And Darkness Fell Read online

  “Mind if I use your toilet?”

  She slowly raised a bony arm and extended it toward the archway beyond the cabinets.

  Dodging more roaches and a mouse nibbling on something, I took a kerosene lamp down the hall. Dirty clothes and food wrappers littered the carpet. The foul odor followed me from the kitchen.

  The bathroom was the first room on the left. I went in, closed the door, and gagged at the stench. The toilet lid and seat were up, the basin brimming with feces. Holding my breath, I depressed the flush handle. Nothing. I tried again. Silence.

  Idiot. No power or water. Do the math.

  I dashed out of the room.

  The little girl hadn’t moved. I didn’t want to leave her but had no choice. I had nowhere to take her and wasn’t able to care for a kid. Reed wouldn’t want the added responsibility, either.

  “I’ll be leaving now.” Something tugged at my heart when I said it.

  She watched me in eerie silence.

  A black cowhide wallet sat on the counter in front of a scratched, red tin can labeled COOKIES. I picked up the wallet and opened it, finding several credit cards and some bills. The plastic wasn’t usable anymore, so I ignored them. I found two twenties, three tens, and two ones. I took two tens then glanced at the little girl and the old woman, who continued working on her afghan. This was probably all the money they had.

  Stealing from this family would haunt me. I’d always wonder if some of it had been earmarked for milk—or maybe fresh underwear.

  I put the money back and returned the wallet to its place on the counter. The little girl still hadn’t moved. I waved and went back outside.

  I’d originally wanted to search the place for firearms. If the two outside were hunters, they might have guns lying around, possibly in one of the upstairs rooms. But I couldn’t spend another moment in that house. The disgusting situation had made me nauseous.

  I rushed over to an overgrown hedge in the trash-cluttered back yard, unzipped my jeans, and urinated in the bushes.

  The two jumbos still sat in the same place on the front lawn. They watched me as I returned to my van and began waving after I’d slipped behind the wheel.

  I hoped they’d remember to buy milk for that little girl.

  Maybe if I go back inside and leave a note...

  A wasted effort at best. They wouldn’t be able to read it.

  I saw the little girl watching me through one of the windows. For a moment, I imagined her dying, her big brown eyes glazing over moments before her head dropped. I forced my mind off it.

  Sympathy and regret had become wasted emotions in this bleak new world.

  I got back on the interstate and headed north, keeping the speedometer at about ninety. I wasn’t afraid of being pulled over—I saw no traffic. The few people still functioning knew how dangerous the roads had become. The others could no longer operate a moving vehicle.

  Depression set in. I forced it away. Depression could be lethal nowadays. I generally had no trouble keeping it a safe distance away, but this time I couldn’t help it. That little girl had no future. No one did any more, but it seemed so much worse for kids, who’d never had the chance to experience any joy in life.

  I’d seen forty years of it. I’d served in the military, defended this country in many unspeakable ways, and witnessed things that would stay with me the rest of my life. I fell in love several times, married and divorced once, met all sorts of people, made friends and enemies, and operated my own successful business.

  I’d seen what the politicians had done to this country. I’d seen people kill one another and steal from one another. I’d seen love turn to hatred, hatred to murder. I’d seen envy. And deceit. I’d seen stupidity in all its forms.

  Worst of all, I’d seen the end of life as we all knew it.

  Viewed this way, the little girl was fortunate she wouldn’t have to endure much more. The young shouldn’t be forced to watch hell emerging from the darkness to claim the lives of everyone on this godforsaken planet.

  “What happened back there?” Reed asked.

  “An old woman and a little girl. Their water and power were cut off.”

  “I guess they didn’t have any fruit, then.”

  Reed’s statement sounded selfish and callous, but the survival instinct had emerged in many forms. Selfishness and callousness were merely two. I considered Reed’s reaction a form of denial.

  “There were roaches, flies, and rats. It was pretty disgusting in that house.”

  “How old was the little girl?”

  “Nine or ten.”

