The Waking Dark

by Robin Wasserman

  Jule sank to the muddy ground, and surveyed the broken land that was her only home. She stayed there in the gathering dark, steeling herself, until finally, there was no delaying it anymore. She rose, approached the nearest pile of twisted aluminum wreckage, and began the search for bodies.

  Of the town’s churches, there was only one whose interior remained intact and whose sanctuary and wooden cross were unharmed, which was strange – for the roof had been neatly sheared off. Left open to the elements for nearly the entire duration of the storm, the church below bore no scars of what had raged overhead.

  This is what Deacon Wally Barnes found when he set out to investigate his masterwork. A church watched over by open sky, and beneath it, a girl, sitting poker straight in a wooden pew, hands clasped and eyes fixed on the sanctuary as if waiting for the sermon of her life. The deacon spoke her name. When there was no response, he sat beside her. The crown of broken glass in her hair glinted in the twilight sun. But, except for a narrow cut on her pale cheek, she appeared unharmed. A trail of dried blood traced a line down her face.

  “Eleanor,” he said again. “Ellie.” She looked no older now than the day she’d been delivered to his doorstep three years before in dire need of guidance and cleansing. They had struggled then, but he had eventually delivered her from need. He had shown her the way.

  She blinked once, slowly, like a princess stirring from a trance.

  He pressed his lips to her forehead in benediction, and she awoke.

  She looked at him strangely, as if she could see into him, including and especially the parts no one was ever meant to see. She peered straight through him with those strange, muddy eyes, and a smile played on her lips. “Yes,” she said, as if in answer – and the deacon, who before taking on the cloth had killed a man bare-handed, a man who’d been drunk, surly, and nearly twice his size, looked at this skinny, wet seventeen-year-old girl, and was afraid.

  “Yes what?”

  She blinked again, and the strange look was gone. “Is it over?” she said.

  “The storm? Yes, it’s over.”

  She looked around, and smiled. “Then it worked. The church is safe.”

  “Well…” He tipped his head toward the nonexistent ceiling. “In a matter of speaking.”

  Ellie stood. “Then I guess I can go.” She sounded foggy, half asleep.

  “Did you get trapped here, when it started?”

  “I came here to watch over it through the storm, as He told me to.”

  “Who did?”

  Ellie glanced to the missing roof – no, to the sky. “He did.”

  The deacon cleared his throat. “You’re telling me… God called on you to watch over the church?”

  She nodded.

  He surveyed the damage above, and the lack thereof below. Maybe just some trick of the shifting wind. Or maybe the Lord had stopped turning a deaf ear and finally taken notice of this festering town. He wanted to believe that – it should have been easy for him to believe that. But it would also mean believing that the Lord had passed him over, and put His faith in this girl. Offered this girl the gift Wally Barnes had waited so long, and so desperately, to receive.

  Envy was not his only sin, but it was his ugliest.

  And yet… he had prayed for a sign. Pleaded for some confirmation, no matter how slight, that his work wasn’t in vain. That he had not been abandoned. If he could believe that God had whispered in this girl’s ear – and he had to believe it – then wasn’t it possible to believe He’d meant the whisper to spread? As the deacon so often told his flock, signs came in many forms.

  He took Ellie’s hand in his own.

  “You aren’t the only one with a mission from the Lord today, Ellie.”

  “He sent you here, too?”

  “Yes. But not for the church.” He waited.

  “He sent you… for me.”

  “As He sent you to me.” The deacon stood with her, still holding her hand, in the church he had built with his will and his craft, and he looked up, and saw no limit.

  Reports had the Preacher wandering into the storm, raising his arms to the rain, and furiously chanting lines from King Lear. The latter was probably poetic license on the part of witnesses eager for a good story, even in the face of calamity. But Daniel knew his father, and the rhetorical extravagance had a ring of truth. Not that it mattered. Shakespeare spouting or not, the Preacher had been consumed by the wind, and Daniel didn’t have time to care, because the Preacher wasn’t the only Ghent unaccounted for.

  No one had seen Milo – not his camp counselors, who’d sent the kids home early, and not his mother, who’d belatedly shown up to claim him.

  “I thought he’d be with you,” Giuliana told Daniel, with a wild-eyed despair that left him nearly sick with fear.

  They had promised him it would be best for Milo: a nice home, with a nice woman, who had the added credential of being his mother. Even though she’d done crap to show it over the last eight years. When Milo was six months old, she’d dumped him in the Preacher’s arms and taken off to find herself. No one had asked her to find her way back.

  After Giuliana’s, Daniel went home, because that’s where Milo always went. There was no sign of him. At the day camp, Laura Tanner was of no help, and he had to restrain himself from shaking her when she offered some thinly veiled observations about children from broken homes. He checked the empty school and, doorstep by doorstep, the houses of Milo’s few friends. When that, too, came up empty, he tried Giuliana’s neighbors at random, most of whom failed to open the door, although he saw more than a few pairs of eyes peering out from behind lace curtains. Everyone on the block knew better than to speak to a Ghent.

