She stopped in mid motion.
“I didn’t say stop. I could feel your ribs when I was tickling you, Rissa, and not in a good way. You are too thin! The scale is a spring type and it still works, how much have you lost?”
“I’m not sure,” she paused, “I stopped weighing myself over a month ago.”
“Why?” Dan was trying to remain clinical but this was his wife!
“Because I knew I wasn’t eating enough but it was me or the girls.”
Dan pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes to hold back the headache that was forming, and now the tears that threatened. Not the kids…the girls. Even now she wouldn’t mention Danny.
“Come to think of it, Dan, take off your shirt,” Marissa said.
“What?” Dan started and looked at his wife.
“Oh come on. Take it off, we’re all losing weight and I’ve seen you put extra on the girls’ plates at dinner too. I know, I know, you’re supposed to be the provider and the protector and all that but just do it, ok? Take off the shirt.”
“Fine,” Dan complied and then they both had their shirts off. Dan realized that his wife wasn’t wearing her normal bra but a sports bra, and even that wasn’t all that snug anymore.
“How much weight have you lost, Mr.?” Marissa asked.
“I don’t know, I haven’t weighed myself in a couple of weeks either, I just feel like I’m in OK shape.”
“OK shape? You are skin and bones! Get into the bathroom, I’ll bring the candle.”
In the bathroom they were confronted with the harsh reality that they were starving to death; or more accurately, they were starving themselves to death for the sake of their children.
Chapter Two
“Day 65 – August 17, 2012. Today would be my youngest child’s birthday. Dan Jr. should be turning two. There will be no cake, there will be no presents. I miss you, son, and I know your mother misses you, too. She’s just in denial.”
Dan hung his head after putting the diary away. “I know the stages of grief. I’ve seen them thousands of times. I really am an idiot—her first word was ‘No’, after all.”
Marissa was already up and making some Cream of Wheat for the girls. Dressed for the day, he helped make some powdered milk for Jessie and Bekah, and then they both took the multi-vitamins that he and Marissa had hidden in the air-return vent when the first attempt at a food collection came around. The vitamins were in the garage, initially, when the HOA board first tried to inventory everything. They simply hadn’t been brought into the house from a previous trip to the warehouse store. Thankfully, they’d bought a couple of bottles of kid’s chewable gummy vitamins the day before the grid went down.
They were lucky that all of their kids were on solid food and weren’t still nursing or, worse, on formula anymore. Not that formula was in and of itself a bad thing but when there wasn’t anymore, well, there wasn’t any more and one of the families in the neighborhood had run into that situation less than a week after the power went out. Thankfully she had just been supplementing with formula while they were getting ready to wean the baby off of nursing completely and onto more solid food. They just made the transition a little sooner--and more abruptly--than they had originally planned.
It was one of those things that still crossed Dan’s mind on occasion--more frequently than he’d like to admit, actually. How was the rest of the world dealing with the loss of the grid? It was a foregone conclusion that there were families out there that hadn’t had enough formula, or enough to feed a nursing mother. What had happened to the baby? It was just one more thing that Dan had to set aside and simply not dwell on or he would go mad.
The original plan to consolidate all the resources in the neighborhood had been a miserable failure—that is, until Carey and what remained of the HOA board decided to enforce their edict, and collect all food, at gunpoint going forwards…for the good of the community.What Carey didn’t seem to understand was that people were already helping each other out. Pantries were being opened. What backyard gardens people had were being worked by everyone who was able and the harvests were being shared. The problem was that the typical garden was about twenty feet by ten feet and the seeds were all hybrids. But pantries were running bare and no amount of communal planning could or would change that. In fact, if Carey had been in charge of it things would have probably been wasted or ruined in the long run.
Dan was in an enviable position because he had the only medical training in the neighborhood. He could have been trading help for food, but he just didn’t feel right about doing that--not yet. If it came down to keeping his children fed then he would consider it; but nobody was going hungry yet, so he simply felt he was doing his part for the community.
They couldn’t stay here forever, though, because the neighborhood wasn’t producing enough food to survive, and they hadn’t seen or heard anything--or anyone--from the outside since the power went out. The government wasn’t going to come in and help; which meant no relief, which meant they needed to help themselves. The neighborhood was teetering on the ragged edge, and looking around… Dan could see that it wouldn’t take much to push it over.
“What’re your plans for today?” Marissa asked before their oldest came downstairs.
“I’m going to poke around the Taylor’s old place,” Dan said. At the sidelong look his wife gave him, he went on, “I know it’s been picked over pretty good, but they had to have gone somewhere and I’m guessing that they were fairly well prepared. Eric was in the military so he probably had some idea how to live out of a tent, and we saw how packed Ms. Hines’ supervisor’s truck was when it came back. They were obviously prepared to go and not come back. Maybe we could find them, join them?”
Marissa shook her head, not in denial but in resignation. “Maybe you’re right. It’s getting to the point that anywhere would be better than here.”
...
