If Darkness Takes Us Read online

  Mazie put on the flouncy tulle skirt over her clothes, and was seldom seen without it for months.

  “Tasha, that was sweet of you,” I said, and she blushed.

  We had another special treat supper of Ritz crackers and spray cheese with olives and smoked oysters that the mutineers brought home. Then we drank warm Cokes and listened to the tale of Keno and Tasha’s trip while I tried to settle my still-fluttering heart.

  It had taken them hours to get to their house because they’d passed so many things they stopped to look at: burned-out houses, some of them still smoldering; godawful piles of wrecked cars; dirty kids running in little mobs; a convenience store with its windows smashed out and nothing left inside; scads of people camped in the post office parking lot; a creek where folks had set up a hoist and were filling water jugs. I hoped those people knew how to filter that water.

  Keno and Tasha said their house was weird without their mom and with no lights or TV. And they were upset because their mother’s bike was missing.

  “I don’t get it,” Keno said. “Everything was locked up. It didn’t look like anyone broke in. How could the bike be gone?”

  “Does someone else have a key to your house? Like a neighbor or a friend? Or the landlord probably has one.”

  “The landlord,” said Tasha, in a worried way.

  “Maybe he just borrowed the bike,” I said. “Was anything else missing?”

  “I don’t know. I was scared, and I wanted to get out of there,” Tasha said.

  They’d started home fast without stopping to check their surroundings because they were nervous about being away from here so long. But then, Tasha’s wheel came loose.

  “There’s tons of stuff in that house,” Tasha said. “Blankets, clothes, candles, plus a bunch of food. And Mom has some big bottles of water in the garage.”

  “Well, that’s good to know. I don’t know how to get it over here though. If you kids keep going in, someone will notice and break into the house after you leave. Anyway, now that you’ve scared me to death, I don’t want you to go back.”

  “But Nana,” Keno insisted, “I can get the bikes in better shape before we go. And I can bring tools.”

  “But what about the gunshot? It’s not safe out there.”

  “The gunshot was here, not out there,” Keno said.

  “Nana, we need all that stuff,” said Tasha.

  “I’m sorry, but it’s not safe. We have lots of stuff here.”

  “But Mom’s pictures and jewelry are there. And her wedding dress that she gave me!” Tasha was so adamant, the veins in her temples were throbbing.

  “Nana, don’t you want the wine from their cellar?” Mazie asked.

  “What cellar?” Keno and Tasha said together. Mazie’s mom and dad, Jeri and Tom, were much wealthier than Erin. Leaps and bounds wealthier. Poor privileged Mazie thought everyone had a wine cellar.

  “They don’t have a wine cellar, dummy,” Milo said.

  “I’m not a dummy!”

  “If we all go and take wagons, we can get more stuff.” Milo changed the subject before I could reprimand him.

  “I can’t walk that far,” I said.

  “Why not?” Milo asked.

  “Because I’m almost seventy years old, and I have a bad heart.”

  “That’s really old.” Mazie looked somewhat amazed.

  “I could pump you on my bike,” Keno said.

  “Ha. Can’t you just see me, balancing on your handlebars?”

  We all started laughing and couldn’t stop. The kids flailed their arms and made horrified faces, doing funny imitations of me freaking out on Keno’s handlebars.

  When we settled down, I said, “Sooner or later, we’ll have to team up with some of our neighbors. Once we do, maybe a contingent of neighbors could go to your house and bring back things to share.”

  “Yes!” said Tasha. Keno didn’t seem so sure. For no discernible reason, Milo did a cartwheel across the living room.

  “What’s a con-tinge-it?” Mazie asked.

  Mutinous teens left me feeling terribly lonely, but it was only late at night that I allowed despair to show its face.

  Back when I’d tried to convince my family we were headed for cataclysm, I hadn’t pinpointed it to either a nuclear EMP or a solar pulse. In fact, I’d fully expected us to die from drought, famine, plague, a poisoned environment, or increasingly devastating storms.

