Before Logan could blink, before he could even think about moving, the creature barreled into Joe. Unfortunately for him—though it probably wouldn’t have mattered—he was holding his notebook and not his weapon.
The creature raked its claws down Joe’s sternum. The sound Joe made was the same sound that Logan thought tortured souls would make in hell. Then he realized that if there was a hell, it was right here, right now.
Logan felt Brad grip him around the shoulders and pull with all his might—it took a lot of might to move a man as large as Logan—as the four-legged monster trundled toward them. It fractured the road and flattened trees in its path.
As Brad ripped Logan out of the way, the only thing on Logan’s mind was his wife, Jane. He could picture her standing over his unmoving corpse, tears spilling down her cheeks, and suddenly he wished he would’ve listened to her when she told him that joining up with Johnson and his fool’s crusade was the closest thing to suicide one could get.
He and Brad spilled into the brush and down into a ditch. The crack-crack of gunfire filled the air. Logan smelled cordite, that pungent odor of triggers already pulled.
Logan’s own rifle rolled away from him as Brad fell on top of his body, and the wind whooshed out of his lungs. Somewhere outside the ditch, Joe was screaming. Logan managed to get his head up. Even in the darkness, he could see the poor man getting mauled. Finally, the four-legged monster trampled him.
Devin Johnson stood mere feet away from the biped. He squeezed the trigger and let off a burst of shots that ripped into the monster. A hole. A splash of blood. The thing made a sound that barely resembled screaming and brought a clawed hand over the wound. But it didn’t just lie down and let Johnson win; it came at him with more force than before.
By this time, Logan had gotten up and found his gun amongst the brush and bramble. Brad was trying to hold him back, saying something like, “No. Don’t!” but Logan hardly heard him. The cold steel of the rifle filled his hand just as the monster lunged at Devin Johnson. Devin held onto his own gun but it was longways to prevent the creature from biting his face off.
Logan didn’t think. He pulled the trigger.
The ripple of gunfire ignited the night, and bullets riddled the monster’s midsection. A splash of black blood here. A splash of brains there. The creature collapsed. It writhed. Devin scooted his body away, breathing hard, sweat and veins standing out on his forehead. No time to thank Logan, no time for much of anything at all, because the other monster was plowing their way.
Its massive feet were coated with red, the guts and blood of Joe. Logan didn’t know where Grease was; he hoped he was better off than Joe. Doubted it. Maybe the man had fled. Good for him, if he had. Smart.
Logan pulled the trigger again. This time, another chorus of gunfire joined him. It was Brad. The young man’s whole body vibrated with the force of the rifle he held. He didn’t falter.
They emptied their clips into the beast. Punctured skin. The thing roared and reared its ugly head until it couldn’t take the shots anymore. As big and ugly as the monsters were, they knew when they’d lost a battle. This one veered off the road and dove into the trees.
Logan heard them falling in its wake.
For a long moment, he and Brad just stood there, breathing hard. Logan thought he might have a heart attack; his adrenaline levels were through the roof.
If I died, Jane would kill me.
He hadn’t died. He was still alive. Somehow. They all were, even Joe…barely.
In this moment of silence, this descent from the peak of madness, they waited for more monsters to come. None did.
Logan’s legs felt weak, like they might give out at any moment.
Joe made a strangled noise of pain. He was suffering. Dying.
If the world hadn’t been in total silence, they would not have heard him.
Now, for the first time, Logan got a good look at the man who took pride in naming the various creatures that inhabited the world. His body was flattened, legs twisted behind his back. A jut of bone stuck out from his sternum; which bone that was, Logan didn’t know.
Brad was the second person to speak. “Holy shit.”
On top of the ruination that was Joe’s body, he had gashes all over. An injury like that from one of the monsters had proven to be beyond deadly to humans. Logan and Brad had seen it firsthand.
It doesn’t really matter, he thought; Joe would not live long enough to transform, to mutate. He would die before his cells could turn alien and monstrous.
