Desolation

by M. L. Banner

  There was an electric murmur in the air as she and John, the palest man on the planet, walked by. They were praying. Another shiver took control of her body as she also understood that their prayers were probably for the man she was about to see. Fear started to wrap its spindly fingers around her mind, and wouldn’t let go. Why me? Did I do something wrong? All these people would have loved to meet with this Teacher-guy and yet I’m the one they fetched in the middle of the night? Cold crept outward from her gut.

  They walked through a front door that seemed to open by itself from the inside, as if the house were expecting them. Once in, they began their ascent of its grand staircase. The entryway and candlelit living area were empty but for a couple of people wearing the same olive drab shirts and GA arm bands like John. They stared at her as she trudged upward with her escort. She was now shivering. Tripping on a step, Darla quickly corrected and regarded a young woman a few steps above, being led downstairs by another man with the same uniform. She looked upset, wiping tears from her eyes. When their paths crossed, Darla’s and the woman’s eyes locked and fear passed between them. That look screamed “Be very careful!”

  Darla felt as if she were in a dream-like state, for in what seemed another instant, she was seated, alone with the Teacher. She was light-headed, like the time some of her friends in high school had persuaded her to try pot and she got so dizzy she fell and smashed open her head, earning her five stitches and the ire of her parents. She willed herself to stay alert to the Teacher in this smoky, candlelit room. Please don’t pass out, she told herself, struggling to focus on this man. With a jolt she realized, just then, she was in his bedroom. Her chair was facing his bed and he was in an arm chair at the bed’s foot, facing her. He was wearing garish silk pajamas, his legs casually crossed, a vision of a young Hugh Hefner—like on that dumb cable show, The Girls Next Door—without the pipe and naked nubile women about. He looked at her, relaxed, waiting, as if he had posed a question and was expecting her answer.

  “Sorry, wha-what did you ask?”

  He stood and poured wine into her glass. She almost dropped it, unaware until then that she even held one. Was the wine drugged?

  “You were telling me about your family, Bill, Lisa, and Sally, and how you were separated,” he said, standing beside her.

  She looked up and replied, “I was?” The hand holding the glass began releasing its grip.

  He grabbed her hand, startling her back to this foggy reality, and held her glass and hand steady.

  “Why am I here?” she said as she pushed up from her chair, letting go of his hand and her glass, almost falling over. Her legs were like gelatin, undulating, almost too weak to support her weight. She braced herself on the arm of her chair.

  “Sit! We were just getting to know each other.” He set his glass down and grabbed her arm, supporting her again. “Is your mother as beautiful as you?”

  She could smell sour wine on his warm breath. She had to get out before something awful happened.

  He now held both her arms and stared into her eyes.

  During her freshman year, her anorexic roommate had taught her how to regurgitate her food in an instant—some sort of mind-over-matter thing that she mastered. It had come in handy once when a blind date attempted to rape her…

  His face moved in closer to hers.

  She thought of the most disgusting thing she could ever imagine. Right now, that was biting into and eating a rat.

  He started kissing her lips.

  She vomited the spiked wine, the beef stroganoff MRE dinner from an hour ago, even the green licorice treats Danny and she had enjoyed hours before dinner.

  He pushed back, almost knocking her over, spitting and wiping his eyes and face. “Franklin!” he yelled. “Franklin, get in here!”

  The door burst open and in rushed another GA uniformed man, a rifle slung over his shoulder, ready to use.

  “Take this volunteer back to her tent. In the morning, she will join the rest of our recruits. Make sure she remembers her commitment to us.”

  Franklin grabbed Darla’s arm and practically carried her out of the room. On the way to the stairs, they passed a pretty, red-headed young woman wearing a negligée, whose face and posture said something different than her clothing. Darla stopped, Franklin’s grip loosening, turned and slurred to the back of the woman’s springy-curls, “Don’ drink th’wine, it drugged.”

