Dark Humanity

by Gwynn White

  He didn't push the issue.

  “Well, I walked back from the library, and it's just as crazy everywhere else as it is in your yard. There are speeding cars, people shooting guns”—he left out the bit where they were shooting at him—“and sick people running through the neighborhood. Oh, and there are thieves rifling through garages in the alleyway.”

  No response.

  “Grandma, do you know what's going on?”

  She had dozed off again.

  He removed her shoes, considered trying to get her under the covers, but instead found a comforter and threw it over her. She must be really bushed to nap when so much was going on outside, he thought, but understood her advanced age gave her the right to sleep whenever she dang well pleased.

  I'll just wait until she wakes up, and then we'll figure this out together.

  The hours ticked away.

  He listened at the windows. The city outside was in full-on collapse the whole time.

  He spent much of the afternoon resting from his ordeal getting home. If he wasn't checking in on Grandma, he was fidgeting with the radio, trying to get news about what was happening. Other than the emergency alert message—playing on all stations—there was no useful information forthcoming anywhere on the dial, other than “Get out!”

  As the sun set over the city, he was checking the rechargeable flashlight he found in Grandma's cupboard. His father was a bit of a type-A and had insisted she had a fully stocked larder at all times, as well as a stash of survival gear such as flashlights, sewing kits, fishing kits, and all manner of camping supplies. He also made sure she had a high-quality toolbox with an appropriate quantity of quality hand tools. He told Liam he knew Grandma would never use any of them, but anyone who was watching over her or helping her out would have everything necessary. Dad often dug into the tools while fixing things up in the house.

  As he was looking things over with his bright flashlight, he wondered if he himself was a piece of equipment in Dad's toolbox for Grandma? Did he send him here to protect her? Was he that smart, or just lucky? He always seemed to have a way about him that said he was looking ahead to what may come. Like buying insane amounts of ammo when it went on sale. Mom always said he was crazy but never made a serious effort to dissuade him from purchasing his “life insurance,” as he called it. It felt unnatural to ascribe any positive qualities to his father, given their recent falling out, but he knew Dad did right by Grandma at least, giving her these supplies. Now he had a fighting chance to help her.

  So what was he going to do? Hunker down with Grandma inside her house? It seemed the most obvious solution, given her advanced age, and the hostility he’d found on a simple neighborhood walk. He heard the gunfire outside, and the men ransacking garages didn't inspire much hope in things staying friendly on the block. No wonder that man who shot yoga lady was perched in his window with a hunting rifle. Staying home and riding things out was a plan, but probably not a good one.

  The other option was getting Grandma out of the city or at least somewhere safer than this house. Where could they go? He was just a kid during Hurricane Katrina, but he had a vivid recollection of the people stuck in the New Orleans Superdome. Were St. Louisans lining up downtown at their football stadium this very minute? It didn't seem like a good idea to have so many people in one place with a disease going around.

  Unless the radio broadcasts started passing along useful instructions, the window for useful help was closing quickly.

  He glared at the radio. “Enough with the 'waiting for instructions.' Just tell us what to do,” he muttered.

  He considered getting her out to Mom and Dad's house. Would they be pissed he took Grandma on an underage car ride? She hadn't driven since the 1980s, and probably couldn't even reach the pedals anymore. If they did drive out of the city, it would have to be him behind the wheel. On the other hand, maybe Dad would drive into the city. That would solve his problems by handing the responsibility to his father, but something about that notion didn't sit well.

  Was there somewhere better to drive her? Maybe over to Illinois? It was a shorter distance in terms of time spent in the crowded city compared to driving south toward home. Once over the Mississippi River, it was open country. At least they could avoid the plague victims over there. The big problem was Grandma couldn't just live in a car or tent somewhere eating baked beans until things got back to normal. Of course, he could—

  He hesitated to finish his thought but knew he had to look at all options.

  I could just leave her.

  It sounded harsh as he thought it. Could he leave Grandma on her own? What if he told himself he was going to get help and then come back to rescue her? Even as the thought entered his mind, he knew he would probably never come back once he was out, especially if things were worse out in the wider world. Maybe if the military settled things down ...

  Leaving Grandma would free him to travel light and fast, but the idea of ditching her simply for expediency was disgusting.

  Oddly, he thought of his father at that moment. He knew his dad would do everything in his power to save the woman, and he knew it would let his dad down tremendously if Liam walked in the door saying he left Grandma to fend for herself because “she was inconvenient.”

  Oh, great. I'm now my father.

  But, he had to admit that sometimes—just sometimes—Dad got things right.

  He was startled from his reverie by a presence in the doorway. She was awake at last.

  “Grandma!” He ran over and gave her a hug before he knew he was doing it.

  “I'm happy to see you too, Liam. I think we're in a bit of a pickle together.”

  He filed that away as the understatement of the year. Gunshots nearby accentuated the issue.

  “Help me over to my chair, if you would. I'm still a bit wobbly from my—” she hesitated as if deciding to expand her thought. “—fainting spell. Those tornado sirens nearly made me jump out of my shoes.”

