Fallen: Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller - Book 1 (Caustic)

by Brian Spangler

“This way,” Peter screamed. And while the light was dim, she could see the veins in his neck pop as he strained to hear his own voice. When he went to speak again, he stopped. The service tunnel shook, and blackness ate away any remaining sight.

  The screeching metal and shattering glass they’d run away from were a mere symptom of what was to come next—a growling rumble started, as if the Food-Mart were inhaling and readying to squeeze out a dying breath. The sound was like a thousand freight trains, deafening and terrifying, and Emily found herself clutching onto Peter, screaming as loud as she could, pleading for it to stop. For a long time, they held on to one another, waiting for the world to collapse and squeeze them into nothingness.

  She was still screaming when she finally heard herself. She heard Peter’s voice next, talking into her ear, telling her that they were safe and that they’d be okay. But they weren’t safe. The service tunnel was in complete darkness, and the air was filled with the pulverized remains of the Food-Mart.

  Emily could barely make out Peter’s figure, but her hands found his mouth and she kissed him, thanking him, and then buried her face in his neck. Her body shuddered with each breath. It’s the adrenaline, her mother or father had told her once. It makes your body shake after an accident. Peter held onto her, and turned away from the hatch’s opening to lean against the service tunnel wall. She fell against him, listening to his heart and his breathing, finding a solace that she had never experienced before: the feeling was intense.

  “I think it’s over,” he finally said. His voice was hoarse, and she thought that he must have been screaming too. How could he not? She realized that most people would probably scream. After all, it was the only thing you’d have control over in a circumstance that was utterly and completely out of your control.

  “Do you have your flashlight?” Emily’s heart sank. The emergency lighting they’d followed from the mall was gone. The can of pet-food, she thought, and wondered if that had taken out the light. A million in one shot. The opening to the Food-Mart was covered with the fallen roof nearly completely, allowing just a sliver of light to get through. Rat tails darted in and out of the light’s sharp edge. If the raining chaos above them rested completely, she was sure she’d be able to hear them scurrying around. “Please tell me you have your flashlight.”

  “I’m looking,” Peter answered, his voice sounded concerned, too. “Did you lose yours?”

  Emily motioned above, “Probably on one of the shelves.” Squinting, she tried to make out the end of the service tunnel, but the light was only a dim gray reflection that might not even be there. “I think my eyes are playing tricks on me. Can you see the mall’s opening? Mr. Halcomb was supposed to leave the door open, but I can’t tell.” Peter turned, squinting just as she had, but shook his head.

  “I see something… might be the opening, but seems too dark.” His hands were in the trash bags next, pushing through the food and the medications, searching. “I can’t believe we did that!” There was a different kind of frustration and irritation in his voice. It was alarm. She put her hand on his arm, uncertain if it would help, but followed an instinct that was new.

  “You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” she teased, but he didn’t laugh, and she wondered if she had hit upon a nerve. “At least we know which direction to go.” Emily nudged his arm toward the mall. Peter stepped into the hard light, turning half of his face into a sheet of white.

  “But if someone closed the door, how will we find the ladder?” he asked, and then lifted the bags. “Let’s just hope the door was left open; otherwise, we’re going to walk right past it.”

  “Stay close to the wall,” she told him. Peter slowed and then stopped before turning around. Having stepped back into the darkness, he was almost completely invisible, and if not for the rustling sound of plastic bags, she thought she would have completely lost him. “If we stay close enough to the wall, we should find the ladder, or at least follow the pipes.” Peter only mumbled a few words, some encouraging, some, not as much.

  There was a kind of darkness that Emily liked. Like the kind that she enjoyed on warm summer nights—the solitude of her bedroom, a breeze from an open window, the rustling of tree branches and crickets chattering. She stayed in the memory of her room for as long as she could, before returning to the kind of darkness that she stood in now – penetrating, unrelenting, almost malevolent. A new hurt nested inside her, and she was suddenly homesick and missed her mom and dad. The homesickness only lasted a moment as they moved blindly through the pitch black. She was afraid. It’s just dark, she told herself. Karma… I shouldn’t have teased earlier.

