Left to Darkness

by Craig Saunders

  The water in the tap, maybe, that would run down. Stocks of wood for the stove would run out. But these things were survivable, negotiable. A heating system that depended on gas? Lighting dependent on electricity? That world was dead.

  It was a good place, she thought, to weather the storm and the dark skies. A good place to either see out the end, or wait in hope for the skies to clear and life to return.

  But it wasn’t the right place.

  Dawn nodded, there in the kitchen. Alone and unseen, but determined enough. Then began the process of packing for two.

  The simple fact was, despite reading the books, having the tools for the job, having a simple, safe home…Dawn knew she didn’t have it in her to bring the child into the world alone.

  She needed help, and that meant finding people.

  50

  Maybe as little as a week ago, Dawn would have panicked at the thought of hunting down people and all the possibilities of entrusting herself, again, to the world of men. A world of women, too, she knew, but deep down, Dawn was shaped by the men in her life. She didn’t want to be, and she knew it was so, but it was ingrained. A father who had wanted his dinner on the table when he came home from work. He’d loved her, perfectly as a father could, but he’d been the kind of old-school father, raised to dominance by his right of birth, by the pure chance that he’d been born with a penis, maybe.

  Ruled, later, by her husband Robert. He’d squashed her soul flat so she’d felt like some kind of two-dimensional wife from a ‘50s cartoon. Richard, a man, her friend. Christ, everyone of any kind of strength in her family, in her life, had been a man…

  Her mother? She’d done as she was told, put the dinner on the table. Apologized if dinner had been late, even when she’d had to pick up Dawn early from school, or if she’d had to go to the doctor or run a late errand. Never excused herself, only apologized. Maybe there had been strength there, too. But a passive kind of strength…strong, but removed, behind, in the shade.

  What about you, Dawn? said that voice in her head. That younger self that had been hopeful, dared to be different and wish for better. What about you? Are you a victim? Are you second-class? You think? Now, in this world?

  Dawn didn’t even dare to hope, but she could see it. It wasn’t the old world. It might be something new.

  So, she tempered her panic with hope. It wasn’t natural to her. She’d been squashed so long, told who to be, shown what she should be, so long. But a person can change plenty in less time than a week.

  So she got thinking, and she packed while she thought.

  Thinking on a few different levels. Not even consciously, as such, when it came to the packing. It was largely just taking the stuff that was hers from the borrowed cottage. The other stuff? That was surface thinking, right there on top.

  Stuff about people, about how they ticked. She worked the thought around in her head, like a detective, or a sociologist. She was neither, but she wasn’t stupid, either.

  People were largely, she figured, social creatures. The world wasn’t full of supermarkets and art galleries and garages and armies and hospitals and banks because people were shy. It’s what drove society. At least, that’s what she figured. Maybe it did boil down to simple survival—people wanted to live, and it was easier with backup.

  People didn’t just work together for some kind of end, though, she thought. They craved contact.

  If she’d survived, then surely others had, too.

  Why? Same reason it didn’t make sense that the Earth was the only populated planet in the galaxy or the universe. What were the chances of her and the child in her womb being the only survivors on a planet of what, six billion, seven billion? Why would one woman, pregnant and heavy on her feet, be the only person to survive the impact of the rock?

  Maybe, she thought, plenty of people had survived…after all, she hadn’t seen any bodies. Might be a reason all the people had gone missing.

  The car-park graveyard, honey?

  Robert’s voice, and right now, not helpful. She shunted it away.

  But if there was a reason for people to go missing, she thought it was probably too big for her to see the shape of it, let alone pick it up and run with it. The missing people was a problem for another day. The problem for today was finding others, like her, that weren’t missing, weren’t dead.

  And keeping a straight head while doing it. Easy enough to drift when you’re thinking. Start thinking about anything but what you’re supposed to be thinking about. Thinking was a kind of skill. One Dawn was getting a hell of a lot better at.

