Free Into That Darkness by Steven Price Page B

overturned, splintered, the chairs kicked wide. The door to the back ovens stood open and a sour smell was coming from there.
    She righted a sofa and slid down feeling heady and strange. She sat for some time.
    At last she got to her feet and kicked her way to the counter looking for food. The glass had been smashed and the pastries had been taken. Some small cakes had been crushed underfoot and she looked at the dark smear of them and then at the blacker kitchen beyond. It was a place utterly without light. You’re not that hungry yet , she thought. She could just make out a shape fallen in the doorway and she thought then of the dogs and then she left the bakery and she did not look back.
    By noon she began to encounter families camped in tents or tarped shelters built of chairs and odds and ends strung up between trees on their lawns. Pale mothers in dusty jeans with children three or four in a line staring bleakly out. Their houses largely undamaged. Foundations shifted. Garages crushed. She walked through the unnatural glow watching children wash in steel tubs in the yards or old women sit on canvas chairs in open doors and no lights burned in the houses. Sometimes there were men with them and they would straighten from whatever task and watch until she had passed.
    Her daughter would be waiting. Her daughter would be. If she is not there then she’ll be somewhere else , she thought. If she is not there then you’ll go to Mason and then together you’ll find Kat. That is all you need to think about now. Keep your head. It’s not far now.
    A short while later in the stark midday light a truck rumbled past with figures jouncing in the bed of it and then its brake lights flared and it turned around and came slowly back. There were two of them in the bed and the paler boy folded his elbows over the siding as they pulled smokily up. He was young and well-dressed and his companion likewise. He held a crowbar crosswise in his lap.
    Hey, he said. Where you headed?
    Anna Mercia stood in the gravel holding her broken arm firmly by the forearm and wiped the grime from her forehead and looked at their eyes and at the truck and at the road.
    Nowhere, she said.
    We’ll give you a lift. Climb in.
    It’s alright.
    You goin into town? We’re goin into town.
    The two boys were watching her intently.
    No, she said.
    Come on.
    No.
    She turned around and started walking back the way she had come and after a moment the truck began reversing slowly behind her.
    Hey, the pale boy was calling to her. He sounded angry. Hey, where you goin?
    She could feel herself shaking. She did not answer him.
    Hey, he shouted at her. You fucken cunt.
    His companion said something she did not hear and the boy laughed. Then he banged the flat of his hand twice on the roof of the cab and the truck started back up.
    Over her shoulder she watched them go and then she slipped down into the drainage ditch and crouched in the bushes holding her knees and she waited. She could not stop shaking. She crouched like that for a long time watching that the truck did not circle back. The white dust smoking off in the gravel.
    The hours passed.
    And then she was stumbling along a street she knew, and then another, and she knew it was close. She passed a row of burned-out houses, the blackened shells of garages and iron railings twisted from the heat. Her feet in their thin black flats were aching and each step seemed to drag heavily. And she lifted her head, and slowed, and stopped.
    Her street too had burned. A fire must have swept through after the earthquake hit for most of the houses stood charred and gutted in the high sunlight and her own house had burned along its eastern wall but for some reason the fire had not taken the house. The kitchen and the garage were gutted. But the bedrooms, the living room looked undamaged from where she stood taking in the sight and she was trembling. She stood at the bottom of the driveway for many minutes