Both the distinguished-looking older man and his ten-years-younger female counterpart advised the audience in the most soothing of tones to remain in their homes and avoid unreasonable panic. The ‘unfounded gossip’ of catastrophe of any sort sweeping over the east coast over the past few hours was laughable at best and at worst was being considered maliciously criminal.
Laura’s bright eyes jumped once to the wall clock, which read 10:09p.m. It seemed the night had already gone on much longer than that, and should be creeping toward the witching hour at the least.
Her cell phone trilled once, and the unexpected noise jolted Laura like an electric shock. “Sam!” she gasped hopefully.
Before she could even get a hand on it, the ringer cut itself off and did not sing again. Frustrated, Laura picked up the damnable thing and checked to see who had called. The number was unknown to her and to the phone. A wrong number. What a night for it, she thought.
The wind raged, frantic and mournful outside, but the chill could not find purchase within the walls of Laura’s home. She shivered anyway just looking into the night’s foreboding darkness, imaging how cold the bite of December had to be at that moment. They hadn’t seen snowfall once the whole year, unusual for Michigan. Even without the snow, the bitterness in the air had been bone-grinding.
“I need something better to do than this,” Laura claimed aloud as she stood and muted the television. It hadn’t told her anything useful, anyway.
Moving soundlessly through her home, Laura occasionally touched the things she passed. Ten years into her marriage and they still had the powder blue sofa gifted to them by Sam’s mother and father the year of their wedding. Laura took good care of things, and the couch was the most comfortable piece of furniture she ever expected to own. Even after two kids, it had suffered so little wear and tear, and experienced such meticulous upkeep, that Laura had based the whole living room design off its color and personality.
The next thing she ran a hand over was a framed picture of the family, a tasteful portrait taken in the time of heat and fun this most recent summer. The sand near the lake looked like a sheet of sugar, nearly white in the brightness of the sun, not golden as it had seemed when she, Sam, and their children sat in their Sunday best, posing for the picture which Laura now had a hand on.
The frame was chocolate brown and had been decorated craftily by Laura. The color and style had been chosen to match the uniform color the family wore for the shot. The reeds that framed Laura, her husband and children, almost as though they’d been arranged for that purpose, seemed ready to blow in the wind as they had that day. Laura knew, from being there herself and from the choppy look of the waves behind her family, that the wind had been almost frantic. Both her and her daughter’s hair had not withstood the onslaught of the devious gusts, and blew around their shoulders in the picture; the only sign of disarray. The inconvenience of the wind had caused laughter, though, and made the portrait that much more real to Laura, that much more sentimental. Her family had never been short on laughter.
Moving away from the family picture, Laura felt thoroughly disquieted. She walked through her home as though it had become a tomb, a memorial to her family and to Laura herself. She moved, perhaps, as a ghost through familiar space, mourning the loss of belonging to the same realm as these things that were so recognizable to her and yet somehow now beyond her reach.
It was a silly thought, and Laura scolded herself for it. She was and had always been too fanciful for her own good. In her youth, Laura had hoped her nature would lend itself to a career that rewarded the wistful mentality of the dreamer. An artist, she hoped, or perhaps an author. She’d at different points in her life wished to be a singer, a dancer, an actress. Something in a field of creativity and passion. Instead, she’d ended up the wife of a wonderful man and mother to his two fantastic children. She’d not have traded one life for the other.
The hallway beckoned Laura, and the doorways of her children seemed to draw her magnetically. Melissa was six and Trevor was eight, both of them old enough to sleep with their doors shut if they preferred, which they did. Though they undoubtedly loved the cats, both of the kids were bed hogs and preferred not to share with their furry, four-legged siblings.
One of the three cats, as though conjured by her thought of them, twined itself around Laura’s legs and gave a soft, mournful-sounding greeting to its favorite human. Rifkin had been named after a character on one of Sam’s favorite television shows, and had actually been chosen from the shelter by Sam himself. After getting home, Rif had never paid the man another mind, and instead had devoted his entire world to Laura, whom he followed around the house without fail. Laura had always been amused by how that had turned out.
