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

by Flint Maxwell

  In the pocket his hand went, but he couldn’t concentrate. The noise was too much, the screaming and shouts of confusion were too much.

  Fingers touched glass, cradled plastic. The phone case. He was so close. He remembered the number by heart. He didn’t have to search through his hundreds of contacts. He could just dial the number outright. He could tell his mother and grandma he loved them, that they meant so much to him, more than they’d ever know. Then he would tell them that he’d be all right, but that would be a lie.

  Because this was the end. There was no coming back from this, he knew.

  He pulled out the phone. He tapped the screen. Blackness. All he saw was his reflection in the glass. His nose bleeding, his eyes bloodshot. He looked beyond terrible.

  The vibrations of the world jarred him back to the present. He dropped his phone as words formed on his lips.

  The words: Mom and Nana, I love you.

  But he never got to say them, because there was something coming out of the anomaly. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  It was beyond alien. Tyler Stapleton thought it would be the end of him; he closed his eyes. He knew if he looked upon whatever came from this impossible doorway, he would lose his mind.

  So he didn’t look as the camp was destroyed, as guns rattled off hundreds of rounds, as Stone Park, Ohio became a haven for these…these monsters. Instead, he crawled away, crawled as far as he could get. As he crawled, he heard every scream. Felt every crunch of broken bone, heard every spurt of blood. Smelled the death and the decay.

  He opened his eyes once he heard a thrumming. About twelve feet away from him, a soldier was climbing up into a tank that was parked just off the base, but the soldier didn’t make it inside. Something black and bulbous, something lightning quick snatched him right before Tyler’s eyes. Insurmountable fear tried its best to freeze his joints, to lock him up, make him a sitting duck, but he wouldn’t let it. He made for the vehicle.

  As he ascended the tank, hearing the soldier screaming as some…thing ripped into his flesh, Tyler prayed silently to Jesus Christ to protect him.

  Please, Lord, please save me.

  At the tank’s opening, his muscles went slack, and he fell forward, landing on the tank’s hard floor with a clang. He couldn’t breathe. His body felt paralyzed.

  No, motherfucker, move your ass! his mind shouted. Move your ass or die!

  So move his ass he did. He could hardly lift his arms above his head, and a sharp pain struck the side he’d landed on. Broken ribs? he wondered, but knew it could’ve been so much worse.

  He closed the tank’s hatch with what would’ve been a resounding boom had he not been in the middle of a war zone—in Ohio of all places.

  Now he shrank back into the darkness, thinking one thought and one thought only: The end of the world has begun.

  It would be nearly a full twenty-four hours before he stopped hearing them come through the void, but Tyler wouldn’t see the outside of the tank for twice as long, and when he did, the world would be much, much different.

  14

  The Harpers Leave Stone Park

  Just before the monsters came forth from the voids all over the world, Logan received a phone call. It was Derek Fritz, his eighteen-year-old coworker at the Monolith. It was the first phone call he’d gotten in a number of days; reception had been spotty to nonexistent since the void had taken up residence in Stone Park.

  “Derek?”

  “Hey, Logan. Can you believe this crap?”

  “No. Not really. You all right?”

  “Yeah, I was just wondering if you’re getting out of town or not.”

  “I am,” Logan said.

  Jane was packing as he spoke. He’d managed to reserve a place at the Country Inn over in Cuyahoga Falls, one of the last rooms, according to the woman he spoke with. The place was a little out of his price range, but it beat spending the next however many nights in a government-run campsite in downtown Akron, surrounded by guns. Part of his mind told him they may actually be a good thing, the guns. He told Derek about this.

  Derek wasn’t usually one to beat around the bush, but Logan could tell he was doing exactly that for some reason.

  “You sure you’re all right?” Logan asked again.

  And then something happened that he wasn’t expecting at all. Derek’s voice broke, and he made a noise that Logan thought might be a sob.

