The Darkness

by W. J. Lundy

  THE DARKNESS

  W. J. Lundy

  The Darkness

  © 2014 W. J. Lundy

  Phalanx Press

  V2.19.15

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental. All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Chicago Suburbs

  Day of the Darkness, Plus 5

  Everything was closed. Jacob’s co-workers jokingly called it a FEMA holiday, like a snow day in the summertime. Office buildings were locked up and the government declared a national shutdown with only essential employees required to report. It was rumored that police officers and even medical professionals were starting to walk off the job, refusing to report for duty.

  Jacob willingly agreed to working from home until the crisis passed, happy to avoid the traffic for a few days. A long break from all the out-of-town travel would be nice, and he could spend some much-needed family time with his wife and young daughter. As the emergency progressed, internet connections and even the phones began to fail. He tried to call in to the daily meetings at the factory but received a fast busy signal and dead phone lines instead.

  Grocery stores sold out of everything as the mass hysteria slowly spread. Gas, milk, eggs, water… everything was hoarded, or the prices raised beyond the average person’s reach. By the time Jacob figured out something real was going on, it was too late. He drove by the local superstore and saw armed guards at the entrance of the parking lot where shoppers were required to show cash before they could enter. The store delivery trucks didn’t even bother to unload their goods as merchandise was being exchanged right out of the backs, like a shady underground marketplace.

  The news just seemed so far away and foreign. It was something that happened in the third world, not here in the suburban neighborhoods of Chicago. Jacob sat on his living room sofa watching a looping satellite broadcast of the chaos in Atlanta. The anchors warned that the rioters had already breached the lobby. Stairwells were full of piled furniture and the elevators sat dead at the bottom of their shafts, but still the rioters came and destroyed everything in their path—nothing was left untouched. Not knowing what else to do, Jacob stared at the TV. The loop always stopped at the enraged face of a man with pearly black eyes; the image would freeze before the video re-started.

  Jacob turned to watch her pace the room while she dialed the phone over and over, receiving the same steady tone as a response. He knew she was afraid; everyone was. She wanted to go to her parents’ home near the lake, north of the city. It was out of town and quiet there; maybe she was right, but how would they get there? Jacob knew the city wouldn’t be safe—even the outer areas of Chicago would be chaos—and he couldn’t risk it on the interstate, not with Katy. Laura suggested the trains, but that was the last place he wanted to be stranded.

  He knew the phones were down, but she tried nonetheless. Once she realized she would have no contact with her mother, she would blame him. He knew it was unreasonable but something he would accept if it helped her. Jacob didn’t want her to give up on him; he needed her to stay focused. He needed her and Katy to be strong. He couldn’t do it alone.

  “Give it a couple days, Laura; if nothing changes, we'll try for the city.”

  Day of the Darkness, Plus 7

  “What happened?” Jacob muttered, pulling his head away from the airbag. He tasted blood from a broken lip and smelled oil dripping from a hot motor. Looking over the dash and through a broken windshield, he could see a second vehicle with steam still pouring from its radiator. Jacob could barely hear his daughter, Katy, screaming over the weather siren. In the side mirror, he caught a glimpse of a man in denim dragging his little girl from the car, then lifting her to his chest before turning to run.

  Jacob strained and painfully pressed against the driver’s door, the metal screeching as he forced it open. Losing his balance, he rolled from the car and onto the street. His daughter’s screams faded. He felt anger rising, giving him strength; he scrambled to his feet and ran after the screams. His daughter fought, screaming and flailing her arms and legs while scratching at the man’s eyes and nose as she struggled. The man dropped her and put his hands to his face, but when he saw Jacob, he turned to lunge. The man’s eyes locked on his, and he howled while reaching for him wildly with oily, blood-covered hands.

  With his hands shaking violently, Jacob raised his Ruger P89 pistol and fired quick shots from only feet away. The first rounds went low; the others, directly to the man’s chest. Jacob twisted away and dodged as the man's momentum carried him past before the body tumbled to the ground, landing on its stomach. Not waiting to see if he was dead, Jacob turned hard and stepped on the man’s back. Enraged, he fired one more shot into his head. The body stiffened before going slack. Jacob’s terrified daughter screamed from where she lay on the pavement; he scooped her up and ran back to the car.

  On the passenger side, Laura was struggling with a second attacker. The large man was on top of her and almost had her pinned to the ground. Jacob sat Katy down, ran full speed, and then, leaping onto the man’s back, grabbed him under the arms. Rolling forcefully, they tumbled away from Laura and into the grass. The crazed attacker was able to gain position on Jacob. Having the advantage in strength and weight, he tussled and twisted until Jacob found his own back to the ground. The man now stared down into Jacob’s face as his hands grasped Jacob’s throat and began to squeeze.

  Looking into the man’s dark eyes, Jacob saw no emotion that could be reasoned with. Like a rabid dog, the man seemed to have no regard for Jacob’s life. Jacob pushed against the man’s chest and gasped for air while struggling under the attacker’s weight. The man suddenly dropped and fell limp over Jacob’s chest, having taken a full kick to the side of the head from Laura. Jacob hoisted the body up and rolled it off him. Grabbing at the grass, he pulled himself away and pushed up into a sitting position. He coughed and choked for oxygen as he looked at the unconscious man. His attention was distracted when he noticed Laura was on the ground, sobbing and pulling Katy into her lap.

