Эллен Гилкрист - Black Winter

“It will blow here. It will blow everywhere. Where are all the people, Tannin? Why weren't there any cars on the roads?”

“They had television. They knew what to do.”

“Our radio went out. Why would television stations be operating?”

“I don't know. I'm just guessing. We were right to leave the towns. There will be rioting. We have food and they will want it.” I moved closer to him. He put his arms around me and we lay like that and talked and slept.

Here is what we had with us at that point. The car, with a tool kit and a small first aid kit. A waterproof car cover. A spare tire. Maps. Two sacks full of crackers and candy bars and beef jerky. Three quarters of a tank of 89 octane gasoline. A bottle of Evian. Ten Cokes. My new fur coat. The clothes we were wearing. Tannin's new sweater and jeans. A pair of running shoes and a pair of socks I had in the trunk of the car.

“We were right to leave Tulsa,” we both kept saying. We knew it was true. There had been riots in cities all year. Ever since President Clinton was killed the dispossessed had rioted everywhere. I counted the trouble from the day the doctor killed forty people in the mosque on the West Bank, in the occupied territories, in Israel, at dawn. It had spread all over the world, in the near east, in South America, in Africa, in the United States. But why am I telling you this. If Germany survived you know all this. If this gets to you. If we ever get out of here. If you are there.

We don't know what to do. We don't know if we should go or stay. Still, the chickens are alive. They have grown very long tails, but Tannin says it's just because they are nesting in the trees and are free. They look like long-haired hippies. I think we should stop eating them. The meat is tasteless after it is boiled. There are roots and berries and nuts in the woods. But we are running out of other things to eat.

I will try to describe the darkness. It is like early November or March. There aren't clouds. It is all one cloud. From horizon to horizon. No break for ten days now. No wind. Tannin says that is good. He has started to use his left brain. So have I. It's very cold in the left brain and makes me click my teeth together when I try as hard as I can to remember every practical and scientific thing I ever learned.

Three days of darkness have passed. We have kept track of every time the watch passes twelve. Now, finally, at two in the afternoon the sky has lightened up a bit to the south and west. There are pale shadows on the forest floor. We will mark the length of the shadow of the nearest tree. We will mark it each afternoon at two. Tannin is wearing a hooded garment made of the microfiber car cover and with a huge cover on his head. I don't think it makes any difference. I'm not sure, but I think radiation can go through anything, even steel. I think lead absorbs it but we don't have any lead except a little bit in some pencils and I'm not sure that's lead. I think it is against the law to put lead in pencils because kids chew on them in school.

Anyway, he puts on all this stuff and goes out to mark the shadow. He won't let me do it. I'm thirty years older than he is. I should be the one to take the chances.

Every day now the sunlight lasts longer. The cloud seems to be moving to the east and north. It has not rained and Tannin says that is good as the gamma particles will rain down on us and they are what carries the radiation.

I don't know what to think. I spend hours looking at my skin waiting for it to start falling off. It hasn't yet. We couldn't be this lucky, could we? Could we have lucked into being alive? It was totally nuts to drive that car for two hours and yet, here we are. With some food and a cave and a car and my fur coat and the woods full of living chickens.

We have a horse. Or, he has us. He came walking up wearing a torn gray horse blanket. We took it off of him and tried to mend it but we don't have a needle. It reminded me to find a needle if we ever go anywhere, or else learn how to make one out of bone. Our clothes won't last forever. Even the fur coat, which we take turns wearing at night or sometimes use for a blanket. That fur coat cheers us up. In the first place it is warm. In the second place I'll never have to pay for it. Mainly it makes us remember we could have had a pound of Godiva chocolate and a box of Godiva coffee if we had bought it. What I would really like is a baked potato and a steak. A bottle of orange juice. And I wouldn't mind some whiskey. I would really like some whiskey.

We make tea with different things we find. We are going to make some dishes soon. We might build a kiln if we decide to stay here. It's hard deciding what to do. I would take hikes to find out what's around here but Tannin doesn't think we should go outside unless we have to. He is painting a mural on the wall. It is a picture of us going to the movies. Sitting in seats eating popcorn and drinking Cokes and watching a screen. On the screen he drew the volcano from the movie we were seeing in Tulsa that afternoon. Stockard Channing in Four Baboons Adoring the Sun , by John Guare.

The horse doesn't do anything. He just hangs around. He has a halter on his face and I wanted to take that off too but Tannin said to leave it on. He is probably used to it and he has had enough changes in his life. I can't believe we don't go and see who is alive. What are we afraid of? What is there left to fear?

We have aspirin, hydrogen peroxide, merthiolate, antibiotic cream, sunscreen lotion, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo. We found a canoe shop on the river ten miles from here. We had been searching for food. The thought of being in the cave all winter with nothing to eat scared us so much we had taken the car to look for food. We followed the road along the river and found the shop. There was a store with nothing touched. We almost killed ourselves eating things. There was sugar and honey and cookies and canned drinks and bottled water. There is enough stuff to take care of us for months. We packed everything we could into the car. Then we put a trailer hitch on the back of the car and loaded a canoe with the rest of the food and supplies and pulled the canoe back to the cave. We have a store of outboard motor oil.

We do not know where the people had gone. Why didn't they come back for the food? We will go back later and make sure there is nothing there that we can use.

Also, there were some guns. We took most of them and all the ammunition. We don't want anyone else to get hold of them.

We have a visitor. A biology teacher from Minnesota. He came on a motorcycle. His name is Mort Ricardo. He has books with him.

“What do you know?” we asked him.

“The east coast is gone,” he answered. “And the south. People are living in camps. There is nothing now, no government, no communication. You're lucky you're way out here.”

“How did you find us?”

“I'm trying to go to the equator.”

He is six feet three inches tall. He has brown hair and blue eyes. He has with him the King James Version of the Bible, The Collected Works of William Shakespeare, a calendar of Florentine art. Tannin wept when he looked at it. It's the first time he's cried since this happened. He said it was because his mother took him to Florence when he was a child. As I said, we never talk about our families.

Mort has The Orestia by Aeschylus and a small anthology of British Poetry of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. He took what would fit in his saddlebags. He has dried food and lots of Bic cigarette lighters. He says it is going to be a long winter. His family was in Atlanta when it happened. He got on his bike and headed south. He is going to the equator with the books. There are other things. A medical textbook, an anatomy, a book of physics, an atlas. He thinks Europe is still there arid maybe parts of central and south America. He is trying to figure out when it will be safe to cross Texas. He thinks he can find gasoline for a while, then he will walk the rest of the way. He's asleep now. He has talked to a lot of people between here and Minnesota. He says they are mostly holed up waiting to see what happens. He said there isn't going to be any more food in North America. Next year he says there probably won't be any.