  A sudden pang of sadness hit him hard. He had always, at some subconscious level, felt bad for Derek Fritz. The kid didn’t exactly come from a good home. His brother was in prison; his father was a drunk, always getting into scuffles at bars and into run-ins with the law; his mom wasn’t around, either, dead or in jail like his brother.

  Derek had been held back at school, too, but Logan knew it wasn’t because the kid was dumb or slow. No. Derek was quite smart… Sometimes, the boy’s intellect surprised him. The reason he’d flunked was because no one cared about him enough to help guide him toward the right path.

  This was part of the reason Logan had put in a good word for him when Derek had applied to the Monolith the summer before.

  “Ain’t he the one whose brother got busted for selling smack?” Mike Ryan had asked when they were going over the thin stack of applications they’d received from the ‘Help Wanted’ ad on the marquee.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Logan had said. “But he’s a nice kid. I used to play basketball with him up at the Y.”

  “Dad’s a son-of-a-bitch, too,” Mike said. He had been about to put the application behind the others, but Logan stayed his hand.

  “Give him an interview. Least you could do,” he pressed.

  Mike eyed him suspiciously.

  “You owe me one, Mike. You know it.”

  “Fine,” he’d said. “An interview.”

  Derek had so impressed Mike during the interview that he was basically hired on the spot. He’d never been late, never talked back (unless they were playing cards—off the clock, of course—and even that was all in good fun), never complained, and was always friendly. Mike had taken a liking to him; so had Uncle Tommy.

  “No, I’m not all right,” Derek now answered from the other end of the line. The connection was spotty and getting spottier. His voice was quiet and full of static. “I’m the furthest thing from all right.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s my dad. He’s been missing the last two days. Now the army comes knocking on my door and tells me I have to get out of town. I asked about my dad… They said they don’t know, but I don’t believe them. I think he got drunk and went to that military base again, and you know what they probably did?”

  Logan could guess, but he remained quiet.

  “They probably shot him and threw him somewhere in the woods for the animals.”

  “No. Don’t say that, Derek,” Logan said. “I’m sure he’s all right. Probably on a bender. He’ll come out of it soon. This’ll all blow over. Meanwhile, you got a place to stay?”

  Derek didn’t answer for a moment. Logan thought the connection had dropped out.

  “I was—I was gonna go down to the stadium, at that camp. I don’t wanna, but I got nowhere else to go.”

  “I’ll swing by and pick you up. You can stay with Jane and me at the Sheraton.”

  “No, I don’t wanna—what’s the word…impose? I was just calling to see if you were heading to downtown Akron, too, hoping I could hitch a ride.”

  “Don’t worry about it, man. We won’t be there more than a couple days,” Logan said. The flyer said the mandatory evacuation was for three days, but he knew it’d be longer. Still, he wanted to remain positive, if not for himself then at least for Jane and Derek.

  “No, Logan—it’s all right. I’ll catch a military bus down that way. No big deal. My dad might be there now,” Derek said. His voice was not convincing.

  “I’ll be over in about fifteen minutes. You better come out when I honk the horn,” Logan said. He could picture how
that military camp would be run. Compared to the Country Inn, it’ll be worse than Hell, he thought.

  Derek’s voice was small when he answered, so small Logan barely heard him. “All right. Thanks a lot, Logan.” But Logan detected a strong undercurrent of happiness in that voice. Very strong.

  About ten minutes later, Logan and Jane set out toward the trailer park that was about two miles from their house. Derek came out with an old travel bag slung over his shoulder and a somber, grateful smile on his face.

  If the Harpers hadn’t picked Derek Fritz up, they might’ve made it out before the monsters’ arrival. Maybe. It didn’t matter, because they did pick up Derek Fritz, and Logan would’ve done that no matter what.

  They were at the Stone Park town limits, heading into Woodhaven, when the road in front of them fractured. Jane was driving, Logan was in the front seat, and Derek was crammed into the back with their suitcases and his bag.

