Taken World (Book 2): Darkness

by Maxwell, Flint

  This first shot evaporated one of the lead creature’s many legs. It wavered, lost its balance, and went skidding along the road, where it fell into the chasm, screeching all the way down.

  Brad’s rifle ripped off a burst of rounds. Blood as black as the sky above spurted from the wounds riddling the spider-things. Their screeches were sounds of hell. A few of them dropped down on their sides, legs scrabbling at the concrete, their dripping mouths full of fangs clacking together.

  “Go, Logan!” Brad yelled, looking over his shoulder. “Go save the others! We’ll hold them off.”

  Logan turned and ran toward the courtyard.

  16

  Regina’s Mission

  She couldn’t take it anymore. It was driving her crazy, not knowing what happened to her husband. She tried lying in bed, but Devin’s side was cold and empty, a reminder that things were not all right, not all right at all.

  The compound had settled down since the arrival of the man and the woman. Everyone had gone back to bed. Sleep was too precious a thing to forgo. It wasn’t that Regina was purposely forgoing it, either; she just would never be able to sleep again. Not without some answers.

  So she thought about her father, and about how he had taught her that if she wanted something, then she should go get it herself. With this attitude, Regina had put herself through college while working two jobs—three in the summer. She was no stranger to labor. As a child, if she wanted something, she’d work for it. A new bike? Better start doubling up on your chores. A scholarship? Hit the books, Gina! And don’t come out of the library until your head is full of knowledge.

  This really was no different. She wanted her husband back, so she was going to go get him.

  Absentmindedly, she had already stripped off her night clothes and slipped on a pair of jeans and a Cleveland Indians sweatshirt, so she put on her boots, walked out of her cell, and headed toward the armory. In the armory, she grabbed a rifle. She was no stranger to weapons—Devin had made sure of that, considering all the guns he kept in their house. She settled on an AR-15, and grabbed a few magazines to go with it, hoping she wouldn’t have to use them.

  From the armory, she walked quietly down the bare, gray corridor. The night air was as sharp as a knife, coming through the stone walls. She shivered.

  She went out of a side door, boots crunching on the gravel, and moved toward the lot where they kept their cars. There was a Humvee parked crookedly next to a Chevy truck, a Toyota Camry, and a Ford Escape. The Humvee was probably her best bet, but unlike the guns, Devin had never taught her how to drive one; plus they were too damn loud and too damn bulky. She settled on the Escape.

  The car keys were in the visor. The inside of the cab smelled like old tobacco smoke. That smell was a reminder. She remembered whose car this had been: Joe, the poor man who’d been killed on the hunters’ last excursion, the smart fella who had always scribbled down the names and descriptions of the monsters he saw. Joe had showed up a couple of months ago in this cherry red Escape. He had heard Devin’s broadcast, just as the new man and woman in the infirmary had heard it. Now he was dead, gone, soon to be forgotten amongst those at Ironlock, and Regina thought about how unfair that was, how unfair life had become when the voids arrived.

  She started the car, backed out of the lot, drove up to the gate, got out, and waved at Ulrich up in the guard tower. In his hand was an open paperback book, a light clipped on to the back cover.

  “Where you going?” Ulrich asked.

  “To save my husband.”

  Ulrich frowned, scratched the side of his head. He cleared his throat. “You want some help?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t suppose I can talk you out of this, can I?”

  Regina shook her head.

  “Didn’t think so.”

  Ulrich opened the gate, the metal sliding soundlessly on its track.

  “I’ve always liked you, Ulrich,” she said.

  “Be safe, Regina.”

  “I will.”

  She got back in the car, buckled her seatbelt, and shifted into drive.

  The mess from the banged up Dodge Charger the man and woman had crashed into the fence was mostly cleared away, but Regina still saw glittering shards of glass on the side of the road that led to the prison. She swerved around it, not looking back in the rearview, heading to downtown Cleveland.

