Dark Road Read online

  …

  Dan and Marissa had been cuddling and fallen asleep afterwards. Both had the best of intentions, and Dan had planned to get up a few minutes after they discussed needing to have a guard, but it hadn’t happened that way.

  Now Bekah was screaming.

  Dan opened his eyes and jumped up, and realized it was almost pitch black and there were people in camp. He didn’t have his flashlight or the shotgun, but he did have his 9mm and his first instinct wasn’t to stand there in stunned shock anymore.

  He drew it and aimed at the standing figures and started shouting.

  “Kids, stay down! Everyone else drop what you have and freeze!”

  That would have worked if he’d had those two things he was missing, the flashlight and the shotgun. As it was, one of the shadows made a noise and then Dan was blind. They had turned on their flashlights—right in his face. He couldn’t see a thing. Apparently, they were expecting this and had closed their eyes, because once they turned off their flashlights there was a flurry of activity, and then the sound of the bikes being ridden off.

  Dan yelled again. “Marissa, kids, are you down?”

  Marissa and the girls all said yes and then Dan fired all eight rounds in the direction of the sound of the bikes since he still couldn’t actually see much of anything. There were a couple of expletives from that general direction but he was pretty sure it was more a case of fear than having actually been hit.

  “DAMN IT! DAMN IT ALL TO HELL!” He screamed.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Dan took two steps towards where the bikes should have been, tripped over the trailer, and swore again. If he hadn’t emptied the 9mm already he would have fired a round heaven only knows where—which scared him even more. As he was getting up, Marissa found her flashlight and turned it on.

  “Dan, are you alright?” She asked as she glanced over at the girls.

  “I’m as fine as the situation will allow.” He said. “Go over and calm down Jessie and Bekah. I’m going to get a spare flashlight out of the trailer.”

  With his night vision thoroughly ruined, it took what seemed like an hour, but was more like a minute, to find one of the extra firemen’s flashlights. The batteries were almost new, but the beam didn’t give him a very large field of view. He kept looking, now that he had light, for one of the more general-purpose flashlights so they could try and do an inventory of what they had.

  “I left my flashlight with Bekah,” Marissa said as she came over to the trailer. “She’s loading the rifle now. It might be the only one we have left.”

  Dan stopped rummaging in the trailer and closed his eyes while that sank in. “I’m half tempted to try to go after them.” He said.

  “You have no idea where they went or how many more there are.” Marissa said. “For all we know there are more in the woods right now waiting for us to try to go back to sleep. Don’t you dare leave me alone right now!”

  Dan sighed and grabbed her hand. “I won’t, I’m sorry. I’m just frustrated that we let this happen. I’m sorry.” He said.

  “I am too,” she said and squeezed his hand. “But I’m also not. We’ll be ok.”

  Dan took a deep breath and finished looking for the other flashlight he needed. “First things first, what all did they take besides the bikes?”

  …

  The fire was going again and providing both light and some sense of comfort. Dan was trying hard not to lose his temper, especially not in front of the girls, but it was tough.

  “Both of our backpacks,” Dan said, his voice devoid of any emotion.

  Marissa massaged her temples. “Yes,” she said, “and the shotgun and .30-30 are definitely gone.”

  “What food didn’t we move from the trailer to the backpacks?” Dan asked. “Anything?” Panic was warring with frustration and despair at this point. In order to make room for the bulkier items and make the journey a little more comfortable for Jessie, almost all of the food had been split between Dan and Marissa’s backpacks.

  “Ketchup,” Marissa said, “the remainder of the chocolate, which is more of a melted and re-melted blob, and probably two pounds of rice and some seasonings that were in the box with the ketchup.”

  Dan’s jaw was going to be sore in the morning from all the clenching he was doing to keep his mouth shut, and he was sure he sounded like a bull from breathing though his nose, but he didn’t know any other way to keep from blowing a gasket. Once he had his breathing under control he asked the first thing that came to mind.

