The Blackout (11 page)

“Did they get any of our food?”  Molly asked wearily.  Most families were still keeping their food in their own homes, which would lead the Wanderers to their front doors. 

“I don’t know yet.  I hope not.”  He spoke into the darkness, never really making eye contact with Molly, but constantly scanning for additional dangers.

“Well, what can I do?” 

“The best thing?  Probably go back to your home and make sure it’s secure.  I can send someone with you if you’d like.”

“No, I’ll be OK.  The original attack was so far from our street, I think we’ll be fine.” 

Molly walked back home feeling relieved, and hoping the incident remained minor. 

But as she approached the front walk she could tell something wasn’t right.  Dug bristled and the hair on his neck stood on end.  He growled loudly and she readied her gun, a small hunting rifle Burt had taught her to use. 

The door was open slightly, and she pushed it the rest of the way with the barrel of the gun.  It was dark inside, and Molly couldn’t tell what was a shadow and what was actual movement.  At first, she pointed the gun wildly from corner to corner of the room.  Then she took a deep breath and slowly moved farther into the house. 

Everything was silent, save for Dug’s low growl.  He pointed his nose to the air, whimpered and took off towards the bedroom.  “Dug!” Molly hissed, but he didn’t listen, so she took off after him.

She rounded the corner to the bedroom and the smell of blood hit her like a ton of bricks.  The only light she had was the moonlight shining through the window, so she carefully walked to the window and opened the curtains to try and shed more light on the room. 

In the center of the floor by the bed Molly saw Dug bathed in pale light.  He was standing over a grisly scene.  A pool of blood and clumps of fur were all that remained.  Molly sucked in a breath.  “Sally…” she breathed. 

Molly grabbed the gun and darted back out the way she came.  Out in the street she scanned both ways for movement.  Any sign of her beloved, and probably horribly injured, pet.  But she had disappeared.  Molly could hear Dug howling from inside the house.  She fell to her knees in the street and cried.  She had left her there alone. 

It’s my fault she died so horribly,
Molly thought.
They probably wanted her for the meat, but I’d rather they starved
.

Jimmy was making his way back to his own home after helping defend the supplies when he stumbled upon Molly in the middle of the street.  He ran to her.  “Molly, what’s happened?” He held his gun up defensively and scanned the horizon.

“Sal-ly,” she hiccupped.  “They-killed-her.” 

“Oh.”  He didn’t have any pets of his own and didn’t know how to relate to this outpouring of emotion over a cat, so he cut to what he thought was more important.  “What about your food?  Did they get any of it?”

She thought, hiccupping every few moments. 
I didn’t check my food.  I was so worried about Sally I didn’t look to see if they’d gotten any of my food.
  A new level of panic rose, and she sprang to her feet and ran to the house.  Dug was still howling upstairs and Jimmy frowned at the sound.  Molly went to the garage, where she was keeping her food.  She figured it was an unconventional place and hoped it would discourage thieves, because they would have to search for it. 

She’d put locks on the cabinets, hoping that would deter thieves even further.  Locks take time to break.  Lucky for Molly, the locks were undisturbed.  She sighed heavily and Jimmy put his hand on her shoulder.  “Well, there’s a blessing.” 

“Yes, well.  I had to sacrifice my cat to get it.”  She turned to look at him.  His eyes were big, green and full of uncertainty.  He was single, and not used to dealing with emotionally unstable women.  “They killed her in my bedroom!  That’s were Dug is.”

He put his arm around her and led her out of the garage.  “I’ll stay here tonight if it’ll make you feel better.  I can sleep on the couch, OK?  In the morning, I’ll help ya clean up.” 

“I can’t sleep in there tonight, Jimmy!” 

“Don’t ya have a guest room you can use?”

“I s’pose,” she pouted.

“Look, it’ll be OK.  You’ve still got all of your food, and hey, you’ve got Dug.”  Dug howled upstairs.  “It could’ve been worse. What if you’d been here?  What do you think they would’ve done to you?” 

“I sure would’ve made it harder for them to hurt Sally.” 

He shook his head, seeing this was a losing battle.  “Why don’t you go get in bed?  Hashing it out isn’t going to change anything.”

