Survivors of the Sun Read online

  ‘Do you have a gun in the house?’ he asked.

  ‘A gun?’ she was a little alarmed at the question.

  ‘Yes, a gun.’

  ‘Why?’ She asked, staring over at him, a plate half washed in her hands.

  ‘I was just thinking that you should have a gun to protect yourself and the children, until…,’ He paused, ‘until your husband gets back anyway.’

  Georgia considered this as she finished washing the plate.

  Maybe he is right. Nevertheless, she was not sure she felt comfortable discussing this with a relative stranger.

  ‘Yes, Nathan has a couple of rifles downstairs and there is a handgun in the bedroom, not loaded though.’ Why did she tell him that?

  ‘Do you have ammo?’ Are you familiar with guns, I mean you do know how to load one, right?’

  Why all the questions? Was it all a façade? Perhaps he wasn’t the nice family man he appeared to be. Had he decided he wanted all the food, the house? Was he planning to rob her? Rob her and then shoot her, or…. She felt herself growing hysterical.

  Then she heard Nathan’s calm voice in the back of her mind. ‘What have you got to lose? If he shows you how to load the gun, then at least you will know how to shoot him. Right now, the best you can do is hit him over the head with it.’

  But, if I show him the guns then he could use one, before he shows me. Then it occurred to her, he didn’t need a gun, he could have used the carving knife he just dried, and put away on the knife rack.’ Oh God, she was going crazy. She was having a conversation in her head with her husband.

  Jack touched her arm. ‘Georgia?’

  She looked over at him, ‘Sorry, I am kind of jumpy.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to give you a fright. Look, if you know how to load them, then once I have gone for God’s sake, make sure that it’s the first thing you do. If you don’t know how, then let me show you, please.’ He looked so concerned.

  ‘Sounds good,’ she said aloud. My husband did show me, but coming from Australia, I guess I was less than interested in the idea of having a loaded gun in the house. It all kind of went in one ear and out the other.’ She hung up the dishcloth and then started putting the dried dishes away in the cupboards. ‘Let me settle the kids with a board game and then I will take you downstairs.’

  They left the children playing monopoly on the rug in the lounge and from time to time their voices rose a little, as children’s voices are apt to do over such games. And the sound of it was comforting and reassuring, she thought, as she led Jack downstairs to her workshop, each holding a candle.

  The guns were kept in the gun safe in the cupboard and as she unlocked it, he held his candle up over her workbench. ‘Wowee,’ he whistled, holding up a bracelet, ‘did you make this?’

  She looked up. ‘Yes, I’m a goldsmith, I work from home.’

  With a few twists of the dial she had the gun safe unlocked.

  ‘Here they are,’ she said as she pulled open the steel door. ‘See which one you think is the best and I will go fetch the boxes of ammo.’

  When she came back into the room, he had made his selection. ‘Best we take this upstairs, so we can see what we are doing.’

  She began to shut the gun safe when she paused. ‘Do you have a gun?’

  ‘Back home I do. Nothing with me though.’

  ‘Would you like one of these?’

  This time he was the one who hesitated.

  ‘You have a long way to go.’ she urged.

  ‘Are you sure your husband wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘No, of course not, if he were here, I am sure he would make the offer himself.’ What was she saying! Of course he would mind. This was his beloved collection, but given the circumstances, she was sure Nathan would forgive her.

  ‘So choose one,’ Georgia continued, ‘just not the colt or the rifle at the top of the rack’.

  ‘The Garand?’ He asked, touching it lightly as he spoke.

  ‘Yes, that one, it was Nathan’s grandfather’s. He brought it back with him. He was stationed someone in Europe during the Second World War.’

  He lowered the candle to have another look in the safe.

  ‘I would like this one,’ he said, lifting out one of the rifles. It’s a Sporter, Remington .243, I’ve got something similar back home.’

  She took him back upstairs to the garage, making sure there was no chance the children would see the guns.

  He had selected a Winchester .410, pump action, single barrel, shot gun for her.

