I didn’t know Mr. Marcus well. I’d only been in the house a few times. His wife was dying from leukemia. His daughter Sara spent most of her time taking care of her mother who stayed in the living room, not having the strength to climb the stairs. Mr. Marcus and Uncle Ray had long conversations about what to do next. The Marcus’s were like us, shut behind doors, waiting, planning, and surviving while watching a familiar world drift into the past.
“It’s turning into a beautiful day,” Uncle Ray said.
The pink-yellow dawn turned into a crisp, blue and cloudless morning sky. Across the valley, the cabin stood in the shadow of the ridge.
“Well,” my uncle said, “I’ll post you here.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to take a walk. And see what I can scare up. You just keep an eye out.”
“Oh?” I said, wanting to do more.
“Now, if something comes by, you take a shot at it,” he said. “I’m not stopping you from doing that.”
I nodded and settled onto the ground next to a tall evergreen. Uncle Ray set the duffle bag on the bed of dry brown pine needles and walked out along the slope through the trees, taking his time, being quiet. He moved diagonally downward, back into the valley.
I kept a good eye on him, because life was different now—people were different. Times were dangerous. The day Uncle Ray arrived at my parents’ house outside Philadelphia the danger had already come. Johnny and I sat up all night in the dark. There was no power. Nothing. Uncle Ray had reached us as soon as he could. He’d driven his truck through dense, confused traffic. And the crowds, the rush of people . . . the two hour trip had taken almost seven hours. We packed everything important into his truck: clothing, blankets, and food, mostly food.
And still, we hunted. We needed to be ready for anything. The seasons changed. Winter would come again. The coming year was going to be a rough one, Uncle Ray said that often.
Every day was difficult. We’d go out hunting and hike up and down the valley. My uncle brought down the larger game like deer. With the 30-30, he never seemed to miss. I went for rabbits, and even got a turkey once.
Uncle Ray continued along the foot of the slope, the rifle resting in the crook of one arm. A cool breeze picked up for a moment and whispered through the branches of the trees. The faint twitter of a bird drifted on the wind. Sounds like that, the flutter of a bird, the scamper of small animals moving through the undergrowth, they had become familiar. The move from the suburbs to the country brought a new life to me. I learned to read the countryside and the animals.
The sun, much higher now, brightened the sky. I squinted in the warm glow which fell on my face, and enjoyed the cool, earthy odor in the air.
Suddenly, my uncle shouted. Then other voices, other men yelling—laughing—and the sound of a scuffle rose up from the foot of the ridge. Uncle Ray was lost from sight beyond a thick copse of evergreens and leafless maples standing midway up the slope. I swallowed hard, my grip tightened on the bow. I charged down the slope.
Dodging around a dense, high thicket, I stopped, trying to control a growing panic—trying to think, trying to move as quickly and quietly as possible. Through a gap in the trees below, three men dragged Uncle Ray out into the valley, into the open. He wasn’t moving or resisting, his head lolled on his shoulder as if he were unconscious or dead.
The men dropped him on the ground and leaned over him, shouting again. I couldn’t understand any words. All of the young men were dressed in blue jeans, and brightly colored ski jackets, but they looked raggedy as they towered over my uncle. One kicked Uncle Ray in the ribs causing him to roll onto his side.
Uncle Ray was kicked again and they continued to yell, “You should’ve been friendly—you should’ve been polite—you should’ve helped us out!”
My stomach tightened. My heart squeezed. I needed to get closer, fast. One of the men held a knife. Another whirled what resembled a shortened baseball bat, and the third held my uncle’s 30-30, pointed at him. All I saw was the rifle. The blue metal glinted big and deadly in that man’s hand.
Down the slope I sprinted, not even feeling the ground. I reached to the quiver on my back and grabbed for arrows. After a few more strides, I stopped again, and stabbed the arrows into the ground at my feet, their metal points grinding into the dirt. With one arrow pressed to the string, my bow arm rigid, I drew back, the bowstring taut in my trembling fingers. I sighted along the arrow, a sliver of sunlight shimmered along the length of the shaft. The point of the arrow like a finger rested on the figure of the man holding the rifle. I took a cool breath, let it out slowly and for an instant recognized that the man was a man, not a nylon target or a rabbit, but the rifle reared up in my sight, metallic and deadly. I released the bowstring.
