The Storm (11 page)

              “Go go go!” Tom was moving before he even said it, and he darted left beyond where I could see him. My eyes and gun barrel were pointed toward the center of the cul-de-sac where a tree stood even as my feet carried me to the right at a brisk pace.

              Tom’s voice boomed forth now. “Freeze, motherfuckers!” He fired a shot straight into the air. The 12 gauge made a roaring thunder that could be felt deep in one’s bones and sparks flew for a fraction of a second straight into the air.

              I swept left and right with my gun, looking for targets, looking for movement, looking for anything and everything but finding nothing. “Surrender!” was the only thing that came to mind and it roared forth with a deep boldness that covered up any doubts that were present.

              A second passed, but it was an eternity. The adrenaline was flowing fast. Would a shot come back at me? Would a gang with knives charge me? Would they flee? When on edge, the mind processes at a speed that would shame the best supercomputers in the world.

              A reply answered us. “Don’t shoot,” came a broken, cracking voice of a youth.

              A kid.
A kid,
I said again to myself. “Who’s there?” I said with a mixture of rage and relief.

              Again, the voice answered loudly but heavily laden with fear. “It’s Zeke.”

              Zeke, the neighborhood’s older adolescent who annoyed everyone. Tom spoke next. “What the hell are you doing out here, Zeke? I almost shot you!”

              Tom and I had both covered the ground between where we started and where the cul-de-sac island was. Zeke was on the ground, spread out as if expecting to be arrested. Half his face was in the dirt surrounded with white cloth as he spoke, “It was a stupid prank. I just wanted a laugh, guys.”

              Even as Tom pondered what was in front of us, I immediately knew. Despite the darkness, the sheer white of toilet paper covering the tree in the middle of the street was now visible. Zeke had been out to have a laugh and toilet paper some neighborhood trees.

              “Sit up, Zeke,” I said as my voice was calming and the blood flow returned to a less hyperactive pace. “Your mother is going to be pissed off when I tell her about this.”

              “She’s gone,” came the reply as he stood up. Zeke was eighteen and still lived with his mother at home. He worked at the local buffalo wing restaurant a mile down the road near the LeapMart. Even that job was almost too much responsibility for him as he needed several more years to mature and turn into a man. “She had to fly to Chicago for business for a few days and was there when the storm happened. I don’t know when she’ll be coming home.”

              “If she ever gets home,” Tom muttered under his breath, but Zeke had heard.

              I decided that it was time to end the night’s activities and wind down. “Go home, Zeke. I’m too tired to deal with this crap right now. You get your butt back up here and clean this up in the morning, or Tom might be firing that gun again. We clear?”

              “Crystal,” came the shaky reply. It was too dark to see much of anything, but the smell was as obvious in the air as was Tom’s drunkenness. Zeke had pissed himself. He turned and ran at full speed back toward his street and house.

              “Well, damn, that was exciting,” was all I could muster as I slung the gun up on my shoulder as though I was about to march in a victory parade.

              “Yeah, I don’t want none of that again,” said Tom. “I’m going to go have myself a drink.” He turned and started walking home.

              As I walked back toward my house, I noticed a small light that seemed to brighten for a few seconds and then dim back to a faint glow as it fell a few feet in the air. It was a cigarette, and it was coming from the doorstep of Slav’s house. I had forgotten all about him the last couple of days and hadn’t had a chance to speak to him after he saw me at LeapMart. Now didn’t feel like the time, and I decided to head back into my house. As he stood there silently smoking and watching, I could make out from the cigarette’s faint light the dim shimmer of what could have been a steel pistol in his hand.

              Back in the house, I could hear Paul crying. Damn, I’d woken him with all the screaming and the gunshot. Stacy would be confused as to what happened, and I had a lot of explaining to do. Better get up there and help her. I needed a shirt too. The cold, damp air had finally vanquished the heat from my body. Before I ran up there, I sought out my glass and needed a sip of water. Through all the sweating and yelling, I was feeling a bit of dehydration. It was still dark, but I turned the faucet and barely a trickle of water came out. We had a new problem now.

Chapter 7

Is it a Democracy?

              Nights were fast becoming living nightmares, and the arrival of daylight brought a temporary refuge from the horrors that would revisit in the dark. Whether a nightmare or real, the creepy pitch black of night brought a steady supply of unpleasantness that made one appreciative of the security of daytime. The night had passed, and it was overcast and raining outside. The cold front that was threatening the full day before had arrived. It was typical of an April storm in the Mid-Atlantic. Heavy rains with strong gusts of wind while lacking the boom of thunder. Whoever had coined the phrase “April showers” was spot-on.
The rain might bring safety too,
I pondered. Nobody wants to go out in this mess.

              Most of the morning was largely uneventful. We used up the last of our bread with a feast centered around jam and peanut butter. Going forward, we would be missing fresh foods. The ice in the cooler had finally melted into water, and it kept a faint brownish red color from the meat’s juices seeping out into it. It wasn’t worth taking chances to cook the leftover meat, so we had discarded some of that as well. Canned and dried goods from here on out were to be our staples for the most part. Again, I felt relief at our having so much food. Most families would start to feel the crunch soon. Like all things in life, we take care of one problem and feel a short sense of relief at having resolved a major issue, only to have another insurmountable problem appear. It was the whack-a-mole game of life. All morning I had been contemplating the water situation.

