SUNFALL: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Fiction Series: Book 2: ADVENT

by D. Gideon

  Her dishrag rubbed little circles around the base of the candle. Beside me, King pulled away from Chester’s attentions and wandered into the front room.

  “I’ve heard about the Watts riots, in school,” I said. “It sounded horrible.”

  She snorted. “I’ve read what they teach about that time; saw it in my granddaughter’s school books. Trying to blame it all on black people. It was everyone.”

  She carefully folded the dishrag and laid it over the center divider in her sink, then pulled a hurricane lamp from a dark corner of the counter. Pulling the globe off, she lit it using the candle.

  “The police had given up,” she said. “They’d called in the National Guard, but most of them were concentrated in Watts. We were just outside of there, so we’d only see them going by every few hours. And we were still getting trouble, mind you. Not just from black folks, either. All kinds of people were taking advantage of the police being gone. Thought there’d be no one to stop them, no one to catch them. No one brave enough to stand up to them. Lots of people were getting hurt, so nothing would do but for Franklin to walk me home, even knowing my Daddy would tear his hide at the door for being near me. You know, him being a grown man and all.”

  “What would people think?” I said in a mock tone, and she chuckled and nodded. She brought the lamp to the table and sat back down in her seat.

  “There was a man who’d been giving me trouble anytime he saw me on the street. He’d been giving everyone trouble since he’d moved in. Rumor was that he liked to put his hands on his women, but he was a big man, and no one wanted to run afoul of him. Well, he was out on his stoop that evening. He decided with no police around, he could do what he wanted. He came off of that stoop and pulled a knife on us. Told Franklin he was going to take me and do me like I needed to be done. Said he was going to make a woman out of me, and if Franklin didn’t leave, he was going to gut Franklin like a fish and leave him lying there on the street.”

  She leaned forward, put her elbows on the table, and smoothed out the frayed edges of her linen placemat.

  “What did Franklin do?” I asked.

  “My gentle, polite Franklin beat that man to the ground,” she said. “And then he kept beating him. The screaming brought people out of their houses, and they all just watched. I couldn’t get Franklin to stop. It’s like he went wild. When he did finally stop, you couldn’t even recognize that man anymore. I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.”

  A little smile lifted the corner of her mouth then.

  “When he stopped, it was like he just switched back to being normal. He said ‘Let’s get you home’, and walked me the rest of the way. He had blood all over his hands. When my Daddy opened the door, Franklin said ‘Sir, a man wanted to hurt your Faye tonight. I think I might have killed him.’ And then he asked if my Daddy could drive me to work the next day to make sure I stayed safe, because he’d probably be sitting in jail.”

  “He just admitted it outright like that? To your dad?”

  “Yes he did,” she said, a note of pride in her voice. “Daddy gave Franklin his blessing that night. We were married six months later, the day after I turned eighteen. I spent fifty-one years with that man, and he never raised a hand to me or our children. Never did me wrong.”

  She took my hand again and squeezed. “Sometimes terrible people pretend to be good, until they think they don’t have to pretend anymore. And sometimes good people do terrible things because that’s what needs to be done. You just need to decide which your Marco is.”

  There was the sound of a footfall outside, and the door opened. Marco shut the door quietly and turned to face us.

  “They’re not there. There’s not anyone there except for the people inside the hospital, and there’s no blood that I could see. I went all the way up to the highway and could not find them.”

  “Did you see the shooter?” I said. “Did he see you?”

  “No one saw me. I did see two men at the end of the street here, but no one has fired since I left.”

  I sighed, and he rubbed my left shoulder. “They know to be back in an hour. Not finding them is good. It means they’re hiding, and they’re okay.”

  Faye gave my hand another little squeeze and stood up. “Well, I guess I need to put coffee on, then. Marco, my neighbors brought me a pack of water this afternoon before they left for their in-law’s house in the country. It’s still inside the front door. Could you bring it in here, please?”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said, and moved past the table into the front room.

