Dark Grid (43 page)

Dan closed his journal and put it in the drawer in the nightstand by the bed. The same nightstand that used to hold a lamp, alarm clock, iPod, cell phone, and CPAP machine but now held only a candle and a picture of his son, Danny Jr.  His only son, who would have been two tomorrow. Dan closed his eyes.

Three weeks ago Dan had come home to find his wife Marissa rocking their youngest and trying to keep him cool with a damp washcloth. Danny Jr. had come down with a fever out of nowhere and nothing that they tried could bring his temperature down. Even alternating toddler ibuprofen and acetaminophen did nothing.  They did their best to keep him cool and tried to keep him hydrated, but later that evening he quit drinking.

Dan and Marissa took turns taking care of their two daughters—eight-year-old Bekah, and six-year-old Jessie--and then stayed up together with Danny. In the middle of the night they had both fallen asleep over their fitfully sleeping, and now also wheezing, toddler. Dan couldn’t remember when he fell asleep…but he knew that he woke up at 4:22 am.

Marissa had her arm over Danny’s legs and was holding Dan’s hand. Dan was an EMT, so he knew what he would see even before he looked at his son. He heard no wheezing, felt no heat coming from his side, and sensed no stirring from the small body between himself and his wife. When he turned his hand to look at his watch it woke Marissa up and they both looked at Danny at the same time.

“No!” Marissa said with a sort of half yelp, half sob.

“Rissa, sweetie, it’s too late. I’m so sorry, honey, he’s already cool to the touch.”

Marissa was crying freely, but keeping it quiet--because even in grief she was thinking of the girls in the next two rooms. She was stroking Danny’s hair and looking back and forth between Dan and her son. “Dan?”

“I don’t know.” Dan said--not knowing what the question was but sure he had no answers, regardless. He was having trouble seeing and wondered what was wrong until he realized he was crying too.

They sat there together, with Marissa cradling Danny and rocking him for several minutes until they could compose themselves enough to think about what they must do next. As the only person in the neighborhood with any medical training, Dan had been involved in dealing with just about every death in the neighborhood so far. He didn’t want to have to deal with this one, though. Dan wanted someone else to deal with this one.

Dan opened his eyes. Marissa and Dan had still not come to terms with the loss of Danny Jr. They had dealt with it to a degree, and Marissa had “put it behind her” for the time being. They didn’t discuss it, ever. The picture on Dan’s nightstand was the only concession she had made, and if either of them had been willing to hit the other they would have probably come to blows over even that. Neither of them had truly dealt with the grief, and the house hadn’t been the same since.

“I miss you Danny, I’m so sorry.” Dan said out loud as he reached towards the picture.

“What was that?” Marissa asked as she came into their bedroom.

Instead of the truth, Dan covered what he felt was a moment of weakness by lying to his wife. “Nothing, just lamenting our fate,” Dan said. Something they had agreed on less than a week into the crisis was that they wouldn’t keep bringing up the things that they missed as it just made it worse.

“Go ahead, what are you missing this time?”

“I don’t want to say, it’s stupid. I mean it, it’s really stupid,” Dan said, hoping she would drop it because he really didn’t have anything to say other than Danny.

“Try me. I’ll even go first. I miss chocolate. Chocolate brownies, chocolate chip cookies, Hershey’s chocolate bars…with almonds, mint Milano cookies, chocolate cake with chocolate icing, I miss eating Nutella right out of the jar with a spoon!”

“Ok fine, my turn. I miss stupid time-waster video games on my phone. I miss Bejeweled Blitz. I miss downloading the monthly update for Bloons Tower Defense 4 and just losing three hours to Plasma Monkeys and then going to bed. I miss being smarter than the Pig in Angry Birds!”

Marissa sat down on Dan’s lap and gave him a hug, putting her head on his shoulder. “Oh honey, you will always be smarter than the pig. You don’t need your phone to prove it to me,” and kissed him on the cheek, for which she got tickled.

After just a few seconds, Dan stopped with a worried look.

“What?” Marissa asked.

