He was fine. He’d make it. Just a minor setback in the grand scheme of his long life. He’d get his sack sewn up, and his balls would work as well as they’d always had, firing on all cylinders.
Then the light went out, and he was wrapped in complete darkness. Visions of large rats began to dance around in his head.
He closed his eyes and did something he’d not done since he was a little boy in Sunday school—he prayed.
When he opened his eyes, he saw them. The golden circles, floating in the darkness. Not one pair, but dozens.
Miguel screamed, but nobody heard. His scream was just one of millions slicing through Miami’s night air. The rats dug into him, crawled all over his body with cold, finger-like paws. Wormy tails coiled around his flesh.
He screamed and screamed.
They went for the soft parts first: eyes, lips, ears, nose…testicles. What was left of them. Then his stomach and legs and chest and feet, until he was finally freed, the cold basement floor pressing against his body…only his hands were still cuffed, and his arms dangled from the support beams above him, detached. Ropes of sinewy muscle and tendons and bode. He was still alive, but not for long, still cognizant enough to realize the atrocity happening to him.
And no rat would go hungry for a long time.
In Paris, the void vomited out monstrosity after monstrosity. The military effort there, like all over the world, was futile. Their bullets and heavy artillery barely punched through the armored flesh of the creatures.
The Eiffel Tower fell at 6:33 a.m.
Somewhere in the Middle East, monsters crushed armed men beneath their feet.
In India, the Taj Mahal was ripped apart by tentacles larger than its towers.
In the United Kingdom, the London Bridge had done more than fall down; it was completely destroyed, done in by some great beast that had slithered into the Thames. An innumerable number of fleeing cars were taken down with it.
Africans bowed to the creatures. On their knees, their eyes tightly closed, they thought themselves untouchable. But this didn’t stop the monsters. Those that weren’t crushed were viciously torn apart.
Of all the places on Earth, however, America seemed to get it the worst. The heavy concentration of voids—which were doorways, in fact—was a large part of this.
A group of nuns from San Antonio, like the praying Africans, were on their knees, talking to a God that was too busy to hear them. A fighter jet out of Lackland Air Force Base crashed not too far from the front doors of their church, taken down by something that resembled a giant spider. The sisters barricaded themselves inside after that, opting to let the chaos—or as Sister Gertrude called it, Hell on Earth—blow over. The problem was, and this really unsettled Sister Amanda, that the church was in a neighborhood that had taken a real downward turn, and these people were full of hate and violence, and something was happening. There were women and children out there screaming. She could hear them. Some of them shouted, ‘Oh God! Please, Lord!’, and what was Amanda to do, ignore them?
But there were also sirens and gunshots.
A few people had started pounding on the front doors of the church. God’s house was supposed to be open for any and everyone. Wasn’t it selfish of them to lock themselves away while others suffered?
There were four nuns inside, their knees resting on the soft carpet of the chancel, their hands steepled and their heads bowed. Each time a gunshot went off or the pounding increased or someone screamed, all of them would flinch except for Gertrude.
Amanda felt like crying.
“Please open up! Please, I’m hurt! There’s so many of them! Jesus God, what kind of terrible people are you?” a man was shouting.
“Ignore them, sisters,” Gertrude said. “They are only trying to use us.”
“We’re supposed to be there for them whenever they need us,” Amanda said.
Gertrude wrinkled her old face into a mess of even more wrinkles. “Well, Sister Amanda, where were they when we needed them? Where were they on Sundays when God needed their worship? They were hungover from a weekend of drink and fornication, that’s where.”
“That’s not how this works,” Sister Mary said.
“Quiet! I’m trying to pray,” Sister Ruby cut in.
They were all quiet, but the quiet was the worst.
Pounding. Shrieking. Screaming. Death. Destruction. Hell.
No, Amanda would not stand by. How was she supposed to pray with all of this noise, anyhow? How could any of them pray?