  Franklin tugged on her arm roughly and she left the same way she came in. Although her head was still a little foggy, she was no longer unsure of her next actions. She was grabbing Danny and they were leaving immediately.

  ~~~

  Of course, that didn’t happen. They had already taken Danny and told her that it was for his own good, and hers. They had a nurse watching him to make sure he didn’t have any further asthma attacks. The threat was overt enough, and so she became one of God’s Army, armband and all. It wasn’t until almost twenty days later that they allowed her to see him. They had long since started their southward procession along the Illinois River, with their plan to head west to some yet-to-be-specified place. The Teacher, as everyone called him, this charismatic preacher on whom she had tossed so many cookies almost a month ago, told them all in a speech that God would protect them on their journey and others would give them what they wanted until they reached their final destination, a place that God would reveal to him in the fullness of time. Whatever that meant.

  Until then, she could see Danny was being cared for, they were being fed, the Teacher never made any more unwanted passes, and they were certainly much better off than many of the people and communities they came upon.

  Mostly they walked, and always Darla walked with her “buddy” Joselin. This choice wasn’t hers either, but if she had to be buddied up with someone, Joselin wasn’t bad. She was an odd mix of races, an “Italian-African American-Indian” as she would tell anyone who asked. Unfortunately for her, she had been cursed with her father’s pear-shaped body and beefy legs, her momma’s skinny chest, and her grandfather’s bulbous nose. Still, she had an infectious laugh that no one could resist. When Darla tried to not join in, Joselin would tell her, “Darla, you know better, resistance is futile,” quoting from their favorite show, Star Trek. After so many days on the road, they were fast becoming good friends in spite of Joselin’s absolute dedication to the Teacher. Because of that Darla was careful of what she said, never giving Joselin her complete trust. Darla also never forgot her ultimate goal of breaking free of the Teacher with Danny, when the time was right.

  The two-thousand-plus group of people came to a halt, and Darla and Joselin were near the rear.

  “Why do you suppose we stopped?” The question was purely rhetorical; she knew that Joselin knew no more than she herself did.

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure glad. My feet feel like I’m walking on hot coals.”

  After a few minutes, Franklin, the big guy who had “helped” Darla back to her tent that evening inside the teacher’s bedroom, was jogging up to them. “You two follow me,” he barked, then pivoted and jogged back the way he had come. Darla and Joselin followed in lock-step, in spite of their tired feet. They stopped at an entrance road off the small rural highway they had been traveling on. There were congregated almost two hundred arm-banded men and women, who made up God’s Army. Thomas, their leader, spoke to them. “All right, we shouldn’t have much resistance in this town. I want all of you”—he pointed toward Darla and about twenty others—“to stay here and watch the roads. The rest of us will march down the main road as a show of strength.”

  With that, Thomas and the larger group advanced down the rural blacktop, the semi-rhythmic plomp-plomp-plomp of their boots—on asphalt that until a few days ago had seen only the occasional tires of a tourist’s vehicle or a farmer’s pickup—announcing their approach to any who heard. Their next conquest was to be the little town of Fossil Ridge.

  24.

  Disconnected

  Rocky Point, Mexico


  As Sally read the journal, her smile grew wider and brighter, her shoulders squared but relaxed. This find was exciting! Its words spoke directly to her. She stopped and reexamined the 150-year-old leather-bound journal in her hands, handling it as if it would turn to dust with one touch; it was made of hardier stuff. Not simply some old book, this journal offered something greater to all of them: salvation. And this whole time it had been hiding in plain sight.

  She considered the rush of excitement she felt right now, a feeling she hadn’t experienced since… She peered up to the ceiling of Max's secret office, searching for that time, just before the Event, when she had found out what was about to hit the world.

  She had been out of her element since the Event. She probably dealt with the loss of technology the worst compared to most people. For the last few years, she had never been disconnected from the Internet, other than for the few short hours she dedicated to sleep. Even when she was offline, she still read saved articles or books on her tablet, or watched her cable TV. Her devices spoke to her sleepy subconscious, pinging their messages each night. Whether by her laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone, Sally had always been connected and always talking to people around the globe. Only a few weeks ago, her Twitter account told her that she had sent at least a hundred thousand tweets. This was funny since she never even liked telling people her thoughts in a meager hundred and forty characters; she was far too verbose in her writing. She had over two million Google Plus followers, and tens of thousands of Facebook friends. Every day, she received no fewer than five hundred emails, two hundred texts, and at least one thousand notifications from her devices that she was being messaged, emailed, called, or mentioned. Then the Event happened and her life stopped.

  She told herself, I have to go cold turkey. These words felt funny to someone who never drank or did drugs, but to her being connected was every bit as much an addiction as drugs or alcohol would be for others. She needed the Internet, and texting, and phone calls. And it wasn’t just personal interconnections, it was her business.

  After the first night, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She was lost. Every few minutes, she would check her dead phone to see if something had miraculously changed. Of course it hadn’t, nor would it ever. By the fifth day she was going stir-crazy. She needed something to occupy her mind and her time. Their home only had five paperback books, all of which she had read before on her fried Kindle, along with the hundreds of others she had inside its vault, which had been pillaged by CMEs. She loved her Kindle so much she had bought one for each of her parents, who took to theirs with an equal degree of fervor, adding books every week to their to-be-read list. More worthless devices. I’ll bet they wished they had ordered books from Oprah, rather than buying so many damned eBooks, now expunged for all eternity. She chortled at her mental meanderings.

  To break out of her funk, she tried to help out her father and mother around the house, but their job offerings were menial and insufficient to occupy her always-active mind. Every moment she contemplated why this had happened and how awful it was.

