Dark Land: An Apocalyptic Novel

by William Zeranski

  “Quick question.” Shadows flickered across Joey’s face in the dim lantern light.

  “What?”

  “Besides hunting and planting, what do you do?”

  “What?” The question struck me as odd and I didn’t know how to answer. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—” He stopped on the second floor landing, and called down, “Hey, Dad, We’re gonna go over to Mrs. Lindsay’s, okay?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  A deep murmur of voices rose up from the floor below as Uncle Ray spoke with Mr. Sample, and then Uncle Ray said, “You go with Joey.”

  “Yeah?” I wanted to go with them to learn what was going on.

  “Yes, go with him,” he said.

  “Follow me.” Joey opened the door leading to the second floor.

  Footsteps echoed in the stairwell. I looked over the metal railing. The circle of lantern light drifted further down.

  “In here.” Joey held the door open.

  I stepped past him into an unlit corridor. The door hissed closed and shut with a click. We stood at the end of the hall. A window looked out onto a neighboring building and a cloudless night sky. Stars glinted white, but no moon shone.

  A murmuring voice, a whisper in the darkness came from the other end of the corridor, where a faint yellow light spilled around the corner.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Lindsay.” Joey’s face was a phantom mask in the dark hallway

  “Ah, well, you gonna tell me more?”

  “Nah, just come this way.”

  From the way he spoke, I sensed a smile on his lips like he was preparing to reveal something wondrous. Maybe he was. His question about what do I do besides hunting and planting kept buzzing around in my mind. What else was there? I had no lawns to mow, no television, no video games and the only music I’d hear in months had come from Robert’s guitar.

  Our footsteps tapped on the linoleum, echoing. We passed a number of office doors, all closed. I stopped at one door and reached for the knob. I glanced at Joey who’d stopped.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  I opened the door, and gave a gentle push. The door swung back revealing more blackness.

  “I shouldn’t have bothered,” I said. “It’s too dark.”

  “Not much to see really. We cleared the offices of useful stuff like pens pencils, blank paper. But not the personal belongings, we left those.”

  “Why?” I shut the door.

  “For me it was like stealing. Some people left family photos behind and . . .” Joey’s silhouette shrugged.

  “Yeah. Makes sense. You wonder who might come back, right?”

  “Maybe,” Joey said. “My mom worked here in the Clerk of Records office. She doesn’t like hanging around here too much.”

  “Kind of like being afraid of ghosts?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her.” Joey started down the hall again.

  Maybe it was ghosts. Or the emptiness of the place. I couldn’t be sure. A mustiness filtered through the air like a faded memory.

  I started after Joey and met him at the corner where the light from a kerosene lantern pulsed brighter. The faint odor of burnt fuel drifted by.

  Down the corridor, right in front of the elevator a group of children and kids my age sat in a half-circle facing a woman seated in a chair in the open space. The lantern rested on a table next to her. She read from a book held close to the glass shield, the flame occasionally twitched.

  “What’s she doing? Reading aloud?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure, neat, isn’t it?” In the brighter light, Joey’s grin showed how pleased he was.

  I moved forward to listen, being as quiet as possible. A couple of the older kids glanced to see who was coming, but then went right back to listening, intensely as the others were. Their attention locked on Mrs. Lindsay.

  The light reflected off her reading glasses. Her white hair, cut short, brushed at the collar of the short-sleeved blouse. She looked up at her audience, a smile on her lips.

  “What’s she reading?” I leaned to Joey’s ear.

  “Robinson Crusoe,” he said.

  I grinned simply because that made sense. Being stranded just like the character in the book. Even lost . . . and lonely.

  I sighed, too loudly, and a girl nearby, gave me a narrow-eyed glare.

  “Is this it?” I asked. “This is what you wanted to show me?”

  Joey shook his head and waved a hand for me to follow. We skirted the group and went down the hall.

  “Here,” he said and opened a door. “In here.”

  In the gloom of the corridor, Joey rummaged around in a front pants pocket and brought out a penlight, and a strong, narrow beam of light darted into the room.

  Books. Everywhere books.

  “It’s the library,” Joey said. “You can talk to Mrs. Lindsay later, but look around.” He handed me the penlight. “I’m going to listen.” Leaving the door open, he returned to the reading.

  I played the light over the stacks and shelves, and slowly moved into the room. I could smell the paper, that dry, nose-tickling scent.

  I ran my finger over the books, looking at the titles, at the names of the writers. Where were they now, all those people who wrote books? What did they write now, if they wrote at all? Was there so much to write about . . . there had to be.

  I had worked my way to the back of the room to where big, hardcover books were kept, lying flat on shelves that slid in and out of a low cabinet. I took one big volume, an atlas, off one of the sliding shelves and set it on top of the cabinet. I opened it, inside where maps, page after page. I turned the pages slowly, looking at the green patches, and the blue patches, and the black lines, and the words. I traced the lines all the way back home, to our house just outside Philadelphia.

  My hands shook.

  I closed the book and carried it with me out into the lobby where the reading was wrapping up for the evening. The children rose to stretch and talk excitedly about what they had heard.

