Let There Be Dark.

Nobody expected the Martians to attack that Sunday afternoon in August. Earth’s Space fleet were vastly better equipped, with their laser cannons and force shields, and positioned strategically all around the red planet as a menacing deterrent. War could surely only mean mutual destruction and even their crazy leader would not go that far. And yet…

The attack wasn’t felt in the way one would expect – no hellfire raining down from the heavens, no virus released against man or computer. All it took was a tiny molecule, released into the earth’s ionosphere, where it sparked a chain reaction on a scale too immense to comprehend. A small spark flickered as the chemicals combined and rearranged themselves, then the sky was filled with tiny flashes as it bonded to the nitric oxide, causing all light from the sun to bounce off the new particles. Suddenly the earth became a planetary mirror ball, through which no satellite signals could penetrate.

For those watching on the ground, the sky was filled with a trillion buzzing, flickering lights, and then, suddenly, darkness. Not the dark of an eclipse, where the world turns gray and dim as twilight. No, this was a total and sudden rolling black as the reaction spread overhead covering the entire planet in a matter of minutes. Everywhere was chaos – pilots, unable to communicate with ground control and with their instruments fluctuating wildly, plummeted in blazing fireballs across the globe.

The Space fleet, unable to contact their command centers and not knowing what had happened or how or why, sat helplessly in their orbit watching Mars and waiting for orders that never came. After all, no guns had been fired, no battle lines drawn. Mars professed solemn words of sympathy, claiming complete ignorance of what had occurred. Only a handful of scientists guessed at the truth.

And down on Earth, in a small green farmhouse in North Dakota, Emmet watched as the world went black. No stars, no moon - his fields of summer squash and nearly-ripe eggplants invisible from beyond the porch light. The temperature dropped from the mid-seventies to the low fifties in just an hour, the time it took him to find his torch and don a jacket. He made his way through the creepy rows of growing vegetables, panic slowly building within him as he calculated his potential losses. The farm was mortgaged to the hilt – one poor harvest could ruin him.

How long would the darkness last? He clambered into his old jeep and headed carefully into town, where the sparse streetlamps did little to dispel the gloom. He found most of his neighbors gathered together in Belle’s Diner, where hot coffee was passed around as Ben Fletcher fiddled with the radio, trying to find a working station. The static rippled like an undercurrent to the nervous chatter in the crowded room. What was happening? Was it a super volcano? That one in Italy, or God forbid, in Yellowstone? Maybe some mega eclipse or solar flare thingamajig or a flaw with the planetary force shield? Nobody had any answers, only questions and fears. Belle dished out pie and sympathy, herself too busy to really take in what was going on. Emmet wondered what would happen when the pie ran out.

By the end of the week Emmet glumly held an old paraffin lamp over his spoiled crops. Hoarfrost coated the delicate squash, their leaves curled from the cold and brittle to touch. The ground was hard and crunched beneath his footsteps. It felt like November, the chill air pluming from his lungs and fogging up his glasses. He stumbled through the inky day to his oil tank to check the levels – he’d had a delivery in February after a particularly chilly winter, but even so it was only ¾ full. If the heating had to go on, which he was beginning to concede was the case, how long until he ran out? And how could he restock?

Already he was avoiding town and the neighbors he had formerly called friends, who seemed to fight endlessly over gas and the low food stock in the mini mart and gas station. None of the tills were working in any of the family run stores, and he presumed it was the case in the Walmart and Target over in Medora. Banks could not dispense cash without access to the internet and the satellites that kept it running were gone from view, like the stars and the planes. Televisions stayed black, and even if Emmet felt like working through his dusty collection of dvds, the electricity was also failing, with brown outs every few hours. He still had the camping stove and some propane tanks and he’d taken stock of his pantry – he could probably last a few months on tinned Campbells soup and peaches and last season's potatoes. He thought often of Belle and her fabulous turkey open faced sandwiches with gravy and all the trimmings, a once weekly tradition he missed more than he had expected.

The riot started in town the day Belle closed her doors for good. The food pantry in the Episcopal church of St. Paul had already emptied its shelves, and the mayor had resorted to handing out the emergency MRE rations from the old atomic bomb shelter beneath the town hall. The locals gathered, unrecognizable in their bulky winter coats and fleece hats, waiting for their share of the dwindling supplies.

What started as a queue became a surge as it was clear the number of boxed goods would not match the number of desperate people. Those who pushed forward took more than their share and those left behind took their frustrations out on the empty stores, smashing windows and stealing what little was left to take.

They congregated outside Belle’s and Emmet, who had experienced some kind of sixth sense, showed up just in time to usher her out the back door before the belligerent mob broke the lock and swarmed inside. Much good it did them – Belle had served every bowl of chicken noodle and every coffee bean in the place, holding back nothing for her own survival.

“I’m scared, Emmet” she admitted as they shivered their way through the crunchy snow to his jeep. “What if they come to the cottage? I’m all alone there, since Walt died.”

“You’ll come to the farmhouse with me, and that’s all she wrote,” he told her firmly, and knew he was secretly glad he would no longer face the end of the world alone.

As they pulled up the driveway a scrawny fox darted in front of the headlights, a dead bird between its jaws. The birds were everywhere, their scattered corpses littering the fields and roadsides. Unable to cope with the dark and the bitter winds they flew blindly till they fell, exhausted, from the sky. At least the fox would last a while longer, with its frozen feathered feast.

The next few weeks passed slowly in the green farmhouse. Time had little meaning when there was no difference between day and night, and often there was nothing to do but sleep, so Belle and Emmet slept a lot. It was warmer under the bedclothes, but the temperature continued to drop precipitously outside. Soon it was -15 and the water no longer flowed from the faucets. Emmet collected it by bucket daily from the well, breaking the ice with a heavy spade as it formed thicker by the day. The storms became more frequent, blasting across the long-dead fields in arctic waves that burned his nose and fingertips despite the heavy clothes he wore.

Once or twice a car or truck drove up the driveway, the headlights almost blinding against the deep black. Emmet stood on the porch and fired his shotgun, and they drove away. Nobody with good intentions made social calls anymore. He counted his bullets carefully, always holding back two in his bedside drawer. He didn’t speak to Belle about those two bullets, but he felt she knew about them all the same.

They lived on tinned fruit and sardines and tomato soup, and when those ran out on lentils or garbanzo beans cooked in water and flavored with salt. Eventually they just drank hot water, rocking in the chairs beside the one working stove, pretending it was jasmine tea. Emmet considered braving the tempestuous storms to go hunting for more provisions, but the jeep was almost out of gas and he couldn’t stomach stealing from his neighbors.

The days, or were they nights? passed by, and conversation ended, the pair patiently waiting in the cold darkness for a miracle that would never come. Each time he went to bed, weaker and shakier than the last, he promised himself tomorrow he would use those two precious bullets.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow.