May thanked him and ate very quickly.
They struck out west, according to Tyler’s wristwatch, at exactly 11:43 a.m., yet the sky looked more like early dusk. There was no telling how much daylight they’d already wasted, nor how much shorter the days would become. Tyler tried not to think of this as they crossed the parking lot. It was virtually empty of cars, but on the south side, near a restaurant called O’Charley’s, there was something near a bus stop that looked a lot like a dead body. He decided not to focus on that and kept heading west.
They brought the radio and found a map in the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in the plaza next to the Best Buy. The map showed them Britain Road, which wasn’t too far, but no Chapman. Tyler figured as long as they got on Britain and headed west, they’d find Chapman eventually. Hopefully.
Up Howe Avenue they went. They passed a bevy of shops and restaurants, all without their lights on, all without patrons to serve. Neither said anything. They cut down a smaller street between a shopping mall and another row of shops and restaurants.
Tyler didn’t like being as out in the open as they were, but he also assumed that the monsters, if they weren’t sleeping the day away, didn’t like being in the open, either. Of course, the big ones—and he’d seen some mighty big ones—didn’t give two shits about that, he supposed. So far, they hadn’t seen a mighty big one, nor had they heard one in the night as they’d slept in the Best Buy break room. Maybe exhaustion had set in and they hadn’t heard or felt it, just slept right through it…but Tyler doubted that.
They came upon a dilapidated movie theater. A little father east, a Circle K gas station. A car had gone through one of the pumps, it seemed, and torched the entire place. Blackened. Crisped. The smell of charred bodies hung heavily in the air. Both Tyler and May covered their mouths. There would be no staying in that gas station tonight, no scrounging junk food and soft drinks.
May did the sign of the cross and mumbled a few words Tyler couldn’t hear, a silent prayer for those who’d been lost. He thought it was a nice gesture, a good gesture, and he did the same.
The sign still standing just near a fallen traffic light by the intersection said this was Britain Road. That was good. Though they couldn’t see too far because of the relative haze and gloom, Tyler thought that the road stretched on for a good few miles.
Neither one of them had much energy—sleeping on hard floors and surviving off of rotten apples tended to do that to a person—but they both picked up their pace.
Twenty minutes later, they approached a hill. Near the top, they could see the green street signs, the names of the streets written in white letters. To their right and left were rundown businesses: a pizza place, a tanning salon, a car dealership with a bunch of old, rusted Cadillacs and BMWs front and center, some strip clubs.
“I think we’re close,” Tyler said. “I can feel it.”
Those were the first words spoken since May had whispered her silent prayer, but even those words had carried in the quiet of the world.
Two weeks, Tyler thought. That’s all it took for the world to regress half a century. What will happen in a month, two months, a year?
He didn’t want to think about it; didn’t want to think about whether he would still be here or not that long from now. In times of struggle, minutes became hours, months became years.
Something shrieked not far off. It was a sound that reminded Tyler of a fork raking down a glass plate, and it set his teeth on edge. He thought of the bat-like creature and its large, leathery wings.
He and May were on top of the hill now, him scanning the right side, May scanning the left. Here was a ‘Hawk Avenue’, a ‘Demo Street’.
No ‘Chapman’.
The road went on for at least another mile or two before there was a traffic light. He saw a pile-up there. Cars bumper to bumper, more military vehicles, possibly a flipped-over tank. This made him shudder. What in the good hell could flip over a tank? They had to weigh fifty tons, probably more.
It’s getting darker out, too. Find shelter soon, or you’ll find out what flipped that tank, his mind said.
“Chapman!” May shouted, startling Tyler.
Relief suddenly flooded him. He was on the brink of tears. Not even thinking about it, he grabbed May’s hand. She was cold. At first, she jumped at his touch—which was wholeheartedly meant to be friendly—but then she squeezed back.
“We made it,” she said.
He echoed. “We made it.”
