Fade To Black (Into The Darkness Book 2)

by Doug Kelly

  The driver’s side door creaked open.

  “We’re about to find out,” announced Dylan.

  Shockingly, a kid, barely more than a teenager, emerged from the other side of the truck, hands held up high in the air. A young man with thin, blonde hair and sparse, patchy facial hair stood before them.

  “Come on,” said Dylan. “Let’s go see what he wants.”

  They walked toward the stranger. Dylan took the lead. Kevin trailed in the back of the group, hiding behind the other men to conceal his pistol. There was no need to confront a stranger who was expressing the goodwill of preemptive surrender. However, the stranger was not holding his hands up in fear. His stance appeared more like a protocol, a sign of the new times in which they lived. Nonetheless, it was prudent to be politely cautious, but armed.

  Dylan stopped about ten feet away from the trespasser. An uneasy moment of quiet ensued, and then the stranger broke the silence.

  “Mind if I put my hands down now?” asked the stranger. His eyes locked with Dylan’s.

  The young man wore a shirt about one size too small. Holding up his hands, the bottom of his tight shirt had risen above his waistline, which verified that there was no weapon hidden in the front of his denim pants. Dylan told him to turn around once to see if he had slipped a weapon into the back of his waistband. He saw nothing. Dylan nodded, and the stranger dropped his arms to his sides. His right arm had a tattoo of the number thirteen. He turned so his tattoo, red and swollen, faced the men. He wore it like a badge of honor.

  “I know you have a pistol,” announced the young man.

  Dylan and the two others side stepped, leaving Kevin in place. Kevin brought the pistol to the front of his body in a non-threatening way, and stood on the gravel with a wide, unyielding stance.

  “Yeah, I do. And we have you, both of you, covered with a rifle,” Kevin lied as he pointed at the newcomers.

  The young man cast a suspicious look around the property. There were plenty of places to hide with a rifle. He swallowed hard, cleared his throat, and then pointed at the truck.

  “This is a gift of goodwill.” The young man spoke mechanically and unemotionally, as if he had memorized each word. The words proceeded each other like cogs on a rotating gear, uniform and with no feeling. The man-child was like a robot, programmed to behave as instructed. As he continued, he pointed at the boxes in the truck’s bed. “Sam Deville wants you to have all this in consideration for your future cooperation and annexation of the property.”

  A flurry of rage arose from the depths of Dylan’s soul. “Let me tell you something, you little son of a bitch.” Dylan slapped the truck with the palm of his hand. The young man took a step back and turned his tattoo toward Dylan, almost like a warning. “This truck belonged to a friend of mine. Someone murdered him in that house, right over there. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” answered the young man. “I was told you’re going to make liquor for us. That’s all I know.”

  Dylan turned around and muttered, “John,” under his breath loud enough for his friends to hear, and then he turned back to the kid. “Shoot you? Maybe I should. All I have to do is wave my hand in the air a certain way.” Dylan raised his hand high and then waved it around. “Just one quick signal to our sniper and both you and your friend on the motorcycle will be dead.”

  The young man’s hands went up, and he looked into the line of trees by the stream for a sniper that was not there. Instead, he saw Ruth walking toward them.

  “Is that your sniper?” asked the young man. He snickered.

  “Ruth, what are you doing?” asked Dylan. “I told you to stay back.”

  “I thought you waved at me to come to you.”

  Dylan realized his mistake. When he was lying about a sniper, he had waved dramatically as a fake signal to shoot. Ruth saw him and thought he wanted her to come forward.

  “Ruth? Ruth Miller? Is that you?” asked the young man.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  The men, shocked that she knew the stranger, were stricken with a silence framed with gawking eyes and slack jaws.

  “Don’t you recognize me?”

  “It’s Clark, right?”

  “Yeah, look.” He turned his tattooed arm toward Ruth and pulled up his sleeve farther than necessary to show off the tattoo. “See, I got in. I’m one of them now.”

  “Oh, Clark, You’re not like them. You should leave those bullies.”

  “I’ve got no place to go, Ruth.” He rolled down his sleeve.

