Into The Darkness (22 page)

Dylan
tried to give Kevin his rifle. “Here, shoot it up if you don’t want to use your
pistol.”

Kevin
put his hand up, refusing the weapon. His eyes remained on the lead railcar.

“Something’s
not right. I see a flickering candle burning inside. Nobody came out and nobody
has moved inside. I’m going in.”

“I
wouldn’t do that, Kevin,” said Dylan.

“I
need to see his face when I kill him.”

Kevin
brought his pistol up to a ready position and braced it with his other hand,
where he held the flashlight that Bull had given him. He moved slowly forward
and stepped into the lead car. He held the pistol directly in front of him, and
he pushed each compartment open with his foot, shining the small light into
each empty room. In the last sleeping compartment, there was a large candle
burning in the center of a small table. Someone had closed all the windows. No
one had escaped. The car was empty. Cyrus was not there. Kevin took the candle,
lit the bedding on fire, and walked out of the railcar. Within minutes, the car
was ablaze. He jumped to the ground and saw the men he was with, standing in a
semicircle watching his return. He felt like a defeated man.

“Empty?”
asked Bull.

“Completely
empty,” said Kevin solemnly, “but that’s where he was, I just know it.”

“He
can’t bother anybody now. He’s a broken man, wherever he is,” said Hector.

“Not
good enough,” answered Kevin.

Dylan
and Kevin left the rail yard. Bull, Hector, and the others decided to stay and
patrol for any stragglers from Cyrus’s gang, as well as stack the remaining
bodies to burn later. The two men walked directly back to Kevin’s apartment.
Kevin was mute, lost in his thoughts. They were obsessive thoughts about Cyrus,
his gang, and where he might be. Dylan tried to stay alert for both of them,
but fatigue began overcoming the adrenaline rush of the night’s events. They
arrived at the apartment building at daybreak. The rain had stopped hours ago.
There was a cool morning breeze and not a cloud in the sky. The eastern horizon
began to glow with sunlight, waking the songbirds at the park across the street
from Kevin’s apartment building.

The
stench inside the lobby remained oppressive. Dylan ripped the drapes from a
large window in the building’s lobby. He placed the drapes beside the body in
the stairwell. They rolled the corpse onto the fabric, and then pulled the dead
body outside.

“We
should bury this. It’s putrid,” said Kevin, looking toward the park.

“I’ve
got to rest,” said Dylan, as he sat on the concrete sidewalk. He then went flat
on his back, and closed his eyes.

Kevin
stepped back off the sidewalk and sat on the hood of a car with broken windows.
“Hey, do you think what we did was right?” asked Kevin.

Dylan
opened his eyes and turned his head to look up at Kevin. “What do you mean? Not
burying that body?”

Kevin
was looking at the ground and slowly shaking his head. “No. What we just came
back from. We helped kill a lot of people.”

Dylan
jumped to his feet. “What? Those weren’t girl scouts back there. You saw what
that pack of wolves was capable of.”

“I’m
just sick of all this shit.” Kevin looked up from the street, and then looked
around, surveying the desolation. “What happened to everyone? They’re all
animals. Disgusting animals.”

Dylan
took a step back and threw his hands in the air. “I’m sick of this shit, too.”
He put his hands on his hips, tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and took a
deep breath. He lowered his head again, looking directly at Kevin, and slowly
exhaled. “There’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Let’s get your wife and
get the hell out of here.”

This
time the hallway was not so dark on Kevin’s floor. The morning light had begun
to fill the sky and the hallway, too. Kevin knocked on this door.

“Mary…Mary,
it’s me…open the door.”

Within
seconds, Kevin heard his wife running toward the door. Mary swung the door open
wildly and stared at Kevin. The morning light illuminated a man quite different
from the man that left her several months ago. She could see him clearly now.
He was dirty, had longer hair and a beard. His beard camouflaged his thin
smile. He was happy to see her, but his body was fighting back with hunger and
fatigue. She stepped forward, hugged him, and wrapped her arms tightly around
his body. He bent over far enough that his bearded face touched her cheek. He
wrapped his arms around her and picked her up. She whispered into his ear,
“Don’t leave me again.”

All
three of them went into the apartment and locked the door behind them. Inside,
Dylan found the couch and Kevin sat on a chair with his wife on his lap.

“Kevin,
I’m starving,” said Dylan.

