The Darkness After: A Novel

by Scott B. Williams

  “STAY BACK!” April shouted, holding the bloody knife in front of her as she backed toward the rear of the car to gain more distance before he could rush her. “I’ll cut you, too, if you don’t leave me alone!” He hesitated for a moment, unsure what to do, as he was unarmed and clearly shocked by what she’d done to his friend, but then she heard the car door slam as the older man got out.

  “Get her, Danny! Don’t let her get away!”

  April turned and ran as the younger man rushed her. She had enough of a head start to sprint past the rear of the car before he could get around to the passenger’s side, but the older man was right behind her, chasing her down the highway. He was much faster than she had imagined. He caught up with her before she had covered thirty paces, and grabbed her by the hair as he overtook her. She tried to slash at him with the knife, but he yanked her off balance before she could connect, causing her to drop her weapon as she fell hard onto the gravel shoulder. She rolled and twisted to get out of his reach. Her fingers closed around a handful of the small rocks that she was determined to hurl in his face as a last resort. She saw him bend over to pick up the knife she’d dropped, and it was clear that he intended to do to her exactly what she had done to T.J. But then something really strange happened . . .

  The man suddenly fell for no apparent reason, collapsing to the roadway beside her when his knees buckled beneath him. She couldn’t understand what caused him to fall, but after he was down, she saw blood pooling on the pavement beneath his body. The other attacker, who had caught up and stopped to watch as she was grabbed and thrown to the ground, turned to run back in the direction of the car, terrified by something he’d seen. But before he could reach the passenger side door, he too collapsed. It made no sense to April, who hadn’t heard a thing, but then she saw something bright standing out in stark contrast to the black of the second one’s T-shirt where he was thrashing facedown by the car. The strange object was just to one side of his spine, where the kidney would be. Blood was welling up around it and spilling onto the road just as it was around the older man who had fallen. It was then that April recognized the bright object for what it was: the tail end of an arrow, with a fletching of brilliant yellow feathers.

  TWO

  April scrambled to grab her knife and then quickly got to her feet. Her hands were scraped from the hard fall onto the gravel, but she put the pain out of her mind as she looked around for whoever had taken out her attackers with, of all things, arrows. When she looked back along the highway in the direction toward New Orleans, she saw a lone figure step up to the pavement from the high grass in the ditch, holding what could only be a bow. The figure was dressed from head to toe in hunter’s camouflage, and if not for his movement, it would have been impossible to spot him against the backdrop of bushes.

  The archer was walking her way, and April’s first impulse was to turn and run. But she knew if he wanted to shoot her, running wouldn’t do any good. She told herself that if he wanted to kill her, he would have done it before revealing himself. She stood her ground, determined that if he did shoot her, it would not be in the back.

  Her four-inch knife was little better than nothing against a weapon that could kill from afar, but the adrenaline from using it on the first attacker still coursed through her body. Had she really cut a man’s throat? She had felt the resistance of flesh against the edge of the blade, and there had been a fountain of blood as he staggered back. But was he really dead? If he was, he was on the ground in front of the car and she couldn’t see him from where she stood. She glanced at the other two and was sure that both of them were dead. The one hit in the back had thrashed for a few seconds but was now still.

  As the archer approached, he raised one hand in a friendly wave and removed the floppy camouflaged hat that shadowed his face. She could see that he was smiling in a way that she took to be an attempt to reassure her. He called out to her, saying he would not hurt her. Although an arrow was on the string at the ready, he carried the bow loosely in one hand, down by his side in a non-threatening way. April could see a cluster of bright arrow feathers protruding over his shoulder.

  She waved back and tried to return the smile, lowering her knife as she did but still keeping her grip white-knuckle tight as she waited for him to get closer. When he did, she was surprised to see that the bowman was not really a man at all, but a boy—clearly young enough to still be in high school. He was not what she expected, considering what he had just done, but she kept her guard up and said nothing until he spoke again:

  “Are you okay? Are you hurt? I know you must be scared after what just happened, but you don’t have to worry, I won’t hurt you. I saw what was going on and it was pretty clear that you needed some help.”

  “I’m okay, and I’m not scared. This wasn’t my fault,” April said a little indignantly even though she was still trembling. She brushed the dirt off the knees of her jeans with one hand, still holding the knife in the other. Her left knee felt bruised from the fall. “I wasn’t looking for trouble. I just ran out of gas and wanted to get some more so I could keep going. I didn’t want anybody to die.” April glanced in the direction of the house the men had come from. “They came out right after I got out of my car. I think they heard the motor and probably wanted to steal it.”

  “I’m sure they did, and then they saw you and thought they could do whatever they wanted because you were alone. They probably would have killed you.” As he said this, he walked past her to the lifeless bodies of the two he had taken out with his arrows. He continued on to search in the grass beyond the shoulder of the road and bent to pick something up. April saw that it was another arrow, red with blood. It was the one that killed the older man, the one she had never heard or seen, that had passed completely through his neck and landed several yards beyond. The boy then walked to the front of the car to check the third man, the one she had sliced across the throat with her knife. She didn’t want to see, so she stayed where she was.

