Dark Road (2 page)

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.

The formal dining room at the front, which had been turned into an office or library, had been stripped almost to the walls. The computers, books, furniture, and rugs were all gone. The only things remaining were the built-in shelves. Nothing to see here, move along…across the entry way was another formal room—a den by the looks of it. There was still a recliner, and a flat-panel TV on the wall, with a Blue-Ray player and Xbox sitting on the floor. The shelves had been pulled down and burned several weeks ago, as had everything else that would burn once fuel got scarce.

The kitchen had been pretty well picked over and now held mostly just appliances. The first time he’d been through the house, only the doors had been taken off the cabinets—because they were easy to remove, but pulling the cabinets down would have been too much work. As easy fuel grew more difficult to find, the cabinets had finally been deemed “easy pickings”. Interestingly, the cork bulletin board was still on the wall next to the fridge, with a couple of notes and postcards still tacked to it. They looked to be your typical vacation postcards with “Wish You Were Here” from a couple of regional, State, and National parks.

The living room was about half empty, with only the really large pieces and leather furniture still in place, again because it was more work to disassemble something to get to the wood than it was worth…so far. The remaining downstairs rooms were just as disappointing.  As Dan climbed the stairs, he wondered why he’d bothered to come in the first place and hoped he’d find something useful.

The first two rooms had been kids’ rooms—he could tell by the paint scheme on the wall if not by the furniture, or lack thereof. It had apparently all been wood furniture, as it was all gone. One was a boy’s room; he had clearly been into cars. Plastic models didn’t burn real well so they’d been left strewn on the floor. The closet was mostly hangers but there was one of those ‘space bags’ that you compress by pulling all the air out of it on the top shelf. Dan grabbed it and headed into the other kid’s room. No telling what was in the space bag; he’d look at it later.

The girl’s room was just as picked over and with nothing to find in the closet. The third room was an empty guest room. The last room was the master bedroom and Dan almost didn’t go in.

This room had no furniture, except for the bedframe, a stand mirror, and a couple of under bed Rubbermaid boxes which had already been gone through. He didn’t feel like going through the picked-over stuff.  He was already feeling a little uneasy about going through the house on his own and he’d only been here for ten minutes. It wasn’t that there was any rule about picking over the empty homes by yourself; it was just that this was Carey’s neighbor and everyone knew that Carey and the Taylors didn’t get on well…and now he was starting to have second thoughts about being in here for too long on his own.

Dan did a quick check under the sinks in the master bathroom to be sure nothing was missed and found a bar of Irish Spring, still in the box, and a disposable razor. Next was the closet. He turned on the flashlight that he’d only turned on three other times since June, to make sure it still worked. The Browning gun safe was still there; Carey still hadn’t tried to pry it away from the wall. Mr. Taylor had done too good a job of bolting it to the studs and the floor and it just wasn’t moving. Too bad, maybe Mr. Taylor had left some of his guns behind.

Dan looked up at the ceiling and the dangling cord for the pull-down attic stairs. Dan had been with Carey on almost all of the initial walkthroughs of empty houses after people had either left or passed away. For the first six or eight homes, Carey had gone up into the attic himself, or had one of his lackeys do it, to see if there was anything worth “collecting”.  The vast majority of them had held empty suitcases, if anything at all, and after another half dozen or so, Carey had called off searching them.

It was Dan’s hope that Carey had neglected the attic of the Taylor’s house as well. Dan grabbed the cord, pulled down the folding stairs, and got a smattering of dust, pink fiberglass, and grey, papery insulation in the face. Most likely he was going to be the first to go up.

The creaking of the springs and metal joints sounded incredibly loud in the otherwise silent house. Like his own attic there were a dozen or so sheets of plywood lain down between the rafters to walk on and support the odd bits of junk that you didn’t want to leave in the garage but just couldn’t bear to part with.

There were the two heating units, and the light switch that didn’t do anything anymore, and, of course, a couple of suitcases that hadn’t been taken. There were, however, what looked like a couple of sleeping bags in stuff sacks that appeared to have been up here for a couple of years and forgotten about. Those could come in handy. They were on the far end of where the plywood was in the attic, where Dan had to stoop down to keep from hitting his head as the roof was sloping down, and he was about as far from the opening back down to the closet as he could get.

From this vantage point he panned the flashlight back and forth across the attic again to see if there was anything else that he’d missed, or couldn’t see while standing on the steps. On the third pass he caught the brief reflection of something on the back of the rafter that held the light switch for the attic. He carried the sleeping bags back to the stairway, set them down, and examined a nail driven into the rafter. Hanging on the nail was a single key—a key with the word “Browning” on it.

Chapter Three

Dan’s heart was racing and his mouth went completely dry. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, willed himself to relax, and then opened his eyes again to make sure the key was still there. Yup, still there, swinging just a little because he’d exhaled on it. “Ok, now take it before someone else comes along, you idiot,” he said to himself.

