Dark Days (Book 6): Survivors

by Lukens, Mark

  “Her name’s Rose,” Ray said. He looked back at Rose. “That’s Josh and Emma. Mike, my son, he’s almost twelve, he’s downstairs in the basement.”

  Rose looked back at Ray, startled for just a moment.

  Ray imagined how that must have sounded—like he had locked his son away in the basement. “He’s playing video games down there,” he added quickly.

  Rose looked confused, her eyebrows scrunching a little. “You . . . you have electricity?”

  “Runs off a solar-powered generator,” Josh said.

  She just stared at him.

  “It’s complicated,” Josh told her. “But yeah, we have electricity.”

  “And running water,” Emma said as she reached out and touched the shorter couch so she could locate it and sit down.

  “My friend built this place,” Ray said. “He’s not here with us, but he told us we could stay here as long as we wanted to.”

  “Where is he?” Rose asked, her voice still just a whisper.

  “I don’t think he made it,” Ray said and left it at that.

  Rose seemed to understand what he meant.

  “His name was Doug,” Ray continued. “He kind of suspected something like this was going to happen. He built this cabin to be ready for it.”

  “We’ve got food and water,” Josh said. “We’re making dinner right now if you’re hungry.”

  Rose nodded, still sitting in the same position on the floor with her blanket all around her.

  “We have hot water,” Emma said with a smile. “You could take a shower or a bath if you want to before we eat. We could wash your clothes. I’ve got some clothes you could borrow while your clothes are being washed.”

  “Shower? Washing machine?” Rose seemed unable to accept these things, like they were visions from the past that she figured she would never see again.

  “Rose,” Ray said. “We helped you. We brought you inside.” He wasn’t trying to smile anymore. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

  She nodded.

  “Are you alone? Are you with a group?”

  “I’m alone. I was with a group, but I got away.”

  “Were they Dark Angels?”

  Rose shook her head no, but she seemed to recognize the name.

  “So you were in another group?”

  “Yes. A group of survivors. It was a small group. Thirteen of us. But . . . but they weren’t good people.”

  Ray could guess where the bruise and the cut on her lip had come from.

  “We’re good people,” Emma said.

  Rose looked at Emma on the couch, staring at the dark glasses on her face.

  Josh was standing right beside Emma at the end of the couch. “She’s blind.”

  Rose just nodded.

  “Where are your people now?” Ray asked, trying to get Rose’s attention again. “Are they looking for you?”

  She shook her head a little. “They’re far away. I got away. They didn’t follow me.”

  “How do you know they didn’t follow you?” Luke asked.

  Rose shrugged. “It’s been days now.”

  “Days since you got away from your group?” Ray asked. “How many days?”

  “I don’t know. A few. Three. Maybe four.”

  “And they weren’t part of the Dark Angels?” Ray pressed.

  “No.”

  “But you have heard of the Dark Angels?”

  “I’ve seen the symbols painted on buildings and cars. Some of the guys in my group, they saw their vehicles. Military vehicles.”

  “Why don’t we let her get a shower and let her eat,” Emma said. “Then we can interrogate her.”

  “I’m just asking a few questions,” Ray said.

  “I’ll go get you some clothes,” Emma told Rose and got up from the couch to go upstairs to her room.

  CHAPTER 19

  Ray

  After Rose took her shower and Josh got the laundry going, they all sat down at the table to eat. The table sat six, and the usually empty chair was taken by Rose now. She sat at one end of the table and Ray sat at the opposite end. Josh and Emma sat next to each other on one side, and Luke and Mike sat next to each other on the other side.

  Rose dove into her food, eating rapidly, shoveling food into her mouth. “I can’t believe this,” she said around a mouthful of food. Then she stopped and looked at everyone, smiling sheepishly. She wiped her mouth with a piece of towel they had ripped up for napkins. “I’m sorry. I don’t usually eat like this. It’s just that it’s been so long . . . so long since . . .”

  “It’s okay,” Ray said.

  “I know I haven’t said it yet,” Rose said, “but thank you for taking me in this morning. I remember seeing the cabin. I wasn’t sure if anyone was home, if anyone lived here. I was just so tired. So cold. I just wanted to get out of the wind.”

  “But you’d seen our cabin before,” Ray said.

  Rose stopped, her motion frozen, her fork halfway up to her mouth. “Uh, I don’t think so.”

  “We found tracks in the woods,” Ray said, glancing at Luke.

  Luke nodded. “Someone was in the woods yesterday. They waited by a tree. Seemed to be watching the cabin, then they went back into the woods.”

  Ray was sure that Rose had just tried to lie about being in the woods yesterday, but he didn’t call her on it just yet.

  Rose looked confused, like she was trying to remember. “Maybe. I think I remember seeing your cabin before, but I was scared. I didn’t know if people lived here. If you were friendly, or if you were people like Zeke.”

  “Zeke?”

  “He was the leader of the group I was in.”

  “How did you join up with them?” Ray asked.

