Dark Road

by David C. Waldron

  “What about power lines?” One of the other volunteers asked.

  “If we can’t get the generators working together or transformers built then we don’t need to worry about power lines.” Chuck said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  …

  “It’s a balancing act,” Sergeant Ramirez said. “Yes, we can cultivate more land. All of the farmers we have talked to are willing to work with us on that. The problem comes down to either manpower or fuel.”

  “How so?” asked Sergeant Jordan Harris. “I thought we were growing our own biodiesel.”

  Sergeant Ramirez shook his head. “Again, the balancing act,” he said. “For every acre we cultivate, we use so much fuel—fuel that we’ve already accounted for. If we’re going to cultivate more land then we need to grow more soybeans—on land which itself needs to be cultivated and irrigated. The wells are run by a generator, which is powered by…”

  Ramirez prompted Harris for the answer.

  “Diesel,” Harris answered, “which we’ve already accounted for.”

  “Bingo,” Ramirez said. “Now, we’re planning on offsetting as much of that as we can with windmills and solar, but there’s only so much that we can do. The first two windmills won’t be ready for at least a couple of weeks, and solar doesn’t do much without batteries and a bunch of other electronic components that frankly I don’t understand. It also requires sun, which doesn’t shine at night or when it’s raining.”

  “What about wood gasifiers?” Harris asked.

  “I’ve heard of them, but know less-than-nothing about them.” Ramirez said. “I don’t like admitting that, but like getting called out for lying even less. If you know something about them, talk to Wilson. I don’t know if they’ve even been brought up. It would be great if we could use the scrap wood for something other than fires.”

  …

  “Ugh!” Joel yelled as Millie came into the tent and quickly shooed her back outside. “Out, OUT!”

  Millie obeyed, just, and sat down right outside the tent flaps—looking up at him with her typical Golden Retriever “I love you SO much!” grin and panting.

  “Where did you find a skunk?” He said as his eyes started to water and his nose began to run. “And how am I going to get you clean? It’s a good thing Rachael isn’t here or I’d be cleaning up after her too.” Joel shook his head, covered his mouth and nose, and dragged their Golden Retriever off to the showers to do his best to de-skunk man’s best friend.

  Chapter Seven

  “Day 69 – We have a problem. Two of the children that came into the hospital yesterday are showing symptoms of the same thing that Danny had the night he died. Both are older but are still under ten. The girl looks to be in a coma…can’t tell for sure. If she survives, she might have brain damage from the high fever. Both are having the same trouble breathing. Propping them up helped a bit, but we can’t do much else. Fevers are running away with them and we can’t do a thing to help. I hate feeling so helpless!”

  Dan put the diary away and crawled into bed after blowing out the candle. This was the latest he’d been up in a while and it was already full dark outside. He was going to pay for it in the morning, especially since he wasn’t actually tired yet.

  “Our biggest issue is going to be food and that’s only going to get worse,” Marissa said. The girls were asleep and they were making plans while lying in bed.

  “What are the chances of being able to hunt once we get out of downtown Nashville?” Dan asked.

  “Six weeks or more into it by the time we leave? Probably pretty slim,” Marissa replied. “I’d imagine that most, if not all, of the wildlife in the surrounding area has been pretty well picked clean, or headed for the hills. It’s possible that we might run into something, but you’re probably putting a lot more stock into my abilities than you should.” Marissa grinned in the dark. “I’d think that fishing would be more productive, but that depends on which direction we head.”

  “Well, fishing hasn’t been real productive here when we’ve tried” Dan said.

  “True, but then again look who was in charge of the effort.”

  “You’ve got a point there.” Dan said. “I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to try to scrounge for gas for our car in the next couple of weeks or not, or if I should even try. I keep coming back to that gas station out on Gallatin Rd. I don’t know if we’ll be able to find much, if any, gas.”

  “We could take more in the car of course, and get wherever we’re going quicker, but what if the car breaks down or we run out of gas?” Marissa was only bringing up what they had already discussed several times before and were just rehashing yet again. “We’re stuck going the rest of the way on foot. If we leave on the bikes then we just have to worry about us running out of steam.”