  One day, she just let go and accepted her fate. She stopped worrying about her devices and started to believe that being disconnected from people she would never meet in person was not something bad. In fact being disconnected became something good. Now people would think about what they were going to say, before they said it. This was so different from most of the emails and texts she had received, and those in truth, she often sent as well: cold, uncaring, and with biting words that would never have been said to someone face to face. Now, she expected people would mean what they say. There was no need for bullshit. A sense of peace slowly settled over her.

  However, she still needed the mental exercises that didn’t come from building defenses around their home and Max’s, or moving boxes of supplies around. So, she made Uncle Max’s office her own, first consuming all the books on its shelves. Besides the paperbacks, he had lots of notebooks: filled with double-sided printed pages from his top-of-the-line printer, three-hole punched and bundled for their different subjects. Almost all of these, occupying an entire bookshelf, were survivalist tomes and how-to books. He really was preparing for the end times.

  One day she opened up the journal. Although the three of them certainly knew of its presence, none of them had ever read through it, only re-reading Max’s letter, the separate loose pages of inventory, and the map of the mysterious place called Cicada. Because the journal was in chronological order, starting with Max’s great-grandfathers’ old notes and writings, these seemed irrelevant to their present day concerns and were ignored. None took the time to read the more recent stuff.

  She turned its pages with anxious anticipation.

  Starting from the back of the book, like she always read a novel, she thumbed backward through the last several pages, recognizing instantly the owner’s penmanship; these were written by Uncle Max. When she reached the start of this section, she stared at the title: “Read After The Solar Apocalypse….”

  Thompson Journal Entry

  2 July 2012

  My sources are telling me that any day we may be hit with a solar apocalypse, an event worse than Carrington in 1859. If I am unable to tell you in person some of what you must know, I’m writing this down, so that you will have it.

  Read After The Solar Apocalypse…

  I left you pretty well prepared with supplies for what will happen immediately and sometime after the apocalypse. However, more important is how you will mentally and physically prepare for the new realities you are about to face. There is no way you would be aware of what will most likely happen after the first 30 days, much less the first 300 days, unless you have been through this before or truly thought it through like I have. This is the purpose of the next few pages; it’s my way of helping you prepare for the coming days.

  First, it is important to keep this in mind. Our homes on the beach of Rocky Point were never intended for long term survival. It is true that I have stocked close to two years’ worth of food and water for me, Fernandez, and your family. However, you will not be there that long, that is if you want to live. I know we all have these idyllic thoughts of retirement on the beach, but those thoughts work only if civilization hasn’t collapsed or you are completely cut off from civilization. When the solar apocalypse occurs, neither will apply here at Rocky Point. Subsequently, RP will not be a pleasant place to be even 10 days after the proverbial shit hits the fan. Don’t worry; I have made provisions for you elsewhere: just continue reading.

  Most important in all this is your mental preparations. If you are reading this immediately after the apocalypse has occurred, you have a little time, as most will be dealing with the shock of the event and all will believe that normalcy will return: Of course it will not, nor will it ever return in your life times. You will be inclined to try and stay in RP and ride it out. But that will be impossible. It pains me to think that each of you will need to reach a mental place of utter desolation before you will be able to accept that it is time to bug out. I just pray that you will not have to experience all of this without me. If I am not there, get ready.

  Just as the Bible speaks about the many signs that will be revealed during the “end days,” you too will see many signs that your time in Rocky Point is at an end, and you will need to leave. Here are some of those signs and my recommendations for each.

  When the food is gone

  When I served a tour in Iraq, I witnessed something that changed my whole view about what regular people are capable of doing if they are desperate and hungry. My unit came across a small village in Kurdish territory that had been pillaged by one of the local terrorist factions. This village was waiting for help from their government that never came. It was thirty or more miles to the next village in the middle of the dead Iraqi desert. When we arrived, the villagers were fighting each other for the last few scraps. One villager, who was well liked by everyone, walked to his elderly neighbor’s house and stabbed h
er to death to take the last small piece of bread she had so that he could feed his young son and daughter who were starving.

  It won’t take long, maybe 10 to 20 days. When the food runs out everywhere, people, it might be your neighbors, will turn to violence to feed their bellies. Desperation will motivate the meekest person to commit the most heinous act of violence. Desperation for the plight of one’s family or friends could turn anyone into a killer. Some person, but most likely a group, will come to you demanding food, and if you don’t give it to them, they will attempt to use force to take it from you. Be ready, because this day will come, and it will come soon.

  25.

  Food Fight

  Rocky Point, Mexico

  “Bill King? Bill King, are you in there? I want to speak with you,” a familiar voice demanded outside on their patio.

  Bill, in the kitchen with Lisa, pulled his gun from his scabbard and approached the left side of the open sliding patio door, using the wall as cover. He felt some assurance from his two trusty companions: paranoia and his .45. They were forever by his side since he’d had to kill the drug dealer who had been out to get Max and his family on the day of the Event.

  Carefully, he peeked around the wall; it was Clyde Clydeston, standing at the foot of their beach access stairs, with at least two others. “What can I do you for, Clydeston?” he called back in a dry voice, even though his heart was racing. Bill stood half obscured by the wall, his gun pointed at the ground, but in plain view of Clydeston and his group.

  “King, I don’t want to make any trouble for you, but you need to give us some of your food!" One of the three was Judas the pervert. Clydeston looked to be the leader. The bluster in his voice grew more pronounced. "Don't pretend you don't know what I’m talking about. I know your idiot friend Thompson gave you food. It is time you shared the wealth with your neighbors."