May put her hand on the barrel and pushed it down.
“Run,” she said.
She was right. Of course she was right.
The creature came toward them, not quickly, but with a lumbering kind of gait. Each step loosened the floorboards and shook plaster from the walls, but its hulking figure couldn’t fit through the kitchen doorway. Then its disc-shaped back cut through the frame. The beast roared, the hot, stinking scent of death and blood on its breath reaching them before the monster itself did.
Tyler turned, grabbed May’s arm, and ran toward the front door and the street beyond.
There was just one monster on this side of the house; Tyler blasted it away with the rifle in one smooth motion. The kick of the weapon tried driving him back toward the other monster, the one with the disc-shaped body, but he held on. This one looked like some kind of deformed crocodile, a long snout full of serrated teeth, two eyes on stalks as thick as Tyler’s forearms.
He had aimed for those eyes and had hit the beast in the fleshy part right between them. It uttered a grating sound of pain and fell over in the side yard, squirming, a tail covered in spikes beating at the ground.
They gave its body a wide berth, came out on the road. Tyler looked back at the house. A legion of monsters surrounded it. The place he had called home for the past four months was now a circus freakshow from Hell.
Above, the sky was full dark. Foreboding. No sun in sight. A stale wind rippled through the surrounding trees, dry leaves crinkling as they rolled down Chapman Street.
They ran until they were at the end. It was no easy task with the weight of the packs strapped to Tyler. The fifty extra pounds caused his body to break out in a sweat—though it might also have been the adrenaline and fear coursing through his system at hyper-speed.
At the end of the street, they looked back again. The house’s roof had begun caving in; the brick chimney fell like a Jenga tower, dust billowing up in the darkness. The last of the lights still on in the house, their evidence once covered by the boards over the windows, winked out one by one.
Tyler crossed himself. “Now what?” he asked aloud.
He was mainly asking himself. He didn’t believe they would survive very long, if he was being totally honest. The four months in Bachman’s big red house hadn’t been the greatest, but outside, it was getting colder and colder by the day. It was sometime in October, and it already felt like January without the snow, the cold, gray days the kind that made you want to draw the curtains, climb under the covers, and never get up again.
Though Tyler had been asking himself what their next step was, May answered. Despite the way she looked, tears streaming down her face—blood, too—she carried a confident tone. She said nearly the same thing Logan Harper had thought four months before, after Brad Long’s mother became infected and destroyed their own little safe haven.
“We have to keep going.”
“Why?” Tyler asked.
His shoulders were slumped, his back was aching under the weight of the packs, which held the essentials: enough food to last them a few weeks, fresh clothes, a loaded handgun in each with extra rounds, and a rudimentary first aid kit with bandages, disinfectant, gauze, and Advil.
“Because we have to,” May said simply.
So they did.
7
Ironlock
Just before Tyler and May were forced out of the big red house, Logan Harper, an inhabitant of Ironlock, had gone out on a supply run.
He and his men all clutched rifles and handguns, what had been left behind by the now-defunct military.
A snap of branches came from their right. They stopped dead in their tracks.
Logan was hunched over, one foot resting on a crack in the blasted sidewalk.
The sky had darkened considerably since the hunters set out, sometime before noon, mere hours ago.
That was the way the world was now. Ever since the voids appeared on Earth, the weather patterns changed, and a constant haze hid the sun. Warmth could only be found by fires, but fires out in the open were the same as death sentences.
In the near-darkness, Logan heard a nightmare thing, a monster.
He looked at Brad over his shoulder. Brad clutched his rifle to his chest. His face looked considerably pale in the grayish dark. Along with them was Devin Johnson, a stocky African American man who had come up with the idea of the hunters; he ran Ironlock. Also joining them was another man they called ‘Grease,’ because of his startling resemblance to a young John Travolta, and Joe, with his large, eye-magnifying glasses.
Devin Johnson nodded his head to the woods at the back of the building, an abandoned Rite Aid. The bricks scorched by fire, and the show windows shattered, as if a great battle had been fought here—which, in fact, was the case. A one-sided battle. Man versus monster, David versus Goliath. David did not come out on top.
Logan motioned the others to the wall, where the shadows hung thicker.
Out in the woods, leaves rustled. Whole trees fell over with roaring booms. The ground shook. Behind them, something clattered inside the Rite Aid—a shelf, perhaps—which created a noise that rivaled the falling timber.
Three minutes passed before those mammoth footsteps receded, heading somewhere south. Logan silently thanked God. Had the beast gone north, there would’ve been no telling how long they had before it found their safe haven in Ironlock…where Jane waited for him, where the other survivors waited, too.
For good measure, the group let another two minutes pass as they hid in the shadows. The world was eerily silent, the lack of noise so heavy, it made Logan’s ears ring.
He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing. That was all he could do in times like these. He had a gun, sure, but before a few months ago, he had never so much as held one. And it wasn’t like guns and weapons were the cure to this plague of monsters. Not completely. You could put the smaller ones down with a few rounds, but the bigger ones…
Devin Johnson pointed toward the Rite Aid’s entrance. ‘Move out,’ this gesture meant.
