His mother reached out and ran her hands through his hair, which clung sweatily to his brow. “Are you all right? Oh, my, I heard gunshots.”
“Y-yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “We’re fine. We’ll all be fine.”
“What’s going on out there?” she asked.
“Ma’am, you wouldn’t believe him if he told you,” the younger man said from the living room.
Mom looked back at Brad; he shrugged. Then he set the shotgun up against the wall and went back into his mother’s room to get the rest of the shells. Not many were left, but some was much better than none.
His mother was still standing in the short hallway when he was done.
“C’mon, Ma, I’ll introduce you.” Brad put his hand on his mother’s shoulders.
As soon as he made contact, he recoiled as if shocked. Her flesh burned like fire. Even through her thin cardigan, he could feel it.
“Ma…are you all right?” he asked in a low whisper.
She looked at him with what seemed like alarm in her eyes. Brad recognized that look; it was the same one she’d worn during the months after Dad’s suicide.
“I’m fine, sweetheart. A little worried about you, but glad you’re back.” Now she touched him, and he didn’t feel the same heat he’d felt earlier.
Did I imagine that? Am I going crazy?
Too much was going on. Brad’s head felt like it was going to explode any second.
Mom walked past him, toward the living room. Brad watched her go.
Is she limping? Is she hurt?
She stopped at the arm of the couch, and Brad followed her in.
“Guys, this is my mother, Brooke Long,” he said. The whole time he spoke, he watched her closely.
She smiled a polite smile and then looked at the woman on the couch.
Brad pointed to the younger guy. “This is Derek. And that’s Jane.”
Derek got up off his knees and took Ma’s hand gently in his own. “Pleasure to meet you. Sorry it has to be in such…odd circumstances.”
“I’m Logan,” the big man said. “This sleeping beauty is my wife. We got in a car accident. We’re all a little banged up.”
“Is she all right?” Mom asked.
Logan nodded. “I think she will be. She’s a tough gal. That’s why I married her.” He offered a smile that looked out of place on his bloody, dirt-streaked face.
“I’m Brad,” Brad said, shaking Logan’s hand. “We haven’t officially been introduced. Nice to meet you. Sorry I didn’t—”
Logan waved a large hand. “Certain circumstances kinda prevented that. Don’t worry about it.”
“Can I get you anything?” Mom asked. She smiled. This, Brad noticed, also looked out of place. “Food, water, lemonade?”
“Thank you,” Logan said, “but I think it would be wise to start rationing the food and water.”
“Jesus, already?” Derek said, looking at the big man.
He nodded. “We don’t know how long we’ll be trapped in here.”
“Luckily for us,” Brad said, trying to lighten the mood, which seemed all but impossible after the things he’d seen—the Russells, the monsters, the car accident, “Mom keeps the fridge stocked.”
“Do you have something we could clean up with? Hydrogen peroxide, Band-Aids?” Logan asked.
Mom nodded. “Just a moment.”
She turned, wavered, and nearly lost her balance. Brad struck out to catch her by the arm before she could go tumbling into the side table and the glass lamp.
“Mom,” he said, “sit down. I’ll get the stuff.”
She blinked hard a couple of times. “I’m fine.” But she went to the chair regardless.
“Shock,” Derek said. “You and me both, ma’am.”
Brad headed to the bathroom. From the medicine cabinet, he pulled out hydrogen peroxide, a box of bandages, wet wipes—since the water wasn’t working—and a roll of gauze. In the sink, he noticed drops of runny red, like blood, but his mind was in overdrive and he didn’t put two and two together.
When he came back to the living room, the woman on the couch had her eyes opened wide. She gawked at everyone.
“What…what the heck? Where am I?” she asked.
Logan didn’t answer immediately. Instead, a smile erupted on his face and he bent low, kissing his wife’s cheek. An undercurrent of happiness—for the moment, out of place—rippled through the living room’s atmosphere.
