The Big Dark

by Rodman Philbrick

  Reggie nodded along, as if considering the merits of the argument. “What about our science teacher’s theory? That whatever happened, it was kicked off by a solar flare, a big one?”

  Again the machine-gun laugh, heh-heh-heh. Bragg shook his head like he felt sorry for anybody who believed such a foolish thing. “You want to blame it on the sun, you go ahead. I know the flash of a nuclear warhead when I see one! Timed it for when we’d all be looking up, for maximum effect. They been planning this for years, waiting for the right moment.”

  “They?” Kingman asked. “Who is ‘they’?”

  “The forces of darkness,” Bragg said ominously, his strange pale eyes gone cold. “The mongrel races that thrive on chaos.”

  “Who is that exactly?”

  Bragg looked faintly disgusted by the stupidity of the question. “Some call it the New World Order, but that’s just a name. Whatever we call them, they are those who conspire to rule the world. Those that have risen from the mud. Mixed-race, mongrel breeds. Blacks and Jews. And they’re coming, mark my word. We have to be ready to defend ourselves. And we won’t have a chance if we refuse to see what’s right before our eyes.”

  “And what’s that, Mr. Bragg?” Kingman asked.

  “A fool in a phony uniform. A fool who thinks he’s a hero when we all know he’s barely fit to swab the filth out of our toilets. You, Reggie Kingman, you’re the fool, and so is anyone fool enough to believe you could lead them.”

  Officer Kingman didn’t respond, not right away. As if he was gathering himself up for something important and wanted to get it right. When he did finally speak, he sounded calm and confident. “I may be a fool, Mr. Bragg, and it’s true that I earn my living as a janitor, but I know something you don’t.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.”

  “I know this nation still stands,” Kingman said. “We’ve suffered a terrible blow, caused by some force of nature we don’t fully understand, but the Constitution is still in force, and this is still America, and we’ll deal with it, whatever it is.”

  “And you know this how? You read it on a Cracker Jack box?”

  Kingman came right back at him. “When I volunteered to be a policeman, I raised my right hand and swore to uphold the law and act for the good of the people. As a sworn officer I also received instruction on emergency response.” He hesitated, then seemed to come to a decision. “This is supposed to be confidential, but I was given a special communication device—a kind of crystal radio—to be used in the event of disaster. That device has been silent since New Year’s Eve. I assumed that it, too, had failed, but early this morning I finally received a message from the emergency response team for the state of New Hampshire.”

  “You’re a liar!” Bragg erupted. “Radios don’t work. Everybody knows that!”

  “This one does. It’s an old crystal set and doesn’t require power.”

  “Prove it!”

  For the first time since Webster Bragg and his bully sons swaggered into the town hall, Reggie Kingman actually smiled. “I asked about you, Mr. Bragg, and they told me not to worry. They said you have a lot of strange, hateful ideas about the world, but in America that’s allowed. You can think what you like.”

  Bragg jerked his bearded chin out, addressing the crowd. “Oh yeah? Here’s what I think. I think it’s time to choose. Time for this town to pick a strong leader with strong ideas. Time for that leader to decide who can be trusted and who can’t. And yes, it’s time to identify the weak and the weak-minded and shove them out of the nest. I pledge to do that. I pledge to keep us safe. You have my word.”

  “What does that mean, ‘shove them out of the nest’?” Kingman demanded.

  “Hard decisions will have to be made,” Bragg said, looking cunning. “Only the strong will survive what is to come. Those of us who planned for the dark times, we can’t be expected to share our precious resources with those who didn’t.”

  Officer Kingman shook his head. “You are entitled to that opinion, Mr. Bragg, but I disagree. Unlike you, I don’t have any answers as to what the future might hold. All I can promise is this: If we look out for one another, nobody starves, nobody freezes. Stick together and we survive, the weak and strong alike.”

  “Pitiful,” Bragg said, shaking his head in disgust. “You have proved my point. You’re not fit to run a mop, let alone a town.”

