Taken World (Book 2): Darkness

by Maxwell, Flint

  She told this to Devin Johnson, and he grumbled his agreement. It all made sense to him, and surprisingly, he didn’t sound the least bit worried.

  About a minute later, a woman’s voice said, “Take off the hoods,” and there was a great rush of light into Jane’s eyes.

  She closed them and tried to ignore the pounding in her head. Another thirty seconds later, she eased them back open. It was not an easy task. Looking around, she noted she was in a shopping mall. It stretched high above her: shiny ceilings, escalators, shuttered storefronts. There was a fountain about twenty paces from where she sat. Devin was next to her. They were both tied to a pole, the bonds so tight that Jane could feel the blood pulsing in her hands. A group of people stood around them, the same people who had attacked them in the arena, the same people Devin Johnson had set out to save. They all wore dark robes, save for the older woman, whose robe was white and made of a finer material than the others—silk, maybe. She was pretty in an aged way. This woman was perhaps seventy, maybe seventy-five, but she didn’t look like she was in bad health; in fact, she looked like she was in better health than a woman of Jane’s age. This was surprising…and, Jane admitted to herself, a little disturbing.

  “What are you doing? What do you want?” Jane demanded.

  “Don’t talk to them,” Devin said. “They’re fucked up. They don’t know right from wrong. No convincing them.”

  The old woman started laughing. She looked up at the dark sky through the windows, at the heavy clouds that had continually looked like they would burst into a thunderstorm at any moment. They were the type of clouds that haunted Jane’s nightmares, the ones she’d wake up from covered in sweat, begging Logan to hold her so she’d feel better. She didn’t like those clouds. They brought an ominous feeling over her, more than the fact that she was currently tied to a weird wooden symbol, like an inverted crucifix, and surrounded by men and women with weapons and wearing robes.

  “It’s almost time!” the older woman proclaimed. “The gift is theirs!”

  A man with long hair leaned over and whispered to the woman. Once the words registered, she looked troubled, brow creased, eyes narrowed. She shook her head.

  “They’ll be here,” the woman said.

  She was obviously the leader. Just looking at her, Jane could tell she was crazy, and leaders shouldn’t be crazy. But this was beyond crazy, that was for sure.

  “They’ll be here unless they want to be the next sacrifices,” the woman finished darkly.

  Then, somewhere off in the distance of the city, Jane heard an unfathomable beast cry out, the sound knifing through the ruined skyscrapers.

  Others quickly answered its call.

  15

  Spiders

  The shriek that hung in the air was heard by each of the men inside the abandoned police station. Logan’s skin prickled at the sound.

  “We gotta move,” he said. “We gotta move now.”

  And he was right. Their time, which had already been short to begin with, had become damn near minute.

  “You can’t leave me here! You can’t leave me here! They’ll get me! They’ll fucking eat me!” the man shouted.

  “We can, my friend,” Grease said, “and we are.”

  So they left him and headed up the street toward Tower City and its courtyard, where Devin Johnson and Logan’s wife Jane were currently the expected main course of a monstrous dinner.

  Halfway down the road, Brad said, “We don’t have any weapons.”

  “I know. We’re gonna take theirs,” Logan answered.

  This made Grease laugh heartily—almost too loud in the stillness of the city.

  “I like you a little more every day, Harper.”

  The old woman’s laughing face settled into something that was wholly ugly, almost monstrous itself. Jane was close to asking if they could put the burlap sack back over her head just so she wouldn’t have to look at the woman…or maybe ask politely if the woman could turn around or something.

  This was beside the point.

  The point was that the old woman, for the first time since Jane had woken up in the courtyard of this towering mall, looked frightened, unsure.

  “Where are they at?” she barked. “Go! Find them! Our gods are coming and they’re ravenous.”

  A young man with a beard and beady, wild eyes who was standing closest to the woman turned and went out of a side door. It banged closed behind him, the sound echoing high up amongst the many stories of the building.