  He helped her, then sat down nearby and began speaking in the nervous cadence of someone who has been waiting a long time to talk. He told her about the walk home, in all its detail.

  “Whoa! Take a breath. Are you saying someone shot at you? Are you OK?”

  He forgot to edit that part out.

  “How long have I been sleeping? It's dark outside. Is this still the same day?”

  “You slept through the afternoon. I've been getting a bunch of stuff together in a backpack so we can escape. I've just not figured out how to travel or where to go.”

  She was thoughtful for a few moments.

  “OK, Liam. I want you to get out of the city. You can escape before it gets too bad.”

  Here it was. He recognized she was giving him his out. He could walk away with her blessing, and it would be a logical story when he reached Mom and Dad's. “She ordered me to go!” He turned it over in his head. Looked at it from multiple angles. But always, he saw his father shaking his head. Would Dad leave her at the most desperate hour like this? Would any man?

  Hell, no!

  “I'm sorry, but I can't leave you. We have to get out together or stick it out here together.”

  “You know that doesn't make any sense. I'm an old woman. I'll probably be dead before you know it, and then you'll be stuck here after things have gotten so bad you can't think of leaving. You have to get out while you still can.”

  “Grandma, I'm not leaving you. My dad would never leave you. My grandpa would never have left you. Great-Grandpa sure as heck wouldn't have thought of abandoning you. I'm staying.”

  Grandma nodded, giving him a grim look.

  He wondered if she was proud of him for making his decision. Or was she disappointed he was putting himself in danger at her expense? She offered no clues.

  “Well, then,” she said, “we have to decide what we're going to do to survive. I'm afraid staying here could be a problem. If there are robbers about, we won't have much hope of stopping them from coming in, and the sick peop
le like Angie aren't going to make getting out of the house very easy either. The police said we have to evacuate to safer places but didn't say where to go that was any safer than here. The most obvious is somewhere out in the country where there aren't as many people. Maybe your mom and dad's place?”

  He was proud he had come up with virtually the same ideas. Getting to his house outside the city did seem the most sensible plan, even if he did have a little fear of showing up after illegally driving across town. Many of the miles he'd logged in pursuit of his learner's permit had been driving Dad to Grandma's, so he knew at least one route home fairly well.

  “Can we take Angie's car? I don't think she'll need it. It was parked on the next street over. Not sure why she put it there, but it was covered in lots of blood and had a—” he grimaced—“a foot on the floor. I think someone stole it from the garage—the car, not the foot. Or maybe she was sick while driving home.”

  He paused as they both sat in thought, then continued, “Also, there are no keys inside it. I checked because I thought about driving it back here.”

  They looked at each other with sudden realization.

  “We have to go up into her flat and find a spare set of car keys,” Grandma said without enthusiasm. He guessed she was worse off than she admitted about losing her friend.

  They agreed to spend the night in the flat. For Grandma, this gave her time to recuperate after her “scare” with the sirens. For Liam, it was a chance to pack up everything he would need to help get them out of the city, such as her bottle of ibuprofen, some water, her walker, and a few bites of food. Just enough for a long drive through the inevitable traffic.

  After packing the essentials, they sat down to eat a heaping dinner of spaghetti and meatballs—his favorite. If they were leaving, it made sense to try to use some of the remaining food. The electric was out, but the gas for her old stove still worked.

  Preparing his backpack was initially exciting—a “real adventure” his friend had texted him earlier in the day—but as he realized they were in a true emergency, with real bullets, his enthusiasm withered. Now he wasn't relishing going outside one bit. He was quietly moving the long strands of pasta on his plate, hardly eating them. That seemed to get Grandma's attention.

  “Eat, Liam. You'll need your strength.”

  He looked up and resumed eating with a little more zest.

  She began talking again, her tone more somber. “Liam, I want to talk to you about something important. I know you and your family get set in your ways, but I'm afraid for your soul. You need to think about going back to church.”

  Inwardly, he groaned. He knew she lamented the choices of his family to stop going to church every Sunday—his mom and dad often talked about it—but he saw that as extra free time he didn't want to give up. Sunday services were a bore that he dreaded each time he went. He was unwilling to make promises to her based solely on the mysterious disruptions outside. Surely the government would get things fixed, and everything would soon be back to normal. What then? And was it right to profess faith in God only because you need something? How wrong would it be to tell her he found God, but not really mean it? He saw this as a massively complex question his brain was unable to process with spaghetti hanging off his lips. He felt the shadow of silence growing longer. Something needed to be said.

  “I'll think about it, Grandma. Really. I will.”

  That should do it.

  Shoveling the last of the noodles into his mouth, he focused on eating, hoping to indicate the conversation was over. He felt her hard stare, but she passed some toasted ravioli rather than push him on his vague response.

  He was thankful she dropped it, though it made the rest of the evening a bit awkward.

  Before she finally went off to bed, she summoned him to the living room. “I want you to go downstairs, way in the back in the farthest corner and look for a black plastic box up in the rafters. It's something your father put there for me.”