  Somebody started banging on an empty aluminum bean pot. Clang clang clang with a big wooden spoon. It was the skinny old man, the one with the shakes. The one who looked like a faint breeze would blow him away. “Vote!” he called out in a surprisingly strong voice. “I call for a vote!”

  Later on Mom told us the skinny old man was Hubert Brown, and he used to be the town moderator until he got Parkinson’s disease and retired. Used to be a real stickler for the rules and going by the book, but was known to be fair. A lot of the older folks respected him. He opened his mouth to say something, but a fit of shakes bent him over double and made him drop the spoon.

  He was all alone in a crowded room, shaking and unable to speak or stand upright. Then someone handed him the spoon and helped him close his fist around it, and get the shakes under control. “Consider this your gavel, Mr. Brown. Now what was it you were saying?”

  The old man’s head trembled like a leaf, but his voice was clear and strong. “All those who favor appointing Mr. Bragg to run the town of Harmony, stand up and say aye.”

  A few people stood, but not many, and they looked both defiant and a little ashamed of themselves.

  “All those who favor sticking with Officer Kingman, stand up and say aye.”

  The ayes came as a roar.

  “Kingman it is! This meeting is adjourned!”

  Too bad that wasn’t how it ended. The good guys win, big cheer from the crowd, and everybody lives happily ever after. But nothing was simple that winter, and opinions kept changing. One day everybody seemed to be in agreement, that it made sense to let Officer Kingman be in charge of food and firewood and security. The next day rumors would run through Harmony like poison, darkening our minds, and what Bragg was saying about a great conspiracy almost seemed to make sense.

  Not Becca, though. She was for Kingman and never wavered. “We can’t be mean,” she would say. “Being mean is just plain wrong.”

  Yeah, but. What about the Givens family, for example? Mr. and Mrs. Givens were bad drinkers, always fighting and complaining, and their two kids were even worse, being bullies and thieves. The entire family lived off the state, and naturally they didn’t have so much as a can of tomato soup in the cupboards. Or any source of heat—chopping wood is way too difficult when you’re drunk as a skunk by noon. So why should the rest of us have to chip in to help a family who couldn’t be bothered to help themselves? And it’s not like they were properly grateful for all the support. Old Man Givens was a foul-tempered drunk, and no matter what was provided, he always asked for more, and then cursed at those who helped.

  Naturally they had a vicious pit bull, and that needed to be fed, too.

  “I have a solution,” Gronk announced with his pie-eating grin. “Feed the goony Givens family to the pit bull. Problem solved.”

  “If Bragg takes over, he just might do that.”

  “Let him. Just for a day. My dad says he’d clean house.”

  “I thought your dad thought Bragg was a nut bar.”

  “My dad does think he’s a nut bar. He was joking.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Gronk thought about it. “Pretty sure,” he said.

  Which made sense. No one was sure of anything, not even jokes. Food wasn’t really a problem, not yet, but fighting the cold was getting old. First thing we were all hoping for was that the power would come back on, and everything would return to normal. Second was for a January thaw, or, failing that, a few days above freezing, so we could all catch a breath and save a little firewood.

  Mr. Mangano said we were caught in a polar vortex, basically cold air blowing down
from the North Pole. Which was not unusual for this time of year and had nothing to do with the massive flare or the geomagnetic event or whatever it was that caused the big dark. School had been canceled for the time being—too many kids were needed at home. Plus the school building was like a freezer box—but Mr. Mangano started holding informal classes at the town hall a few hours each day for anybody who could get there.

  Our first project? Build and maintain a weather station. The usual weather module didn’t work, of course, so our assignment was to “devise and explore more traditional options.” Which meant using an old-fashioned mercury thermometer—Gronk found it in the barn behind his house—and a wind indicator made of wire with tinfoil vanes, and an aneroid barometer. Gronk called it the hemorrhoid barometer, and Mr. Mangano laughed and said, “You have that in common with a hemorrhoid, Gary—you’re both pains in the butt, but at least you’re funny.”

