“I lost control,” she continued after a moment. “I crashed into a traffic light. My little brother…my—Stephen...he died. A piece of the windshield went through his throat.” Crying still, but now adding a laugh, May said, “Get that. Isn’t that bullshit? I was driving and all that happened to me was I cut my arm up and got a couple of bruises. But my little brother…he died.”
“It’s all right,” Tyler said. “It’s all right.”
She was sobbing. He didn’t know what to do.
“I killed him.”
“No, you didn’t. It was an accident,” Tyler said.
He sat up and moved closer. Put an arm on her shoulder. Her whole body was shuddering.
“Yeah, I did. I killed him,” May repeated. “But you know what?”
“What?”
“It was probably a better death than what would’ve happened to him.”
Tyler said nothing. What could he say? May was right. He’d seen firsthand what the monsters did to people. They were relentless.
She leaned her head on him, buried her face in his shoulder, sobbed.
He stroked her hair. “It’s okay,” he said.
She fell asleep like that, and he must’ve done the same because when he woke up, weak sunlight was streaming through the small spaces between the slats in the roof above him. He heard no monsters. Not yet, at least. He sat there a while, not wanting to wake up May. It was good to have a companion now. He’d only been traveling for a little while, but in that time, he had experienced the worst thing in the world for the first time in his forty-odd years: loneliness.
Maybe another half an hour passed before May stirred. When she woke, Tyler thought she looked well rested.
She blinked dazedly for a moment. “What—where am…”
And then she must’ve remembered. Seeing how close she was to Tyler, she scrambled away and apologized.
“Don’t sweat it,” he said.
Her cheeks flushed with color. He thought it just added to her beauty.
“I think today’s the day,” he said, getting up. His back and knees crackled loudly. Remind me to never fall asleep sitting on a concrete floor again.
“For what?” May wanted to know.
“Today’s the day we find some help. Today’s the day we get back to civilization.”
“Tyler…I don’t think there’s much civilization out there,” she said, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hands.
“There has to be,” he said. “Think of how many people are on this planet: upward of seven billion. Billion. There’s no way any creatures from beyond could’ve wiped us all out in a matter of days.”
“No, maybe not, but they got pretty damn close.”
May stood up now. Her joints didn’t audibly crack like his.
Ah, to be young again.
“Still, we can’t sit in this gas station for the rest of our lives. We have to make a stand. We have to fight back. We have to help, May.”
May didn’t say anything. She knew he was right. Their store of food was already running pretty low, though it hadn’t been much to begin with, and not to mention it would eventually expire.
And after seeing the scorpion-thing last night, Tyler was nearly a hundred percent certain that the metal shutters wouldn’t hold up very long, either. If the monsters wanted to get in, they would. It was just not safe here. Not as safe as they could be.
“So we go today. As soon as possible,” Tyler said with finality.
May wasn’t looking at him. He could sense her fear as much as he could sense the doom and chaos outside.
“It’ll be better together,” he told her.
She nodded, but the color that had filled her cheeks earlier was now gone. Drained away.
They had been walking for an hour by the time they crested a hill leading toward Akron, one of the largest cities in Ohio.
They’d been able to see the smoke for a while now. It was the color of ink, and the darkening sky swallowed it up greedily. Only a few rays of sunlight streamed down upon them. It was quite cold, considering it was summer. More like fall weather, Tyler thought. He had offered May his light jacket. She refused.
At the top of the hill, Tyler stopped. May stopped beside him.
“Oh, God,” he moaned.
They could see downtown from the hill—well, what was left of the downtown area, that was. The skyline looked diseased. The few skyscrapers that had once stood—and Tyler remembered them fondly, having driven down the highway right by it coming from the Cleveland airport—stood no longer. It was as if someone had taken a giant wrecking ball to the city.
The Chase Bank building was burning and throwing the inky smoke into the air. Half of the structure was nonexistent, practically ash. Other buildings were completely smashed into the ground, which made the skyline look like a set of rotten teeth, gaps and all. Inside of the destruction, he hear could things moving. Unnatural things. Big things.
“I told you,” May said.
Avoiding the city, for now, was a major priority. The top priority, however, was to find out what was happening, to get into contact with some type of authority. The local police, the military, National Guard—hell, even the President of the United States, if he hadn’t been devoured by some beast with a thousand sharp teeth.
They went east. Another hour passed before they saw a monster. It seemed the things didn’t like hanging around places that lacked food, and from here to Stone Park was a total wasteland.
The creature was up in a tree. It looked like a mutated bat, wings and all. Tyler put his arm across May, like a scared parent would reflexively do to their child in the front seat of a car as they slammed on the brakes.
The bat saw them with its yellow eyes, shrieked, and took to the sky. Heavy wings beat at the air, sounding like someone smacking a rug with a baseball bat.
The two humans kept going after that, but it wasn’t easy.
As the sun began to go down, they found a Best Buy. The front doors were broken and shattered, and the inside was dark except for something sparking to the left, near the cash registers.
“Come on,” Tyler said.
“Now’s not the time to go shopping,” May replied.
