The Dark

Bell died while she slept.

Day and night no longer existed, time was now defined by sleep or awake.

Jess frowned.

Bell had been so excited to see the wicks. Fifty cured and intricately braided, ready for use lantern tapers. Ten-thousand dollars worth. Half of what he found in the lock box, the other half, another 10K, now secured in a pouch deep within her backpack.

“Money means nothing,” Bell had said when he found the box and its contents in a scavenge house. He lifted a few bills and let them slide through his fingers back into the box. “But light is everything.”

Jess nodded, not because his words were new information, but because they were absolute truth.

“They’ll burn too quick for cooking or heat,” he said, handing her the container full of money. “Any other ideas?”

Jess thought for a time before it came to her. “I could make wicks for the lantern?”

Even in the flickering light of the candle the pride in his smile was undeniable. “Brilliant.
 That was ten days ago. Now, with Bell dead, it felt like a lifetime ago.

A soft scritch scritch sound pulled Jess out of her thoughts and she reached for the gun tucked safely in its holster. Sometimes rats came like thieves in the forever night to tear open bags of rice or steal unseen scraps, sometimes it was something more dangerous. Candlelight flickered and jumped on the walls, and for a moment she felt fear catch in her throat.

Then she saw it was just Bell’s tiny, aging Chihuahua.

Jess relaxed and her hand slid away from the holster. She stooped and reached out her fingers for the mostly blind dog to sniff. “I’m so sorry Tinker,” she said, her voice hushed.

In the time before, Tinker still had his eyesight and energy enough to give rabbits a chase in Bell’s front yard. Back then Bell was the neighbor to the East of her parents property. He wasn’t what you would call the social type, keeping to himself aside from the occasional neighborly wave.

Then the world turned inside out.

Opinions, theories, conspiracies: all spread like a brush fire in California. Some thought it was soil erosion gone mad, others thought climate change was the culprit and a whole other group swore it was the missiles that wiped out New York and Tokyo and so many other places she couldn’t remember. Bell believed it was all of those things and more.

Before any theory could be proved or disproved, the riots began. Not the kind of riots born out of a need for change, but those steeped in confusion and fear.

Everyone was afraid.

Of the Dark.

It was as if some cosmic hand had carelessly flipped a switch and all natural light disappeared. A thick swirling layer of sand and dust and debris had created a veil between the Earth and her Universe.

Jess scooped Tinker into her arms and looked at the man who spent the last years of his life caring for a teenage girl he barely knew under less than hospitable conditions.

Her chest tightened and she willed herself not to cry.

Bell. The man who took her in when her parents died in those first horrific months, the man who protected her from their neighbors, and then later others, as resources dried up.

“Fear is the enemy of rational thought,” Bell had told her as power grids were lost, buildings burned, stores looted. “Fools will destroy that which preserves them.”

And they did.

Fast.

Until there was no light left at all except that which they could scavenge. Food and water they stockpiled, taking first from houses near Bell’s, then the corner store two blocks south and eventually Schueler’s Grocery. Each time they went they saw no one, not that seeing was easy in the Dark, but the lantern helped. Flashlights were kept for short trips.

When they weren’t scavenging or theorizing about why the sun would never shine again or how they got there in the first place, Bell told her stories of playing violin with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and traveling to far away places like Prague. In turn, Jess told him about her older brother Jason, who was away at school when the Dark came; how she tried to get in touch with him but cell service was one of the first things to go and emails just sat in the outbox unable to send and no matter what she tried she couldn’t get through. She told Bell that she wanted to learn to play bass guitar and draw in charcoal. But most of all she wanted to find her brother. He would nod and ask questions and sometimes he would make notes or doodles in the little black notebook he always had with him, but he never told her she couldn’t play bass or draw or find Jason.

Tinker whimpered, his tiny tail drumming a soft rhythm against her arm.

“It’s okay,” Jess cooed at the dog. She didn’t really think that, it had been a long time since anything had been okay, but the dog needed comfort and the least she could do was that.

Bell lay quiet and still in his final resting place, a tattered coffee-stained settee that carried the stink of decades of cigarette and incense smoke. An afghan Bell himself called “of questionable taste”, lay stretched over his legs. He looked peaceful at least.

Then she spotted it, Bell’s black notebook.

Perched on the arm of the sofa, dog-eared and soft with age and use, sat Bell’s collected thoughts and ideas. Bell, her friend, now only composed of ink and page and binding.

She reached for it, Tinker still safely tucked in her other arm.

It felt heavier than she expected, as if the words inside added weight.

Jess opened the book and read the first line.

The world ended like all life begins and ends, in the Dark.

She smiled. Bell was nothing if not poetic.

She read on, turning page after page, until she came to one with a familiar name scrawled on it. Right there, printed at the top, was her brother’s name.

Jason

Jess stared at it.

She hadn’t talked about Jason in ages, but it appeared that Bell took notes right from the beginning. Below her brother’s name were things she had told Bell, where Jason went to college, what he studied, how far he was away from me, how long it might take to cross that distance. Calculations littered the page, x = the likelihood of successfully making a trip that far, y = Jason even still being alive.

He was trying to get her to her brother.

She turned the page.

Directions. Step by step from Bell’s front door to her brother’s dorm room.

Another page listed supplies. An intricate map on yet another. The book had suggestions, information and advice, all for her. Where had he found it all? Internet no longer existed, you couldn’t phone a friend and books went up in flames long ago. Still, he managed to to put it all together. This time she didn’t fight the tears. Instead, she flipped to the last page and gasped.

Do not let the Dark consume you Jess.

Please take care of Tinker. He enjoys your company as much as I have.

He knew.

How long though? Before she showed him the wicks? Before the money?

Did it even matter?

She closed the book. Bell was dead and that wouldn’t change no matter how much she cried or sat or scavenged or braided wicks. Bell was dead and there was no one left in Longville except a teenage girl named Jess and an elderly pocket dog.

By the end of the day she was ready to go. Packing items from Bell’s list, threading brand new wick into the lantern and filling it with alcohol. Another thing she learned since the Dark came––most fuels go bad, alcohol does not.

Tinker watched Jess prepare from his perch on her bed, eyeing each thing she stuffed into her pack with the nervous suspicion that seems ingrained in the DNA of Chihuahuas.

“Do you want to come with?” She asked, as if he had a choice.

Tinker thumped his tucked tail against his own body.

“Good. I’m glad we agree.”

His ears swiveled forward and he cocked his head, tiny pink tongue poking between his lips.

Jess couldn’t help but laugh.

With all supplies packed, Jess placed a towel inside. “Time to make this work,” she told him. Before she could pick him up, Tinker hopped into the pack and curled up on the towel. She tucked it around his tiny body; it would be cold out there. She draped layers of cheese cloth over him to filter the dark dirty air, then pulled the latches closed and slipped the pack over her shoulders.

Jess struck a match, one of the few she had left, and lit the lantern. The money wick first sputtered, then sparked to life, bright flame chased the Dark out of Bell’s kitchen. She slipped the remaining matches into the pocket that held her flint and covered her face, squinting into the goggles Bell always insisted they wear outside.

She opened the door and stepped into the Dark.

Bell’s directions told her to turn right at the end of his driveway and take Little Hill Road, the road she grew up on, to Main Street. Jess put a hand on the pocket of her parka, comforted by the outline of Bell’s notebook. The wind kept her company though it seemed milder than most days.

In all of their salvage trips, Bell and Jess rarely saw life aside from rats and occasionally cats, one time even a pack of raccoons. On rare occasions they saw a bird, like the one that flew over her now.

An owl.

It swooped down and cut a path in front of her, flying low and fast over the scorched and buckled black top. Jess wasn’t worried about it, she wasn’t prey and Tinker lay safe inside the pack, but she did wonder about the bird’s destination as it crested the hill ahead and disappeared.

She hoped it stayed safe.

She hoped it found light.

She hoped.