  Mr. Mangano said we were all suffering from aimless compass syndrome. He sort of meant it as a joke, but it was like Harmony no longer had a direction, or even an opinion that didn’t keep changing. Like we were all trying to find magnetic north, but we couldn’t because it no longer existed.

  I know, I know—it didn’t make sense. That was the problem—nothing really made sense. And when nothing makes sense, crazy ideas like Bragg’s start to seem not so crazy after all.

  * * *

  Kingman made sure the town hall was heated and open to the public during the day. He said the suggestion came over his special crystal radio, from the state emergency people, who said it was important for every town to establish a central place to go and be neighborly, and that’s why the wide front door was kept off the latch.

  Every day a new update would arrive over the crystal radio, and Kingman would post it on the pinup board beside the door.

  Mostly announcements like New Hampshire residents unite to face difficult challenges and Federal Emergency Management Agency officials confirm that the massive power outage is under investigation by top scientists, and urge citizens to keep calm.

  Gronk’s dad grumbled that he wouldn’t believe a thing FEMA said until they showed up and shoveled his sidewalk. But even he got a kick out of the New Hampshire Emergency Task Force Tip of the Day:

  Make somebody smile. It warms the heart if not the hearth.

  “Happy talk,” he said, but it made him smile, so I guess it worked.

  * * *

  Gronk and I happened to be in the town hall one afternoon, working on our weather station project, when we got an unexpected visitor. First thing we noticed was the cold breeze from the open door, and then came the clopping of hooves.

  “Oh my cheese,” Gronk said under his breath. “It’s Bambi!”

  The deer, which weighed maybe a hundred pounds, did not seem to be anywhere near as excited as we were. She clopped along between the tables and chairs, found an open space not too far from the stove, lay down with her long spindly legs folded, and promptly fell asleep.

  “Bambi was a male,” I pointed out. “That’s a doe. A year or so old.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Let her sleep, I guess.”

  “Someone will want to shoot it,” Gronk said, very matter-of-fact.

  He had a point. This is the north country and hunting is what we do. Moose, deer, turkey, duck, bear—you name it, we shoot it. Rifle, shotgun, musket, bow, whatever gets the job done. Food for the freezer.

  “Yeah, but why bother?” I said. “We’ve got more venison than we can eat before it goes bad. Besides, I’m not going to tell anybody, are you?”

  Gronk shrugged. “Guess not.”

  The deer stayed overnight and was waiting to leave when we opened the door early the next morning. Trotted lightly out of town, not in any particular hurry. Like it knew hunting season was over and assumed the rules would be enforced. Or maybe, Gronk said, it just needed a break from the cold.

  Anyhow, it was kind of a cool thing. For a while I thought maybe the visiting deer was a sign that things would get better, that we could all get along.

  Then Mom got sick, and everything changed.

  In my dream I was watching TV. Weird but true. Can’t remember what show it was, just that the TV was working and everything was back to normal. It was warm, too, summer warm—not woodstove warm—and I could smell fresh-cut grass and cotton candy.

  It was such a comfortable dream that I didn’t want it to stop, even with Becca shaking me as hard as she could.

  “Charlie! Charlie, wake up! Something’s wrong with Mom!”

  When my brain finally figured out what she was saying, I swung out of bed and put my feet on a floor as cold as an ice rink. Which startled me the rest of the way awake because Mom had been getting up every morning at four a.m. and loading the stove so it was warm when me and Becca got up.

  Every morning, never failed.

  Becca was crying, which scared me. Really scared me. Because it reminded me of how we found out that Dad had been killed in a skiing accident. Mom waking us up and telling us something really bad had happened, and then both of us crying until we choked, refusing to believe her when she told us a storm had come up suddenly, and he had hit a tree and died.

  But it didn’t matter how much we wanted it not to have happened. It did happen, and there was nothing we could do to change it.

  We found Mom curled up on the bathroom floor. She wasn’t asleep or unconscious, exactly, but her eyes were unfocused, and her words were slurred, as if she’d been drinking.

  Okay, I know what you’re thinking, but Mom didn’t drink alcohol, not ever.