  “For the record, I don’t think you have to worry,” she stage-whispered to me, and moved an old silver percolator to the front burner of her gas range.

  I smiled at her, but I still wasn’t sure. I’d been the one to run those people over. At least a part of me was glad Woody wouldn’t be alive to do what he threatened to another woman.

  Maybe Marco wasn’t the monster. Maybe I was.

  Chapter 19

  Tuesday, September 4th

  Cambridge, Maryland

  Faye was an amazing little woman who kept us laughing with stories of her late husband’s escapades. She reminded me so much of Grams that I wished I could take her home with us so the two could meet. While she talked, she pulled out bowls and announced she’d make a few of her “Fifteen Minute Buns” that we could take with us. King had curled up on the carpeted edge of the living room, where he could still see us. Chester was curled up with him.

  She showed us pictures of her daughter and son-in-law, who had moved away from Cambridge to Colorado just two years ago. She spoke with pride of her granddaughter Chelsea, who had been staying the summer with her until last week when she left to go home, and back to college. I told her about Corey and Melanie. Marco made her giggle like a schoolgirl, wooing her in a few different languages.

  I told her I wanted to come back and visit with her when things had settled down some. Marco said he’d be willing to walk back with me just to spend some time with her.

  And that’s when she told us she was going to die.

  “Oh, honey, don’t you fret. It can’t be helped. I knew it would come sooner or later, and I’m no spring chicken,” she said, seeing the shock on my face.

  I shook my head. “How can you be sure? Maybe there’s a mistake, maybe-”

  “The doctor told me years ago that if I stopped taking my adrenal pill, I’d only have 24-72 hours before I passed. I’ve only got a few pills left, and the social security check didn’t come through so I could buy my prescription this morning, so…” she shrugged.

  “This weekend, then,” Marco said.

  Faye nodded. “Most likely. I might make it until Monday. I’m stubborn like that, sometimes. But after what I saw this morning at the bank, and then the shooting tonight, I doubt the pharmacy would still be standing even if I did manage to hang on.” She rolled little balls of dough in her hand, tucking them into a baking pan while she talked. As if it were any other day, any other subject.

  Marco looked at me over the bowl of dough, face stricken. We’d seen the pharmacies. Even if they were able to clean up the damage in a day, it would still take weeks to inventory and re-stock their drugs. And that’s only if the electricity was running, to fuel the trucks to bring the deliveries. There was no way.

  “That’s the look of someone who has bad news,” she said, pointing a finger at Marco. “The riots have already gotten to the pharmacies, haven’t they?”

  “We haven’t gone far enough into town here to see,” I said. “In Easton they had, but…maybe they’re okay here.”

  “No, they were pretty angry here. It’s the same, I’m sure,” she said.

  “What happened at the bank this morning?” Marco asked.

  Faye got up and opened the oven door on her old gas range, peeking inside at the thermometer. Nodding, she pulled the tray of buns from the table and slid them in. She pulled an old twist timer from the back of her stove and spun the dial. I smiled, again thinking
of Grams.

  “Well normally there’s a group of seniors at the bank on the first business day of the month,” she said. “We like to get paper printouts of our social security deposits, and sometimes we’ll walk next door for coffee. I always pull out cash for my prescription and go get it right then. But this morning, there were so many people waiting for the bank to open. Young people; some even your age.”

  “Our age? Maybe they needed cash for food?” Marco guessed.

  “Well I guess everyone does right now, but it didn’t seem like that. They were yelling about benefits and snapping something. When the bank wasn’t open fifteen minutes after it was supposed to be, they just went crazy,” Faye said. “Started breaking the windows, tearing up signs…it was the strangest thing.’

  “That’s it,” I said, sitting straighter. “Corey said it was like someone flipped a switch this morning. Snapping something…the SNAP cards. Today’s when the food stamp cards are supposed to be refilled.”

  “That’s not good,” Marco said. “That means it’s not just in one town.”

