Blackout (Darkness Trilogy)

by Madeleine Henry

  I’ve only jumped in the ocean once, but I remember it knocked the wind out of me. Bitter cold pushed every bit of air out of my lungs, and it was the closest I’ve ever felt to death. If the Shadows can endure something like that, who knows what else they can do.

  “Phoenix!” someone calls.

  Down the wall, Mrs. Brown jogs toward me. Half of all the Browns who are left. She’s a fast-talker with wide shoulders and biceps bigger than mine, and her husband’s the soft one who form-fits around her. A basket of false tinder fungus scratches against her gray parka as she moves. She stops right in front of me, looking concerned.

  “Sorry for not visiting last night,” I mumble.

  She holds me firmly like a mother would. She’s strong enough to have kids, but she never had any of her own. Said she didn’t want to bring more DZs into a world this harsh. Mr. Brown agreed, like he always does, but I wish they had their own children to love them. Now that Wick is sick, all they have are Star and me. Everyone else in Dark DC is older than we are. So we do our best with Mrs. Brown, but it’s not family.

  “Did something happen?” Mrs. Brown asks. “Is Star okay?”

  “Yeah, something happened,” I say, rubbing the back of my neck with my hand. She waits for me to finish, but I don’t know how to say it. The whole thing sounds impossible, even to me. And I was there.

  “Phoenix, I’ve never seen you like this,” she whispers.

  “It’s about the eighth family,” I say uncomfortably. “I can’t explain it.”

  “Did they try to hurt you?” she asks. Her eyes narrow defensively above her broad nose. Her grip tightens on the basket.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Brown,” I say to explain. “You just have to see it for yourself.”

  “See what for myself?” she asks.

  “Their shelter,” I say. “It’s different.”

  She eyes me skeptically. “Then I’ll go have a look,” she says.

  “Watch from somewhere safe,” I say clearly. “Don’t go inside.”

  “Okay, son,” she says. “Will you be able to visit tonight?”

  “Of course,” I say. “Tonight, we’ll talk about everything. Once you’ve seen it.”

  She rubs my arm and squeezes my elbow. I wish I could tell her about the electricity, but this is the best I can do.

  We walk in our separate directions. I hope Mrs. Brown doesn’t think I avoided her questions on purpose. No, she’s smarter than that. She’s the best game tracker in Dark DC. She taught me how to track a porcupine by looking at treetops; missing bark means a porcupine has passed through, and dripping sap means it’s still near. She must know I did my best. We’ll sort it out tonight when we’re making candlewicks out of the fungus.

  I kick the top off a snowbank in front of me and Magic bounces against my back. I have to figure out how the neighbors got that power. Use it for good. His words replay in my mind—“We earned it”—but exactly how they earned it, I don’t know. Not one lousy idea. I tighten my backpack’s straps and wind up to kick another icy white mound when suddenly, muffled shouts call above me on the Frontier.

  “Stop the vehicle!” the Frontman yells. He sprints toward the nearest gate along the concrete ledge, gripping his gun across his chest with both hands. His black goggles drop from where they rested on his helmet to cover his eyes. “Stop the vehicle now!” His voice sounds faint from here, but my heart is racing. He spoke.

  I run below him alongside the wall, pumping my arms hard back and forth to propel me forward. Cold air freezes the back of my throat as I suck it in, and I keep my eyes on the Frontman. He dodges through a narrow vertical slit very high on the surface of the Frontier right next to the gate and starts to fire his gun at something on the other side.

  I stop short. The Frontman finishes his round. I take cover behind a battered police car as a roar rips through the air, getting louder every second. I don’t recognize the sound and my stomach curdles with fear. Something is coming straight toward the Dark Zone. I creep back from the Frontier and fall into a run. Stealing a quick glance over my right shoulder, my eyes bulge.