  “How bad ... was she?”

  “A few more days, maybe.”

  “Bummer.” Reed sighed.

  “If things were different, we might’ve taken her with us.”

  “If things were different.”

  “But they aren’t.”

  “No. They aren’t.” Reed settled back in his seat. He probably wanted to talk to his friend about the little girl.

  TWO

  As I forced the van into the darkness of the night, I found myself once again trying to believe the last six months hadn’t actually happened. I wished it had all been a hellacious dream, because all dreams end, so things would eventually revert back to the way they once were, and the world hadn’t really become a gruesome hell filled with death and slobbering idiots. The powerful, intelligent people running the planet’s governments would never let such horrors happen.

  Would they?

  Unfortunately, after spending so many mornings gazing out the bedroom window of my apartment and staring numbly at the growing number of bodies lying on the pavement behind the complex, I came to the frightening realization that I wasn’t dreaming at all. And the stench assaulting my nostrils whenever I opened my window served as yet another clue.

  A living nightmare had been born, sending reality gasping in the dust. In just a few short years, the System finally broke apart and began its decline into chaos and death, gaining momentum as things deteriorated, and turning society into a dark wasteland.

  For ten years, I had been running my own auto detailing business, employing six men who drove to people’s homes and thoroughly cleaned, washed, and polished their vehicles. I provided a terrific service, using hard-working, professional-minded young men and offering an unconditional money-back guarantee. The business earned much repeat service and many valuable contacts. But when the phones stopped working just a few months ago, customers could no longer call for appointments. And when my boys and my faithful secretary Leona stopped coming in to work, I knew the business was finished.

  I remained in my apartment, scraping by on what cash I had left. I didn’t have enough for rent, but that no longer mattered. The association running the apartment complex had suspended all activities and collections weeks earlier.

  Orlando Utilities suffered serious changes that damaged their service. As the doping grew to mammoth proportions, their billing department turned chaotic, dying quietly over a period of days.

  One afternoon, the meter reader showed up, just as she had on the fifteenth of every month. She got out of her small white pickup and shuffled over to my building. Just as she approached my meter, she stopped moving and stood very still, staring at the equipment in her hand. She remained standing there all evening. By next morning, she’d fallen dead on the pavement.

  A week later, Orlando Utilities announced it would operate until the end of the month and then terminate its services. That meant all the stores on its grid would eventually follow suit.

  Although most of this chaos took effect fairly quickly, it hadn’t exactly happened overnight. I’d noticed several bad omens years earlier, for instance, while watching TV in my apartment. Every so often, the broadcasts would suffer signal glitches followed by white noise. It wasn’t earth-shattering, so I didn’t give it much thought at the time. I would just get up from the sofa, grab another beer, and wait for the program to resume. I didn’t attribute such minuscule fuckups to an
ything serious or far-reaching. The guy running things from the computer room could have spilled coffee on the keyboard. He might have been shooting up, and when the drug penetrated his system, he fell out of his chair, pulling out power cords during his mind-blowing odyssey to the floor. Or maybe Barbie, the stacked, sunny-faced weather girl, had distracted him by walking by.

  Signal hiccups and other interruptions quickly took a back seat to other meltdowns, however. Commercials began interfering with programming. Or, the image would become grainy and soft, almost muted followed by a blast of sharp and deafening audio, forcing me to lunge for the mute button. Eventually, normal programming appeared only fitfully, a few seconds here and there, only to revert back into inappropriately timed commercials and signal distortions.

  One afternoon, as I watched a documentary, a grainy print of a home movie appeared in the middle of a break, showing two naked teenagers humping away in front of a swimming pool.

  Then, a few months ago, the misspellings started, first in the commercials, soon thereafter on the local news, and finally on the national news.

