Dark Land: An Apocalyptic Novel

by William Zeranski

  “Hey, how you two doing?” Joey called and walked over to us from one of the plank tables. He held an apple which he rubbed against his pants leg.

  “It’s good to see you,” I said.

  “It’s been awhile, and Sara, I’m sorry I haven’t been around.”

  “That okay. I understand.” She stood and gave him a hug.

  Sara knew the shooting at the house had given him a lot to think about.

  He nodded and then bit into the apple.

  I noticed Mr. Marcus working his way to his feet with the help of his cane.

  “How did you get here? You didn’t walk,” I said.

  “No, dad drove.”

  Mr. Sample used an alcohol fuel mix that Uncle Ray and Mr. Marcus made up, but the mix was in limited supply, so the meeting had to be a serious one.

  “We left the car down the driveway and walked up.” Joey’s gaze swept over the festival crowd. “We didn’t want to upset the party.”

  Mr. Marcus, my uncle and Mr. Sample made their way to the barn, weaving through the throng of dancers and small groups who talked and watched the fire. Mr. Sample tapped Lt. Brant and whispered in his ear. The lieutenant’s drumming slowed then stopped, but he continued to smile as he said something to the two other musicians. They nodded, still playing and smiling. Lt. Brant rose and followed after Mr. Sample.

  “Something serious is going on,” I said, watching her father, Uncle Ray and the others go into the barn.

  Chapter 20

  My uncle walked into the barn with the others and I didn’t like it. I puckered my lips, drawing them in and then out. I stood and took Joey by the arm. The sleeve of his heavy green nylon jacket was cool to the touch. “Okay, quick, what’s going on?”

  Joey took another bite from the apple, and while chewing, said, “Just north of the town, one of our patrols spotted the raiders. Well, they heard them.”

  “Heard them?” Sara moved next to us and took my hand.

  “Yeah.” Looking from Sara to me, Joey’s eyes were narrowed as if he still scrutinized some deep thought.

  “Okay,” I said. “And . . .”

  “The patrol followed as best they could and found where the riders were stopping for the night,” Joey said in a low voice.

  “What else? What’s going on?” I leaned toward him.

  “My dad’s—”

  “—got a plan, right?” I lightly thumped him on the shoulder with a fist.

  Joey gave a quick nod. “They’ve camped north of town, in a house.”

  “Thanks.” I started to the barn, holding Sara’s hand, turning to Joey, I said, “You coming?”

  “To the meeting?” Joey tossed the apple core into the bonfire.

  “Well, yes.”

  “I didn’t think my dad wanted me there.”

  “You ask?” I looked him in the eye. “Don’t you think you’ve earned the right to be there?”

  “What?” A quizzical expression caused his eyebrows to pinch at the bridge of his nose.

  “Remember the house, the rider?” I asked “You did what had to be done. Remember?”

  “I didn’t forget,” Sara said. “Come on.”

  He stuffed his fists into his jacket pockets and nodded.

  We moved through the crowd around the roaring bonfire, crossed an open patch of ground and entered the barn through the wide open doorway. The light from the fire rose high behind us throwing our shadows along the barn floor, which was covered with a scattered web of dry and dirty straw.

  They huddled around the Franklin stove at the center of the barn with a lantern set on a stool nearby. My uncle and Lt. Brant shared a bench. Next to them Mr. Marcus sat on a simple, wooden high-back chair, his bad leg propped out in front of him toward the front of the barn. Joey’s father sat on a chair on the other side of the stove, his view of us was blocked by the stove pipe. He spoke in a low voice, but stopped when we neared, but stopped and glanced around the tin chimney. “Joey, something wrong?”

  “Mr. Sample,” I said. “He came in with me, and I need to know what’s going on.”

  He was about to speak again when Uncle Ray, said, “Neil, why not? There shouldn’t be anything to hide.”

  After a moment’s pause, Mr. Sample nodded. “Fine.” He waved for Joey to join him and Joey went to the other side of the stove and crouch next to his father. He put a hand on his son’s back.