  Only Grace Tuck answered her door, sizing him up with those cold, narrow eyes.

  “I’m here alone,” she said. “So if you’re a roving ax murderer, you should really pick someone who would be more of a challenge.”

  He nearly told her she shouldn’t answer the door to strangers, then reminded himself she was someone else’s problem.

  “I’m looking for my little brother,” he said. “Milo? He’s eight. Maybe you’ve seen him around?”

  “I know Milo.” She softened. “You can’t find him?”

  He shook his head, swallowing the fear. The Christmas before last, he and Milo had spent the night watching The Wizard of Oz. The flying monkeys had given the poor kid nightmares for a month, but that didn’t stop him from demanding to see the movie again and again, until he knew all the lyrics and could do a fair impression of Dorothy shrieking for her Auntie Em when the twister was a-comin’. He’d always wanted to see a “twister.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” Daniel said tightly.

  “Yeah.”

  “I just need to find him.”

  “Yeah. You do.”

  The roads were largely impassable by car, so he walked, calling his brother’s name, trying to ignore the heaps of wreckage, overturned cars, vacant lots where houses used to be, men scrabbling with their bare hands to pry up collapsed beams and crushed walls and extricate whoever lay beneath. He didn’t let his mind stray to the question of what he would do if Milo was gone.

  In the scrabble of weeds behind the Ghent house lay an old shed that Daniel’s father had used as a workroom in better times. Its wood beams and floorboards had rotted at approximately the same rate his father had, until its walls sagged alarmingly, its door rusted shut, and a hive of wasps took up residence under its eaves. There was a loose floorboard in the back corner, which, for a couple of years, Daniel had used as a hiding spot for things he didn’t want his father to find – candy, books, a Victoria’s Secret catalog that seemed to qualify as porn. But the last time he’d pried up the bent wooden board, a clutter of spiders had spilled out of it, the largest the size of his thumb. As he’d knelt there, mesmerized by the swarm, they had reached him, and crawled over his sneakers, into his hands, up his pant legs, his back, his neck, everywhere, until he broke from his stupor and screamed
and screamed and screamed. It was weeks before they stopped skittering over his dreams. Lesson learned: don’t go looking in dark places, because dark things live there. And hidden beneath the prospect of Milo’s death were the real spiders. The truth, buried deep enough that ignoring it was unconscious as breathing: Without Milo, things would be easier. There’d be nothing to hold him to his father, to Oleander, to his small and hateful life. He had known it even at age nine, when the baby had appeared on the doorstep like a fairy-tale changeling. He’d known it, without letting himself know it, every day since. Sometimes he woke up in the night, from a disguised wish of a dream that would have made Freud proud, feeling guilty and ashamed. He never let himself remember why.

  Daniel looked for Milo until the sun set, and then stole a flashlight from the drugstore and continued his search.

  They would tell no stories of that night. Stories of the storm itself, yes, the Where were you when… and If I’d been a little less lucky… Stories of the dark days that followed. But not that night. The day’s adrenaline surge cast the night into shadow. Energy ebbed away, and with it, the capacity to remember, to mark the moments, narrating for some future self, This matters. This is how it happened. They moved through the night in a fog. They searched the wreckage and collected their belongings and taped up windows and hugged their children, and in the morning, they remembered only that they had survived, and then, sometime later, shaky with relief, they had slept.

  Two people died in the hospital that night; three more died under the wreckage of their houses before help could reach them. Oleander had an all-volunteer fire squad, a five-man police department, and a handful of utilities employees charged with righting the water, gas, and power. But that night, anyone with an able body ventured into the darkness, flashlights and supplies in hand. Gas and water mains were mended; blankets and coffee were distributed to the shattered and wounded; cots were provided to the newly homeless. Plumbers joined electricians and handymen to jury-rig the town’s infrastructure while friends and neighbors dug through piles of rubble, searching for keepsakes and loved ones. Even among the sturdiest of old-fashioned farming stoics, there were more embraces than handshakes, and more tears than either.

  The hospital overflowed with bleeders, people pressing shirts and tissues and rags to dirty wounds. While the nurses tended to the critical cases, the rest tended to each other, fetching washcloths and rubbing shoulders and doing the kind of banding together and communal rallying that played well on the evening news. In the homes without emergency generators, candles were lit. Families played cards and told scary stories of scarier days. Some stayed in the storm cellar all night, waiting.

  Many looked to the sky. The night had cooled, and a soft breeze rustled what few leaves remained on branches. The storms were gone, the skies clear from Wichita to Topeka. But they weren’t clear over Oleander, where a thick layer of clouds blotted out the sky. A strange trick of the moonlight had stained them red. And when people remembered anything about that night, it was this: there were no stars.