“Take off your shirt.”

“Honey, the kids are still awake.” Marissa said, playing coy.

“Rissa, I’m not kidding,” he walked over and shut and locked the door. “Take off your shirt, right now.” His tone of voice was worrying her and she started to untuck her shirt as he walked back to the bed.

“I’ve been so busy with everyone else that I haven’t been paying attention to my own family. How much weight have you lost?”

She stopped in mid motion.

“I didn’t say stop. I could feel your ribs when I was tickling you, Rissa, and not in a good way. You are too thin! The scale is a spring type and it still works, how much have you lost?”

“I’m not sure,” she paused, “I stopped weighing myself over a month ago.”

“Why?” Dan was trying to remain clinical but this was his
wife
!

“Because I knew I wasn’t eating enough but it was me or the girls.”

Dan pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes to hold back the headache that was forming, and now the tears that threatened. Not the kids…the girls. Even now she wouldn’t mention Danny.

“Come to think of it, Dan, take off
your
shirt,” Marissa said.

“What?” Dan started and looked at his wife.

“Oh come on. Take it off, we’re all losing weight and I’ve seen you put extra on the girls’ plates at dinner too. I know, I know, you’re supposed to be the provider and the protector and all that but just do it, ok? Take off the shirt.”

“Fine,” Dan complied and then they both had their shirts off. Dan realized that his wife wasn’t wearing her normal bra but a sports bra, and even that wasn’t all that snug anymore.

“How much weight have
you
lost, Mr.?” Marissa asked.

“I don’t know, I haven’t weighed myself in a couple of weeks either, I just feel like I’m in OK shape.”

“OK shape? You are skin and bones! Get into the bathroom, I’ll bring the candle.”

In the bathroom they were confronted with the harsh reality that they were starving to death; or more accurately, they were starving themselves to death for the sake of their children.

Chapter Two

“Day 65 – August 17, 2012. Today would be my youngest child’s birthday.  Dan Jr. should be turning two. There will be no cake, there will be no presents. I miss you, son, and I know your mother misses you, too. She’s just in denial.”

Dan hung his head after putting the diary away. “I know the stages of grief.  I’ve seen them thousands of times. I really am an idiot—her first word
was
‘No’, after all.”

Marissa was already up and making some Cream of Wheat for the girls. Dressed for the day, he helped make some powdered milk for Jessie and Bekah, and then they both took the multi-vitamins that he and Marissa had hidden in the air-return vent when the first attempt at a food collection came around. The vitamins were in the garage, initially, when the HOA board first tried to inventory everything.  They simply hadn’t been brought into the house from a previous trip to the warehouse store. Thankfully, they’d bought a couple of bottles of kid’s chewable gummy vitamins the day before the grid went down.

They were lucky that all of their kids were on solid food and weren’t still nursing or, worse, on formula anymore. Not that formula was in and of itself a bad thing but when there wasn’t anymore, well, there wasn’t any more and one of the families in the neighborhood had run into that situation less than a week after the power went out. Thankfully she had just been supplementing with formula while they were getting ready to wean the baby off of nursing completely and onto more solid food. They just made the transition a little sooner--and more abruptly--than they had originally planned.

It was one of those things that still crossed Dan’s mind on occasion--more frequently than he’d like to admit, actually.  How was the rest of the world dealing with the loss of the grid?  It was a foregone conclusion that there were families out there that hadn’t had enough formula, or enough to feed a nursing mother. What had happened to the baby? It was just one more thing that Dan had to set aside and simply not dwell on or he would go mad.

The original plan to consolidate all the resources in the neighborhood had been a miserable failure—that is, until Carey and what remained of the HOA board decided to enforce their edict, and collect all food, at gunpoint going forwards…for the good of the community.What Carey didn’t seem to understand was that people were already helping each other out. Pantries were being opened. What backyard gardens people had were being worked by everyone who was able and the harvests were being shared. The problem was that the typical garden was about twenty feet by ten feet and the seeds were all hybrids. But pantries were running bare and no amount of communal planning could or would change that. In fact, if Carey
had
been in charge of it things would have probably been wasted or ruined in the long run.

