Into The Darkness

by Doug Kelly

  “Let’s keep all of it. You never know when we might need it,” Dylan suggested.

  They ate boiled catfish and cattails, then boarded the rafts and resumed their journey.

  Heading downstream, they kept cautious eyes on the interstate. There were people still stranded on the road. Some saw the three men in their rafts and waved, while others were oblivious. Most of the stranded travelers would be dehydrated and beginning to get desperately hungry by now.

  At a point where the road came close to the river, they saw a woman by the water’s edge. She appeared to be drinking the river water. The woman was carrying a bundle of something in her arms, but the men were too far away to see what it was. Kevin put his paddle down and motioned for the others to do the same. He retrieved the binoculars from the backpack and brought the woman into focus. He could see she was carrying something close to her body as she positioned herself to drink the river’s water.

  “It’s a baby. She has a baby in her arms,” said Kevin.

  The woman looked up and saw the men floating down the river. Standing up, she lethargically began to wave with one arm. Her weakness overcame her and she went to her knees. She raised her weary arm to signal them again. The men could barely hear her attempt at a scream for help.

  “Look around. If it’s clear, we should try to help her,” said Dylan.

  Fearing an ambush, Kevin looked around with the binoculars, but saw no threats. The riverbank gradually met the water with a barely existent slope. The men beached their rafts nearby and approached the woman. Dylan immediately thought of the family he was desperately trying to get to. This increased the urgency he felt to help the woman and her baby.

  “Help me…help me, please…I need water…I’m hungry…my baby—,” the woman said before she glazed over with a fading consciousness. Regaining focus she began to speak again, “I need your cell phone…my…car—”

  “What’s your name?” Dylan asked, interrupting the woman’s lethargic speech.

  “Beth,” she said softly.

  “Beth, I want you to sip this water,” said Dylan. “Give some to your baby. You look dehydrated. Sip it slowly; I don’t want you to vomit. Keep the water down and we can give you something to eat.”

  They moved to the cover of a small shade tree. After the woman finished the bottle of water, Kevin handed her another one, reminding her to drink slowly. The woman appeared to gain focus in her pattern of speech, so Dylan continued questioning her.

  “Where are you going?” asked Dylan.

  “I was going to Helena to pick up my husband from the airport. He was on an early morning flight.” The woman looked down at her child. “This is our first child. He hasn’t even seen her yet. He’s been deployed overseas.” She leaned her head back against the trunk of the tree and closed her eyes. “My car died and my cell phone doesn’t work, either. There’s no way to call a tow truck and no one has driven by to help. I tried to walk to get help, but saw all the other stalled vehicles on both sides of the road.” Beth opened her eyes and shook her head. “I need to get my husband and get back to Great Falls.”

  “Beth, when your car stalled, did you see the massive display of northern lights?” asked Dylan.

  “How did you know that is when my car stalled?”

  “We think there was a large solar storm responsible for causing that display of northern lights. It was so massive everything with a computer chip is dead and the power grid has been taken down, too. We’re lucky to have these rafts to take us home.”

  The woman appeared stunned and tearfully said, “My husband…he was on a jet…what about my husband?”

  “I’m sorry,” Dylan said, in a hushed tone.

  The woman broke down and sobbed uncontrollably. Kevin and Richard walked a short distance away from the woman, but Dylan stayed with her. He kept thinking of his family. He thought how easy it would be to collapse emotionally right now, but that would not help him get home. He knew they should help this woman and he wanted to make sure they did all they could. He gently touched her shoulder and spoke.

  “Beth, we’re going through Great Falls to get home. You can go with us. We can get you home. Grab your stuff. Don’t you have a stroller?” asked Dylan.

  “They took it. Those men took the stroller and my purse,” she replied, as she pointed to the road.

  Dylan immediately stood up and quickly looked around. Kevin and Richard, noticing Dylan’s sudden alertness, became concerned and hurried back over.