  What Daniel saw was so close to what he wanted to see that for a moment, he didn’t trust it: a small, lithe figure creeping out of the shed and shutting the door firmly behind him, darting a look over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching. It was too dark to see the boy’s face, but he could easily make out the baseball cap perched cockeyed on a mess of curly hair. Daniel’s legs, which had nearly given out after hours of walking the town, felt new again, capable of leaping small buildings in a single bound, more than capable of sprinting across the yard in seconds, and then he was close enough to reach out and grab Milo, who was no desperate hallucination, who was solid, and whole, and alive.

  “I will kill you,” Daniel promised, his face buried in his brother’s shoulder. He squeezed Milo tight enough to pop him. “You run off like that again, you’re dead, get it?”

  Milo wiggled out of his grip and looked up at his brother. Daniel aimed the flashlight at his face.

  “Hey, watch it!” He jerked away from the beam, but Daniel didn’t let up.

  “You listening to me? No more wandering away from grown-ups, no more running home. You…” Daniel swallowed hard. “You have to listen to your mom. She’s in charge.”

  “She hates you,” Milo said, sullen now.

  “But she loves you.” Maybe it was even true. “Promise,” Daniel said.

  Milo shrugged.

  “Say it.”

  “I promise I’ll listen to her.”

  “And do what she says.”

  “Danny!”

  “And do what she says.”

  “And do what she says.”

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” Daniel said.

  “I just needed to… get something.”

  “In the middle of a tornado?”

  “I waited till it was over,” Milo said, in a tone that indicated he didn’t appreciate Daniel calling him an idiot. He paused. “Dad’s not here.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “You think he’s out saving people?”

  Daniel rolled his eyes in the dark. This was a kid who’d seen through the Santa sham from day one, but somehow he still believed their father was a superhero, out to save the souls of the world. “Sure, Milo. That’s what he does, right?”

  Milo grinned. It faded quickly. “You’re gonna take me back there, aren’t you. To her house.”

  “To your house,” Daniel said. He flicked off the flashlight, preferring not to see his brother’s face. “Yeah. I am.”

  “But we don’t have to go now, right? Can we eat first, or something? I’m hungry.”

  The dark gave him no protection against Milo’s high, eager voice.

  “And tired,” Milo added quickly. The kid knew what he was doing.

  “It’s pretty late. Your mom’s probably already asleep,” he said, knowing better. “No reason to wake her up. But first thing in the morning, you’re going right back. Got it?”

  “Got it.” Milo took his hand, and together they crossed the dark. “Danny?” Milo sounded younger than usual.

  “Yeah?”

  “Missed you.”

  “Yeah.”

  They dined on cold pizza and warm pop, and then Daniel tucked his brother in and stayed by his side until he fell asleep. It didn’t occur to him – not that night or the next, not until it was too late – to wonder what Milo was hiding in the shed.

  5

  EVERYBODY KNOWS

  After.

  After the bodies were zipped into body bags and returned to their graves.

  After the newly dead were buried beside the old.

  After the windows were taped up and the caution tape taken down.

  After the sun came up and the tanks rolled in.

  After the men in uniforms blockaded the road.

  After the food ran out.

  After one day passed, and then two and then three, and the power came back but the phones, the Internet, the outside world never did.

  After that, things were different.

  But maybe not different enough.

  There were three main routes out of Oleander: State Street to Route 8 ran along the southern edge of the town, skirting Potawamie Lake to the east and tracing the woods in the west before winding into the prairie. Route 72 cut through the farmland in the east and crossed a set of disused railroad tracks on its way to the horizon. The Nanimwe River bordered the town on the north, but crossing Asylum Bridge would take you only to the old power plant or an endless field of corn – in other words, nowhere you’d ever want to go.

  All three were blocked by a cluster of tanks and soldiers, each carrying some this-means-business weaponry. The soldiers wore surgical masks. Barbed-wire fences had been erected along the highway lines, while floodlights swept over the lake. Word soon spread of the ATVs that cut back and forth across the farmland by Route 72, hunting for anyone who’d made an ill-advised trek into the wild.

  It took a couple of days, and more than a han
dful of border skirmishes, for anyone to find the time and energy to care. Those first forty-eight hours were about digging out and rebuilding, patching wounds and wiping tears. The lack of access to the outside world via phone, computer, or car was expected. The crimson smoke that still billowed overhead, blocking the stars and staining the sun? That was not.

  Nor was the absence of media vultures, eager volunteers, photographers, FEMA paper pushers, politicians, the complete cast of characters who could be counted on to descend after any communal tragedy. The town had waited: for the Good Samaritans who would drive cross-country with bags of ice and racks of barbecue, for the charity groups who would apply their overpriced tool kits and rudimentary carpentry skills to the rubble, for the medical volunteers who would supplement the overrun hospital, for the politicians who would pose with the sad and brokenhearted, for the camera crews who would capture it all on film for News at 11. But the federal disaster workers were the first and last to arrive. And whatever work they were doing beyond the borders, these strange nonsoldiers with their soldier-like bearing, it didn’t include restoring television and phone reception, constructing temporary housing, or bolstering the mental health of the town, the last of which was decaying by the day.