Darkness Rising (Book 2): The Lost Light

by Bell, Justin

  The gun shot was quick and abrupt—a single rifle crack and the creature hitched, then stumbled, then fell, slumping to its left shoulder before collapsing to the ground.

  About the size of a typical family dog, the coyote was far from a meal for seven, but it would have to do. The Frasers hadn’t had a chance to stockpile much food when they made their desperate move from the abandoned convenience store, and fearing that the Demon Dogs might return, they’d loaded up the bare minimum and hit the road running. Down to only two all-terrain vehicles and a single duffel bag, making their way from Salina, Kansas back to Interstate 70, then heading east had been a long and arduous process that was compounded by their desire to stay concealed.

  It had been a week since the daring rescue from the Demon Dogs. A week since Greer was shot in the chest. A week since Jeremiah Schroeder sacrificed his life so they could escape. So much had happened, yet nothing had happened at the same time. The interstate remained buried by tons of domestic and international steel, cars clogging every lane of every roadway, east, west, north, and south. Corpses were at least fewer and farther between as they made their way towards Missouri, finally bypassing Demon Dog territory. There were no guarantees that anything was safer than it had been in central Kansas, though. After all, if Jerry hadn’t warned them about the Demon Dogs, would they have ever known? No. And most likely they would not have survived the experience of meeting them, either.

  “How are you feeling?” Brad asked Clancy Greer, who was sitting upright, leaning on one of the all-terrain vehicles. They were in a thin scrabble of a forest, surrounded by narrow trees and sitting on dried, dirt-covered grass. A short distance away a makeshift campfire crackled and Max sat there roasting the skinned corpse of the coyote, slowly turning it on a makeshift spit.

  “Fine,” Greer replied. “I’m doing fine.” His chest ached, as it always seemed to, though they’d managed to stop the bleeding. He’d been fortunate that the bullet hadn’t struck any vital organs, but he thought it was still lodged somewhere, sitting there, waiting to cause some fatal infection. The wound itched, and he scratched around it, but the itching was deeper, almost like he could feel the slug, wedged where it wasn’t supposed to be, lying in wait to kill him in his sleep.

  Rhonda walked over with a hunk of toasted canine in her fingers. Her arm was slung over her stomach, a complex web of bandages wrapped around her collarbone.

  “Your boy is getting to be a good shot,” Greer said, nodding towards Max.

  Rhonda smiled. “Yeah, he’s doing good. Better than the rest of us I’d wager.” She didn’t want to think about how good of a shot he really was. After all, it hadn’t been that long ago when him picking up a weapon and taking another person’s life was one of the least likely things she expected him to do.

  “How’s the shoulder?” Greer motioned to the ordered chaos of bandages.

  “Probably better than your chest. It doesn’t seem like it’s infected, though I don’t know how that’s possible.”

  Brad looked up at Rhonda. “Do you know where we are?” he asked.

  “We’re close,” she replied, smiling. “Tomorrow we should be in St. Louis.”

  Brad smiled. “Then you move on to Chicago?”

  “That’s the plan,” Rhonda replied. The plan. The plan they’d made a week ago, before they’d even met Jeremiah. Before they’d taken on a convict who turned out to be one of their best allies. Before they’d even heard of the Demon Dogs. Back then the biggest threat Rhonda had considered was getting the ATVs through the trees and traffic. How foolish she had been.

  Rhonda, like everyone else in the group, had kept an extra wary eye pointed in Angel’s direction, and she knew that he could feel them all watching him. He showed no signs of betraying their trust, harming them, stealing from them, or doing anything else nefarious, though. She had been one of the first to stick up for him after he turned on his friends and helped save the group’s lives, but she—like the rest—couldn’t help but wonder if he had an ulterior motive.

  Rhonda looked over at Angel who was sitting by himself again, using a needle and some scraps of thread to patch a hole in his shirt. He kept to himself for the most part, his gaze low to the ground as he tended fires, cleaned weapons, and volunteered to help out with menial tasks. She had gotten the opportunity to talk with him a few times, but he never opened up. Every interaction she had with him was polite and even bordered on friendly, but he didn’t seem interested in getting to know anyone all that well. Whether it was because he knew that the group was watching him closely or because he was uncomfortable for other reasons, Rhonda didn’t know.

