The Darkening

by Paul Antony Jones

  Birdy shook her head solemnly.

  "Not much use for one," said Tyreese.

  "Great, just great," said Collins. "So, we stay here, until morning at least. Hope those things don't notice us." He picked up Tyreese's cell phone and dialed the number for the station again but when he put the phone to his ear all he heard was dead air. There wasn't even a dial tone now. He hung up and tried again with the same result. Collins looked at his watch. It was just after eleven at night. He took his pistol from its holster, popped the magazine out and checked how many rounds he had left. He placed the weapon on the table, then fished out another two full magazines and a Taser. He laid them next to the pistol.

  "So we stay here then," Collins said finally. "Wait it out, keep trying the phone until we reach someone that can help us. If we can't reach anyone, we wait until morning and then I'll go for help."

  Tyreese shook his head. "Bad move."

  "Why?"

  "Because as far as we know, we're surrounded and outmanned. It's not going to take those things long to figure out where we are and come looking for us."

  Collins stared blankly at Tyreese.

  "They're smart," the big black man said. "You heard the old woman in the lobby. She was aware of us. She talked to us. Whatever they are, they're still able to think like us, and she was waiting down there to make sure we didn't get out of the building. Think about it. The old woman herded us back up here. She could have grabbed any of us if she really wanted to, instead they just took Mulroney. If they'd wanted to take all of us, they would have."

  "That's ridiculous," said Collins.

  "No," said Birdy. She stepped around from the kitchen. "The one on the stairwell, the one that used to be my mom, she tried to use it against me. Tried to get me to come down to her. And I would have gone, too, if it hadn't have been for Tyreese."

  "You're saying they want to keep us here?"

  Birdy nodded and Tyreese raised his eyebrows to confirm that that was exactly what they thought.

  "That's just... just..." he was running out of adjectives to use in his defense. "Whatever! Leaving is out of the question. We stay here until dawn and if, and only if, I reestablish a line of communication with the emergency services, we'll talk about walking out of here. But until then, we wait. Am I understood?"

  Birdy shrugged, pulled a chair out from under the kitchen table and sat down. She folded her arms and laid her head against them, but she didn't close her eyes. She watched the two men stare at each other.

  "Not like I have much of a choice," Tyreese grumbled.

  "Exactly. So, how about some food?" Collins said.

  Tyreese looked at Birdy. She watched him with her big eyes, her face unreadable.

  "Hungry?" he asked her.

  Birdy nodded.

  "I'll fix us some sandwiches," Tyreese said.

  •••

  "You ever heard of a slow earthquake?" said Tyreese, after the three survivors had eaten their sandwiches.

  Collins shook his head, no. "Is that like the not-so-bright brother of a regular earthquake?" Collins joked.

  Tyreese ignored the cop's poor attempt at humor.

  "No, a slow earthquake is a quake that can go on for days or even months. Thing is, you don't even realize it's happening, but your world is breaking apart right under your feet, right under your nose. It's just as destructive as a regular quake, more so sometimes, but you don't know it's happening until it's just too late."

  "So what's that got to do with this?"

  Tyreese pondered the question for a moment or two, gathering his thoughts before speaking. "That's what I think's been happening; this slow, steady accumulation of destructive energy that's been building up for the last few days, maybe longer. It's gone unnoticed for most of that time, but at some point all hell is gonna break loose and the end result, well, it's gonna be devastating. The West Coast is not going to be safe with this storm hitting us. Emergency services are going to be stretched to breaking point, communication services are going to be intermittent, if they stay up at all, and the people are all going to be nicely contained in their homes. Easy pickings for those... those vampires."

  "So it's sorta like the story about the frog slowly boiling in the saucepan of water; he just doesn't know how hot it really is until he's toast?" said Collins.

  "Right. Everything's okay, everything is normal, just a little warm... until it isn't."

  "Then we're dead," said Collins.

  "Yes," Tyreese nodded his head in agreement. "Then everyone's dead."