  The mall door had to have been shut, closing them off from getting back. Peter was right, without the light, they were likely to walk past it, never knowing that they were directly beneath the mall. She imagined herself dragging the trash bags of medicine and food, passing under the food court, passing by Justin, walking off into an abyss of black unknown.

  “What do you think happened to Mr. Halcomb?” she asked. Her voice sounded tinny and whiny in the service tunnel. “Did you hear that?”

  There was more to hear than just the sound of her voice. Her palms tingled and itched as concern sent her blood into a hot spin.

  “Hear what?” he asked. “That’s just your echo.”

  “No. Not that. I thought I heard something else.”

  “The rats?”

  She heard Peter’s foot skid against the ground, scraping against the concrete. A few rats protested, screeching at them. “Damn little shits are brave!” His foot hit the ground again, kicking into the dark, shooing them.

  Emily turned to look behind them. The narrow opening to the Food-Mart was still there. She fixed her eyes on the blade of light, razor thin and cutting into the blackness. And as they made their way across the service tunnel, Emily found herself turning around to look at the sliver of light, using it like a beacon. Making sure that they hadn’t accidentally turned down one of the other service tunnels. She thought of the early sea travelers, and how the sailors used lighthouses to avoid destroying their ships on the rocky shallows. When they’d first entered the tunnel, they’d seen the emergency light beneath the Food-Mart’s hatch door. And while that light was gone, the light bleeding in would serve to do the same.

  Ahead of them there was nothing. Her eyes had never been so big, so open, and still she could see absolutely nothing. The service tunnel’s air, cool and damp, gently caressed her blindness, a soothing reward to rest the itching burns on her face and arms.

  She heard it again. It wasn’t Peter or her. It wasn’t the dragging of trash bags or the rats following them. There was something else in the tunnel. She was sure of it. Emily was back in her bedroom, hiding under her sheets, afraid to peek out. After all, monsters loomed underneath your bed, coming out from beneath them when you least expected it. Emily shook, ridding herself of the silliness and forced herself to check the beacon.

  The sharp light remained stoic, slicing like a blade that had pierced the concrete in a single stab. A shadow! Emily jumped, catching her breath. Her heart squeezed hard and didn’t let go. Another shadow—a silhouetted figure bounced in and out of the light, winking—walking to them, following them.

  “Peter!” she rasped in a breathy squeal. “Behind us!” She heard Peter turn and stop just enough to see the same.

  “Who’s there?” he called out. Uncertainty crept into Peter's voice, shaking it. Silence. Peter nervously clutched his hands, filling the silence with the sound of crunching plastic trash bags. “We’re armed…” It was a shallow threat, and the shadow figure seemed to know it. They continued forward, untroubled by Peter’s remark. She could clearly make out the head and broad shoulders of a tall man, slender. The man slowed for a moment and stopped, and then bobbed his head from side to side, peeking in and out of the light. And when he resumed walking, he picked up the pace, rushing with a quicker shuffle, determined to reach them.

  “Run!” Emily screamed. Terror
rippled through her. “Just run!” But as she turned back, she bumped into Peter, dropping one of her trash bags. Her heart was in her throat, and she clawed at the darkness, searching for her prize. She landed on the plastic, gripping it, but the plastic was slippery with condensation. She stumbled ahead, turning to land the plastic in her hand.

  Emily clawed at the darkness again, but this time she grabbed Peter’s shirt, pulling a wad of fabric, tethering herself to him, becoming one person. She struggled to drag both trash bags in one hand as they ran into the darkness. Her fingers cramped, and one of the bags fell, tumbling into emptiness where she was sure the rats would find it. Please don’t be the bag with the medicine.

  “I can’t see anything!” Peter cried out. She pushed against him with each hesitant step. Every fiber of her body told her to run, but this wasn’t running. She didn’t know what to call it. It was a blind leading the blind shuffle; movements hampered and crippled with terror.

  “Just keep going—go faster!”

