The Darkness After: A Novel

by Scott B. Williams

  “The next day we all figured that the power wasn’t going to come back on anytime soon, so Jason, Stacy, and Lisa set out walking to your folks’ place. Lisa said that old truck of your grandpa’s was still sitting out there in the barn. We talked about it and figured it would still run, so Jason planned to use it to go to Hattiesburg to get his mom. I don’t know what happened after that. If he did manage to get her, they didn’t come back here. As far as I know, no one has been back to the Burns’ house since they all left that day.”

  Mitch was frantic with worry now. What did this mean? Had all of them gotten in the truck and gone to Hattiesburg? Could they have gotten stuck there or broken down on the road somewhere? What if the truck had been stolen or taken from them by force? Or maybe they were safely back at the farm by now? Maybe they couldn’t get the truck running and never even left? There were so many possibilities, but there was no way to get any answers until he ruled them out one by one.

  “I’ll bet they’re all just fine and waiting out their at your folks’ place,” said Mr. Holloway, wary of how his news had affected Mitch. “Jason probably picked up his mom, and they decided it would be safer to stay out there than try to come back to Brooklyn, since we’re so close to the main highway here.”

  Mitch hoped he was right but was doubtful. Wouldn’t they have at least stopped back by their house to get some of their stuff? He was sure there would be things there they would need. He wanted to walk over there to check and be sure there was no sign they’d been back, just in case, but first, Mr. Holloway insisted that he and April come to his house behind the store and eat breakfast.

  Mitch didn’t argue with that. He was starving and April said she was, too. Bacon, fresh eggs, and biscuits were a welcome change from the spartan fare they’d had on the road. These rural folks were well set for food, at least for the foreseeable future, and with propane, wood stoves, and other essentials for living off the grid, losing the power for a while wasn’t too much of a disruption in how they ate.

  As April and Mitch finished their meal and last cups of coffee, April expressed her doubts about continuing on to the farm with him. “If the truck is not there anymore, I’m just going to be walking that much farther out of my way and will lose even more time getting to Kimberly,” she said.

  Mitch felt as if he were on the receiving end of one of her vicious kicks. “But we don’t know that it’s not there,” he argued. “It’s highly likely that they did pick up Mrs. Burns and drive back, and that it is there. Or it could be that Jason and the girls couldn’t figure out how to get it running anyway. Jason doesn’t know anything about mechanics, as far as I know. If any of them could get it going, it would be Lisa, but who knows?”

  “That’s the problem,” April said. “We just don’t know. I’m thinking I should just try to make my way to Hattiesburg from here, while I’m closer.”

  “That would be crazy!” Mitch said, starting to panic at the thought of them suddenly parting. “You know by now how dangerous it is to travel at all, much less alone. We need to stick together, like we planned.”

  “I don’t want to go alone, but I know you can’t go with me. Your first responsibility is your sister, and I wouldn’t expect you not to look for her first.”

  “Then just go with me to my house. It won’t take long. I’ll find her and then I promise you I’ll help you get to Hattiesburg, one way or the other. I won’t let you down.”

  When they left Mrs. Holloway’s kitchen, April still wasn’t sure. He managed to talk her into walking with him the short distance to the Burns’ house. After looking around the outside and peering in the windows and doors, it appeared that no one had been there for a while.

  “Wherever they are, it looks like they didn’t come back here after they left. Look, April, it will only take a few hours to get to my house and find out if the truck is there or not. If it is, it could make all the difference. If you go on alone from here, anything could happen. Will you at least take a chance that it’s there?”

  “I’ll go with you today, but if it’s not there, I can’t wait any longer and with or without the truck, and with or without you, I’m heading straight for Hattiesburg.”

  “Okay, that’s a deal. Either way, you won’t regret it. If you do have go on alone, at least you’ll be even better armed than you are now. I’ll make sure of that.”

  They walked back to Mr. Holloway’s store on the way back to the intersection of the road and the hiking trail. “It’ll take you most of the day to walk home on that trail, Mitch,” the store owner said. “You know that last big storm we had knocked down a lot of trees over the path, and the forest service hasn’t cleared them all out yet. Why don’t y’all just run the creek? Heck, with the way it’s been raining, it’s up a lot. I’ll bet you can get there in five or six hours on that current.”

  “I would, but my canoe is at the house, so that kind of defeats the purpose, and I doubt the canoe rental place is open this week,” Mitch said with a laugh.

  “That ain’t a problem at all, Mitch. The outfitter left, that’s true. He had that old diesel Land-cruiser that he kept around back, so he was going somewhere over in Louisiana where his wife was from. But he left me a key to the building and his storage yard. I know he won’t mind if Doug Henley’s son borrows one of his canoes. Your dad has helped him out a bunch of times when he’s had boats stolen and that time somebody broke in his cabin.”

  “Wow, that would be great! A canoe would get us there a lot faster. Have you ever been canoeing, April?”

  “No, but I’ll learn quick if it means it gets us there faster,” she said.