  Logan and the others were caught off guard. A robed man ran right toward them, almost invisible in the darkness except for the pale moon of his face.

  Brad grabbed Logan roughly by the arm and pulled him into an alley. Grease followed. In the low light, Grease gave them signals: a peace sign, a tap on the wrist, a pull on his earlobe.

  Brad shook his head. “What?”

  “Get his fucking gun!” Grease whisper-shouted, throwing up his hands.

  He quickly realized his mistake, his eyes growing wide, as the footsteps of the robed man paused.

  “George? Tony?” the robed man called. “Is that you guys?”

  Grease still had the Glock. He held it up and walked out into the street.

  “Hey! Drop it!” the robed guy said.

  “You first.” Then Grease casually looked to his left and then to his right at Brad and Logan. He flicked his eyes, and they knew what he was telling them. Go around, flank him!

  Logan power walked to the end of the alley, rounding the building and all of its debris. He thought this was probably another parking deck. Brad was right behind him. They moved like cats stalking their prey; it was something the two of them had picked up on their excursions with Devin Johnson and the other hunters.

  Logan lifted a chunk of concrete easily weighing fifteen pounds, but to him feeling almost as light as a feather. He cocked it behind his ear and threw it with all his might.

  He’d never been an athlete, despite his size, but his aim wasn’t off by much. The concrete thundered against the road a few feet from the man. The sound was enormous.

  The man whirled around with his rifle in hand, a look of confusion on his face.

  “Hey!”

  Then a shot went off. It didn’t come from the man’s rifle; it came from Grease’s Glock. The man crunched sideways, dropped his weapon, and clapped both hands to his right side. He cried out in shock, in pain, in horror as he fell to his knees. Then he pulled his hands away and looked at the redness on his fingers in utter disbelief.

  Logan felt a pang of pity for the guy, but the feeling quickly dissipated as he thought of them taking Jane and preparing her for sacrifice.

  Grease bent down and picked up the rifle, threw it to Brad. “No offense, big guy,” he said to Logan, “but I think you’ll do well enough with your fists. Brad and I…well, we need a little extra something to make up for our lack of size.”

  Logan hardly noticed Grease’s voice, because the man on the ground, leaking blood from his bullet wound and squirming, was screaming. It was hard to concentrate when a thing like that was going on.

  “We can’t leave him here,” he decided.

  In the air, he felt something. Maybe it was the screech from the monster, one of the many undoubtedly on their way; maybe not. All he knew for sure was that shit was about to hit the fan, if it hadn’t already.

  He told this to Grease and Brad. “I don’t know about you, but I can go without seeing one of those ugly creatures until we get Jane and Devin out of this hellhole.”

  Brad, just a boy four-ish months ago, had grown up. Seeing one’s mother turned into an abomination, and then shooting said abomination with your dead father’s shotgun would do that to a person. In fact, Logan admired Brad more and more every day. How he could be so strong, how he could keep his sanity, Logan just didn’t understand—nor would he ever.

  The purple-black sky above them felt as if it were pressing down closer and closer with each passing moment. It was as if—a
t least to Logan—the sky itself was a monster, too; that it had been infected by whatever poison was running rampant in the aliens’ blood. Quite simply, the sky was betraying them.

  “Fine, dude, you want to be Mickey Mouse, I’ll be your goddamn Pluto. C’mon,” Grease said. He rolled his eyes.

  Logan noted that Grease’s hands were shaking as he holstered the Glock he’d used to shoot the robed man. That was good, he thought; it meant Grease wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, that he wasn’t as tough as he seemed. Certainly, Brad and Logan weren’t tough. Not really. Sure, they’d been hardened by the experiences of the last few months, by the end of the world, but the fact of the matter was that this was terrifying.

  “Oh, gross!” Grease said. “I got blood on my hands.” He glared at the man. “You’d better not have AIDS.”

  “Shut up, Grease,” Brad said.

