Come Into The Light
Page 6
She had her comfort zone and it was beginning to fray but she didn’t want to go back to the way things were. She found that she didn’t like being alone, not entirely, that maintaining her distance had become tiresome, distressing, and a part of her wanted to try and be different from the way she was but it was the hardest thing she ever had to face, yet Seth told her not to be scared and she tried her best not to be. Seth said that Harold wouldn’t do anything that she didn’t want him to do, that he could talk to him if she wanted him to. Yet the mere mention of those things would cause a frenzied feeling to bubble in her gut. Still it was like exploring new territory and she has always been willing to do that. And all Harold was doing was trying to be cute, funny, even when he was asking her all these questions. It was that idea of new territory all over again. Besides, he wasn’t as bad as she first thought. Maybe not the person she dreamed about but that was okay. He did have a lot of good qualities. He admired her abilities for one.
CHAPTER 11
Adam was in trouble, he just knew it. Seth could see him trapped by that thing with an army of sunbies advancing on all sides. He was plagued by the thought daily but he never let on because of the headaches that came in advance of the thought. That sun thing could be planting the thought in his head but that didn’t make him any less worried about Adam. Even if his son wanted nothing to do with him he had to know he was alright. He couldn’t leave without knowing and even though he was frantic he would disguise his feelings to Harold and Amy. They wouldn’t allow him to see his son. They’d be concerned about his safety. And besides having Harold with him would only upset his son and he wouldn’t risk Amy’s life. He had to do this on his own. Somehow he knew he had to do this on his own for everything to turn out right. Adam and Sara would have to come with them. He’d convince them. He had to. The headaches would go away then and he would be able to sleep. Nothing was going to stop him.
CHAPTER 12
Harold wasn’t crazy about the choice Amy made given the truck’s color. To him the Toyota Tundra stood out like a beacon and would create undue attention but Amy pushed aside his criticism saying the truck would light up like a fire ball burning through the streets, cleansing everything it came in contact with, so what was so wrong with that.
“I thought you were the type that didn’t like attention.”
The matter was closed, red it was and red it was going to stay. Harold shook his head, admiring her spirit.
“I’ll help you load up if you want.”
Amy said she could handle it. She would rather have him keep an eye on Seth, his memory lapses were getting worse. Harold didn’t think the lapses were all that bad believing Seth simply needed time to rest. He was just stressed, that’s all, they all were stressed. The sooner they left the city the better.
“Just do it, okay?”
“Whatever you say, ma’am.”
Harold watched her work in open-mouthed wonder as she circumvented the computer and started the engine. Was there anything she couldn’t do? She was sweating by the time she finished. That was the first time he saw her sweat, he kind of liked it.
When they returned with the truck Seth wasn’t where they left him in the storage area of the library. He said he was going to fill the time while they were gone with assessing their inventory but he wasn’t in the storage area, though this didn’t seem to be a big deal since they knew he had a tendency to get bored, needing a new stimulant to spark his interest, they went exploring. It was near the end of the day so they guessed he had probably gone up to the language section to continue brushing up on the Mandarin he was learning through one of the instruction books in braille. But he wasn’t in the language section or anywhere else. Usually he saw every part of the library as his own little home away from home and Harold hadn’t taken his wandering all that seriously even if Amy had. And now he wanted to kick himself for being so casual about Seth’s absences.
They searched outside the building and along the street, hoping he might have stepped out or lost his bearings, but Seth has never just stepped out without notifying them or lost his bearings and the search proved futile.
“He has ever done something like this?”
Amy was too occupied with bad thoughts to answer Harold’s question and Harold didn’t really want to know in any case. The Seth he knew would be incapable of simply disappearing, but he has had moments when he has been testy and irritable, even acting like he didn’t know who Harold was, and those moments had become more frequent lately. Harold had thought that his sleeplessness was responsible but what if something else was bothering him.
That was just the thing. At one moment he would be enjoying Harold and Amy’s company and at the next his face would twist strangely and he would be irritable, saying he was suffocating and needed to be alone.
Amy had to remind him to take his inhibitors. The testiness and the irritability were resulting from the headaches, and short of her feeding him his pills directly which he would have taken as an insult she had to live with his assurances that he was keeping up with the dosages.
“C’mon, let’s get in the truck and search the neighborhood. He couldn’t have gone far.”
A few minutes after they started out Seth was spotted turning down Delaware. They were immediately relieved to see him even in his current dogged condition. He was shambling along on tired feet looking distraught as he called out to his son. Seth didn’t respond to them as they pulled up beside him. He returned to shouting as Amy parked the truck and they got out.
“Stop it, Seth! What are you doing?”
Seth held back from his hollering to turn to Harold. His face had changed slightly beneath the shades. He seemed to be disoriented, straining to concentrate, “Is that you, Harold?”
“Yea, it is, now get in the truck.”
Amy was struck by a feeling that they were being watched. She looked about and saw sunbies appearing on the roofs, on the streets, some of them were armed. She grabbed onto Harold’s arm and pointed them out to him.
“Okay, Seth, now we’ve really got to go.”
“But my son. He’s here somewhere, I know it.”
A shot rang out from the rooftops and Seth was hit in the chest. Harold and Amy quickly grabbed hold of him and threw him into the truck, not bothering to look and see where the shot came from. There were more. The truck was besieged with bullets. The driver’s side window was shattered, the windshield was cracked, and a headlight blown out as Amy sped away from the curb. The left front tire was hit seconds later and then a rear tire. They had to abandon the truck. They carried Seth into a shopping center under gunfire and hid behind the jewelry counter as the shooting continued checking Seth’s condition. The bullet missed his heart but hit a lung. He was bleeding from the mouth and struggling to breathe. Of all the talents Amy had she didn’t know how to remove a bullet and neither did Harold.
