Ravaged: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 1)

by Flint Maxwell

“What? No,” Derek said. “The…I don’t know how to explain it. I’m cold. Colder than I think I’ve ever been.” The young man rubbed at his exposed flesh, and Logan saw he was riddled with goosebumps.

  That was when he felt it, too. The cold. The freezing nothingness he had always associated with death and the spaces between the stars, the blackness.

  He looked at Mike and saw that the old man wasn’t blinking. The redness from around the edges of the diamond-thing in the forest danced in his eyes, reflected there.

  “Don’t look at it, Mike,” Logan said. “Don’t look.”

  “I have to,” Mike said. “It’s just so…beautiful.”

  Derek, nearest Logan, was looking up, too. Logan reached out and grabbed the kid roughly by the arm, and just like that, the trance Derek had fallen under vanished.

  “Oh, God…” he said. “I saw something. Something terrible.”

  Logan gripped Mike’s arm now. Beneath the fabric of the man’s clothes, he felt that his muscles were tensed. Like he was in great pain.

  “We gotta get inside,” Logan said. “C’mon.”

  “Get your fuckin’ hand off of me!” Mike shouted and ripped his arm out of Logan’s grip.

  Logan stumbled backward, his lips parted in shock. “Mike?”

  “Don’t you get it?” he said.

  Logan pushed Derek out of the way. “Get inside, kid,” he said. “Go on.”

  Derek went.

  “Get what, Mike?” Logan asked.

  “They’re coming. And they’re gonna kill the ones that don’t bow down to them.”

  “Who’s coming, Mike?”

  His face went slack. He looked like he had been called on to answer a question in a class he wasn’t paying any attention to. “I-I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. He blinked slowly a few times then turned. “Logan?”

  “Yes?”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re at work,” Logan answered.

  “I am?” Mike shook his head again, and Logan turned the man toward the back of the Monolith with the help of a guiding hand, not rough but firm.

  He didn’t want Mike to see the diamond-thing again, whatever it was. They crossed the back lot, moving past the fallen cards and overturned table and chairs, and came to the door.

  The diamond was reflected in the small glass window there, and Logan saw the sharp black edges tinged with red, saw it crystal clear, and his own mind started filling with dark thoughts of death and destruction. It took all of his will to force his eyes away from that reflection. He was lucky he had that kind of willpower; not many men and women did.

  Mike, however, did not possess such restraint, and he began screaming. With a great burst of strength Logan had not anticipated, Mike ripped free of his hold, turned, and ran toward the forest and the dark void beyond.

  Logan lunged after him, but a rough hand grabbed the back of his vest.

  “Don’t,” Derek said in a hypnotized voice. “Don’t. You can’t.”

  “I have to,” Logan said.

  “Mike’s right. They are coming.”

  3

  Deer in the Road

  Jane Harper cruised down 756 into Stone Park. It was a fine night…not too hot, not too cold. Summer looked like it was here to stay. Finally.

  In Ohio, where the summers are short and the winters long, warm weather was always welcome.

  Jane had the windows down for the first time since last September. She had undone her ponytail, the usual ‘do for a long shift at the hospital, and let her hair go wild. She needed that. Today had been a hell of a day, one of those days that made her question the online classes she signed up for this summer to fast track her graduation.

  Jane wanted to be a nurse. Right now, she was a nursing assistant, wiping butts and cleaning up spilled-guts, as the saying around City Hospital went, but tonight had been particularly difficult. Mrs. Havertine, near the nurse’s station, had just gotten out of surgery, something about a colon blockage, and she was supposed to stay in bed. Of course, Mrs. Havertine was having none of that. Thirteen times—yes, Jane counted—she’d had to go in there and calm the poor woman down. Seeing her lying on the bed, her face pale and sweaty, the tubes sticking out of her nose and arms, about broke Jane’s heart. Mrs. Havertine had no immediate family members, no one to come sit by her bed or bring her flowers and Get Well Soon! cards, no one at all except for Jane, who had to do the calming while the nurses sat in their stations on their phones or gossiping about the new doctor making the rounds in B wing.