“Honey,
we need to eat, and then we need to sleep. We have been awake for…uh,” said
Kevin, pausing as he rubbed his bearded face and briefly tried to remember when
the last time was that he had slept. “I don’t know how long.” He leaned his
head back, thinking of food, and closed his eyes. “What do you have to eat?”

“I
was awake all night, too.” Mary playfully hit her husband on the shoulder, and
then jumped up off her husband’s lap. “I’ll get some food ready.” She walked
halfway to the kitchen, but abruptly turned around. “Oh, I forgot about the
water. Can you go get the buckets from the roof?”

Kevin
opened his eyes and looked at Dylan.

“Let’s
go,” said Dylan, stiffly getting up. “No rest for the weary.”

On
the roof, they could feel the morning sunlight still warming the air. The sun
had come up past the horizon, casting long shadows from the tall buildings.
Mary had set ten buckets on the roof, and arranged tarps and sheets of plastic
to direct the rainwater into the buckets. Before they took the buckets of water
back to the apartment, the men looked around the surrounding area from the
rooftop. This height gave them a good vantage point to study what to expect in
an urban area.

Stalled
cars filled the streets below and the cars were vandalized, most having broken
windows, although some were burned, too. There was a large building in the
distance with smoke still rising from it. Trash littered the streets, some of
it collected in small piles by the wind and the rest dispersed across the urban
landscape. Movement in the city park across the street got their attention. It
was a pack of dogs. People were either no longer able to feed their pets, or
the owners had already died. The dogs were chasing a rabbit. The rabbit was
running and turning as fast as it could, but the pack was gaining. The alpha
dog captured the rabbit and the rabbit let out a high-pitched screech before
the dog shook it, breaking its neck. The dogs hastily devoured the rabbit and
the pack moved onward, noses to the ground in their search for another meal.

“Hey,
Kevin, earlier you asked me if what we did was right. Now I have a question for
you. Do you want to be the dog or the rabbit?”

Kevin
put his foot on the roof’s parapet, bent forward, and then rested an elbow on
his elevated knee. He continued to look at the park while he stroked his beard
and contemplated Dylan’s question.

“A
dog,” replied Kevin, pausing to look at the desolate street below before he
added, “with a conscience.”

Dylan
slapped him on the back and said, “Good answer. Let’s go before I chase down a
rabbit and eat it raw, too.”

Kevin
quietly laughed and looked back at the pack of dogs wandering around with their
noses sniffing the air and the ground, looking for their next kill. The humor
of his comment faded away as he thought about his answer to Dylan’s question.
Kevin knew it was survival of the fittest now. He did not ever want to kill and
enjoy it, but he wanted to survive, and he still wanted revenge.

The
men brought the rainwater back to the apartment and Mary soaked pasta in the
water to soften it. She opened cans of beans and fruit, which were quickly
devoured. They put water into the empty cans and gently swirled it to dissolve
any remaining nutrients, and drank it, then drank some more.

With
food in their stomachs, they decided to finally get some sleep. Dylan leaned
back on the couch and put a towel over his eyes to block the morning light.
Kevin and Mary went to their bedroom, and all were instantly asleep. It had
been months since Dylan and Kevin had slept inside a building.

Hours
later, they heard a loud blast through the apartment’s open window, rousing
everyone in the apartment from a deep sleep. Dylan was sleeping next to his
rifle and instinctively grabbed for it, jumping off the couch. In a startled
daze, Dylan looked around the apartment, then realized that the blast had come
from outside at street level. He put the rifle back down, and gave Kevin and
Mary a wave as they entered the living room.

“I’ve
heard that before, mostly at night,” said Mary, sitting on a chair in the
living room. “I’ve mostly stayed in the apartment for months now.” She looked
at a calendar on the wall that was no longer of any use. “Just like solitary
confinement. I hate it.”

Dylan
and Kevin went to the window for a look outside. There was a person sprawled in
the street, dead from a shotgun blast. Next to the body was a shopping cart,
tipped over and empty.

Dylan
pointed out the window and asked, “Have you seen that before?”

Not
knowing what Dylan was referring to, she looked out the window. When she saw
the body, she quickly turned her head and closed her eyes. “Disgusting. I hate
it here,” she said softly to herself.

Kevin
tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention and moved his chair next to her
so he could face her when he spoke. “We can’t stay here. We have to go.”