  Rose was nearly finished with her dinner. She mopped up the last bit of tomato sauce with a piece of baked bread and ate it. She drank a few swallows of water. “I’m from Maryland, a small town about forty miles outside of Baltimore. I lived in an apartment with my boyfriend, Sayid. I remember how everything was going bad. There were riots on the news. Businesses shutting down. Murders everywhere. Rumors about a plague. We stocked up on some food and water, but we didn’t really have a lot of money. Sayid had been out of work for a while, and my hours had been cut way down. I worked at a gas station store, and my boss was talking about closing the place down. We found a dead body behind the store; the guy had been mauled, half-eaten, like a pack of wolves had attacked him.”

  Rose paused and took another sip of water. “And then Friday came. The banks closed. There was martial law. The military was everywhere, the police. Planes and helicopters were flying everywhere. People in our building and our town were starting to leave. We thought we should leave, too. And we knew by then that the disease was real, the disease turning people into rippers. The electricity went out. Our phones hadn’t been working the whole day. We didn’t know what else to do, so we went to my mom and dad’s house. But my parents weren’t too welcoming.”

  “Why not?”

  “They had never liked Sayid. They actually hated him, hated that I was with someone like him. My parents had money, but they vowed never to help me as long as I was with Sayid. But as bad as this was, they said they would let me in, but not Sayid. But I told them I wasn’t going to stay without Sayid.”

  Rose paused, beginning to cry. She shook her head. “They told me to go ahead and leave then.”

  Emma reached a hand out and patted Rose’s hand, holding it for a few seconds.

  “I even told my parents that I was pregnant,” Rose said, laughing a little through her tears. “I don’t know what I was thinking, that maybe me being pregnant might change things, that they would have some sympathy for me, or know how serious me and Sayid were. I wasn’t really pregnant, but I thought it might make them take us in. But all it did was make things worse. My parents went ballistic. They weren’t even acting like themselves anymore. I’d never seen them get so angry, so venomous. My dad could hardly spit the words out. Looking back now
, I know that he was beginning to turn into a ripper. They both were. And I guess they couldn’t help how they were acting. That’s what I want to believe, anyway.”

  Ray remembered how Kim had acted when she’d begun to turn, how her emotions had flipped on a dime from one extreme to another. And he remembered Vanessa, her anger, how she had gotten her words mixed up, how she had kept saying the words bad moon over and over again, how she had bitten Mike’s arm, how she had tried to attack him.

  His dream from two nights ago came back with a sudden force, his daughter attacking him all over again.

  “So you and Sayid left,” Josh said.

  “Yeah,” Rose answered. “We had some stuff in our car. We tried to get on the highway, but it was packed. Cars were stalled and abandoned. Cops were everywhere. We drove to the next town. By then we started seeing the rippers everywhere. We found a house to stay in, a basement where we could hide. We boarded up the door. Rippers got into the house, they tried the door, but they gave up eventually, moving on. We were safe for a little while. We had some food, some water, but not enough to last a long time.”

  “Where’s Sayid now?” Luke asked.

  Ray was afraid he already knew the answer.

  “He started to turn in the basement.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Ray

  “I didn’t want to leave Sayid,” Rose said. “But he knew he was turning into a ripper. He tried to convince me to be strong, trying to form a plan. He told me I should head west, into the mountains of West Virginia, to a remote place, a place where there wouldn’t be many rippers, where the military wouldn’t be bombing cities.”

  Rose paused again. She looked like she was about to cry again, but she choked back the tears, continuing with her story. “Sayid asked me to kill him.”

  Again, Ray was brought back to Emma’s condo. He was in the bedroom with Kim again, where she’d asked him to kill her. And he had. He had poisoned his wife. He’d seen her die. He had wrapped her body in a shroud. And her body was still there, still in that bedroom. Unless rippers had gotten to it.

  God, he couldn’t think about that right now.

  “I couldn’t do it,” Rose said as tears slipped from her eyes. “I couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to turn into one of those monsters, but I still couldn’t kill him. Then he wanted me to leave before he turned. But I was too scared. I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to be out there in that world with those monsters. I could hear them every so often, running past the basement windows like a herd of horses, calling to each other. The screams. The yells. I heard them in the house above us, jiggling doorhandles. But by then the house must have been picked clean, because they usually moved along pretty quickly.”

  “But you obviously left Sayid,” Josh said.

  She nodded. “While I was asleep, Sayid found this thick chain and padlock. He chained himself to the heater somehow. He was practically a ripper by then, yelling at me to go, to pack a bag and take the car. His yells, when he was more ripper than human, were attracting other rippers. I knew I didn’t have a lot of time. I had to leave. Sayid wasn’t Sayid anymore. But I had almost waited too long. By the time I grabbed my small bag and the claw hammer, by the time I was at the top of the steps trying to pull the boards off the door that Sayid had nailed there, he was almost free, screaming and pulling at the chain, pulling parts of the heater apart. Yeah, Sayid had nailed those pieces of boards on the door pretty good. I almost didn’t get out in time. Somehow I got out before he got loose. I got to the car, got inside and started it. The windows were smashed out, glass everywhere, but at least the tires weren’t flat. I just got in and drove, heading west. I didn’t even stop and look at a map until I was far outside of town.”