Kneeling by the slinky black and white feline, Laura scratched Rif behind the ears as he preferred and let him guide her rubbing down his back and up to the tip of his bushy tail.
“Silly kitty,” Laura murmured. “Don’t you have somewhere to be lounging?”
Rifkin, strange for a cat, rarely lounged. His bemused expression seemed to remind Laura of this fact. When Laura returned to her feet, Rif padded after her, down the hallway toward her children’s rooms.
Laura couldn’t explain to herself why she roamed her house like a ghost hunter desperately seeking contact with the other side, trying to be quiet and confident while her nervous heart thundered away beneath her breast. Nor did she know why an inexplicable fear suddenly leapt into her throat at the thought of opening the doors to the rooms of her children. The fear and her mood were both so unexpected and unexplainable that she wanted to force herself to go to her own room and read a book, or maybe sleep.
“What’s the matter with you?” Laura asked herself as she found a hand on the door to Trevor’s room.
Just a quick peek, she decided. A quick peek like she’d allowed herself hundreds or thousands of times over the years since her children had been born. There was nothing wrong with a mother’s concern. Perhaps there was something wrong with the irrational way her throat had tightened and tears sprang to her eyes, she thought, but there was nothing, nothing wrong with maternal concern.
She pushed the door open. The light from the hallway spilled inside, anxious fingers moving eagerly to sweep away the darkness that pervaded the room. Trevor slept soundly on his side, one hand fisted beneath his cheek and the other tossed carelessly over the side of the bed. Most of his blankets were on the floor, his brown hair was tousled, and his bright blue eyes, so lively when he was awake, were peacefully closed. There was nothing wrong with the room, or with the boy who slept within.
After a moment’s relief, the fear that Laura felt increased tenfold. The feel of ice moved through her veins, chilling her from the inside as though she’d developed an instant and unprovoked case of extreme hypothermia. She shouted her daughter’s name, but it came out in a whisper.
“Mel,” Laura murmured again with tears trembling in her voice.
She never made it to her daughter’s door. As Rifkin hissed and spat near her feet, Laura drowned in and was consumed by the world’s new darkness. She knew fear, desperate, breath-stealing fear, and then she knew nothing.
Chapter Three
Amy Grondin had seen the new darkness and was still wide-awake and fully herself within it. The clock read nearly 3 a.m., and students all over the college she attended and lived at had been acting in the grip of consuming madness for hours.
Amy tried reaching her cousin, Laura Walker, on the cell phone again. Laura was the closest family she had here in Michigan, with the rest of the brood living in Ohio and Amy’s own parents far away in Washington. She missed them desperately that night, and her inability to reach Laura made her feel even more cut off. She was bereft in a swirling sea of cruel insanity, and her family seemed as far away as Mars.
Hitting the call button again, Amy was shocked to actually hear ringing. It was the first time in hours one of her calls had gone through. Though the connection stayed strong, Laura
didn’t pick up. Instead, Amy got her voicemail.
Nearly crying, Amy left a pleading message for Laura to call her back as soon as she could. Being as quick as possible, lest the phones cut out as they had been all night, she tried sketching the quickest picture possible of how the situation had deteriorated at the college. She ended the message by saying that if Laura didn’t get back with her by the time the dawn came, she’d try walking or finding a ride to where her cousin and family lived. Just before she hung up, the phone service (as she had predicted it would several minutes ago) cut her call off. The message had gone through, and that was what counted, Amy comforted herself.
The walk would take her the better part of two days if she couldn’t find a ride, because she knew she wouldn’t be safe in the darkness. She didn’t know how she knew that, but just as she knew that what affected the general populace around campus wouldn’t be affecting her unless she allowed it, she knew the dark awaited her with death in its skeletal hands. She would walk in the light, and she would be careful to avoid contact with strangers until she was safe with her family.