  Thinking, as it turned out, that people were social, and they’d be hungry, tired, hurt, lonely, afraid.

  Of those things, only two would kill you right away—hungry and hurting.

  Dawn looked at the gear she’d stowed in her bags, mind switching modes now that she’d decided where to search for people like her.

  Everything…

  No. Almost everything.

  While she’d been on automatic, she’d left the shotgun in the kitchen of her borrowed cottage. Same place she’d put it when she’d first decided to stay away. Same place it’d been ever since. Right there, standing in a corner of the cool pantry on the stock, the barrel pointing up.

  Now that it pricked her mind, she seriously thought about leaving it.

  But one niggling thought made her head over and pick it up.

  Looking for people like me, she thought…but then, not all people are like me, are they?

  She closed the skewed old door to the cottage behind her, got into her borrowed Volvo and turned the key in the ignition. She was sad, leaving the place. It had been a kind of haven for her. A place to heal, and rest, and yes, to think. But it was time to move on. She could be passive, or be active…

  She drove away, never once looking back. Drove south, back to the places she knew. Drove south with the gun in the seat beside her. Because she knew she was right, even though she didn’t want to be.

  Not all people were like her.

  51

  Dawn didn’t know her country all that well—she knew London. She’d be born in London. She’d grown up in London, married and worked and grieved there. As to the rest of the country, her geography was vague. She didn’t know Lincolnshire, the county in which she’d found herself, at all. But she knew enough to head south. She could have gone inland, but psychologically, it would have felt like being trapped. She liked the feel of the coast to one side. It felt like freedom. Like having a window, or a missing wall.

  Trouble was, the road drifted away from the coast and with the dust storm still blowing strong, she couldn’t actually see the sea.

  She knew where Wales and Scotland were, in a general kind of over there, up there, sense. She didn’t realize how badly she’d ignored the rest of the country until, after two hours of driving through Lincolnshire, following the signs, she found Boston.

  She’d thought Boston sounded like a good bet.

  It wasn’t. It was quaint, in a way (or would have been, had it not been covered in dust—as it was it looked like a cut-priced set from a movie about mummies and pharaohs). Country, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of place that bustled even before all the people had gone.

  Like everywhere else, it was covered in dust and grime, so it was difficult to tell exactly what it would have looked like. Plenty of roundabouts, a small industrial area on the outskirts. She ran the windshield wipers constantly and drove with the lights on despite the fact that the dashboard clock was telling her it was the middle of the afternoon. In the grubby air, with the headlights bouncing off the grime, Boston didn’t look like she’d imagined it would at all.

  She frowned, concentrating hard on the road and the occasional abandoned vehicles in her path. She’d already forgotten what she’d set out to do in the first place. She was supposed to be looking for people. Instead, she drove slack-jawed, staring at the destruction, the waste, the aftermath of the meteor. She drove with one part of her mind
concentrating on not crashing. The rest, the larger part of her, was stuck on the sheer scale of the carnage she saw.

  The remnants of a few fires, burned-out buildings. The odd car wreck, but mostly, a sense of emptiness and abandonment on such a large scale that she couldn’t get the feel of the thing. Like the whole world, in a moment, had gone to sleep. Like a fairy tale, but a dark, dark one, in which there was no fabled princess to wake, there was no happy ending. There was just nothing. A fairy tale that drifted off into some kind of void, never ending and terrifying enough to be a horror story, a nightmare from which there was no waking.

  Seeing the vast, deserted waste, her mind wished for a joke, a prank of epic proportions. She wanted people to jump from the dead buildings she passed and shout “ta-da” with glee. She wanted desperately to see someone, anyone, walking in the street, or another set of headlights, or a light burning in a farmhouse along the way.

  But there was nothing. No one, no signs of life, no sense of death. No bodies, no people. No birds, even, or dogs, roaming, howling for their masters. No horses in the wide fields, or cows. Nothing at all.