  “You sure gave that one a surprise. Where did you learn to handle a knife like that, anyway?”

  “I used to practice with my dad, a long time ago. Is he . . . ?”

  “Yes, he’s quite dead.”

  April looked down at the knife in her hand, for the first time noticing the blood that covered the blade. She bent down and wiped it in the grass near the shoulder of the road, keeping her eyes on the archer as she did. “My dad was into martial arts. He grew up in Okinawa and studied both Shorin-ryu and Aikido. After that, he had been an instructor for years as a young man, and even after I was born, and he still kept up his training. He taught me a lot about both armed and unarmed self-defense, but just in an informal way. He said the knife was one of the easiest weapons to carry, and that I should always have one with me. He gave me my Spyderco and I have always kept it close, mainly because it reminds me of him. I’ve never needed it for anything but opening the mail until today.”

  “He sure taught you well judging by how you handled yourself. Look, you didn’t do anything wrong. You did what you had to do, and no one would blame you, just like you don’t blame me. I’ve never aimed my bow at another human being until today either, but I’m sure glad I had it. I’m Mitch, by the way.”

  “I’m April,” she said. “I’m glad you showed up, Mitch. I guess you’re right. I probably couldn’t have stopped those other two, so if it hadn’t been for you, I don’t know . . . But where did you come from? I didn’t see anyone else around here when I got out of the car.”

  “I was resting behind some roadside bushes about a half mile back, in the strip of woods between the highway and the railroad. I was trying to get some sleep after walking the tracks all night. I heard you drive by, and at first I thought I was dreaming. There just aren’t many motors running since the blackout, you know. I jumped up and ran to edge of the highway in time to hear your car starting to cut out. I started walking this way because I wanted to see who it was that had a running car and if I could help get it going again. Ma
inly, I was hoping for a ride if it would still run. Before I got halfway here, I saw those guys come up onto the road and I slipped back into the ditch to stay out of sight as I came closer. Something about them just didn’t seem right, and I saw that you were alone.”

  “I can’t believe how you hit them like that and they never saw you, and neither did I. Where did you learn how to shoot a bow and arrow like that? You must be some kind of hunter or something.”

  “Yeah, I hunt. I grew up on six hundred acres of woods in Mississippi. I’ve been hunting all my life. I’ve been into the bow and arrow since I was old enough to shoot the toy kind with rubber-tipped arrows. I started hunting with real bows when I was about eight. I just like archery, and I’ve always preferred the bow and arrow to guns, but I sure wish I had my rifle, or at least a good handgun, with me now.”

  “You have your own guns? How old are you, anyway? You must still be in high school, right?”

  “I am. I’m a junior this year, though. I just turned sixteen. You’ve got to still be in school yourself, right?”

  “Ha, ha. No, I know I don’t look it, but I’m eighteen. Everybody thinks I’m about fifteen, though, even after they see Kimberly.”

  “Kimberly?”

  “My baby, my little girl. She’s just over a year old.”

  “Wow, I never would have believed you had a kid of your own. Where is she, she’s not in the car is she?”

  “No, I wish. But if I had her with me, I wouldn’t be out here on the road to begin with. As far as I know, she’s still in Hattiesburg. At least I hope that’s where she is. David, her daddy, well, his parents were keeping her overnight last weekend and I was supposed to go pick her up Monday morning, but I got called in to work, so he took my car and drove up there Monday night after he got off work. He was going to stay overnight and bring her back to New Orleans Tuesday morning, but then of course, whatever it was that happened and caused the power to go off and all the cars to quit working happened early that morning. I couldn’t call him, and I’m sure that my car isn’t running, so he couldn’t bring her back home. I just hope he wasn’t already out on the road with her when it happened.”

  “So the Mustang belongs to your husband?”

  “Boyfriend. Well, fiancé, I suppose, though it’s not official. We were supposed to be married by now, but that’s another story.”

  “So your car must be a newer one?”

  “Hardly new, but yeah, it’s a ’99 Honda Accord, so new enough that it won’t run.”

  “Well, his Mustang sure is pretty sweet. There can’t be anything under the hood of it that’s high-tech enough to be affected if you got this far. What do you think is wrong with it?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s just out of gas. It wasn’t running at all when this blackout thing happened. That’s why David took my car. He was having carburetor problems and had bought a rebuild kit for it. He went off and left the parts all over our kitchen table. I didn’t do anything that first day but pace the floor. I kept hoping my phone would somehow come back on or David would just drive up and everything would be okay. By the next day, I heard people around my neighborhood talking about what could have happened. Everybody seemed to think it was some kind of electromagnetic pulse from the sun.”

  “I think that’s probably it,” Mitch said. “Most likely it was caused by a solar flare, but nobody seems to know for sure. There were some news stories last year, though, about how something like this could happen, but I don’t think many people really believed it would.”