  Twenty yards behind me, something slams through the titanium gate. I flinch at the earsplitting sound. Shreds of metal scatter to reveal the front end of a speeding black truck headed right for me. It’s enormous: tires up to my shoulders. I take a sharp left turn and dodge out of the way as the truck barrels into the ruins of the Grand Hyatt Hotel. It crashes to a stop inside.

  4

  Two Easy men emerge from a billowing cloud of black dust. They step forward on shaking legs, and I can’t believe how much they look like DZs. I had always imagined them to be—I don’t know—more. Bigger somehow. Taller. Maybe even immortal. But here they are, injured and human and hobbling just ten feet away.

  I’m in shock.

  One presses the heel of his hand against a fresh gash across his forehead. Blood drips in two rivulets down his temple. The other Easy is bent at the waist and wheezing with one hand on each knee. Both wear all-white coats and pants, whiter than anything we have in the Dark Zone. Watching them recover on our soil, my shock subsides and turns to gut-wrenching hatred. Easies. The ones who abandoned us are here. My eyes narrow, transforming them into prey. I reach my hand slowly behind my neck to wrap my fingers around Magic’s muzzle.

  “Seize them!” a Frontman yells. He sprints through the fresh hole in the gate, backlit by light coming from the other side, and heading right for us. Two more Frontmen run behind him and together the three move in the shape of a perfect triangle. Their thick legs fly over the snowy ground.

  The wounded men look at me with desperate eyes, and I understand in a flash that these are not just any Easies. They crashed into the Dark Zone for a reason—and they disobeyed Frontmen to do it. I grin. Any enemies of the United States are friends of mine. Magic slides back into my bag.

  “Follow me!” I bark.

  I run headfirst into the dark fog coming from the Hyatt and hear them patter close behind. One drags the other forward by his jacket collar, as if the second man is too hurt to run on his own. Coughing on dust, we dash through an old conference room and take a sharp turn down the hallway that leads to the lobby. My eyes sting as we exit the thick haze. Pausing under a chandelier in the empty lobby, I scour for a place to hide them and find nothing. The Frontmen can’t be far away, but staying here isn’t an option.

  “This way!” I say.

  I run to the nearest wall and jump through a window frame. They hoist themselves quickly over the ledge after me. Looking frantically up and down the quiet street, I finally spot the perfect place to hide: the Hyatt’s parking garage. I race toward the entrance and they follow close behind. I hear their footsteps slow as we jog down the steep ramp into the underground lot. One of them gasps, and I can guess why. During the plagues, this place was turned into a morgue. Without electricity to store human remains, some bodies were stacked in parking garages like this one. Corpses left from decades ago are still wrapped here in black body bags. It’s somewhere no one wants to be—making it the perfect place to hide.

  “Breach confirmed,” a Frontman shouts from the street. “In pursuit. Over.”

  The garage is packed with cars. Body bags stick out of every backseat window and popped trunk. The runaways stride behind me through the maze of empty space between cars, swatting aside the limp ends of bags in their way without flinching. I duck behind a blue suburban as the Frontmen enter the garage. Crouched next to the panting men, I hold my finger to my lips. We wait.

  Looking at them, I can’t help but notice that they are both cleaner than anyone I’ve ever seen. They look basically the same to me—same gray-white hair, similar faces—and enviable fat puffs their cheeks. One still grips the other’s collar, using his free hand to rebutton his jacket. On his breast pocket, the letters TC are woven elaborately above a name: Jack Fletcher. My eyes dart to the other’s pocket and read: Daniel Harris.

  The Frontmen open and close car doors, grunting in disgust a
t their task. I lean closer to the runaways, stare intensely at them, and say with my eyes, I’m going to get you out of here. Trust me to keep you safe and I’ll make those goddamn Easies writhe. Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Harris have caught their breaths now, which means it’s time to move. There’s an old door tucked in the rear of the garage, and all three of us are going to make for it.

  “Us—crawl—the back,” I mouth.