  “We won’t be able to take nearly as much with us, though.” Dan countered.

  “Like we have a lot to take in the first place.” Marissa replied.

  “I think when it comes down to it, you’ll be surprised how much we try to pack into the pull-behind and stack in the old toddler seats.” Dan said.

  Marissa sighed. “So do we steal an SUV and put the bikes on the roof?”

  Dan was silent for long enough that Marissa rolled over to see if he’d heard her, and was surprised to see a tear creeping down from the corner of his eye.

  “Dan? What is it? What’s the matter?”

  Dan sniffed and rubbed his nose, then wiped his eyes, and then tried to laugh. It came out more like a dusty cough. “I’ve been trying for days—weeks actually—but more so for the last couple of days, to convince myself that what I’ve been doing has been for the good of my family and hasn’t been hurting anyone else. The pistol from the Taylor’s safe wasn’t stealing because they were gone. The book from the library wasn’t stealing because the library isn’t really the library anymore. I made the conscious decision to not look through whatever was gathered there by whoever was living there, including books from the library, because they were still using it. I didn’t want to steal it from them.”

  “Honey, I didn’t mean…” Marissa started.

  “No, you’re right, let me finish.” Dan interrupted. “Maybe the pistol and the book weren’t technically stealing, but we are living in a different world than we were before the power went out. The rules have changed. Carey and his people can come into our house whenever they damned well feel like it, to take whatever they like, for ‘the good of the community’, and we’re lucky to get even a little of it back!”

  Marissa reached over and took Dan’s hand, but he wasn’t quite finished. “I’m not a looter, I’m not going to go around just taking what I want because it’s ‘us or them’. That’s not how I work and I couldn’t live with myself afterwards, Rissa, I think you know that.” Dan snorted, “Then again, we kept stuff hidden in the first place, for ourselves, in case the food collections began in earnest; so I shouldn’t set myself on too high a pedestal, now, should I?”

  “Dan, you are a good man, and a wonderful father and husband. What you’ve done for this community more than makes up for anything that we’ve kept back. No, neither of us is justifying, at least no more than anyone else in the neighborhood, and a lot less than some.” Dan squeezed his wife’s hand but continued looking at the ceiling. He was having a bit of a crisis of conscience at the moment.

  “So, yeah, maybe we…appropriate something that we can put the bikes on. If we can find one; if we can get gas for it; if we can find a way to secure it; if we can find a way to pack it without anyone noticing. If, if, if.”

  “If, if is good,” Marissa said. They both laughed. That had been one of their favorite lines from Disney’s ‘Hercules’.

  …

  “We need to think about when and how we’re going to get the rest of the guns out of the Taylor’s safe,” Marissa said when she realized that Dan was awake.

  “How long have you been up?”

  “I have no idea; my nightstand clock s
topped working a little over a month ago.”

  “Ok, how’s this, have you gotten any sleep?” Dan asked.

  Marissa considered for a second and then yawned. “I think so. If I hadn’t I would have woken you up a couple of hours ago. The sun actually woke me up. This is when I usually come downstairs and sleep on the couch for a couple of hours anyway, remember? The fibro, or RA, or whatever it is, won’t let me be comfortable for more than about four hours straight in the same place.”

  “Right, sorry. So, the Taylor’s guns,” Dan said.

  “The Taylor’s abandoned guns,” Marissa corrected. “Assuage your conscience, oh husband of mine, at least in this instance, ok? If nothing else, we may even be able to reunite them with their owner.”

  Dan smiled and said, “Ok, deal. So, there are three more to get and two of them are not going to be trivial—they’re fairly long. Plus, there is all the ammo.” Dan made sure to use the correct word this time.

  “Well, ok, first of all the ammo. We don’t have to take it all. We won’t be able to use it all, so we only take what we can reasonably use. Two or three boxes for each handgun, rifle, and shotgun should be fine.”

