After Darkness Fell

by David Berardelli

  “Easy,” Shaw said. “Don’t pass out on us now.”

  “I’m fine.” I knew that was a lie, and I was sure Shaw knew it too, but it didn’t matter because I’d come this far and wasn’t about to stop because of a little queasiness. But as I waited for the waves of dizziness to subside, something began nagging at me.

  Shaw had just said “us.” What did that mean? The two of us? Was it just a figure of speech? Or another reference to what he’d said earlier, when he’d used the word “we”?

  This was something I was going to figure out later, after I’d confronted Simon and forced him to tell me what he’d done with Fields. Right now I had to concentrate on more important matters, such as staying alert. I couldn’t pass out; I refused to. “That bastard’s here, isn’t he?” I asked, my voice unsteady. “He’s here, and God only knows what he’s doing or what he’s done.”

  Shaw had already got out and climbed down. He held his .45 in his right hand. With his left, he pointed to the barn, then eased the door quietly shut.

  It registered immediately: Simon was in the barn. That was what brought me back: the cold, harsh reality that Simon had come to my place and gone into the barn. His reasoning didn’t matter. Neither did half a dozen questions that came with this scenario. The only thing that did matter was that the same bastard responsible for taking away the love of my love, for sending two killers onto our property, had come back, and now that he did, I was going to end this right here and now.

  My adrenaline thundered right back, and I went right back and tackled the seat harness. This time I was successful, snapping it open on the first try. I grabbed the Ruger, kicked open the door and slid out of the truck. The bottoms of my feet smacked the gravel, sending a torrent of hot tingling pain scurrying up my legs. I nearly collapsed, grabbing the door handle for balance. My legs would eventually work. They’d been through much more than this. All they needed to do was carry me up that hill.

  Once the tingling subsided, a heavy gush of heat flowed down my legs. It felt like I’d been lowered into a tub of warm water. Good. It was safe to start moving again. Shaw was already halfway up the hill, but I knew better than try and catch up with him. I gripped the Ruger tightly as I forced myself forward.

  About half a minute later, just as we were twenty yards or so from the barn, we heard a gunshot. It sounded like it had come from inside the barn.

  Shaw and I both stopped cold, and for several tense moments we listened to the silence. My head grew hot and my pulse pounded. My imagination ran wild, and once again I wondered who’d come with Simon in that truck. And why Simon was in the barn. And who’d fired that shot.

  Just then, Shaw took off in a dead run, heading straight for the barn.

  Another fresh batch of adrenaline shot through me. I veered off to the right, into the thick grass, toward the overgrown path that led to the lower floor of the barn that faced the road. This section contained the horse stalls, access to the silo, and the long row of stalls where Uncle Joe kept the cows when the farm was fully operational many years ago. I trudged through the weeds, the Ruger held straight out in front of me.

  When I was about twenty feet from the far corner of the barn, someone staggered outside. It was a man, and he held a gun in his hand.

  I froze.

  He turned toward me and I saw a large dark circle of blood growing in the center of his white sweatshirt. His arm hung loosely at his side, the barrel of the gun pointed at the ground.

  He looked strangely familiar—about my age and bulky, with a receding hairline and a scraggly brown beard. He looked like he’d once been muscular but had let himself go. He was a couple of inches taller than me, but at least twenty pounds heavier.

  It only took me a few moments to remember him. He was a year ahead of me in high school—a member of the football team and captain of the basketball team. He’d been voted Most Popular as a senior, made good grades, was popular with girls and had been offered several athletic scholarships. Last I’d heard, he’d studied Phys Ed at Carnegie-Mellon and had taught at one of the local high schools.

  Like most jocks, he’d been an arrogant bully, but hadn’t been known for causing trouble. Apparently he’d decided to spend the rest of his days in charge of a psychotic gang of killers preying on what was left of the neighborhood.

  “Simon Ettinger.” I couldn’t believe this.