  “She said she got mugged on the road.”

  “I don’t want any trouble. Let’s get out of here,” Richard said, as he inched backwards toward the raft, while continuing to scan the highway with his nervous eyes.

  “Get in my raft,” Dylan told Beth. “I have some boxed cereal there. You can crush it and feed some to the baby.”

  The woman obeyed, and they pushed away from the shallow riverbank and began to float downstream again. The woman swallowed more water, ravished the dry cereal, and fed the baby what she could. After she and her baby ate and drank, they fell fast asleep in Dylan’s raft.

  As the sun climbed higher in the sky, they travelled several more miles downstream. Richard motioned to the riverbank where there was some trees for shade. That is where they all stopped and pulled the rafts from the water. Richard headed to the bushes to relieve himself and smoke one of his precious cigarettes. Kevin had been studying the map and concluded that they could make it to the next town by sundown. Dylan suggested they go just to the other side of the town and stop for the night. They needed to get food. Everyone ate a bagel and drank some newly filtered water. The shadow of the shade trees barely moved before they continued downstream again.

  Just outside of the small town, the woman and baby awoke. Dylan could feel his body becoming fatigued from constantly paddling and steering the raft. It would be a good time to stop. As they gently floated past the quiet town, Kevin noticed a small park and that there was no one around. Dylan only agreed to stop at this location because it offered trees and shrubbery to conceal the rafts and supplies. He was extremely hesitant about staying this close to the town.

  “Do you know anybody in this town, or have any relatives here, maybe?” asked Richard.

  “No, my husband is—,” she choked up, but maintained her composure, “was in the military. We moved around a lot. We were each other’s best friend.”

  “Richard, here’s the axe and machete,” said Kevin. “Get some wood together. I’ll use some grubs as bait and throw some lines in the water. We are going to try to find some food around here.”

  Richard nodded, and the woman sat down at a picnic table with her baby. Richard lit a cigarette and began to gather wood for a fire. The woman held the baby close and wished her husband could have gotten the chance to see his beautiful daughter. Beth pulled a small picture of her husband out of her pocket. She turned the photo over and read the back. He had written, “I love you” in red ink. Her eyes welled and a tear hit the picture near the red ink. The three words began to smear and then disappeared in an incoherent trail of red on the back of the photo.

  Chapter Five

  The highway paralleling the river went through the small town. Dylan and Kevin walked to the road from the river and followed it to the town’s outskirts. At the edge of town, the name of the highway changed to Main Street, and looking several blocks down Main Street, they could see what looked like a convenience store with its front door propped open. They thought it would be hot in the store, with the sun shining through the large glass windows, and no air conditioning or even an electric fan. As they got closer, the men could see a sign in the window that warned, CASH ONLY, and wondered to themselves how much longer that would last. From the sidewalk, they peered inside the store through the open door. The men saw a clerk leaning against the counter by the dead cash register, with his back to the door, fanning himself with a flat piece of cardboard. The clerk heard the men enter the store and turned, wiping the sweat from his brow with
a rag, and staring at Dylan and Kevin as they came in. The clerk had an awkward movement and tilt to his head as his gaze tracked the men walking through the store.

  Their plan was to use cash to buy supplies. Dylan surmised, and Kevin agreed, that merchants would first stop using credit cards and then only accept cash. They wanted to use their cash before people realized it was also worthless. Food was their main priority. After the cash ran out, or people stopped using it, they would have to scavenge and barter, but they had nothing to barter with.

  “Cash only,” said the clerk.

  “We have cash,” Kevin replied.

  They found a short aisle with dried foods. Using a dusty blue plastic basket, they took all the bags of rice, beans, noodles, and spaghetti that were on the shelf. Dylan found some dishtowels for sale. He grabbed two for Beth to use as diapers for the baby. They sat the small basket of dried goods on the counter and noticed that the man had a glass eye, explaining his strange stare. The clerk grabbed the basket and pulled it toward him.