  In front of them was a Nissan going well under the thirty-five mph speed limit. Jane, as loving and sweet as she was off the road, had proven to be quite impatient when it came to being on the road, and that was when the world wasn’t ending. As they made their way out of town, she was much too close to the Nissan’s rear end. Logan kept telling her to back off, and she finally took his advice about a quarter mile back. If she hadn’t, well…

  The chasm that parted State Street was easily twenty feet across. Tires shrieked as brakes locked. The Nissan just made it over the crack, while Jane stopped about five feet short. That was all the distance between them and plummeting down the chasm, between life and death. Five feet.

  “What the hell?” Logan said, but as he spoke, his voice was drowned out by the cracking of the ground and the destruction of the nearby town. Light posts fell over. Cars flipped and rolled. People screamed.

  “Back up!” Logan yelled.

  Jane heard him and shifted into reverse, stomping on the gas pedal. They were thrown forward as they got as far away from the crack in the road as they could.

  “Holy shit…” Derek said. “What’s happening?”

  Jane jumped the curb, cutting the Honda through someone’s front lawn. She hit their mailbox, and it tumbled end over end, the metal hitting the back window and starring the glass. Then she cut the wheel again, narrowly avoided a tree, jumped the curb, and wound up back on the road. She stopped the car and just sat there for a long moment while the world fell to shambles all around her.

  Logan put a hand on her thigh. She was trembling. So was he. Derek was covered by the luggage, all of which had miraculously kept their contents inside. If he hadn’t been buckled in, he would’ve probably been in the front seat, sporting more than a couple bumps.

  Logan stepped out of the car, not closing the door. He looked up, back in the direction of Stone Park. The void had grown bigger. Now the violent red light emanating from its sharp edges pulsed like it was near exploding.

  The driver of the Nissan opened the door. He was a short man that Logan didn’t recognize. His mouth dropped open. “Are you seeing this, too?”

  Logan swallowed, his throat so dry it made a terrible scratching sound. He nodded.

  Derek and Jane got out.

  All along the street, people were stepping out of their homes. Some were assessing the damages to their houses or their cars and their driveways.

  Too much damage to properly assess, Logan thought. The place looked like a war-torn country.

  As he, Jane, and Derek stared out at the void—Is it getting bigger? his mind frantically thought again, then: Yes. Yes, it is—he turned to Jane. That terrible feeling in his stomach came back with rip-roaring fury. He felt faint, lightheaded, sick.

  “We have to go,” he said.

  She didn’t hear him.

  He repeated himself, this time louder, but still barely loud enough to be heard over the clamor.

  “What?” Jane said, but then she got a good look at her husband, and she could tell something was very wrong.

  Because something was.

  Logan had never felt so strongly about anything in his life before. He put a hand on her lower back and guided her to the car. Derek slowly made his way over to them.

  Jane tried handing Logan the keys, but he shook his head. “You drive. You’re the better driver.”

  “I don’t know—the roads. What if that happens again?” she asked. Her bottom lip was quivering.

  “It probably will, but you’re a hell of a driver, Jane. If anyone can get us out of this mess, it’s you.”

  She took a deep breath. Nodded. Then she went around to the driver’s side and got in. A rigid look of determination replaced the one of fear on her face.

  At least for a moment.

  Then the ground shook again, and the crack in the road parted wider. A solid darkness came over the town as the remaining streetlights winked out. The grid had gone down. The only light came from the few cars’ high beams and, farther off in the distance, from the edges of the ever-expanding void. But the void’s light was red, hellish. Until one looked into it—then there was no light. It was just a black hole, sucking away your thoughts, your very soul.

  Logan climbed back into the car and closed the door. Jane drove on, but before they were very far down the road, he heard something he couldn’t completely comprehend. Some type of roaring, a sound reserved for big budget monster movies. Am I imagining this? he wondered. Please let me be imagining this.

  But what followed this terrible sound was even worse.

  It was a man’s dying scream.