Logan looked down at the man and noticed his glasses were not on. How odd Joe looked without his eyes magnified like a bug’s under a microscope.
Devin Johnson said, “I’m sorry, Joe.”
Johnson drew his sidearm, a .44 Magnum, and put a round in Joe’s head.
Logan’s eyes snapped closed at the thunder that came from the weapon. When he opened them, Joe was even more unrecognizable. His head looked as squashed as the rest of his body. Pumping blood. Exposed brains. White flakes of skull.
Brad turned his head and vomited in the brush, the same brush he had pulled Logan into to save his life. Logan himself felt queasy, but he had skipped breakfast that day. He swallowed down the dry heave that threatened to come up.
Grease said a few words. Asked God to forgive Joe’s soul. As Grease spoke, Logan bent down, picked up Joe’s journal full of made-up names and unknowns. He held it by the spiral binding, shook it a few times. Droplets of blood fell on the concrete.
Joe’s body was left on the road to rot. More than likely, an animal—or monster—would come along and fill itself up on what was left of Joe’s organs. The smell would be thick for a while, the winds taking the sickeningly sweet stench of death with them.
Devin Johnson said they would have a funeral, but Joe had been at Ironlock alone, so they wouldn’t make a big deal about it.
“C’mon, men, let’s move out!” Devin waved his hand forward.
And then they went, heading back down the road like nothing had happened. That was just their way of life now.
Jane sat on the large stone steps that led to the front of the prison. The cigarette between her fingers trembled. A cold wind blew, but that wasn’t what made Jane shaky; Logan and Brad weren’t back yet, and they should’ve been. Logan had told her that it was a simple operation, in and out. The town they’d gone to was only a couple of miles away.
But the world was unstable now. Anything could happen. Jane knew this.
She’d never been a constant smoker—not until all the shit hit the fan. In high school, she’d smoked a bit with her friends here and there… They thought it looked cool. It didn’t, she knew that now, but damn, did it taste good, and damn, did it relax her. Since then, she had always kept a pack in the glovebox of her Honda.
That first night the void had appeared in Stone Park, the night the deer had run across the road with half of its face hanging from the bone, slapping against its skull like a torn mask…that night, Jane had busted out her pack of cigarettes and smoked three. The tobacco was stale. Her head had instantly begun to hurt. But it had helped. Yes, it had.
She was now down to her last pack.
The door behind her opened. She jumped with the sound of squealing hinges, and then an overwhelming feeling of guilt washed over her, replacing her fear and anxiety. She felt like she’d been caught smoking in the bathroom by a teacher, an incident that had occurred a handful of times back in high school.
She resisted the urge to stub out the cigarette.
“Relax, honey,” a woman said. It was Regina Johnson, Devin’s wife. “I won’t tell no one.”
Jane smiled. It felt false on her face. She took another drag of the cigarette, but all of a sudden, it didn’t taste so good.
“We’re all eating inside, Jane. I saved you a plate. You need to eat, quit worrying about him. He’s a big boy and he ain’t alone.”
Jane didn’t respond for nearly a minute. When she did, she said, “How d
o you do it, Regina?”
“Do what, honey?”
“How do you stay so calm?”
Regina smiled. She was a woman in her fifties who already looked younger than her years, but the smile knocked another decade from her features. Her eyes glittered. Her teeth were glaringly white. “Well, I don’t know. There ain’t no surefire way, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve.”
“Like what?”
Regina reached a hand under the collar of her blouse. She pulled out a gold cross pendant on a chain. “Like my faith, for one.”
Jane smiled and took out the box of cigarettes, offered it to Regina.
“No, thank you, Jane. I quit years ago.”
“Same,” Jane said, a wry smile on her face.
Regina chuckled. Put a warm hand on Jane’s shoulder as she stood up. Graceful.