Inside, there were bodies. Some of them had mutated, their bellies swollen and their limbs long, hands turned to claws; others were just mutilated, their bellies torn open, their limbs gone, their heads caved in.
Logan brought his forearm over his nose and mouth. The smell…oh, God, the smell.
There was not much left in the store. Brad and Logan went toward the food, Johnson and Grease toward the pharmacy, while Joe studied the abominations on the floor.
Brad pulled a trash bag out of his back pocket. He scooped an entire row of junk food into it: Slim Jims, Twinkies, Ho-Hos, Famous Amos Cookies, potato chips. It was all they could eat now, besides the canned goods. Most of the grid had gone down or was in the process of going down, which meant freezers had shut off, and meat, milk, and cheese was long-spoiled. At least in Northeast Ohio, the world was ever so dark. Communications with other states, with other countries, was nonexistent.
He hoped they were doing better than in his corner of the world.
Logan went to the dimmed cooler; unsurprisingly, the bottles of water were still cold. The nights weren’t exactly freezing, but they were chilly. Logan feared the worst from the oncoming winter. It was only about two months away.
Before the event, December was when Ohio became bitter; January and February were worse, but March and April were only wet and chilly, nothing to write home about. Now, after the event, it seemed winter had come early. September felt like November; there was no telling what October would feel like. Whatever percentage of the population was hanging on would be vanquished with the snow. Diseases different from the ones brought on by the monsters would wreck families, starvation and the stark weather would freeze people to their deaths.
The end of the world would not be an easy thing to get through, Logan knew. It would pretty much be hell, just like the last months had been. But still, through all of this—through losing Derek, his home, his friends, and the bit of family he had l
eft, through seeing unspeakable horrors, death, living nightmares—Logan still had his wife, his Jane, and that was what kept him going.
From the cooler, Logan took over a dozen bottles of water, Gatorade, soft drinks, energy drinks, stuff he would’ve never been caught drinking before all of this, but that he now had no choice but to drink. He moved away from the drinks toward the rack of books. These were untouched. When the looting and riots swept through this town, people went for the electronics. He shook his head at that.
Short sighted, not thinking about the long run.
He wasn’t much of a reader, but Jane was. She read any and everything. One night she’d be reading a steamy romance novel with Fabio and his greased-up, muscular chest on the cover, and the next night she’d be reading a Stephen King novel about a shapeshifting clown. Once, he’d even seen her reading a book on World War II. She never ceased to amaze him. So, for good measure, Logan grabbed as many paperbacks as he could fit into his pockets.
That’ll keep her mind occupied. For a while, at least.
They were to meet near the front of the store, by the registers. Logan had exhausted the store of what little resources it still had left. He waited for the others. His ears strained to hear any and all noises from the outside. In the months since the end of the world, his hearing had become almost supersonic, like a bat’s. Now he heard nothing.
He turned, ready to scan the lottery tickets—he always took a roll of scratch-offs whenever they went on a run. So far, he’d won upward of thirty-eight thousand dollars; Jane was hovering near fifty; Brad was somewhere just north of twenty. In the old world, they would’ve been doing pretty well for themselves. Not anymore.
He paused before his eyes could settle on the lottery display case.
Another dead body behind the counter. Half the man’s head was blown off. Blood on the wall behind him, long congealed. A gun lay near his feet, also covered in syrupy blood. Flies buzzed and lighted on the all-encompassing head wound. Logan climbed over the counter, knocking over a display of sunglasses. The noise it made wasn’t much, but Johnson and Grease scowled at him.
Though Logan’s sense of smell had become used to the sickening stench of rotting corpses, being this close to the dead man brought on a wave of nausea. He put it to the back of his mind and picked up the gun. He ejected the last round then patted the man down for anything of use. More rounds. A lighter. A pack of Marlboros. Logan didn’t smoke, but he knew a few people back at the camp that did. They’d appreciate it, though he’d neglect to tell them he took the smokes off of a dead man. It was the least he could do.
The others approached as he stood. Grease grimaced at the sight of the body. Brad’s garbage bag looked full to bursting. He assured them it wouldn’t. Devin Johnson wore a sour look of disappointment on his face.
“No luck in the pharmacy,” he muttered.
Like electronics, it seemed like medicine (along with booze and cigarettes) was always the first to go.
“We’ll try somewhere else,” Logan said.
“Tomorrow,” Devin answered. “I’d like to be back before total sundown.”
This gave them about thirty minutes. At night, the creatures became braver, more audacious—though they didn’t need to be. They had nearly decimated a race of people and had those still alive cowering in fear.
“C’mon, Joe,” Devin said.
Joe was examining one of the bodies near the front door, his notepad out, his pen in hand. His eyes behind his glasses were magnified tenfold, making him look like a bug.
“What should I call this one?” Joe asked.
“How about ‘Vomit’?” Grease suggested.
None of them laughed; it wasn’t meant as a joke. Grease was being serious. The abomination on the stained white tile looked like a pile of vomit.
“No,” Joe said dismissively. “That hardly goes with the theme.”
“Give it a rest, Joe,” Devin said. “Let someone else deal with this.”