  Looking up to the sky, she scowled at the gray clouds crowding out the dull orange sun. They hadn’t seen blue skies in a few days, the persistent threat of a spring storm following them as they progressed down Interstate 70. Day by day, their eyes were on the lookout for any tiny morsel of good news they could find. They hadn’t found any.

  Siphoning fuel from the thousands of parked cars had provided plenty of gas for the ATVs, though with only two of them left for seven people, traveling had been slow. For the first two days, Greer had laid on one of them with Angel standing near the front, running it at a slow trot. Rhonda had been riding on the second with Max behind the wheel, but they couldn’t travel too far and leave the rest of them behind. It had been an exercise in patience and frustration, all at once.

  As they neared the city, though, they deviated more from the interstate, branching off into thicker, more wooded areas. However, those wooded areas were getting fewer and farther between as they grew closer to the Missouri River. Even so, they were within shouting distance of St. Louis, which felt like a small victory in and of itself in light of their narrow escape from both the Demon Dogs and the West Plains Militia.

  Rhonda hadn’t thought of Bruce Cavendish and his crew in a while, but she felt pretty certain they’d left them far behind. The West Plains Militia was a Colorado movement, with a little Utah and Wyoming thrown in for good measure, but as far as she could remember from her time at the cabin with her parents, it was a small, local crew with little desire to expand east.

  Was that still the case? She had no idea, but if she worried about every little possible threat to her and her family’s safety, she was pretty sure she’d never get another minute of sleep at night.

  There had been a few times throughout their travels that she felt a presence. She felt like they were being watched, but every time she’d looked back, every time she’d asked Phil, they hadn’t seen anyone. Just empty air, scattered trees and the persistent slate gray of cloudy sky.

  She felt it then. Felt the hot burn of eyes on her, someone watching from the darkness, but as she turned and peered into the trees, there was nothing but woods and black.

  “Coyote? Really?” Rhonda looked over at Winnie, who was making her way out into the clearing. Her eyes were thick and tired with sleep, a look that was becoming all too familiar among all of them as of late. Sleeping in the woods wasn’t really sleeping, serving more as momentary rest before going onto the next adventure.

  “Sorry, sweetie,” Rhonda said. “Best we could do this morning.”

  “Tastes like chicken, right?” Max said as he walked over from the fire, a hunk of cooked coyote in his hand. He lifted it and tore a piece off with his teeth, then chewed and swallowed. As he choked it down, he scowled. “Yeah, not so much.”

  Rhonda smiled at Winnie who showed no reaction to her brother’s attempt at humor. She hadn’t found much funny since their escape from the Demon Dogs. Jerry’s death seemed to have hit her particularly hard, and Rhonda wasn’t sure why, though she thought she could guess. He’d been a good looking, young man showing some authority, and she thought that Winnie had fallen for him, at least as much as a fifteen-year-old girl can in the span of two days.

  “Where’s your gun?” Winnie asked Max.

  “Rifle’s over by the trees,” Max replied. “Pistol’s in my belt like usual. Why?”

/>   “I want to go see if I can find something better tasting than dead dog.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Max said. Winnie broke away and walked over past the fire, scooping up the SIG 522 and checking the ammo load. If nothing else, taking a week to travel to Missouri had given Greer a good amount of time to go over some more rudimentary weapons training with the kids and Phil, and as each day passed, they were all feeling more comfortable.

  Except for Brad. Brad still refused to touch a weapon, which was fine for the moment, though Rhonda feared that if things got hairy they’d need all the help they could get. If Brad wasn’t comfortable or familiar with a weapon, trying to protect him could endanger others.

  “You want to go with Winnie?” Rhonda asked Brad.

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “This is a new world, Bradley. You’re going to have to get used to guns. I wish it wasn’t so, but it is.”