  I saw an ad for a local law firm that went something like this:

  CALL MARTIN LANG IF YOU WENT TO BE COMPONSATED FOR YUR INJYRIES

  And: DON’T LET THE IRS BETE YOU UPP— CALL NORMIN BLAINE, ATTORNIE-AT-LAW— HELL FIX YOU

  The weather report in the screen crawl would read: LOCL SHOWERS

  HIGHTS IN THE EIGHTYS LOWS IN THE SIXTYS TOPICAL DISTURBENCES ON THE TOPRICS… DETALES LATR ON, WITH THE EVNING NEWCAST

  Inquiries proved pointless. Each time I tried reporting a problem, I received a busy signal or recording saying the number was not valid, or no longer in service. I eventually stopped calling altogether and turned off the set.

  Things worsened. My WiFi connection, which normally ran flawlessly, broke down. Telephone service tanked. Internet service grew sporadic and frequently stopped for days on end. Electricity went off for hours. Cell phones lost their signals. ATMs stopped dispensing cash. Credit cards could no longer be scanned and were frequently chewed up by the machine.

  As the doping epidemic increased, the chaos intensified. Because of the numbers of people winding down, the cities proved much more dangerous than the rural areas. And as more people became affected, violence increased, and some of it was unimaginable in a normal world.

  As for me, for reasons I couldn’t explain—because I still didn’t know what was going on—I remained unaffected. I wasn’t alone. Many others who seemed still able to function wandered about. Like me, they’d witnessed the growing plague and its consequences, determined what they needed to do to survive, and did what was necessary. Their sense of self-preservation, heightened to the nth degree by the horrors they’d seen, forced them to do terrible things.

  I’d been doing some terrible things myself. I’d walked into someone’s house less than an hour ago to use their facilities and take whatever I wanted. If it hadn’t been for the little girl and the old woman, I would have taken their money and anything else I could find. But I couldn’t possibly steal from the unfortunate.

  Even in this nightmare world, I clung to the principles I’d been following since I was a kid.

  I realized that having principles at this stage was a weakness, and if I didn’t soon toughen up, it would mean my demise. I understood this but still couldn’t bring myself to do certain things. On the other hand, I couldn’t bring myself to give up or come to grips with the world dying this way. I was a survivor and always had been. This was certainly a devastating blow to civilization, but I refused to believe it was the final one—though for me it had come awfully close just a few days earlier.

  Orlando Utilities, operating with a skeleton crew of functioning employees, was providing service on a very limited basis: one hour in the morning and two hours in the evening. I would use this opportunity to cool off the sweltering apartment by turning the thermostat to 60 and keeping it there until the power switched off.

  The severely crippled Internet followed the same pattern as the power company, providing service between 6 and 8 p.m. each day.

  I switched on my screen one night during the two-hour window to see if anything was going on. It displayed the usual dated news reports and one new email message.

  The email was from my mother, who still lived on the 88-acre property my great-grandparents had bought nearly a century earlier in Western Pennsylvania. Mom was in her mid-sixties and had lived on the farm her entire life. When Dad died five years earlier, Mom moved back into the main house with her older brother, Joe, and rented out the small frame house next door, where Mom and Dad had raised me.

  Mom’s message made my pulse pound.

  HI SON WISH YOU WERE HERE THINGS HAVE BEEN GETTING BAD UP HERE LATLY AND I HOPE I GET TO SEE YU SOONE

  MOM

  The message was ominous enough in its content, but the misspellings told me the worst. My mother had graduated with honors from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and taught College English for twenty years.

  I had to face reality: Mom was affected. It was the email that convinced me to return home. I had no idea how affected she was, but I’d never seen her misspell a word before. I hadn’t seen her since Dad’s funeral and felt badly about it. I’d considered moving back to Pennsylvania, but since my business had been doing so well, I didn’t want to tempt fate. Now that fate had dealt us all the worst hand imaginable, I had no more excuses. If I didn’t go back now, I’d probably never see my mother again.

  Like many apartment complexes in Florida, mine adjoined the rear parking lot of a major Safeway. Normally, living within walking distance of a supermarket can be a terrific convenience. But the rules had changed dramatically. Even if I hadn’t planned to leave the state, I would have moved out of my apartment. I refused to spend my final days next door to a building filled with massive amounts of putrefying foods.