  17

  Final Showdown

  Sneaking up on the courtyard was not an option, so Logan Harper didn’t even try. He had no weapon besides the switchblade. Behind him, the street was filled with the screeching death sounds of the spider-things and the concussive explosions of gunshots. In front of him was a building with ‘TOWER CITY CENTER’ embossed across its facade. This building was completely intact, which was amazing because it was almost all glass. Only one spot had been busted out, as if a car had plowed through it. Though Logan knew it wasn’t a car that had made this hole. It was whatever monsters came to feast on the sacrifices.

  Logan hunched behind a sedan. It was flipped over, half on the curb, half in the road. He squinted, trying to peer into the glass windows. Most of them were blacked out, painted over, so he couldn’t see anything. And he couldn’t hear anything, either, besides the sounds of the gunshots down the road.

  He scanned the building for another way in. When he didn’t see one, he mumbled, “Screw it,” and stepped closer to the blown-out side that the monsters must’ve used.

  What he saw caused his heart to simultaneously swell with hope and drop into his stomach. He was looking down into the lower level of the place known as Tower City. The ground level of downtown Cleveland was the third level of the mall. Dimly, he was aware of the shuttered storefronts, the shiny pearlescent color of the floor, and the fountain in the middle of it, which had been drained of all water, yet was still lit up.

  He saw his wife, his Jane. She was tied to a large piece of wood, a ceiling beam fashioned into an upside down cross, by the looks of it. The ropes were wound about her body at least fifteen times, digging red marks into her flesh. Unsurprisingly, she was conscious, and her eyes were burning holes into Annette.

  The woman paid no mind to Jane or to Devin, who was tied up next to her. She stood tapping her foot and looking toward the doors opposite Logan. Below these doors were escalators in constant motion.

  Logan ducked back into the shadows, but he had made it inside Tower City; there was no going back now. He counted seven robed figures. They all varied in age. Some were young and strong looking, while others appeared to be closer to their leader in years. Most were somewhere in the middle, their faces gaunt, their eyes haunted. All of them looked nervous. Whenever a gunshot popped off outside, Logan cringed. So did the others inside.

  What am I gonna do? How am I gonna get to her? They’re all watching and they’re all armed to the teeth.

  Annette snapped a finger and pointed at a stocky man. Logan recognized him as one of the men who’d knocked him out at the arena. The man shook his head.

  Annette’s voice carried. “If you don’t want to be on the stake, then you’ll go out there. Now!”

  At the harsh sound of her voice, the man practically folded in on himself.

  Logan saw evil in her eyes—pure, unadulterated evil. He had seen this same evil in the eyes of cult leaders like Charles Manson and Jim Jones. It brought a ripple of chills up his spine, and suddenly the fear he’d felt earlier was back in full force, the adrenaline long gone.

  No, dammit. Get ahold of yourself, Logan. Be strong. Be strong for Jane.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The shaking in his hands, all over his body, didn’t stop, but it calmed slightly. He leaned back out of the shadows, his head just visible over the railing. It was too dark where he was for any of them to see anything, though.

  The stocky man went up the escalator and disappeared through the doors.

  “I know you’re here!” Annette suddenly shouted. “I know you’ve been watching. How you have th
e audacity to come the same way our gods do! Shame! Shame!”

  Logan suddenly grew cold, very cold. There was no way she could see him this far away.

  “I sense you, my large friend,” Annette continued, almost as if reading his mind.

  This took him from very cold to freezing.

  Logan would’ve moved, had he not been rooted to the spot, too stunned to do much of anything. He saw Jane’s head perk up. She was scanning all around her, looking for him. Her eyes passed the spot he sat in three times; she didn’t see him.

  But I’m here, yes I am, Jane. And I’m coming for you.

  “Know this, Mr. Harper,” the old woman went on, “our ritual does not require the lambs to be alive.”

  She pulled a gun from beneath her robes. It was a compact, black thing with a snub nose, and it looked so wrong in her hands, gripped by a woman old enough to be a grandmother.