The arrow pierced the air like a whisper, in a floating arc, high then curving down.
The man with the rifle grabbed at the arrow in his neck.
I shook my head, sharply. I’d shot too high. I could’ve missed.
The 30-30 thumped to the ground. The other two men cursed and looked around wildly.
My next arrow sliced the air and hit the next attacker in the side. The man with the arrow in his neck dropped to his knees. A dark stream of blood covered his hands and jacket. The other two started to run. The one with the arrow in his side moved slower, and he yelped, almost crying.
I grabbed the remaining arrows out of the ground and ran the rest of the way down in big leaping strides. I crashed through a row of bushes, getting lashed by thorny branches, but I kept running. I hit the bottom of the slope and ran to Uncle Ray who was getting to his knees.
“The rifle!” he said.
I snatched the 30-30 out of the tall, dry grass and handed it to him.
The fleeing attackers ran straight up the valley. The injured man lagged further and further behind. But both constantly glanced back.
Uncle Ray worked the rifle’s lever fast—crack—crack—and crack again.
The uninjured man, who was further away, fell forward as if stumbling and then dropped, the green and white of his ski jacket disappearing into the grass. The second man ran in a lolloping crouch. The arrow still protruded from his flank. When the first man crumpled to the ground, the second one spun around to face us, and then flopped onto his back into a patch of bushes as the concussion of the last rifle shot rolled away.
From a kneeling position, Uncle Ray rose, wobbly at first. “Shit . . . I’m shocked that I got them.” He twisted in pain as he pressed a hand to his side. “I’m shocked,” he said again.
So was I. A tremor passed through my body and my hands grew cold. Only a couple feet away, the first man, the one with the arrow still in his neck, laid still and quiet. He stared into the sky with eyes like dull, frosty-blue marbles.
I caught my breath, fighting a queasiness in my stomach. I glanced back at Uncle Ray. Blood ran down from the corner of his mouth. Dirt stained his face and clothes.
I didn’t hate the man lying on the ground, but I was glad he was dead. A chilly sweat covered the back of my neck as I pulled the arrow out and wiped the blood on his yellow ski jacket.
Uncle Ray watched me. Not saying anything, he put a warm and heavy hand on my shoulder.
He limped when he walked so he sent me back up to get the duffle bag. When I returned, he still looked at the dead man. Uncle Ray took the Geiger counter out of the duffle bag, flicked the thumb switch and the Counter chattered loudly as he passed it over the body. He glanced at the dial as the red, hair-thin needle twitched.
My uncle shook his head, saying, “He was dead anyway.”
“Radiation?” I looked at the body again, noticing the waxy, drawn quality of his face. “He came here from where, Philly . . . New York, maybe? He lived long enough to get here?”
Uncle Ray didn’t answer one way or the other. It didn’t matter. The man was dead.
My uncle raised one arm, stretching his side. “We’ll take care of the bodies later. Tomorrow.” He gazed
at the sky and the clouds moving overhead. Shrugging, he said, “They shouldn’t have come back.”
“What?” My eyes narrowed. “You knew them? You knew they were here?”
“No. No, I didn’t know them. They showed up one of those days when you were out practicing with your bow—Thank God.” He tapped me lightly on the shoulder with a fist. “I found these guys wandering around in the woods near the cabin. And I told them to get the hell out of here. These kinds of people, they’re dangerous,” he said as if I didn’t understand. “I thought I sent them packing.”
“And you didn’t tell me about them?” The question shot out of my mouth fueled by a plain and pure anger.
Uncle Ray looked at me, pursing his lips.