That night, she sobbed into her pillow as Dug lay by her side.  Though her sobs, she asked Dug, “Where is your father?  Why isn’t he here?  He would never have let this happen.” 

Dug only whimpered a reply as she soaked the pillow with tears.

14.

It was a long four days to D.C.  The trek took him far from the coast, and Gary had run out of food by the time he reached the city.  It was a wet few days though, so at least he wasn’t wanting for water. 

The situation in D.C. seemed similar to Baltimore at first.  But soon Gary saw it was different.  Horribly different.  As in Baltimore, the power was clearly off, and the place had been looted right down to the building studs, but there was no one.  It was an absolute ghost town. 

Garbage and debris littered the streets and sidewalks that wove their way through the capital city.  Gary’s lone footsteps echoed off buildings and disappeared into nothingness.  No aid for the country’s citizens.  No information for those left.  Nothing.

He kicked a small rock a few feet and listened to it bounce along the street.  When he caught up with it, he picked it up and examined it. 

What is going on? Why is this happening?  What did I do to deserve such abandonment?
  He flung the rock at the nearest window.  It was already broken and went sailing through, landing in what remained of the storefront.  It wasn’t very satisfying, to tell the truth.

Deflated, he decided to fish the river near the Washington Mall for a bit.  He tripped and fell spectacularly on the way to the riverbank.  He clenched his teeth and stood up, brushing the front of his pants off, not having much luck with the mud and grass stains that found a new home on his clothes. 

While Gary was readying the fishing line, he cut his hand open with the hook. 

That’s it.  I’ve had enough.
  He stood up, picked up the pack and flung it as far as it would go.  What was left of his supplies spilled out as the pack arched over the field.  He fell to his knees and cried while he watched it fall.  But there was no one to see him cry.  No one to comfort him.  No one to answer his questions.  Gary lost track of time while he knelt there, tears streaming into his newly-grown beard.  He finally allowed himself to mourn the losses of the last few weeks. 

When the tears stopped, he took a deep breath and stood.  He gathered everything that had spilled out of the pack and collected the bag from the other side of the field.  Then he renewed his effort to catch some fish, and made a fire in a grassy field overlooking the Washington Monument.  He feasted on fresh fish – his first real meal in about thirty-two hours.  As twilight settled in, exhaustion overwhelmed him.  He found a secluded spot near the Lincoln Memorial, and was asleep before he could even lay his head down.

Gary felt something poking him.  He opened one eye, and couldn’t see anything.  A light was shining in his face, with nothing but darkness beyond it.  He brought his hands to his face to shield his eyes.  “What the hell?” 

“Don’t move.”  A nondescript male voice commanded.

He froze. 
Shit.  What now?

“What are you doing here?”

“Trying to get some sleep.  I was having pretty good luck until you fellas came along.” 

“Sir, the only thing his pack has that could be considered a weapon is a multi-purpose knife.  Everything else appears to be simple supplies.”  That voice seemed younger than the first, but it was hard for Gary’s startled mind to know for sure.  The light made it impossible to see. 

“Not a threat?”

“No, sir.  Not immediately.” 

“Copy that.” 

His pack landed roughly in his lap.  “Move along now.  We’ve got orders to shoot on sight anyone who doesn’t belong here.  Consider this your one and only warning.” 

“But,” Gary paused.  “What?  I mean, where can I go?  Is everywhere like this?  How will I know where’s safe?” 

The men didn’t answer.  He watched the light become dimmer as they backed away.  He never saw them clearly, just shadows and silhouettes.  He thought he caught the outline of a gun on more than one of them, and helmets on them all. 

The military,
he thought. 
It’s worse than I thought.

When he felt like they were far enough away, he threw his pack over his shoulder and started trying to navigate the darkness.  He still felt like they were watching him, but he didn’t see any sign of them by the light of the moon. 

He walked to what he hoped was a little beyond the borders of D.C. and set up his camp for the second time that night. 

In the morning he knew he had to come up with a plan.  He pulled out the map and considered his options: stick with I-95 all the way home, or follow the coast.  After what he’d seen in D.C., and how hard it was to come by food away from the coast, he was leery of straying from it again.  He looked more closely at his map and saw that a rural road skirted the shoreline pretty closely most of the way.  Gary decided loosely following that was his best bet.  He hoped staying away from the bigger cities would keep him under the military’s radar. 

