The Darkness After: A Novel

by Scott B. Williams

  While they were walking all afternoon in the rain, Mitch had more time to reflect on what had happened that morning. It was still almost surreal, but he had killed two men just hours before. He was surprised at how easy it had actually been, how he had spontaneously reacted to the situation as soon as he took it in and realized what was unfolding before his eyes. Despite his initial shakiness, his aim had been true and with just two perfectly placed arrows he had taken out both men before they could react.

  Even though he was not technically an adult, his years of dedication to learning hunting and woodcraft skills gave him distinct advantages over most people in a situation like this. Walking long distances and enduring the discomforts caused by the weather on a day like today were nothing new to him, and, in a way, he enjoyed the challenge. But thinking on all this, he knew there were many others with little in the way of survival skills or knowledge who were desperate to get somewhere: back home, out of a hopeless place like New Orleans, or to their loved ones as April was doing. How many would die trying before the power, communications, transportation, and security could be restored? He had no idea, but he was sure the numbers would be staggering if it took as long as he feared.

  Most people had no prospect of a safe place to retreat to, much less six hundred acres of remote woods bordering on tens of thousands of acres of undeveloped national forestland. Not only was his family’s land far off any main routes, it was also abundant with natural resources such as timber and firewood, edible plants, and wild game. A clear, spring-fed creek wound it’s way through, en route to the larger Black Creek, guaranteeing safe water, even in the absence of electricity to run the pump that pulled water from their well at the house. Mitch’s mom was in the habit of keeping the pantry well-stocked with groceries. Living that far out meant driving to Hattiesburg for most shopping, so she always bought a lot at a time. Of course all the frozen food, including the deer and wild hog meat he had contributed to their two large freezers, would be a thawed-out, stinking mess, but more fresh meat could easily be hunted without leaving the property. Compared to most, he and his sister were by far among the lucky ones.

  But what about all the others? What about April? She had proven she was tough enough to be a survivor, there was no questioning that, but where would she go? Where could she possibly go with her child, the child’s father, and her grandparents that would be safe for all of them? Where could they find the essentials of food and shelter and medicine if needed? He assumed that at least in some places people would try to organize shelters, but unlike after a hurricane or other limited disaster, supplies would not be pouring in from other regions. How were the authorities going to handle desperate, hungry crowds? How many places like the town they had just left were going to start making up their own laws out of desperation for some sort of order? It was mind-boggling to consider.

  He climbed back down to the railroad after a few minutes and found her wearing a dry pair of jeans and a white T-shirt, her wet, dark hair combed and pulled back in a neat ponytail. She had spread out the remaining food she had salvaged from the small stash of groceries she’d put in the car that morning, and Mitch sat down beside her to eat. They shared the last of a bag of tortilla chips and a jar of spicy salsa, and ate cold black beans right from the can.

  “This sure beats those energy bars I’ve got left,” Mitch said.

  April was staring off into space as she ate. “I just wonder if Kimberly is getting enough to eat. I keep worrying that David had already left that morning with her in my car before the power went out,” April said. “If he did, they might be outside somewhere just like this. They wouldn’t have anything to eat, because he wouldn’t have had any reason to bring food for what he thought was going to be a two-hour drive. It makes me sick to think about it. No one could properly care for a one-year-old out here like this, and especially not David.”

  “It happened so early,” Mitch said, “like you said before, they probably hadn’t left his parents’ house yet.”

  “I can hope. At least I know for sure that David does like to sleep in whenever he can. He was supposed to go to work that day, but not until noon. So he knew he could wait and leave as late as nine in the morning and still get home in time. But even if they are both at his parents’ house, I wonder if they’re going to have enough to eat and how long they’ll be able to stay there. I’m afraid for my baby. I’m afraid for all of us after what I’ve seen. What are we going to do?”

  Mitch didn’t have the answer. It would be much simpler if it were just her, alone as she was now. He would tell her to come back to his house and wait out the rest of this nightmare with him and Lisa. Her need to travel to Hattiesburg first was a problem. It would be dangerous going into any urban area, and dangerous getting back out, especially with a baby. There would be at least five of them, counting David’s parents. How difficult would it be to provide for so many, in addition to meeting his own needs and those of his sister? What about Lisa’s friends and others he knew from school and the town, who might also have difficulty surviving the duration of this event? Could he invite them all to his family’s land? How many would there be, and what about other strangers, other refugees who might find their way there on their own? How many could he help, if any? How would he turn away the ones he couldn’t, or even stop them all? And what of his own parents? Would his mom and dad be able to make their way back, and if so, how long would it take?

  Mitch had a lot more questions than he had answers, but he had a lot of respect for this brave young woman (whom he still thought of as a girl his own age), and he was determined to help her however he could.

  A week ago, he would have never dreamed he’d be sitting under a bridge in the middle of nowhere with someone like April. He had never met a girl anything at all like her, and as they ate and talked he found the opportunity to really look at her for the first time since they’d met that morning. With her wet, dark hair pulled back from her face, he could see that she was pretty without the eyeliner and mascara most of the girls he knew from school would not be caught dead without. She had a natural look that he found much more attractive, and her confidence and the ease with which she adapted to the circumstances they were in made her that much more appealing.