  She could hear Logan’s voice in her head now, telling her she didn’t have to put up with the nurses’ crap.

  Jane smiled. Oh yes, she could hear Logan’s voice crystal clear, but she could also hear her own, some future version of herself saying, ‘No, it’s not my job to do that, not really, but if you would’ve seen this woman, you would’ve done the same. She needed someone, anyone, and I was there for her when no one else could be.’

  Logan would frown in that way that wasn’t really a frown at all, but more a somber smile, and he would say, ‘You’re too good for that hospital, Janey. Too good.’

  Am I?

  God, the thought of becoming one of those nurses who sat in the station on their phones, ignoring the groans and moans of their patients, made Jane’s stomach sick. Is this really what she wanted to do for the rest of her life?

  That, she couldn’t answer for certain, but she could see Logan’s somber smile in her head now, could hear his voice again.

  ‘Yes, it is, Jane, because you’re not gonna be like them. You’re gonna be better and you’re gonna light up the shadows of that place with that smile of yours,’ he would say.

  She took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. It was a question she didn’t want to answer right now. She would think it over in the morning, when her head was clear and her feet weren’t hurting.

  She put a hand under her hair. She was sweaty, but the night air whipping into the car felt good. Her right hand came off the steering wheel and flipped on the stereo. The first station she got was a dead channel; the next, 88.1, the college station, was playing polka music, as it sometimes did this late; as she hit the third preset, a deer shot out from the trees and ran onto the road.

  Jane screamed and slammed on her brakes. The Honda was old, and she didn’t know the last time she’d taken it to get a tune-up (or an oil change, for that matter), but the car screeched to a halt mere inches from clobbering the deer, which had stopped, like the old cliché says a deer is apt to do, and turned its head slightly in her direction.

  Jane’s heart was nearly leaping out of her chest. Talk about a wakeup call, she thought.

  She beeped the horn.

  The deer still wasn’t moving.

  She leaned out of the window and shouted, “Hey! Go on!”

  You live another day, her mind said, but, Jesus, be careful.

  She tried the horn again. One beep. Two beeps. One long beeeeeeep.

  Birds and bats took flight from the nearby trees, their shadows dancing over the pavement of 756, wings flapping louder than the ticking of the Honda’s engine.

  The deer turned its head all the way toward her. What Jane saw filled her with an icy cold terror.

  Where half of the deer’s face should’ve been, there was only bone and shiny red gore. One eye socket was empty. Hollow.

  Jane wanted to scream, but she couldn’t find the energy.

  The deer turned its head away and ran off the road, into the trees beyond.

  All Jane could do was sit there.

  After about two minutes, the image of the deer with half of its face missing faded like a dream, and Jane began to wonder if she had imagined it. She was quite tired. She had barely gotten any sleep the night before. Tossed and turned. Woke Logan up.

  Ah, but it was the great Catch-22, wasn’t it? Though she wanted—no, needed—sleep, she did not think she’d be able to fall asleep tonight without the picture of the deer making its way into her
mind.

  In the dark, no haunting images were off-limits.

  She steadied herself, took her foot off the brake, and eased the Honda forward.

  Soon she was crossing the town limits of Stone Park, leaving the hospital, Mrs. Havertine, and deer with half-faces long behind her.

  But she would not get any restful sleep that night, nor would she for a long, long time.

  4

  The Rest

  At the same time the malicious void ate away much of the forest beyond the Monolith in Stone Park, Ohio, more voids popped up all over the United States and the rest of the world.

  Forty-seven, to be exact, each one, in fact, as big as three New York City skyscrapers.

  5

  Worship

  Logan raced through the forest. He tripped and fell over roots, and at one point, stuck his size fourteen in a rabbit’s hole, feeling a crack in his ankle. He was on the ground for half a minute, wincing in pain. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

  The thrumming rattled the inside of his sternum, made it buzz. He felt nauseous.