  Ruth looked at Dylan, and he shook his head.

  “Clark, you better leave now,” warned Dylan. “I’m not kidding.”

  Clark puffed his chest. “And who are you?”

  Dylan moved toward the young man as he spoke. “The name is Dylan Smith, and I’m your worst nightmare.” Dylan quickly extended his right arm. The palm of his hand went directly into Clark’s chest and knocked the wind out of him.

  Clark stumbled backward and clenched his fists.

  “Don’t do it, boy,” warned Dylan. “I’ll beat the shit out of you.”

  Clark looked back at the motorcycle driver. The driver revved the motor as a signal to leave.

  “Sam isn’t going to like this,” said Clark, walking backwards toward the motorcycle.

  Kevin waved him on with the pistol, and Clark left on the back of the motorcycle after lifting his middle finger at Dylan.

  “Ruth,” said Dylan, as he looked directly at her. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but how do you know him?”

  “No, it’s everybody’s business.” She looked away to the tranquility of the babbling stream. Then she looked back, ready to tell them anything they wanted to know. “I lived in an apartment building near the food warehouse that Sam Deville controls. Both Sam and Clark lived in that same apartment building. Sam’s friends are bad, but Sam is worse. He’s crazy. Now, he has a gang…or a militia…I don’t know what you call it, but it’s all the same. They are mean and evil. It looks like he’s coming this way. I thought I had escaped, but I guess not.”

  Dylan stroked his beard and looked around as he thought about it all. Then he leaned against the truck and muttered under his breath, “John is there, too. I just know it.”

  Curious, Jim and Joel began to look through the boxes stacked in the back of the truck.

  “Hey, you should get this stuff home,” suggested Dylan. “We’ll see what’s in it and split it up.” He looked at Ruth. “Let them take you home. I’ll walk back. I want to clear my head.”

  “I’m sorry if I caused any problems,” she said.

  “No,” replied Dylan. “You didn’t do anything. This isn’t your fault. I’ll see you at the house, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Joel’s long, skinny body sprawled on the boxes in the truck’s bed, and Kevin drove them to Dylan’s house.

  Dylan put the goats back into the barn and shut the door tightly. He looked around and thought of all their effort and the hope it had produced. He wondered what it would take to keep the fruits of their labor. How much force could they resist? What else would they have to do to survive? His heart sank.

  He strode heavily on the ground as he made his way toward the stream. On the path through the clearing, the percussion of his work boots preceded him and warned somnolent creatures of springtime that he approached. A dark snake slithered away, undetected, into the undergrowth.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Kevin drove the truck onto Dylan’s driveway and honked the horn. A window curtain moved slightly, and Kevin recognized Mary’s curious eyes staring at him. He pointed to the garage door, and Mary scurried to open it for her husband. Kevin parked the truck on the driveway and went into the garage to make room for it. Dylan’s children, Brad and Jennifer, bolted past him to look in the old truck, expecting to find their father with the returning group. He was not there. After clearing a place for the truck and setting the boxes on the driveway, Kevin d
rove the truck into the garage for safekeeping.

  Mary, curious and confused, fired off three questions in quick succession. “Kevin, what’s in the boxes? Where’s Dylan? Where did this truck come from?”

  “Slow down. Dylan is on his way. He wanted to walk back from Tom’s place and clear his head.”

  “Explain, ‘clear his head.’ I don’t understand.”

  Kevin turned and looked down the street. He saw a lone figure walking in their direction and guessed that it was Dylan.

  “We had a little bit of trouble.” He pointed down the street and said, “Look, he’s okay. Don’t worry.”

  “Now, I’m worried. You haven’t explained anything yet.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll explain. There’s a guy. His name is Sam Deville, and he wants the land we plowed. Ruth knows him and thinks he’s crazy. Whatever he is, he has taken over a food warehouse and the apartment complex next to it. He has men, armed men, and it looks like he’s going to start pushing his weight around. Maybe in our direction.” Kevin glanced at the truck and paused. “It gets worse.”