  •••

  Birdy's eyes flickered open. She was curled up on the only chair in Tyreese's living room, her head laid against its padded armrest. She vaguely remembered Tyreese picking her up from the kitchen table where she had fallen asleep and carrying her here. A sound—she wasn't quite sure what had caused it—had snapped her from sleep.

  Birdy listened. There was the quiet breathing of Detective Collins and Tyreese. Both men, exhausted, were asleep at the kitchen table; Detective Collins, head tilted back and snoring gently in his chair, Tyreese, his arms folded on the table, head resting on them.

  Beyond the apartment walls, rain still drummed against the building, now such a continual background noise, Birdy barely registered it.

  But neither of those sounds were responsible for having woken her. Birdy eased herself into an upright position and unfolded her legs from beneath her. She stood up, her calves cramping a little from being in one position for too long, then stretched—

  Tink!

  Birdy froze. There it was again; a sharp, but barely discernible noise that sounded like water dripping into a metal sink, except it had come from the other side of the living room, from the hallway leading up to the front door. She looked over at the kitchen sink to see if the faucet was leaking. It didn't look like it was. She cocked her head to one side, straining to listen for the sound again so she could identify exactly where it was coming from. A few minutes passed and Birdy began to think she had imagined it, but then...

  Tink!

  Definitely from the hallway, Birdy thought. She looked over at the two sleeping men, considered waking one of them, but then thought better of it, at least until she knew what was making the noise. She walked across the living room and leaned her head around the corner of the wall to the corridor; it was empty. The loveseat still leaned against the door. The door was still bolted and... something small and metallic glittered on the tiled floor of the entryway. She knelt down and picked it up; it was a small, short screw. There was a second and a third just a few feet away. She was quite sure they hadn't been there earlier, so where had they—

  Birdy squeaked in surprise and jumped backward as something fell from the ceiling and clattered to a stop at her feet. It took her a second or so to recognize the white 12-inch by 12-inch piece of metal as the cover for a ceiling vent.

  "Birdy?" Detective Collins's worried, still-sleepy voice reached her from the kitchen just as she looked up at the ceiling. Where the vent cover should have been there was now only the exposed opening of the ductwork.

  She gasped as two golden orbs appeared in the black space. Something began to ooze out of the vent. First fingers reached down and gripped the ceiling on either side of the vent, then a grossly distorted head forced itself through the space.

  Birdy heard Tyreese yelling her name as the two men scrambled to locate her in the tiny apartment, but she was frozen in place. A scream had lodged midway up her throat, unable to pass the sudden stricture created by the terror that squeezed her in its ever-tightening grip.

  The thing in the air vent was almost halfway out now, using grossly elongated fingers to lever itself down. The squashed face, vaguely familiar to the terrified girl, began to fill out like a deflated football slowly pumped full of air. Then the shoulders and upper torso oozed from the ducting. Birdy saw a belly button, then hips... then the remainder of the creature popped free of the air vent and dropped to the floor, its legs swinging beneath it as it f
ell so it landed with almost perfect cat-like agility on both feet with an odd squelch like mud thrown against a wall. It waited for a few moments, yellow eyes rooting Birdy to the spot, as its body began to return to its normal humanoid shape.

  Finally, she recognized the creature before her. It was Julio, sweet little Julio. The kid lived on the ground floor with his mom, just like Birdy. He was maybe eight, maybe nine, the kid was so skinny it was hard to tell. The few times they had talked he had told her his mom homeschooled him, but Birdy thought that maybe that wasn't true. Birdy didn't know how or why but she got the impression that his mom just didn't care enough about her child to send him to school. The kid always seemed so terribly sad, and Birdy had tried in her own childish way to befriend him.

  Julio remained crouched in the corridor, his naked skin covered in a thin sheen of liquid that glistened like sweat, but was more of a goo. His body looked even more emaciated than she remembered, folds of skin hung limply from his body, and every bone within it looked broken, as though he had fallen from a great height instead of the eight or so feet from ceiling to floor.