  April was easy to talk to, and he was not intimidated by her even though he was usually extremely shy around girls, especially most of the ones from school. He found it hard to look them in the eye when he had a reason to talk to one, and he rarely started the conversation. He was an outsider to the circle of the popular kids, and the only girls he was even remotely attracted to were definitely in that clique. Since he didn’t play the usual team sports or join in the unofficial extracurriculars, like sneaking off to the creek after school to drink beer or smoke pot with the rest of them, he was mostly excluded and kept to himself.

  He had developed crushes on a couple different occasions for girls that a lot of the other guys in the school were into, but none of those girls had ever given him the time of day. He thought about one of them sometimes when he was alone in the forest, fantasizing that she had his same interests and was there with him, living a life of adventure in the wild, free of the classroom and the idiotic rules of school and society in general. Usually in these fantasies they were both warrior-hunters, living by the bow and roaming a boundless primeval forest like the characters in the novels and movies that inspired his daydreams. Of course, the real-life girl he put into this fantasy world had little interest in the woods and would be horrified at the thought of the life he imagined for her. But for Mitch, when he was alone on the hunt, moving stealthily through the forest with weapons little changed for countless millennia, it was hardly a stretch to put himself in the dream worlds he conjured from the images of those stories.

  It was so improbable, but now here he was, sitting in the dark with a strong, determined young woman not so unlike those of his fantasies. Both of them hiding from a world gone mad, and both of them carrying weapons bloodied that very day in a figh
t for life or death. Mitch said nothing about any of this of course, but as they sat there talking, he couldn’t stop thinking how strange it all was.

  April was still wired, so when she volunteered to sit up and keep watch first while he slept, Mitch didn’t argue. He curled up on the ground a few feet away, wet and uncomfortable, but glad that for the first night since he left New Orleans, he was not alone.

  EIGHT

  Mitch was sitting awake in the predawn stillness listening to the sound of light rain falling when April began to stir. They both took their turns keeping watch and sleeping, and now he was ready to get moving. As soon as she stretched and had a drink of water from one of the bottles they were carrying, she was ready, too. His clothes had not had time to completely dry out, but it didn’t matter because they would soon be back out in the rain again anyway. He left her again for a few minutes so she could change back into her wet clothes, climbing back up to the roadway to look and listen.

  Nothing was moving on the road, and even the usual sounds of the morning woods were hushed by the softly falling rain. As the sky began to lighten, a solitary squirrel barked from somewhere in the mist-cloaked woods nearby, but he could hear no evidence of human life besides their own. The complete absence of mechanical sounds was amazing. Mitch was used to quiet mornings in the deep woods on the farm, but even there or in the farthest reaches of Desoto National Forest, there was almost always some faraway sound of traffic on a highway, an outboard motor on the creek, or a passing plane overhead. Now, all of that was gone. The silence in the absence of humanity’s machinery was palpable.

  Mitch had only experienced this kind of quiet once before, when his dad had taken him elk hunting two years ago in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, one of the few truly wild places remaining in the Lower 48. If there was anything good that came out of the failure of the modern world, this silence was it—at least while it lasted.

  For breakfast they finished off the rest of April’s canned black beans and ate two of the remaining energy bars that the couple in New Orleans had given him. Mitch told her that he thought it would take two full days to get to their land, partly because of the weather and partly because traveling cross-country along a pipeline would be slower going. They probably had enough food to make it, but he said that he was going to be ready if any game that could be taken down with the bow presented itself. He carried the strung bow loosely in his left hand as they walked, the quiver of arrows slung over his shoulder along with his small daypack.

  “Mornings like this, when it’s just raining lightly, are actually some of the best days to hunt,” he said. “If it’s raining harder, deer and other animals don’t move much, but in this, especially after a day of hard rain like yesterday, they are out looking for something to eat. It’s easier to sneak up within bow range, too, because when the leaves and stuff are wet you can walk more quietly. The rain also helps hide our human scent.”

  “You’re really into hunting, aren’t you?”

  “Nothing I’d rather do,” he said.

  “I guess there’s not much else to do when you live way out in the woods, is there?”

  “It’s not quite like that,” he said. “We do have a real house. We’ve even got TV and the Internet, if you can believe that!”

  “Did have,” April corrected him. “So, are you going to shoot a deer this morning?”

  “No, we’re way too far from home to carry a whole deer back, and I don’t like to waste any part of an animal I kill. I’m not really hunting, because we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. It’s just that if we come up on a rabbit or squirrel or something in easy range, I wanted to let you know so you wouldn’t freak out if I suddenly pull out an arrow and draw the bow.”

  “Okay, I gotcha. Don’t worry about me. I can be quiet if I need to.”