  “And how did you find this group you were with?” Ray asked. “This Zeke that you were talking about.”

  “They found me. I thought I was dead at first when they found me. I figured they were going to rape me and kill me.” She glanced at Mike. “Sorry.”

  Ray didn’t say anything—Mike was going to have to understand that evil things happened in the world, part of his rapid path into adulthood now. He waited for Rose to continue.

  “Then I thought maybe I was saved. But it was neither heaven nor hell, somewhere in between. I was safer with the group, but I was also trapped there.”

  “Is that when you got that?” Josh asked, pointing to his own lip. “Zeke did that?”

  “Not Zeke. Another man.”

  Rose didn’t expound and Ray didn’t ask for further details in front of Mike. He could imagine how the rest of the story would go.

  “How’d you get away from them?” Luke asked.

  Ray swore he could hear the suspicion and doubt in Luke’s voice, the same suspicions he felt—like they were looking for holes in her story.

  “I just left in the middle of the night. They didn’t really guard us; they figured none of us would actually go out into that hell the world had become. The abuse was bad, but maybe they figured it was better than being eaten alive by a pack of rippers.”

  “So you took a bag and left?” Luke asked.

  “No. They kept the supplies and weapons guarded. I just left with the clothes on my back and my coat. I left at night, almost at dawn. It seemed like the time when the rippers were least active."

  “You didn’t have a vehicle?” Luke asked.

  “No. I left on foot.”

  “And they couldn’t catch you?”

  “We were in a small town. A rural area. I found a pickup truck at a house. Found the keys inside. It was almost dawn by then. I found a can opener in the house and about five cans of vegetables and two cans of tuna that weren’t beat to shit by the rippers.” She shrugged. “They might have chased me. I don’t know. I’m sure they did. But they had two other women with them. And two children.”

  Ray felt a chill dance along his skin. He figured the group of survivors Rose was involved with had been good people once, most of them anyway. But eventually a leader emerged, a leader to control the group, a leader who would eventually become a dictator. He would have a few henchmen or enforcers—much like Luke used to be in his prior occupation—and he would rule with an iron fist. He would show no weakness or mercy, so no one would even think about trying to usurp him.

  This Ripper Plague and the collapse of civilization had sent the world back to the medieval times, maybe even back to the cavemen times. Groups of people had turned savage to survive, becoming gangs of highway robbers and bands of pillagers, a nearly overnight devolution of human society.

  These groups, like the one Rose had been in, were dangerous. But the Dark Angels were still the main concern for Ray because they were so organized and because they had organized so quickly. He was sure that had something to do with their leader and the psychic net he entangled them in.

  Which brought Ray to his next question.

  But Luke continued his questions first. “How’d you end up in the woods?”

  “I did what Sayid told me to do. I headed into the mountains, into the woods. I left the truck, took the little bit of food and supplies I had in a pillow case. I had a hammer and a kitchen knife for weapons. I just kept walking deeper into the woods, away from the rippers, away from the world.”

  “Where’d you sleep?”

  “I found a small cave one time. Another time I curled up at the bottom of a tree. I found a stream to drink out of. I thought I was going to get sick, but I didn’t. I . . . I can’t really remember everything that happened. Once I got into the woods, time became like a blur. I got so hungry. So thirsty. So tired.”

  “And then you found our cabin,” Luke said.

  She nodded.

  “Have you had any strange dreams?” Ray asked her.

  CHAPTER 21

  Emma

  Emma sat at the table beside Josh, with Rose to her left. She’d been listening to Ray and Luke’s interrogation of Rose. And that’s exactly what it was. Of course she understood why they were doing it�
��they were just being cautious. Ray was a cautious man, and it was that same cautiousness that had probably kept her and Mike alive when the three of them had been together. But she couldn’t help thinking that they had already made up their minds about Rose’s guilt. She could hear the suspicion in their voices.

  “I don’t really remember what I dreamed,” Rose said. She sounded thrown off for a moment, Ray’s question rattling her. And now she seemed a little shaky, like these questions had taken some kind of bizarre turn that she couldn’t understand.

  “I don’t dream very much,” Rose added. “At least I don’t remember them much. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” Ray said.

  Rose seemed to leave it at that.

  But Emma knew why Ray was asking that question. Ray had seen Josh and Luke in his dreams, and he’d even seen her. Josh and Luke had seen her, Ray, and Mike in their dreams. And now they were seeing others in their dreams: two women, a man, and a young girl. And maybe those people were seeing them at the same time. Maybe she had visited those four in their dreams and spoke to them like she’d done to Josh and Luke. She couldn’t be sure—that part of her mind was shut off when it happened, and for good reason, because the Dragon was always lurking, always trying to worm his way in, to control their dreams, to see where they were so he could find them.

  She’d had a few oppressive dreams about the Dragon, but none the last few nights that she could remember. Maybe the relative safety of this cabin had set her at ease, or maybe the Dragon was targeting others besides herself. She couldn’t be sure.

  “Everyone get enough to eat?” Josh asked. He stood up, collecting plates and silverware.

  “Thank you so much for the food,” Rose said.

  “You like to play video games?” Mike asked Rose.