Darkness Falling

by Peter Crowther

  Then he started to shuffle in towards her.

  Karl coughed and wiped more specks of blood from his mouth. He stared at the flecks and then looked at the man: another three steps, four at the outside, and the guy would be right up at the girl close enough to take her dancing. "Fuck it," he said.

  Karl lurched forward as Ronnie brought the bus's head back up again and shattered an overhead streetlight. They could hear broken glass and metal fixtures sliding across the bus's roof. He sidestepped the boy and moved straight for the old man, a sudden constriction in his chest as though he had been roped like a hog and the rope pulled tight. He staggered for a moment, his head lolloping forward and, just for a second or two, Karl thought he was simply going to fall head first to the floor. But he managed to keep upright and reached the man as the man started to turn again, this time towards Karl.

  And now the man was smiling.

  It wasn't a happy smile or a friendly smile, and, if he had been pushed, Karl wouldn't have been able to explain why that thought was paramount in his mind at that point – just as he was entering the final few minutes of what had been, until this past 36 hours, a singularly uneventful but wonderfully enjoyable life.

  As Karl took a hold of the man's shoulder and collar, the man grasped Karl's left cheek with his right hand, the left hand barely missing a similar handhold on the other side of the cartographer's face.

  Immediately, Karl began to shake. His own hands dropped from the old man's clothes, flopping by his side and twitching spasmodically. And now the rest of him began to gyrate.

  "Hey, map-man," Virgil Banders shouted. To no avail.

  Ronnie managed to manipulate the steering wheel to bring the bus around in a small turning circle in the middle of a four-lane road leading into downtown Denver. His muscles were aching and his back felt as though he'd been digging the yard back in At lanta for two days straight without so much as a break for sleeping, eating or even taking a dump. He heard the girl scream again but he didn't know why – the bus seemed to be settling down into the roadway pretty evenly. He even managed to avoid hitting a FedEx van that was leaning at a rakish angle into a jeweler's store window, broken glass now lying amidst the diamonds.

  And what do you know, he thought as the wheels touched the blacktop and the bus settled. There were some people out there.

  "Hey," he shouted. "There are some–"

  That's when he saw his new friend, Karl, shaking like a bowl of jello, his right eyeball popped right out of its socket and hanging down the side of the map-reader's face on what appeared to be a piece of orangey-brown coiled string.

  The girl was now falling over the seat in front of her and screaming hysterically.

  Virgil Banders was backing away from a little old man – where the fuck did that guy come from? – who appeared to have Karl in a death grip.

  "Let him go!" Ronnie shouted. He stepped from the driver's seat immediately into the aisle.

  The old man looked at him, turning his attention from Karl and a careful eye on the stealthy but retreating figure of Virgil Banders to focus on the driver of the bus.

  It's his bus, Ronnie realized – or, at least, it was the vehicle into which the bus had been customized, presumably by him. It came in one fleeting second, quickly followed by other thoughts. He's not just an old fart, was the first one. The next was simply, Those hands…

  Ronnie reached his right arm back and, fist clenched tight, he swung it with all his might, right into the side of the old guy's face. He felt like he was beating up his grandfather, or smacking some old rest home geriatric who hadn't ever hurt a soul. But he knew better than that.

  He had expected it to hurt like hell but, surprisingly, it was OK. The old guy's face went with the force of the punch to the side, turning his head to the right. But his hands still reached forward.

  "Get the girl," Ronnie shouted, and he swung his right hand again, the hand open this time, swiping at one of the old guy's own hands, which had now let go of Karl – and Ronnie would have put money on the map-reader never again reading any maps.

  When Ronnie's hand connected with the old guy's splayedout fingers, he felt an excruciating blast of pain – it was only for a few seconds but it made him cry out. The man's hand shot outwards and collided with the vertical tubular rail.

  Virgil said, "His glasses. Go for his glasses."

  The old man steadied himself and turned to Ronnie. There was a thick gouge on the side of his heavily jowled face but there was no blood. It just looked like a tear in the skin, like a rip in the side of a kid's nighttime cuddly toy, with stuffing exposed instead of tissue and artery and vein.

  His glasses?

  Ronnie looked at the old man as he took a step forward.

  Somewhere from behind him, Ronnie heard Angel Wurst scream and then lots of feet clumping on the steps of the bus. Then he heard Virgil say, "Who the hell are–"

  (40)

  "Move away from the door."

  It was the only thing Junior Talbert could think of to say to his kid brother, little Wayne, huddled up and cowering beneath the frosted glass that lay between him and the screen door, the door still perplexingly shut tight even though someone clearly wanted to come into the house.

  Hey, who'th that knocking at the door? lisped the hippified Garcia Gopher in the constant TV screen playing way in the back of Junior's head, the goateed Garcia wrapping an implausibly long arm around his cereal bowl. Lookth like thomeone'th after my Gopher Nut Cluthterth. Mmm, necktht to tree bark, they're the betht!

  But Junior figured the person at their front door this early evening – ridiculously early, come to think of it, but much darker than usual at this time – was not after breakfast cereal. In fact, Junior reckoned they were after something a whole lot more substantial.