  They didn’t have to walk much more than an hour before they saw what Mitch was looking for: a major pipeline crossing the railroad at a near perpendicular angle, running east and west. It was obviously one that would go to Highway 49 and well beyond, judging by the size of the well-maintained right-of-way path, which was probably 150 feet wide. Looking east along its route, they saw that it crossed rolling terrain of hills and hollows, unlike the well-graded railroad bed that was mostly flat.

  “This looks like our turn off,” Mitch said. “Like I said, the going won’t be as easy, you can see that. It’s going to be muddy everywhere, and we’ll probably have to wade creeks down in some of those hollows.”

  “As long as it gets us to your place and I get to Hattiesburg, I don’t care what we have to go through,” April replied.

  “You’ve got the right attitude,” Mitch said. “You remind me a lot of my little sister. She’s a tough girl.

  “Well, at least it looks like the rain is letting up.” He pointed to the sky back to the west. The clouds were much lighter and there was only a drizzle that seemed to indicate the rain front had passed over. By the time they had walked a mile or so east along the pipeline right-of-way, the rain had stopped completely. Both sides of the clear-cut swath were bordered by mature pine forests. The right-of-way itself was mostly covered in grass that was almost waist-high, with occasional patches of blackberry briars on the hillsides and river cane and small willows in the hollows. There were old tire ruts from the service trucks and ATV trails winding along the route most of the way, but in some places they had to push through thickets where there was no path. There were no signs that anyone had been along the route since the rain, which Mitch said would have washed out tracks left before it started.

  “This is deeper into the middle of nowhere than I’ve ever been,” said April.

  “Well, this area isn’t nearly as remote as our land. We’ve got a lot more of the national forestlands east of 49. That’s were the Black Creek Wilderness Area is and there are several tracts of thousands of acres of woods with no roads of any kind.”

  Just thinking about those places made Mitch feel better. He was much more relaxed, now that they were surrounded by woods, and the closer he got to his familiar stomping grounds, the better he would feel. It also made him feel good that April trusted him enough to follow him there. It was a new experience for him and his outdoorsman skills to be so valuable and relevant when before they just made him an outsider to most everyone else his age. He was determined to show her that he was worthy of her trust, and as they walked he pointed out various animal tracks and other signs, such as droppings and deer runs. It was all new to her, and he delighted in sharing his knowledge with someone who seemed genuinely interested.

  They followed the pipeline all day, crossing several gravel roads and a couple of small paved ones but seeing no one as they made their way east. The rain seemed to be gone for good, but the skies remained overcast, gloomy and gray with no sunshine to dry the saturated ground and vegetation of the forest. Mitch estimated they had covered fifteen miles or more by late afternoon. They took a short break about every two hours, but otherwise they walked mostly non-stop. He was starting to think about looking for a place to camp for the night as they started up another hillside after crossing a muddy low spot in the right-of-way.

  Suddenly, something burst out of a clump of thick grass in front of him and took off up the path ahead. He froze in place and with one hand behind him, motioned for April to do the same. Then, with a deliberate, fluid movement that seemed to take forever in slow motion, he reached for an arrow with the same hand while the rest of his body remained motionless. When the arrow was free of the quiver, he brought the bow up with the other hand, careful to avoid any fast or jerky movement, while hoping that April was keeping still behind him. The rabbit they had spooked had done what rabbits frequently do when startled: it ran about a dozen yards and then stopped, its large ears erect, nostrils sniffing as it looked at them and tried to figure out what they were. Mitch drew the bow and steadied his breathing as he willed the rabbit to stay where it was for just a few more seconds, knowing that it could disappear in a flash if he he
sitated too long. As soon as he felt his right thumb anchor to the spot on his cheek that told him he was at full draw, he released the string.

  “You got him!” April said, in a loud whisper.

  Mitch smiled at her and walked ahead, not bothering to draw another arrow, as it clearly was unnecessary. A broadhead of course wasn’t ideal for small game, but all the arrows he had with him were fitted with those points because wild hogs were the only game legal to hunt that time of year. Its effect on a rabbit-sized animal was destructive, but also instantaneous, and it had died without a twitch.

  “Ever eaten a rabbit before?” he asked her as he bent to pick it up.

  “No, but I’m okay with it, I guess. As long as it’s cooked.”

  “Of course. I think we can safely build a fire tonight since we’re not near a road. If you’re ready, I’d say we ought to start looking for a place to do that and get set up to spend the night. At least it’s not going to rain any more.”

  Mitch led the way until the pipeline right-of-way reached a small crest, and then turned off along the ridge into the adjoining pine forest until he found a suitable area among the trees that was clear of underbrush and briars. “I think we’ll be fine just sleeping out in the open tonight,” he said. “If we get enough firewood together before it gets dark, we’ll have enough to last all night.”

  Since the ground and any fallen branches that were on it were still soaked from the rain, Mitch showed April the old Indian trick of collecting “squaw wood,” the smaller dead branches still attached to the lower reaches of standing live trees. He explained that these branches didn’t soak up much water, since they were off the ground, and they were also generally harder than the half-rotten ones that had fallen off long before.