  But I knew we were ripe for traumatic trouble and were in poor condition to survive it. Openly discussing such things marked me as an outlier, a kook, a nut to ignore—even in my own family. “You’re paranoid,” they said. “Don’t be a downer,” they said.

  I tried to explain that it wasn’t paranoia if the threats were real, but my family tuned me out. They had shopping sprees to plan, lovers to romance, Netflix shows to binge-watch.

  They made me furious, but more than that, I was hurt to the core. I could not understand why they didn’t love me enough to hear me out.

  Finally, I thought, “I’ll get ready anyway. I’ll show them!” But, alas, I hadn’t shown them a thing since the adults weren’t even here.

  Oh, Hank, if I had done a better job of explaining things, would you have heard me?

  Are you trying to get home to us now? How soon can you get here? I can’t find where you’ve stashed your screwdrivers. I can’t sleep without your loud breathing in the bed. I don’t have another adult to talk to, even one who doesn’t listen.

  There’s a Hank-shaped hole in my life without you.

  ELEVEN

  BANG! Bang! Ka-Bang!

  Loud knocking at the back door made me fly out of bed. Was it Hank? Or trouble?

  Keno beat me to the door, but I was right behind him, pulling on my robe and holding a pistol.

  “Sorry to wake you,” Mr. Jeffers said, his mustache askew. “You’re usually up making breakfast by now. I’ve got something for you all.” He had a bundle tucked under his arm.

  “I didn’t fall asleep until dawn,” I said. “Did you hear that rifle shot? I’ve heard a lot of guns lately, but this was close.”

  Mr. Jeffers turned red in the face. “Sorry. That was me.”

  “You? Why would you shoot a gun? Did someone attack you?”

  “No, I—”

  “You scared us to death. What were you thinking?”

  “I shot a deer in the field behind my house. Brought you some meat.” He thrust out his hand, which held a bloody towel, apparently covering a deer haunch. But I couldn’t accept such a gift from this particular man. It would open a door that I’d tried to keep closed.

  “That’s kind of you, Mr. Jeffers, but do you think it might be poisoned? That deer could’ve been grazing by the train tracks.”

  “I’ve never seen deer around here before. Have you? I think this one came in from the country, since there aren’t cars and other noises to scare her away.”

  “I’m afraid to eat it.”

  “Really? More for me then.” Grinning wryly, he retracted the meat. This was an offering of fresh meat, the main food we didn’t have.

  “It’s very generous of you,” I said, “I guess I could boil it and pour off the water. I’d lose the vitamins, but we’d still have the protein.”

  “There ya go. You need the meat for your kids.”

  “Keno, please take this meat and set it in a roasting pan, then wipe your hands with a bleach wipe.”

  Keno looked nonplussed, but he took the meat. I followed Mr. Jeffers out the back door, though it was hard to keep up with his long, lanky strides.

  “What are our neighbors doing for water?” I asked. “How will they survive?”

  “Interesting that you’re worried about neighbors but not yourself.” He looked me hard in the eye.

  I grimaced. “I’ve got my rain barrels and some bottled water.”

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said, “but you can’t tell anyone. There’s a drainage pond surrounded by trees, so it’s pretty well hidden over by
the train tracks.”

  “There’s poison down there.”

  “No, this is almost a mile upstream from the wreck. Only my patrollers know about it. There’s not enough water for the whole neighborhood.”

  “Okay, but what are the patrollers doing for food? Seems like all Silas and his crew have found are snacks and beer.”

  “And they’re lucky to have it. We found a bunch of food in that train.”

  “But the chemicals!”

  He sucked in his lower lip. “Relax, Bea. It’s canned goods. Lots of big cans of beans, vegetables, tuna, cooking oil, beef stew. It should last us a couple more weeks.”

  “And then what?”

  He sighed deeply. “Don’t know.”

  “Are your patrollers sick from climbing in that train?”

  “Two of them have coughs, so yeah.”

  “That’s awfully grim.”

  “Grim ain’t the half of it,” he said.

  “You should have told me. I have gas masks.”

