Blackout (Darkness Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page B

accomplices. “Don’t let Harris run.”
    Their footsteps file to the top of the garage and echo throughout the cavernous space. My jaw clenches when it hits me: Those Easies never wanted to stay in the Dark Zone. They gave themselves up too soon, right after I’d showed them a safe way out. No, those men wanted to get caught. They were going to surrender all along.
    I wait until it’s safe to leave. Ten minutes, twenty, I don’t know. I trudge dejectedly up the ramp and see a row of massive tractors has already begun to rebuild the gate. The tractors look taller than the White House, taller than everything else on our side. I turn to head back home, where I was going before any of this even started. It’s still early and my parents should be at our house—with no idea how much I’m about to shock them.
     
    *
     
    After the Blackout, two types of people had a head start: the paranoid and the privileged. The paranoid were doomsday preppers. They lived in constant fear of disaster and had stockpiled the necessities just in case: portable toilets, charcoal, garden seeds. The privileged type—rich people—simply had too much. Their supplies were ready by chance.
    My family, the Troublefields, were privileged. When the flare hit, they happened to own stacked pallets of bottled water, a storm shelter, and two gleaming closets of hunting guns. But that head start only helped for so long because eventually everyone ran out of supplies. Only the hardest workers endured, and my ancestors battled to survive. And they did more: They refused to move from our family townhouse, and they stayed true to what they believed. Even facing the greatest challenge in human history, they did not sacrifice their principles. Their identity. Their core value was always family first.
    My parents and I are the only Troublefields left, and we still live in the family townhouse. Follow every tradition. Conventions like addressing every family member by their first name. So I call my mom Aura and my dad Burn. And if there were any other Troublefields on the planet, I’d have to call them their first names, too. Obeying traditions like this one helps us keep a strong sense of family, or at least that’s what my parents say. A kind of Troublefield togetherness. And that’s the most important thing to them: family. Family, family, family. They say sticking together is what’s right and it’s how we got this far.
    Walking up our wooden steps now, I see the names Skye and Leiter carved in elegant cursive on the mahogany front door. That’s another tradition: carve your name somewhere in the family house. Skye and Leiter, my grandparents, carved theirs after taking on their DZ names as teenagers. They were both given American names at birth—Grace and Alexander—but they discarded those as they grew up. And the name “Troublefield” has stayed the same. To them, that word encapsulated their very souls.
    I never met either of them. In the months before I was born, they became increasingly senile. Started to forget things and get lost outside. And through no fault of theirs, they went from being the most generous caretakers to burdens. It weighed on them. Burn told me he could see it bothered them. Then the morning Aura gave birth to me, they left. They didn’t pack a thing, just walked out the front door toward the dark horizon without even saying good-bye. Burn didn’t notice they’d gone until he announced loudly that I was a boy. In the silence that followed, he let his smile fall. And what gets me about that story is, even when my grandparents’ minds were so weak, they still managed to put family first. Give to everyone but themselves.
    Stories like that make me feel like I’m not a true Troublefield. Sure, I have the name, but I haven’t earned it. Troublefields are supposed to serve the family, and when I’m being honest with myself, I know I’m not that noble. I’m different. My parents love me unconditionally, but that’s the