  ‘This will be the best one for you,’ he said. ‘It is fairly light weight, recoils not too bad either. It’s good for crowd control, and does a lot of damage up close.’

  She smiled at his choice. It was the one Nathan had bought her for her birthday, the year before. At the time, she had thought it a really odd present.

  Jack was thorough, patiently showing her how to load and unload, pointing out the safety, and when he felt she had a solid grasp on the basic handling, he had spent time guiding her through the steps of cleaning the gun. Georgia had not realized how much was involved. To be honest, she had never appreciated the fact that a gun even needed to be cleaned. It seemed all very complicated.

  ‘Shooting it,’ he had joked, ‘is the easy part. You just point it, and pull the trigger.’

  She knew there was more to it than that, but she took the point he was making.

  He had taken one box of ammo for the Remington, she had tried to get him to take a couple more, but he had politely refused.

  Later, they sat on the back steps together, having a smoke. She had stopped smoking a couple of months before, but finding Nathan’s open carton of Camel Lights on the top shelf of the pantry, had been her undoing. She had resisted for all of twenty minutes, studiously putting away the cans of dog food, packets of noodles, and the other items they had managed to buy at Prestos. Then just as she was shutting the cupboard door, she pulled it open again. After all, what’s the harm in having just one?

  The first of the lightning bugs were out, and the kids freshly showered, were in their pajamas, sharing the porch swing. They were whispering together, and from time to time, they giggled, so she knew she did not need to worry about them. ‘Not just yet anyway,’ she added to herself.

  ‘You know,’ Jack said, and her heart did a jump at that, for a second he had sounded just like Nathan. Nathan often started a sentence with, ‘you know’.

  He spoke in a low voice now, ‘you know if your husband doesn’t come back in the next couple of days you might want to consider getting out of town. Seriously consider it. Do you have any family out in the country? It is going to get extremely dangerous here, once food runs low. People will start grouping together for survival and then there will be marauding gangs all over the place, that has already started, no one will be safe. And you have to consider disease as well, no power, no running water.’

  ‘We still have running water, and water in the tub just in case.’ she said.

  He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘No running water, and the dead lying around unburied, if the gangs don’t get you, disease will, believe me.’

  She sat in silence, absorbing his words. He was right she knew; it had been playing on her mind as well.

  ‘Kansas City is no place to be, get the kids out.’ he insisted.

  Georgia reached over and picked up her packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Would you like another one?’

  He nodded his head, and reached out to take one. ‘There is another reason,’ he said as he leaned forward to light her cigarette, before lighting his own. ‘I’m talking about the nuclear power station at Wood Creek. There is a very real likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe. No power, and well, it will be like Fukushima all over again.’

  He exhaled, long and slow, and added, so softly, he might have been talking to himself, ‘yeah it’s going to be like Katrina and Fukushima coming together and there sure isn’t going be a christening party at the end of that union.’r />
  Jack left shortly afterwards, but not before scribbling his name and address on a piece of paper and pressing it into her hand.

  ‘Deschene?’ She said hesitatingly.

  He chuckled. ‘First time I’ve heard it pronounced in Australian, but yes that’s how you say it. I myself am Navajo and if you are ever in Las Cruces, please look us up, allow us to repay the courtesy that you have shown me.’

  She promised that she would and tried again to offer him one of the spare bedrooms, but he held his hands up. ‘No, I had best be going; I have a long way to go till I get home.’

  ‘Thank you for all your advice,’ she said, hugging him, holding him close for a moment, overwhelmed with a sadness at the knowledge that it was very unlikely they would ever meet again.

  ‘Travel safely,’ she whispered.

  ‘Take good care of you,’ he whispered back and then he turned and walked down the driveway, a parcel of smoked meat under his arm, the Remington slung over his shoulder. She watched him as he strode up the road, disappearing into the dusk.

  Chapter Eight

  As soon as Jack was out of sight, Georgia went inside, locking the screen door, before shutting the main door and sending the bolt firmly in place. That done, she went to the back door, called the children and the dogs inside, and secured that door as well.

