Dark Land: An Apocalyptic Novel

by William Zeranski

  “Detained?” Uncle Ray shook his head, and stepped toward the desk.

  “Hold it,” the colonel addressed Sergeant Fort.

  Uncle Ray froze in his steps.

  An icy chill stabbed me deep in the spine. For an instant, I held my breath.

  “First, Ray, I’d offer you a seat, if there was one, but please, don’t do that again.” The colonel sat back in his chair, taking a relaxed position which dampened the tension.

  I glanced back at the MP. He surprised me with what I interpreted as a polite tip of his head. His gaze then went back to Uncle Ray who tucked his fingers into his front pockets, trying to be at his ease.

  Colonel Dorrance’s grin didn’t return and seriousness wrinkled the corners of his eyes. “Now, you all look fit, even well feed,” he said.

  “After a fashion, yes.” My uncle shuffled back slightly retaking his previous spot in line. “We’ve worked hard and taken care of—”

  “You are more fortunate than others,” the colonel cut in.

  “I believe it’s necessary to hear everything . . . Ray has to say,” the woman seated by the colonel finally spoke. “Don’t you think, Colonel?” She seemed to add his title grudgingly. “At this time, there is information we should know—”

  “Ah, I apologize to you,” Colonel Dorrance addressed us, and continued, “This is Ms. Rhoda Mallory, a regional aide to Senator Owens.”

  “A senator?” Mr. Wheeler stripped off his cap and scratched his sweaty hair. “We still have them?”

  The colonel grinned, but Ms. Mallory jolted upright in her chair, saying, “Of course, and having you cooperate is necessary to—”

  “Ms. Mallory,” the colonel spoke sharply, “this post and the associated portion of the Zone is under my authority and you are, at most, an observer—”

  “The Senator—”

  “The Senator is not here and, again, you don’t have to be. You’re here at my sufferance, and I can and do insist that you stop the interruptions or leave.”

  The exchange fascinated me. Some struggle was being played out right in the office. I didn’t know the details of this collision between the two of them, but the notion that we were somehow connected in some way, didn’t sit well at all. In the commander’s office, there had to be something more, and that unknown something—that something I was afraid of was dangerous, dangerous to me, my family, friends, and Sara. I wasn’t sure that the conflict between the colonel and aide was all that foreign to all of us who came through the Demarcation Zone.

  In that contentious moment, Ms. Mallory’s stare grew deadly, her eyes narrowed, and the way her body lifted from the chair she seemed ready to bound out of the office.

  “Well?” Colonel Dorrance coolly held her gaze, and raised an eyebrow. “Your presence isn’t necessary.”

  “Not necessary?” Her anger smoldered. “Not necessary to you, but . . .” In an instance of a hesitation, she seemed distracted by some other thought and settled back in the chair. “No, Colonel, you’re quite right, you should be able to go about your duty unimpeded”

  The colonel and the senator’s aide still sparred but in silence.

  “Please, tell me what the hell is going on here?” Uncle Ray crossed his arms. “We’d like to get a move on ourselves.”

  “Ah, yes, what’s going on,” Colonel Dorrance said. His gaze moved from Ms. Mallory to the desktop, then to us. He appeared forlorn as he frowned and pressed his lips. “So, what brought you out here? You just wanted to know what was going on?”

  “You’re kidding us with that kind of question, right?” Uncle Ray’s annoyance showed in a forced grin.

  I quickly said, “We wanted to know what a Demarcation Zone was. We heard about it from a starving man.”

  The colonel seemed taken aback, and said, “So, you weren’t overwhelmed by some urge to go and find out what’s been going on for the last few months?”

  “Not anymore.” I shook my head. There was nothing else to add. I didn’t want or care to talk about my parents. It wasn’t anyone’s business, and I just wanted to go home. “Your men got us, not the other way around. Remember?”

  “True,” Colonel Dorrance said, “and I wish I could in some way apologize for that, but life has not improved for us.” He looked at Senator Owens’s aide. “I’m sure Ms. Mallory would agree it will take a long time for things to get better.”