After breakfast, most mornings started with the two and a half mile round trip to get water from the Cumberland River. Dan had rigged the baby trailer for his mountain bike to hold a couple of the three-gallon frosting buckets the neighborhood had scrounged from one of the grocery stores and now used to transport water for the community. He was lucky he had both the bike and the baby trailer, otherwise he’d be making the trip multiple times to bring back his share of water.
During his ride and while he was filling the buckets, he paid closer attention to the state of the world--both in the neighborhood and on the other side of the river. The process had become such a routine that he hadn’t thought anything of it in weeks; ever since he’d convinced Carey that people needed to quit doing it on their own so they could establish and maintain a central supply of clean drinking and cooking water. People had been getting sick because they were either drinking the water straight from the river or they weren’t filtering it or boiling it correctly, which amounted to the same thing.
Their section of riverfront, while not heavily fortified, was guarded at all times with some of the rifles that just about everyone in the neighborhood, excepting he and Marissa, apparently owned. There were twenty-four hour patrols of the neighborhood as well, and the only reason that Dan wasn’t on them was that he didn’t know how to use a gun of any kind, and they didn’t have the extra ammunition to teach him.
Not quite directly across the river, but near enough as made no difference, was a house with a boat slip that another neighborhood seemed to be using for the same purpose. The main difference in the neighborhood across the river was that the bulk of the houses were closer to the river so they used a bucket brigade each morning to get the water up to what Dan assumed was some sort of cistern--or possibly a converted water truck? “If only we had all been closer to the river,” Dan thought to himself and then chuckled. “If only the power hadn’t gone out in the first place.”
At least twice that Dan was aware of the guards had…thwarted… attempts to breach the security of the neighborhood --but the amount of gunfire along
the river had made it sound more like a full-scale invasion. Dan had patched up one of the guards with a gunshot wound to the lower leg after the first firefight, and ended up using most of his ready supply of antibiotics.
As it was, Dan finished his compulsory chore in a little under half an hour, which he thought was pretty good given that he hadn’t had more than 1,200 calories a day for the last six weeks. As he dropped off his full buckets he was told they needed him to report for firewood duty later that afternoon and then there were always the sick to look in on. The meager medical supplies he had on hand--the ones the neighborhood knew about anyway--were running thin.
…
He’d been to the Taylor’s house a number of times over the past couple of months, but always with someone else, and always looking for something specific. Now he was here alone and he had no idea what he was looking for. The front door was closed but unlocked. It smelled musty inside as Dan walked in. Apparently it had been some time since anyone else had been here and nobody had been leaving windows open. Dan closed the door behind him and started walking through the house one room at a time.
The formal dining room at the front, which had been turned into an office or library, had been stripped almost to the walls. The computers, books, furniture, and rugs were all gone. The only things remaining were the built-in shelves. Nothing to see here, move along…across the entry way was another formal room--a den by the looks of it. There was still a recliner, and a flat-panel TV on the wall, with a Blue-Ray player and Xbox sitting on the floor. The shelves had been pulled down and burned several weeks ago, as had everything else that would burn once fuel got scarce.
The kitchen had been pretty well picked over and now held mostly just appliances. The first time he’d been through the house, only the doors had been taken off the cabinets--because they were easy to remove, but pulling the cabinets down would have been too much work. As easy fuel grew more difficult to find, the cabinets had finally been deemed “easy pickings”. Interestingly, the cork bulletin board was still on the wall next to the fridge, with a couple of notes and postcards still tacked to it. They looked to be your typical vacation postcards with “Wish You Were Here” from a couple of regional, State, and National parks.
The living room was about half empty, with only the really large pieces and leather furniture still in place, again because it was more work to disassemble something to get to the wood than it was worth…so far. The remaining downstairs rooms were just as disappointing. As Dan climbed the stairs, he wondered why he’d bothered to come in the first place and hoped he’d find something useful.
The first two rooms had been kids’ rooms--he could tell by the paint scheme on the wall if not by the furniture, or lack thereof. It had apparently all been wood furniture, as it was all gone. One was a boy’s room; he had clearly been into cars. Plastic models didn’t burn real well so they’d been left strewn on the floor. The closet was mostly hangers but there was one of those ‘space bags’ that you compress by pulling all the air out of it on the top shelf. Dan grabbed it and headed into the other kid’s room. No telling what was in the space bag; he’d look at it later.
The girl’s room was just as picked over and with nothing to find in the closet. The third room was an empty guest room. The last room was the master bedroom and Dan almost didn’t go in.
This room had no furniture, except for the bedframe, a stand mirror, and a couple of under bed Rubbermaid boxes which had already been gone through. He didn’t feel like going through the picked-over stuff. He was already feeling a little uneasy about going through the house on his own and he’d only been here for ten minutes. It wasn’t that there was any rule about picking over the empty homes by yourself; it was just that this was Carey’s neighbor and everyone knew that Carey and the Taylors didn’t get on well…and now he was starting to have second thoughts about being in here for too long on his own.