  Dawn’s shock turned to hopelessness, to anger, to sadness. So huge, the emptiness of the world, that there was no response, nothing to hold on to, no way to tie it down and examine it and make sense of it. She tried to shy away from it, but it was there, at every turn, at every dead shell of cars and houses along the way.

  It wasn’t until she’d decided to pass Boston by and hit the next road south that she saw her first person. Thankfully, even though she wasn’t being especially careful, looking for pedestrians was ingrained in her. She thought she probably would have taken the gun right then and blown her own head off if she had. As it was, she panicked a little and probably overreacted in her rush to stop, to talk, to hear someone’s breath but her own.

  The man, swaddled in a hood and scarf, was walking, head down, right in the middle of the road. She braked far too early and too hard, but the man still leapt from the road. He was probably as shocked as she was. She slewed across the road at an angle, coming to a stop about ten yards from the man. He held up his hands toward her.

  Her initial hope, her joy, turned to shit in less than a second.

  Fuck, she thought. Fuck fuck fuck.

  He had a gun.

  Dawn fumbled, ducking, at the shotgun in the passenger seat. She took a quick breath and brought the gun up before he could open fire. She pulled the trigger and blew out the windshield. Deaf, instantly. Shards of glass everywhere.

  Thankfully, she completely missed the man, because he wasn’t holding a gun at all. Just a pair of black gloves.

  Even though she couldn’t hear anything, she could tell perfectly well what he said from his gestures and his lips, now that he’d pulled down the scarf covering his face.

  “You could’ve fucking killed me! You could’ve killed me!”

  Sounded squishy, and it might not have been exact, but she got the gist.

  “I’m so sorry…I’m sorry. I thought you were shooting at me!”

  “You shot at me,” he said, or something similar. Dawn couldn’t hear properly, and she felt wetness running down the side of her neck. I just made myself deaf, she thought, dumbfounded at her own idiocy.

  “I can’t hear you. I’m deaf. The gun. Think I blew my eardrums.”

  She couldn’t even tell if that was what she said. That was her intention, anyway.

  She decided to concentrate on apologizing until the man calmed down and she could (hopefully) hear again. The dirt in the air was irritating her face, getting between her teeth, but she carried on anyway…apologizing like a crazy woman, still holding the gun, but this time pointing it nowhere near the man. She didn’t realize how deep her desperation to see another human was until she actually met one.

  And then you tried to blow his head off.

  She laughed, despite herself, still apologizing, but laughing now, too.

  “Fuck, you’re nuts. You shot at me. What are you laughing at?”

  “Fucked it up a bit, didn’t I?” said Dawn, waving at the remnants of her shattered windshield. She laughed again. She didn’t even care if the man saw the funny side of it.

  But he did. He swore, laughed a little, then finally, there they both were, laughing in the windstorm.

  “Adam,” he said when they’d both quit laughing and passed over to the shaking side of shock. He didn’t approach, or offer his hand. A wary kind of greeting, but a greeting, nonetheless. Far more friendly than hers had been.

  “Dawn,” she said.

  “You really did balls that up, eh?” His words sounded distant, still, but she could hear him with her left ear despite the blast of the gun and the howling wind.

  Dawn smiled. “I did. Never was very good at meeting people,” she said.

  He grinned. She grinned.

  “You a nut?” she asked him.

  “Nope, but if it’s all the same,” he said, “I’m not so sure about you…”

  She smiled, because he was smiling. He had a good clean smile and bad skin.

  “I’m actually looking for people,” she said. “You’re the first person I’ve seen in…a week?”

  “For someone who’s looking for people, you’re pretty quick to shoot ‘em…”

  “Come on, I did miss.”

  He nodded. “Well, thanks, I guess…?”

  “My pleasure,” said Dawn. “I think.”

  “It’s a brave new world, huh?”

  Dawn realized, then, that she wasn’t the only person scared. But she was still happy, feeling lighter than she had in a while. She wasn’t alone.