“Devin is a fighter. Always has been. Three times, he left me to go do his fighting overseas. For months, I worried myself sick. I lost weight, quit eating, smoked a ton, didn’t sleep. My momma thought I was gonna die. Then Devin came back the first time. I got better. He left again. I worried some more. He came back again. When the third time came around, I kissed him bye—never goodbye because that’s for good, my momma always said that—and he came back again.
“He was doing a good thing, I knew. And I knew it was selfish of me to want him all for myself when his country needed him. I accepted the fact that my husband was a fighter, a modern-day superhero. Then those damned things came from the voids, and I knew I was gonna lose him again. I knew he was gonna strap on his helmet and dive right into the battle.” Regina chuckled and shook her head. “He did, too. But he came back. He always does. I like to think God is on our side, that He’s out there watching over my husband because Devin is doing what’s right.” She paused and looked in Jane’s eyes, which were now teary. “Just like Logan and young Bradley are doing. They’re out there trying to help, trying to keep our race from going extinct. God admires that. Believe me, Mrs. Harper.”
Jane smiled. “Thank you.”
“Come on in. Your food’s getting cold.”
“I will. Just a few more minutes.”
“It won’t be easy,” Regina said. “But each time he comes back, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
With that, Regina left Jane on the front steps of the abandoned prison.
Jane finished her cigarette in the dark, listening to the distant groans and thunderous movements from creatures of another dimension.
She was still waiting for Logan an hour later, her stomach grumbling, the sky as dark as tar, when the Humvee pulled in. Most of the compound, aside from a few lookouts posted around the fence, had gone to sleep.
Johnson emerged from the driver’s side. In the dim light from the Humvee’s dashboard, he looked sick. Jane stood up, her hands clenched together in one large fist.
Devin waved at the tower. The guy keeping watch disappeared. Great gears ground together, and the gate slid open soundlessly on its track. Then Devin got back behind the wheel and drove the transport through. He parked near the side of the prison with the other vehicles. The engine shut off. The world was quiet and dark once more.
Devin was again the first person out of the truck. The next person to get out was Grease. Jane found herself walking forward as if pulled by some invisible force. Her hands came up to her mouth, prepared to stifle the sob that was coming. Where was Logan? Where was her husband?
Brad came out of the back next. He turned and stuck his hand into the truck, and Jane couldn’t help herself. She took off running, footsteps thudding on the concrete yard. Logan finally emerged, looking much too big for even the oversized truck.
Jane stared at her husband. He stared back.
His uniform was dirty. Splotches of red and mud and God knew what else. One pant leg was torn near the knee. A scratch above his eye not too far from the scar on his forehead, left behind by their crash on Chestnut Road in Woodhaven a few months ago.
“Logan,” Jane whispered.
He smiled. “I’m all right.”
She went to him now. He met her halfway and wrapped his arms around her, dwarfing her. She felt, as she always did in Logan’s arms, safer than she’d ever feel behind the stone walls of an abandoned prison.
Beneath the cloying scent of sweat, Jane smelled blood and stale earth.
They parted.
Brad tried sneaking away, but Jane didn’t let him. She grabbed him by the back of his jacket and pulled him into a hug. He grunted beneath her iron grip. Then they parted, and Devin Johnson groused, “Hey now, where the hell’s my hug?”
Grease chuckled dryly as they went up to the prison’s front doors, holding the bags of items they’d gotten from their run.
That was when Jane noticed they were one short: Joe, the pleasant, middle-aged guy with the Coke-bottle eyeglasses. She thought of the blood on Logan’s jacket. She thought of the monsters out there—Always thinking about them, Jane—and then she took a step backward, tears dancing down her cheeks in zigzags. They had at first been tears of joy and happiness and relief, but were now those of worry and fear again.
“Joe?” she asked.
“He didn’t make it,” Logan replied.
Jane’s chest began to ache. All of a sudden she wanted to sit down. “What—what happened?”
Brad spoke in a low voice. “Blindsided by a couple of bugs on our way to the Humvee. One crushed Joe. Another one sliced him up.”
She didn’t like when Brad talked like that. Like he was a stone-cold killer instead of a young man in his early twenties.