  The knocking grew louder but not faster. Still leisurely, kind of. Hey, we know you're there… so just make this easy and open the damn door, OK?

  The figure out in the cold night banged on the screen door twice and then let out some kind of yowl sound, like a wolf or maybe a bear. Truth be known, neither of the Talbert boys had heard either, leastways not outside of the National Geographic channel. But one thing was for sure: it didn't sound like anything they'd heard or might expect to hear from Mr Yovingham. But then again, they neither of them thought that the guy out there was Mr Yovingham. Sure, he looked just like him, but it wasn't him. Nossir. Not at all. It was someone or something completely different come to pay a social call on the boys. Both Junior and little Wayne the Dwain knew that one because they knew damn well – down there in the darkness where facts is facts and you just don't question them – that this version of Mr Yovingham knew all too well that the boys' folks were not at home and was about to capitalize on that information. In fact, the boys figured that Mr Yovingham knew all too well about the whole city being empty.

  "I said, get away from the door!" Junior hissed.

  "You don't have to yell," Wayne hissed back, stretching his neck out like the bendy man in their dad's old Flash comic books. "Why don't we let him in?"

  "We don't know who he is."

  Wayne drew in his head at that one, frowned and said, "It's Mr Yovingham," waving his arm out and pointing at the door. Then, lowering his arm again, adding, "Isn't it?"

  "Uh uh," was all Junior said to that one. Junior had known it wasn't Mr Yovingham as soon as they had first seen their neighbor moving slowly along the early evening street in his car, sometimes getting out and checking the doors like a prison guard, checking the doors and giving them a good rattle before moving off. Meanwhile, all around, the light had started to fade and then had pretty much just gone out, like someone flicked a switch someplace.

  It was around twelve hours before the sun snaked its head up on the horizon between the familiar shapes of the Civic Center and the Mint, and Junior had a strong feeling in his gut that it was going to be a long night.

  The car, a beat-up old Toyota that Junior's dad said was being held together by sp
it and brown tape, had appeared around from 18th

  Street with the driver, cunningly disguised as Dick Yovingham, apparently checking the houses as he drifted along the street, veering across from side to side every few yards. With just a couple of exceptions, the scene was profoundly optimistic and heartwarming for Junior and for Wayne too – and save for the marked lack of glorious tailfins and good primary coloring, the whole thing could have been a cover for the old Saturday Evening Post magazines that Grandpa August kept in a box in the cupboard up in Hudson. But those two exceptions kind of nixed the initial euphoria.

  The first one was small: the car's driver was wearing dark glasses so Junior figured he had some kind of eye problem that meant he couldn't stand to look at bright lights as he moved along the street as quiet as you please. (Junior wasn't happy about this particular slice of reasoning because there were no bright lights along Market, just a couple of streetlamps and maybe one or two warm glows behind closed drapes and blinds, all houses on whose doors Junior and Wayne had hammered throughout the day.)

  But the second exception was pretty fundamental: the car's wheels were not actually touching the ground, old man Yovingham staring out of the side window at each place as he passed it by, holding his car steady just a few feet above the blacktop and the sidewalk, checking the properties as he passed them by like he was in a neighborhood watch scheme.

  And that was the problem right there, wasn't it?

  Oh, there were strangenesses, sure, but then life was kind of filled up with strangenesses – even a life as relatively short as Junior Talbert's. No, the problem here wasn't the fact that every one had disappeared – and that wasn't simply everyone on the street; it was, as far as the Talbert brothers could ascertain, the whole of Denver, plus everyone they could think of calling on the telephone, people out of state, even (Junior just hadn't had the stomach to call his Uncle Pete over in London, England, but he couldn't help feeling that he'd get an answerphone, even though, over the Atlantic, it was well beyond breakfast time right now).

  It wasn't the fact that no TV stations were on the air, and no radio shows appeared when he spun the dial. Wasn't even the blinding flash of light that had turned the world white for a few seconds just a couple of hours ago. And it didn't matter that, after the light – and Junior believed with all of his heart that the two things were somehow connected – folks had come back. A few of them, anyways.

  It was the car that had done it. The car and the simple fact that it was flying. As far as Junior was concerned, that just had to register a pretty impressive nine on Ripley's Sphincter Scale of Unusual Occurrences.

  "Junior–" Wayne started. He didn't need to complete the sentence. Junior knew what that meant. It meant that his kid brother was pissed at him.

  Junior shook his head and flared his eyes. If he'd been that guy in the X Men, he'd have burned his kid brother into a little pile of ashes. And truth be told, it was Junior who had every reason to be pissed at Wayne, not the other way around.

  They had been sitting in the darkened front room, eating peanuts and drinking Dr Pepper while they watched their way through the second season box set of 24, featuring a suddenly pleasantly normal-seeming world. OK, maybe the world of Jack whatever-his-name was preposterous – their father's word, but Junior had adopted it – but at least it was filled with people and cars and noise and McDonald's outlets and Burger Kings and movie theaters and drugstores. Sure it was just more aural and visual wallpaper presented for suckers of the glass teat (their father again) but at least it seemed real, seemed to be happening.