Such a big man, Brad thought, shouldn’t act like this. It was completely out of character, but he had never been in love himself. He hadn’t known the feeling of having your heart full for someone else. Now, the idea of never falling in love unnerved him. If this really is the end of the world, the end of the human race…
“My head,” Jane said. “Ow, what happened?”
“We crashed,” Logan answered.
Jane looked at him confusedly. “By ‘we’ you mean me.”
Logan smiled at her. He didn’t respond to this question, instead opting to wrap his wife up in a big hug.
The next hour was spent cleaning up and getting to know one another.
The Harpers came from Stone Park. Logan himself had been, save for the forest-dwelling animals, one of the closest beings to the void. Derek, too. They worked at the Monolith, a theater Brad had never been to because old movies didn’t interest him—not many movies did at all, actually.
Movie theater clerk was not the job Brad expected Logan to have. A professional football player or a loan shark’s henchman would’ve been more fitting. Of course, he kept this to himself.
Mom didn’t speak much. Brad kept catching her looking toward the window whenever a sound rattled the panes—and that happened often.
They did not eat; they did not drink.
Nearly forty-five minutes into this first hour they were all under the same roof, Jane stood up. Logan rose with her, his hands out in case she fell. She didn’t, and was able to walk around the living room without much problem.
Fifteen minutes passed. No sounds came from the outside. Brad found himself sucked into the window’s gravitational pull. He parted the curtains and looked out at the dark street, though he couldn’t see much of anything. When he’d seen the first monster, the one devouring Mr. Russell—an incident that seemed more and more like a bad dream as the time passed—he remembered seeing its eyes. They glowed a deep red, a devilish red. That meant he’d be able to see them out in the pitch blackness. Since he didn’t, he figured he was in the clear.
For good measure, Brad crossed the living room. Derek was telling a story about Logan at work that was making Jane smile wide. Now didn’t seem the time for funny stories, but Brad guessed that it was better than the truth of the matter—which was the fact that Stone Park and Woodhaven were lost, and mostly likely the rest of the world was following in their footsteps.
The voices he’d heard all those days ago, back at the apartment, came into his head now. Portuguese or Spanish, the meaning was the same: Our blood for them! Our blood for them!
Brad clenched his teeth, stifling a shudder before it could take hold of his body, and moved into the kitchen, looking out the window above the sink.
A fire was still burning in the town square, the dark smoke rising above the woods behind their house. He estimated the square would be ash by the time the sun rose…if the sun ever rose again.
He no longer heard gunshots. That was either really bad or really good. Either the townspeople a couple miles away had eradicated the threat—which, thanks to experience, Brad knew was possible—or the threat had eradicated the townspeople…
If you had held a gun to Brad’s temple and made him guess what had happened, he would’ve said that the townspeople were all gone, that they were now ravaged corpses like Mr. Russell.
The shudder that he had stifled in the living room hit him full-force. He gripped the edge of the kitchen sink to keep himself upright.
Oh God, what’s happening?
Suddenly, he didn
’t want the sun to rise at all, because when it did, he would see the monster he had shot down in the street right after the Harpers crashed. If he never saw one of those again, it would be too soon.
He headed back into the living room.
“We have to go,” he said. “We’re not safe here.”
All eyes were on him. He wasn’t sure if he liked it; it made him feel…anxious.
“Where?” Derek asked.
Logan stood up, dwarfing Brad. “The only place I can think of is the camp the military have set up on that football field in Akron.”
Brad shook his head. It took a lot of courage to refute anything a man as big as Logan said. “That won’t be safe, either,” he said. “It’s too open.”
“I think our best bet is staying right here,” Mom said. “For now, at least. This’ll all blow over soon. Whatever’s happening, the troops will get it under control.”
“Mom,” Brad said, looking into her eyes, which he noticed were becoming more and more vacant as the clock ticked on. “There are things outside. Things from the void.”
“Is that where you think they came from?” Jane asked. She, like his mother, hadn’t seen what Brad had seen.
“Wherever they came from…it wasn’t Earth,” Brad answered.