  “What’s she trying to say?” Becca wanted to know, desperately. “I can’t figure it out. Charlie, figure it out, please please please.”

  I knelt beside Mom and leaned close. She was trying to say something but it sounded like baby talk, ga ga ga. Which totally freaked me out. It’s stupid, but more than anything I wanted to ignore what was happening and pretend it was summertime and the TV was on.

  When I tried to get up, Mom’s hand locked around my wrist. She wanted me to lean closer.

  “Nah me adah,” Mom said, struggling to speak, her eyes rolling. “Nah me adah.”

  “Nah me adah?” I repeated to Becca.

  My sister’s eyes lit up. “Naomi Adler! Of course! She wants us to get Mrs. Adler!”

  We covered Mom with blankets, because the floor was so cold, and I held her hands for dear life while Becca put on her snowmobile suit and went out to fetch Mrs. Adler.

  * * *

  An hour later Mom was in bed and sleeping soundly. Mrs. Adler took one look at her, checked the medicine cabinet, and then counted the pills in a medicine bottle.

  “I was worried this might happen,” she told us. “Are you aware that your mother has a form of type 2 diabetes? Okay. Of course you are. So you know she takes medication that helps regulate her blood sugar. Your mother picked up her prescription a day or so before the store burned. Wasn’t only the food and sundries burned, it was the pharmacy, too. Anyhow, it looks like Emma was trying to stretch her prescription. Taking one pill every other day instead of every day. And it caught up with her.”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  As the manager of the Superette, Mrs. Adler was famous for telling it like it was, even if it hurt someone’s feelings. No sugarcoating anything. Her store was gone, turned into frozen charcoal, but Mrs. Adler hadn’t changed.

  “I don’t know,” she told us. “I hope she’ll be okay, but I’m not a doctor. I’m a licensed pharmacy assistant, which means I can pass along medication in consultation with a pharmacist. That was by phone, to the hospital pharmacy in Concord.”

  “But you know stuff,” Becca said, begging. “Tell us what to do.”

  Mrs. Adler sighed. “I know enough to know that Emma can only do so much to regulate her blood sugar by managing her diet and so on. Her condition is quite serious, and she needs her medication.”

  “How long will her pills last, if she take
s one every day like she’s supposed to?”

  Mrs. Adler held up the bottle. “You can count it yourself, to make sure. But I make it nineteen pills.”

  Nineteen pills. Nineteen days and counting.

  It’s amazing what you can forget when you don’t want to think about it. Later Becca told me she had been worried all along about Mom not having enough pills. Not me. Maybe that was on purpose. Ever since Dad died, Becca had worried Mom would die, too. Again, not me. I refused to think about it, because thinking about something bad might make it more likely to happen. Which was stupid, but that’s how my brain works.

  Anyhow, bottom line, I had to think about it now. No choice. It wasn’t like she’d die the moment she ran out of medication. Being really careful with her diet would help Mom keep her blood sugar balanced for a while. Avoiding stress, that would help, too. But the medication kept her stable over the long run, so we needed to find more pills for her, that’s all there was to it.

  But how? The nearest real pharmacy was fifty miles away, down through the forests and the mountains. In the dead of winter, all snowed in like we were, it might as well be a thousand miles.

  Then an idea clicked on like a beautiful lightbulb.

  * * *

  It took a while to get in to see King Man. We didn’t have a police station in Harmony, and the volunteer police officer didn’t get an office or anything, so he was running his kingdom out of the old firehouse.

  “King Man,” that’s what Gronk had started calling him, ever since Reggie Kingman won the vote at the town meeting. Gronk was joking, of course, but it was sort of true, because trying to see Kingman was like waiting in line at a royal palace or something. Not that the old firehouse was much of a palace. More like a dinky garage with a useless fire truck taking up most of the space. In the back was a small, windowless room that reminded me of the custodian’s closet at school. Maybe that’s why Kingman chose it. His throne was a swivel chair, and his crown was a knitted wool hat with earflaps, because the old potbelly stove barely kept the place above freezing.