Darkness upon the Land

Actually one of the two people was holding an infant, Reuben realized as they approached, but he still snatched up the slingshot and four pellets. Alexia cast an almost disgusted glance at him as she got to her feet first and began walking toward the newcomers. He held the slingshot at his side with one hand and carried the pellets in the other as he caught up with her.

“Hey there!” She called back to them. “Have you been traveling since yesterday?”

The couple was a man and a woman who appeared to be only a few years older than Reuben. The woman, who was carrying the baby against her chest so that it was looking back over her shoulder, was wearing a short-sleeved, yellow blouse that didn’t come all the way to the top of her blue slacks. Her hair, which was bright green, was buzz-cut along the sides and the longer stands at top that probably once stuck up in a Mohawk-type fashion now drooped in clumps. Her makeup was smeared, with the dark liner smudged around her eyes, and the cracking foundation and blush caused her to initially appear older. All assortments of rings lined her ears and fingers and even her navel, which he could easily see from her belly that protruded between the shirt and pants. The blue, spike-heeled shoes she wore probably explained her limp and slow pace.

The man’s appearance was similar. His stomach hung over the top of the baggy jeans but he had only one ring dangling from his navel. There were also fewer rings on his fingers and ears, and instead of makeup to disrupt his appearance the man had intricate, colorful tattoos that covered the length of his arms. The sleeveless, gray shirt he wore concealed if those tattoos continued to his torso. His hair was brown with red highlights and hung about his shoulders in tight, twisted curls. The black, athletic shoes he wore were pretty scuffed, and he carried a green, cubical suitcase.

The woman responded in a loud voice as they continued to approach. “We’re tired and hungry and would sure like to share your fire.”

“Hold up a moment.” Reuben took a stride to get ahead of Alexia, and transferred the pellets to his left hand so he could hold up the right. “We need to talk things over a little bit first.”

“Would you lighten up?” Her tone betrayed some annoyance as the couple hesitated.

“I’m sorry.” He glanced from her to the pair. “But in the past thirty-six hours I’ve been beaten up and nearly blown up twice, so you’ll forgive me for having some reservations to work through.”

The man frowned slightly. “Who tried to blow you up?”

“I didn’t get their names.” At this range Reuben noticed he could distinctly detect a whiff of not only general body odor but fecal stench as well. The baby was wearing a pink, ruffled, one-piece outfit that was considerably stained at its bottom.

“Dude,” the man replied, “we need a place to stop for the night. We got to realizing that it’s getting late and there’s no guarantee we’ll make it to a house in time where they’ll let us stay.”

“How far are you going?” Alexia asked.

The man pointed toward the highway. “We’re heading back to Baton Rouge.”

“Oh, you’d better stay with us, then,” she took a step forward, placing her in line with Reuben. “The next house is at least thirty minutes away, and I can’t imagine going that far in the shoes you’re wearing.”

Reuben hesitated. In situations that didn’t present an obvious course of action for him, he found that relying upon the nuances of his enteric nervous system usually provided the best suggestion. Although he didn’t sense any imminent danger from this pair, there was still something about them that caused him to remain uneasy. While normally he would be quite happy to offer hospitality, he remembered again how limited their resources were and his promise to deliver Alexia safely home. Well, since the very person he was protecting was the one extending an invitation to these people, that pretty much settled the decision for him.

“That’s very kind of you.” The woman smiled at her and then glanced toward Reuben.

“She’s the boss.” He shrugged.

“I’m Alexia and this is Reuben.”

His gut twitched uncomfortably again.

“My name’s J. C.,” the man replied.

His immediate consideration of what the initials might stand for made him think of Junior College.

“I’m Sierra,” the woman added and turned the child in her arms so that it faced forward. “And this is Kayla.”

“Hello there, Kayla.” Alexia smiled warmly and waggled one hand at the infant. “How old is she?”

“Five months.”

The baby looked pretty rough, even with little fake diamond studs in her earlobes. Her heavy-jowl face was blotched with red spots and her eyes were bloodshot, and Reuben figured the only reason she wasn’t currently crying was because she was simply worn out.

“Don’t suppose you have anything to eat?” J. C. asked.

The question disgruntled him. For one thing he realized he was already a bit put off that they were going to wind up sharing at least half of their meal. He acknowledged that his attitude was wrong. Any opportunity to give charity should be welcomed. He still would have preferred to offer hospitality rather than be asked for it.

“You’re lucky,” Alexia replied before he could extricate himself from the dose of negativity. “Rube just got a couple of fish roasting over the fire.”

“Where’d you get fish?” J. C. asked in amazement.

“In the bayou,” he replied.