5
Bachman
The big red house really couldn’t be missed. It stuck out among all the others, even as it sat at the end of the visible street, where Chapman curved harshly to the right.
Tyler’s feet hurt. Blisters had formed between a few of his toes, and he needed rest as badly as he needed a nutritious meal, but he wouldn’t stop now.
They picked up their pace. Already, like a monster itself, they could both feel the darkness creeping over their shoulders.
“I don’t want to be negative again,” May said, “but we should tamper our expectations. This might not be—”
But she didn’t get to finish the thought, because a man was standing in the middle of the road, aiming a gun at them.
The man had to raise his voice to be heard, but not by much. He was about two hundred feet from them. He wore a checkered red and black shirt, rolled-up sleeves, and blue jeans. His hair was black, salted with bits of gray, as was the heavy beard covering his face. He looked young but old, like he could’ve been in his forties or possibly his seventies.
“Either of you hurt?” this man asked, and Tyler instantly recognized him as the voice over the radio.
“No,” Tyler called back.
“Throw your weapons out in front of you!”
Tyler let the shotgun drop.
Silence for a while. Then, even closer now, that shriek from earlier, now sounding like the fork was scraping through the glass plate, grinding it to shards.
Tyler shuddered.
“That’s all you got?” the man asked. Tyler nodded. “Well, damn, you need more than that!”
“We heard your message,” May said. “We need help.”
The man lowered his gun. He grinned. “Well, pretty lady, come on in.”
May and Tyler exchanged a glance. She looked worried.
Tyler said, “I won’t let anything happen to either of us. I promise.”
May nodded.
They approached the man. His gun was something you’d see in a video game, Tyler thought. Long-barreled, modded with different pieces and parts: a scope that didn’t match the color of the stock, a barrel punctured with holes—for silence, Tyler assumed.
“Name’s Bachman. Glad someone heard my message. I knew this shit was gonna happen sooner or later. I recorded that thing soon as I heard about them alien structures popping up all over the world.” Bachman laughed. “Believe that? Aliens? Of all the ways I’d thought we’d go out…aliens.”
Tyler laughed out of politeness, picking up the shotgun he’d let fall. He certainly didn’t find their situation, the world’s situation, amusing.
“Well, come on in,” Bachman said. “Big red house.” He winked. “Can’t miss it.”
The inside smelled like cigarette smoke and sour beer, and it certainly was big. The windows had been boarded over, the doors triple padlocked. There was a cache of weapons in the corner of the living room, which the front entrance opened on.
“You hungry?” Bachman asked.
Tyler nodded.
“I bet. You two look like hell…” he drifted off. He was looking at the dirty bandage on May’s arm. Now, in a whirl of confusion, he raised his modified rifle at her. “The hell is that, honey?”
May stumbled backward and hit the wall. A picture frame fell and shattered on the floor. Neither of them seemed to notice.
Tyler’s mind was in a haze. This sudden change in Bachman’s mood had caught him off guard, but he’d made a promise to May, and he was going to keep
that promise.
He threw himself between her and the man, raised his own shotgun. Bachman wavered a little. A bead of sweat that had collected near Bachman’s brow rolled down the side of his face.
“No need for that,” he said. “I just asked a simple question. Didn’t see that bandage there. My eyes aren’t what they used to be. I see it now. So what the hell is it?”
May’s voice shook. “I was in a car accident.”
“Bull,” Bachman said.
“She was in a car accident,” Tyler repeated. “You heard the lady.”
“Take it off,” Bachman growled. “Take it off so I can see it.”
May did. A red wound lay under it, pinkish near one edge.
Bachman lowered his weapon and squinted. Tyler still didn’t lower his.
“All right, just checking,” Bachman said. “I seen what them things do to people. It ain’t pretty. That ain’t a bite or a scratch, but, honey, you sure could use some medicine. Help it heal faster. Surprised you ain’t got gangrene, with that dirty bandage on it.”