  “Mike!” he shouted. “Mike!”

  Then he was hearing Derek’s voice again, telling him they were coming, and suddenly he didn’t feel like getting up any longer. He wanted to lie there on the forest floor until the sun rose.

  No.

  He used a tree for support, clawing his way up the rough bark. Once standing, he tested his ankle by putting about half his weight on it. There was a slight pinch, but that was all. Seventy-five percent of his weight now. A slightly more painful pinch. One hundred percent. Enough pain to make him take a deep breath.

  “Mike!” he shouted again.

  No answer.

  He wound his way through the trees, mindful of holes and branches and roots. He didn’t know exactly what direction he was traveling in, and the thought occurred to him more than once that he would most likely get lost on his way back, but he knew he needed to head toward the diamond-thing buzzing with its reddish-black light, because that was where Mike would be going. Lucky for him, the diamond-thing was huge, towering over the trees it hadn’t yet destroyed.

  Each step he took brought more madness into his head, more dark thoughts. He found himself remembering a car accident he’d seen when he was in middle school. Logan and his mother had been on their way to Cedar Point for his twelfth birthday, heading up the highway at a cruising clip. Some of Mom’s favorite country music blasted from the speakers, and though Logan wouldn’t normally be okay with the twanging banjos and gruff-voiced men crooning about beer and tractors, he was okay with it then because everything was perfect.

  Until the cars in front of them put on their brake lights, and Mom slowed with the stopping flow of the traffic. A cop stood up ahead, twirling an orange baton. Flashing lights dimmed by the bright sunlight. An ambulance. A firetruck. Half a dozen highway troopers.

  Slowly, his mom drove by. Logan’s head turned toward the scene. A small sedan had crossed the median grass strip and hit a semi head-on. Glass glittered all over the highway. There was a tire on the shoulder, the rim still in the middle of it, gleaming, unhurt by the horror of the accident. Somehow.

  “Don’t look,” his mom had told him, but he did. How could he not?

  One of the EMTs was covering what once had been a person with a white sheet. Blood and gore soaked through the fabric, and Logan was—

  screaming.

  “Mike?” Logan said. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving.

  Christ, it was like he had gone back in time. He could smell the burned rubber. Could hear the low rumbling engine of his mom’s bucket of bolts as it lurched through the traffic cones, following the trooper’s twirling baton. He could see the sticky red, like cherry syrup, through the sheet. The hunk of meat beneath.

  The screaming again.

  “Mike!” Logan ran despite the pain in his ankle.

  This time, he didn’t think about any roots or rabbit holes. He just thought of his friend in pain, the same man who Uncle Tommy called his best friend, the same man who’d been managing the Monolith since long before Logan worked there, since Logan was a kid visiting his uncle’s business in the dog days of summer, going in for the matinee, free popcorn, and snacks.

  When he got to the clearing, he stopped. The diamond shimmered in front of him. The red around its edges was the color of anger and it buzzed like hornets.

  Mike was on his knees in front of it. For too long a moment, Logan thought the old man might be praying. Then he stepped forward and saw that Mike was hurt, clutching his stomach.

  Logan rushed over to him. This took a lot of willpower, not because he was afraid, nothing like that, but because the diamond-thing was so unnatural, so out there, that he realized anything could happen.

  “Mike?” he said.

  Mike turned and looked up. His eyes were red and blotchy, like he’d been crying.

  “Are you all right?” Logan asked.

  As soon as the words left his lips, he knew it was a useless question. Of course he wasn’t all right. Nothing was all right.

  Something told him nothing would ever be right again.

  “I don’t feel so good,” Mike moaned.

  Logan bent down, bracing himself for another of Mike’s outbursts, but it never came. He put a hand under Mike’s arm and picked him up, the old man now leaning on him for support.

  “C’mon, we’ll get you fixed up.”

  Mike coughed. In the glow of the diamond’s malicious red light, Logan saw something like black syrup come out of the old man’s mouth.

