nothing!

  I flipped to the first short-wave band and followed the same tedious procedure, but got only popping and crackling.

  “Crap!” I whacked the table with my hand. I came damned close to smashing that radio to bits. With all the things I’ve been mistaken about in my life, why did I have to be right about impending disaster? And what kind of disaster was this? Was it earth-shattering or only temporary? Was I risking exposure of my secrets for nothing?

  “What’s wrong?” Tasha asked. Harry paced the floor next to her feet.

  “The radio.”

  “I’ll help you,” Keno said.

  I scooted over on the padded bench, and Keno sat beside me. While he examined the radio and tweaked the dials, sniffing constantly, the other kids resumed their game.

  “What do you think happened?” I murmured.

  “Either a nuke or the sun.” Keno peeked up from the radio to be sure the other kids weren’t listening. They seemed engrossed in their Uno game, with Milo gloating about his every play.

  From my research of possible gloom-and-doom scenarios, I knew that nuclear weapons sent out an electromagnetic pulse, an EMP, which could take out the electric grid and even the cars. A relatively small one-megaton bomb that burst three hundred kilometers above Nebraska or Kansas could do this to the entire U.S. Since the curvature of the earth blocks magnetic waves, pulses from nukes exploding closer to the ground could only damage smaller areas.

  “It almost has to be a nuke, doesn’t it?” I said. “Because the cars died?”

  “Well, or an EMP weapon,” Keno said.

  “Okay, but no one’s broadcasting on the radio. That means this thing must have gone pretty far. And I thought an EMP weapon could only damage a small area. There’s not even any Mexican stations on, Keno.”

  He gulped. “Whatever it was coulda fried those giant transformers in electric plants.”

  “Oh, God.” Those transformers were so huge and expensive that no one kept spares. They were manufactured only in China, and even the Chinese didn’t keep a backstock. “If the transformers were fried,” I said, “it could take decades to replace them. That would mean no power for years.”

  “Are you serious?”

  My hands trembled, so I hid them in my lap. I closed my eyes and counted to five.

  “Nana,” Keno said, “if a nuke exploded in the stratosphere, would the fallout be bad?”

  “There’s not supposed to be fallout because it’s so high in the sky, but I find that hard to—”

  “A nuke!” Tasha cried. “You mean a nuclear bomb?”

  “What?” Milo shouted, slapping down his Uno cards and springing to his feet.

  I cursed under my breath. I hadn’t wanted the other kids to hear us.

  “Tasha.” I eyed Mazie and shook my head at Tasha. “Not now.”

  Mazie ran over and jumped into my lap, burying her face in my neck. My heart pounded so fast I thought it might explode.

  What if my grandkids were exposed to radiation? How could I take care of them on my own? Milo, Keno, and Tasha were looking to me for answers, and they wanted them now.

  “Mazie, honey,” I pulled her forward to see her face, “I have a surprise for you.”

  Her eyes lit up. “What is it?”

  “It’s a battery-powered record player. Let’s go see the record I have.”

  “How come a record player would work if the phones died?” Milo wanted to know.

  “The batteries aren’t in it, so there’s no circuit to get fried. It should be fine.”

  I led Mazie around a corner to a space filled with bunk beds. From a drawer, I pulled out the phonograph, headphones, a pack of batteries, and a vinyl record.

  “Ta-Da!” I handed the album to Mazie.

  “Frozen! I love Frozen!”

  I smiled to be reassuring, while I put batteries in the player, fit the headphones over her ears, and kissed her. I lifted one of her earpieces. “Lie down and close your eyes, sweetie.” She grinned and willingly complied.

  “Reindeers are better than people,” Mazie sang as I made my way to the other kids.

  “Sorry, Nana,” Tasha said. “But what about the nukes?”

  “I don’t want Mazie to hear all this.” I settled on to the bench. “So, if a nuke caused this . . . this thing, it probably would’ve been a high-altitude bomb, very far away and twice as high in the sky as the space shuttle. It would be safer than a nuclear test in the desert, and I’ve lived through hundreds of those.”

  “I think it was the sun,” Keno blurted out. I took several breaths, wondering if he was only saying that to calm the other kids. He sniffled and swallowed.

  “I thought the sun couldn’t damage cars and cell phones,” I said.

  “Well, that’s what they always said. But I been reading online that Earth is about to have a polarity shift. It happens every sixty-thousand years or so, and we’re overdue. The scientists don’t know how quick it will happen once it starts, but they said if it happens fast, then Earth’s magnetic field could shrink down to five percent of normal for a while. The magnetic field protects us from the sun. So, if a CME—”

  “What’s a CME?” Milo interrupted.

  “Coronal mass ejection—huge flames and energy shoot out from the sun. If a CME happened when our magnetic field was low, especially if the CME was extra strong and hit us dead on, why couldn’t it take out the cars? They don’t know any of this stuff for sure. They could have been wrong about the cars.”

  “But Keno,” Tasha said, “you can’t believe every stupid thing on the internet.”

  “I know that, but this was on the NASA site.”

  “All of it?” I asked. Mazie was still singing quietly from the bed.

  “No, my idea about the polarity shift making the CME so bad is my own theory.”

  “I see.” I wanted t
o believe Keno was capable of creating a sound scientific hypothesis, although it was difficult to credit him with such an adult skill when he needed to blow his nose.

  “Okay,” I said, “if it could be either the sun or a nuke, why do you think it was the sun?”

  “No mushroom clouds. No heat blasts.”

  “Yes, honey, but those things would come from a nuke close by, not from a nuke that’s three hundred kilometers over Nebraska.”

  “Yeah, but only the sun would make that green light.”

  “Oh, right. The green light, like the aurora borealis. But does the aurora make the sky glow? You saw the glow, didn’t you?”

  “What’s the aurora bor—what’s that?” Milo asked.

  “Hey, I just thought of something.” Keno wrinkled his brow. “The CME could have caused the train wreck.”

  “Seriously? How?”

  “You said the wreck was caused by a problem with the switching signal, right?”

  “They said it was ‘a distinct possibility.’”

  “Well, CMEs disrupt signals, and sometimes they happen in waves. So, when there’s a lot of solar activity, flares can leave the sun at different times, and some have more power and travel faster than others. They can take several days to reach us, giving us a warning, or they can show up in less than a day. The first wave could’ve disrupted electronic signals before a big wave took out the grid.”

  Somebody, save us.

  “Nature is amazing,” I said.

  But divine retribution was a bitch.

  We sat pondering the implications, then I snapped to attention. I needed to know what was happening outside. Mazie belted out, “Let it go! Let it go!”

  “I’m going up to check on things.” I stood to leave. “You guys stay here. There’s a Monopoly game in that cabinet over there. Watch out for the candles, and don’t get burned. Don’t set anything near them that could catch fire.”

  “I wanna go, too.” Milo clenched his fists. Tasha and Keno nodded and watched me. They all wanted to go, of course.

  “Not yet. Let me make sure it’s safe first.”

  The kids frowned at me, scared faces trying to hold it together.