“Never mind the king of understatement.” She began heading toward their camp and beckoned for the strangers to follow. “So where were you when the power went out?”

“In our car,” Sierra said as they accompanied the pair. “J. C. was trying to get to Baton Rouge before it happened, but instead he got us stranded.”

Jefferson City. Reuben noticed the man scowl.

“Do you really believe the motel would have just let us stay there?” he grumbled.

“And then finding somewhere to stay last night was an awful joke.” Sierra frowned at him. “Nobody wanted to share anything. We finally found a place that let us stay in the garage, but you wouldn’t believe how uncomfortable that was.”

“We left Baton Rouge yesterday,” Alexia announced as they reached the campfire.

His gut cringed again.

“Oh, wonderful!” Sierra piped. “So we can be home by tomorrow.”

“Well,” she murmured, “maybe in more like a day and a half.”

The woman muttered an expletive.

“You don’t live in Baton Rouge, then?” J. C. asked.

“No, we’re going to Esperanza.”

Reuben’s gut collapsed into a quivering mess and he decided to redirect their discussion. “So were you on vacation or something?”

“We were attending a gamer’s conference in New Iberia,” J. C. replied. “I told Sierra her mother should keep Kayla while we went on this trip, but she insisted on bringing the kid.”

“You know my mom’s work hours don’t fit with the daycare’s,” Sierra snapped.

J. C. shook his head. “Then you shouldn’t have registered for the conference, too.”

“Why should I be the one who doesn’t get to go?”

It was time to change the subject again. “So what have you been doing about water and food in the past day?”

“The people at the house we stayed at gave us some food, but only enough for one meal.” Sierra rolled her eyes. “We haven’t been able to get much water. Had to resort to sipping it straight from the bayou a couple of times, but it sure tastes nasty.”

He caught the alarmed glance Alexia cast toward them.

“I wouldn’t do that anymore if I were you,” she cautioned. “You didn’t give any of that to Kayla, did you?”

“No, but today’s the day she ran out of formula,” Sierra replied. She referred to the infant in an excremental term as she complained about the crying.

Her alarmed glance shot to Reuben. Sierra’s word usage didn’t surprise him, but he was still … disappointed.

They reached the campfire, and Alexia asked, “Has she started on solid food yet?”

“Yeah, cereal and baby food, but we don’t have any.”

“We can mush up some fish.” She looked almost relieved as she nodded to him.

Reuben envisioned a string of fish pulling a sled. “That’ll be easy.”

Sierra groaned as she sat on the log while Alexia walked straight to her duffel bag. “Don’t suppose you got something soft I can stick under my butt?”

The new imagery in his mind terminated any offer he might have otherwise been willing to make had she worded her request differently.

“Sorry.” Maybe Alexia had the same reaction as she opened the bag. “I have a blanket, but I thought we could spread it out for Kayla.”

J. C. scoffed. “Your butt has plenty of cushioning already.”

“Look who’s talking!”

“Here.” She grabbed her water bottle with the filter straw and stepped over to Sierra. “Give her some of this.”

Reuben’s gut didn’t complain, but his blood pressure must have shot up a notch. These people struck him as “unclean,” and the filters had a limited amount of use.

He managed to remain calm. “If you’re gonna be giving my stuff away, you and I will have to share from mine.”

Alexia shot him a quizzical look. “I’m just offering to let them use it.”

He didn’t want to say that after they used it, he didn’t want it back. At least it wasn’t just because Sierra’s mouth offended him as much as her butt. As he regarded the bedraggled infant, Reuben could only feel pity for the little girl.

“Nah.” He shrugged. “Just let them keep it.”

“She can drink from a straw, can’t she?” Alexia asked as she handed them the bottle.

Sierra nodded. “Oh yes, definitely.”

The way the baby sucked away greedily at mere water, there was no doubt she had been getting pretty dehydrated. His begrudging act of charity became a little more heartwarming, but he still approached Alexia from the side and leaned toward her in order to speak in a low murmur.

“Don’t offer anything else until you check with me first.”

From the look she shot back at him, Reuben was a little surprised he didn’t also feel a small jolt from her.

J. C. sat at the other end of the log. “Don’t suppose you got anything harder than water, do you?”

He took a couple of seconds to process the question as he regarded the man. “I could look for some rocks.”

Sierra shook her head. “J. C. thinks the day isn’t complete without a drink.”

Jim Crow. Now he was starting to get somewhere.

The chit chat continued while Reuben tended the fish and started boiling water to cook the greens in. Alexia helped with getting the baby cleaned up a bit and informed them how moss made a better diaper than nothing. The conversation then tried to turn more to how they had managed to set up a camp and build a fire. He hoped to educate these people on a few necessities to help them get by, but neither seemed interested in picking up any survival skills. They quickly diverted the topic back to their interests in programming and game design.