  ‘Okay kids,’ she said, ‘it’s bedtime, I will be in shortly to read to you, so go get yourselves all comfortable…, oh, and before you hop into bed, make sure you all use the bathroom.’

  While they were getting into bed, she went round the entire house checking all the windows, making sure the security locks were all firmly in place. As Georgia checked the front windows, she looked across at the house opposite. Odd, no lights, they are still not back then. Then she gave a derisive snort of laughter. She could not believe she had just thought that. Of course, there were no lights on.

  Even so, the place had a deserted feel, clearly her neighbors had not come home yet and neither for that matter had Nina. In fact, she did not think that any of the houses down this end of the street were occupied. It was a chilling thought. A very lonely thought; in this new darkness, that was now the Kansas City nightlife.

  As she pulled the drapes closed, she felt a little shiver of apprehension run down her back. Deedee’s voice came floating out of the bedroom.

  ‘We need a candle. It’s getting too dark to see.’

  ‘Just getting one,’ Georgia called back, as she made her way into the kitchen and lit a candle, setting it firmly onto a saucer and then carrying it into the bedroom.

  She began to read to the children, and one by one they fell asleep; Rebecca first and then Deedee. Jamie struggled to stay awake, wanting to listen right to the end of the chapter, but he too drifted off. ‘The poor things were exhausted,’ Georgia thought. Her own eyes were watering with the strain of reading in the dim light, but she had been determined to send the children to sleep with happy thoughts. Hopefully now they would dream about the prince in the story, and not the horrors they had seen earlier. She put the book on the bedside table and then blew out the candle.

  She lay between them; the dogs sprawled over her legs, the soft breathing of the children contrasting with the occasional snore from Ant, and stared up into the darkness.

  Nathan should have been home by now. Jack had told her that Blue Springs, was only twenty five miles away, not forty, as she had originally thought, and that the average person could travel three miles an hour on foot, if they were fit and the road was flat. It should have taken Nathan about eight hours to get home from his office.

  But what if his appointment had been elsewhere? She had assumed his meeting was in the boardroom at McNair, Caswell & Associates. But it might not have been. It had been odd, him having such an early appointment. Perhaps he had been rushing to get down to the courthouse but that made no sense. The court house wouldn’t even have been open at that time. Then something else occurred to her. What if Nathan had been driving at the time, and had been injured, or even worse?

  Georgia gave an involuntary moan at this latest thought and turned over onto her side, trying to make room for her legs as she pulled the pillow into a more comfortable position. However Jack had been talking about when conditions were perfect. But the conditions were not perfect, were they? Not by any stretch of the imagination. So if he only managed to walk ten miles a day, he would definitely be here by tomorrow night, or the night after that, at the very latest. She felt a flood of relief wash over her. It was unreasonable to expect him home already.

  Eventually Georgia fell into a dark and restless sleep filled with feverish nightmares. She was running down a long dark corridor, hunting for an exit, and as she ran faces would loom out of the shadows. The dead blonde woman was staring up at her. ‘I am going to be late for my appointment,’ she said.

  In her dream, Georgia tried to comfort her, to tell her how sorry she was, but the woman floated away. She ran on, down through the half light of the corridor. Suddenly she fell through a hole that had opened up in the floor. ‘It’s a nightmare,’ Georgia whispered to herself, but it felt so real, and she knew she must be mortally wounded from the fall, because as she lay at the bottom of the pit, she could feel the warmth of blood spreading out beneath her.

  She woke with a start, heart racing, breathing raggedly, and felt a liquid warmth, still spreading beneath her, soaking into her pajamas. Then her nostrils took in the unpleasant smell of urine. ‘Oh Great,’ she thought, ‘Deedee has wet the bed again.’

  It was still night outside, and in the bedroom it was black as the bottom of a coal miners bucket. She carefully peeled back the covers and slipped out of bed, without waking up any of the children (or surprisingly, the dogs), Then leaning down, she scooped Deedee up into her arms, shushing her as she woke up.