With key in hand, and sleeping bags now tossed carefully into the closet so as not to tear on the stairs or the wire closet shelves, Dan descended the folding stairs. Once the attic stairs were closed, it was time to try to open the safe.

The first attempt was a bust. Teeth up and the key wouldn’t even go into the slot.
Duh. Ok, how about teeth down? Quit shaking. Man, I’m going into shock; I need to get this over with and get home, I’m no good at this stuff,
Dan thought to himself. The key at least fit the lock, and it turned.
Spin the handle, which way? Does it matter? Try left, nothing. Try right, spinning; one, two, three full spins. Pull. Oh…my…Marissa is going to freak out!
For the first time in almost five weeks, Joel Taylor’s gun safe opened.

Dan was not a pacifist but he wasn’t a gun enthusiast either. He was an EMT for crying out loud; while he spent most of his time scraping people off the highway he’d seen the really nasty side of what firearms could do and had never really been that excited about owning one. He was enough of a realist to admit that if he and his family were going to leave they would need to be able to protect themselves, though.

He hoped that what he was looking at would be enough to do that. Joel hadn’t left much but he’d apparently realized that he either wasn’t going to need, or wouldn’t have room for, everything he owned. He’d left what looked like a shotgun, a small rifle, most probably a hunting rifle, and a couple of pistols.

Dan wasn’t sure of anything in the gun cabinet; he hadn’t grown up around guns like his wife had and, frankly, knew very little about them. He was reasonably sure that given enough time he could figure out how to use one but he was also secure enough in his manhood to be willing to ask his wife “how do I use this thing?” if he had to. This was clearly a case of having to ask if he’d ever seen one. Dan was, however, willing to bet that the bullets on the shelves of the safe matched what was left behind.

He grabbed the larger of the two handguns, careful to keep his finger as far as possible from the trigger, and examined the gun, also keeping his face away from the end of the barrel. He’d seen enough guns, rifles, and pistols, to know that many of them had the caliber marked somewhere on them and this one was no different. On the left-hand side, next to the manufacturer—he assumed—and among other things, was stamped ‘9mm’. As there were several boxes also marked 9mm on the shelves, he felt pretty confident that those bullets would work in this gun.

“Ok, don’t be greedy. The key works and I can come back. One box, the gun, go talk to Rissa and then we see about what to do next.” Dan muttered. Dan closed the safe after putting the pistol in one jacket pocket and the box of bullets in another and then tried the key one more time just to be sure. Good, the key still worked and he could get back in later if he decided to. He closed the safe for the final time, spun the dial, and checked the handle…locked. Dan sighed.

With one sleeping bag in each hand, the soap and razor in the same pocket as the bullets, and the space bag under his arm, he headed towards the front door. “Keep cool,” he kept telling himself. “This is all you found, you aren’t hiding anything.”

Dan made it almost all the way to the sidewalk in front of the Taylor’s house before Carey called his name. Dan about dropped the space bag when he started at his name and then turned around, keeping the side pocket with the gun in it away from Carey while, unfortunately, keeping the bulkier pocket with the bullets towards him.

“So, looks like we missed some stuff in there after all?” Carey said. “Where’d you find the sleeping bags?”

“I, um, actually went up into the attic.” Dan was trying almost too hard not to be nervous and failing miserably. He kept looking around and couldn’t look Carey in the eyes for more than half a second.

“Anything else in there worth finding?” Carey asked.

“Um, no, not really,” Dan replied.

“Well, what’s in your pocket then?” Carey pointed to the squarish bulge in Dan’s right-front coat pocket.

Dan panicked for half a second and then had what he hoped was a flash of genius. “Oh, there were actually a couple of bars of Irish Spring still in their boxes under the master bathroom sink.” Dan set down the sleeping bag he was holding in his right hand and reached into his pocket and pulled out the
one
bar of soap, leaving the box of bullets to continue to leave a square impression at the bottom of his pocket. Now that he thought more about it, they were just about the same size at the end and Carey couldn’t see the top, just the bottom impression.

“You want the other one?” Dan asked.

Carey wasn’t even looking at Dan’s pocket anymore, he was just looking at the box of soap, and if he looked any harder Dan thought he’d begin to drool. “Well, that’d be awfully nice of you Dan, awfully nice. I appreciate that quite a lot. Cleanliness is next to Godliness; that’s what they say!” Carey said as he took the offered bar.

“Yes sir, that’s what they say.” Dan replied.

“You’ll be sure to let me know if you find anything else useful won’t you. You sure you’re going to need those sleeping bags?” Carey asked.

“Yes sir, we are. You never know when it’s going to start cooling off and we don’t want the girls to get cold.” Dan said.

“I understand, got to keep those kids safe and snug in their beds. We’ll see you a little later on for the fuel gathering then.” And Carey turned around headed back towards his house.  The soap had already disappeared into his coat pocket.