  Mr. Fletcher doesn’t show any sign that he’s understood me. He looks off in the distance now with an expression that’s far too calm. As if he’s given up and accepted his fate. My mouth tightens into a hard line and hot frustration flares inside me. I won’t let him surrender and ruin my chance to get back at the Frontmen. He has to follow me. Now.

  “Crawl—back.” I emphasize with a rigidly pointed finger.

  “No,” Mr. Fletcher mouths. The two men look at each other and nod solemnly. Together they sink to their hands and knees, and now I’m certain they want to turn themselves in. Horrified, I grab both of their sleeves, but they shake me off and proceed to crawl around the car. I squint in betrayed confusion as they disappear from view. They’ve left me and I don’t understand why.

  “Got him!” Mr. Fletcher shouts. His voice sounds triumphant—too triumphant, though, like he’s putting on an act for the Frontmen. Confused, I peer through a shattered car window and watch him shove Mr. Harris to the ground at the Frontmen’s feet. Mr. Harris starts moaning in pain—looking far more injured than he was just a moment ago.

  “Show your hands!” a Frontman yells. Guards swarm the two runaways on the other side of the suburban. I duck down fast and press my back against the giant tire, praying that they don’t look on this side.

  “He took me against my will,” Mr. Fletcher says breathlessly. “Needed my help to escape…I didn’t want to…”

  “Where’s the boy?” the Frontman demands.

  “He left us,” Mr. Fletcher says. “Went south.”

  I hold my breath in the silence. No one moves.

  “All right, take them back,” the Frontman barks to his accomplices. “Don’t let Harris run.”

  Their footsteps file to the top of the garage and echo throughout the cavernous space. My jaw clenches when it hits me: Those Easies never wanted to stay in the Dark Zone. They gave themselves up too soon, right after I’d showed them a safe way out. No, those men wanted to get caught. They were going to surrender all along.

  I wait until it’s safe to leave. Ten minutes, twenty, I don’t know. I trudge dejectedly up the ramp and see a row of massive tractors has already begun to rebuild the gate. The tractors look taller than the White House, taller than everything else on our side. I turn to head back home, where I was going before any of this even started. It’s still early and my parents should be at our house—with no idea how much I’m about to shock them.

  *

  After the Blackout, two types of people had a head start: the paranoid and the privileged. The paranoid were doomsday preppers. They lived in constant fear of disaster and had stockpiled the necessities just in case: portable toilets, charcoal, garden seeds. The privileged type—rich people—simply had too much. Their supplies were ready by chance.

  My family, the Troublefields, were privileged. When the flare hit, they happened to own stacked pallets of bottled water, a storm shelter, and two gleaming closets of hunting guns. But that head start only helped for so long because eventually everyone ran out of supplies. Only the hardest workers endured, and my ancestors battled to survive. And they did more: They refused to move from our family townhouse, and they stayed true to what they believed. Even facing the greatest challenge in human history, they did not sacrifice their principles. Their identity. Their core value was always family first.

  My parents and I are the only Troublefields left, and we still live in the family townhouse. Follow every tradition. Conventions like addressing every family member by their first name. So I call my mom Aura and my dad Burn. And if there were any other Troublefields on the planet, I’d have to call them their first names, too. Obeying traditions like this one helps us keep a strong sense of family, or at least that’s what my parents say. A kind of Troublefield togetherness. And that’s the most important thing to them: family. Family, family, family. They say sticking together is what’s right and it’s how we got this far.

  Walking up our wooden steps now, I see the names Skye and Leiter carved in elegant cursive on the mahogany front door. That’s another tradition: carve your name somewhere in the family house. Skye and Leiter, my grandparents, carved theirs after taking on their DZ names as teenagers. They were both given American names at birth—Grace and Alexander—but they discarded those as they grew up. And the name “Troublefield” has stayed the same. To them, that word encapsulated their very souls.