  Once in the bathroom, she grabbed a towel and wrapped Deedee in it. Then lowering the toilet seat, she sat Deedee down. ‘Okay honey, you sit here while I light the candle.’ Deedee huddled in silence, as Georgia felt round in the darkness, finding the box of matches, and lighting the candle set out on the shelf above the sink.

  ‘Back in a sec,’ she whispered. She returned to the bedroom with more towels and layered them over the wet patch. It would be better to let the other two keep sleeping and this way the worst that would happen was that they would roll onto the towels. She would deal with the mattress in the morning.

  Back in the bathroom, she fetched a clean facecloth and turned on the tap. Water spat out at her, and then there was a horrible gurgle sound of air in the pipes and then nothing. The water had finally stopped flowing.

  ‘Shit!’ The word was out before Georgia could stop it. Surprisingly, Deedee did not say anything about her use of bad language, which was probably a good thing, as Georgia, still half-asleep, one side of her pajamas sodden from Deedee’s mishap, felt very close to breaking point, to unstoppable tears.

  The water failing was the final straw. There was a mattress to be wiped down, and sheets to wash for starters. There was also, the terrifying thought of what would happen, when they had used all the water in the bathtub. Why hadn’t she filled up every available container?’

  She peeled back a corner of the cling wrap covering the bath and was about to dampen the facecloth when she stopped herself. That was not a good idea. The last thing they needed was to contaminate their limited water. Instead, she fetched a small bowl from the kitchen and filled that. Then Georgia carefully put the cling wrap back in place.

  Deedee stood quietly, as Georgia helped her out of her clothes and washed her, trying to be as gentle as she could with the washcloth. Afterwards she dressed her in fresh clothes raided from Rebecca’s wardrobe and wrapped her in a light blanket also from Rebecca’s room. She carried Deedee into the lounge and placed her on the couch. ‘I won’t be a moment,’ she said and then went to get herself cleaned up.’

  Now that she had on fresh clothes, Georgia felt much more able to face the world. Back in the lou
nge, she found Deedee had fallen asleep. As she watched her, she mumbled something and turned over. She looked so peaceful, but inwardly Georgia knew that was not the case. The bedwetting, two nights running, had to be an indication of that. After a moment, Georgia turned and tiptoed over to the bay window.

  She stood looking out into the darkness of the street. The new moon was a mere curved sliver of silver. In the distance, she heard muffled gun shots. It was so hard to get used to. Just a few short days ago, life was the comforting sound of constant traffic and sirens and cars honking. Now the stillness of the night air, was broken by gunfire and the occasional dog howl. She shivered; she didn’t like to think of the reason why the dogs were howling. They had howled like that after hurricane Katrina.

  She didn’t want to think anymore, she just wanted to go back to sleep, but she was wide-awake now, her mind going round in circles. She considered making a coffee. There was no milk left, but at least there was still some sugar. As she wondered whether it was even worth the effort to light the grill, a tiny hand slipped into hers.

  She looked down in the gloom. Unnoticed, Deedee had slipped off the couch and come to stand next to her. She leaned down and picked her up. Deedee was heavy, being a little on the chubby side, and as she held her close. Deedee’s arms slid round her neck.

  ‘It’s going to be alright honey,’ she said. But, she knew she was reassuring herself, as much as she was comforting Deedee. Together they stared out into the gloom. Far off to the south the sky glowed red. Over the Light District, something big was burning.

  ‘It’s all going to be okay,’ she murmured again, as eventually they settled on the couch, Deedee curled up on her lap, leaning against her. ‘You’ll see, probably later today the power will come back on, and Nathan and Auntie Maggie will come by and in no time at all you will be back home with your mummy.’

  Deedee remained silent, just staring up at her, eyes closing with exhaustion, her thumb firmly in her mouth.

  It scared her, Deedee being so quiet, Deedee who always had an opinion about everything, Deedee, Miss Bossiness herself, silent.