GLENDA REACHED FOR GERRY’S SIDE of the bed. She peered toward the alarm clock, hoping to see its dim blue digits, praying that the utility company might have restored power by this time, because wasn’t this going on a bit too long? Didn’t they understand that the dark freaked people out, and that to make people live in the dark all the time was simply too much?
All she saw, as she stared in the general direction of the alarm clock, was more darkness.
She pulled her hands close to her collarbones, curling into a fetal position.
She lay there for close to an hour, and that’s when the power came back on. She heard the electric baseboards crackling, heard her own voice on the answering machine, “Hi, this is the home of Glenda, Gerry, Jake, and Hanna Thorndike,” et cetera, et cetera, and at last heard the television go on, the president’s voice coming over the Emergency Broadcast System—yes, Bayard’s measured game-show cadences.
She sprang out of bed and hurried to the living room. She blinked in the light. She wasn’t used to seeing light. The lamp beside Gerry’s chair was on. So was the porch light. The fluorescent light above the kitchen sink was on and spilled its bluish glow over the dining room floor.
“Units of the First, Second, and Eighth Infantry Units have been moved into place, and there have been fierce clashes along the state borders, but so far the Army has yet to break the stranglehold. These three states house some of our largest emergency food supply depots. You can rest assured that I’m doing everything in my power to keep the supply lines open, and I consider the unilateral actions of Governors Fitton, Peters, and Marles, as well as their Western Secessionist supporters, to be criminal. I can pledge to the American people that all three governors will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, once the situation is brought under control. Until such time, our relief efforts will be severely hampered, and at this point we can’t guarantee any of our previously scheduled relief drops, and ask you to bear with us while our military units attempt to regain control of these critical food stockpiles. Until such time, the First Lady and I offer our sincerest prayers, and urge you—”
And that was it, because with a percussive click and the trace flash of a sudden power surge, the electricity failed once again and the house was plunged into darkness.
“Mom?” Jake’s voice.
“It’s okay, sweetie.”
“Was the power back on?”
“For a bit. Go back to sleep.”
“I’m hungry.”
“I’m going to ask Leigh if he can give us some more food tomorrow.”
Because from the look of things, the government wasn’t going to come through anymore. From the look of things, the Western Secessionists were at last ruining the country. Which meant the food situation had just gone from bad to impossible. And come to think of it, why hadn’t the television woken Hanna up? Hanna was sleeping way too much.
Glenda waited for her eyes to get used to the dark, then felt her way through the living room and went down the hall into Hanna’s room. Couldn’t see a thing—it was truly an absence of all light, especially when the power was off, that made things so difficult.
She stumbled into Hanna’s bed, her shin hitting its steel frame—a lot of bumps and bruises for everyone, wandering around in the dark all the time—and she heard Hanna’s deep and heavy breathing, her lungs crackling, always half inflamed. She sat on the edge of Hanna’s bed and put her hand on Hanna’s leg.
That’s when Glenda heard a truck coming down the highway. She thought it might be an Army truck bringing food relief. But then she recognized the steady putt-putt of a civilian truck, and wondered who would be driving down the highway in the middle of the night. The middle of the day? Which was it? Headlight beams made squares of light on the wall, and as the truck drew closer, the squares moved, passed over Hanna’s shelf of stuffed animals, rested momentarily on her grade-five district-wide spelling bee plaque, and finally shifted obliquely as the truck pulled up Leigh Phelps’s driveway.
She got off the end of Hanna’s bed and walked to the windows. A pickup truck crunched up the gravel, two men riding in the back and one driving. They pulled up to Leigh’s house and got out. They had rifles—hunting weapons that she could see in the glow of the headlights—and she knew that Leigh’s fears had been justified after all, that the look he had seen in Jamie’s eyes had been enough.
It was a crossroads for her, because she had the extra rifle now, and knew how to shoot—all those summers partridge hunting with her father in Kansas—and it was the moral thing to do, get her rifle and stand shoulder to shoulder with her neighbor against these men, especially because she was planning to ask Leigh for food again tomorrow. But the risk was too great. She had to survive. Not for herself but for her children. She would not put herself in harm’s way, not unless it was for Hanna and Jake.