  Dan nodded.

  “Second, if we absolutely had to, we could just walk in on our last day and waltz out with the weapons. After all, who’s going to stop us when we have a rifle, a shotgun, and two pistols?”

  Dan winced at that. “Really, Rissa?”

  Marissa shook her head, “No, I said if we absolutely had to. It would be a worst-case last-resort plan. Pretty much everyone else has firearms in the neighborhood and we really don’t want a firefight. We still have two children to look out for.”

  Dan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Thank you.”

  “I’m not completely insane; I got a D in crazy for your information.” Marissa grinned.

  “You are tired.”

  “Yes, I am, but that really doesn’t matter, we’re running out of time.” Marissa stretched and cracked her back. It sounded like the world’s biggest zipper.

  Dan winced again. “After all this time, I still can’t believe that doesn’t hurt when you do that!”

  “Sometimes it does, usually it doesn’t. It’s probably going to rain in a couple of days—maybe tomorrow night.” Marissa said.

  “Bad?” Dan asked.

  Marissa flexed her fingers, because it wasn’t light enough to see if they were red or not. “Not horrible, but bad enough that I can feel it a couple days ahead of time.”

  This was why Dan had first changed his major from Computer Science to Pre-Med. He’d wanted to become a doctor so he could discover what was wrong with, and cure, his girlfriend. It became clear very early on though that things didn’t work that way, so he quickly switched to Nursing and then became an EMT. The hours were worse, initially, as an EMT, but he’d made much more in the long run and eventually worked 7-4, five days a week. Dan still hated the fact that he could do nothing for his wife, that after fifteen years of tests the best they could come up with was either Fibromyalgia, or sero-negative Rheumatoid Arthritis, or maybe both…or possibly something else altogether. It was so frustrating for someone on the outside to watch and he could only imagine how it was for Marissa to actually experience.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Marissa said. “I know what you’re thinking, Mr. ‘I should have become a doctor and discovered a cure.’ We’ve been over this so many times it’s not funny. I love you, and I appreciate the sentiment, but it doesn’t work that way. If wishes were kisses then fish would have wings. I’m not crippled. I still function. Don’t pity me, just help me deal when I need the help and, well, let’s move along the rest of the time, ok?”

  “Ok,” Dan said.

  “I’m thinking sooner rather than later,” Marissa said.

  “Huh?”

  “The guns,” Marissa said, eyebrows raised.

  “Right, sorry. I don’t think we should make more than one more visit to the house. We need to do it all at once.”

  “We need to do it soon, too,” Marissa said. “I don’t think we can put it off too much longer, I just have a bad feeling about it.”

  “Agreed. So, we go over sometime in the middle of the night when everyone is supposed to be asleep.” Dan wasn’t foolish enough to think everyone was asleep in the middle of the night. He closed his eyes to ask the next question because it was one he was dreading.

  “Do we both go, or just you, or just me?” Dan asked.

  Marissa didn’t like the answer but didn’t hesitate either. “Both of us go. There’s going to be too much to bring back and, frankly, you don’t know what you’re looking for.”

  Dan nodded.

  “Plus, heaven forbid someone is already in the house, there is no way I can defend myself alone.” Marissa said. “We both need to be there to help each other.”

  “You’re better at this than I am, you know that?” Dan smiled and it actually reached his eyes.

  “You have a lot on your plate and you’re doing fine.” She gave him an impish smile and a kiss on the nose and then they heard Jessie start to make morning waking-up noises.

  “Day 70.”

  “Day 70.” Marissa agreed and then said, “Day 1.”

  “Of…” Dan prompted.

  “Preparing to get out of here, in earnest.” Marissa said.

  “Amen to that.”

  Chapter Eight

  The last week in the Clark household was a flurry of activity. Both Dan and Marissa had to keep up with all of their usual community responsibilities while preparing as best they could, in secret, to leave at a moment’s notice.