  He took a breath and blinked, squinting, trying to remember. His eyes were glossy and seemed out of focus. His nose was running as well. “Moss?”

  “Yeah.”

  A cough. “Figured it was you.”

  It was time to end this. “Where is she?”

  He lowered his head and coughed again, wetly.

  I could barely contain myself. It didn’t matter who this bastard was or if I once knew him. He’d taken the woman I loved from me, and now he was going to die.

  The strength in my numb right arm had mysteriously returned, and I found no difficulty raising the Ruger. My hand trembled a little at first before turning deadly still. I took a breath and aimed the barrel at Ettinger’s right eye. “Did you ... kill her?”

  He raised his head and blinked, and I caught the beginnings of a smile.

  A smile? Was this maniac kidding? You asked for it, you bastard. But just as my index finger began applying pressure to the trigger, Ettinger coughed up phlegm mixed with blood. Slobber covered his lower lip and chin. His voice was a throaty whisper when he said, “That’s ... a laugh.” Then his head fell forward. His gun dropped to the ground and he collapsed in the grass.

  Another figure emerged from the barn.

  It was Fields. She was wearing the same outfit she’d had on the night before, but her jeans were dirty and smudged, and her hair was mussed. Long, matted strands fell in front of her face. She held a long-barrel revolver in her right hand and stood looking down at Simon, her gun aimed at his motionless body. She slowly raised her head, but her hair blocked her view. With her free hand, she pulled it back. When she saw me, her jaw dropped, and she gawked at me as if she didn’t believe her eyes. She let her gun drop in the grass.

  I quickly discovered I could not move. I wanted to run to her, wrap my arms around her and hold her, but my legs had gone numb again. Of all the damned luck ... I tried to say something but my voice was gone as well. I’d turned comatose, and once again the fear that I’d died came drifting back. This had to be death. It certainly was hell, or as close to damnation as I could imagine. I’d finally been reunited with Fields, but all I could do was stand there like a zombie, gawking at her.

  She rushed toward me.

  A moment later, someone else appeared behind her—another man. He was large and broad-shouldered. Like Shaw, he was dressed in camouflage slacks and matching jacket. His arms hung at his sides. A gun extended from his right hand. He approached Simon cautiously, knelt and felt for a pulse. Then he straightened and watched Fields and me. He holstered his gun, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled something out of it. He brought it up and placed it next to his ear.

  It was a cell phone.

  My eyes glazed over. A cell phone. Right. Why, of course. In this world of death, corpses and walking zombies, no electricity, satellites or any other power sources, there had to be some miracle that defied all rational explanation.

  Roaches and cell phones would always survive a holocaust.

  When Fields was only a couple of yards away, I tried raising my arms. Like my legs, they’d gone numb. The Ruger was still in my hand. I no longer needed it, and let it drop. I figured that without its weight, I could raise my hands and wrap my arms around her.

  But a heavy curtain of blackness dropped over me, and I collapsed beneath it.

  ***

  Fields sat on a chair beside the bed, applying a fresh wrap to my arm.

  Just a few minutes earlier, when I opened my eyes and saw her, I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven. But when she touched me, kissed me lightly on the lips and told me I’d been asleep for nearly fort
y-eight hours, I realized we were both still alive, had survived the nightmare and had made it safely back home. It wasn’t exactly Heaven, but it seemed as close to it as one could get in this horribly dark, frightening world.

  “How’d I make it up the stairs?” I asked. “I don’t remember anything once I blacked out.”

  “I carried you.”

  My expression must have been classic. She laughed. “Two big, strong guys happened to be walking around at the time. They came over and asked if I needed help. They didn’t seem to have anything better to do, so I asked them to lend me a hand.”

  “Nice of them.”

  She was silent for a few moments. Her smile vanished, and she told me how sorry she was.

  “For what?”