  “Well, some people were saying old vehicles weren’t affected by it. Then I saw some running that second day. Not many, but every once and a while, I would hear an old car or truck going by on our street. I started thinking that since this Mustang was built in the ’60s, it would probably run, too. I just had to get that carburetor back together and put it back on.”

  “You did that by yourself? That’s pretty impressive!”

  “I had to. I knew there was no other way to get to my baby. I had watched David take it off, so I knew how to put it back on. I worked on it all the next day. I was afraid to ask anyone for help, because I didn’t trust them not to steal the car. It was kind of hidden in the alley beside our apartment, so hardly anyone in the neighborhood knew it was there. The hardest part was putting the carburetor back together with the rebuild kit. But the kit did come with instructions and a diagram, showing where all the gaskets and parts went. David left his tools, so I was able to do it. Honestly, I think I may have done it even faster than he could have,” April laughed to herself and shook her head. “That’s why I just left today instead of the day all this happened. I would have almost been there by now, if I hadn’t run out of gas. I didn’t know how much was in the tank. The gauge has never worked since he bought it.”

  “Wow, now I’m really impressed. You put that carburetor back together and got it running all by yourself, with no mechanical experience? That’s amazing.”

  “You do what you’ve gotta do when you have a child,” April said, “no matter how much you don’t want to.” She glanced at the knife she was still holding and then folded the blade back into the handle. She put it back into her pocket, starting to relax a bit for the first time since the three men approached her. She felt confident that Mitch wasn’t a threat, but she still had a lot of questions. “You said you were walking all night; where were you going?”

  “Home,” Mitch said. “My family’s land is about forty miles northeast of here. I was in New Orleans, too, when the solar flare hit.”

  “You’ve walked all this way? What were you doing in New Orleans dressed like that, and carrying a bow and arrows?”

  “That’s a good question, isn’t it? Well, for one thing, I’ve just about always got my bow with me. I usually have my .357 Magnum revolver under the seat, too, at least if I’m driving my own truck. But like a fool, I didn’t take the gun that day; I knew I’d be driving across state lines, and it would be just my luck some New Orleans cop would stop me and find it. Since I’m not twenty-one, I’m not legally old enough to have a handgun, but back home in Perry County, nobody cares.

  “Anyway, I was in my dad’s truck because I was taking him and my mom to the New Orleans airport to catch an early flight and my truck doesn’t have a back seat. I put the bow and my camo stuff in there because I wasn’t going back to school that day anyway, and I figured I could drop them off and get back to the woods early enough to do some wild hog hunting before my little sister got home from school.

  “Of course my dad’s truck, being a brand new Ford F-150, just shut down right in the middle of the street while I was sitting at a red light. It happened about an hour and a half after their flight was scheduled to leave, and I still don’t know if they made it to Houston in time or not. I could hear an explosion from at least one plane crash in New Orleans from where the truck stopped.”

  “Oh my God! You must be worried to death about them then!”

  “I am worried, but I feel like they probably got to Houston before it happened. Like most flights out of New Orleans, they had a connection there and it was supposed to be a flight time of just about an hour. Unless something delayed their plane taking off or landing, they would have had enough time to get back on the ground there. If they did, they’re stuck in a bigger city than New Orleans, and I know it’ll be dangerous, but at least they’ll be alive. My dad would know what to do in any case, and I figured there was nothing I could do for them right now. There’s really no way to find out if they’re okay, but I have to get back to Mississippi and look out for my little sister. She was at a friend’s house the night before all this happened, and I’m sure she stayed with them, but I’m still worried about her. I know she’s got to be scared and worried about Mom and Dad, too. So I started walking out of the city, but I figured it was safer to travel at night and stay out of sight in the daytime, even after I got way out there and was walking the railroad tracks. That’s why I happened to be near here trying to rest when
you drove by, and the loud exhaust on that old Mustang woke me up.”

  “I’m glad it’s so noisy then. I didn’t like listening to it when David had it running before, and I’ve been worried about it attracting too much attention, but I guess that can be a good thing once in a while.”

  Mitch nodded. “Look, it’s going to be raining soon, and it looks like it might set in for days, judging by those clouds. We’d better get some gas in your tank and see if it will still start again. Since you’re heading to Hattiesburg anyway, I wonder if I could bum a ride part of the way? Our land is not far off your route, and it would save me a couple more nights of walking.”

  “Absolutely,” April said. “That’s the least I could do. There’s got to be gas in some of these abandoned cars and trucks, but I didn’t have anything to get it out with. Do you have any ideas?”

  THREE

  Mitchell Henley still had moments when he hoped the new reality he found himself in was a dream he would surely wake from. Had he really just killed two men with his hunting bow? Did this young woman who looked more like she was fifteen than the eighteen years she claimed just cut a man’s throat with a folding knife? It seemed impossible that the fabric of civilization could unravel in just a matter of days after the failure of technology, but everywhere he looked, it was happening. Mitch had practically grown up in the woods, and he much preferred to be outdoors than inside, but it was clear that almost everyone else was absolutely freaking out at the loss of their comforts, conveniences, and security.