  He shook his head, holding his chin steady. “I’m okay. We’ll be in St. Louis tomorrow. You won’t have to worry about me after that.” He said it with a smile, but Rhonda didn’t want him to feel that way.

  “Brad, that’s not what I’m saying. You know how I feel. How we all feel about you. What you did back there to save us? That was braver than anyone who shoots a gun. Winnie and I both owe you our lives. I just want you to be safe, honey, okay?”

  Brad nodded. “I know, Mrs. Fraser. I’ll be safe with my mom and dad.”

  Rhonda wasn’t sure. Nothing she had seen in the past week gave her any confidence that there was a safe place left in the world, especially in a city like St. Louis. They’d spent a lot of time walking and riding through some pretty rural areas and had managed to find plenty of slime balls along the way. A larger city like St. Louis would just provide a larger population of them in a more concentrated area. Of that, Rhonda was becoming more and more certain. She was starting to see her parents’ way of thinking about things and it was starting to make too much sense—their rural cabin in the mountains, their secret stockpile of canned goods and weapons. Maybe they’d been right all along. She looked forward to finally finding them and telling them so.

  It suddenly occurred to her that she had no idea where her parents even were at that particular moment. The cabin was their summer home, but they spent most of their time in St Petersburg, Florida. She hadn’t had much of a chance to even think about their safety, and she supposed that was because she knew they were tough and they could handle whatever came their way. They’d taught her to use weapons and to survive the stuff she was surviving, so she had no doubt they’d be able to handle it themselves.

  She hadn’t heard of any detonations happening in Florida, but considering all forms of communication were now non-existent, she supposed she wouldn’t have heard regardless. A small pang of guilt and worry knotted itself into her stomach, twisting a fist. Bad enough that she expended so much energy worrying about Lydia, she didn’t want to add her parents to that list. So she wouldn’t. She’d have faith that they’d be fine and just move on from there. Next stop St. Louis, then on to Chicago.

  The air had already become thicker and smokier as they’d neared the city, and she hoped that wasn’t some kind of indication of what they’d find there. Brad’s parents were staying with his grandparents according to the message she had listened to over a week ago. Brad had told them that his grandparents lived on the west side of St. Louis, not right downtown, so the hope was that they had escaped any truly bad mojo sparked by the incident.

  But again, who knew? The group hadn’t come across any large cities since they’d made their way out of Denver and she wasn’t sure she wanted to come across any others anytime soon.

  Two quick gun shots rang out, echoing through the narrow trees. Rhonda looked out towards the fire and saw Winnie emerge from the settling fog, holding a small shape in her left hand. It looked like a gopher, and a nice fat one to boot.

  Rhonda wasn’t sure she’d eaten gopher yet on this trip. She hoped it tasted better than coyote.

  ***

  St. Louis was burning.

  There were no visible flames, but the thick, dark smoke clung like early morning fog, blurring the tops of buildings and settling in the air, a pungent, acrid spike of scorched brickwork. Like a blackened mass of coal twisted in smoldering wood wedged at the bottom of a fire, the city seemed to emanate a rippling wave of spent heat.

  Brad’s eyes grew wide as they approached the first row of ramshackle houses on the western outskirts of St. Louis, the urban sprawl spreading out several miles in all directions, cascading out from the center of the city.

  “What’s that smell?” he asked.

  “Fire,” replied Max.

  “Not just fire,” said Winnie. “Something already burnt. Charred.”

  “I don’t like this,” Brad said quietly.

  Rhonda pressed a palm to his back in a calming motion. Her other arm was held tight to her body by the sling, so she gave him a somewhat awkward half embrace.

  “It’s okay. Where are your grandparents?”

  Brad recited an address by memory. As they moved in towards pseudo civilization, Phil eyed a gas station, sitting dark and empty, the wide front window punched through with a series of small holes.

  “Clancy, how are you holding up?” Rhonda asked, turning towards the ex-sheriff of Brisbee, Colorado.

  “Good. I’m okay,” he replied, his voice low. “I’ll manage.”

  “We should ditch the four-wheelers somewhere,” she continued. “Can you walk for a while?”