  The attacker let out a moan and stretched an arm, reaching for Jacob’s ankle. Jacob pawed at the grass until he found the pistol and then turned back to face the man. Leveling the weapon, he shot the attacker once in the face, snapping back its head violently, causing the girls to scream.

  Staggering back to his feet, he looked in both directions. Jacob's focused tunnel vision faded enough to allow him to see everything. The sounds of the wailing weather siren seemed to come back even louder than before. It was over; the threat stopped. Suddenly exhausted, he struggled to stay on his feet as adrenalin pushed spasms through his legs and knees. Jacob turned and looked around him; his neighbors were standing on their porches, staring at him accusingly. He ignored them and reached down for Laura.

  “Are you okay? Come on, get Katy back in the house,” he said, lifting Laura to her feet.

  Laura looked at him in shock. “What happened?”

  “Get Katy back in the house, Laura!” he said over the sound of the siren.

  Laura looked at the dead man at her feet. She screamed, “What happened?”

  Katy began crying hysterically.

  With his heart still racing, he lifted Katy and handed her off to Laura. “Please get her inside; I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Laura turned her head to look at their neighbors before backing away toward the porch. She held Katy’s head to her shoulder in a belated attempt to shield the young girl from the ho
rror of what lay on the ground.

  He watched them move across the porch and waited for the door to close behind them. Jacob’s head ached and the sound of the siren clouded his mind as he struggled to collect his thoughts on what had happened. He stepped to the house and wearily dropped to the porch steps. They were trying to flee to the country, or at least get to Laura's parents north of the city—anywhere as far away from people as they could get. He remembered pulling out of the garage and barely entering the street before the speeding car collided with them. But the men… where did they come from? They must have been pursuing the other car. Why did they attack them?

  Under the spiteful eyes of his neighbors, Jacob stood and went to the other car.

  “Thanks for the help, guys,” he said under his breath.

  He ignored their stares and opened the passenger-side door, stretched across the front seat, and checked the man’s bloodied wrist for a pulse. The driver was dead; the lack of a seatbelt had allowed his body to thrust partway through the windshield.

  Looking in the backseat, he found it filled with luggage. He saw a plastic grocery bag stuffed with oranges and bottles of water. Jacob pondered them briefly before taking the bag and joining his wife back in the house. Ignoring his neighbors’ cold stares, he shut and locked the house door behind him.

  Moving across the room to a window, Jacob parted the curtains and looked into the street. The incessant wailing of the weather siren was better behind the plate-glass window. Even with the power out, it wailed. Why had it not been shut off yet? Jacob looked at the smoking vehicles in the street and saw his neighbors approaching.

  The anxiety built up in his chest; he was sweating and he felt his heart racing. Jacob was fighting off panic… and losing. He had to do something.

  “Laura, get everything and take it upstairs to our bedroom,” he said.

  Laura was in the kitchen, handing Katy a glass of water and still trying to calm her. “Why? What are we doing?”

  “We need to lock ourselves in. I’m afraid they’re coming. We need to be ready.”

  “Those things we saw on the news? Here? Is that what that was?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Laura, please… just get all the food and water upstairs. We don’t have much time.”

  Jacob went to the garage and shut the overhead door before retrieving his cordless drill and a box of deck screws. He made a quick pass through his home, locking and bolting every door, closing every curtain.

  By habit, he went to arm the alarm by the front door, his fingers nearly touching the buttons. With no power and the backup batteries long dead, the alarm was useless. Jacob shook his head before running up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  He joined his wife on the second floor and followed her into the master suite. Their bedroom was large and square; an antique armoire rested against an interior wall close to the door. A single, long window faced the street, opposite the entrance to the bathroom. A king-sized bed in the center of the room, with a nightstand on each side, filled the rest of the space. Jacob moved to the foot of the bed where Laura had placed everything and took a quick inventory of their belongings. He nodded before turning away to bolt the heavy hardwood bedroom door.

  Jacob had always been security conscious… or paranoid, as his friends called it. He was on the road a lot for work, and he wanted his family safe when he was away. Laura was against guns and refused to learn to use them, which meant Jacob's firearms were kept in a closet safe when he was away. As a compromise—in Jacob’s mind, at least—he’d installed a heavy exterior door at the entrance to their bedroom. The heavy bolt he had added, to secure it further, effectively turned their master suite into a safe room.

  Jacob stopped and looked at the door with the brass bolt lock, talking quietly to himself. “Better than that damn security alarm I spent all the money on,” he said. “More practical too… and passive, doesn’t require electricity like the alarm. Nothing to train or learn and no fancy monitoring companies… a one-time expense to install, and we have a barrier between us and them…”

  He paused when Laura asked, “Who are you talking to?”

  Jacob put his hand on the door again and rattled the knob. Checking the lock, he felt the clunk of the steel bolt riding into the two-by-six stud frame.