  “I found it! I found—” he screamed, stopping abruptly. Emily stumbled against the ladder, her breath spewing out of her when she caught a punch in her gut from his elbow. Emily wheezed. Peter’s shirt pulled from her hand. Starlights streaked in front of her.

  “Hurry!” she begged, gasping. The black figure rocked back and forth, blinking like holiday lights. “Hurry, Peter!”

  She heard the thin, tinny sound of feet, and realized Peter had started climbing up the ladder. He was nearing the top by the time the last of the stars faded from her sight.

  The sound of metal ringing chimed through the service tunnel. Peter groaned with each strike, pounding the service door harder, trying to make enough noise for someone to hear them. When no reply came, Emily heard the familiar sound of him shoving on the door.

  Light suddenly flooded the opening, bathing them in blinding brightness that spilled mercilessly into her eyes. Emily reared away, shielding her face from the glare. When her focus returned, she saw a hundred other eyes peering up at her—round black beads, screeching and scurrying, crossing over the hard border between light and dark.

  The suddenness of the mall’s light blinded her to the approaching figure, but then his lowly stomps echoed like clapping hands. But there was something else that she picked up in the sound; a limp—thinly disguised in painful grunts—the sounds gave her hope. Hurt.

  The tromping pace grew, lurching in her heart and matching her fettered pulse. The open door gave the silhouetted man a target. He could see them, and he was going to reach her before she could get up the ladder.

  “Oh, my! That last explosion must have shut the—” Mr. Halcomb began to say.

  “Someone is chasing us!” Emily screamed and reached for a ladder rung. The metal was wet; the mall’s warm air collecting on the cool metal. Emily gripped a ladder rung and pulled. “Hurry! Help us out of here!” Peter had a knee on the lip of the hatch’s opening, climbing out of the hole as Mr. Halcomb reached past him to take her hand. His calloused grip squeezed her forearm, slipping on the watery blisters from her burns. She let out a small scream, but the sound of stomping feet seemed to carry her up the ladder.

  Daylight. She was back in the daylight of the mall, her waist and legs still dangling in the service tunnel hole. A hand closed around her ankle, pulling on her. Her mind raced, floating obscurely between an urge to cry and an instinct to scream. Another hand closed onto her leg. Emily screamed like she had never screamed before. Mr. Halcomb’s face became stoney, fixed in frightened surprise.

  “He has me!” she yelled. She bucked her free leg, missing and hitting nothing. She kicked again, connecting on a shoulder or maybe—hopefully—the stranger’s head. The hands let go at once, and she heard the sound of the stranger scuttling backwards like the rats scampering to hide.

  “Wait… wait!” the stranger pleaded. “Emily—it’s me!”

  Both of Emily’s arms hung suspended in the air. Her hands in the grips of Mr. Halcomb and Peter while they dragged her out of the service tunnel. The stranger took hold of her leg again. An odd scene played in her head: a tug-of-war.

  “Emily, please, it’s me!” She knew the voice, but in her mind she could only see the green-armed monster. The monster’s appetite was dry, hunger pushing to wet a deep craving for human flesh like her father’s poison fog. She was screaming and crying, her mind collapsing from the need to do both at once.

  And as if the stranger had heard her pleas, he suddenly let go. When Emily was back on her feet, wiping the tears from her face, she let herself look down into the service tunnel, to look at the green-monster roaming in the dark with a million rat-pets peppered around its ugly feet. But it wasn’t a monster at all. It was just a man. His handsome face was deathly pale, beaten and bruised, his cheeks wet with tears, and stained with blood, his mouth catching on a crooked smile that she immediately recognized.

  “Dad?”

  13

  Emily forgot about the food and medicine. She forgot about the fallen clouds. She forgot about the machine that spewed the poison and choked the world. From the service tunnel, her father’s gaunt face stared up at her, pleading. He squinted against the lights, and struggled to make out who was with her. A moment ago she thought her father was dead. A moment ago she thought the stranger chasing them was a murderer with a penchant for fire-extinguishers. Instead, her father was alive, having come back from the dead.