  Greer nodded and slipped off the ATV while Angel swung his leg off the other one. Phil gestured towards them and they moved his way, pushing the vehicles in neutral with the help of Winnie and Max across the cracked and empty streets. There were no people within sight and no vehicles, either. It was nearing mid-afternoon, but the sun hid behind the low, persistent smoke, and even as close to the city as they were, the vast and all-encompassing silence was almost offensive to their ears. Phil ratcheted up a garage door attached to the gas station, and they wheeled the ATVs over inside of it, then lowered the doors back down after Angel retrieved the duffel bag and slung it over his large, tattooed shoulder. Greer limped while Winnie moved towards him to help him along, letting him use her for a crutch. As they were stashing the four-wheelers out of sight, Phil moved into the store area of the gas station and plucked a map from one of the racks. To his surprise, the store was still well stocked with warm soda, bottled water, and stale food sitting out under long dead heat ovens. Almost as if that part of the city had just been abandoned.

  Rhonda looked back over to where I-70 passed nearby and still saw the wall of cars and trucks, and as they led towards an exit ramp into the city, the wall became a haggard, twisted jumble, a tangle of metal and plastic. Newspapers slipped up into a cross breeze and swung over the surface of the road, caught by a gust and whipped up into the air, fluttering there as she looked at the barricade of immobile vehicles.

  The true scope of the country’s situation settled on her. St. Louis was a city, but it was by far not the largest city, and if it had succumbed to destruction so wholly after week, what were other cities like? What was Chicago like? She didn’t even want to think of what Lydia might be dealing with.

  “You’re new here.”

  Rhonda swung around, her shoulder filling with pain as she instinctively went to reach for her weapon with her injured hand. She held her motion, but let her other hand drift to her left hip, closer to where her pistol was at the small of her back.

  A woman approached, draped in a large, formless trench coat. It was colored dark with soot, and her feet scuffled over the dirty pavement as she meandered around the corner of the gas station, roaming down the empty street.

  “I haven’t seen you all before.”

  “You recognize everyone in this city?” Phil asked, coming up from the parking lot, putting himself between her and the rest of the crew.

  “These days?” the woman asked, then broke into a
coughing fit. It was a hoarse, chest racking cough, the personification of the floating ash in the air. “Not many in this part of town. You’d do best not to be neither.”

  “We’re looking for someone,” Phil replied. “Looking for family.”

  The woman chewed on this for a moment, then nodded. “Hope they still in town. Hope they aren’t headin’ east. Ain’t nobody heading east no more.”

  She turned and started to walk the other way, her feet still scuffing the asphalt beneath her.

  “What do you mean?” asked Rhonda. “What’s further east?”

  She looked back over her shoulder, fixing Rhonda with a strange glare. “Guv’ment. They setting up roadblocks way I heard it. Tryin’ ta stop folks overcrowding. I hear they’re shootin’ people. Settin’ up blockades. Don’t know if it’s true but seems like it could be.”

  Rhonda and Phil shot each other a quick look. They each knew what the other was thinking, and they didn’t like it much. Jerry’s description of the gangs came back to both of them, and they thought about the possibilities of what might lie ahead of them.

  The woman continued her shuffling gait back down the street and soon was out of sight. Phil walked over to Brad with the map of the city and unfolded it, trying to track down the address Brad had given them.

  “Have you ever been here before?” he asked. Brad shook his head.

  “I sent them thank you cards every year. After birthdays and Christmas. I think even after Easter. Thank you cards were serious business with my mom.”

  Rhonda smirked and glanced at Max who rolled his eyes in a pure ‘give me a break’ gesture.

  “Okay,” Phil said. “Here. I think this is where we want to be.” He pointed a figure at an area near the outer parts of downtown St. Louis, a section of town which looked to be only a ten or fifteen minute walk from where they were. Brad nodded.

  “All right, let’s get going,” Phil said, standing and running a hand through Brad’s thick hair. As they continued ahead, Greer lagged behind somewhat, his breathing somewhat labored. Angel fell back as well and propped him up.