  THIRTEEN

  Mitch seemed almost elated as they shoved off from the sandbar under the bridge in an aluminum rental canoe, a ticket back to his home that would be so much easier than walking. But April knew that every positive thought he had must have been dampened by concern for Lisa. All this time, he had been sure that she was safe at the Burns’ house, but now she could be out on the road some-where—the same treacherous road that the two of them had just come from. Lisa could be in real and immediate danger. Anything could have happened if she’d attempted that trip with Jason and Stacy in the old truck, and Mitch was sure that she would have gone with them, as they would not have left her there alone.

  Mitch dug his paddle in with strong strokes, determined to get home as fast as possible, and April did her best to help him. Although she had never been in a canoe before, she picked up the paddling technique quickly after Mitch gave her a few pointers. From her position in the bow, all she really had to do was provide extra power, while he maneuvered the slender, seventeen-foot craft through the logjams, snags, and gravel shoals of the stream. Running the creek in the silent canoe, Mitch said he felt much more at ease than on any part of the route they had taken so far, including the isolated pipeline. Black Creek flowed for dozens of miles through remote national forestlands, and aside from a few access points, it was far removed from roads. They rounded bend after bend, seeing no signs of people but lots of wildlife, including herons, kingfishers, wood ducks, and at one point even a deer drinking from the edge of the water.

  April couldn’t help but notice the beauty of her surroundings: mile after mile of magnificent old pines and hardwoods and the clear, whiskey-colored waters of the swift-running creek that swept their canoe past contrasting white sandbars like a magic carpet.

  “This is an incredible place,” April said, looking around her as they slipped beneath high clay banks topped with towering pines that seemed to rake the sky above.

  “It is that,” Mitch said. “Most of our land looks just like this, except our creek isn’t big enough to canoe.”

  “I can see why you said it was a good place to be after what’s happened. I can’t imagine the refugees finding their way here anytime soon.”

  “We can hope not,” Mitch said.

  Though the natural beauty awed her, she almost felt guilty for enjoying it. Here she was on the fourth day after leav
ing New Orleans, still not in Hattiesburg with her child, and at the moment traveling in the wrong direction to get there. She trusted that Mitch was doing the best he could to help her, but there had been so many setbacks. None of them were his fault, but even so, she had to remind herself that she was not his priority, despite the bond that had developed between them because of what they’d been through in their short time together.

  With Mitch’s sister missing, April knew that he would not stop until he did everything in his power to find her. On top of that, if the old truck was gone, April’s hope of an easier way to get to Hattiesburg was gone with it. She would still have to walk, and as they skated quickly on the current she wondered if she had made a mistake getting in the canoe with Mitch.

  Even if the truck was still there, it might be more dangerous to try and drive it than it would be to continue walking. There could be more roadblocks, more crooked cops, or more men like the three on Highway 11. After Mitch opened her eyes to alternative routes like pipelines and railroads, she knew that if she did have to walk, it would not be on the main roads. If she had parted ways with him that morning, she could have just continued north on the railroad that ran through Brooklyn. But she had to admit she didn’t like the idea of going alone, even on that route.

  As Mitch had pointed out, despite her martial arts skills, the only weapon she had was her knife, and being alone would put her at a disadvantage in a confrontation, especially if there were more than one person involved. And while she was fascinated with the bow and arrow after seeing his skill with it, and was determined to master it herself someday, even if she had one of her own, it wouldn’t do her much good given her current skill level. What she needed was a gun, and Mitch promised her that once they got to his house she would have one. Between him and his father, they had a variety of firearms to choose from, and when she and Mitch parted, he would make sure she was well-armed so she could protect herself and her family.

  That alone was worth the extra time it would take to make the side trip to his land, even if she did end up having to go alone from there to Hattiesburg. From what she had seen, things were not going to get better anytime soon. Wherever she ended up with Kimberly, David, and his parents, there would likely be more threats to deal with.

  David didn’t have a firearm of any kind because owning one would violate the terms of his probation. Before she had met him, he got caught selling a small amount of marijuana, but he had stayed out of trouble since and certainly didn’t want to risk going to jail. She didn’t know if his dad had one in their house or not, but she didn’t recall any mention of it if he did.

  She could only speculate as to what the conditions might be in a small city like Hattiesburg. As Mitch said, it was not big enough to be as desperate as New Orleans, but even so, 50,000 people was no small number. Unlike in rural communities like Brooklyn, most of those people would not be equipped to continue the day-to-day necessities of living without electricity, grocery stores, and cars. Mitch said that Hattiesburg was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina, and the grid had been down there for an extended time, but outside help had quickly flooded into the region after the storm had passed. Shelters were opened and basic needs were provided for. Without that help from the outside, the situation there now was bound to be vastly different.