With
a confused look on her face, she shrugged her shoulders and asked, “Where?”

Kevin
pointed toward Dylan. “With him.”

“But
I don’t know him,” she said, apprehensively looking away from Dylan, “and you
still haven’t explained how you got back here.”

“This
could take a while,” said Dylan, lying down on the couch and closing his eyes. Kevin
began to explain to his wife what they had done to get back to her. “There were
four of us on the job when the pulse hit. One had a pacemaker and it must’ve
failed when everything else did. He died in his sleep. Three of us got rafts
and headed downstream. It was Dylan’s idea to get the rafts and travel on the
Missouri River. That river got me all the way back here to you.”

Mary
smiled at the thought of her husband’s return. She then asked, “Three of you?
Where’s the other one?”

Kevin
quickly glanced at Dylan. He appeared to be sleeping already.

“Richard
was the third man. He was shot. Richard didn’t have much common sense.”

“You
want us to leave with him?” Mary whispered the question as she pointed at
Dylan. “Where to? When we leave the building, do we end up like the person on
the street down below, like your friend Richard?”

“It’s
not pretty out there. We were able to get some weapons and ammunition. If we
stick together, we can help each other. That’s what has worked so far.”

Kevin
stood up and walked into the kitchen. He opened the pantry door and pointed
inside.

“What
little food we have here is going to run out soon. When the food runs out, what
will we do?”

He
walked back to his wife, kneeling beside her. She put her arm around him and
touched her forehead to his. “What do you want me to do, Kevin?”

“Dylan
said we could go home with him. He’s convinced me. And face it, Mary, we don’t
have a better option. I’ll let Dylan explain.”

Kevin
moved over to Dylan’s sleeping body on the couch. He tapped Dylan on the
shoulder to wake him up. Dylan was startled awake, took a deep breath, and sat
up wiping some slobber from his beard.

“Sorry
to wake you from your beauty sleep.”

“Asshole,”
said Dylan with a laugh.

“I
told her about how we got here and that you offered to take us with you.”

“Yes,
I did.”

“Tell
her why you have a better deal.”

Dylan
rubbed his face with the palms of his dirty hands to help wake himself. He
looked at Mary, smiled under his beard, and said, “Let me explain to you what
I’ve told your husband. I live in a house in suburbia. I wish it was a rural
setting, but it’s not, so I will have to deal with that. However, I am away
from the urban area. That’s very different from where you live now.”

Mary
nodded her head.

“My
subdivision is located close to farmland and is next to an enormous county
park. That open land is next to my house. It’s a new subdivision and not all of
the lots are developed. Therefore, it has the advantage of low population
density. The parkland I’m next to has an artificial lake. The lake is fed by a
small stream a short distance down my street. I’ve seen deer, turkeys, geese,
and groundhogs close by. I’ve seen them walking right through my back yard.
That’s food and water, Mary, and let me tell you something else. I’ve been
stockpiling food, the kind of food that will last for years, and seeds, too.
That will give us time to learn to grow our own food.”

“Where
do you live?”

“A
suburb of Kansas City, on the Missouri side.”

Mary
quickly stood up and ran to a closet down the hallway. She moved a stack of
papers and books, and retrieved a road atlas. As she walked back into the room
where she had left the two men, she opened the atlas to a page showing the
route of the Missouri River from Omaha to Kansas City. She carefully traced the
convoluted blue line of the river between the two cities on the map and
compared the distance to the map’s key. Mary shook her head.

“Are
you crazy? It’s hundreds of miles from here,” said Mary, in disbelief.

Kevin
stood beside Mary and held her index finger. He traced the river on the atlas,
with her finger, from Omaha back to Helena, Montana.

“That’s
what I’ve been through to get back to you. Now I’m here, and we have to go.
There’s no other option.”

Mary
sat down in the chair again, dropped the atlas to the floor, and began to cry.
Kevin gently touched her shoulder and gave her a kiss on the forehead. He then
walked to the kitchen pantry and motioned for Dylan to follow him. Kevin opened
the door to the pantry and leaned his hip against the kitchen countertop.

“That’s
not the reaction I was expecting,” said Kevin, quietly.

Dylan
whispered back, “Cut her some slack. This past day has been a shock to her. Let
her sleep on it. We all need some rest. It’s probably a good idea to eat some
more food now, and then try to get a good night’s sleep.”