  He turned around, looked out of the cracked back windshield, past Derek’s hunched shape and the stacked luggage. What he saw made his vocal chords freeze up. He would’ve screamed if he was able to. The beast—the monster—the freak—the thing—that trundled through the street they’d just left was unexplainable. He could hardly comprehend it. It was animalistic in nature, but unlike any animal he’d ever seen before.

  It tore through the rubble, knocked aside the Nissan, and opened two very large claws and squished the short man’s head like a grape. Logan saw a burst of red and white, blood and bone, and then the collapsing body. Dead. His family looked on in horror.

  A great longing to grab his wife by the shoulder and tell her they had to help them came over him, but he couldn’t speak, and deep down in his psyche, he knew it was best if they got the hell out of Dodge as fast as they could.

  Part of him was hoping against hope that Jane hadn’t seen what he’d seen, that no one had seen it because he was hallucinating, but Jane spoke up, her voice a dull whisper. “Did you see that?”

  “Keep driving,” Logan said.

  Jane didn’t stop. Much to her credit, too, because Logan probably would’ve pulled over and vomited if he’d had the chance.

  They hadn’t seen any monsters since leaving Stone Park. Now they were in Woodhaven, heading into the heart of town, toward the highway. They passed the Woodhaven Recreation Center.

  Logan said, “Pull over up here.”

  Jane did so. She needed a break as much as anyone. She had been gripping the steering wheel so tightly that she’d broken three nails—the index of her left hand, her ring of the same hand, and her pinky on her right. A throbbing pain had taken the place of those nails.

  Logan pointed to a side street, and Jane pulled off into the ditch.

  For a long moment, no one said a thing. The car was filled with raspy breathing, stuttering, thumping heartbeats.

  Then: “What the fuck was that?” Derek asked.

  “I—I don’t know,” Jane answered. “I saw…I don’t know what the hell I saw.”

  Her blood pressure was undoubtedly off the charts, which got her thinking about her father, who had died of heart failure. She thought about the day he died, how she’d found out he hadn’t been taking the medicine the doctor had prescribed to him, how he’d been squirreling it away so everyone thought he was taking it, and she suddenly felt more scared than she had when she saw the driver of the Niss
an get his head ripped off by what looked like a blurry shadow with terrible claws.

  “I’m not crazy,” Derek said. “I saw something when Logan was looking out of the back window. I saw…I saw a monster.”

  “I did, too,” Logan said.

  “Me, too,” Jane echoed.

  “Try the radio,” Logan said.

  Jane twisted the knob. No channels came through, not even the constant stream of pop music on 96.5. Everything was dead static.

  “What the hell is happening?” Derek said.

  Jane had seen in the rearview mirror that the boy looked very pale, but when she turned around, she saw that he looked even paler with her own two eyes.

  The dead static of the radio suddenly changed to a braying alarm, a steady beeeeeeep; the same kind heard when a TV channel ran tests in the dead of night.

  “Try A/M,” Logan said.

  Jane hit a button and turned the knob. The antenna now picked up an army broadcast.

  “Overrun…help us…compromised…” some random voice said, cutting in and out before she shut it off for good.

  Jane’s flesh chilled. She reached out and took Logan’s hand in her own. They both shook like cold puppies.

  “What do we do?” Logan asked. For the first time in a long time, he sounded unsure.

  This unnerved Jane.

  Logan was her rock, the one who always had a great idea, the one solid in a world full of chaos. But this…this was beyond chaos. The world had moved from incomprehensible to completely insane.

  “We keep going,” she said.

  Logan looked at her with what she thought was gratitude. He knew she was right.

  “We keep going,” she said again, more firmly. “What else can we do?”

  “I agree,” Derek said from the backseat. “Maybe we head to downtown Akron. The military is there; we can’t go back to Stone Park…maybe ever again.”

  Jane knew going back was completely out of the question. Something major had happened. She knew she would never again see the house they had bought in Stone Park, and that was enough to make her heart sink.