  “Do you?” Mr. Jeffers narrowed his eyes to scrutinize me while I struggled to meet his gaze, struck by a wave of emotion I had forbidden myself to feel.

  As he turned to leave, I said, “It’s awfully sweet of you to bring us the meat.”

  “Yeah?” He grinned, erasing the tiny age lines around his wide mouth. “I was hoping you’d like it.”

  “I do,” I said, smiling back.

  A group of neighbors walked many miles around the city and came back to report seeing no open businesses of any kind and no signs of a repair effort. Mostly they saw evidence of looting and people toting water in various ways.

  Why wasn’t anyone trying to fix the electricity? Was it because they knew it was hopeless?

  I guessed folks were too absorbed in saving themselves and their families to think about saving others. But what happened to the people who trained for emergency interventions, who dedicated their lives to this sort of thing? Was our entire society going to descend into chaos for want of power and cars?

  Something wasn’t right about this. Maybe the government was helping, but hadn’t made it to our area yet. There was nothing we could do except to keep waiting—for our loved ones and for any relief.

  Our indoor plants were either half-dead or worse. I watered them a couple of times because I didn’t want anything else to die. But I soon gave up and took the plants outside to fend for themselves.

  And the candlelight, which I’d always found so magical in the past, now cast a gloom over everything.

  The boys and Mazie seemed to be in better moods. I was relieved about finishing the house organization, but I was in a worse mood than ever about Hank and the grown kids. It had now been ten days and we hadn’t heard a word. Even if they’d walked only ten miles per day, they should have been home by now.

  The man with the truck came through again and said other neighborhoods in town were in about the same shape as ours. He’d seen a few other old vehicles making their way between dead cars on the roads, and cops in wrinkled uniforms hanging around outside the police station downtown.

  “People are getting restless,” the man said. “Got to get them water and food soon.”

  “I think we better figure on getting those things for ourselves,” said Mr. Jeffers. “Did you find a place to get water?”

  “Me and hundreds of other folks were downtown taking it out of Town Lake. Don’t know how long that will work out, but we’ve got that for now.”

  “Don’t forget to filter it,” Mr. Jeffers said as the man drove away.

  Lady Bird Lake—that had been the name of Town Lake for years. Evidently, I wasn’t the only old coot who kept forgetting that.

  Tasha seemed very unhappy. I often heard her crying at night, missing her mother I’m sure, but also missing her familiar life and her cadre of friends, who, without telephones or internet, might as well have been in Bangkok. I wondered if she longed for a particular boyfriend, but she refused to discuss such things with me.

  And I kept catching Milo wasting water, pouring a quart or two over his hands to wash them, dumping drinking water in the toilet to flush it, being careless and busting a gallon jug of fresh water when he slammed it on the counter.

  “Milo, please! You have to treat water like it’s life and death. We can’t live without it, so it is life and death.”

  “But we have all that water at the other house,” he said, brushing me off with a cocky grin.

  “Milo Raintree, you have no idea how fast that water will disappear.”

  I gathered the kids and watched them roll their eyes and tap their feet, slouching this way and that, while I went through the mathematics of our water usage versus our limited supply. I didn’t mention the cistern, hoping they’d be thriftier with water if they remained unaware of the reserve.

  By the end of the lecture, the four kids looked gloomy. I hated making them gloomy, but I wanted them to survive.

  TWELVE

  TWELVE DAYS SINCE CATASTROPHE STRUCK, and still no cavalry, no electricity, no Hank.

  Certain neighborhood kids were becoming a problem—kids between about eight and fourteen, mostly but not all boys. They ran in a pack like dirty, snot-nosed little animals. Their parents seemed to lack the gumption to deal with them. Folks were losing heart. I almost wished the adults would act crazy and show some fight, rather than sitting back resigned to the end, like the proverbial frog in the water as it rose to a boil.

  I forbade my grandchildren from going near the misbehaving kids, but my grandkids had outdoor chores to do, and the unruly kids were running wild everywhere.