  “Disability checks, housing payments…all those benefits from the government were supposed to be deposited today,” I said. “There’s been riots before when those things got delayed for just half a day. Now? They’re not coming. At all.”

  “Maybe the Governor will send in the National Guard, like they did in the race riots, or when that fellow was shot by police out in the mid-west,” Faye said.

  I knew better. The officer at the Bay Bridge had told us what the Governor was doing with the Guard. If that was what had set people off, then there was a pretty good chance that people were rioting in little Snow Hill, too. The downslide in the economy had hit our town hard, and more and more, people had been paying for their groceries at the Food Rite with State-issued SNAP cards. Abe had even set up a new cooler in the front of the store with SNAP-approved and WIC-compliant items. It made things less confusing for new people navigating the system with its list of what was allowed and what wasn’t.

  If they were rioting in Snow Hill, that meant Grams and my parents, on Washington Street, were right in the middle of it. Fear turned the coffee in my stomach into a pot of acid.

  “I need some air,” I said, standing and moving around the table. Marco held up a hand.

  “You shouldn’t go outside yet,” he said. “The shooter might still be out there, waiting for a target to come out of hiding. We need to keep our heads down.”

  “I need some air,” I nearly growled. “I’m not going to go out there screaming and calling attention to myself, Marco, for christ’s sake.”

  “Give it some more time, Ripley. Don’t-”

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, stepping over King into the living room. He started to sit up to come with me, but I clucked my tongue and he settled back down, huffing. The glow from the kitchen barely reached in here, and I pulled out the flashlight so I could find the front door. Opening it, I stepped out onto the front porch and found a rocking chair with a deep padded cushion. Sitting down, I clicked the flashlight off and blinked as my eyes adjusted.

  It seemed cooler out here than in Faye’s little kitchen, now that she had the oven on. It was still humid though, and I could taste the river on the air coming from behind the hospital. Crickets chirped, frogs were singing, and somewhere in the distance I could hear a dog barking. The sky was still that beautiful deep red, and as I watched, a pretty ribbon of green cascaded down to the horizon and seemed to flutter like a curtain in the breeze.

  I drew in a deep breath through my nose and let it out slowly through my mouth.

  None of this was fair.

  People as healthy as horses, like the guys we’d run into at the building supply, weren’t suffering right now. The guy who had pulled a gun on me to take the truck wasn’t suffering. They might be a little hungry, maybe a little bruised up, but that was it. Meanwhile, good people, like Faye, were facing running out of life-sustaining medicine. She’d be gone in a few days, and the two guys from the supply that had run off would still be here, still causing trouble for good people. Still intending to hurt good people. Probably getting away with it, too.

  Maybe we could tilt that balance a little bit. Maybe we could go dig through what was left of the pharmacies. Maybe we’d be able to find a bottle of whatever it was that was keeping Faye alive.

  And then what, Rip? In thirty days she’d be facing the same end.

  It wasn’t right. Nothing about this was right. That sweet lady, who had opened her home to us, who was in there right now baking us bread rolls from scratch, was going to be gone in a few days. And no matter how good she was, no matter how she deserved to stay alive so much more than the people we’d seen today, there wasn’t a damn thing we could do to save her.

  Chapter 20

  Tuesday, September 4th

  Cambridge, Maryland

  Trevor Lynch sat on the hood of a car at the edge of the hospital parking lot and took another swig from his bottle of Wild Turkey. He tapped the barrel of his Beretta M9 against his thigh and belched.

  “This is boring as hell. Them old folks should’ve been back by now. I figured we’d get at least two good scares out of ‘em.”

  “It’ll probably be a couple of hours before they come back,” his buddy Morgan said. “We should go on up to the strip. I bet there’s all kinds of action out by the Wal-Mart.”

  “Screw that. I ain’t walkin’ that far.”

  “You could grab some clothes and shit for that baby you got comin’. Ain’t Tammy been on you about that?”