  The three of them together dragged the man into the alleyway and set him amongst the trash and toppled over bricks. Brad looked over the wound. He wasn’t much of a doctor, but he was right in his next declaration.

  “It’s just a graze.”

  “Bullshit,” Grease said. “I don’t miss…I mean, I meant to graze him.”

  “Fuck you,” the man spat. “You’ll all suffer for this.”

  Logan grabbed him around an arm and settled him up against what was left of the brick wall of a nearby building. An image of him being in a war movie came to mind, him in his fatigues, a helmet on his head, dragging an injured man out of the battlefield. Saving Private Logan.

  “Listen, man,” Logan said, “I’m sorry you got shot. I really am. If it was up to me, we’d skip all the violence, but I guess it’s necessary. Remember, you are the reason you got shot—you and you alone. Had you left us be, not tried to deceive us, none of this would’ve happened.”

  The man stared at him with wet eyes. He really was just a kid, barely as old as Brad was. He didn’t deserve any of this. None of them deserved any of what had happened over the past months.

  “I know, I know,” Logan continued. “It hurts. No shit. It’ll hurt for a while. But you’re just grazed. My advice to you is shut the fuck up. The louder you are, the higher the chance that some ugly thing will crawl out of the darkness and finish the job. If you have the strength, I suggest you get the fuck out of here.”

  “Let’s just kill him,” Grease said. “Finish the job. It’s more humane than letting a fucking monster eat him up.”

  Logan shook his head.

  Brad nodded. “I agree with Logan. No need for more death. This world has enough of it.”

  “Pussies,” Grease said, again rolling his eyes.

  The other two ignored him; that was just Grease. He was a hard-ass that would sooner shoot himself than admit he was wrong.

  The man, for the moment, stopped his hollering. Logan looked him in those watery eyes. “You want this to be over quicker, you’ll point us in the right direction. We want the courtyard at Tower City.”

  The man cocked his head, confused.

  “The shrine,” Logan said.

  Something like realization entered the man’s eyes now. He nodded. Turned and pointed. “You w-were going the right way. But she’s crazy, man. She’s crazy.”

  “The old woman?” Brad said.

  The man nodded. “She won’t let them go. You’ll have to take them. I d-don’t agree with what she’s doing, but man, the monsters don’t bother us as long as we keep feeding them.”

  Logan said, “Oh, we plan on taking them. We plan on fighting.”

  “We do?” Grease said.

  He was just being sarcastic, Logan knew. He didn’t even spare him a glance.

  They did plan on fighting—that was true. When the chips were down, you had to fight for the ones you loved. Jane Harper was the only one in the world Logan loved. He would do anything for her.

  But the fight came sooner than he’d anticipated.

  They had been going down a darkened street. A zigzag ran through the cement, a chasm across the road. Logan would’ve fallen into it had he spotted it a second later.

  He put his arms up and stopped Grease from going over headfirst.

  “Thanks,” Grease said. As volatile as he could be sometimes, he had his moments of kindness, too.

  Perhaps if they hadn’t paused at the crack in the road, they would’ve been indoors by the time the beast rose from the Cuyahoga River.

  From the murky water came a dreadful sound, the sound of the river itself rising from the channel. Logan snapped around and saw a looming black shape emerge. It was as big as the sky. He felt his stomach clench and his heart speed up. The temperature outside was chilly, yet his back prickled with sweat.

  This creature was worse than any the three men had seen before. If Logan could’ve described it, he would’ve said it looked like something the Devil himself had thrown up, and then the sickness had mutated and grown—oh, how it had grown. Its color was a jet black. It rose high into the air on legs as thick as buildings. In the middle of what Logan thought of as its face was a cluster of eyes, each one a different color, none of them bright; they were the colors of graveyards at night, grays, black, the yellows of a foreboding moon.

  Logan and the others just stood there, gawking up at it. What else could they do? There was no defeating such a monster. Around the thing’s back, swarms of black aerial creatures circled it, the way vultures circle roadkill. Water shimmered off the beast and splashed back into the channel, the noise as loud as anything Logan had ever heard.