  Mr. Holloway and the other men in Brooklyn hadn’t had any more news than the other people she and Mitch had met—just rumors spread from some of the refugees passing through. It seemed that no one knew anyone who had been in contact with a place that was not affected by the blackout. Even with a few older vehicles still running, no one they talked to came from anywhere beyond the scope of the event. Every day they kept hoping information would find its way there, but so far like everyone else, they were still in the dark in more ways than one.

  As they paddled down the creek, April kept expecting some change in the scenery around each bend, an open field perhaps, or a house or some other sign of humanity. Yet mile after mile, the stream wound through seemingly endless forest, broken only by a single bridge they passed beneath, which Mitch said was a little-used county road. It felt as though they were in a trackless wilderness, and the total absence of sounds from man-made machinery, even from distant roads or passing planes, added to that effect. Mitch told her that in reality, despite the feeling of isolation among the tall trees, they were not that far from paved roads that roughly paralleled Black Creek’s course. If they were to set out walking at right angles to the creek, they could find a road within a mile or so on either side.

  “I sometimes wish that weren’t the case, but the reality is that there are roads everywhere in this state and everywhere else in the country really, except in a few big areas out West like that place in Montana I told you about, where Dad took me hunting.”

  “Well, it sure seems like a wilderness here to me,” April said. “I guess those roads don’t mean much anymore if no one has a vehicle to drive on them.”

  “True. It does make a place like this much more inaccessible, kind of like it used to be in the old days. Given what’s happened, that’s a good thing, and that’s why I am so grateful for our land down here. I’ve been thinking about how all this is going to play out and wondering just how many people living in the cities and bigger towns are going to actually make their way out of the crowds and to the country. I mean, I don’t know much about cities, maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t you think that most people there would know that if there is nothing left to eat in the stores, their only hope is out in the country, where the farms are?”

  “Sure, I think so. Everybody knows their food comes from farms, but I haven’t seen much to eat so far on this whole journey. So where are all the farms out here?”

  “Unfortunately, there are not many at all left in south Mississippi. People that own land around here grow pine trees, not food crops. There’s more money in it, and it doesn’t require much work. A lot of the landowners live somewhere else anyway. It’s not like it was in my grandpa’s day. He was always telling me how they raised everything they ate. They grew vegetables, ground their own cornmeal, made their own cane sugar, slaughtered their own chickens and hogs. They were completely self-sufficient. There aren’t many people living that way nowadays, even way out here.

  “There are a few small cattle operations, but most are like my dad’s, just a part-time hobby. Some people still grow corn or watermelons, or maybe soybeans, and of course a lot of country folk keep up a small garden around the house, but no one I know of lives completely off of their land the way they did in Grandpa’s day. So I guess even if some of those people make it out of the cities, they are going to be disappointed in what they find. That’s what really worries me. When they get desperate enough, hungry enough, there’s just no telling what people will do—even good people—not to mention the kind like those three who murdered that poor old couple.”

  “It’s really scary,” April agreed. “It could turn into something like a war, I guess, with everybody fighting over food and whatever medicine is still left.”

  “It could even be worse than a war,” Mitch said, “because practically everybody will be involved in it, not just soldiers like in a conventional war. Even people who don’t want to fight will have to fight to defend themselves and their property and supplies, if they have any.”

  “Speaking of soldiers, where are they anyway? Why haven’t we seen any sign of the military? They help out after hurricanes and other disasters. Where are they now?”

  “You can bet that they’re busy wherever they are,” Mitch said, “and I’ll bet they’re involved in maintaining order in a lot of places, they’re just probably not operating far from their bases. But as a matter of fact, there’s a major Army National Guard base not far to the north of here. It’s called Camp Shelby. It’s a major training area for the Guard and regular soldiers heading for overseas combat. They’ve even built simulated Iraqi and Afghan villages there for training purposes. Sometimes we can hear art
illery and heavy machine gun fire from our land on the weekends when they’re doing a lot of training.

  “They also use parts of the national forest for special exercises. I’m sure the entire place is locked down under tight security right now, so that’s probably another thing we should be aware of. The base covers a large area, and it’s pretty much between our place and Hattiesburg. Some of the back roads I know to get to Hattiesburg either go through part of it or pass close to it.”

  “Are there other ways to get there? The last thing I want to do is go through another roadblock.”

  “Oh yeah, there are lots of back roads going everywhere, and I know most of the ones north of here a lot better than the area we walked through. It might involve a roundabout route, but there are alternatives to going near the base or getting on the main highways.”

  April paddled on in silence. Another obstacle between her and Hattiesburg was the last thing she needed. Mitch always seemed to have an answer to every problem that came up, or at least he said he did. At least the canoeing was easier than walking, and seemed to be faster, too, judging by how the trees on the bank slipped past them. She had no way of estimating distance out here, though—everything looked the same. The hours were passing along, though, that was easy to tell as the sun finally climbed high enough that the streamside trees didn’t shade the river fully, and the morning cool changed to almost uncomfortable warmth. She could feel the sun on her exposed arms and face and though she knew it might give her sunburn if she were out here long enough, it was much better than walking in the drenching rain.