Grabbing her favorite bag, not a backpack but what her cousin Laura’s husband Sam called a ‘survival pack,’ Amy set about taking what she would need from her dorm. She was alone in the room, though she shared the space with three other girls. Having been gifted something of a psychic sense since the onset of whatever had happened around her, Amy knew for fact in her heart that the other three girls would not be coming back. Even if they did, they would not be as they had been.
As she went to the tiny kitchenette on the right side of the dorm, Amy’s eyes skipped once over the heavy desk and television stand she had stacked and pushed against the securely-locked door. The measures hadn’t been extreme; Amy knew that as well as she knew the girls she’d lived with for the better part of the last two years would not be returning.
From the kitchenette, Amy grabbed several bottles of water, four cans of varied Chef Boyardee meals, a small bag of trail mix that had been sitting in the cupboard for a while, and the larger pack of jerky sitting beside it.
Figuring anything else would just be unnecessary weight, Amy added the eatables to her pack, which already contained a lightweight, collapsible utensil set, waterproof matches, a wind-up LED light, two pairs of thick socks, a rain poncho, a pair of sunglasses, and several other miscellaneous items.
Her cousin Sam had filled the bag with most of what always sat in the pack when he bought it for her. Amy had thought it an amusing gesture, but Sam had always had something of a survivalist streak to him. Amy and Laura had teased him incessantly about it. The trait didn’t seem so funny to Amy now.
“Thanks, Sam,” Amy murmured as she shouldered the bag and checked its weight.
The cans were the weightiest things in the pack and all of it combined didn’t make the bag more than fifteen pounds. Amy found the weight acceptable. She was a college student who usually carried an armful of books, a full book bag, and a purse. She could handle an efficiently-packed survivalist’s bag for two days of continuous walking. Or at least, she hoped she could.
Laying the bag down near the couch she intended to nap on for a while, Amy gathered her snow boots, her thick winter jacket, her leather gloves, a scarf and hat set, and a hooded, zip-up sweatshirt that she intended to wear when she left. She realized with something of a start that she would be walking, for sure. It was as much a fact as anything else Amy accepted as concrete in that strange night. Laura would not be getting back with her, and she would be leaving this place in the morning.
The realization frightened her, and Amy began to cry. Sitting on the couch, Amy wept unabashedly, as a child or grieving widow so full of what she felt that she didn’t mind how wretched the sobs sounded as they were pulled from within her. She didn’t expect the tears to abate her terror, but they helped far more than she anticipated.
When Amy was dry of tears and her fear had momentarily been drowned in them, she laid down and lost herself to sleep. An alarm on her phone was set for shortly after 7 a.m., a little more than four hours away. With the dawn, she would leave.
Chapter Four
As Amy slept in a barricaded dorm room nearly an hour’s drive away, Laura awakened on the hallway floor of her home. A fresh flood of fear awakened with her and her hands began to tremble. The shaking spread outward, and soon she felt as though she was in the grip of a terror-induced seizure.
Laura felt different, and not only different. She felt as though an oil slick had spread over her soul as she slept, like some kind of infinitely strange, alien darkness had taken up residence inside her while she was unconscious and unable to keep it out. Something was wrong–so, so wrong–and she didn’t just feel it within herself. The sickness was all around her, and suddenly Laura knew with simple certainty that it wasn’t only her, it wasn’t only here. It was everyone, it was everywhere. And Laura was suddenly very afraid for her children.
Pulling herself to her feet and steadying herself against the wall, Laura gripped the fabric of her shirt just over her heart, feeling as though the organ had somehow been polluted with incurable sickness while she wandered lost in her unconscious state. Her blood moved sluggishly and felt more like tar in her veins than flowing life. What had happened to her? More frightening; what was still happening?