She shot up, her youthfulness giving her the upper-hand as Gertrude went after her, swiping and missing. Amanda bolted down the nave, moved the debris out of the doorway, and unlocked the door.
What she saw was the closest thing to Hell on Earth that she could imagine.
There was a pulsing, black hunk of metal in the street across from the Dunkin’ Donuts—a piece of the jet, no doubt. The apartment buildings on the corner of the block were on fire and crumbling. Five cars had piled up in the middle of the intersection; two of them were burning, inky, black smoke rising into the dusky air. People were running around screaming. Some of them were bloody and slouched, their arms out and their hands shaped like claws. She saw an older man limp out from the alley—she recognized him as the homeless guy who always talked about Vietnam like he’d fought in the war.
Harry is his name, she thought.
Harry’s face was torn up. Most of the hanging, loose skin was bunched around his jawbone.
Someone gasped behind her.
“See, I told you,” Gertrude said.
“Fuckin’ finally!” a man said from the bottom of the church’s front steps. “I was beginning to think ya dumb broads had murder-suicided each other. In the name of fucking Christ, of course.”
“No, sir, you cannot come in,” Gertrude said.
Amanda’s courage seemed to have died with the rest of the block.
“The fuck you mean I can’t come in there?” the man demanded. His upper lip snarled.
“This church is private property,” Gertrude said firmly. “We are in no position to turn it into a safe house.” The sometimes sweet and calm voice of Sister Gertrude was replaced by the cold tone of a judge sentencing someone to life in prison.
“It’s a fuckin’ church, lady. You’re gonna let me in.” He pointed down the street where the flames of the two cars had spread to a third. “Look, I’m hurt and I’m scared. There’s things out here. Demons, whatever. I need Jesus, okay? So let me in.”
“No,” Gertrude said. She retreated into the shadows of the church, grabbing Amanda by the sleeve of her tunic and giving a great yank, probably expecting some resistance. Amanda gave none. She went as obediently as a dog on a leash.
A police car flew down the street, its sirens whirling, momentarily painting the church in red and blue lights. It did not slow down at the five car pileup, and as it went by, Amanda saw a man struggling to throw something off of him inside of the cab. It looked like an oversized beetle. The tires skidded, metal crumbled, and the vehicle finally came to a stop.
“Look at this!” the man shouted. “Look at this, you can’t leave me, please!”
“Sorry,” Gertrude said quietly and began to shut the doors.
But the man was persistent. He came up the steps and kicked in the wood. It cracked and went flying into the backs of both Gertrude and Amanda. They sprawled out on the thin carpet, tangled amongst the tables and chairs they’d piled against the door earlier. Amanda had felt a few of her fingers crack as she landed on them the wrong way. By the pews, through hazy sight, she saw Ruby and Mary bring their hands up to their mouths.
“That ain’t fuckin’ Christian,” the man roared.
Amanda stirred and turned around to see Gertrude’s eyes closed and a stream of blood pouring from her nostrils.
“I’m sorry I have to do this,” the man said, “But I got a kid in Dallas, and I’m damn well gonna survive to go get him from his crazy, no-good mother, all right?
”
Amanda pulled herself up. Her back felt like the Devil himself had stamped his cloven hooves in the middle of her spine. Her head was swimming, her brain working slow and sticky as if covered in molasses.
“I gotta do this for him. Nothin’ personal.”
Amanda looked up at the man. He held a pistol in his hand—an evil, black thing—pointed at Gertrude. He pulled the trigger once, the explosion cracking Amanda’s eardrums to the point that she could not even hear herself screaming. Gertrude convulsed like a kicked rag doll.
Then the gun came up to point behind Amanda, where the two other nuns, Mary and Ruby, were running up the aisle. Two more shots, two smoking holes in their habits, and two more deaths.
The man had a crazy look in his eyes…bloodlust. He finally aimed the pistol at Amanda, and she saw he was shaking.