“You can’t do that,” I said. The anger increased as I glanced from him to the dead man. “You just can’t decide not to tell me things. I needed to know about this.” I pointed a quivering finger at the corpse. “You just can’t think it doesn’t matter. I need to know.” My throat tightened as I wrenched my anger into control. “You see, you could’ve gotten killed. You could’ve died, then what—what would I do?”
His brown eyes looked into mine with a weary sadness. “Yes, I’m very sorry.”
I took the Geiger counter and returned it to the duffle bag. Uncle Ray reached for the bag, but I kept it. He nodded his thanks, and we headed back to the cabin. I walked beside him giving a shoulder to lean on. He winced.
“I’ll be okay,” he said, pain showing in his smile.
I believed him. I had to.
We reached the cabin, and even though it looked like a bunker, with all the sand bags piled against the walls, it was a friendly sight.
“Still, no wind,” my uncle said as he looked at the weathervane. “But there’s nothing to worry about out here. Just stay out of the city, right?”
I nodded, and felt hollow inside, even sick.
Uncle Ray looked at me, frowning. “You okay?”
“I was just thinking about that guy back there. The one you said was already dead.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, he just made me think about Johnny.”
A questioning look made deep lines on my uncle’s face.
“He’s going to die too, isn’t he?” I asked.
He stared. His eyes grew big, and I heard a squeak in his throat. He turned away, went to the cabin door, removed the lock and went inside.
Chapter 3
In the living room, I sat at the narrow wood table, situated under the window, and looked out at the dark woods behind the cabin. Green buds sprouted on the branches of the maples and the bushes and new stocks of wild grass inched out of the dark ground. I drummed on the table top with the fingers of my left hand and tweaked the tuning dial of the shortwave radio with the other. The red digital numbers flickered rapidly as they changed. Static tweeted and whined from the speaker. I adjusted the dial again, hunting through the frequencies.
No one was on the air, not even government broadcasts, not anymore. The emergency broadcasts became the last victim of an old world shutting down following the television and the commercial radio stations. Like a dying man, the eyes grayed over and then the breathing grew shallow and stopped hissing out that terminal breath. The radio sputtered, but no voice rose or came into focus out of the ambient noise.
I turned the dial and watched the numbers flash from the silver face of the radio for a few minutes longer. The search of the frequencies took place every other day, because the radio ran on battery power. Uncle Ray used the portable generator sparingly to charge batteries and run the lights if they were needed.
We used the generator a great deal originally, right after the blackout, because news broadcasts were still available. But again, the hours of watching the swooping bird’s eye helicopter footage of the burned-out city blocks of Philly and Manhattan became too much. Especially Philly. I half-expected to see my parents lying in the rubble. That was how strong the sense of misery was.
And a plague, which some suspected originated in Los Angeles International Airport, relentlessly moved from one major airport hub to the next, from one country to the next. The sickness like a skulking creature had been stopped west of the Appalachian Mountains when air travel was finally shutdown. But no quarantine zones, no state militias, no pleas for calm helped the tens of thousands who were already dead and the many more who were doomed.
Watching the images simply fed the nerve-racking fear of wondering when the great hammer would fall. The hammer did fall, heavily; the broadcasts stopped and the world became silent.
The shortwave radio static died when I flipped the power switch. I slumped back in the straight-back chair. An empty spot next to the shortwave used to be occupied by the radiation detector. Uncle Ray saw no reason to keep it operating, so the detector and the laptop computer which ran the software were stored in the backroom. Only the cable that attached the device to the weathervane remained coiled on the floor under the table.
“Hey, Stan,” Uncle Ray called.
“What?” I turned in the chair.
Uncle Ray knelt by the fireplace, stabbing at the embers with an iron poker. A large cast-iron pot hung on an iron arm over the fire. A mix of vegetables, a rabbit and a few pepper corns cooked and filled the air with a thick spicy aroma. “Go out and get some cordwood, would you?”
I nodded and rose. The chair legs squeaked on the wood floor.
“They’ll be here soon.” He stood and rubbed his hands on his denim pants. “And that will give you someone else to talk to besides me.”
“That’ll be nice.” I grinned, joking.