  She didn’t reply and her face was unreadable now, just a placid calm.

  “And when I said you are more fortunate than others,” Colonel Dorrance continued, “I meant it.”

  Colonel Dorrance stated that the plague was considered to be a continuing threat. That was why everyone continued to be tested. In some pockets of humanity out west, the manmade apocalypse still rose and moved through swaths of the remaining population. In Washington D.C. many senators and representatives lived and represented large depopulated regions, and they still had the urge to politic and discuss policies which only affected handfuls of people who didn’t have any running water let alone the electricity to receive proposed radio broadcasts.

  How could a government govern a people who didn’t have the know-how to feed themselves? The colonel puzzled over that often, he said. The lack of knowledge and ability of the general population to take care of themselves was what begot the Demarcation Zone.

  To hear the Colonel say that, I realized I was right when I’d said at Mr. Senkow’s house, “To think, somebody I never met decided I couldn’t be saved.”

  Colonel Dorrance stated the fact that government officials recognized that the deadly virus dealt more destruction than the two nuclear blasts. The plague swept over the world and only a few island nations were spared, but world trade had stopped, and the Zone had been created because no one knew what else to do. Saving some of the population was thought better then watching so many more starve outright. But once the Demarcation Zone had been determined and monitored and whole populations moved, taking actions to provide for survival didn’t work as planned.

  “One problem leads to another and to another.” Colonel Dorrance shook his head. “The main problem being, how do you teach a society to take care of itself—to simply survive—when all it knows is how to turn on a water faucet but not how that water gets there? Can you imagine what that means?” His exasperation displayed itself as he rapidly tapped a finger on the desk. “Right now, outside this facility, which is ringed with acres of chain link and topped with razor, is a population dwindling away because it doesn’t know how to plant a seed!”

  He paused and sucked in a deep breath as if he was a drowning man awash in a raging sea, and Ms. Mallory looked at her hands through most of what was said.

  “You are the first group of people to come across the Zone in a few months. You also look pretty healthy at that. You’ve succeeded in some fashion.” He raised a hand stopping any of us from speaking. “And I can’t have people like you coming here, let alone be seen. I can’t have what population there is under my control to get any ideas—any conspiratorial notions that somehow—food, power or anything like that was being kept from them!”

  The tension in the room was palpable. My mouth dried and perspiration dampened my palms.

  “And it’s for that reason that I’m going to do myself a big favor.” Colonel Dorrance set his elbows on the desk. “I’m sending you back.”

  “I’m leaving now, Colonel.” Ms. Mallory rose so abruptly the chair teetered backward before settling back down.

  Dorrance looked at the aide, her expression blank, but for a thin sheen of perspiration on her face. He nodded an acknowledgment.

  Sergeant Fort opened the door for Ms. Mallory, who didn’t glance at anyone of us as she left.

  The door closed, and after a moment of silence, Colonel Dorrance said, “We here, on this side of the Zone, are hanging by a thread. You must understand that.” The pleading in his voice came across as a subtle electric current. “Good men like Sergeant Fort, like the people who found you, they are loyal
to what’s left.” He frowned and then grinned, saying, “They haven’t been paid in months. Isn’t that right, Fort?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s correct.” The sergeant grinned, also.

  “But again, there’s nothing to buy either.” The colonel leaned back in his chair. “I’ve got a wife and daughter living just outside D.C. The Capital is an armed camp, and you’ve got a bureaucracy trying to squeeze survival out of an international system that hardly exists anymore. So, as I said, I’m going to do myself a favor, and you a favor. I’m sending you back, and I’m telling you not to come this way again. If you do . . .” He pensively bit his lower lip. “There will be no happy ending.”

  Chapter 28

  Colonel Dorrance’s instructions to Sergeant Fort were, “Feed them, and get them on a truck and back to where they came from.”