  “How could it?”

  “That’s Tom’s truck. John must have ended up with Sam’s crew after he killed Tom. That’s how they knew where all of this is.”

  Kevin clearly saw that it was Dylan walking down the street. Dylan waved, and Kevin waved back. He continued explaining. “One of Sam’s little punks who left all this in Tom’s driveway said it was a ‘gift of goodwill,’ but it didn’t take long for him to cross Dylan the wrong way. I thought Dylan was going to kill him.”

  As Kevin explained, Mary remembered the story that Ruth had told her about the brutality she had endured, the apartment complex, Sam and his gang of thugs. She felt a heavy knot in her stomach grow tighter as the story continued.

  After Kevin concluded his explanation, Mary only responded by sadly saying, “Oh.”

  With long fingernails, they picked and scratched at the tape securing the boxes, but to no avail. Beside Dylan’s bow, Kevin found his friend’s knife and made quick work of opening some boxes. Kevin stepped back, and the group attacked the contents inside each box in an uncivilized fashion. They found food, disposable razors, toilet paper, over-the-counter medicine, and more food. All of it lay in piles on the driveway amid smashed cardboard boxes. Kevin did not join the frenzy. He stepped away, head down, admiring Dylan’s knife. Mary saw him detaching from the group and she went over to him.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Mary.

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t want anything?”

  He held up Dylan’s knife. “This is what I need, a good knife.”

  Just as he held up the knife, Dylan saw it from across the driveway and yelled, “Toss it over here. There’s a few more boxes to open.”

  Kevin slid the knife into its sheath, snapped the retention strap closed, and threw it the short distance to Dylan.

  “Hey,” Dylan yelled to Kevin. “I’ll help split up the goodies. Can you break down the boxes and put them by the wood pile?”

  Kevin picked up the cardboard boxes and dragged them behind the house. Mary watched him flatten the boxes without a knife, and the emptiness of his hands was heavy on her heart. Their wedding anniversary approached. In the world before, she would have gone to a store and bought her husband a nice hunting knife as an anniversary present. She sadly walked into the house. That world was gone now.

  Kevin ripped at the folds of the boxes and stacked the sheets of cardboard for kindling. As he was breaking down a crumpled box, a plastic bag full of candy dropped to the ground. His first reaction was to pick it up and return it to the pile on the driveway, but after a second glance, he recognized it as his wife’s favorite. He took the bag and slipped into the kitchen, unnoticed. Climbing onto the countertop, he hid the sweet treats out of view on top of a cabinet.

  Early the next morning, people began to leave the house. Dylan, with rifle in hand, headed to Tom’s barn to look for tools for the truck. Kevin promised he would be there soon to help him with the task. Ruth walked with Dylan, not wanting to walk alone anymore, so she could check on the goats. Brad left to hunt rabbits with a group of young boys. Joel’s wife came early to take Jennifer to her house. She wanted to teach the young girl to read while she homeschooled her sons.

  Kevin and Mary were alone in the house, and he summoned her into the kitchen.

  “Mary.” He called.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m in the kitchen. Come here a second.”

  “On the way.” Wearing socks, Mary shuffled across the hardwood floor toward the kitchen as she combed her long hair.

  Kevin stood there, smiling mysteriously, with his hand behind his back.

  “Kevin, what are you doing?”

  “Well,” said Kevin, smiling widely now. “It’s that time of year and—”

  “What time of year?”

  “Okay, here it is, but it’s not much.” He brought his hand from behind his back and put the bag of candy on the countertop, then pushed it toward his wife. “Happy Anniversary.”

  “Oh, Kevin.” A tear came to her eye. “But I don’t have anything for you.”

  He hugged her. “You don’t need to. Thanks for being my wife.” He kissed her gently and went to the front door. “I have to meet Dylan at the barn. I’ll see you tonight. I love you.”