“I didn’t want to do it. I had to,” he explained.
Amanda screamed hoarsely for the police, for help.
He snorted. “Pretty soon, there won’t be any more police. Last I heard, those things all over the world, those shapes, are all full of spiders and worms and evil, hungry things, man.”
She had not the slightest idea what the man was talking about. He must be crazy. He must be out of his mind.
But didn’t you see an oversized beetle? A huge spidery thing?
Yes, yes you did.
“We are fucked. The whole human race is majorly fucked,” the man continued. “But I’m gonna save my kid. I’m gonna save him, and he’s gonna love me again. He’s gonna be proud of his old man.” He nodded as he looked down at his feet.
Amanda looked to Gertrude, and the fountain of blood running out of the bullet hole in her back. “Will he be proud of that?” she asked. She did not know where this courage was coming from. It must be from the man Jesus himself.
The crazed man began to look up, and with his gaze came the barrel of the pistol. He smiled, but Amanda thought it was a pained expression.
“Well, he’ll never know,” he said, and he pulled the trigger twice.
Both shots took Amanda in the chest. She did not feel anything at all. She died almost instantly.
As the war raged on throughout the world, the man thought he had done them a favor, had done them all a favor. Now, in a House of God, this man felt safe. But House of God or not, bricks were just bricks. No religion could stop the Ravaging.
To prove this point, the same giant, spider-like creature that had taken down the fighter jet from Lackland Air Force Base smashed through the walls no less than two hours after the madman buried two slugs into Sister Amanda’s chest. A tidal wave of bricks and plaster fell down upon the man, crushing his bones to powder.
He didn’t die instantly.
In the few minutes he remained alive, his punctured lungs filling with blood, the man watched through the cracks in the debris as giant spider legs, needle-like hair jutting from them, skittered through the remains of the church.
If this isn’t Hell…I don’t know what is.
He died choking on his own blood.
Meanwhile, all across America, all across the world, the monsters ravaged.
16
Brad Saves the Day
Just minutes after the second and more violent earthquake, a voice inside Bradley Long’s head told him to run to his mother’s bedroom. There were two closets in there, one meant for her clothes and her millions upon millions of shoes and purses (or so it had seemed to Brad for as long as he could remember), and one for Brad’s father’s belongings.
Mom hadn’t thrown out his clothes, his shoes, or even his underwear. She had left the closet exactly as it had been the day Kevin Long took his own life. The door stayed closed, however. In those early days after his father’s death, Brad often spotted his mom standing in front of the closed door, like a dog waiting for their owner to come home. Each time he saw this, his heart cracked a little wider. He knew her internal debate; she wanted to open the closet, pull out Dad’s robe or one of his work shirts, hold it, smell it, let the cloth comfort her, but he knew she wouldn’t do that, because it was, as she said, ‘Just salt in the wound.’
So as Brad threw open his father’s closet, and his eyes took in the rows of dress shirts, loafers, and belts, he realized this was possibly the first time the closet had been opened in years, and that made his gut feel like it was sinking into his own shoes.
Outside, people were still clamoring, trying to figure out what had happened. Their muffled voices drifted in through the window.
Then Bradley heard the scream. It was not a scream of confusion or surprise, but of fear. A cold-blooded fear he once thought was reserved only for actors in cheap horror movies.
This scream made what Brad was searching for seem all the more logical.
On the top shelf of his father’s closet, hidden behind a stack of empty shoeboxes, was a shotgun and a small box of shells. Brad had only held the gun one other time: back when he was thirteen, during one of his video game phases, when he religiously played Call of Duty or Halo on the weekends and whenever he’d gotten his homework done on the weekdays.