  “For causing all this. For feeling so sorry for myself that I left the house alone at night and let myself get picked up by a bunch of crazy jerks.”

  “It happened on our property. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “But it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t just left the house half-cocked. Or if I’d just stayed closer to the house. Or just went over to the stoop, sat down and brooded right there.”

  “You were upset. You needed time by yourself. You didn’t deserve anything that happened out there.”

  “But it happened. To make it even worse, it happened just hours after I’d chastised you for leaving the house that morning without telling me.”

  She was right, but I didn’t feel this was the time for an I-told-you-so. She was already punishing herself. “That was different.”

  “I nearly got us both killed. That’s going to be hard to live with.”

  “Like I said, it wasn’t your fault. You’d had a really close call earlier that day and it freaked you out. Actually, it had been a horrendous day on several different levels. You needed time to sort things out.”

  “You didn’t want me to go for that walk. I should have listened to you.” A shadow had drifted across her face. I figured she’d just gone back to relive some unpleasant memories. I wanted to know where she was, what exactly had happened. I wasn’t sure if I could handle it, and told myself I should ask about this later, when I felt better. Right now I was weak and tired, and didn’t want to deal with violent emotions. I wanted only to bathe myself in her wonderful presence.

  She noticed my inner turmoil almost at once. “You want to know what happened that night? After they picked me up?”

  I just sighed.

  “I promise it won’t upset you.”

  “How can you promise something like that?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing really bad happened.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing as bad as what you’re probably thinking.”

  I suddenly realized that I could no longer stand the suspense. In spite of my instincts, my fears, I said, “Then tell me what happened.”

  “It’s dark at night in the woods, but it’s also very quiet. When I reached the clearing on the other side of the pine trees, I could hear rustling coming from three different directions, so I knew right then that I wasn’t alone, that there were several of them coming toward me, and that I’d be surrounded before I could do anything to prevent it. I knew they weren’t very far away, so I didn’t have much time. I obviously couldn’t outrun them or stand a chance of getting them all with my gun, so I unclipped the holster and placed it on a stump along the trail we’d used several times before. I knew that if they saw the gun, they’d consider me a threat and would kill me and take my gun, or rape me first, then kill me and take the gun. But if they found me unarmed and thought I was doped, they might leave me alone, or just check me out to see what I had on me and go away. But they didn’t. They walked me through the woods, to the road on the other side of the farm. A car was parked there, on Deer Creek Road. They shoved me in the back and took me to Simon’s place out there in the boonies.”

  “They didn’t hurt you, then?”

  “Aside from getting a little wild when they were patting me down, no, they didn’t hurt me. They just kept pushing me to the car. Simon turned out to be a different story. He wanted to rape me as soon as they brought me into the house. He grabbed me and pulled me into his den and started to undress me, but quickly changed his mind.”

  “Where does the part come when I won’t be upset? You obviously haven’t gotten there yet.”

  She smiled. “Like I said, he changed his mind even before he tried getting my top off. It was the way I was acting that turned him off. He didn’t know how to deal with me.”

  “I’d heard his boys say that he didn’t like messing around with doped women.”

  “I didn’t try acting doped. I wasn’t sure how well I could pull that off, so I tried something else. I’d worked with the mentally disturbed during my nursing years, and remembered how they acted, spoke and moved. Not too many guys are anxious to get physical with a handicapped woman, so that’s what I did.”

  “It obviously worked, then.”

  “Simon helped quite a bit, surprisingly. He’d taken something just a few minutes before I was brought into the house. I think it might have been a popper, so he was pretty buzzed. Just a minute or so after he took me into his den and began tugging on my top, I cried like a little girl. That turned him right off, so I figured I might as well make my performance even more convincing. I told him all about you. I said you were my daddy and that you were crazy, always scaring me and pushing me around and locking me in the basement at night. I told him you’d tried to kill me that morning. You were cleaning a gun after breakfast and when I walked by, I accidentally knocked over your whiskey glass and you got so mad, you picked up your gun and tried to shoot me, but the gun jammed. This made you even madder, so you told me you were going to kill me as soon as you got another gun. I ran out of the house and hid in the woods. I heard gunshots and thought you were shooting at me, but after a while I heard your truck and saw you loading two bodies onto the back of it. That’s when I ran back into the woods and hid there all day.”