  Food was going to be their biggest concern. They hadn’t been prepared with long-term food storage, by any means, but they had both been amazed how far what they’d had in the house could be stretched. Dan and Marissa still let the girls have a little extra here and there if they were hungry at meals, but the extra activity took its toll on the adults. They had practiced packing the kiddie-carrier toddler seat on Dan’s bike—both seats had been re-installed on his and Marissa’s bikes under the pretense of carrying more water from the river—and packing the pull-behind bike trailer.

  Jessie would be in the pull-behind, and Bekah was going to have to ride her own bike. That’s all there was to it. It would cut down on how much they could carry, but there was no way Jessie could keep up otherwise—and Bekah had been riding without training wheels for two years. Now all they needed was a destination.

  They planned to go to the Taylor’s house later tonight and get the rest of the guns and ammo, and then continue gathering as much food, and any other supplies they came across, for the next week or so.

  Although he knew it was the right thing to do, Dan was struggling with the plan to leave. The younger of the two kids that Dan had seen in the hospital, the boy, had died two days afterwards, in his sleep. His breathing had become labored to the point that finally, it simply stopped. The girl, the older of the two, still held on, but had been unconscious for the last three days, and Dan had serious doubts that she would make it.

  The worst part of leaving was the fact that the neighborhood would have nobody with any real medical training. He wouldn’t discuss it with Marissa because he knew she would tell him that if the tables were turned they would leave him so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him, but that didn’t make him feel any better.

  People still showed up with burns, and cuts, and even the occasional broken bone or dislocated joint that he could actually fix. When he was gone…quit thinking about it, it’ll drive you mad.

  Marissa was already dressed in black jeans and a navy top and it was Dan’s turn to get into the darkest clothes he had.

  …

  “OK,” Marissa said. “The girls are asleep. I hate to do it, but we’ve got to leave a couple of downstairs windows open. It’s too hot to close everything up and I tried just having upstairs windows open for a while and it got stifling down here.”

  “W
e can put it off until its cooler,” Dan said. “Speaking of which, aren’t you going to roast in that?” Marissa was wearing a black windbreaker over a tank top.

  Marissa shook her head. “I didn’t have anything dark enough with longer sleeves so it’s this or my pasty white arms will glow in the dark. And no, we can’t. If we start postponing now then we’ll keep finding reasons to put it off and then we’ll get found out.”

  Dan nodded.

  “I know,” Marissa said. “I’ve seen you moping around the house. We’ve been married for ten years, Dan; I can read you like a book. You are feeling bad for ‘abandoning’ all these people. Don’t, you yourself said it’s them or us just a few days ago.”

  Dan nodded again, “I know. Funny thing is that it doesn’t really make it any easier to just up and leave.” Dan looked around the downstairs in the candlelight and wondered aloud, “How hard must it have been for the Taylors, Eric and Karen, and Sheri?”

  “Truth?” Marissa asked.

  “Truth.”

  “Murder. I wouldn’t have wanted to leave,” Marissa laughed mirthlessly. “Obviously…we’re still here even now.”

  “So, let’s limit the open windows to the back of the house.” Dan said.

  “Agreed, and we lock the doors.”

  Dan smiled. “Obviously.”

  …

  At 2:00 am, when any sane person should have been dead-to-the-world asleep, Carey was prowling around his house. It had been a hot day, which had led to a hot night. It was humid and he was sticky and grumpy. Now he couldn’t go back to sleep. “Should’a moved everyone downstairs like the Clarks,” he said under his breath, trying not to wake up his wife and daughter.

  It was while he was roving around the house that he happened to look out the window and see, just barely, two shadows cross the street a couple of houses down…about where Eric Tripp used to live.

  “Now what in the,” Carey stopped himself before he swore. He’d been finding it more and more difficult to do that recently, and being a good Christian man he knew that ‘Thoughts led to Words led to Actions.’ He was going to nip it in the bud at thoughts. He crouched down into the shadows of his own house and kept looking out the window in hopes of catching another glimpse. He didn’t dare go outside, as the last thing he wanted to do was scare off whoever was sneaking around in the dark, at least not yet.