  He wondered if the thing saw them, if they were big enough to merit this eldritch abomination’s attention.

  Then, from what would be considered its mouth, a trio of thick tentacles fell. Its jaws widened, and teeth bigger than Logan was tall gleamed in the low light of the dying day. But what topped this off, what made the unreality of the situation heavier, was the pulsing sac on the monster’s underside. To Logan, it looked like a spider’s eggs.

  “We should probably run,” Brad said.

  “I think you’re right,” Logan replied.

  They ran.

  Less than twenty feet into their flight, a spurting sound filled the air. Logan stopped dead in his tracks. He knew he had to look back, though everything in his mind was telling him not to. If he did, there was a very good chance he would go insane, and right now, insanity was out of the question. An insane Logan Harper could not save Jane. An insane Logan Harper wouldn’t last very long in this world.

  He suddenly wished Jane was here with him—not because it would make what he must do any easier, but because she always had a way of comforting him. She was his rock, and right now, he needed a boulder.

  “Wow,” Grease said. He was the only one of the three who could find words; the others were speechless.

  The sac busted open. A spray of viscous, yellow fluid rained down on the Cuyahoga. Monsters, creatures, abominations, whatever they were, sprang forth from the sac, birthed into this dying world. They descended from their mother on strings that gleamed like white moonlight.

  Brad finally found words. “Are those—are those spiders?”

  Logan nor Grease answered. In Logan’s mind, however, he did; it was just his lips wouldn’t move when his brain told them to.

  Those look a lot like spiders—big spiders—but they’re not. Whatever those are didn’t come from this world.

  Then another thought took hold of his mind, as clear as anything he’d ever thought before.

  What if the spiders of this planet are alien? What if this planet was just a galactic melting pot…or maybe a prison…created by God for all the species He’d made and rejected? What if—

  But this last thought didn’t come to fruition, as Brad grabbed him harshly around one arm and dragged him out of the street, back into the shadows.

  What a miserable existence this is, Logan thought, living in the dark.

  Grease was close behind them and babbling about the impossible. The impossible had already happened, the night L
ogan was in the back of the Monolith, playing Rummy 500 with Derek and Mike Fritz. The impossible had happened when monsters poured out of the voids like ants from an anthill. No longer was the impossible ‘impossible’. Everything was possible.

  Of course, Logan didn’t say any of this, because he still couldn’t find his words. The sight of this large abomination had zapped them from his throat.

  Jane again came into Logan’s mind. He decided right then that he wouldn’t die without seeing her again, even though death felt like it was right around the corner.

  The spider-things descending their steel, pearlescent webs touched down on the road. They were easily as big as cars. Newborns, Logan thought as he tried to catch his breath. There were half a dozen of them.

  The large monster lowered itself into the water, and the river gushed over the road in a great, tsunami-like wave. Boats washed ashore, their bodies scraping along the concrete with a raucous sound. The spiders didn’t like this sound at all. The one at the head of the diamond formation they were in leaned back and thrusted two long and hairy legs into the air. They blended in with the dark sky. It let out a grumbling roar that the others echoed.

  Then the large creature disappeared back into the depths of the river.

  If Logan never saw it again it would be too soon.

  There was an odd aspect to it just rising to hatch its offspring. Its hungry offspring. They had apparently grown accustomed to feeding on human flesh in the past few months, but Logan would be damned if they were going to feed on his wife…or him.

  Nearly thirty feet away from them now.

  Brad looked at Logan and said, “Deja vu.”

  Logan nodded.

  Grease didn’t waste any time talking, and for that Logan admired him. There was just no way they would be able to outrun these spider-things. A half a dozen of them, all with red, hungry eyes. Grease aimed his Glock and let the first shot rip.

  The good thing about these monsters, especially those of the smaller variety, was that they weren’t indestructible.