Roman Cesaro - Fallen Into Darkness

Robert walked toward the barricaded RV. He passed the large man who was holding the baseball bat. “He’s all yours.” Robert went to the picnic table that was holding the door shut on the RV, and pulled. The table collapsed and Robert dragged it away from the door. The men inside the RV jumped out of the vehicle and stared at the sergeant, who was writhing on the ground. “He’s all yours now. Do what you want.” The men from the RV immediately ran to the sergeant and dragged him to the river, and the man with the bat followed behind them. Robert decided not to watch, although he briefly heard the sergeant screaming.

Robert, Kyle, and Richard, stood near the RV that the sergeant had held the campers captive in. The men picked up the picnic table and placed it upright on the ground. They discussed what had just happened and felt a sense of relief knowing that the campers had taken care of Sergeant Haber. Realizing that it had just gotten quiet by the riverbank, Robert glanced in that direction. He saw the men standing there looking down. The large man was still holding the baseball bat, but now he was using it to poke a motionless body sprawled on the ground. Robert saw them throw the body into the river.

A young woman holding a sleeping infant came quietly up to the three men sitting at the picnic table, and hesitantly sat at the far end. The men could sense the fear in her as she glanced at their faces. Her hair was long and greasy, and like everyone else, she had not bathed. Her eyes had dark circles around them and were slightly sunken inward. Although it was summer, her skin was pale. She did not appear to be well.

“Do you know what has happened?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. Something very bad has happened,” Robert said quietly.

“Bad?” The woman laughed inappropriately and with glazed eyes, looked past the men. “Do you believe in God?” She stared at them with bloodshot eyes and did not give them a chance to respond to her question. “It’s the rapture. We have been left here to suffer. I will starve to death with my baby. I know this. I saw the angels the morning this happened. My baby was crying, so I woke up and took her outside to rock her. The angels lit up the night sky.” She was speaking loudly and her baby began to cry. Two women overheard what she was saying and came to her side. One of the women took the baby to comfort it and the other put a blanket around the deranged young woman’s shoulders and led her away.

The men who had taken Sergeant Haber away came back to the campground and the big man in the flannel shirt approached the picnic table where the three men were seated.

“I saw them take Jane away,” said the man. “She’s been acting strange ever since we’ve been stuck here. Sorry about that. Do you know what happened? We haven’t seen a single vehicle or a plane in the sky, and nothing electric works here. Most everything stopped at once, except for the electric lights in the RVs, but the batteries died because our motors wouldn’t start, and now nothing works.” He leaned the blood- stained bat against the table and sat down.

“Everywhere we’ve been is bad,” said Richard.

“Really, really, bad and it’s going to get worse,” Kyle added.

“What?”

“Let me try to explain what I think happened,” said Robert. “There was a massive solar storm and it destroyed tiny electronic circuits and the power grid, too. Nothing with a computer chip works now. People are going to get desperate, like Sergeant Haber, and do stupid things. Most likely, they will hurt other people in their desperation.”

“Then we are stuck here. Really stuck here,” the man said, fearfully.

“We decided to head south, to get back home,” said Robert. “We aren’t looking forward to going through any large cities. Think about how much trouble the sergeant has caused. What if there was a whole gang of people like him, with weapons?"

“I better tell the others.” The man stood up. “I forgot to thank you for helping me today.” The man extended his hand to shake Robert ’s, and realized it was bloody. He slowly put his hand to his side and rubbed the blood onto his jeans. “I wish there was something we could do for you, but we’ve got nothing. I don’t even know how we’re going to get out of here.”

Robert stood up. “You don’t owe me anything. We’re just going to get what was stolen from us and leave, if you don’t mind.”

The big man buttoned his flannel shirt, thanked them again, and walked away.

“Let’s go. You two go back upstream, get your rafts, and float down here. I want to check out my raft before we leave.”

Robert walked down to the river’s edge. He looked, but did not see any food left in the raft. The pillowcases that had held the food from the hotel were empty now, and the box of MREs was gone. He evidently had not tried to scavenge food along the way, either. The sergeant had nothing to eat, and must have been desperate. Robert thought, What a fool, not rationing out the food supply . Robert lifted the suitcase and saw the pistol that Haber had stolen from him. There were still boxes of cartridges, some clothes, a blanket, and that black duffle bag that the sergeant had brought with him. Robert stepped into the raft and opened the black bag. He had been right; the bag was full of weapons that the sergeant had stolen from the base. There were boxes of ammunition and hand grenades. He moved the bag carefully away from the other supplies and put his suitcase on top.

Robert noticed that a zipper on an outside pocket of the suitcase was partially open. He opened it the rest of the way and felt around inside. There was a folded piece of paper tucked way back in there. He pulled it out and opened it. It was a picture that his son and daughter had drawn for him, with crayons, before he left on the trip to Montana. It depicted him with his children standing beside him, and at the top they had written, We love you Daddy. The emotions evoked by that piece of paper hit him hard. He felt a sick feeling in his stomach and a huge lump in his throat. The crayon lines became blurry as tears welled in his eyes. When he noticed his two companions floating toward him, he quickly replaced the picture and wiped away his tears. He waved to the two men and shoved his raft out into the water. While he floated down the river, he kept his hand on the suitcase pocket that held the drawing, and thought of his children a thousand miles away.

The river carried the men forward on their journey, teasing them with abrupt changes of direction and speed. Although Robert felt like he had the burden of leading the others on this journey, he had the comfort of knowing that the river would lead them home. That was one less thing he had to worry about. Just follow the river, let the river take its course. As the river meandered, taking the men with it, minutes changed to hours, and the hours changed to days. Nobody kept track of time anymore. The days just blurred together. The days of the week held no meaning for them. There were no jobs, no meetings, and no appointments to keep. Life was just day by day.

They scavenged for food as they went along. For days, they supplemented the deer jerky and dried beans with small game, cattails, berries, dandelions, and other green plants that they would have normally never considered as food. As the days passed, their beards grew longer and their waistlines smaller, and after several more days, the terrain also began to change. The river gradually got wider and the current slowed. It became increasingly difficult to paddle the rafts through the sluggish water. The men decided that as the river widened, the riverbank was turning into the shoreline of a lake, so they switched from paddling to rowing the rafts. The lake seemed to fight back, in alliance with a constant headwind. The men would row and seem to advance only an imperceptible amount against the strong winds on the lake. The endless rowing was burning countless calories and their hunger increased in unison with their discontent.