  "Julio?" she whispered.

  The broken creature did not respond, instead he began to shiver as though he were frozen. Then his body began to rattle like glass marbles shaken in a mason jar.

  "Jesus Christ on a fucking bike!" Collins exclaimed, as he and Tyreese rounded the corner into the corridor.

  The sound of Collins's voice partially broke the spell that held Birdy, and her legs finally returned to her control. She began to back away but was still unable to tear her eyes away from Julio. Then, even as she stared wide-eyed at the boy, his bones began to snap back into place with audible pops. The goo that covered his skin began to seep back into his body, filling out muscles and tissue and sinew as it was absorbed.

  Birdy felt Tyreese's hands clamp on each of her shoulders and pull her quickly backward until he had placed himself between the creature and her.

  "How did that get in here?" the detective demanded. He was standing alongside Tyreese now, his voice a disbelieving hiss.

  "Through the vent," Birdy said, her voice wavering, as she watched through the gap between the two men. "He... it... Julio came through the air conditioning vent."

  Birdy saw Collins glance up at the vent. It was no more than a foot square. Birdy could almost hear the detective's brain stalling as he tried to figure out how the boy had managed to get through that impossible space.

  The goo over Julio's body continued to soak into his skin, and his bones cracked and popped like freshly cut wood on a fire as his limbs mended. It was an insanity-inducing nightmare, yet not one of the three humans in the hall could tear their eyes away from the morbidly fascinating spectacle.

  "Jesus! It stinks," said Collins, blocking his nose with the crook of his elbow. The corridor was filled with the stench of swamp mud, rottenness.

  "Birdy, cover your ears," said Tyreese. He reached into the back of his pants waistband, pulled out the pistol she had brought to him and shot Julio once directly between the eyes.

  Julio's head snapped backward, a hole the size of Birdy's fist blown momentarily through his skull, but a second later, the hole began to fill in.

  "Where the fuck did you get that from?" Collins demanded, his eyes never leaving the injured boy.

  Tyreese ignored the question and shot Julio again, this time in the chest where his heart should have been. The bullet blew a fist-sized hole in the boy's chest, but the boy was merely staggered by the impact.

  Julio's mouth opened to reveal black teeth and a set of fangs... he leapt straight at Tyreese.

  •••

  Tyreese spat an expletive, automatically throwing his hands up to protect himself as he stepped back. He backed hard into Birdy, sending her sprawling to the floor. Then he was yelling in pain as the vampire child landed on his chest and latched on like a crazed cat, its fingers digging deep into his shoulder and chest. Tyreese felt like he had been stabbed by hot knives, the pain so intense his own mouth refused to open and let out the scream that erupted from him. The boy's mouth opened inhumanly wide and it dipped its head down toward Tyreese's exposed throat, as Tyreese fought to bring his arms up and push the creature off him.

  Collins dove forward, driving his forearm under the vampire's chin, forcing its head backward just as the jaws snapped shut with a sharp crack. He fastened his arm tighter around the thing's neck, securing it in a headlock.

  "Got it?" Tyreese managed to blurt out between his clenched teeth.

  "Yes... I think... Fuck! Do it," Collins yelled as the vampire struggled in his grip. It was wriggling so much he felt like he was wrestling with a shark.

  Tyreese, his face contorted with pain, began to pry the talons from his flesh. The child vampire was unbelievably strong, but he was stronger. One after the other, the bloody talons came out from Tyreese's muscles and flesh until, finally, he had freed one of the vampire's hands. Tyreese gripped the boy's hand around the wrist. For some reason, he had expected the creature's flesh to be cold, freezing, but instead it felt uncannily hot, like he was holding his hand above a stove burner. He began to pry the other hand off. The pain was awful as the three-inch-long talons slid out from where they had embedded deep into his chest muscle. Finally, they slipped free and Tyreese seized the creature's other wrist in his meaty hands, Collins's chokehold ensuring it could not escape. The creature thrashed in the detective's grip while its jaws snapped at Tyreese, dark red mucous-like goo flying from its mouth as its teeth clacked together on empty air.