  The sound of the closing door echoed in the empty house and brought sadness to her heart. She should have felt happy with the small anniversary gift from the man she loved, but now, as she stood here alone in the house, anniversary present in hand, sorrow wrapped heavy chains around her ankles and tried to submerge her beneath the lapping waves of the sea of love, and drown her. Before this moment, this single act of kindness, she had so effortlessly floated in an ocean of happiness with her husband’s unconditional love for buoyancy. She took an emotional gasp for air, but aspirated her gloom instead as the heaviness in her heart pulled her under and smothered her. She wanted to do something for him, to get him something, but all she had to give was her love.

  Still standing in the kitchen, she heard the front door open. Mary wiped the tear from her cheek and quickly said, “I love you, too.”

  No one answered, but she heard light footsteps coming toward her. It was Dylan’s son, Brad, holding a bow at his side.

  “Who are you talking to?” asked Brad.

  “I’m sorry, I thought you were Kevin.”

  “I just saw him run down the street.”

  “Oh, he must be trying to catch up with your dad. Why did you come back?” she asked.

  “My friends left, and Dad said he didn’t want me to be out alone anymore.”

  Mary showed the bag of candy to Brad. “Want some? Kevin gave it to me.”

  “Sure!”

  Mary tried to rip the bag open, but could not, so she found a kitchen knife to finish the job. She gave a piece to Brad and took one herself. It was her favorite kind, and it was delicious. Another tear came to her eye.

  “What’s wrong, Mary? Don’t you like it?”

  “Oh, Brad, it’s not that. The candy is wonderful, and so is my husband. He gave this to me. It’s just that…I wish I could get him something, too. Kevin wants a hunting knife like your dad’s. I don’t know what to do.”

  “When I went with Dad and Kevin to the big parking lot, where the grocery store used to be, I saw people trading things. I saw knives. Maybe you could get him a knife there. Trade something for it.”

  The tears came back. She muttered, “But I don’t have anything.” She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the countertop. Her head hung low. Then she felt her crucifix pendant dangling from the gold chain around her neck. She grasped it tightly and realized that she did have something.

  “Brad, do you know where that parking lot is? Can you help me find it?”

  “I remember.”

  She passed him another piece of candy.

  “Don’t tell anybody. We’re not supposed to go there, and I want it to be a
surprise for Kevin.”

  Brad grinned and put the second piece of candy in his mouth.

  Mary got a bicycle out of the garage and attached the bike trailer to it. Brad climbed into it with his bow. He wanted to take the bow along, ever vigilant to get a rabbit, squirrel, or any other small furry creature that got close enough for one of his arrows.

  At the bartering lot, Mary parked the bike by a streetlamp and used a metal chain and padlock to secure it. She held Brad’s hand tightly as they walked toward the crowd. Pete, at the edge of the gathering, came into view. Brad recognized Pete, and told Mary to go to him. Mary went to Pete’s area and began to look at the goods spread around on his tables.

  “What can I find for y’all?” asked Pete.

  “A knife.”

  “For cooking?”

  “No, a hunting knife. A big knife.”

  Pete hooked his thumbs under his overall straps. “You don’t look like a hunter.”

  Pete’s son, Junior, stood up from a chair, hooked his thumbs under the straps of his overalls, and repeated, “You don’t look like a hunter.”

  Mary looked at Junior curiously.

  “Don’t pay no attention to him,” advised Pete. “He’s harmless.”

  Pete noticed Brad standing quietly beside Mary. He thought he recognized the child, but was not sure.

  “The knife is for my husband.”

  “How about this one?” Pete handed her a knife in a leather sheath. Removing the knife, she inspected the blade, not knowing what a good knife is supposed to look like.

  “This here is a KA-BAR. Military issue, used by the Marine Corps,” Pete explained. “If this won’t work, I don’t know what will.”

  Junior did not repeat his father’s words this time. He was watching a familiar face in the crowd. It was a face that his father despised, and it was staring at them.

  “Is it sharp?”

  “I can put an edge on it.” He took the knife back. “But first, what are we trading for? I don’t see you carrying anything.”

  Mary took the gold chain from around her neck and held it in front of her. The gold crucifix dangled and twisted on the chain, reflecting the sunlight in quick, bright flashes.