The fish and greens were done when it was about time for darkness to fall. After instructing their guests on how to wash up, Reuben divided each fish into half and then took a pinch from each portion and mashed the flesh up in a little water in the insulated cup.

He began passing out the food, which Sierra and J. C. began eating immediately. With a shrug he handed Alexia her share, and then bowed his head to murmur, “Blessed art Thou, Lord our God....”

From the corner of his eye he saw her touch the fingertips of her right hand to her forehead, then to her chest, then from the left shoulder to the right before she also spoke softly. “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts....”

He was surprised that J. C. seemed to actually notice. The fellow glanced back and forth at them as both finished grace and began to eat. Then their guest gasped his own expletive and pointed toward the sky.

“There it is again!”

Shimmering green filled the sky as twilight settled around them.

“Oh.” Alexia sounded disappointed. “The sun storms are still going.”

“What storms?” Sierra asked through a mouthful of fish.

Reuben took it upon himself to explain the coronal mass ejection. J. C. seemed slightly more interested than Sierra, who complained with salty language how nasty the greens were and she couldn’t see how anybody could be expected to eat such “filth.”

“So how come we never prepared for it?” Their male guest asked.

“Why spend billions of dollars on something we’d never experienced before in written history? None of the near misses were scary enough to make anybody think this would happen.”

“How do you know all this?”

He realized the truth would be beyond the man’s concept of reality. “A little green alien told me.”

Alexia’s eyes rolled as she shook her head. “Just ignore him. How’s Kayla doing with the fish?”

“She seems to be eating it,” Sierra replied, but she had offered the child only one bite thus far.

Kayla didn’t have to wait long to finish getting fed, however. The woman had her food, minus the greens, gulped down first and asked if there was anything else their hosts could offer. Without bothering to hide her disgruntlement at their negative response, she took a bite of the mashed fish and then offered what was left to her daughter. J. C. also finished before Reuben and Alexia, but he asked if the younger man might be able to catch more fish tonight.

Their lack of social graces was giving him a lot of practice in patience. “Too many other things are out on the prowl, now. But I’ll tell you what, in the morning we can show you a few tips about finding and preparing your own food.”

“Nah.” J. C. waved away his offer. “We’ll get to Baton Rouge in a couple of days.”

Alexia frowned. “There might not be anything left there.”

Sierra seemed to challenge her comment. “Why not?”

“People were already looting the stores when we left.”

“Well, we’ve got food at home, and my mom’s got food. That’ll be enough to get by on until the relief gets there.”

As Alexia went into more detail about conditions in Baton Rouge and how nobody could count on relief to show up anytime soon, he figured that information was safe enough for her to share. As long as she didn’t mention the research university, the beans had already been spilled about the city they’d left. He did find himself morbidly fascinated by their guests’ responses. These people displayed no interest in learning or doing anything that would enable them to fend for themselves. They were confident government aid would be waiting on their doorstep when they got home, which meant they had traded historical fact for empty ideologies.

He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. Much of today’s culture preferred to embrace pretty fantasies over hard reality. But now reality had just gotten a lot harder.

Sierra smugly wrapped up why life would be good again when they reached Baton Rouge. “And besides, J. C.’s employer provides a stocked retreat for his workers to go.”

Jerry can. Yeah, he liked that one.

After the meal, he and Alexia cleaned up while their company watched and talked. Reuben decided to dispense with the tent tonight. He knew Sierra and probably J. C. would expect them to share it, and it would take more effort than necessary to explain he had no intention of sharing guard duty with them – he didn’t trust either of them to not fall asleep at the post. He and Alexia would need to take turns again. He did feel sorry for the infant, who through no fault of her own was at the mercy of a couple of boors.

They did try to engage the pair in observing how they arranged limbs and twigs gathered from the area into a skeletal lean-to over a rustic mattress of leaves. Sierra complained how it wasn’t as soft as a real bed and of course used profanity to do so, and then complained about how small the “bleeping” stadium blanket was.

As she prepared to turn in with the emergency blanket, Alexia hesitated. “Wouldn’t it be better if I take the double shift tonight?”

“No, leave those to me.”

“You can’t get by forever on only three or four hours of sleep.”

“I don’t have to get by on that forever. I only have to keep it up for two or three more nights.”

Turned out nobody got much sleep that night. Kayla awakened and cried for several minutes a couple of times, and her parents both swore while only Sierra tried to get the infant back to sleep. And of course Alexia had to try to help them out. But it wasn’t just the noise that disturbed Reuben. He worried that all the ruckus would bring someone or something more predatory than trespassing crickets into their camp.