  And then a single light, muted, as though a flashlight were running down its battery, had played briefly on the bushes across the street. The two of them, Junior and Wayne the Dwain, had gone to the window and there was the car. Junior had told Wayne to stay where he was. Then he had turned off the TV set and gone upstairs to see if he could get a better look. And it was while he was up in their parents' bedroom, craning his neck around his mom and dad's table (his mom's making-up table, as she was always kind of keen to point out) that he suddenly noticed his kid brother on his hands and knees crawling away from the front of the house towards the street. Even as Junior started to think that there was some reason his brother should not be doing that (he later wondered how long it would have been before he'd worked that reason out for himself), the Talberts' security light flashed on with all the intensity of a baseball stadium's floodlights.

  Junior had barely managed to refrain from rapping hard on the window glass, thereby inevitably drawing even more attention to them – or, at least, to their house. Just before he turned to look up the street, Junior saw his brother hightail it into the shrubbery, where he turned to one side and looked contritely up at Junior. Junior shook his head and waved him back to the house exaggeratedly. Then he had looked up the street just in time to see Mr Yovingham's car bank to one side, cross the street and move slowly (but Junior thought "purposefully") up to outside their own home.

  Still on all fours, Wayne had banged his way back into the house through the side door. "Junior!" He closed the door, turned the key in the lock and – This'll stop 'em! – shuffled his backside up against it.

  But Junior wasn't listening. He reached up and switched off the little nightlight in the hallway before dropping to his brother's level and crawling crablike towards the sofa in front of the street windows by the front door.

  "Junior," Wayne said, the word coming out like a whine now, "I'm getting scared."

  "Don't be," he said. "Just do as I say and–" He eased himself up against the sofa and peered around the side through the window into the street. It was deserted – no people, anyways. But Dick Yovingham's Toyota was there, its headlights on, its taillights on and, who'd have thought it, ladeez and genteelmen, even the lights mounted on the side panels were on, sweeping the Talberts' front yard like a jailbreak movie. Oh, and one more thing, unbelievers: the Toyota was not exactly parked normally. It was floating some four feet or so above Junior's mom's rosebushes.

  Nah, this was not Old Man Yovingham. This was a real life version of Mork from Ork. Nanoo nanoo.

  Another howl from the porch. Junior glanced across at the front door.

  Behind him, Wayne said, "You know what's funny?" When Junior didn't answer, Wayne continued anyway. "Have you noticed? How he hasn't tried the door?" Wayne sniffed alongside his brother and rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his sweater. "Have you seen him try the door?"

  Junior didn't answer.

  "It's like he doesn't know how a handle works."

  Without responding, Junior allowed his eyes to fall to the handle and, below that, the key in the lock. "Hey," he whispered, "did you lock the door?"

  "Did you?" Wayne sniffed again, like he was coming down with a head cold. "I'm the kid, remember. Someone's supposed to be looking after me."

  "Shit." Junior flattened himself on the floor and edged around the sofa.

  "I locked the side door," Wayne said in a conciliatory tone.

  "I have to check the door," Junior said, and without further comment, he edged out from in front of the sofa and began crawling across the wilderness of carpet between the sofa and the front door.

  The closer he got to the door, the more Junior's neck ached. He was craning his head backwards and a little to the side, just so that he could keep an eye on what the figure outside was doing. Right now, the figure outside wasn't doing much of anything. Come to think of it, the figure seemed to have stopped, or at least slowed down a little. It was standing on the porch step, partly jammed inside the screen door, with its head on one side, as though it was listening.

  Junior stopped in his tracks, glancing down at the handle and the key below it.

  Wayne hissed from behind him. "You OK, Ju?"

  Junior hissed shhhh over his right shoulder. Dick Yovingham's head had tilted sideways when Wayne had spoken and was now looking over, through the darkness, in the direction of the sofa. Wayne stayed as still as he could and dropped his h
ead so that his chin was now resting on the carpet. The figure's head moved again, first down a little to the left and then down a little in the other direction, like a swimmer trying to get rid of water collected in his ears. Then he lifted his arms and beat on the door so hard that Junior was frightened the glass panels would shatter.

  "Move away from the sofa," Junior shouted, hoping that his voice would be lost beneath the clamor of hammering, and he lurched forward the final few feet to reach the door, reaching out and taking hold of the key fob and turning the key in the lock as slowly and as quietly as he could. The key turned part of the way and then stuck – it did that sometimes but Junior didn't want now to be one of those times.

  He pulled his head back and over to the doorjamb, trying to see if he could see the telltale glint of metal that signified the lock was thrown across. But it was too dark. Junior fished in his pocket and found a folded piece of paper. He unfolded the paper and saw that it had a phone number scribbled on it but he had no idea whose number it was. The sudden realization that it didn't matter and would probably never matter ever again sent a cold chill across his shoulder blades, though maybe that was a draft from around the door. He refolded the paper and slid it between the door and the door surround. It passed right down without any obstruction. So the door was unlocked.