“I know of a doctor who could help him but we need a vehicle.” Amy said.
“We can’t go out in that.”
“I know, but she isn’t in the city and we don’t have the time.”
There was more shooting. A larger barrage, a battle. Sunbies were flooding into the store with Rosa at the head. Her golden eyes had zeroed in on Harold and Amy with uncommon efficiency as if instructed to do so.
“I can help. You know I was a nurse, Harold. Let me help.”
Harold was shocked. It seemed like all his friends were lost to him. Amy had to get him to focus, to not look at Rosa, to not be swept into her spell, its spell.
“Let me help. Let us bring him to our lord for healing.”
There was a hallelujah expelled from the followers at her side yet before they could make an advance a commotion from outside made them turn and go. Rosa promised they would be coming back so they knew they couldn’t stay there. Luckily Harold found a wheelbarrow in the gardening area as they made their way to the back of the shop and into a corridor ranked with other shops toward the loading area at the rear of the center. All
of this took time and Seth was finding it harder and harder to breathe. They kept him on his side in order to clear his air passages but he still had problems breathing. They were afraid they were going to lose him but no other ideas came to them. They tried getting him to talk, to stop from fainting.
Harold broke a lock to pull up on the overhead door. There was a service van parked in the loading area, possibly illegally but who cared, there was no one around. There would be no greater opportunity. They worked quickly with Harold carting and distributing Seth into the van while Amy busied herself with the ignition system.
It was getting dark even though they were in the middle of the day. After Harold removed Seth from the wheelbarrow and laid him out on a canvas at the back of the van he looked up to see what was making things dark. He thought it might be a wave of clouds creating a storm but it hasn’t rained in ages. What he saw instead seemed even less possible and it left him speechless. The sun was being eclipsed. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it happening right there before his eyes. He thought he had to be dreaming.
“Amy, look, do you see?!”
“Shhh, someone will hear you.”
By the time he got to the front of the van he found her waiting for him with an expression of absolute amazement and a ring of keys jingling in her hand.
“They were wedged in beside the seat.”
“Damn.”
The van was opened in the back so Harold could keep Seth company while still talking to Amy as she drove. They had to take the long way back to the library, curving around the sounds of battle.
Amy told Harold to stay in the truck as she went into the library. Seth’s breathing was becoming shallow. He told Seth to hang on but he was becoming anxious. Seth wouldn’t survive much longer and Amy seemed to be taking too long. She could be in trouble. What if there was someone inside waiting for her? He wasn’t sure if there was any place that was safe and it was getting darker by the moment outside. At the same time it was getting darker he could feel a weight being lifted from his mind. The inhibitors worked but there was still the weight of something there yet now that something had lifted off of him. He could hear the distant sound of howling, of people in the midst of bewilderment and pain. The air of battle had turned silent.
He saw Amy’s pale face shoot through the gloom. She was carrying a back pack and a satchel as he flew open the doors in the back for her, grabbing on to the pack and the satchel as she handed them to him. He closed the doors as she got inside. She was out of breath but fine otherwise.
“I was afraid. I was almost going to go inside to look for you.”
“I’m okay. We have at least an hour’s drive ahead of us. Do you think he’ll make it?”
Harold looked down at Seth. What could he say? It was anybody’s guess.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, there’s a first-aid kit in the satchel if you think of anything that could help.”
The howling had gotten worse.
“What in the hell is that?”
“Just drive, okay.”
There was sporadic graffiti on the side of the library detailed n red ink saying FUCK THE SUNBIES, SINNERS REPENT, BLESS OUR GOLDEN CREATOR, and HOLY WAR as they pulled out of the parking lot. They encountered a mob after they went a couple of blocks. Amy, without missing a beat, locked the passenger door as someone tried to get in. All those sets of radiated golden eyes were coming out of the gloom and merging toward them. Rocks were thrown at the van. The passenger side window was busted in. A hand reached into the lock. Seth grabbed hold of a crow bar near the wheel wedge and stabbed at the hand sharply until he heard a scream and the hand recoiled. The butts of rifles were slammed against the metal sides of the van. The mob howled, they roared that God would not forsake thee. The sound was chilling, ear-splitting, but Amy kept her eyes on the road and pressed the accelerator to the floor running over bodies along the way. More objects flew within her sight and she had to duck when one of them came in close contact with her, poking a hole through the windshield instead and tumbling off the dashboard. It was a rock, some kind of rock, or maybe a piece of concrete from one of the cracked structures.
She kept driving and the howling, the clashes against the van continued. The sky had turned into a dark hole now, a dark abyss that shrank the sun’s light out of existence. One headlight blared into the night showcasing the devastation as Amy touched a knob on the steering column. The other headlight hung in shatters.
The road ahead of them stretched out to the city’s limit. They had to make it. They had to keep going while all around them there was madness and the darkened, cooling sky.
-The End—
About The Author
Stephen O’Rourke is a graduate of Scripps-Howard School of Journalism and the Hollywood Script-Writing Institute. He has done everything from being a farmhand to selling solar panels. His work has appeared in magazines and he lives in upstate New York.
COMING SOON
Severed Empire: Wizard’s War by Phillip Tomasso
Halfway To Anywhere – A Sci/Fi short story collection
Find these and other books at
www.mirrormatterpress.com
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
About The Author
COMING SOON