  “How much 9mm and .22 do we have left?” Dan asked. “Did we have any in the backpacks?”

  “All of it was in the trailer.” Marissa said.

  Dan walked around the fire to the trailer to reload his magazine since they didn’t have extras for either of their handguns, and he hadn’t taken the time to do it yet since the raid. He needed something tedious and this would be just the thing since he was bad at it and it would require him to concentrate on the task at hand.

  “Dan,” Marissa said while he was digging out a box of ammunition.

  “Rissa, I just need a few minutes.” Dan said. “Just give me a couple of minutes and I’ll be ok.”

  “Fine,” she said, “but don’t check out on me. I need you here.”

  “I won’t, I just need a couple of minutes.”

  Marissa was fairly certain Dan wouldn’t do anything rash, like eat a bullet, so she went to comfort the girls while Dan pulled himself together. It didn’t take him a full two minutes, but it did seem like a long time while she waited.

  “As near as I can tell, the park is still another twenty or twenty-five miles away.” Dan said when he came and sat down where Marissa was sitting with the girls. “We can’t make the same kind of time we were making before. In fact, I have no idea how fast we’ll be able to move on foot.”

  “Five miles a day is five days.” Marissa said.

  “If we can make five miles a day,” Dan said. “And we probably have enough food for that. Three miles a day is eight days…and we’re going to need more food at that rate.”

  Marissa nodded.

  “I’ll hunt,” Bekah said.

  “I know you will, sweetie,” Dan said with a forced smile, “and given your track record so far we’ll be eating well all the way there. I have no doubt you’ll hit it if there’s anything to shoot. Having something to shoot at may be the problem and we can’t always count on that, though.”

  “Oh,” Bekah said.

  “You girls need to go to sleep now, though, and Daddy is going to take watch for a while.” Dan said. “You too, hon,” he said to Marissa. “I’m up, and I was planning on first watch anyway.”

  Marissa gave him a questioning look and he responded. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I wouldn’t leave you unprotected. I may not be the best guard in the world but I’m better than that.”

  “I didn’t…” Marissa started.

  “Go to sleep,” Dan said. “It’s ok.”

  …

  “We need to stop, Dan,” Marissa said.

  “I’m ok,” he panted, “I can make it a little further. Besides, we’ve barely gone three miles today.”

  “You can’t go any further today!” Marissa snapped. “Neither can the girls.”

  Marissa had actually been carrying Jessie for the last quarter mile and Dan hadn’t even noticed because he’d been so intent on pulling the trailer. He had re-done the rope sling a half dozen times during the day to try and find something at least usable and less likely to cause the trailer tongue to stab him in the back or drag in the dirt if he stopped.

  Currently, the tow bar was removed and tied to the top of the trailer and he was using two loops of their traded rope, one around each shoulder. The trick was to keep moving so the ropes stayed taut and the attachment point stayed out of the dirt or off the road, whichever they were walking on.

  Dan stopped and let the ropes go slack and the trailer ground to a halt behind him. He turned around to s
ee his wife holding their youngest on her hip and Bekah bent over with her hands on her knees.

  “We aren’t stopping often enough,” Marissa said, “even for as slow as we’re going. You’re pulling everything we had before by hand, and going up that first hill almost killed you this morning.”

  Now that Dan was stopped he realized he didn’t have the extra energy for talking and just nodded.

  “Then, going down that same hill almost killed us all,” she said, “literally.”

  Dan couldn’t let that one go and had to respond. “Ok, ok,” he panted. “Lesson learned. I go behind the cart and I let it pull me down the hill. It really didn’t look that steep though.”

  “Fine, fair point, but we’re out of water now and we’ve been plodding along all day and it’s got to be 90 degrees out here.” Marissa said. “We need to stop for the day and recover if we’re going to get anywhere tomorrow. We can’t get stuck for two or three days in one place because we overdid it.”