  “Nobody,” he said.

  Jacob lifted the drill and a handful of screws. He drove the four-inch screws in deep—one in each corner, two in the top, and two on each side.

  “What are you doing?” Laura protested. “You’re wrecking the door.”

  Jacob stopped and looked her in the eye. He could see she was in shock and not fully comprehending the situation. She still didn’t believe it. In denial, she blocked it out and ignored all of it. Even having felt the violence firsthand in front of their home, she wasn’t getting the urgency of the situation. This wasn't something that happened far away; the violence had reached their front yard. People were killing out there, and nobody was coming to save them. They would have to save themselves.

  Laura watched the same news reports he did—the attacks, the disappearances, the mobs, the warnings from police to stay off the streets. At first, they’d compared them to events expected with third-world mentality, like the massacres in the Congo and attacks in Rwanda—even the LA Riots; they simply did not make any sense.

  The newscasters relayed messages from mayors urging residents to stay in their homes and wait out the crisis. The government was working on it and the police were organizing a response. The National Guard mobilized and set up evacuation centers. Although in some cases, the evacuation centers were as dangerous as the streets. Several reports aired news of them being wiped out… everyone lost… everyone dead. The warnings were shown on the TV in long, repeating broadcasts before the power went out.

  Secured on the second floor, Jacob went to the window and observed the street. The road was wide with tall shade trees on both sides and ran deep into the suburban neighborhood. Well-maintained, cookie-cutter homes sat back from green lawns, interrupted by the destroyed car that was still smoking from the collision just beyond his own driveway. Some of his neighbors had left their porches and gathered around it, talking and taking photos with their phones of the dead men.

  “What are they doing? Damn it, they need to get inside,” Jacob shouted. “The news said to stay in your homes. Did they not see those men? Something is wrong, Laura; they were crazed and couldn’t be reasoned with! They need to get back inside!”

  Laura went to the window to stand beside him and looked out. “They’re doing what you should have done, Jacob! The right thing. You can’t just flee the scene—”

  “No, it’s too dangerous; I don’t know what they are. Bath salt nutters, zombies, crazed maniacs… Laura, I’m afraid—”

  He was interrupted by a loud, blood-curdling scream from down the street. Jacob strained and focused through the shade of the trees lining the road. A woman was running barefoot toward them and screaming, her ripped clothing covered in blood. She ran directly into a man standing by the wrecked cars. He tried to hold the frantic woman, but she struggled and pointed back down the road. She broke free of the man and continued to scream as she ran away.

  Jacob stared in horror when he saw what the woman had pointed at; the mob was just as the newscasters described—crazy and bloodthirsty. Their black eyes stared straight ahead and they shrieked as they filled the street from curb to curb, charging fast like a herd of bulls. He saw the neighbors around the cars begin to scatter while they fled back to their homes. The mobs broke up and splintered to follow them up onto porches and crash through doors.

  Jacob grabbed his wife, pulled her to the floor and out of sight, and then put a hand over her mouth to muffle her cries. He crawled across the floor with his wife in tow and grabbed his daughter. He brought them both into the en suite bathroom and sat them on the floor, holding them tight and urging them to be quiet.

  “What’s happening?” Laura sobbed.

  �
�I don’t know,” Jacob whispered back.

  Jacob waited for the noise to stop, the screaming and the pleas for help to fade. He ripped down the shower curtain and, walking low, moved back into the bedroom. He peeked cautiously through the window and saw that the street was clear. The destroyed cars remained, but there was nothing else left. The mob was gone and, with the exception of the dead man still poking through the window, there were no bodies—even the two men he killed were gone. Tattered clothing littered the street and lawns; blood streaks and drag marks showed where victims had been pulled away. The things, whatever they were, seemed to have consumed everything in their path. They recovered their dead and took away the living.

  Why leave the man in the car and take the rest? Jacob asked himself.

  Searching, he looked at the neighboring houses. Two of them were destroyed, their windows broken and the doors shattered. He then looked at the house across from him. In the second-story window, he could see his neighbor, Smitty, looking back. He waved to Jacob. Jacob returned his gaze and shook his head sadly before stretching the shower curtain across the window to further block out the light.

  Chapter 1

  A chilling, uncomfortable silence woke him. His wife and daughter lay sleeping beside him, their soft breathing the only noise to reach his ears. Not wanting to move, he opened his eyes and stared at a solitary fly walking across the ceiling. His clothing was soaked with sweat, but he didn’t dare remove his heavy shirt and jeans. The room grew hot during the night with the electricity out and the air conditioning along with it. The summer heat and humidity made the space nearly unbearable. Quietly, he worked his way around his daughter, Katy, and pulled his legs to the side of the bed before standing in the blacked-out bedroom.

  He was normally a patient man, taking his time to ensure things were done right. He wasn’t one to jump to conclusions or make thoughtless decisions—probably why he was good at his job working as a setup engineer. He traveled the country from plant to plant troubleshooting assembly line operations, fixing bottlenecks, and finding solutions to problems. Jacob wasn’t hasty in action; he liked to analyze problems and attack them with a well-conceived plan.