  “Good thinking. How’d he deal with it?”

  “Like I said, he was pretty buzzed, but when I told him that, he got really angry, and kicked the door. He went over to his desk, opened a drawer, took out some powder and poured some on the blotter.”

  “Coke?”

  “No doubt. He was babbling about his friends Doc and James, and how he was going to kill you for killing them. He did two lines, slumped over the desk and went to sleep. I didn’t know what to do. I knew I could probably sneak out through the window, but since I’d seen people running around all over the place, I knew someone would see me and wake him. There were people in the house, too, but no one would come in the den. They seemed to avoid it, and whenever they came down the hall, they veered away, keeping as far away as possible.

  “I just stayed in the room and waited for him to come to. I knew I could probably find a decent hiding place, but something told me not to. Some of those guys living there looked like they’d nail anything, and I didn’t want to give them any ideas. They wouldn’t have touched me because I was with Simon, and there was a strong, unwritten policy about who they could and couldn’t mess with. I just didn’t want to take a chance. Besides, I knew I wouldn’t be there long. I figured you were looking for me and had already found the gun and holster, so I wasn’t worried. I just bided my time.”

  “How many were living there?”

  “There were at least a dozen of them in the main house. I didn’t get to learn anything about the guest house, but I could tell several of them were living there as well. Most of them living on the ground floor of the main house were women, all around twenty-five or thirty. I saw a few in their early teens. A few were doped, but most were functioning fairly well. The pretty ones acting normal were dressed in shorts, two-piece bikinis or slips. I even saw a tall blond woman around thirty walking around in a leather outfit. It was really bizarre. Not many of the boys were walking around, just two or three of the older ones. They were in their mid- or late t
wenties, I guess. I imagine the others were living in the basement. From what I learned, they had video games and other things to keep them busy when they weren’t doing errands for Simon.”

  “He came a long way from being the classic high school jock.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Not very well. He was a year ahead of me.”

  “Good thing I never told him your name. He wouldn’t have believed you were my father.”

  “How’d you get him to bring you back here?”

  “I told him I wanted him to come here and take your guns so you couldn’t try and shoot me anymore.”

  “That’s all it took?”

  She smiled. “I told him a few other things. They were mostly lies, but given the circumstances, I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “What else did you tell him?”

  “I told him you had hundreds of guns. He really liked that. I also told him you had canisters of ammo in every room in the house.”

  “I guess that would turn him on.”

  “It did, but then I told him a few other things to encourage him to bring me here. Like I said, he was pretty upset over Doc and James. At first he wanted to take me somewhere and dump me. I overheard him talking about it when he left the den. I realized I needed some sort of bait to use to get him to bring me back. The gun and ammo thing just didn’t seem quite enough. When he came back in the den, I told him about the special refrigerator you kept in the barn. As soon as I mentioned that, his entire demeanor changed. His eyes grew and his face seemed to glow.”

  “Special refrigerator?” This was getting interesting.

  “I told him you came back from some hospital or clinic one night a few weeks ago with a carload of boxes of medical supplies you’d found in their drug cabinets. I had to help him carry them into the barn.”

  “Smart.”

  “I just figured that since he was constantly buzzed, he’d want to get his hands on anything he could, and wouldn’t care how he got it.”

  “I overheard some of his boys talking about the same thing. Doc and James drove all around the county, looking for drugs. They made sure Simon always had enough drugs on hand. When we killed them, it ended his constant supply, and he was forced to rely on a few of the other boys to make the trips. That was really good thinking on your part.”