So she retreated from the window, fearful that they might have seen her face in the glare of the headlights. She sat on Hanna’s bed, gripped her daughter by the leg, and shook her. Hanna moaned, then said her usual, “One more minute,” but must have at last sensed something strange going on because she pushed herself up, cleared the hair from her face, and squinted at the glow of the headlights coming in through the windows.
“Sweetie, we have to go to the basement.”
“Why?”
“Remember what we talked about.”
Hanna’s sleepiness immediately lifted and her blank look of slumber was transformed into one of alarm.
They left Hanna’s room and walked down the hall to get Jake.
Jake was already up and looking out his own window, down on one knee, a yard back from the casement and well into the shadows so that any chance glare from the headlights wouldn’t catch his face. He glanced over his shoulder as his mother and sister entered. He didn’t say a word, but his expression, at once solemn and concerned, with a knit to his tawny brow, revealed a boy who simply accepted, who had made the transition, who understood and was now resigned to the ways of this dark world.
He got up and lifted his Handheld Sport from his desk, a game-playing device that no longer worked because it got its recharge from sunlight.
He followed them down the hall to the basement stairs.
They descended the narrow, steep stairs into the shallow basement—more a storm cellar—and, as was so often the case these days, especially since the power had become intermittent, Glenda found herself in a world of touch. The banister was smooth and cool against her palm. The dank smell of the cellar permeated her nostrils. Her children creaked down the stairs behind her. Her foot hit the basement’s concrete floor with a light scuffing sound. She reached for her rifle, which she had leaned against the wall at the foot of the stairs.
And then it happened. What she had been dreading, but also what she had been expecting. The obvious outcome to all this buildup. Because hadn’t it been a long time now, and wasn’t the food situation just a bit much to take, especially when no one knew when it was going to end? Yes, the inevitable happened. Gunfire—like the barking of dogs—erupted from next door. It was a sound she at first didn’t want to admit to herself, because it escalated the situation to an entirely new plane. The rifle shots made her skin crawl and her throat tighten, but at last she shook all feeling away because she knew she had to look after her children.
“Jake, will you hurry up?” she said in a small, panicked voice.
“I can’t see where I’m going.”
“Shhh.”
“Mom,” said Jake, “they’re not going to hear us over all that gunfire.”
How easily Jake accepted it all.
“Just move quickly and quietly to the back. Jake, grab onto my sleeve, and Hanna, you grab onto Jake’s.”
Forming a human chain, they walked in the darkness until they came to the back. More gunfire came from next door, and then a lot of shouting. Then there was one final shot, and all the shouting stopped. They listened for a while. Nothing.
The phone rang upstairs. Her body stiffened. Who could that be? Maybe somehow Gerry had managed to get back, and he was phoning from somewhere on the “ph” phone. She was terrified because she thought the men next door might hear the ringing. She was eager to go answer so she could see if it was Gerry, but hesitant to move from her safe basement refuge.
At last, Glenda bolted from her crouched position on the floor and, feeling her way through the aisle of junk, came to the foot of the stairs. She crawled up the steep steps on all fours.
She came to the kitchen, rose to her feet, and got no farther than the table when someone shone a flashlight in through the front window. She froze and quickly backed up against the wall.
The flashlight beam penetrated through the living room to the dining room, and into the kitchen, where she saw it brightening first the cupboards, then the sink, then the floor. And all the while the handset part of the vidphone continued to ring on the dining room table, set to sing like a cardinal because she loved the sound of the cardinal so much.
The flashlight beam swung away, and its peripheral glow grew dimmer and dimmer, until finally the kitchen was dark again. She sprang from her hiding spot against the wall, and headed for the dining room table, where the phone continued to tweet like a cardinal. She got halfway there when the phone stopped ringing. Even though her good sense told her she had lost her chance, she lifted the phone anyway.
“Gerry?”
All she heard was silence.
She selected the call list to see who had phoned but the little screen remained blank. Who could it have been? Neil? Louise?
She rested the handset on the receiver and went downstairs, disappointed and close to tears. She felt her way through the dark to the back. Her kids sat crouched next to the downstairs refrigerator.
“Was it Dad?” asked Jake.
“I didn’t get it in time.”
Her kids said nothing.
She sat down.
“Are they still out there?” asked Jake.
“One came to the window and looked inside.”
All three lapsed into silence. She thought of all the other people hiding in the dark, in similar situations. And then thought of the Western Secessionists, now making everything a lot harder.