  Sara moved to her dad, sitting on the arm of his chair. He put his arm around her waist. I dropped onto the end of the bench next to Uncle Ray.

  “Well,” Mr. Sample rubbed the back of his neck and tugged on his ball cap, “as I was saying, they’ve bivouacked in a house north of town, and we’re going to try and finish them off tomorrow.”

  “You’re moving fast,” Lt. Brant said.

  “Good,” I said.

  Uncle Ray glanced at me out of the corner of his eye.

  Mr. Sample nodded and said, “I think the faster, the better.”

  “We’re going to be there, too? Right, Uncle Ray? We need to finish them.” I caught myself glancing at Sara.

  “They need to be dealt with,” Mr. Marcus said.

  “But I just keep wondering why they keep coming back,” Joey said, looking at his father.

  “Who knows why,” Lt. Brant said. “Returning to the scene of their crimes, maybe?” He chuckled.

  “Maybe they don’t have a choice,” I said. “The people in town have already killed some of them. We’ve even gotten some of their foragers. And it’s just that . . .”

  “What?” Sara took a hold of her father’s hand.

  “Like us, they won’t go west,” I said.

  The fear of plague was still a fearsome threat if only in our minds, because no one was going to go and find out. When there was still television in those early days, everyone was riveted to the screens, hearing about the sickness moving from one Mid-Western city to the next. From one airport on the west coast the plague made that big leap to Japan and then the rest of Asia. People got sick and quickly died. Only road blocks, armed citizens and finally martial law kept the east coast free of that kind of death. Now, no one wanted to get the sickness and bring back a virus which caused people to drown in their own bodily fluids.

  “But east, we know from Lt. Brant, there was some effort to create some kind of order, some place for people to keep living, right?”

  “Yes,” Lt. Brant said. “But I’ve told you what it was like. I don’t want to go back.” The lieutenant gazed at the barn floor.

  “I know . . . and I know there was no reason for you to stay” I said.

  “Stanley, what are you getting at?” Mr. Sample asked.

  “I don’t think the raiders have a choice either—assuming they’re the same people.”

  “Oh, please, let’s not even entertain the possibility that there are others,” Uncle Ray said.

  “No, I don’t, but just the same,” I said. “I think they’re being pushed this way by someone else.”

  “That’s a pretty big assumption,” Lt. Brant said.

  “But Joey asked the right question. Why do they keep coming back?” I said. “Okay, they’re out of food and winter is coming, but they can’t win here, not against us.”

  “That seems true, but where are you going with this?” The lieutenant crossed his arms.

  “After we get these raiders, we have to find out who else is out there. We have to know, because I don’t want to be surprised if they—whoever they are—decide to come our way.” I looked from face to face and ended with Mr. Marcus who nodded and then I gazed at Sara.

  “When did you get so smart?” Uncle Ray grinned. “I think he’s onto something, though.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Sample said. “But we don’t have time to plan that kind of expedition, not now. We have an attack on the raiders to contend with . . .” He pulled a pocket watch from inside his jacket pocket and popped open the cover. “In seven hours.”

  A chilling wind blew in through the open barn doors,
lifting the smoke from the Franklin stove out an open loft window at the back of the barn. A moan rose from the stove pipe as the smoke flowed over the top.

  “Look,” Joey said. “Snow.”

  Fat flakes, appearing gray and then white in the flame of the bonfire, drifted down, salting the plank floor.

  “Wonderful,” Uncle Ray murmured, not sounding all that pleased. He propped his elbows on his knees and warmed his hands in front of the stove. “Wonderful . . .”

  Snow only made life harder. Maybe there won’t be much falling that night, but more would come with the first heavy snowfall and then that first storm would follow.

  “We have to get ready, Uncle Ray,” I said. “Who else is going?”

  Uncle Ray said, “I’ll talk to Dan Hansel, but I’m sure he’ll go, and—”

  “—Ray,” Mr. Sample said. “I’ve already got enough of my people. We’ve got the element of surprise. I don’t think we’ll need anymore. We don’t want a whole bunch of people tramping around in the woods out there. In the dark.”