Dan was in an enviable position because he had the only medical training in the neighborhood.  He could have been trading help for food, but he just didn’t feel right about doing that--not yet. If it came down to keeping his children fed then he would consider it; but nobody was going hungry yet, so he simply felt he was doing his part for the community.

They couldn’t stay here forever, though, because the neighborhood wasn’t
producing
enough food to survive, and they hadn’t seen or heard anything--or any
one
--from the outside since the power went out. The government wasn’t going to come in and help; which meant no relief, which meant they needed to help themselves. The neighborhood was teetering on the ragged edge, and looking around… Dan could see that it wouldn’t take much to push it over.

“What’re your plans for today?” Marissa asked before their oldest came downstairs.

 “I’m going to poke around the Taylor’s old place,” Dan said. At the sidelong look his wife gave him, he went on, “I know it’s been picked over pretty good, but they had to have gone somewhere and I’m guessing that they were fairly well prepared. Eric was in the military so he probably had some idea how to live out of a tent, and we saw how packed Ms. Hines’ supervisor’s truck was when it came back. They were obviously prepared to go and not come back. Maybe we could find them, join them?”

Marissa shook her head, not in denial but in resignation. “Maybe you’re right. It’s getting to the point that anywhere would be better than here.”

...

After breakfast, most mornings started with the two and a half mile round trip to get water from the Cumberland River. Dan had rigged the baby trailer for his mountain bike to hold a couple of the three-gallon frosting buckets the neighborhood had scrounged from one of the grocery stores and now used to transport water for the community. He was lucky he had both the bike and the baby trailer, otherwise he’d be making the trip multiple times to bring back his share of water.

During his ride and while he was filling the buckets, he paid closer attention to the state of the world--both in the neighborhood and on the other side of the river. The process had become such a routine that he hadn’t thought anything of it in weeks; ever since he’d convinced Carey that people needed to quit doing it on their own so they could establish and maintain a central supply of clean drinking and cooking water.  People had been getting sick because they were either drinking the water straight from the river or they weren’t filtering it
or
boiling it correctly, which amounted to the same thing.

Their section of riverfront, while not heavily fortified, was guarded at all times with some of the rifles that just about everyone in the neighborhood, excepting he and Marissa, apparently owned. There were twenty-four hour patrols of the neighborhood as well, and the only reason that Dan wasn’t on them was that he didn’t know how to use a gun of any kind, and they didn’t have the extra ammunition to teach him.

Not quite directly across the river, but near enough as made no difference, was a house with a boat slip that another neighborhood seemed to be using for the same purpose. The main difference in the neighborhood across the river was that the bulk of the houses were closer to the river so they used a bucket brigade each morning to get the water up to what Dan assumed was some sort of cistern--or possibly a converted water truck? 
“If only we had all been closer to the river,”
Dan thought to himself and then chuckled.
“If only the power hadn’t gone out in the first place.”

At least twice that Dan was aware of the guards had…thwarted… attempts to breach the security of the neighborhood --but the amount of gunfire along the river had made it sound more like a full-scale invasion.  Dan had patched up one of the guards with a gunshot wound to the lower leg after the first firefight, and ended up using most of his ready supply of antibiotics.

As it was, Dan finished his compulsory chore in a little under half an hour, which he thought was pretty good given that he hadn’t had more than 1,200 calories a day for the last six weeks. As he dropped off his full buckets he was told they needed him to report for firewood duty later that afternoon and then there were always the sick to look in on. The meager medical supplies he had on hand--the ones the neighborhood knew about anyway--were running thin.

…

He’d been to the Taylor’s house a number of times over the past couple of months, but always with someone else, and always looking for something specific. Now he was here alone and he had no idea what he was looking for. The front door was closed but unlocked. It smelled musty inside as Dan walked in. Apparently it had been some time since anyone else had been here and nobody had been leaving windows open. Dan closed the door behind him and started walking through the house one room at a time.