  “Screw Tammy, too. Ain’t a good word come outta her mouth in a month. Says her momma’s right when she calls me white trash. Got all over me for puttin’ that sound system in the car.” His voice took on a high falsetto. “That could have been a stroller and a carseat and a crib, Trevor. Same shit I heard when I got this.” He gestured with the Beretta. “That could have been a down payment on an apartment, Trevor. We can’t stay in my momma’s house forever.”

  “She ain’t wrong, man,” Morgan said, leaning back against the car and adjusting his Glock in his waistband. “It ain’t like when we was in high school and we could just blow all the money we made off of shit we stole. You gotta start thinkin’ ahead.”

  “It’s my money. I worked for it, I’ll spend it how I want to. And until she starts puttin’ out again, she ain’t gettin’ shit. I don’t get what I want, she don’t get what she wants.” He tipped the bottle back again and passed it to Morgan, who took a long pull.

  “Besides,” Trevor said, hopping down and moving over to a tree. He slid the Beretta into the back of his waistband and pulled down his zipper. “If her momma kicks me out, I’ll just move in with you.”

  “The fuck you will,” Morgan said. “I ain’t bringin’ women back to my apartment and havin’ no drunk white boy passed out on my couch. We friends, but we ain’t fam, yo.”

  “Think of it, bro. We could have all-night parties, like we used to. Playin’ GTA5 ‘till the freakin’ sun comes up,” Trevor said, shaking off and tucking himself back in.

  “You still playin’ that? No wonder Tammy ain’t puttin’ out,” Morgan said.

  “That’s my game, yo. It was made for me,” Trevor said, turning and looking out over the street.

  “Just ‘cause you got the same name as that redneck in that game don’t mean you’re no baller,” Morgan started. “It’s been months since you took a five-finger discount on something. You and your auto parts job-”

  “Shh shh shh,” Trevor said, waving a hand at him and scurrying around to the other side of the tree. “Look there.”

  Morgan came around the car and looked down the street. On one of the porches, someone was waving a flashlight around. After a moment, the light went off, and all they could see in the hazy red light from the sky was the form of a woman, sitting down with her elbows on her knees.

  “Whose house is that?” Morgan whispered.

  “It’s old lady Faye’s,�
� Trevor said. “Looks like that stuck-up bitch Chelsea stuck around to take care of the old bat while the power’s out.”

  “Stuck around?”

  “She was s’posed to be going back to college. Came riding her bike past the house last week, and her and Tammy got to talking in the front yard. Had a couple of brats in one of them trailer things off the back, but she said they wasn’t hers.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “I went out there and said hi. Bitch still won’t give me the time of day. Soon as I walked up, she made an excuse about babysittin’ and took off.” Trevor nabbed the bottle out of Morgan’s hand and took another drink.

  “She never did like you much,” Morgan said. “Even before you tried what you did under the bleachers.”

  “Ain’t my fault she was givin’ off the wrong signals,” Trevor said. “You can only tease a man so far before he’s gonna take action.”

  “So what you thinkin’?”

  “I’m thinkin’ there’s no cops around,” Trevor said, “and it’s about to time to get what I’m owed.”

  “What about Tammy?”

  “What Tammy don’t know won’t hurt her. Besides, if a woman don’t give a man what he needs, he’s got a right to go get it somewhere else, ain’t he?”

  “Gotta do what you gotta do, bro,” Morgan said. “But the instant we’re gone, she’s gonna run tellin’.”

  “Then we use these,” Trevor said, tugging on the bandana hanging around Morgan’s neck. “Just like when we was firing into the air to scare them old farts. And we can blindfold her. You chickening out? I thought you always wanted some of that.”

  “Everybody in town always wanted some of that,” Morgan said.

  “Well this is your chance, man…free and clear. We doin’ this?”

  Morgan ejected his magazine and checked it. Four rounds here, and two more mags in his pocket. Trevor had already switched mags once, but they’d each loaded up three before coming out to have some fun.