  “One hundred dollars, please,” he stated flatly, without adding up the individual items.

  Dylan replied angrily, “What kind of shit—”

  The clerk immediately pulled the basket off the counter, halting Dylan’s response.

  “We get it, here’s your cash. Bag it up,” Dylan said, trying to conceal his anger.

  The clerk stared directly at the men as he slid the cash off the counter and onto the palm of his hand. Fanning the twenty-dollar bills, he tilted his head toward the outside light from the window and panned over the paper bills with his one good eye. Satisfied, the clerk placed the money into his pocket, bagged the items, and then slid them halfway across the counter to Dylan and Kevin.

  “Thank you and come again,” the clerk said sarcastically.

  “What a deal,” Dylan said, as he grabbed the bags close to his body, holding tightly with both arms.

  “Yeah, what a deal. I would have given my right eye for this stuff,” Kevin said, as he looked directly at the clerk’s glass eye.

  The clerk held up his middle finger and pointed to the exit.

  Dylan and Kevin walked back to the campsite down a nearly vacant Main Street. There were no moving cars, no electric lights, and only a few people out walking. At the end of the block, they turned the corner at a large old brick building on their way back to camp. Around the corner, they found themselves staring directly into the face of a horse, mounted by a man in uniform. They stepped back and saw that it was a police officer, with his hand on a pistol holstered to his leather belt.

  “Not from around here, are you?” the man on the horse asked in an offhanded tone.

  “Nope, just passing through,” replied Dylan.

  “Just keep on passing through.”

  The officer watched them walk away toward the river and disappear into the bushes and small trees. They set the dry goods on the picnic table and Kevin got to work preparing to boil some of the food. Dylan handed the towels to Beth, explaining that they could use them as diapers. She unwrapped the sleeping baby and put the blanket she had been using to hold her child onto the ground. Beth cleaned the baby as well as she could and wrapped her in a clean towel. Richard had found a working faucet at the campsite. Beth used the clean water to rinse the soiled blanket.

  She had just finished rinsing her hands when Kevin announced that the food was ready. They ate small portions of boiled rice and noodles, then Dylan removed the equipment from his raft so he, Beth, and the baby could have room to sleep. After covering themselves with the tarp, they immediately feel asleep.

  With his eyes still closed, Dylan sensed dawn’s morning light and decided to get up to start the day. He moved the tarp, startling Beth, which in turn startled the baby, and the baby’s crying woke the others.

  “Don’t tell me, I know. I’ll get the fire going,” Richard said to Kevin.

  “I’ll check the lines for fish,” Kevin replied.

  Dylan looked at the two saplings that he had chopped down to make into bows for hunting. He was ready to get started on them. He burnt the end of a pencil-sized stick, and used the charcoal to mark dimensions on the oak staves. Dylan retrieved the paracord from the backpack and unraveled it the length of the staves. He folded the paracord in half and marked the midpoint of its length with the charcoal pencil. Placing his hand around the stave just above the midpoint and then just below it, he made two additional marks to define the bow’s handgrip. He held each stave at one end and peered toward the other end, slowly rotating the wood. He needed to identify the curvature of the former sapling to find the future front and back of the bow. Each stave had a slight curvature along its length. The convex side would be the belly of the bow, and the opposite side, its back. This natural recurve would allow for some eventual set in the wood from the stress of being in the strung position. Dylan was ready to start carving the belly of the bow away first, by working from the grip toward the tip.

  Dylan found a gap in the slatted wood planks of the picnic table. He inserted a stave into the gap, wedged it there, and used the gap to hold each stave like a vice. Starting at the bow’s handle Dylan held his knife with both hands, blade perpendicular to the wood, and pulled the blade back. The knife released thin shavings of wood. With each pull of the knife, he removed more wood as he got closer to the bow’s tip. He did this to allow for an even bend to the wood. The stave began to have a taper from the thickness of the handle toward the thinness of the tip. After he roughly carved the staves, he peeled away the remaining bark. The wood just underneath the bark of the stave would be the back of the bow. Satisfied, he decided to stop and allow the wood to dry further before doing any additional carving.