  “Ok,” Dan said. “From the map there’s a tributary from the river and a bridge up ahead. Obviously we don’t want to camp too close to the river because we don’t want any more company.”

  Marissa gritted her teeth and nodded.

  “This isn’t a good place but I don’t want to get closer to the river.” Dan said. “I hate to do it, but let’s backtrack a little bit because there was a good place a little bit back. We’ll set up camp and I’ll ferry water from the stream…”

  …

  “What can we do without?” Dan asked Marissa after the kids were asleep.

  “As in,” she asked in reply.

  “I can’t keep pulling that trailer as full as it is.” Dan said. “Not on our diet after what we’ve been through.”

  Dan shook his head. “If we were doing this right after the power went out and it was full of food, yeah, I could keep doing it for weeks, but not now. My endurance is down to nothing. We made another three and a half miles today.” Dan looked down at his hands and then looked back up at Marissa. “Six months ago we used to go for walks with the kids—yes, with Daniel in the jogging stroller—and we would walk three or four miles in an hour on the walking trail at the park.”

  “But…” Marissa started to say.

  Dan interrupted her and continued. “I know it’s different, believe me I know. My point is that we have to trim down what we’re taking,” he said. “The bikes were great, they were a huge advantage and they let me pull all that weight and I didn’t even notice it. I put the bike in a lower gear and once I was going there was no difference.” Dan shrugged his shoulders and winced. “Now, believe me, I notice it.”

  “Well, what can’t we live without?” Marissa asked.

  …

  In addition to being sore from the last two days of walking, Dan and Marissa were tired from being up half the night convincing each other that this or that was needed for the rest of the journey. When they departed, they left a small but tidy pile for someone to find of some of the heavier but redundant items from their supplies. Partially used, but not dead, batteries, partially used, but not empty, lighters, four of their eight empty glass jars from food they had traded and such, all covered by the smaller of the two tarps—so as not to get ruined.

  “If I never see another hill for as long as I live I will still die a bitter man!” Dan said as they were setting up camp for the night.”

  “We made, what, three miles again today?” Marissa said.

  “If that,” he said.

  “At least the rice is getting lighter.” Marissa said. “That glass is still half full.”

  “Please tell me it’s more than half full.” Dan said with more than a little bit of anxiety.

  “Actually, it’s not, I was…never mind,” she said.

  “Sorry, I’m just,” Dan stopped and shook his head. “I’m about done in. Three days of walking and pulling something on wheels shouldn’t do this to one person. It’s degrading.”

  Marissa just stared at him.

  “What?” He said.

  “Really?” Marissa said. “Like I’m not feeling just as bad for feeling just as worn out for just walking beside you? How do you think that makes me feel?”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Dan said. “And you don’t just walk next to me. Half the time you’re carrying Jessie.”

  “No, I’m not. Not since the first day.” Marissa said. “I get to the end of the day and I just want to fall down and not get back up, but I can’t do that. There’s too much to do, even here and now. I’m not complaining, because a lot of the time you’re right there alongside doing it with me, but I’m the one who had to suggest doing laundry when we came to the river.”

  Dan blushed but didn’t say anything.

  “I’m still the mom,” Marissa said, trying not to lose her temper but starting to raise her voice a little. “I still do what dishes need to be done after the meals, I still seem to be the one that does the girls’ hair in the morning—and yes, they still need their hair done in the morning—those are not the same braids we left the house with.”

  Dan pursed his lips and then said the absolute worst thing he could have said in the situation. “I’m sorry.”

  “Damn it, Dan, it’s not your fault!” Marissa said. “You don’t need to apologize, but once in a while I need some help without needing to ask for it or bringing it up. And of course now that I’ve mentioned dishes, and getting the kids up, or doing their hair you’re going to have to come up with something else because if you do those you’re screwed since I already brought them up—which isn’t fair, but I’m a woman so you’ll just have to deal with it.”