Dan did a quick check under the sinks in the master bathroom to be sure nothing was missed and found a bar of Irish Spring, still in the box, and a disposable razor. Next was the closet. He turned on the flashlight that he’d only turned on three other times since June, to make sure it still worked. The Browning gun safe was still there; Carey still hadn’t tried to pry it away from the wall. Mr. Taylor had done too good a job of bolting it to the studs and the floor and it just wasn’t moving. Too bad, maybe Mr. Taylor had left some of his guns behind.
Dan looked up at the ceiling and the dangling cord for the pull-down attic stairs. Dan had been with Carey on almost all of the initial walkthroughs of empty houses after people had either left or passed away. For the first six or eight homes, Carey had gone up into the attic himself, or had one of his lackeys do it, to see if there was anything worth “collecting”. The vast majority of them had held empty suitcases, if anything at all, and after another half dozen or so, Carey had called off searching them.
It was Dan’s hope that Carey had neglected the attic of the Taylor’s house as well. Dan grabbed the cord, pulled down the folding stairs, and got a smattering of dust, pink fiberglass, and grey, papery insulation in the face. Most likely he was going to be the first to go up.
The creaking of the springs and metal joints sounded incredibly loud in the otherwise silent house. Like his own attic there were a dozen or so sheets of plywood lain down between the rafters to walk on and support the odd bits of junk that you didn’t want to leave in the garage but just couldn’t bear to part with.
There were the two heating units and the light switch that didn’t do anything anymore and of course a couple of suitcases that hadn’t been taken. There were, however, what looked like a couple of sleeping bags in stuff sacks that appeared to have been up here for a couple of years and forgotten about. Those could come in handy. They were on the far end of where the plywood was in the attic, where Dan had to stoop down to keep from hitting his head as the roof was sloping down, and he was about as far from the opening back down to the closet as he could get.
From this vantage point he panned the flashlight back and forth across the attic again to see if there was anything else that he’d missed, or couldn’t see while standing on the steps. On the third pass he caught the brief reflection of something on the back of the rafter that held the light switch for the attic. He carried the sleeping bags back to the stairway, set them down, and examined a nail driven into the rafter. Hanging on the nail was a single key--a key with the word “Browning” on it.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I must thank my wife. She has put up with a lot, and I do mean a LOT, while I did what I did to get this thing done. She made sure I stayed fed when I would have just kept writing when I was ‘in the zone’, went to bed when I had to get up in the morning for the job that actually pays the bills, and spent time with the family so my kids didn’t ever say, “Who’s the guy taking off in Dad’s car?”. I was even accused, tongue in cheek--I’m pretty sure, of having an affair with one of my main characters because of the amount of time I was spending writing, and she stuck with me through it all. Thank you, hon, I love you.
An additional huge “Thank You” goes to my wife as editor. She took this challenge on for the second edition and I have to say that it was a Herculean task. Neither of us knew what she was in for when she signed on but I think the results speak for themselves. Words alone don’t do justice but thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
Second goes to my kids. I have the greatest family in the world, bar none. Daddy was grumpy when he couldn’t write but he really wanted to or felt he needed to but was stuck. Even though the first draft was done in a relatively short amount of time, there were some rough patches. Then there were the times when Dad just wouldn’t…shut…UP about the book. Again, they were great. I’ll make it up to you, and we’ll go get ice-cream!
This has been a long time in the making. If I’m really honest with myself, I’ve been toying with bits and pieces of this since 1988 and my “Writing Science Fiction” class with Mr.
K at Lake Forest High School (you will always be “Ken” to me, sorry). For good or ill, I actually started a story back then with--I kid you not,--“It was a dark and stormy night”. As God is my witness, I didn’t even know it was a cliché at the time. After I graduated, I toyed around with writing the dust jackets for the books I eventually hoped to write but never got around to even starting, and eventually, life got in the way.
Fast-forward twenty years and a co-worker introduced me to an author who is going to hate me for describing him this way, but so be it. This co-worker (who shall remain nameless at this point but appears as a character in Dark Grid) hands me a book by one John Ringo, and I like it. I read another one, and another, and then I got this wild hair to start writing. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to compete with John but I got, no foolin’, a little inspired. After about a month of hammering on the keyboard I decided to email John and ask him for advice and lo and behold, he responded…within like fifteen minutes! This is where I use the word he’ll probably hate…since then, he’s been a bit of a mentor. He’s been supportive in a way that I don’t think anyone else could have been with advice, insight, and blunt honesty.
Then there’s a whole cast of additional characters, some based more in “reality” than others, but all of them just as real to me in many ways. I work with a bunch of really great guys, many of whom are Veterans (capital “V” people, that wasn’t a typo) and a lot of them show up as characters in the book. I have never served in the military but several members of my family have, and I have the utmost respect for ALL members of our Armed Forces. Those that I know personally proved to be an invaluable resource, allowing me to tap into their knowledge and past experiences. It’s a culture that I can only glimpse from the outside and only understand at the most basic level, but it is one that I am grateful for nonetheless.
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