  “So here’s the deal, Mr. Harper. I am going to shoot Jane in the face and then I’ll shoot Devin right after that—he won’t feel much pain, since he is out cold. He’s quite a talker, that Devin. Lucky I didn’t have his brains bashed in. You’ll get to see it all. Unless you come out right now and join us.”

  “Don’t, Logan! Run! Get out while you can!” Jane shouted.

  He did not listen to her.

  Instead, he stood up, hardly even thinking about it, and said, “Wait, don’t!”

  The old woman pressed the gun against Jane’s temple. “Show yourself.”

  He came out. Put his arms up high above his head.

  The woman’s mouth curled into a sickening smile, those evil eyes glittering above it. “Empty your pockets.”

  Logan did. He turned them inside out. All he had on him was the switchblade he’d taken off the guy at the dungeons. This he threw down onto the first level. When the weapon hit the floor, the blade sprang forth.

  “Turn around,” she said.

  Logan obeyed. To a couple of her cronies, she nodded her head as if to say, ‘Go get him’.

  These men obeyed, each one clutching a gun; one a pistol, and the other a rifle that you might see your grandpa take duck hunting. Didn’t matter, though—a gun was a gun, bullets were bullets, and a wound in this world, no matter how minor, was pretty much damning.

  An array of possible escapes blazed through Logan’s mind. He could put up a fight; he could run; he could get on his knees and beg. None of these ideas seemed particularly good. Their success rate was probably close to zero.

  “No need,” he said. “I’ll come down.”

  He approached the steps; at the first sign of his movement, the man with the old rifle aimed at him, finger on the trigger. Logan hardly noticed. He was looking at Jane, meeting her eyes, trying to tell her that everything was going to be okay.

  When he reached the first floor, the two men rushed to him. Logan kept his hands up, signaling he meant no harm. But the old woman knew this, he was sure. Something in her expression told him so. Maybe she was psychic. Maybe she was just plain crazy. Whatever the case may be, it didn’t matter…because she now had the upper hand.

  “Logan, I love you!” Jane called.

  “I love you too.”

  No cool Han Solo quip here.

  “How dear,” Annette said, staring at Logan from across the fountain, its pale lights gleaming brighter without the water atop of it.

  “Let them go,” Logan said.

  “Were it that simple, Logan,” Annette replied.

  “I’ll take their place.”

  The woman began laughing now. Her other robed friends joined in—though a bit apprehensively. This burst of laughter caused one of the men holding Logan to squeeze him tighter.

  Well, his plan had failed, and he didn’t think it would. There was always the fallback plan. The one that involved kicking everyone’s ass. That was his next best option; it might get him shot, and Jane would die, but at least he’d go out fighting. What other option did he have?

  Brad and Grease were probably dead, overrun by the spider-babies birthed from some enormous water monster’s egg sac. Logan should’ve never split from them. If he somehow managed to get out of this mess with Jane and Devin, he would never forgive himself for leaving the others behind.

  You had to go. You had to go for Jane, he told himself.

  The laughter tapered off. Annette was bent over, hands on her knees, the pistol she held dangerously close to Jane’s middle.

  This was Logan’s chance. He would take out the two men holding him, grab their weapons, and go out guns-a-blazing, just like the countless action heroes he had so looked up to while growing up—Bruce Willis, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme.

  Except, deep down in Logan’s heart, he knew his heroes were fiction, all their moves choreographed, their dialogue written in a script. It was Hollywood. It was movie magic.

  This was not.

  This was real life, and in real life, you could die. Bullets wouldn’t just bounce off of a person, walking over a mile of broken glass barefoot would probably bring you to your knees with tears in your eyes, and the bad guys probably wouldn’t have gloriously terrible aim when they shot.

  Still…Logan Harper had to try.

  Just as he tensed up, ready to spring into action, the doors opposite the way he’d come exploded open in a shower of glass. Reflexively, the men holding Logan let go and stumbled backward a few steps. Logan did, too.

