Read Online Dark Road by David C. Waldron - Free Book Online

it actually reached his eyes.
    “You have a lot on your plate and you’re doing fine.” She gave him an impish smile and a kiss on the nose and then they heard Jessie start to make morning waking-up noises.
    “Day 70.”
    “Day 70.” Marissa agreed and then said, “Day 1.”
    “Of…” Dan prompted.
    “Preparing to get out of here, in earnest.” Marissa said.
    “Amen to that.”
     
     

Chapter Eight
    The last week in the Clark household was a flurry of activity. Both Dan and Marissa had to keep up with all of their usual community responsibilities while preparing as best they could, in secret, to leave at a moment’s notice.
    Food was going to be their biggest concern. They hadn’t been prepared with long-term food storage, by any means, but they had both been amazed how far what they’d had in the house could be stretched. Dan and Marissa still let the girls have a little extra here and there if they were hungry at meals, but the extra activity took its toll on the adults. They had practiced packing the kiddie-carrier toddler seat on Dan’s bike—both seats had been re-installed on his and Marissa’s bikes under the pretense of carrying more water from the river—and packing the pull-behind bike trailer.
    Jessie would be in the pull-behind, and Bekah was going to have to ride her own bike. That’s all there was to it. It would cut down on how much they could carry, but there was no way Jessie could keep up otherwise—and Bekah had been riding without training wheels for two years. Now all they needed was a destination.
    They planned to go to the Taylor’s house later tonight and get the rest of the guns and ammo, and then continue gathering as much food, and any other supplies they came across, for the next week or so.
    Although he knew it was the right thing to do, Dan was struggling with the plan to leave.  The younger of the two kids that Dan had seen in the hospital, the boy, had died two days afterwards, in his sleep. His breathing had become labored to the point that finally, it simply stopped. The girl, the older of the two, still held on, but had been unconscious for the last three days, and Dan had serious doubts that she would make it.
    The worst part of leaving was the fact that the neighborhood would have nobody with any real medical training. He wouldn’t discuss it with Marissa because he knew she would tell him that if the tables were turned they would leave him so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him, but that didn’t make him feel any better.
    People still showed up with burns, and cuts, and even the occasional broken bone or dislocated joint that he could actually fix. When he was gone… quit thinking about it, it’ll drive you mad.
    Marissa was already dressed in black jeans and a navy top and it was Dan’s turn to get into the darkest clothes he had.
    …
    “OK,” Marissa said. “The girls are asleep. I hate to do it, but we’ve got to leave a couple of downstairs windows open. It’s too hot to close everything up and I tried just having upstairs windows open for a while and it got stifling down here.”
    “We can put it off until its cooler,” Dan said. “Speaking of which, aren’t you going to roast in that?” Marissa was wearing a black windbreaker over a tank top.
    Marissa shook her head. “I didn’t have anything dark enough with longer sleeves so it’s this or my pasty white arms will glow in the dark. And no, we can’t. If we start postponing now then we’ll keep finding reasons to put it off and then we’ll get found out.”
    Dan nodded.
    “I know,” Marissa said. “I’ve seen you moping around the house. We’ve been married for ten years, Dan; I can read you like a book. You are feeling bad for ‘abandoning’ all these people. Don’t, you yourself said it’s them or us just a few days ago.”
    Dan nodded again, “I know. Funny thing is that it doesn’t really make it any easier to just up and leave.” Dan looked around the downstairs in the