  I walked up to Mrs. Lindsay. Joey stood next to her.

  She wiped her spectacles with a flowered handkerchief and slid them into glass case and put the case into her shoulder bag resting on the chair.

  Joey introduced us and we shook hands.

  “So, you found something.” she said.

  “This,” I said, holding out the book.

  She looked, her eyes grew sharp, and her head tilted a little to the side.

  “An atlas?” she said. “You planning to go somewhere?”

  “No,” I grinned. “I just . . . I just wanted to look at it. But, can I take it? It’s okay, isn’t it?”

  Her smile grew broad and her gaze was warm like she was remembering better times. “Yes, it’s okay. I know you’ll be back. We’re in this together, right?”

  “Yes.” I returned her smile

  “Come right this way.” Mrs. Lindsay head back to the library.

  She picked up a pencil and wrote the title of the book on a long yellow pad of paper, and then she handed me the pencil.

  “Print your name, here, and then sign after it. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  We said our goodbyes and Joey and I left.

  Out on the street, I took a deep breath and let it go. I was fired up. I held the atlas tight against my chest. I wanted to open the book, to look at the maps, to see where I was and to where I wanted to go. And that was home.

  Chapter 16

  We stayed in the town for a few more days. Talks went on about the raiders, and about the past months but everyone was sure of one thing, the valley people and the townspeople would hang together.

  “Mutual protection,” Mr. Wheeler called it. “We’re already two independent communities, so we’re in a good position to support each other, share ideas, even resources.”

  Uncle Ray wanted to know if Mr. Wheeler was running for office. But we also knew what he said made sense. The two communities working toget
her would help us all keep an eye out for bad guys.

  In the coming weeks that abandoned stretch of road connecting the valley and the town became busy with people traveling back and forth in small groups. Some people went to town just for a change, for a sense of normalcy, even though there were no malls, no shops to visit. There were the new faces to be seen and friends to be made, to join in the common cause of living safely and surviving.

  Joey came to the cabin and stayed with us many times. But after his first visit, he said, “I guess there isn’t much to do out here but hunt and plant tomatoes.” He grinned.

  “Well, we don’t have a whole town to explore,” I said.

  “That’s a fact.” He shook his head.

  So, we hunted and began exploring the lands beyond the valley. What remained of the summer was spent roving over the countryside. Other people from the valley did the same, searching abandoned houses, looking for other people.

  In late September an early chill came and thoughts of the coming winter made exploring beyond our little world an important and urgent element of survival. Finding those extra tools, gasoline, bottled motor oil or some forgotten canned food, those were the prizes sought.

  Joey and I started out early one morning on one of those foraging exercises, and just before leaving, I said, “Yes, Uncle Ray. I’ll be careful.”

  He looked at me from the radio table, and ran his tongue over his top front teeth. “You won’t be gone too late, right?”

  “No. Why would we?” That was my answer, but I knew what was on his mind. He was thinking of the map I was making using the atlas loaned from Mrs. Lindsay as a guide. The road home I’d been drawing on a piece of butcher’s paper I’d found in the cabin’s back room. I’d broken out the colored pencils and a ruler. Uncle Ray watched me work on it, copying from the atlas to the big white sheet, not asking any questions, but his silence said more.

  I could’ve just kept the atlas or found a road map and traced the highways all the way back to my parents’ house, but drawing the map, personalizing it, made the possibility of going back seem all the more possible, not just one of those places you hope to go to on some exotic vacation.

  “We won’t be going too far,” I said, but he knew the map, which I folded into a little packet, was in my backpack.

  “Do that. Both of you,” Uncle Ray said

  Joey nodded, and we pulled on our jackets and ball caps. I took my bow and revolver and Joey tucked his automatic into a leather loop on his belt. As we left, I glanced back. Uncle Ray gave me a long look and then went back to the patrol schedule he kept on the radio table.

  No one had reported seeing the raiders in some time but there was that sense of urgency, if not impending doom. No one cared to say it out loud, but we didn’t want to start living in constant fear. Not anymore.

  From the cabin we went to Sara’s house, and I said, “Mr. Marcus, we’ll be careful.”

  Sara hugged him.

  We headed back across the valley, over the ridge and went east, crossing the ridge road. We jumped the gully on the other side of the road and crossed a narrow field with thigh-high grass and a number of old blueberry brushes.

  The rising sun painted the sky a deep pink, making long deep shadows. Our passage left a trail in the early frost covering the ground. Plumes of thin vapor came from our mouths.

  “How far do we want to go?” Joey asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think, Sara?”

  She shrugged and her ponytail bobbed. “Let’s go until we see something we haven’t seen before.”

  I hitched up the pack and the quiver, and we entered the woods. The leaves of the trees had begun to change color with the coming of the fall season. Some of the orange, yellow and red foliage had dropped loose and crunched under our footfalls. A lone bird chirped out.

  “Most of them are gone,” Joey said.

  “What?” Sara said.

  “The birds,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Most have already gone south.”

  “Yeah, winter’s coming.” Sara said. “Big thrill, right?”

  I smiled, but winter was not something I looked forward to. Never knowing how serious the snow fall would be or how cold it would get. Finding those extra supplies was the task that kept me from participating in the regular patrols.