He decided not to think too much about his long-term problems: supplies, the state of his shoes, how long he’d last on his own.  To survive, he had to be concerned with now.  Today.  What was he going to do to get as far south as he could in that one day?  That became his new mantra.

He had learned to take it one day at a time during a special workshop on survival.  He thought it was important to learn what to do if his plane ever did go down in the middle of nowhere, and he survived.  It had been the longest five days of his life – up until the Blackout, at least.  He and four others were dumped in the middle of the swamp with one instructor,  who taught them how to hunt, how to start a fire, how to build a shelter, and how to stay alive.  Gary was left bit to hell by mosquitoes, cut to hell by the thick brush they had to trudge through, and tired as hell after sleeping in hammocks made from palm fronds so they could get up off the ground at night.  The first night, he hadn’t quite perfected his hammock construction yet, and he came crashing down into the swamp below around two a.m.  Sputtering and scrambling to get out of the alligator-infested waters, he didn’t sleep much the rest of that night.  But it was all worth it.  Knowledge he hoped he’d never have to use was coming in very handy during this long journey. 

He made it into Virginia easily and stopped for the night inside a wildlife preserve.  He thought back to some show he’d watched on the Discovery Channel before all this happened.  That guy had made trapping animals look so easy.  Gary tried his hand at a few snares before he went to bed, but came up empty in the morning. 

He frowned at the empty trap. 
Not as easy as I’d hoped.

He ended up fishing the river again, and although he wasn’t hungry after the meal, he had been hoping to have something other than fish for breakfast. 

As he cast the bones and skin into the fire he said aloud, “I s’pose I should be grateful for the meal.”  Gary sighed.  He
was
grateful.  It had been eighteen days since the Blackout.  He was a Wanderer, but he was alive.  He could only hope Molly’s conditions were a little better. 

15.

Three weeks into the wall’s construction, a fire broke out.  The alarm rousted everyone from their beds in the middle of the night.  Molly caught up with Jimmy, standing on the edge of the blaze. 

It looked like a bonfire, near where they were constructing the third section of the wall.  Molly was confused. 

“What’s going on?”

“Someone set fire to the supplies,” Jimmy said, so flatly that it caught Molly off-guard.

“What?  Oh my God!  We have to put it out!  Maybe some of the ones in the middle of the pile are still usable!”  She looked around.  “Where’s Burt?”

Jimmy gestured.  “Over there.”

Molly abandoned Jimmy’s nonchalance and ran to Burt.  “Burt!  What can I do?  How can we get this out?”

Burt looked mournfully at the blaze.  “I don’t think we can.  Best thing is to just let it burn out.  The supplies are a loss.” 

“No!  Come on!  Maybe there’s some salvageable things in the middle that haven’t been burned yet!  I’ll go get some buckets and we can put it out!”  She looked at Burt, and lowered her voice. “Burt, please. Don’t give up like this.” 

He turned and simply looked at her.

“Who did this?” she demanded.

“We think it was a group of Wanderers.” 

Molly shook her head.  “That doesn’t make any sense.  Wouldn’t Wanderers take the supplies, rather than destroy them?”

Burt grunted a response. 

“Burt-“

But he cut her off.  “Molly, you know as much as I do.  Now, I have things to do.  I’ll see you in the morning.” 

She was left standing alone in the moonlight.  Jimmy approached quietly.  “I don’t understand,” she said.

“Honey, I’m not sure any of us do.” 

The next day, they scrambled to try and replace the lost supplies.  While they scrounged, rumors flew about who was responsible.  It turned neighbor against neighbor, as everyone suspected it was someone inside who’d done it. Otherwise, why not take the supplies, as Molly had suggested? 

Molly didn’t fully agree.  Her theory was that Craig was behind the whole thing.  She thought he’d gotten some of his cronies to help him sneak back into the town and start the fire.

She was taking a break near the town square when a fight broke out.  “Well, I’ll bet you started it!” someone yelled at another person standing nearby.