“Watch that!” He glared, and then chuckled, scratching the thin growth of beard running along his jaw.
Humor was at a premium lately. The close call with those three men was a continual reminder of what was going on, not just how fragile life was, but how broken everything was. We’d left their bodies out overnight, because it took all that time to get over the shakes. My hands quivered and fatigue weighted me down. I sat by the fireplace watching the flames; the fiery dance calmed me. Uncle Ray slept, going out almost as soon as he reclined on the sofa. The next day we returned to the dead men and rummaged through their pockets; most of what they had, the knives, jewelry and even paper currency, was radioactive. My uncle didn’t want to bury them where they lay, so we put them in the back of his truck and moved them a mile out, to an old quarry, burying the corpses in a single shallow grave. We completed the burial by covering the mound with rocks to try and keep animals from digging up the bodies.
Life went on in its own lonely, barren way, but with a stab of anxiety. The worry of when the next intruder would appear was always there, drifting just beyond view like the blur of something shadowy at the periphery of one’s vision. Short visits to the Marcus house drove away those low simmering fears, if only for a little while.
My uncle and Mr. Marcus engaged in long discussions of what to do next. My uncle was confident that something important could be arranged. Something more had to be built. There had to be more to life now than hunting and surviving and the quiet. Being just the two of us most of the time made it harder to keep thoughts of my parents away. Memories of them made the loneliness deeper, and so empty.
So, Mr. Marcus and his daughter Sara were coming to lunch. Sara and I were the same age, that I knew, but I didn’t know her. She was only a young girl moving through the rooms of the Marcus House to take care of her mother. Having Sara visit that cabin was a meeting I was looking forward to.
A man by the name of Jay Harper would be visiting, also. Mr. Marcus told of him and my uncle knew him, but I had never met him. Mr. Harper owned a big piece of farmland on the other side of the west ridge, bordering the Marcus property.
In anticipation of the meeting, Uncle Ray continued to prepare the meal, and I grabbed the large basket he held out and headed down the back hall. Halfway down the hall a door opened out to the rear of the cabin. I walked over to a stack of cordwood, about five
feet high and eight or nine feet long, under a dark-green tarp. I set the basket on the concrete slab, drew back a corner of the canvas, and filled the basket with arm-length pieces of wood. Seven logs filled the basket.
I took a deep breath of the cool air and glanced out from under the small roof overhanging the woodpile. By the angle of the sun it was about noon. The trees cast thick shadows on the ground, which were darker, almost black where the maples and evergreens grew thick a hundred or so yards back before the ground rose steeply up the ridge.
Back in those shadows was where Johnny was buried. Past all the greenery, all the evidence of spring, in the dark shade of the trees at the foot of the eastern ridge was Johnny’s grave.
The urge to see the grave pulsed, but I wasn’t in a mood to be sad. Johnny’s death hovered fresh in my mind. Still, I crossed my arms and thought about him under the mound of brown dirt that slowly sank as spring warmed the ground.
A week and a half after we buried the men, Johnny came back, more ill and dying. He lasted another week, and when he died, I was so damned mad at him. But how could we fight him? We couldn’t keep him from going back to Philadelphia. We couldn’t lock him up, but none of that mattered, not anymore.
The fact that he died was hard enough, that’s how Uncle Ray saw it and told me when he held me by the shoulders, looking me right in the eye. Of course, he was right and the only thing we could do for Johnny now was bury him.
The frozen ground fought back. Working hard, we pried loose chunks of dirt, and dug until the grave was about waist deep. Johnny’s body, wrapped in a blue tarp, was lowered into the ground.
I sighed, heaviness in my chest squeezed like a big fist. I shook my head and gazed up at the blue sky through the budding tree branches. I grabbed the handle of the basket, weighed down with logs, and went inside.
In the living room, Mr. Marcus had already arrived. Pulling off his jacket, he tossed it, along with a ball cap, on the arm of the sofa nearest the front door. He wore a navy-blue sweatshirt and jeans. A holstered revolver hung from his belt.
Dark Land: An Apocalyptic Novel Page 2