  It was blood.

  6

  The Hospital

  Logan and Derek managed to get Mike to the emergency room. The doctor who saw to the manager of the Monolith was one Logan recognized but couldn’t name.

  The doctor came out to the waiting room about an hour later. Mike’s wife Trudy was there; Logan had called her with Mike’s cell phone. Her face was red and her eyes redder. She clutched balled up tissues in one fist. As the doctor approached them, she dropped the tissues and dug her fingers into Logan’s arm. He barely felt it.

  “He’s going to be all right,” the doctor said. His name was Mitchell.

  Trudy burst into tears again. She buried her face into Logan’s side—he was much taller than most people, but he practically towered over Trudy. He gave her a reassuring pat on the back and whispered, “I told you, Trudy. It’s going to be okay.”

  Doctor Mitchell was smiling, but Logan thought he saw something in the doctor’s eyes, something…off.

  “Can we go back and see him?” Logan asked, already moving past him through the double automatic doors, but Mitchell slid sideways, blocking Logan’s way.

  “Not yet, I’m afraid. He’ll need his rest.”

  “We just want to see him. If you won’t let me back, at least let her go. I mean, that’s his wife,” Logan said. As he turned to nod toward Trudy, he realized she was gone.

  The hem of her purple nightgown flapped beneath the thin jacket she wore as she slipped through the doors.

  Logan let the words die in his throat, and Mitchell finally got the hint about a minute too late.

  He brought a hand to his brow and said, “Oh, Christ.”

  That was when Trudy started screaming.

  A spike of fear rippled through Logan. He found himself pushing past Mitchell, which was so easy, he hardly noticed the man at all, as he made his way through the double doors.

  He turned left, maneuvering through a long, glaringly white corridor, navigating around nurses with dazed expressions on their faces—expressions that would soon become all too common in Stone Park—and passing empty beds. At a T-junction, he lost track of where he was and where Trudy might’ve gone. A million times he’d been in this hospital, because of Jane, but he could never remember the layout of the place. He was almost sure it shifted every other week or so.

  “He’s my husband, you sons-of-bitches!” The voice came from the right, high and shri
ll, almost demonic in its delivery.

  For a long moment, Logan wasn’t sure if it belonged to Trudy or not. It just couldn’t.

  But it did.

  There at the end of the hall, a battalion of men wearing hazmat suits were spilling out of a room. They were wheeling a bed covered in what looked like a plastic bubble, flanked by armed soldiers wearing high-tech gas masks.

  And who was in that bubble?

  Mike Ryan.

  Logan couldn’t move.

  Trudy could, however. She followed this procession, beating at the soldiers and hazmat suits with her small handbag and flailing limbs. They seemed to hardly notice her; she was a gnat at a picnic.

  Slowly, the parade grew close enough for Logan to see the slight condensation on the inside of the face masks, the steely eyes of the men behind the plastic. No-nonsense.

  Despite the fear and confusion Logan was feeling—God, there was so much he didn’t understand, and so much he couldn’t even begin to understand—he stepped in the middle of the hallway.

  Luckily, he had the good fortune of being big as all hell.

  The men stopped.

  Logan got a good look at Mike. He was hooked up to a respirator, breathing raggedly. His chest seemed to have caved in beneath his hospital gown. The ID bracelet on his wrist dangled as if it were actually a necklace. His eyes fluttered open and closed; when they were open, Logan could see that they were beyond bloodshot, the whites almost all red, as if Mike were suffering from a thousand popped blood vessels.

  “Step aside, sir,” one of the soldiers said, his voice slightly muffled by the respirator. He wasn’t as big as Logan, but that didn’t matter much, as he held an assault rifle of some sort. It was vicious looking, out of place anywhere except a war zone, and this wasn’t a war zone.

  The soldier hadn’t pointed the weapon at Logan. Yet.

  “Where are you taking him?” Logan asked. “He’s my friend.” A weak argument, he would later think.