by Scott Mackay
He couldn’t say why, but Ian seemed to be made extremely uncomfortable by Stephanie’s friendliness toward him.
A short while later, as Gerry got into a more protracted conversation with Dr. Langstrom about the xenophyta and the flagella, he watched Ian pull Stephanie aside and separate her from the rest of the group. The two lagged behind. He glanced back. Stephanie looked so small next to Ian, her Ossimaxed bones slender; an impossible creature, growing up in this weak gravity as an entirely different species of human, moving with the grace of Peter Pan in Neverland. Tonight, she wore magenta contact lenses, and she reminded him of a cute blue lab mouse. He sensed a mild distress in her, and understood that Ian was a problem for her.
Neil and Dr. Langstrom strolled to a bench, where they sat. Dr. Langstrom suggested that he rather liked “being in the thick of it” again, and Gerry at first couldn’t decide whether this was an appropriate remark or not, considering Earth’s peril, and formed a new notion of the Martian professor—that within his grandfatherly exterior there lurked an immense ego, and that his interest in the xenophyta and flagella wasn’t necessarily about the phytosphere, but more about Dr. Luke Langstrom showing Dr. Gerald Thorndike how smart he could be.
In any case, his true concern was for Ian and Stephanie, as they seemed to be having a real row back by the lake. He couldn’t help wondering if they might be lovers, and if he had inadvertantly been the cause of their quarrel. As the recipient of Stephanie’s overt friendliness, he had to consider the possibility that he might have precipitated a jealous tantrum in Ian. Ian gripped her by the arm, and she tried to pull away.
But he had a tight hold on her. When she looked up at him, he thought she might have been angry, but instead she looked perplexed, as if Ian’s words were now puzzling her greatly. At last he let her go. The others had drifted on ahead. Dr. Langstrom was still talking about the phytosphere and possible ways to destroy it, none of them sounding the least bit plausible to Gerry. Stephanie became subdued, said a few quiet words to Ian, then turned around and walked back up Pisces Road. Ian watched her go, then came toward Gerry.
As his old friend closed the distance, Gerry excused himself—rather abruptly, if Dr. Langstrom’s surprise was any indication—and joined the god of good times.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
Ian looked at him for several moments, apparently fighting to contain a strong emotion. “She’s tired, that’s all. She gets moody if she has too much excitement.”
10
In the third week of July, Glenda stepped out her back door into the darkness and turned on her flashlight. The beam cut through the gloom and fell in an amorphous circle on the trees at the end of the yard. Nearly half the leaves had fallen; the other half hung limply from their branches.
Her watch said five p.m., and it should have been light, but it was dark, and the darkness was doing something to her. She didn’t feel like Glenda Thorndike anymore. Glenda Thorndike was always bold as brass. But now she felt…perpetually unsettled.
Where the hell was Leigh? She swung her flashlight toward her neighbor’s house. She shook her head.
Was he hiding? Dead? Or had he just gone somewhere, maybe to his folks’ place?
She proceeded across the patio onto the grass. The grass smelled funky and was slippery underfoot. It had rotted, like lettuce in a fridge. She walked to the toolshed and got the spade. With the spade in one hand and the flashlight in the other, she proceeded to the rear of the lot.
The woods looked like something out of a horror movie. Her heart pulsed with fear. She was afraid of bears. They got a few down from Jordan Lake every so often. With the forest dead, would the bears be hungry and come down into Old Hill looking for something to eat? Would a hungry bear consider her fair game?
“Live a day at a time,” she murmured into the dark.
She shone her flashlight at a maple tree. After three weeks without light, the wilted leaves hung like sleeping bats, their green cellulose as pliant as limp balloons, the tree giving up the ghost as it eased into sapless purgatory. One maple might not look so strange—but they were all like that.
She stopped halfway to the woods. Did she want to go in there to get the toy box? She never went into the woods at night. But of course it wasn’t night. It was five o’clock in the afternoon.
She glanced at Leigh’s house once more. God, this darkness. It penetrated her with horrible imaginings.
She gave up on going into the woods and, leaning the spade against the fence, walked over to Leigh’s house. If she knew her neighbor was there, maybe she wouldn’t be so afraid.
His car sat in the drive, hooked to its recharge cell. The blinds on his living room window were drawn and the light was on, but the light had been on like that for the past five days. She was really beginning to think something had happened to him.
She went to the front door. The console scanned her and asked if she were the owner, a guest, or a delivery person.
“It’s Glenda Thorndike.”
She read the screen. Glenda Thorndike: acknowledged. Please wait.
So Leigh was inside? “Leigh?”
She caught movement at the side of house.
Leigh emerged from the bushes. She swung her flashlight in his direction. He carried a rifle. His face was slack, as if the last several days had taken their toll on him.
“It’s you,” he said with obvious relief.
She lowered the flashlight. “I thought you were inside.”
“You’re alone?” He peered past her shoulder. “Where are the kids?”
“In the house.” She motioned at his weapon. “What are you doing with a rifle?”