Turning around, Laura entered Trevor’s room first. The darkness of the night had been swept away by an uneasy dawn. The faint blades of light cutting through the room from the closed blinds seemed uninspired, as though they felt no true conviction that it was right to shine upon this world anymore. The cold quality of the light made Laura shiver and she hit the light switch before crossing the room to her son’s bed.
Shaking him gently, Laura called her son’s name in a soft voice. “Trevor. Trev, wake up, honey.”
Trevor’s eyes opened easily and held none of the cloudy confusion one would expect from a young boy being shaken from a sound sleep. They were clear and calculating, and as Laura watched, they turned black.
Instinctively, Laura took a step back. The fear that welled within her when she looked into the painfully alien eyes of her firstborn was a breathless, pouncing thing. It made her pulse jump and then stampede. Uttering a low moan of pure terror, Laura once again put a hand to her heart.
Something was here, some knowing of just what had happened and what was coming, but Laura was either too learned or too scared to allow the concept to root itself in the center of her being, where it clawed at the doors of her stubborn mind, demanding access in a howl as dark as the primordial black.
“Trevor,” she whispered, as though his name was a talisman against whatever being of darkness currently held her boy in its thrall. “Trevor, talk to me.”
The boy sat up, unconcerned, and didn’t say anything to his mother. He looked at her, almost through her, it seem, and then stood. Moving with economical speed that was not at home in the body of an eight year old just getting out of bed, Trevor quickly shed his pajamas and dressed himself in smart winter clothing. When he turned back to his mother, his eyes were still the fathomless black of some lightless pit.
Trevor said one word, “Melissa,” before he began walking forward.
His gait was not hurried or slow, nor was it quite Trevor’s typical walk. He moved almost as though someone had taken adult poise and some ethereal grace and injected it into his small body. He walked like he was more than himself, and the more was something unnatural and terrifying that made Laura moan low in her throat again.
When Trevor walked around her and toward his sister’s room, Laura was suddenly overcome with conviction that the boy could not be alone with Mel. Whatever was wrong with Trevor was dangerous to the girl, and no matter if she didn’t understand what was happening, Laura knew there were certain things she still had to do. Protecting her children, even from each other if it came to that, was one of those things.
“Let me go first,” Laura demanded as she followed the boy out and grabbed his arm to sto
p him walking.
Trevor looked down at the hand on his arm and a curious expression crossed his face. For a moment, Laura wondered if the boy was going to get physical with her, and the thought was met with instant denial. Trevor had never been a violent or even moody child. He’d never once raised voice or hand to either of his parents. So why did Laura think he was considering how easy it would be to break his mother’s wrist in that instant?
Removing her hand from his arm, Laura did her best to quell her fear and banish what she tried to convince herself were irrational thoughts. Trevor wasn’t a violent boy and it was shameful to think he would do anything to hurt her or anyone else. Whatever was wrong with the world, she wasn’t going to be afraid of her son.
“Stay close to me,” Laura told Trevor as she moved toward Mel’s room.
Trevor didn’t respond; he simply followed Laura toward his sister’s room.
When Laura pushed open Mel’s door, she was filled with a fear so big it was almost impossible to walk around. She had a flash of no less than ten nightmarish images, all pertaining to finding the girl in some state of injury or death.
Melissa was sleeping soundly, facing away from them, blond hair spilling over her pillow and across the bed. Her small shoulders moved almost indiscernibly as she breathed in a slow, even way.
Laura had a moment of relief, a moment to think of how very long her daughter’s hair had gotten since the last trim and then an alien part of her seized control of her body and propelled her forward. Laura felt more than saw some sort of darkness thrust itself from her body, a head from where her head was, but no head like anything Laura had ever seen.
When she pulled her body back like she was straining on the reigns of a wild stallion she was trying to break, the phantom head snapped back into her, disappearing under her skin as if it had never been. But Laura knew what she had seen. Sinew made of shadow, a neck that seemed able to stretch and fling itself a distance of perhaps three feet and massive jaws full of teeth black as jet yet as insubstantial as smoke.
Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller Page 2
