If Darkness Takes Us by Smith Brenda Marie

Author:Smith, Brenda Marie [Smith, Brenda Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Post-Apocalyptic | Solar Pulse
ISBN: 9781970137842
Publisher: SFK Press
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

That affair I had fifteen years ago—it was with Jack. I’m pretty sure Hank never knew about Jack, but he may have suspected the affair. Now Jack was trying to reignite it. I can’t say that I minded, though I was scared shitless to release my grip on the invisible Hank.

TWENTY-SEVEN

DAY 66, and I was still holding my breath, waiting for a break from this misery.

This boyfriend of Tasha’s, Chas Matheson, was turning out to be more trouble than I’d realized. He was sixteen and too old for this behavior, but he was a ringleader in the band of roving kids. He sent them on missions of vandalism and theft, and they brought the spoils back to Chas. After our patrollers caught the thieving kids, they stopped robbing us and branched out into new territory.

As far as we could tell, our neighborhood was the only one getting organized for miles around. Abandoned homes were scattered all over town, and the ones near to us were getting defaced and robbed with some frequency. I understood taking useful stuff from empty homes, but what was the point of defacing them?

I found out this news about Chas not from Tasha or Keno, but from Darla when we finally had our talk, days later than I’d intended. Time escaped me more than ever lately. It seemed like time would have dragged by without television or internet to suck it away, but the opposite was true, at least for me.

I asked Darla how she was doing, and she shrugged. Her light hair looked cleaner than usual, her face a little plumper than before. I wanted to tell her how good her poem was, how well she’d evoked emotion. But since I saw the poem by snooping, I had to leave this unsaid.

“Honey, I know you’re going through an awful lot, but you haven’t been doing your gardening work. Why not?”

“I had other stuff to do,” she said. She still wouldn’t look at me.

“Darla, I need you to try harder to keep busy. I don’t like nagging you about it, and I’m sure you don’t want to be nagged. But there’s a whole lot of work to be done if we’re going to survive, and you need to do your share. You don’t want other people doing your work for you, do you?”

“No,” she said, as tears pooled atop her creamy cheeks.

“Well, will you please do your garden work? And I mean all the hours, every day.”

“Okay,” she muttered.

“Good. Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

Darla didn’t hesitate. “Chas steals,” she said.

“Chas? What does he steal?”

Darla finally looked up to tell me about Chas strong-arming the smaller kids into doing his dirty work. Shrewd of Darla to change the subject from her negligence—and bad on me, because it worked.

Alarm bells went off in my head—about my granddaughter’s boyfriend being a thief, yes, but also about Darla. Was she lying? Why would she betray a teenage code of silence to an old woman like me?

“How do you know all this, Darla?”

“Chas told me.

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