  “Have you seen any other people?”

  “I have. Plenty.”

  “Thank God…I thought I was going nuts. I thought the rock hitting would take its toll…but everyone?”

  “Sorry…Dawn…not that many. The missing?” Adam shrugged his shoulders. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Dawn’s sudden hope fled. “I saw a traffic jam in Lincolnshire…hundreds and hundreds of cars…no people.”

  “I’ve been wandering a while. Only seen maybe a hundred people all week. No one knows…one old man, he reckoned it was the Rapture. Me? Don’t know, but…”

  “…but?”

  “More I think about it…the more I get afraid.”

  It wasn’t until then that Dawn realized Adam was quite young. Maybe not even thirty.

  Of course he was afraid.

  You don’t have the monopoly on fear, she told herself.

  And him being young? Didn’t matter. Old, young…anyone still ticking in this wasteland should be afraid.

  The Rapture?

  The Bible had always seemed like nonsense to her. The Rapture, frankly, sounded ridiculous. To Adam, too…but if not something massive, mystical…what the fuck was it?

  She looked Adam in the eye.

  “You want to come with me? Go find these people?”

  Adam shook his head, sad, but resigned, too.

  “I’m…no. No, Dawn. Thank you. I’ll point the way, but I’ve got my own thing going on. I’m just going to walk a while, you know?”

  The way Adam said it, she thought he was saying something else entirely.

  The way he said it, she didn’t think she’d be seeing him again.

  It made her sad, even though she’d only just met him. But she didn’t judge, she didn’t try to change his mind, or save him. It wasn’t the kind of world she’d grown up in. But already, she was getting a feel for how this new world, the world beneath the cloud of dust and the dirt storms, would be.

  Let him go his own way, she thought.

  She just nodded. “King’s Lynn,” he said. “You know it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t suppose you can see the signs in this dirt,” he said, “but I don’t know the way, exactly. Not from here. It’s south, though. There’s a smallish hospital there. People are living there.”

  “Nice people?”

&
nbsp; Adam nodded. He understood what she was saying.

  “Nice people. Nice enough. They’ve got food, medicine. Some guys there have been trying to get the electricity up and running. There’s a generator. Might be a good bet, you know…if you’re planning on…”

  Dawn smiled sadly and finished Adam’s sentence for him. “Staying?”

  He nodded.

  Seemed to Dawn that there really wasn’t much else to say.

  He stood on the road. She was higher, in the seat of the car. He hadn’t mentioned her bump, she realized. Unusual, but then, he couldn’t see it, could he?

  “Well,” he said. She thought he might shuffle his feet. He was younger than her, but he seemed, in this moment, no more than a boy. She wondered if he was waiting for her to be his angel. To change his mind about moving on.

  But then, she wasn’t an angel, and this world? This wasn’t a world of Samaritans. It was a new world, and she knew the boy would go his own way no matter what she said, or how long they spoke.

  A sixth sense? A mother’s instinct? How did she know the boy was going to kill himself? How else would she know, without any doubt at all, that she couldn’t do or say anything to help him?

  She didn’t know the answer. Didn’t understand. But it didn’t make it any less true.

  She felt for the boy, but even so, knew the only thing she could do for him right now was to send him on with at least the memory of kindness to see him go.

  “Glad I didn’t shoot you,” said Dawn.

  Adam nodded. “Luck, Dawn.”

  She didn’t know what to say to him. Good-bye? For some reason she wanted to kiss him, his cheek, hold his hand…let him know…

  Let him know what? That there’s a reason for going on?

  You don’t know that, do you?

  Truth was, she didn’t. Her reason for going on was in her belly.

  Maybe he didn’t have one at all.

  “Good-bye,” she said. She started the car and drove south.

  The young man watched her go. He looked neither happy nor sad. Then, for a moment, he watched her taillights disappear into the murk.