  From where he stood to where the opposite doors and windows had once been was maybe a hundred feet, give or take a few. The projectile that had come through the glass skittered across the white floor, leaving behind a trail of blood and stained shards. It came to a crunching stop just beyond the empty fountain. Logan looked up to see what it was.

  The sight zapped the breath from his lungs.

  All eyes were on it. Yes, it was an it now. There was just no way one could call this thing a human being any longer. Despite the mutations and the destruction inflicted on its body, Logan recognized the robe it wore. He even faintly recognized the human features of its face. This was the man that Annette had sent out no less than five minutes ago. She had sent this man, unknowingly, of course, to his death—though Logan didn’t think she would lose any sleep over the fact.

  Glass tinkled as a cold wind sliced through the new opening. The very atmosphere of the mall changed from code-red-violent to DEFCON 1—maximum readiness, nuclear war imminent!

  Then the monster that had thrown this poor, mutated follower of Annette’s emerged through the jagged opening. Logan was sickeningly reminded of the spider-babies coming from the water creature’s egg sac.

  If his breath had been zapped away before, his lungs were now shrinking in on themselves. Disappearing. Winking out of existence. He gasped, but pulled no air into his chest. He hadn’t been prepared for the sheer insanity he looked upon at this moment.

  The monster’s body was human-like, though very big. Two legs, a torso, two arms, and at the end of each arm, arthritic-looking fingers as long as Logan’s shinbone. What wasn’t human about the creature, besides its immense size, was the area where its head should’ve been. Where it wasn’t. In place of a head was what reminded Logan of a Venus fly trap, the way the two halves, each with long guard hairs like teeth, opened and closed. No guard hairs here. Only black fangs. At the apex of each half, stood the largest and thickest fangs of all, like tarantula pincers.

  The two halves parted as a roar escaped, so loud that what was left of the glass windows above the escalators shattered as if a lightning bolt had struck it. Inside of the creature’s opened head was the dangerous pink of diseased gums. Saliva sprayed the air in a thick mist and landed in glops on the floor. The creature perched on the ledge of the upper most level, two levels above the escalators and the platform where Logan’s wife and Devin Johnson were being held captive. It roared again.

  Annette turned toward Logan and at the top of her voice, shrill and broken, she shouted, “What have you done?”

  18

  The End />
  He hadn’t done anything, but he knew what Annette was accusing him of. The great beast of the Cuyahoga River had birthed forth its spider-babies, and the spider-babies were meant to feast upon Jane and Devin—and, had Annette gotten her way, Logan, Brad, and Grease, too. The wrench thrown into the plan, for lack of a better idiom, was Brad and Grease pelting the spider-babies with assault rifle fire and Glock ammunition.

  Somehow, this disturbance had given the other monsters power over Tower City, this one with the Venus fly trap head among them.

  The men next to Logan opened fire; he would’ve bet this was as reflexive an action as them shielding their faces when the glass had sprayed across the atrium.

  “Stop shooting!” Annette yelled, her pale flesh growing redder, spit flying from her mouth in the low light, just like it had flown from the monster’s.

  Logan watched as the large creature, seemingly blind, hopped down from the balcony and landed on the floor with a sonic boom. The tile cracked, ruining this sacred place. The thing shook its ‘head’ and sprayed more of its black spittle.

  Then Logan did the impossible.

  While the others were running for cover, realizing their robes weren’t much protection, he ran toward the thing. He ran toward Jane and Devin.

  Annette stumbled off the platform, out of the way of the gunfire, shouting, “STOP IT! STOP IT NOW!” but no one heard her.

  The monster took the bullets as if they were mosquito bites, and not something deadly at all. Those large, human-like hands swatted at the welts the bullets left in its hide. It roared louder, causing more glass to explode out of the surrounding window frames, and shop mannequins to fall forward with the vibration, landing amongst a sea of glittering shards.

  It was pandemonium; chaos. Logan likened it to what had happened months before, when the voids had first opened, and the ground shook and opened up all over. This, of course, was a more concentrated dosage of chaos, but it was chaos nonetheless.