“Turn off the flashlight.” He cast a nervous glance toward the road. The corners of his lips turned downward and he raised his chin. His eyes narrowed in suspicious perusal of the thoroughfare.
“What’s wrong? Why were you at the side of the house?” She glanced out at the highway. “What are you doing?”
He continued looking at the road. “Just being cautious.”
She turned off her flashlight. “Have you been going to work? Your car’s always in the drive.”
“I’ve been off for a while now. I’m going to weather this thing at home.”
She gave him a hint of her own apprehension. “I just wanted to make sure you were here. I thought something might have happened to you.”
He turned to her. He tried to smile but his expression crumbled, and he looked as if he were going to be physically sick.
“Leigh, what’s wrong?”
“I did something stupid.”
“What?”
He looked away. “I told a couple of guys at work I had a stash.”
“A stash? What kind of stash?”
“Food. Water. Basic supplies.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “We were just sitting around talking about the shroud…and how people were preparing for it. And I let it slip.” He shook his head. “I’m a total idiot.”
She gave him a sympathetic grin. “I’m sure they all have their own stashes.”
“Glenda… I saw this thing coming a long time ago. I never trusted the Tarsalans. I’ve been stocking up for the last three months, since the minute the negotiations got rocky. I knew they were going to try something. And these guys at work—they’re always so full of themselves. We were talking about the shroud… and I had something to brag about for a change, so I bragged.” He shook his head and glanced out to the highway again. “Now I realize it was a big mistake. I keep thinking they’re going to come to my house and take everything I have. I haven’t slept. My whole cycle is screwed up.”
He lapsed into silence.
She tried to be helpful. “Where do these guys live? Do they live far?”
“In Raleigh.”
“And you think they’re going to come all the way out here and raid your house?” She shook her head.
“Doesn’t that sound a little… crazy?”
“It’s just this one gu
y, Jamie… the last day I worked, the way he looked at me. He knew I was taking time off. Just the way he was looking at me. Like he had plans for me. Like he was going to hook up with these other guys, Lars and Perry, and they were going to come out… I wouldn’t put it past them, Glenda.
These guys are real assholes.”
“Yes, but how much of a stash do you have? All the stores are closed. Would it be worth their while?”
“I’ve got two fifty-gallon barrels of fresh water. I’ve got candles, and boxes of ammunition for my rifle. I bought a lot of dried-food dinners from a specialty place in Raleigh, those little vacu-packed ones. I’ve got a hundred rolls of toilet paper. I know that might sound stupid… but toilet paper is something you don’t want to do without.”
“Jeez, Leigh. I really don’t have more than enough supplies to last me a week now.”
Leigh’s eyes narrowed in speculation. “If you guys get hungry, I’ve got tons.”
She nodded, trying to swallow her pride. “The government relief truck didn’t come to the school yesterday.”
“I’ve got an extra rifle, too. You know how to use a rifle?”
“My dad used to take me partridge hunting. Back when I was a kid in Kansas.”
“Because you should really have a rifle in the house.”
“I hate to ask you for a handout.”
“The food reserves in this country have been horribly managed.”
“Bayard’s doing everything he can.”
“Not really.”
“He’s downed a total of thirty killer satellites. We’re chipping away at them.”
Leigh shook his head. “That doesn’t help the food situation, does it?”
His complexion was pale, and he had great dark patches under his eyes. Despite his boasts of more than enough food, he looked as if he had lost weight. He smelled like he hadn’t bathed in days, and his face was unshaven.
“Leigh, why don’t you come over and sit with us for a while?”
Leigh drifted for a few seconds, staring at the dead grass; then his eyes narrowed and the corners of his lips tightened. He looked like an entirely different man. “I would like to see Jamie try,” he said darkly. He turned to her. “Let me get that rifle.”
As he went inside, the lights turned on automatically. Their glow spilled onto the front stoop. The begonias in the terra-cotta planters had died. The ivy covering the side of the house was nothing more than a dry, spidery track.
Leigh came back a few moments later with the rifle and a plastic bag. “Here. I hope you won’t have to use it, but you never know.” He held up the plastic bag. “And here’s three freeze-dried dinners and a few
boxes of ammo. Put the freeze-dried dinners in boiling water and they cook up nicely. If you need more, let me know. I’ve got a stash in the basement, plus some stuff buried out behind the shed.”
She took the rifle and bag. “Thanks.” She inspected the rifle, a Remington. “It’s pump action?”
“You ever fire one before?”
“No. Just bolt action.”
He took the rifle and demonstrated how to use it, then handed it back. “It’s got a four-round magazine.
It’s not the best rifle, but it’s not the worst, either.”
When she finally went back home with her rifle, food, and ammo, she had a lot of jittery new thoughts, ones she knew she wouldn’t have if it were broad daylight. Thoughts of Jamie, Lars, and Perry. Thoughts of Leigh going beserko on her. Of everybody going crazy because of the damn dark. But most of all she thought of how Leigh had a stash buried behind the shed. Because if worse came to worst… She nodded to herself. Yes, if worse came to worst.