  “Help him,” she demanded from the others. Peter had already perched himself over the service tunnel, preparing to land his shoe onto the stranger’s face. Her heart tightened, and she screamed to him, “He’s my father!” Peter narrowed his eyes, confused. He quickly withdrew his leg. Mr. Halcomb held the hatch door—and like Peter—had poised to drop it shut on the stranger’s head. But instead, he shoved the door against the wall, and tied it off like he’d done earlier; though, Emily thought, she’d seen more knots go into the tying this time.

  “But I thought—” Peter started, and then stopped. He dropped to his knees, kneeling next to her and stretched his hand into the tunnel. Phil Stark reached up out of the darkness and grabbed Peter’s hand. And when he was standing in front of her, she wrapped her arms around his middle, squeezing.

  “It’s okay, Em,” he told her. But it wasn’t okay; nothing would be okay anymore. “I had no idea it was you. I heard a noise and then followed the light.”

  “But how?” she asked, looking up into his unshaven face. “How did you get out of the car?” His skin looked pale, and his eyes were set deep and seemed stuck in a permanent squint. The grays in his stubble stood out. And though it had been just a few days, he’d never looked so old. She was anxious to hear the answers. A thousand questions were suddenly born inside her mind, filling a deep reserve, each of them waiting their turn to be heard and answered.

  “My leg,” he answered first. “Pinned from the accident, but I was able to pry it out.” The accident. Emily’s heart sank, her questions dispersing like smoke into the wind.

  “Mom,” she managed to say. Her father closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “The accident, Dad—the other car that you hit—that was us, and Mom…” Emily saw the quick pass of glances between Mr. Halcomb and Peter. She hadn’t shared the details of her parents’ death. She hadn’t told anyone that it was her father’s car that hit them, killing the mother of his children: his wife.

  “I know,” he told her and gently touched the cut on her head. “I was able to get out of the car and stay low. The poison doesn’t always reach the ground; has to do with the cloud density. I saw your mother there—” he stopped abruptly, overcome.

  “Justin was hurt… we both were, but he’s good,” she told him, hoping the news helped.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he struggled to say. “You saved your brother, do you know that? You saved him, and you saved yourself.” He kissed her atop her forehead, whispering her mother’s name, but she couldn’t make out what it was he was saying.

  “This is Peter and Mr. Halc
omb. Peter and I were in the Food-Mart, getting what we could—medicine and food—but then the roof caved in.”

  “So, that’s what I heard,” he said. “I didn’t know what the noise was, but turned to go down the closest service tunnel. When I got to the light, the door was blocked. But I heard something ahead of me, and followed it. I had no idea it was you.” Mr. Halcomb stepped forward, listening, and posturing to ask a questions.

  “Good to meet you. You say that you were in the service tunnels?” he asked. “Did you see anyone else?” Her father gave her an adoring look before stepping over to take Mr. Halcomb’s hand. The handshake was a cordial formality; she’d seen her father do the same a hundred times.

  “I’ve been walking the tunnels the last couple of days,” he answered. “When I freed myself from the car, I found an open storm drain off the highway and dropped into the tunnel. Air is good beneath the ground level. Cool too. And other than the rats, you’re the first faces I’ve seen.”

  “Can we talk about this later?” Emily asked. “I’d really like to get my Dad some help and get Justin, too.” Mr. Halcomb nodded, offering an of-course, of-course gesture. Grabbing the trash bags, Mr. Halcomb added, “And I’m so sorry about your wife.” Emily gritted her teeth when she heard the sentiment. After all, how many lives were lost? How many sons and daughters and wives and husbands? And did her father have any idea of the magnitude? Well, if he didn’t, he soon would.

  Justin hung onto their father’s arm, hugging and staying as close to him as he could. Emily thought it was adorable, and maybe even a little sad. Justin had changed—they had all changed. The loss of their mother. The loss of their home.

  Had her brother become colder?

  Distant?

  If he had, she didn’t see it. Not now, anyway. And maybe it was because she could only see what was in front of her—a glimpse into the way it used to be. Family. And though fleeting, she didn’t care. She was happy to live in the bright memories before they disappeared forever.