  At which point Marissa walked off to gather some wood for the fire and Dan was left to try and make sense of an argument that had happened probably a dozen or more times during their marriage on any number of topics. He hadn’t yet, and was still looking for someone who had. It wasn’t that Marissa didn’t have a valid point, and he would figure out something that he could do to pick up some of the slack. He also wasn’t blaming it on anything in particular—but he wondered if this might be a good time to break out the chocolate bar he found as the lone contents of that compressed space bag in the Taylor’s house.

  …

  “I can’t do it,” Marissa said, “and frankly I don’t know how you’ve managed for the last three days.”

  “Don’t feel bad.” Dan said. “I’ll make it as far as however we go today but then we take whatever we can put on our backs. The hills are the worst, if it wasn’t for those I think I’d be ok but they’re doing me in.”

  Dan looked around at where they were resting, after one of those hills, in the shade of an unoccupied underpass. “I have to go down backwards, almost on my hands and knees, now to keep from losing the trailer, and we’re resting so long that we either have to go longer to get further, or our distance for the day is just too short.”

  “We started earlier this morning so we got further before it got too hot and we’ve been able to rest while we drank and refilled water.” Marissa said. “I don’t know how much it’s helped you. We’ve managed to keep from getting dehydrated, which is good since you left all the IV supplies, but, frankly, I don’t know how useful they would have been. If we were dehydrated you’d have been the worst off and shaking too badly to start an IV.”

  “True,” Dan said and nodded his head.

  “Today is already our furthest day and if we can make it to Holladay we’ll be over four miles.” Dan said.

  “Let’s shoot for that but not kill ourselves in the effort.” Marissa said.

  …

  As they walked away from the campsite, Jessie stopped and turned around and waved.

  “What are you doing, honey?” Dan asked.

  “Saying goodbye to the trailer,” she said.

  Out of nowhere, Marissa wanted to cry, but she just didn’t have the water reserves. Instead she squatted down and waved goodbye too. “It was a good trailer wasn’t it?” Marissa said.
r />   “Yeah, even though it made my bum hurt,” she said.

  Dan was down on one knee now, next to Jessie and Marissa, looking back at the trailer stacked with everything they were leaving behind. “Even after you weren’t sitting on the cans?” he asked.

  Jessie quirked her mouth, “Yeah, even after I wasn’t sitting on the cans,” she said.

  Everybody laughed a little at that and Bekah joined the line looking back at the trailer and waved goodbye. The sleeping bags were tied into bundles under the backpacks that Dan and Marissa wore. The tarp and the silver were in Dan’s backpack. Dan and Marissa both had a glass jar of rice and their remaining water bottles. They were out of ketchup. Dan was carrying his EMT box in his left hand to keep his pistol hand free. They both had the vitamins, girls’ clothes, two flashlights, matches, and lighters in their backpacks—and that was all, there wasn’t room for anything else.

  “Let’s see if we can make any better progress today.” Dan said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Promised Land – September 7, 2012

  Once the morning meeting, to vote on The Constitution, broke up, the day settled back into its normal routine. Rachael was teaching at the Middle School, and since Josh was in High School, he was free before his sister and mother were. Joel figured it was time to see if they could have a conversation without a confrontation.

  “Dad,” Josh started.

  “Joshua. Now that we’re on as close to a first name basis as you’re allowed to be with me, what’s on your mind?” Joel asked.

  “Stop it, Dad, please. I’m trying to be serious,” Josh said, turning a bit red but trying not to get angry.

  “Ok, I’m sorry, really. I wasn’t trying to be silly, it’s just something we always did at work and old habits die hard. Seriously, what’s on your mind?” Joel asked again, sitting back in the camp chair. “I wouldn’t say you’ve been stewing about something, but whatever it is, something has been on your mind since you tried to bring it up a week ago and we apparently need to talk about it.”