  Worse though, in our neighborhood with no power and little water, people were getting sick. We heard them upchucking in their yards—first a couple of Gonzales kids next door, then someone across Pico Street, then others at the end of the block. Mr. Jeffers thought they must be drinking bad water. My kids and I put four five-gallon water jugs in two wagons, along with a kitchen funnel. Keno stayed home to chop firewood while the rest of us went to houses where I’d heard or seen sick people.

  Milo and Mazie knocked on doors then hightailed it back to the sidewalk with Tasha and me. When people answered their doors, I told them we didn’t want to get too close in case they were contagious, but if they’d set out containers, up to three gallons per house, we’d give them water.

  Mrs. Gonzales was so grateful that she cried.

  An irritable old man said, “Are you crazy? I’m not taking water from kids.” An admirable sentiment, but he could have been nicer about it.

  “We have enough water for a while, sir,” I said. “I wouldn’t be giving it away if we didn’t.”

  He scowled, but he set out a jug and glowered at us while we filled it.

  I asked people if their water had made them ill. Some folks didn’t seem to know, others said probably. But the teenage girl at the Belding house said she was sure it was the water, because she’d refused to drink it, and she was the only one in her family who wasn’t sick. The girl was rumpled and dirty, her reddish-blonde hair hanging in uncombed tangles down her back and over half her pale face.

  “Why did you refuse?” I asked her.

  “Because they got it out of the creek.” She curled her upper lip in disgust.

  “Did they filter it?”

  “Yeah, but it was gross.”

  “Well, creek water would taste bad, honey, but you have to stay hydrated or your kidneys will shut down. Which creek did they go to?”

  “The one by the train tracks.”

  “The train tracks? Didn’t they remember the wreck and the chemical spill?”

  “That’s what I told ‘em. But they said the news told us everything was safe.”

  Good grief. Didn’t people know that the news only repeated whatever lies the chemical companies told them?

  The girl hung her head, wiping her eyes. “What’s your name, sweetie,” I asked.

  “Darla. Darla Belding.”

  A loud groan arose from inside the
house—the sound of a man in pain? Mazie took a big step backward. Darla cringed and turned to hurry inside, then she shot me a look of sheer panic.

  “You need help?” I asked. She nodded yes.

  Sweet Jesus, I did not want to go in that house. But this dirty, wan girl with her pleading blue eyes had a grip on me.

  “Wait here,” I said to my brood. “Don’t leave, but don’t come inside either.” They gaped at me solemnly, scared I thought.

  I followed Darla into the filthy house that smelled like vomit and diarrhea and something rotten and sharp. Mr. Belding—thinner than I’d ever seen him—sprawled across the couch moaning, his breaths loud and raspy, like Harry’s. This family had stayed in the neighborhood after the train wreck, too.

  Mr. Belding didn’t look up, and Darla led me deeper into the house. The stench took my breath away and made my eyes water. Once this family had gotten sick from the poison, opportunistic germs must have been having a field day in here.

  We passed a room containing a teenage boy, lying on his bed, wheezing and staring at a poster of a bare-breasted woman on his ceiling.

  At the end of the hall, Darla tapped on a door. Bedclothes rustled, followed by a string of harsh coughs. A raspy voice said, “Darla?”

  Darla slowly opened the door. When Mrs. Belding saw me, she gasped and pulled the sheet to her chin. Her face was gaunt, her arms shockingly thin.

  “Hello, I’m your neighbor, Bea Crenshaw. Darla says y’all are sick. I thought I’d see if I could help.” Based on my experience with Harry, I doubted I could keep the Beldings alive. I’d never much cared for them, but I certainly didn’t want them to die.

  “I don’t got no way to pay you.” She made it sound like a curse.

  “You don’t have to pay me. We’re neighbors. I’m glad to help.”

  The woman sighed and let her head fall into the pillow, choking back a cough.

  “Do you mind if I check your pulse and temperature, Mrs. Belding?” I stepped toward her. She nodded feebly. Her pulse felt rapid and thready; her skin was plenty hot to the touch. The bruised-looking circles around her eyes frightened me.