Bachman turned, but before he did, he put a palm on Tyler’s shotgun and pushed it down. “No need, son. Everything’s fine.”
Tyler didn’t resist, though his heart was beating a mile a minute, and everything certainly wasn’t fine.
“Come on,” Bachman said. “I’ll get you fixed up, and then we can have dinner.”
Tyler and May exchanged a look, a confused one, but they followed the big man regardless.
That night, they ate canned ravioli and drank filtered water from wine glasses. May had a new bandage on her arm and wore a blue oversized t-shirt that had ‘Tallmadge Blue Devils’ written in big gold letters across the chest. Tyler’s new clothes fit a little better than hers.
Outside, the monsters wailed, and the world continued dying.
“That’s a nice radio,” Bachman said. “I got one myself.”
“Best Buy,” Tyler replied.
They had just finished eating. May was lying down on a pullout couch in a guest room.
“Good place,” Bachman said. “So, Tyler, where you from? Because you certainly don’t look or talk like an Ohio boy.”
“Atlanta originally, but I lived in D.C. before…before all of this.”
Bachman shook his head somberly. “Shitty thing that happened in D.C.”
Tyler’s stomach felt as if he’d eaten bricks instead of ravioli. “What happened in—in D.C.?” he asked, realizing his voice hardly sounded like his own.
“Shit, same thing that happened pretty much everywhere else. If you turn on that radio sometimes, I’m sure you’ll catch a hint.” Bachman downed the last of his water. “One of them alien diamonds or whatever was in South Carolina, right on the border of North Carolina, and then there was the one in West Virginia. They blew like all the rest, man. D.C. was surrounded by thousands—maybe millions—of aliens. They move fast. Last I heard, our nation’s capital was burning.”
“Do you know if they evacuated?”
Bachman shook his head again. “Doubt it. All I get from D.C. now is static. I don’t think there was much time for evacuation, ‘cept maybe for the people real close to the voids like over in Stone Park. No one knew they were just gonna…pop. People must’ve thought they were jokes when they first popped up. Me, well, I got my ass in gear. I battened down the goddam hatches.” He chuckled. “Over the radio, the people still alive call it ‘The Ravaging’. Stupid name, but stupid or not, it’s true. The United States was ravaged; the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, China, Australia, Japan—anywhere remotely close to one of those damn diamonds…ravaged. Yet, here we are.” He raised his empty wine glass.
Tyler absentmindedly raised his in return, but he was barely listening. Bachman’s words were echoing in his head. ‘Last I heard, D.C. was burning’; wasn’t that the final nail in the coffin? Sure, some part of him knew that the chances of his mother and Nana still being alive were slim—practically zero percent—but another part of him held on to some hope that they were okay.
D.C. was the capital of the country… So much history, so much importance. Wouldn’t they fight harder to protect that? Maybe, but the reality of the situation was that the president of the United States was in a bunker miles below the surface, and no one really knew what was coming until it had happened. Not everyone had military-grade tanks to hide in, like Tyler did.
At his core, he was a scientist, and a scientist was supposed to think logically no matter what. He hadn’t been doing that. He’d been holding onto the hope his family was still alive, but Bachman’s words were like a splash of cold water to his face. Now he knew the truth.
“Power went out almost instantly around here. They came around and told me I had to go, had to stay with family or friends a few miles away or go to one of their safe zones downtown, but I knew, Tyler. I knew that they wouldn’t be able to handle what was coming. Sometimes, I don’t think they were meant to. No. I think the human race’s time is up, my friend. I think God is clearing the planet out for something else.”
Tyler had no words. The images of his mother and grandma hung in his head. The worst thing? These images would fade in time. He wouldn’t be able to remember their faces, their smiles, their smells. They would become ghosts of a past life, a life so very far away, transparent and wispy like fog.
Bachman got up, the chair scooting loudly across the kitchen linoleum. “Come on, Tyler. I wanna show you something.”