She heard about people getting into confrontations. Fighting over food. Even killing each other for it. But she never got in a confrontation herself. She talked to Tammy St. Martin, who lived over the west hill, and learned that every single store in Old Hill had been looted clean and there wasn’t even one can of beans left anywhere.
And then the mailman stopped coming and she phoned the post office, and the computerized voice on the other end told her that, because of labor difficulties, the post office would now implement a system of rotational mail deliveries, and that any given addressee couldn’t reasonably expect to get their mail more than once a week.
She learned from Whit that fully half the Old Hill Fire Department had quit.
“Everybody’s looking out for their own. Especially because this… this darkness is starting to go on for a while.”
Other strange things happened, and these things told her that the whole country was being affected.
Small, ridiculous things, details one wouldn’t normally think of, but details that seemed to be more frightening to her than the larger calamities that might eventually come. For one thing, she stopped getting bulk or spam e-mails, as if the people or corporations who generated this crap now had much more serious things to worry about.
On the television, people were indignant about the nearly total lack of food relief and ranted against the Western Secessionists for being so tightfisted with the assistance. Why wasn’t the government doing something to intervene?
Then there would be sound bites of farmers plowing under crops, or killing their livestock because they had nothing to feed them with.
Shortly after that, she couldn’t get any network television at all, just the Emergency Broadcast System, and that was too bad, because there was nothing but a test pattern on the EBS most of the time.
The radio still worked, though, and that’s how she got her news.
There was news of how the electrical utility workers were deserting their jobs and management was struggling to hang on, but it was hard because people had to spend a lot of time looking for food and the other essentials of survival, and couldn’t spend a lot of time at work. She got news from the Internet, and learned that there had been a cascading blackout in the West affecting forty million people. Then she got the scare of her life because the power went out in Wake County, and the blackout lasted five hours.
Also, a few buildings burned to the ground downtown, set alight by looters, and no firemen came to put them out.
So, little by little things got worse, but out here on the highway she and her kids remained okay, because Leigh kept giving them food. She started filling empty pails and jars with tap water and storing them downstairs in the basement in case the water stopped working. She tried to get through to Gerry every day, but never could. The power went out again, and this time the utility told the customers it wasn’t their fault; that they were caught in the middle of a cascade, and they were having these cascades because there simply wasn’t the maintenance staff to keep the electrical equipment properly serviced.
And then the Internet went down, right around the time the radio went down, so she had no idea what was going on. The servers across the country weren’t adequately connecting to each other. On certain evenings she couldn’t get the news site, and finally she couldn’t get anything at all, not even her home page.
This particular brand of Armageddon, at least at first, was of a slow and creeping kind, but it was pernicious. It was formally announced, on one of the few evenings the radio came back on, that fully ninety percent of next year’s crops had been lost, and that many livestock had already starved to death.
Things couldn’t survive without light.
When Leigh told her that there had been several home invasions over in Willington—people just trying to find some food—she tried to buy stronger locks for her doors, and even traveled all the way to Raleigh to find a locksmith who was open. But it seemed as if locksmithing, as a profession, had entirely disappeared, and she was forced to make do with the crappy old locks she already had on her doors.
11
Are you afraid of the dark? This question kept parading through Glenda’s mind once the rolling blackouts became a more permanent feature of their day-to-day living. And she was sure it was the same all over the country. Twelve h
ours of night was one thing. But at the end of that twelve hours, daylight was supposed to come back. Now it didn’t. Not with the power off most of the time. It was dark twenty-four hours a day. The days had stretched into weeks, and the weeks had stretched into the first month, and they had received only occasional blips of power every now and again. They were officially at war with the Tarsalans, but most of it was happening up there, beyond the black skin of the shroud, while down here it just got darker and darker, and colder and colder, so that on a few occasions it had actually snowed, right here in North Carolina, in the middle of summer.
Her kids sat on the floor around the living room coffee table playing chess because it was the only “board” game they owned. All their other games were electronic, and with no electricity they couldn’t play them. They played by candlelight and she watched them with low-level apprehension because everything was running out—food, medicine, electricity—and she didn’t know how much longer she could hang on.
She could be grateful for one thing only: Leigh next door was providing them with food every now and again. But Leigh was getting that look in his eyes, like a boy who had a high school crush, and she was afraid that he was going to do something stupid, like make a pass at her, and then she wouldn’t be able to accept his food anymore.
She hated it all. But mainly it was the dark. It was like a chronic disease, something that made her feel not only anxious but also under the weather, as if she were suffering from the weakness of persistent anemia.
Even worse was her loneliness. God, how she wanted Gerry. She sipped her cold chamomile tea. She wanted to be pressed against his tallness. She wanted to feel his arms around her. She wanted to tell him she was sorry for exploding like that.
She was just thinking she might try the fone again, which had become like a talisman of futility to her, when she noticed light coming through the front window.
She looked out the window and saw firelight far to the west. Something was burning? She walked to the door, opened it, and went out onto the porch. She gazed to the west and saw the glow of what must have been a considerable conflagration just over the hill. Was that Tammy St. Martin’s place burning?