Logan nodded his agreement, then spoke up. “I don’t think we’re in any state to make a run for it yet. Jane’s hurt.”
She’ll be a lot worse than hurt if we stick around here, Brad thought. She’ll be dead. We’ll all be. Of course, Brad couldn’t say this to the big man. He couldn’t say it to anyone, because saying it, he believed, would make it true. That was a realization he wasn’t ready for. Not yet.
“What should we do, then?” he asked instead, almost mockingly.
But Logan gave a serious answer, though he’d no doubt heard Brad’s tone. “We stay here. We regroup. There’s no reason to go plunging into the darkness until we have to.” He turned his gaze to Brooke Long, who sat in an armchair in an almost catatonic state. “That is, if you don’t mind us staying a while, ma’am?”
Mom didn’t answer right away. All of them watched her, but unlike Brad, this didn’t seem to fill her with anxiety; she hardly noticed.
“Ma?” Brad prompted.
Blank eyes became alive again. Mom said, “Yes?”
“Mr. Harper here was asking you a question,” Brad replied.
“Oh, of course. Stay as long as you like. We have plenty of food and water,” Mom said.
“I don’t think it’ll be long,” Jane said. “Things will surely start clearing up…right?” Before anyone answered, she rubbed her temples and moaned.
Logan patted her thigh. “Lie back, darling. Get some rest. Don’t worry about anything.”
Easier said than done, Brad thought.
Then the thought flittered away; maybe Logan was right, maybe it all would be okay.
By one a.m., Brad was the only one still awake in the house.
A couple hours before, they had all shared a meal of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips, washed down with glasses of milk, but Brad had hardly eaten. He couldn’t. Every time he took a bite out of the sandwich and a little jelly squirted out of the sides of the bread, his mind brought up the images of Mr. Russell, the blood-soaked carpet, the dangling entrails and guts, and the white knobs of his spinal cord. Brad wasn’t sure if he’d ever eat again.
At dinner, Logan, looking much too large for his mother’s dining room table, suggested they all get some sleep.
“If you can…” he added. “No one gets much done when they’re exhausted, and we all look beyond exhausted.”
Mom thought that was a great idea. So did the others. Jane was already passed out on the couch, her forehead now turning a purplish blue around the gash she’d been gifted from the car accident.
Brad tried going to sleep. He lay down and brought the covers over his head like he was a child again, hiding from the boogeyman, but no sleep came. His brain thought then was the perfect time to play through the events of the day.
Still, it didn’t feel real to him. None of it did.
A few days ago, everything was normal. He was getting drunk on the nights he wasn’t out delivering pizzas, and the biggest problem in his life was whether or not he’d be thrown out of college. Now in a span of hours, it seemed he had aged a decade, and gained more than a lifetime’s worth of worries and troubles.
He looked over at the shotgun propped up against his nightstand. Loaded. More shells were lined up around his lamp. Not even that weapon made him feel safe.
Would he ever feel safe again?
Then a voice out of the darkness of his mind came to him, loud in the quiet of the night. It was his father’s voice.
You have to make it safe. The world is ending, and no one’s gonna protect you or your mom anymore. You’ll have to protect yourselves.
As usual, Kevin Long was right.
Brad got out of bed and went into the garage, where all his father’s old tools were. He got a hammer, nails, and a crowbar. The first thing he took apart was an old TV stand they never used. From it, he got three large pieces of heavy wood that he used to barricade the windows in the kitchen, the hall, his bedroom. The light banging of the hammer on the nails woke no one.
He continued this for almost an hour, until another earthquake stopped him dead in his tracks. This one wasn’t as intense as the first two, but it did seem closer.
Voices came from the living room. Brad hadn’t blocked any windows in there yet, saving them for last because of the noise that would possibly be heard inside and out.
Logan’s was the first voice Brad could understand.
“Stay away from the windows,” he said. “Another earthquake. It’ll pass.”