  Tyreese could see sweat popping on Collin's forehead. The detective was having a hard time holding on to the boy. Tyreese felt blood trickling over his chest and left arm. His own strength was dwindling rapidly, too. They had to do something with this nightmare right now.

  "On three..." Tyreese grunted, nodding toward the front door. "Then we make a run for the kitchen." He looked over his shoulder, Birdy was up on her feet, a graze above her left eye from where she had collided with the wall. "Get to the kitchen," Tyreese yelled at her. He didn't have time to see if she had complied, the creature's struggles only seemed to be growing stronger while he and Collins were getting weaker by the second.

  "One. Two. Three!" He flung the vampire's arms away from him and stepped back out of reach. Collins, far more agile than Tyreese would ever have thought a man his size could be, rotated in place like an Olympic shot putter gearing up to throw, swinging the struggling vampire by its throat, then launched the thing that had once been a human child down the hall toward the front door.

  Neither man stopped to check whether their maneuver had worked as they both scrambled to get to the kitchen, but a satisfying thud confirmed it had.

  •••

  Birdy was in the kitchen already, backed into a corner between the window and a cupboard. Collins thought she had his pistol in her hand but quickly recognized it was a Taser. He grabbed it from her and checked to make sure the safety was off, his breath was coming in shallow bursts, his heart thumped loudly in his ears and his vision was swimming like he was under water. He held the Taser out at arm's length, trying to focus his vision beyond his shaking hands.

  Tyreese had grabbed a large Chef's knife from a block on the counter and he stood next to the detective, the knife held out in front of him.

  There was no sound from the corridor.

  "You okay?" Tyreese asked.

  "Fine. I'm fine," said Collins, not sure if the words were to reassure Tyreese or himself. He was, of course, far from fine. His entire world had just been disassembled in front of him and reassembled into this... this insanity. There could be no doubt now that whatever was happening here could not be put down to some kind of virus or biological attack. This was something utterly outside the realm of humanity's doing. What he had just seen... it was impossible. Impossible!

  Collins looked over at Tyreese. Blood stained the big black man's shirt at both shoulders and across his belly where the little bastard had sunk its talons
into him. A horrible thought occurred to Collins, one he did not want to even consider: what if whatever was wrong with the kid was contagious? He'd seen enough TV shows to know that if you got bit by a zombie, you became one, right? Did the same apply to vampires?

  "What do we do?" asked Tyreese, his voice low.

  Collins heard nervousness in the man's voice for the first time since all of this shit had started coming down, and that did not make him feel any better. "We wait for it, right here," he said.

  "Not much of a plan," Tyreese whispered back to him, with the slightest hint of humor.

  "Best I could come up with under the circumstances." Collins's mind began going back over all the old B-movies he'd watched when he was a kid. Count Dracula, werewolves, zombies. They were all make-believe, but they had all also drawn from the same mythos, so maybe there was a common denominator that they could use to their advantage. Tyreese had said that Birdy had used the sharp end of his broken cane to stake her mother. It had undoubtedly killed Birdy's mom, and he had already proven that his pistol was as good as useless. He cast his eyes around the apartment looking for anything that they might be able to fashion into some kind of an effective weapon to use against the vampire—There, I've said it, his inner voice whispered, vampire. I'm stuck in an apartment fighting a fucking vampire.

  The only wooden thing he could quickly lay hands on was the kitchen table and the four chairs that went with it. Everything else was either plastic or metal. They could use the legs of the chairs, but they would have to be broken apart first and then they would have to sharpen them before they would be of any use. He didn't think that the thing in the corridor was going to wait around for them to do that.

  "Christ!" he whispered. Listen to yourself, you're talking like this is real. There would be time for analyzing the situation later, if there was a later. Right now, he needed to maintain full situational awareness because unless that little bastard had disappeared back up into the air vent, then it was still lurking back there, in the corridor.