  As instructed, he made his way into the dark basement, struggling even with his flashlight to weave through the piles of old junk his grandma insisted be kept down there. Not one to let go of old stuff, she had quite a collection of aging rocking chairs, long-since-replaced light fixtures, and many pieces of furniture, tools, and equipment hoarded by Great-Grandpa Al.

  And there in the corner, high above everything else, was the promised black box wedged up into the rafters. He had to use an old walking stick to poke it from its perch and make it fall into his waiting hands. The box was surprisingly heavy. He caught it one-handed, dropped the walking stick, and wrapped his other arm around the box as he balanced himself to keep from dropping it.

  Pass completed, touchdown! And the crowd goes wild!

  As he walked up the steps with the box, he had a pretty good idea what it was. For years, his father had taken him to the local shooting range to practice with a variety of weapons. First, it was BB guns, then airsoft guns, and finally the ubiquitous .22-caliber rifle. From the box’s size and shape, this was clearly a container for handguns: roughly sixteen by sixteen inches and eight inches thick.

  He set it up on the coffee table in Grandma's living room. Using a small light, she produced a key that unlocked the safety lock securing the container. It popped open and, just as he had suspected, there was a handgun inside. Two, in fact, packed with gray insulating foam inserts to keep the contents from shifting inside.

  Picking up the first gun with both hands, Grandma placed it on the table.

  “You probably didn't think your old grandma knew anything about guns, eh?” She was smiling as she said it.

  “This is heavier than I remember. This is a Ruger Mark I Target .22. The other one is identical. Your great-grandpa bought both of these way back before you were born. There had been a break-in on our block, and Al told me he wanted me to be ready in case something like that ever happened again.”

  She sat back in her chair as she continued.

  “Oh, those were the days. Simple times. We took these guns out to the country a few times, and I even shot one. Can you believe that? Got pretty good too. But, like so many things in life, it just became too much trouble to practice, to maintain them, to think about them. Someday I'll tell you about my lasso rope that fell into similar disuse.” She chuckled a little at her own joke.

  “Anyway, a few months ago your dad was here telling me I needed to be prepared for anything that might happen in the city—you probably don't remember all that rioting business last year? I told him I was fine and that I even had two handguns. Well, he was not impressed. He had me show him where they were, then he took them and said he was going to clean and service them to make sure they were working properly for me. The next week he had them both back in this case, with this box of 1,000 rounds to go with it. I'm sure he knew I would not be able to use these anymore, but he told me where he was going to put the box, and he said it would be there ‘in case of emergency.’ I guess he was pretty smart about that.”

  He eyed the shiny black objects sitting there. In the darkness, he could only see the harsh lines of the Mark I, but he knew it well. In fact, he was beginning to believe his father was smarter than he ever let on. How else could one explain that Liam had spent considerable time training on a Mark I with his dad? He never thought to ask him where it came from, but it sure seemed likely he got it from Great-Grandpa too. And now, at this critical moment, he would be carrying the same model. Did this make him the gardener with the deadly spade?

  Dad always said the .22 was the best training round because it was so cheap and had very little recoil. He said Liam would eventually graduate to more powerful rounds, but if a person could master the .22, all the others would fall in line. It was all about stance, awareness, and a steady arm. Plus, the consequences of breaking any of the cardinal rules of gun handling was minimized during the learning period with the tiny round. He assured Liam it was still quite deadly, of course; assassins had used the small and quiet caliber to good effect for m
any years.

  He never pushed for bigger guns because he loved going out and “plinking” with the little one. At least, he used to enjoy it. Lately, his dad would drag him to the range whether he wanted to go or not. Looking back, he realized he was acting like a whiny baby each time he complained he didn't want to go shooting.

  I didn't want to go with him.

  Now he looked at them with a silent appreciation for the lessons he'd been taught.

  “I hope we don't need these, Grandma.”

  “Me too.”

  “Why don't you hit the hay, and we'll get started at first light. I'll be sleeping right out here on the couch. I hope you don't mind that I don't sleep downstairs?”

  “Not at all. Why don't you keep one of these by your side from now on?”

  He picked up the gun. Felt the weight. There was no mystery to it. It was just another item in the toolbox pre-positioned by his own father.

  He couldn't help but feel a longing to see his dad.

  A distant explosion faintly rocked the items in Grandma's china cabinet.

  “I can't wait to see the sun rise again,” he said, as much to himself as to her.

  “I'll pray for us before I go to bed.”

  “Thanks Grandma.” He was an agnostic—didn't know what he believed—but was respectful of Grandma's overwhelming faith. “And I meant what I said about considering going back to church.”

  She gave him a kindly smile, turned around, and was slowly off to her room.

  The last thing he remembered of that night was the sound of a car speeding down the street at high speed, followed by the unmistakable sound of squealing tires under extreme braking. He held his breath waiting for the sound of an impact, but it never came. Thirty seconds later, he remembered to breathe again.

  He didn't get any quality sleep, but it did serve as a deep breath before his upcoming journey. He wondered if it was destined to end in extreme braking? Would he and Grandma meet their demise as raw sounds in someone else's bedtime story?