  Kevin proudly brought back three large catfish. The smell of the cooking catfish from Richard’s campfire teased their hunger. They shared small portions of rice, beans, and pasta, the catfish adding the missing flavor to their meager breakfast. Beth ground some dry cereal into powder, mixed it with water, and fed her crying baby.

  With their morning hunger temporarily suppressed, they decided it was time to get ready to leave. Kevin got the map out to identify their next destination. It would be Great Falls, a much larger town than their current location and it had a military base. The military base would be an uncertain variable. Dylan expressed his concern and reminded them that a large group of people with weapons could be dangerous. There were also five dams to portage around within about ten miles, starting at Great Falls. They agreed to drop Beth off somewhere on the riverbank, near the city, then continue downstream without an excursion into the town. Getting around five dams would take time, and could take all day. They planned to stop just before the city, and at daybreak, pass through Great Falls and get around the dams. If the current was swift, they could make it to just outside of Great Falls, and camp there for the night.

  Before they left, they took advantage of the faucet at the campsite. After filling all the water bottles, each person had their turn trying to clean their bodies as best they could with the cold water from the camping spigot. Beth rinsed out her baby’s nighttime diaper and placed it flat on the raft to dry as they floated downstream.

  This section of the river had many curves. Small islands divided the waterway at several points, offering a riddle as to which side was best to pass. At midday, they came to a road crossing the river in front of them. Beth recognized the bridge spanning the water. It led to a small community near the highway that went into Great Falls. They stopped under the bridge for shade and decided to try using their remaining cash to get more food. Richard took the opportunity to smoke. The tendrils of cigarette smoke wafted around Beth and her daughter. She glared at Richard as she moved further away to cleaner air.

  “Let’s not stay here very long,” said Dylan. “I don’t think we should build a fire. We don’t need the attention that would bring.”

  “You have all my cash,” said Richard. “I’ll wait here while you’re gone. Get what you can.”

  “
Somebody has to stay awake,” Kevin said, looking at both Richard and Beth.

  “No problem, I have to watch the baby. I can sleep as we float if I really need to. By the way, there should be a little store close by on the right side of this road.” Beth pointed upward, toward the bridge.

  Kevin nodded and then prodded Dylan with a small stick. Dylan hesitated and walked back to the raft. He reached to the floor of the raft and retrieved his pistol.

  “I should carry this from now on. It needs to be a habit for me,” Dylan said, as he tucked the pistol into his pants, concealing it with his shirt.

  The two men climbed the steep embankment and stood on the road. They looked back down and motioned for Richard and Beth to move further underneath the bridge because they saw them from the bridge.

  The midday sun was hot and it drained their energy away as they walked on the blacktop. The gentle breeze was welcome, but only offered minor relief from the heat. A small store came into view and they walked toward it, passing a few abandoned cars on the way. Some of the car doors were open and the cars had obviously been relieved of anything the looter thought had value. They decided to check the next vehicle for items they might need. Stopping at a pickup truck, they peered through the open door into the cab. The glove compartment was open and empty. With probing hands, Dylan felt underneath the seat. Hidden farther back he found sunglasses, and placed the sunglasses on his face to model his newest accessory.

  “You look stunning,” Kevin said, sarcastically.

  As they got closer to the store, a woman was visible, nervously looking through the glass door. She did not see the two men yet. There was a sign on the door that stated, CASH ONLY, NO PHONE, and NO RESTROOMS. She turned toward them just as they approached the door and the woman jumped back, startled. The men stopped walking as she opened the door, but stood there blocking the entrance.

  “Can I help you guys?” the woman asked, trying to hide her apprehension.