They went into a room off of the kitchen. It had probably once been a bedroom, but now there was no bed in it. Not much of anything besides a desk and a chair, and on the desk, a computer. On the walls were maps and pictures and scribblings from a frantic hand.
“I call this my war room.” Bachman pointed to the map. “I’ve marked every place that has a void. Forty-seven in total.”
The voids were represented by little red triangles. Nine were in the United States; Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia, Florida, Wyoming, two in California, Colorado, and Texas. Then the rest of the red triangles were scattered throughout the world. Mexico City, Mexico; Toronto, Canada; São Paulo, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina. On the eastern part of the world, places like Tokyo, Shanghai, Mumbai, Cairo, Sydney, Istanbul, Karachi.
Tyler had studied a map just like this one nearly a month before, when the voids had first arrived and his job had gotten much harder and more confusing; except instead of little red triangles, they had used black pushpins to represent the anomalies.
“You know why they popped up in those places?” Bachman asked, looking at the map like a proud parent.
Tyler shook his head. “We’ll never know why, but, in light of recent developments, I guess it’s safe to say they popped up in places with the largest populations. Each one of those cities houses many, many human lives.”
Bachman nodded. “Yup. Skip the line and head straight to the buffet.”
“We never had a chance.”
“No way,” Bachman replied. “No chance in hell.”
They lived with Bachman for three months; it was a meager existence. Tyler found himself slowly losing his mind. Despite the house being so big, each day, the walls grew closer and closer. May knew this—she had felt it, too—but she also knew that without Bachman, they would’ve easily been dead…or worse.
In Bachman’s war room, Tyler had been tasked with a job of his own, on top of his other duties—duties that steadily rotated between the three of them and consisted of such banal activities as cooking, cleaning, emptying the bathroom buckets, checking the window blockades, monitoring the streets and surrounding woods via a gadget that Bachman had hooked up, which resembled a seismograph, and, of course, laundry (the worst of all).
This new job had been Tyler’s idea. He would sit in the war room, the seismograph-gadget scribbling on paper to his left, with headphones plugged into Bachman’s radio—a much nicer shortwave than the one Tyler had taken from Best Buy three months prior—and he would listen to the static for hours at a time. He
would get incoming transmissions from all over the country: survivors on their last legs, budding communities, and lone men, women, and children calling out for someone—anyone—to help them.
The latter always broke his heart. Sitting in the war room, hardly any natural light streaming in, locked up in this big red house, unable to do anything to help as humanity’s collective breath grew more ragged by the minute, but it was part of the job.
Whenever Tyler would come across one of the communities, these so called ‘safe havens,’ he would mark it down and look up the distance from their own ‘safe haven,’ then scribble it in a notebook. So far, none of the transmissions they’d picked up had been remotely close, besides one just outside of Cleveland, at a place called Ironlock. It was about forty-five miles away. On foot, that would take upward of twelve hours; that was much too long to be out in the open, especially when the day was dark by three in the afternoon, and pitch black by seven. They would have no realistic shot of getting there in one piece. If they had a vehicle, that would be a different story…but if Bachman had a working car, he knew how to keep a hell of a secret.
Tyler scanned through the channels. Static. More static. And static. The sound was an empty one. It filled him with dread, yet, every day, he’d still be in the war room, still sitting in the same chair with the same headphones plugged into the same radio, listening to the same static over and over again.
Hope. That’s what it was. A funny little thing.
Today, the three month anniversary of their arrival to Bachman’s place, had been no different. Tyler took the headphones from his head and switched off the radio. He looked at the list one last time before putting out the dim lantern and heading out to the living room. At the top, ‘IRONLOCK — 45 mi,’ was circled.
He knew they were already pushing their luck. They should’ve been somewhere underground, or, if God was good, an entirely different planet. But he knew if worst came to worst—which it most certainly would—they’d have to leave, and find a way to the outskirts of Cleveland; one of Ohio’s formerly most populated cities.
Taken World (Book 2): Darkness Page 4