He shook his head, a ghost of a smile on his lips.
The town they were in was called Cuyahoga Falls. They had gone up this street full of businesses and restaurants because it was a concrete wasteland. There were no trees for bat creatures and scorpion-things to hide in, and that was all right.
They had passed many cars in the parking lots, but none of them had keys in the ignition, and Tyler, as smart as he was, didn’t know the first thing about hot-wiring. He was sure he could figure it out, but would a car in all this be the best decision? Would it not just draw attention to them?
It was a double-edged sword, that was for sure. Walking was safe because it was quiet, but they were out in the open; driving was unsafe because of the noise, but safe because they’d be somewhat protected and could travel quicker. They had noticed, though, that the roads were hardly fit for travel. Most of them in the general vicinity of the anomaly had cracked or caved in completely with the earthquakes.
Maybe I should find a bike, one of those two-seater jobs, he thought, nearly laughing.
“Fine. We going in or what?” May asked.
Her voice startled him. “Yeah,” he said.
Inside the Best Buy, most of the shelves were bare. The place had either had a mega sale or experienced some looting at the onset of this apocalypse. All the TVs were gone, and the computers, the racks of movies empty, too. Funny, actually, he thought, because the electricity was down around here, and probably the whole world, or would be soon enough. Those electronics would be useless.
From the light of the sparks near the registers, Tyler saw that the small snack section usually full of candy bars and chips and other various junk foods had also been emptied.
He and May stood near the entrance of the store, directly in front of the doors and
the stand where a security guard was meant to monitor the cameras.
“Why are we here?” May asked. “I mean, of all the places we should be, I wouldn’t put a Best Buy very high up on the list.”
“Well, seeing as how Radio Shack went the way of the dinosaur, this is our best bet to find some communication gear, something we can use to get in contact with the outside world.”
“You think that stuff is still going to be here?”
Tyler smirked. “Look around. The first stuff to go is the thousand-dollar computers and five-thousand-dollar TVs. People don’t think long-term.”
“What are you, like one of those preppers or something? End of the world, doomsday predictors?” May asked, squinting at him.
Tyler laughed softly, but the sound carried far around the empty store, echoing. It was an eerie noise, one that summed up the world’s current predicament. He didn’t like it. Not one bit.
“No, I’m not a prepper or a doomsday-sayer, but maybe I should’ve been after those anomalies popped up. Maybe I should’ve taken some precautions.” He shrugged. “But I didn’t.”
“Most people didn’t,” May said. “It all happened so fast.”
True enough, but even if it hadn’t, Tyler thought that most people would’ve put off preparing until the very last minute.
“Come on,” he said, and motioned her toward the back of the store.
It took some time, but they eventually came to the back left corner, well past the damaged and discounted washers and dryers and right next to the GPS systems, which had all but become obsolete thanks to the advent of the smartphone. There was, unsurprisingly, a good amount of TomToms left on the rack, but it wasn’t a GPS he was after.
It was radios.
A selection of AM/FM boxes took up about half a shelf of space. The display models were covered in a fine layer of dust; they hadn’t been touched in a long time. He scanned the price tags, May looking on skeptically, until he came across a Grundig Field BT AM/FM/shortwave satellite radio, priced at just over a hundred bucks. If the world was still up and running, he was sure he would’ve been able to talk a store clerk into knocking off a few extra dollars from the final total. Radios were just not in vogue, when music could be streamed on the internet and 4G networks.
“This will do just fine,” he said, picking up a boxed one and blowing dust off the package. Unlike the more ‘in’ gadgets, these weren’t locked up behind a metal door only a clerk could unlock; he doubted many people had come around to steal these. “With this baby, we’ll be able to receive signals…if there are any.”
“I don’t think there’s much room for hope now,” May said.
Tyler ignored her. “We’ll need batteries.” He turned the package around and noted that it came with a rechargeable battery, but since most of the grid seemed to be down, that was out of the question. Their best bet was disposables, which Best Buy would have.
“Takes D batteries,” he said, squinting to read the small words on the box in the dying light. “Let’s go find them.”
“Let’s go find the Ds,” May repeated and chuckled.
If there was a joke there, Tyler didn’t get it. A youth thing, he figured, because she was young.
They found one eight-pack of Ds, under the shelf the rest were supposed to be on; someone must’ve kicked it there in the mad scramble of cleaning out the store.
The radio took four batteries. He put them in, so excited and nervous that his fingers were shaking. Just as he was about to press the ON button, May put her hand over his. The chilliness of her flesh pebbled Tyler’s own.
“Wait,” she said. “What if we don’t want to hear what’s going on?”
“What? That’s crazy. We have to find out.”
“I know…but what if there isn’t anything? What if there’s just static? What if we’re the last people around?” May’s skin paled.
“But the jets,” Tyler said. “I heard jets. Those don’t just fly by themselves. And this part of Ohio, so close to the anomaly, was evacuated—that’s where all the people went. They were evacuated.”
But even as he spoke, Tyler began to detect the uncertainty in his voice. What May was saying made sense…didn’t it?
“I’m scared, Tyler.”