On a break from playing, Brad had snuck into his parent’s bedroom, and gone into his father’s closet. His main goal had been to find the stack of Playboy magazines Brad’s friend Chris had told him was in every dad’s closet—the damn computer had a parental control on it, so internet porn was out of the question. So Brad was standing on his tiptoes, looking at the top shelf, opening the boxes, checking inside them. He found no Playboys, but came across the gun instead. It wasn’t loaded, but holy moly was it heavy to his thirteen-year-old toothpick arms.
He liked the way he looked, holding it in front of the mirror. He liked how holding the gun made him feel—at the time, invincible.
Dad had come home early that day, and had been as quiet as a cat entering the house. He was loosening his tie when he stopped short at the bedroom’s threshold. It was quite a shock, seeing his only son standing there with death cradled in his arms. He’d smacked Brad upside the head and scolded him (which was something Kevin Long never did, having been a naturally quiet man), and taken the XBOX out of the living room. He’d held on to it for two weeks; the most depressing two weeks of Brad’s then-young life.
Now Brad was holding the gun again for the second time, only on this occasion, he was about seven inches taller and almost a decade older. And this time, it wasn’t for show; Brad meant to use it if he had to.
Mom came into the bedroom. She looked down at the weapon Brad held, and her face paled considerably more than it had since the earthquake. Her trembling fingers were wrapped tightly around the cordless house phone, but Brad could hear the steady beep-beeeeep that indicated the lines were down.
“What—Bradley, put that back…”
But her eyes had drifted away from the shotgun and the messy state the earthquakes had left her bedroom in—along with the rest of the neighborhood and, though they didn’t know it yet, the world.
Brad followed his mother’s eyes. She was looking at the rows and rows of old shirts, the lined up dress shoes, the folded khakis with their sharp creases still running along the sides of the legs.
The phone fell out of her hand and landed on the floor with a muffled thud. She brought her still-trembling fingers up to her mouth. Tears stood out in her eyes, pregnant and ready to fall down her face.
Brad closed the closet door.
“Mom,” he said, “stay in the house.”
This seemed to snap her out of whatever daze she was currently in. She reached for his arm, gripping him.
“Where are you going? You can’t go out there. I think it’s best we stay inside until help comes.”
For a moment, his mom sounded completely levelheaded; a stark contrast to the way she looked, all disheveled and covered in a fresh sprinkle of plaster dust that had drifted down from the ceiling.
“I don’t think help’s coming, Ma. At least not for a while. And I heard screaming outside.”
&nb
sp; She let go of his forearm and put her cool palm on the side of his face, a resigned look coming over her features. “Your father would be proud.”
Brad mustered up a smile. It wasn’t much, considering the circumstances.
“Lock the doors. Don’t answer for anyone except me,” he said.
Still touching his face, his mother said, “Be careful, Bradley.”
The darkness was near complete, though it was much too early. By his estimate, it was barely nine p.m.; though in the summer that was right around the time the sun went down, this darkness was more like that found in the middle of the night.
Brad felt dread creeping into his mind. He couldn’t see the gun in front of him, let alone much else.
A fire burned in the center of town, offering the only source of light. It looked to be coming from the old and defunct courthouse, the one built sometime in the 1800s. It had been turned into a historic site for tourists coming through Woodhaven, but Woodhaven didn’t get many tourists, so they wouldn’t miss the courthouse much. He saw the large columns burning, like rods of lightning perpetually hanging in the dark sky. From the same direction came shouts and screams; people he thought must be trapped inside the collapsed buildings or in the fissures that had opened up all over.
Brad thought of heading that way; it was only about a mile and a half away from his neighborhood, and it sounded like they needed all the help they could get up there. He looked back over his shoulder at his mother’s house. The Taurus sat off to the side of the driveway, already collecting dust, but probably enjoying the break it had been given.
Driving’s out of the question, he thought. For now, at least.
The roads were all torn up and cracked, and the Taurus certainly wouldn’t make it very far, when it could barely last under normal circumstances. The Kia might make it, but he didn’t want to leave his mom stranded in the house with no means of escape.
Ravaged: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 1) Page 10