              During the night, there had been a faint trickle of water, but by morning, the pipes were bone dry and nothing came out. Lucky for us that we hadn’t flushed the toilets. I wasn’t sure what would happen, and I wasn’t anxious to find out. We had all used one bathroom, so we would have some nasty business ahead with cleaning it, but maybe I could find a way to get Stacy to do it. She had her famous yellow gloves for cleaning that were too small for me and I might be able to con her into it . . . somehow. That was amusing to think about, but it was a problem for later. It was almost time for the town hall meeting. Our watches had all stopped working, so it was impossible to know exactly when noon was, but my internal body clock felt like it was late morning.

              I was alone in the basement and could hear the consistent thumping of feet above me. The kids were running and playing in the den, and Stacy was probably sitting there exhausted already and cursing me for not being next to her and at least shouldering some of the responsibility. If she wanted to argue about it, she would probably be right. There were just too many variables and problems, and I would think for a few minutes about one before switching to the next when I realized how hard it would be. We might have to try hunting soon in the state park next to us with Keuka Creek. There are plenty of deer and ducks in there, and we might be able to get some fresh meat. A few trout might even be on the menu, though I wondered how many other tens of thousands of people in the vicinity might have the same idea.
It would be time to start planting veggies and other crops soon too
, I thought. That could be an issue for the town meeting. At least food-wise, my family was secure. Security was another issue, and I felt like I could have had a heart attack the night before if I’d only been twenty years older. We needed to get a watch together and procedures in place so we could at least sleep in peace. Again, another issue for today at the town meeting. Finally, and most unexpectedly, water was now a problem despite the deluge coming down outside. In the back of my mind, I always knew water would be an issue eventually, though I had gotten the idea in my head it wouldn’t flare up for a couple of weeks, and we had time. At least I’d had the foresight to fill up ten one-gallon jugs of water in the basement. That was at least a few days’ emergency supply. We could always get water from Keuka Creek and boil it, but it was dirty and a half mile away. I’d spent enough time letting my mind wander. It was time to head down to the pool house and share my concerns with the community.

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              The pool house would again host a meeting of the neighborhood. Typically the Homeowners’ Association convenes here every couple of months to cover the pressing needs of the neighborhood. Usually it was about parking issues or penalizing someone for letting his house fall apart and drag down the values of the surrounding homes. Attendance was always an ongoing issue. In some years, less than ten percent of the neighborhood showed up, and it took several meetings to meet the quorum requirements to elect officers. I usually attended a couple of meetings a year so that I could at least be aware of the goings on of the community, and there was normally plenty of empty space. The pool house was about nine hundred square feet and held thirty chairs. Today it was cramped and invoked a sense of claustrophobia. I hadn’t felt this confined in such small quarters since my college party days, when students could cram one hundred people into one apartment and have a good time.

              It was nearly noon. Jean Pierre Le Bouder had an old-fashioned crank watch and had kept it going since before the storm hit. “Five Minutes!” he said loudly so that everyone could hear, and immediately the decibel levels dropped as most everyone was eager to begin.

There were probably sixty people in attendance. New York City was the unmistakable melting pot of American diversity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It still clung to that reputation proudly, even though many neighborhoods were largely segregated by nationality. Washington DC has become the new ultra diverse melting pot of the twenty-first century, and it was reflected by those in attendance. Standing there waiting for it to begin, I was wishing I’d brought Stacy with me. Half the people in attendance were couples, and I could hear probably a dozen languages being spoken around me. If I had closed my eyes, it would be easy to imagine being in a general assembly of the United Nations.

              Slowly I pushed forward to be near the front when the assembly began. The anxiety was palpable, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. As I wedged myself between an older couple I recognized from walking Murphy, I bumped into a neighbor I knew somewhat well. “Hey, Mohammad,” I said affectionately to the back of his head.

              Mohammad and Chumi Alchand lived on our cul-de-sac but rarely came outside. They had lived here for two years and came directly from Bangladesh. He would always be pleasant and have a nice conversation with me when I saw him, but those were rare moments, such as when we both were mowing the yard at the same time. I had only spoken to Chumi at length once, when she gave Stacy and me a basket full of Kohlrabi. It was an interesting vegetable, probably better than we appreciated because we had never cooked with it before. As he turned around, his eyes met mine, and his expression relaxed a bit and a smile came forth. “Hello, Josh. Good to see a familiar face,” came out with a heavily accented voice. His wife was in her hijab and smiled at me, though she didn’t extend her hand to be shaken as her husband had.

              “Yeah, I am surprised by how many people are in our neighborhood that I have never seen before,” I truthfully replied.

              “It is true. I feel like I’m back home,” he said and then paused. “No room and no electricity. I joked with Chumi that all we need are a few cousins, and it’ll be just like being back in Bangladesh.”

              I chuckled with him for a minute. What he said was tragically true. The whole first world had just taken a nosedive into third- or even fourth-world status, if there was such a thing. The progress some countries had made the previous centuries was wiped out in one fell swoop. Countries like Bangladesh that already struggled to survive and could barely feed their people were probably screwed. As much as he might joke about being home, it was almost a certainty that he wouldn’t trade anything in the world to go back now.

              I felt a tap on my back, and I turned around to see another familiar face. It was Nana Ogebe. Another immigrant from my cul-de-sac, he had come here ten years ago without a penny or word of English and now was the embodiment of the American dream. He worked hard for some humanitarian aid agency in the district and frequently went back to organize aid work in his home country of Ghana. He was short and had a shaven head, but his large and genuine smile revealed his bright white teeth in contrast to his ultra-dark skin. It was a relief to see Nana; he was always one of the most optimistic people I’ve ever met.

              “Good morning, Nana. Or afternoon, I guess. I haven’t seen you around. What have you been up to?”

              “You know, I was leaving DC when the storm hit,” he began with a now mild African accent and a faint hint of British influence from his youth.