  Mr. Sample wanted a few of us to join the attack, just a little more support. He didn’t see any reason to start asking everyone at the party if they were interested in being part of the ambush. Why break up the festivities? He smiled at that, but he also didn’t want the bad guys to have more targets and more chances of killing one of us. Or by accident, killing each other.

  All that mattered to me was that I was going. I wanted to be part of the fight, and the sooner the fight was done, the sooner I could head out . . . maybe head home, because right then as I watched the snow drifting out of the night, thoughts of my parents drifted in like the snow, out of the dark, backlit by the fluttering tongues of flame from the bonfire.

  Uncle Ray went hunting for Mr. Hansel. He also wanted to see if Maggie Waite would go on the off chance someone might need some medical attention. Mr. Sample cringed at the idea, but didn’t argue. Mr. Marcus accepted Mr. Sample’s offer of a ride home, and with cane in one hand, he hobbled along with Joey and his father to their car.

  Sara and I watched her father, Mr. Sample and Joey move into the dark and down the road to their car. The firelight threw our silhouettes, long and flickering, along the thin layer of snow.

  “You should go with your dad,” I said.

  “He knows I’m with you,” Sara said. “And I have this.” She drew her father’s snub-nosed revolver from an outside coat pocket. “He told me to the bonfire’s glow.”

  She giggled. A smile crinkled the corners of her eyes.

  “Okay.” I chuckled. “But the walk to your house is going to be cold.”

  “That’s okay.” Sara took my hand.

  We walked toward the west ridge. The voices and the music grew dimmer, becoming a pulsing whisper on the crisp-cold air. The cloud cover broke enough, so silver light cast by a full moon cut through to glitter on the new snow.

  The festival sounds faded away to silence. I took a deep frosty breath. Not a great deal of snow had fallen, but there was enough that every footstep squeaked and snow piled up on boot tips to fall away with the next step. Like marching, I started thinking of each footfall, thinking of where I’d be going after the attack in the morning. The raiders’ camp was north of the town, to the east, but I needed to go further east. A direction I hadn’t been in so very long, and with the thought of being there, seeing my parents’ house, seeing what was left . . . fear suddenly made me lose my step as if I’d stumbled but not quite.

  “What?” Sara asked.

  “Oh, nothing. Just thinking.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of home,” I said.

  “What’s there to think about? Life is okay here—better than okay.”

  But she spoke of the valley, and my thoughts were on a place, a house—my parents who were miles and miles away. Maybe being in the house where I used to live or standing on the sidewalk where I once road my bike and met with friends. I hadn’t seen my parents, and I hadn’t seen my parents dead, but I couldn’t really see them as ghosts either. I couldn’t think of them as that. I had to know more, and going there was the only way. I couldn’t tell Sara that. Not that she wouldn’t understand, but she’d keep me from going. I knew that, and that’s why I said, “Yeah, it’s good here.”

  We worked our way up the ridge, heading north. A brisk wind picked up the soft snow, and in the scattered moonlight, it looked like gray smoke rolling along the ground.

  “You’re worried about tomorrow, I guess,” Sara said. “I am, too.”

  I stopped walking and turned to her; putting my arms around her, I studied her eyes which, instead of the crystal-blue, were dark and shadowed. When I first kissed her, her lips were cool, but quickly warmed. We stood there for a long time, holding and kissing in that cold night world.

  I walked her home. At the front door, we hugged and I turned, not wanting to go.

  Sara, I thought, I have something to tell you and I can’t. I plan on going home to a place you’ve never seen, and I know won’t be the same, but I’ve got to go.

  Pulling away from her, our fingertips seemed to touch for a long time; then the front door closed.

  ***

  I returned to the cabin, which was in darkness, except for the low, red glow from dying embers in the fireplace and moonlight sifting in through a part in the curtains I pulled off my coat and tossed it over the back of the couch where I slept. Without a good fire, a chill pervaded the room.

  “Get some rest.” Uncle Ray’s voice startled me.