He looked up at her, saw the raw terror in her eyes. “I am, too, May. But I have to know. Good or bad, I have to know.”
He turned on the radio.
There was a short burst of static, unbelievably loud. Quickly, he fumbled for the volume knob and turned it down a few notches. May had stumbled backward a step and almost took a seat on one of the shelves.
They waited a few heartbeats.
Tyler hoped he would hear anything: a semblance of a human voice, an emergency broadcast alert…just something.
Please, God, please.
He turned the dial again.
Static.
Don’t do this. Help us. Please.
Turning. Static. More static. And static.
“It’s okay, Tyler,” May was saying. Her hand was on his shoulder; he was barely aware of it. “We’ll find someone yet. I know we will.” But she was not convincing as the voice of hope…even through the delirium settling over Tyler, he noticed this.
He kept turning the knob, running over each frequency and getting nothing.
Then he switched the radio off completely.
May’s hand was now on his. “No. Keep trying. Can’t you try locally? Like, you know, how walkie-talkies work or whatever?” She closed her eyes, furrowing her brow. “Wait, I know this. My grandpa taught me. It’s called, like, HAM radio or something. Try that.”
Local signals? He hadn’t thought about that. What’s left here but bodies and destruction?
Still, he knew what frequency he needed in order to pick up local signals. He switched the radio back on and began scanning—
“This is an emergency broadcast message—” A female voice that cut to a male’s.
“The date is June 18th, 2018. We are located at 5432 Chapman Drive, off of Britain Road. West Akron, near the border of Tallmadge. Big red house, can’t miss it… The date is June 18th, 2018. We are located at 5432 Chapman Drive, off of Britain Road. West Akron, near the border of Tallmadge. Big red house, can’t miss it… The date is June 18th, 2018. We are located at 5432 Chapman Drive, off of Britain Road. West Akron, near the border of Tallmadge. Big red house, can’t miss it.”
Then came the woman’s voice again: “This is an emergency broadcast message,” and the man’s message repeated three more times.
For a while, all Tyler and May could do was stare at each other. Akron. A neighboring city, a place they’d just fled from…well, the downtown area, at least. Wherever this big red house was, it couldn’t be far. Tyler looked up at the ceiling, his mind saw through it, and he imagined a picturesque blue sky. He thanked God.
“What’s the date?” Tyler asked when he was finally able to find words.
“It’s June 28th, I think. Pretty close to that, if not. Definitely the end of the month, or early July.”
Jesus. He’d prepared the test—the test Hammond had forced him to run—on June 15th. It had only taken three days after that for someone to hole up and get an emergency message on the radio waves. If it was the twenty-eighth, that meant he’d been wandering for nearly two weeks—that’s right, ladies and gentlemen, two weeks, a fact that he was aware of at some subconscious level, but had just realized.
It didn’t seem like it had been that long…then again, when he thought about it, it actually felt like a damn eternity. He blamed it on the lack of people, the lack of interactions, and most of all, the lack of sun. The watch on his wrist, which gave the time but not the date, said it was near nine p.m., but a quick glance outside, and you might think it was well past midnight.
Something was happening there, something he wasn’t exactly prepared to understand.
“So it’s been maybe ten days,” Tyler said. “He said Akron. He said West Akron, near the border of
Tallmadge. That can’t be far. Is that far?”
May shook her head. “It’s not far. It’s maybe two miles from here.” She pointed out of the store. “I’ve never been that way, though. I don’t know where Chapman Drive is.”
“All we have to do is head west, right?”
“But—”
“I know. We’ll stay here tonight and head out when the sun makes another appearance,” Tyler said, then in his head, he thought, If the sun makes another appearance.
They went to the break room, near the back of the Best Buy. Tyler opened the fridge and found some warm water and a couple of apples that had rotted slightly. He gave one to May and kept one for himself.
“Eat around the black spots,” he said.
“Healthier, yeah, but I sure miss the Slim Jims and candy.”
They both laughed, then they slept huddled up.
Neither slept very well. Tyler dreamed about his mother and Nana. He woke up in a cold sweat, thinking about them. Unlike most nightmares, this one didn’t dissolve as he swam to consciousness.
He went to a window and looked out. He saw no monsters, only a bit of sun. Early morning light, hazed over by the clouds. He wondered how far this would go, how long this would last. The monsters—Aliens...let’s be real here, folks.
They may not have come from a flying saucer, but they certainly were from another world or dimension or whatever. Call them what you want. Monsters. Aliens. Creatures. They hunted man. They decimated populations. Yeah. They were here. A lot of them, Tyler figured. Forty-seven anomalies all over the world. If each one erupted with monsters like Mount Vesuvius had erupted with lava, then the human race was utterly, for lack of a better term, fucked.
He reached over and gently shook May. She blinked her eyes open and looked around like she didn’t know where she was, just like she’d done the previous night at the gas station.
“Morning. Daylight’s wasting,” Tyler said. He tossed her a package of peanut butter crackers. “There’s breakfast. It isn’t five-star, but it’ll do.”
Taken World (Book 2): Darkness Page 3