“He wasn’t gonna make it. He would’ve turned before we got him back here,” Logan said. “And then what could we have done for him even if we did get him here?”
Jane shook her head. She knew the answer.
“The monsters?” she asked. “What were they?”
“Couple I haven’t seen before,” Logan replied.
Brad nodded. “Ugly bastards. Joe would’ve called them ‘Unknowns.’”
Somewhere far in the distance, a creature bellowed. Low and droning. A foghorn on a sightless sea.
8
The Next Day
That night, Brad Long suffered from the worst nightmare yet. He woke up screaming into his pillow. The candle on the small stand next to the bunk hadn’t completely guttered out yet. It burned low, shining off the leather copy of the King James Bible that Regina Johnson had given him. He wasn’t much for reading, but on the nights he’d dug into Genesis, the dreams hadn’t been so bad. Regina had been right about that. He had gone to her two weeks ago, when the nightmares were becoming more vivid.
To put it bluntly, Brad was embarrassed.
That first nightmare had been about his mother. She was in bed, sick but getting better. He had left the room, and when he’d come back, she was the monster again, that horrid thing that possessed no semblance to the woman who had raised him. He’d woken up sweaty. No big deal, just a nightmare. He had, he reckoned, just gone through something that no one in the history of mankind had gone through before. A nightmare was okay.
But then they got gradually worse. He woke up in tears. He woke up with a sweaty-wet bed. He woke up strangling his pillow. Each night was more horrid than the last.
He couldn’t tell Logan and Jane this. What would they think of him? In fact, he wouldn’t have told anyone at all, not even Regina Johnson, had she not approached him in the back courtyard two weeks past.
He had been sitting out there by himself, silently crying; it seemed he cried a lot these days. She’d asked what was wrong, and her face had been gentle, trusting. In a way, she’d reminded him of his mother. So he’d told her, and she’d nodded solemnly, completely understanding. She had mentioned faith, but not in a way that seemed forceful. Had mentioned the Bible. He told her he’d never read it, that his family wasn’t very religious.
“Would you give it a shot?” Regina asked. “It can only help, sugar.”
He said he wo
uld.
The first night of reading—which was slow going, you’d better believe—had helped him into an almost dreamless sleep. After the second night of reading about God creating heaven and the Earth, he woke up without any remembrance of nightmares.
But like with every elixir, he had become desensitized to it.
He woke now to his heart beating thunderously. His hands were slick with something. He held them up by the candle, and the low fire showed that the wetness in his palms was red. He had clenched his hands so tightly that his fingernails had dug into his flesh, creating crimson crescent moons.
Brad took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. Instantly opened them. As soon as the darkness had enveloped him, the images came back. The terrible images of his mother as a monster. Of her ruining the house. Engulfing the house. Chasing them out.
In this nightmare, his father was still alive. Brad was young. He had walked into their room to say goodnight and tell them he loved them, like he had often done when he was young. In real life, Dad would be sitting up with a book in his lap. Glasses on. Mom would have the television going with the volume down so Dad could read, usually watching a late-night talk show.
In the nightmare, when Brad walked in, everything was off. He stopped short in the threshold of their bedroom when he noticed that Mom was the one holding something. His father’s head. Kevin Long’s face was bloated, turned a sickly green from carbon monoxide poisoning, courtesy of his old Toyota Camry. A flash of white bone jutted from the dangling veins and gore near his neck. Through all of this, Kevin Long talked.
He said, “It’s useless to resist, son. They’re already here. These are just the shitheels. The big kahuna is coming soon. It’s gonna walk right out of the void and then it’s gonna kill all life on the planet in the blink of an eye. You ready for that? No. I don’t think so. Remember what I told you when you kept losing in basketball? Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. You didn’t. And you never won because of it. You were always a loser. And you still are today. So, for God’s sake, Bradley, be a fucking winner for once! Join them join them jointhemjointhemjointhem—
Taken World (Book 2): Darkness Page 7