  My eyes adjusted and I saw him reclining on the other couch, his shoulders against the arm. His legs stretched out along the length of the cushions.

  “You’ll need a little sleep. We’ve only got a few hours to go,” he said.

  “Yes, but I need to put a few things together first.” I felt with my foot for my backpack which sat on the floor near the fireplace.

  “What things?” The weariness went out of my uncle’s voice.

  After a moment of silence that weighed down like a great stone, I said, “Food. I want to pack some.”

  “Food?” Uncle stirred and slowly sat up. “So, you’re thinking of going somewhere . . . after the ambush.”

  I took my pack from the floor, and I paused, feeling my uncle’s gaze.

  “You’re going to take that map of yours and go, right?” he asked, a sudden sharpness in his voice. “And why now?”

  “If not now, when?” I unzipped the pack. My hand began to tremble. “The snow is coming. I know that, and yes, it’s getting colder, but spring will come . . .” I faced the dark shape of my uncle. “And who will come with it? I don’t know. You don’t.”

  “Yes, that’s true, but you have something else in mind and that’s what I’m talking about . . . about you going back to your parents’ home.”

  “Yes, that’s on my mind.” I tried to squelch the growl that rose up from deep in my throat because the talking, the back and forth, became something I’d known before. I recalled seeing my brother Johnny and Uncle Ray sparring; then Johnny got on that motorcycle and left. “He went back to find them. That’s what my brother was doing. We both know that.”

  “And Johnny’s dead.”

  Blindsided by what Uncle Ray said, I was unable to utter a word, the fight knocked out of me.

  “Yes . . . yes, I know,” I whispered. “I helped bury him. But does that make him wrong . . . that he tried?”

  Uncle stood, quietly. His breathing was audible over the crackle of the last remains of the wood fire.

  “Can’t we do both?” I help out my hands, palms up, imploring. “Why can’t both be done? Find out who else is out there and go to the house?”

  Uncle Ray crouched by the fire and picked up a short twig, lit in the embers, and touched the tiny flame to the wick of the lantern on the coffee table. The flame flickered and the odor of kerosene rose up as he turned the adjustment knob. He stood and nodded. “Okay. But I can only promise that we’re going to try. That’s all. Stanley,
that has to be enough for you, is it?”

  I sighed out a long breath and nodded.

  “Good then. We’ll pack some food, water, and then sleep. We have to get through tomorrow morning first.”

  I nodded again and then smiled as he grinned. I moved quickly around the coffee table to hug him. We are going, I thought, so pleased and warm inside. But I knew Uncle was right to be wary, we had to finish the coming fight.

  Chapter 21

  My homemade map, sealed in a clear plastic storage bag, was the last item I tucked into the pack, along with vegetables, turkey meat, and some venison, all of it enclosed in plastic bags. Once Uncle Ray and I were on the way, we didn’t want food to be an immediate problem, but I knew what I’d packed wouldn’t last more than a few days, a week on the outside.

  Still, racking my brains, as I considered other ways to include more food, Uncle Ray said, “Enough.”

  The time for a few hours of sleep had come. Sleep, of course, wasn’t on my mind. But once the order came; it was an order, I obeyed. A wave of fatigue came unwanted.

  A heaviness tugged on me as if gravity had in that instance increased, and I dropped onto the couch. My brain grew foggy. I recalled mumbling a goodnight to Uncle Ray. I rolled onto my back and sleep came, rushing in warm, even in the chill of the cabin as the fire had gone out.

  Anxiety about the coming assault on the raiders’ bivouac couldn’t stave off that rushing slumber, but the sleep was strange, bringing on a floating netherworld, a place where sleep and dream met. In a slow-motion fall, I drifted from dark to light.

  In that transition, the stark dreamy light collapsed, fusing together to become the dining room of my parents’ house with all its familiar furniture, the long dining table, the matching dark wood chairs and the framed print of a wintry hunting scene hanging over the server.

  I saw my mother smile. Her short, brown hair, made lighter by sunshine coming over her shoulders.