  It was already after 2:00 p.m. That was the time reported to me by Sergeant Fort. None of the wall clocks worked. The hands of the analogue clocks were frozen in the past and the digital clocks were blank

  With Corporal Welles at the rear, Fort led the way down two flights of stairs to the basement area. The floor of the corridor was yellow linoleum and an odor of old food hung in the air. Our steps clacked and echoed dimly as the sergeant headed down the hallway and stopped outside a set of double doors. Here the scent of food was stronger and fresher.

  “You will eat here,” he glanced at his wristwatch, “and in one hour we will head out.” He pushed through the right double door.

  The cafeteria could seat about a hundred people, and like the warehouse where we originally arrive, I-beams and heating ducts criss-crossed the ceiling. A number of junction boxes for electrical wiring lined the cinderblock wall by the main entrance. The ventilation ports in the ceiling blew down a feeble stream of air which did nothing to relieve the cool air flowing along the concrete floor.

  “This isn’t really a military base, is it?” Mr. Wheeler asked. “It’s kind of an afterthought, right?” He looked around, taking in the details.

  “No, it wasn’t a military facility, but a hub for a trucking firm,” Sergeant Fort said, taking us to the serving line at the left end of the room. He brought us to the front of a line of twenty people already waiting to be served, dinning trays in hand.

  Mr. Wheeler began to protest, but Fort shook his head, saying, “We are on a time schedule.”

  Obviously annoyed, the military personal, attired in camouflage, pants and dress shirts or working cloths, didn’t protest, because of the presences of Fort and Welles. But they looked at us as if we were some new phenomenon.

  I nodded to the soldier who originally stood first in line. He was young, nineteen or twenty. His lean face displayed an intensity that comes from experience. He was young, but he was a man. He scrutinized us, holding back his annoyance. In his green eyes, I thought I could see him considering our presence, who we were and what we were doing here.

  For some reason, I felt he thought that I was on equal terms with him. I hitched up my backpack, which sagged off my shoulder. I took a plastic brown tray in hand like the others held. I moved down the line. Uncle Ray moved me in front, making me first to be served.

  The servers, three men and two women, stood in position on the other side of the serving table. They wore camouflage caps and loose-fitting plastic gloves, and spooned vegetables and what resembled chicken in a sauce, from stainless-steel bins on the other side of the glass partition. The contents of large metal spoons were emptied into one of the tray’s six compartments. The thin face of every server displayed that strange fatigue, their eyes tired, working hard to remain focused.

  I thanked each server. Most nodded while one, an older woman, graying hair pulled back under her cap, offered a trace of a smile.

  Sergeant Fort directed us to a corner table at the far side of the room, a secluded spot, away from the door. We sat on one side of the table, looking out over the large room. Corporal Welles stood at one end of the table, his back against the wall with a full view of the cafeteria. Sergeant Fort at a position at the other end of the table where I sat. They didn’t watch over us, but the rest of the room.

  I held the fork and knife, and peered at the tray. The poultry, the potatoes, even the corn appeared grayed out, and the low illumination from the overhead lights threw a yellowish cast over the gray. I fought the urge to sigh, realizing this was the best they had. I cut into the gray square of chicken.

  Uncle Ray, who sat on my left, winked. To his right was Mr. Wheeler, who stared at his tray a long moment before venturing to eat. I grinned, which helped me cope with the tension, and there was a creeping discomfort, a sense of racing against the clock.

  Trays and utensils clattered as those who’d stood in line found seats and began their meal. Sergeant Fort, with his hands behind his back and a wide stance, dominated the corner of the room. No one took a table near us. We ate in silence.

  I considered everything Colonel Dorrance said back in that small office on the second floor. Plague, starvation and the effort to save a population snatched from one danger and transported to another. The animosity between Colonel Dorrance and the senator’s aide, Ms. Mallory seemed to pull at the thread that held his command together. Outside the post, people struggled on the edge of death, and my foolish notion of returning to my family’s home on Thatcher Road was more than dangerous but suicidal.