  The store normally operated twenty-four/seven, but because of the power loss, even with backup generators, the staff had given up on the facility weeks ago. Now, the evening air hung heavy with decay, assaulting my sinuses. Still, I had an errand to do before leaving town.

  The parking lot was practically empty. I saw half a dozen vehicles parked farther down, in front of the local bar. That’s where the few unaffected people in the neighborhood had chosen to gather—obviously to get sloshed. If I wasn’t heading out of town, I would have joined them. Downing free drinks would have been a sensible way of facing a bleak future.

  The Safeway’s big sliding-glass doors were partially open. They’d probably stopped in that position during the last power blip and hadn’t been reset. Most of the store was dark, while some parts flickered beneath erratic fluorescents. A large, heavyset black woman leaned against one of the registers, watching me with unseeing eyes. If I hadn’t seen her blink, I would’ve thought she was dead.

  To my left, Jim, a slender guy around thirty, watched me through the window of the manager’s office. I waved, but he didn’t move. I’d shopped in this store hundreds of times during the last ten years and had seen and spoken to him often. But now his face showed no recognition. His eyes displayed a fixed gaze. I’d learned to recognize the signs. When the light leaves the eyes and is replaced with a heavy glossiness, death settles in quickly. Jim probably had become affected a few days ago.

  I grabbed a cart and pushed it down the aisle, passing a few other shoppers who were moving so slowly they’d probably be dead before they finished shopping. A tall black man around seventy faced the glass refrigerator door, staring blankly at the racks of assorted beers. I edged toward his left, pulled it open, picked up a six-pack of German pilsner, closed the door, and hurried down the aisle. Just before I turned the corner, I glanced back. He still hadn’t moved.

  I grabbed cans of tuna, chicken, baked beans, and several packets of beef jerky. I dumped them in the cart and headed back toward the front of the store. So far, so good. I seemed to be the only one moving about normally. The store remained quiet. If th
e cashier still hadn’t moved as I was ready to leave, I wouldn’t have to pay for my purchases.

  Then I stopped cold.

  Three large punks in filthy jeans, leather vests, and do-rags blocked my path. They all had long, greasy beards and stunk of B.O., cigarettes, and beer. Two of them wore nose rings. The third had several studs piercing the flesh at the ends of his eyebrows. All three wore ear studs. Two of them had switchblades tucked into their belts. The third gripped a pair of brass knuckles in his right fist.

  They were standing still.

  My guts churned, and my feet turned numb. I had no idea what to do, because I wasn’t sure they were doped. Their glossy eyes suggested they might be doped. Or, they might be hyped up on something. I hadn’t noticed them when I walked in the store.

  They were spaced a few feet apart, giving me just enough room to slip by. If they were playing possum, they could easily kill me if I moved closer.

  Backtrack!

  It seemed my only possible escape.

  I turned the cart around and hurried back down the aisle.

  Just then, one of them zipped past me, stopped, slammed his scuffed boot onto the bottom shelf of my cart, and waved his switchblade at my face.

  “Money,” he said flatly.

  Terrific. The world’s been destroyed and I’m about to be mugged.

  My pulse pounding, I glanced behind me. The others had crept up to us, stopping about five feet away. The punk with the switchblade held it out. Its razor-sharp blade glittered in the sputtering fluorescents. The other continued gripping the brass knuckles.

  I was trapped.

  “Your money, motherfucker. Everything you got. Give it up.” His large, filthy left palm moved toward me. A heavy whiff of BO raked up and down my face.

  The other two didn’t move, but their eyes stayed on me.

  My military training, long forgotten, quickly snapped on. The punk facing me was obviously still functioning. My cart separated us, but he could easily kick it aside and lunge at me with his knife. The other two stood within easy access of my back, with nothing separating us. This made them even deadlier than the first guy. If I wanted to get out of this alive, I’d have to confuse them.