Brad left the kitchen to join the others in the living room. The whole house seemed to shake, and each step he took was difficult. A couple times, he had to hold on to the wall for support.
Then came Derek’s voice, very small and full of fear.
“Guys…” he said, “that’s not—this isn’t an earthquake.”
“What?” Logan asked.
When Brad entered the living room, he saw Derek crouched under the bay window, the curtains above him parted slightly.
The vibrations in the ground became constant. Now they were like a giant’s heartbeat.
Thump...thump…thump…
As if something huge was…walking?
Brad found himself drawn toward the window. Three steps before he would reach it, the glass exploded. Shards sprayed every which way, cutting the curtain to ribbons, the force knocking the rod from the wall.
Jane screamed behind him, the sound muted by the thump…thump… thump…
Brad dropped and covered the back of his neck with laced fingers. The damage was done, though. And then he heard it—the great bellowing of some even greater beast. The sound was that of whales communicating in the dark depths of the ocean, a lonely sound, a dangerous sound. He looked up and wished he hadn’t.
All he could see through the ruined bay window were legs. Four of them, like walking tree trunks. They were the color of sickness, a greenish, squeamish gray; they looked as hard as concrete. Tentacles as long and thick as branches hung from what Brad thought of as the creature’s head, but he couldn’t be sure.
Then one of the legs came down on the Honda and crushed the sedan into a pancake, never slowing its pace.
Logan and Derek watched from the window, as still as statues, like Brad, not even breathing.
For what felt like a long moment, Brad waited. He waited for death, waited for that monstrosity to demolish the very house they were huddled in, like it had done to the Honda.
But death never came. Not that night, at least.
The creature continued down Chestnut Road until the darkness swallowed it up.
Somehow, Brooke Long slept through it all.
19
Infected
After the passing behemoth, Brad suggest
ed they board up all the windows and doors, like he had been doing before the tremors caused by the beast woke them all up.
Derek resisted. “If we stay in here any longer, that thing is gonna smash us to bits, man. Boarded up windows or not, I don’t wanna be here. We need to get far, far away. A different galaxy.” He sounded frantic. His face dripped sweat, and his eyes had become perpetually huge and unblinking since that land-leviathan had gone past.
Logan gripped the kid around the shoulders—though he was only a decade older than Derek, he would always think of him as ‘the kid’—and gave him a light shake, trying to calm him down.
“What?” Derek snapped. “You saw that! We all saw that! And then there was the fucking bear out of hell that attacked the car. They’re everywhere! It’s like a plague.”
Logan nodded. That was all he could do. He knew it as well as everyone else: they—those things—were everywhere.
That was exactly why they needed shelter. With only one shotgun between them, an array of injuries from the car accident, and God knew what else lurking out there in the shadows, their chances of survival were less than none. Probably dipping into the negatives.
“Derek,” Logan said, looking into the boy’s eyes. “I need you to take a deep breath—”
“Take a deep breath? Are you serious? How are you so calm, man? Did you not see what I saw? There are things from Hell outside. They’re not nice, either!” he spouted, words running together so fast, Logan couldn’t understand.
“I know, Derek, I know. I saw it, too. But listen, our best bet is to ride this out. We stay indoors. We don’t draw attention to ourselves. We let nature run its course.”
Derek laughed then. A manic laugh that didn’t exactly scream humor. “Nature is already running its course, Logan! And, news flash: we’re losing!”
“Derek, honey,” Jane said from the couch. She was sitting up, shaking. Logan hated seeing her like this. “Please. Just listen.”
Derek closed his eyes. Took a deep breath. “I’m—I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just—”
Logan nodded, patted him on his shoulder. “I know.” Then he turned toward Brad, who stood in the doorway of the kitchen holding a hammer, his fingers so tight around the handle, the bone stood out through his skin, glowing in the room’s darkness—they had since snuffed out the few candles they’d placed around the living room. “Brad has the right idea. You still up for a little late-night carpentry?”
Ravaged: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 1) Page 13