  We knew this stretch of woods, having scouted it many times in the past few weeks. The tall maples, oaks and the birch trees reached up and out, leaving thick shadows. Dampness chilled the air and a thin ground-hugging fog laced in among the tree trunks.

  The morning passed uneventfully; the sun burned away the white crust of the frost and the pink sky turned to a powered-blue. With an easy stride we carefully picked our path through the woods, and walked a good distance, crossing roads with names like Logan, Hitchcock and Grant. We searched the occasional abandoned car. Usually, nothing was found, but we’d mark the location so when the opportunity presented itself we’d come back and empty out the oil pan.

  We passed houses we’d explored before. High grass and weeds dominated the yards, and a few of them had been picked over months ago, long before we’d found them. Broken windows and doors left open let in the elements and the animals. We did our best never to destroy someone’s home even if we were sure the owners would never come back.

  I looked up through the trees. The sun just passed its zenith, and I said, “It’ll be time to eat soon.”

  Sara nodded. She walked next to me along the road, but Joey was ahead of us, blazing the trail. I was about to call out, when he turned and waved to us.

  Sara and I moved a little faster and we met up with him at the top of the hill. The road went down in a gentle grade. Fall leaves and branches covered much of the asphalt

  “Want to keep going?” Sara asked.

  “Well,” Joey said. “I think there’s a stream down that way.” He cocked his head to the right. “Hear it?”

  The whisper of running water almost like a breeze rustling leaves floated on the air.

  “Okay,” Sara said. “Let’s go.”

  Descending the slope, we kept in the middle of the road. A speed limit sign hung upside-down on the metal post. Yellow weeds grew out of the cracks in the black top and a maple tree lay in the road, fragments of wood rotting.

  Up ahead, the road crossed a little bridge, and water rushed louder.

  “Almost there,” I said.

  “Well, we don’t know this road, so let’s be ready,” Joey said and pulled the automatic from inside a faded, blue denim jacket.

  Sara drew her father’s snub-nosed revolver from the holster on her belt.

  We reached the guardrail on the right of the bridge and looked over the side. The stream ran clear and fast.

  “Looks good enough to drink,” Sara said, and went around the guardrail and down to the low bank of the stream.

  “And look!” Joey said. “There’s fish.”

  In the shadow of the bridge, the tail of a trout broke the water with a swirl.

  “Man, Mr. Wheeler would be in his glory,” I said, looking into the water.

  “It’s good and cold,” Sara called up. Water ran off her cupped hand.

  I joined her and crouched by the stream, looking and listening to the water. Joey’s reflection shimmered in the water; then it went away. A little bit later he called, “Hey, come here.”

  Sara and I climbed back up to the road. Across the bridge, further down the road, Joey stood.

  “What, you found something else?” Sara held up a hand.

  He nodded and said, “Looks promising.”

  Catching up with him again, we looked up the dirt road he pointed to. Trees grew close in on the driveway. The branches hung low, making a tunnel of leaves, and would’ve made the entrance almost impossible to find, except for a blue plastic mail box standing at the foot of the driveway. No name showed on the box, only the number 418.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  The driveway curved up a
long slope into a broad bend, and nothing could be seen beyond that. I couldn’t tell how far we would have to walk. “The house has to be up there somewhere,” I said.

  “Now, who’s hungry?” Sara asked.

  “What?” I looked to where she pointed.

  Further up, just before the sharp turn, a rabbit sat at the edge of the road, gnawing at some grass.

  “Let me have the bow,” she said, holstering her pistol. “I want the shot.”

  Taking the weapon, she pulled an arrow from the quiver hanging from my shoulder. At one time, Sara wasn’t sure about using the bow. But she tried and saw that she was good, and got better. In one deft motion, she put the arrow to the string, drew back, sighted and let go. The shaft struck the rabbit behind the left shoulder and pinned it where it rested.

  “That was a good shot,” Joey said. “Real good.”

  “Thanks.” Sara smiled, broadly. Handing the bow back, she sprinted over to the kill, pulled the shaft loose, held up the rabbit and said, “Here’s lunch. I’ll clean the rabbit at the house.” She pointed with the arrow. “It’s just up ahead.”

  More of the house and the yard came into view as we reached the head of the driveway. A two-car garage was connected to the house by a breezeway. The front porch ran the length of the house, but didn’t have a railing. The broad front yard was high and shaggy with grass, and in the middle stood a little wooden wishing well. The two-story house resembled a log cabin, but the logs weren’t rounded, but cut so they were flat and dark brown.

  “Pretty house,” Sara said.

  “Yeah,” Joey said. “And I don’t think anyone is home.”

  Walking up to the garage, I could see spider webs in all corners of the two garage doors and down along the sides. The garage doors had no windows. We went up the stone sidewalk to the house. Joey walked up the three wooden steps onto the porch; then Sara went. I followed.

  “Should I knock?” Joey said.

  “Sure,” I said, shrugging.

  Joey knocked his knuckles hard against the wooden door.

  We waited. Not expecting anyone. But we waited, and Joey knocked one more time, saying, “Hello!”