  I never met either of them. In the months before I was born, they became increasingly senile. Started to forget things and get lost outside. And through no fault of theirs, they went from being the most generous caretakers to burdens. It weighed on them. Burn told me he could see it bothered them. Then the morning Aura gave birth to me, they left. They didn’t pack a thing, just walked out the front door toward the dark horizon without even saying good-bye. Burn didn’t notice they’d gone until he announced loudly that I was a boy. In the silence that followed, he let his smile fall. And what gets me about that story is, even when my grandparents’ minds were so weak, they still managed to put family first. Give to everyone but themselves.

  Stories like that make me feel like I’m not a true Troublefield. Sure, I have the name, but I haven’t earned it. Troublefields are supposed to serve the family, and when I’m being honest with myself, I know I’m not that noble. I’m different. My parents love me unconditionally, but that’s the point: They have that drive to honor Troublefields, and I just don’t. I love my parents, but I want more than this family in my life. I have my own dreams for power, for Star. For something bigger than this family and better than what we already have. My parents don’t feel anything when they walk by the Frontier because they’re happy on this side. And it makes me feel guilty for wanting more, but I do. If my family ever needed me to, I don’t know if I’d have what it takes to give myself up and walk boldly into the dark. There’s more to live for than just this family name.

  I rub the back of my neck and walk through the tall arch of the front door. An image of the monstrous black truck speeding toward me flashes through my mind, and I feel the shock prick my skin all over again. Never in my life did I expect to see anything pass through the Frontier, in either direction. And why they did it, I don’t know.

  “Phoenix!” Aura calls from inside. “Come here!”

  I follow the sound of her voice to the living room where she sits on the rug making candles. Deer fat boils in a large cast-iron pot over the fireplace. On the floor around her, she has spread a bundle of false tinder fungus for candlewicks. Burn stands beside her over an ironing board, skinning his latest kill, a squirrel. The knife is poised in his hand, ready to cut it from neck to tail. I’d offer to help but my hands are still quivering in my gloves. When my parents see the look on my face, they know something is wrong. As true Troublefields, they pride themselves on being in tune with each other and with me. It’s how they’re able to give before I ever have to ask—another family custom.

  “Tell us, son,” Burn says.

  I collapse onto the sunken leather sofa and tell them everything—slowly.

  Aura moves to sit next to me and listens closely while Burn tends to the meat. You have to deal with fresh game immediately. I tell them what the electricity felt like, about hiding in the morgue, and about the strange act the Easies put on, handing themselves over to the Frontmen. A silence grows after I finish.

  “Why would they break through the Frontier, only to surrender themselves so soon?” Aura asks. It’s the riddle on all of our minds, and it doesn’t make any sense. Pummeling through the Frontier must have been an incredible risk for them—the impact, t
he consequences—but it’s as if they never actually wanted to escape at all.

  It reminds me of the last deer I shot: I stalked it in circles for an hour through a forest before I realized that the deer wasn’t actually trying to get away. It never wanted to escape me completely. I had to stumble across a concealed pair of fawns before I understood: This deer, their mother, was just trying to distract me.

  That’s it.

  “Maybe they were a decoy,” I wonder out loud, and my parents nod to consider it. It’s the best explanation on the table so far.

  “Who would they be distracting? The Frontmen?” Burn asks.

  I shrug uncertainly. “Or us,” I suggest. “I don’t know.”

  The idea sends a chill down my back, but I shouldn’t be scared. I don’t know enough to be afraid. Even if their breach was a distraction, we still don’t know what it was meant to accomplish.

  The door to our townhouse suddenly slams shut, and two pairs of footsteps enter. I bolt upright and aim Magic toward the front hall.

  “It’s me!” Star cries.

  I lower my gun before she comes in range. That was too close for comfort. Star peers around the doorway, leading Spark—Spark!—by the shoulders toward us. He looks small and pitiable, with his face dirtier than most and his matted hair sticking out in all directions. They stop at the end of the sofa, where Spark pouts but Star looks exultant. Her cheeks flush with life. She crouches eagerly next to his ear, on the verge of revealing something big.

  “Tell them what you told me,” she says sweetly to Spark. “Tell them how your family earned the power.”

  5