“There might not be anyone else,” Brad said, his voice chilling. The others grumbled their agreement.
“I’ll have to think about it a little more,” Joe said. “For now,” he scribbled something in his notepad, “it shall be called ‘Unknown.’”
Logan had seen Joe’s notebook. Many of the entries were labeled ‘Unknown,’ followed by similar descriptions of gruesomeness.
Joe made another scribble, got up off of his haunches, and smiled. He was about the only one who smiled anymore. He took pride in his work, Logan knew; he thought he was doing what was left of their world some good. Maybe he was. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he, like Jane with her reading, was keeping his mind busy. In a way, it must be therapeutic, though how one could relax by looking at the ruined husks of human bodies, Logan didn’t know.
“Let’s bug out of here,” Devin Johnson said.
“Careful with your choice of words,” Grease replied.
Still no smiles. It wasn’t meant as a joke. There weren’t many jokes to go around anymore.
Outside, the darkness was near complete. The hunters had flashlights, but they dare not turn them on unless it was absolutely necessary. The smell of death was thick in the air, an almost alien smell.
The Humvee was parked about a quarter mile down the road, in the lot of an abandoned A&W root beer stand.
Logan felt the prickle of fear creeping up his back with each step he took. Again, he strained his ears for the slightest of sounds: the cracking of branches, the clacking of claws on concrete, the huffing of air through the nostrils of some black beast.
He heard nothing.
None of them spoke. They marched on in a single file line. Ruined buildings stood to their left and right like headstones in a graveyard. Logan’s mind drifted toward Jane, as it so often did. She would be waiting up for him, like the rest of the camp would be.
Ironlock, they called it. An unfinished prison about ten miles outside of Cleveland. The company funding the place had run out of money a few years before the Ravaging, thank God. The state had talked about turning it into a rehab facility, and had even put it up for sale a few times, but there had been no buyers. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway, in the long run. The world was dead, and most everyone was dead with it. People hooked on drugs and alcohol would have to get off the stuff the old-fashioned way.
If Ironlock had ever been turned into a rehab facility, Logan figured the fence would no longer be up. Two blocks of steel fencing surrounded the facilities. On top of the fence was barbed wire. Logan had seen many monsters that could’ve eaten the fence and not even chipped a tooth, but what the barrier did for the other survivors—all nineteen of them—was give them a sense of security. If a human, a being once at the top of the food chain, couldn’t get past those steel bars, then neither could a monster, a fabled creature of horror stories and films.
Devin stopped. He held his left fist up, and the others stopped with him.
But Logan heard nothing.
Devin started moving again, his rifle clutched in his right hand, and the others followed in his footsteps. Eyes darting around the darkness. Sweat prickling on their foreheads.
Logan’s heart shuddered in his chest.
When he’d decided to join up with Johnson and his band of hunters, the prospect of death was fresh on his mind, but so far, they’d had three good runs without incident. Sure, they’d seen some pretty messed up things, but they’d always come back in one piece. This, though—this was the closest they’d been to danger. Johnson had never held up the group before, like he was doing now.
Trees surrounded them. They were away from the town, mere feet from the truck, the vessel that would take them back to their safe haven, to Ironlock.
The dark had a way of playing tricks on your mind… Maybe that was what was happening; maybe Johnson had heard something in his head. Maybe he was imagining it all.
Logan met Brad’s eyes as the man turned back to look at him. It was all Logan could do t
o shrug and not broadcast the fear that was seizing his large muscles. If he showed signs of weakness, he was sure Brad would crumble.
The trees suddenly parted. Branches snapped like the cracks of a bullwhip.
Two monsters spilled out, moving like drunken men leaving the bar after last call. For some reason, as Logan was staring at these two abominations, he wondered if Joe had names for them, if they were scribbled in his little notebook. Unknowns, probably, because Logan had never seen any like these before.
One was humanoid in appearance. Bipedal. Its head was elongated, stretching far back behind it, alien in the simplest sense. 1950s sci-fi. This one possessed two eyes, a mouth full of teeth. No nose. The teeth were as sharp as jagged, broken rocks. A long, pinkish tongue fell out from between them. Frothy spit bubbled from its mouth, and tentacles like dreadlocks hung loosely in disorder beneath its chin.
God messed up making this one, Logan thought. The only explanation.
The other one looked like the type of monster this first monster would ride. It stood on all fours. Tree stump legs, short and stocky. Its hide was thicker than that of the armor on an army tank. Its face looked as if some greater beast had, quite simply, thrown it up, all dripping and out of proportion.
Logan found that he could not move. His legs were bolted to the old, cracked road that would eventually lead the hunters to safety.
Johnson was the first one to pull the trigger of his rifle. The sound it made in the quiet of the world was ear-splitting.
A burst of rounds took the bigger, elephantine monster in the sternum. Black blood poured out of the fresh holes, but the creature stayed up on all fours. The other creature, the one that so resembled a human in its posture and stature, dove out of the way. It moved in a blur, tucking itself into a somersault. Logan was reminded of the Xenomorph in the Alien films.
Taken World (Book 2): Darkness Page 6