  Traveling from the ambush with the raiders to Mr. Senkow’s home, and seeing what had happened to him, forced me to realize that all that was left of my parents’ home was a ransacked shell. I couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to take anything they needed to survive from that house, I’d done that myself, but thinking of what must’ve happened to that dead woman lying in bed, it was hard not to think that being dead was better. The colonel was doing us a great favor by sending us back. With that thought, I began to eat faster and in earnest.

  ***

  The cafeteria doors swung open, the left door banging against the cinderblock wall.

  Sergeant Fort’s posture snapped up, rigid and wary. His hands no longer clasped behind his back, but at his sides, a hand resting on the holstered automatic.

  “Sorry,” a man in a dark-blue overcoat said, moving into the cafeteria, and nodding as if that was enough.

  But my stomach was still in mid-leap as I set my fork down.

  “Do we need this guy?” Welles moved up to the sergeant.

  “We don’t need Stabenow or any of them,” Sergeant Fort said when two more men and a woman entered.

  Dressed in business attire, they wore overcoats similar to the man the sergeant referred to as Stabenow, except one of the men had his overcoat over his arm. They moved into the cafeteria line behind Stabenow, who casually held out a tray, not paying attention to what was being served. He watched us.

  Sergeant Fort stepped to the vacant side of the table leaning slightly forward. “We may have a little problem here, but you people just eat and do your best to relax,” he said firmly, but somewhere in the tone, an edge of urgency couldn’t be missed.

  I nodded, and turning back to my tray, I noticed the ‘Door-banger’ Stabenow heading toward us. He pushed by a table occupied by uniformed personnel, bumped one chair, apologized over his shoulder, and continued on his way.

  Fort moved to the head of the table and stood ramrod straight again, his jaw flexing and his lips pressing in a line.

  Stabenow dropped his tray on the next table, food spilled onto the white surface. He stepped right up to Sergeant Fort, face to face, smiling one of those broad friendly smiles, and said, “Are these our guests?”

  “Yes, Mr. Stabenow,” was all Fort said.

  Seeing him standing rigid again, looking the man in the eye, I knew Sergeant Fort hated his guts.

  Stabenow’s eyes, gray and intense, moved from Sergeant Fort and then to me. “How are you doing?” he asked, still smiling, teeth showing.

  It had to be my age; maybe he thought I was still a kid. But like the Sergeant I didn’t like him
either, and a voice sounding something like Uncle Ray’s said, None of your damned business, but I opted for, “Okay.”

  “Just okay?” Stabenow kept smiling.

  In my head that voice offered another suggestion, but I said, “Okay’s good enough.” I picked up my fork.

  “That sounds reasonable.” His smile dimmed, and he nodded, directing another question at me, “So where are you off to next?”

  “I couldn’t say.” I stabbed a piece of chicken and continued to eat.

  “You couldn’t say,” Stabenow repeated, the smile still there, but the attempted friendliness was gone. “Well, Sergeant Fort do you—”

  “Mr. Stabenow,” the MP said, “I can’t say either.”

  The smile disappeared, and he glared at the sergeant. “So, that’s how it is?”

  “Sir, any questions should be directed—”

  “To the colonel, I know, Sergeant.” The muscles in Stabenow’s neck flexed. A restrained anger showed in his eyes, which he held on Fort, and then directed at me.

  I desperately wanted to hold his gaze, but the power behind those eyes forced me to look at my tray. A hot mix of embarrassment and failure burned up my neck and across my face.

  Stabenow’s shadow moved off, his shoes cracked on the concrete with every hurried step. The members of his entourage hadn’t even sat down at their table. They followed him out leaving untouched trays behind. Their overcoats flapped behind them as they left the cafeteria, both double doors banged against the walls.

  The clatter of utensils followed a brief instance of silence and then in the next fifteen or twenty minutes, Sergeant Fort rocked on his feet in agitation, from heel to toe. He gazed off from time to time, his lips worked pensively, pressing and releasing, and deep creases lined his brow as he ruminated over some thought. Finally, he glanced at his watch, and said, “We’ve got to get moving, so finish up.”

  “Sounds like something serious just came up,” Uncle Ray said, shoveling a last bite into his mouth while he stood.