Paranormals | Book 3 | Darkness Reigns

by Andrews, Christopher

  “... group ...” Michael’s voice was breaking up worse than before. But it didn’t sound like normal static; it was more like his voice was getting further and further away, only pulsing back every few words. “... ability ... watch ...”

  And then the line went dead.

  Except it didn’t. When Lincoln looked, his screen indicated that their connection was still there. He just wasn’t able to hear the lieutenant any longer.

  Okay, he thought, that’s not good. He closed the line, intending to try Shockwave, see if that was any better. If so, the two of them could converge on the last place he had seen—

  As he looked around for both Takayasu and Shockwave, Lincoln rotated until his back was to the window he had been peering through, and he was caught completely unprepared when a pair of hands shot through the glass, grabbed him by the head, and jerked him up and back into the building. His borrowed trench coat snagged on the jagged shards and ripped, and from sheer surprise, he squeezed his phone hard enough that he heard it crack! He caught a quick glimpse of the wall, but the inside of the room was too dark for him to see the ceiling — that, plus one of his assailant’s hands was blocking his right eye. Dropping his phone, he reached up to grab that hand, to crush it into powder as he twisted the arm around—

  But then something struck the back of his head. It felt like someone had punched him, and it caused a surprising amount of pain, pain he had not felt since he broke his arms fighting the Noctoponm.

  The room had been dark before.

  Now his world sank into absolute blackout.

  PCA

  When he opened his eyes again, Lincoln’s head was still pounding. But the disorientation and nausea were worse.

  Blinking several times, he sat up and looked around, which prompted his head to spin. He had been lying on a cot in some sort of ... well, technically, he supposed it was “a room,” but it was so small, his first inclination had been to call it a cubicle. Four bland walls, a tiny table with a dingy lamp, a single door, no decoration of any kind ... and no ceiling that he could see — the walls just rose up into dark oblivion.

  He tried to stand, but stumbled back onto the cot, its springs creaking and protesting. The urge to vomit surged — which didn’t help his headache — then thankfully backed off, a little.

  Where in the world was he? What happened? He remembered searching for ... for something or someone, having trouble seeing ... somewhere with big abandoned buildings ... and had he been calling someone on his phone ...?

  The door opened, startling him. A thirty-something guy walked into the room, wearing casual street clothes, bed-head hair, and a tired expression on his face. He looked a little familiar, but Lincoln couldn’t place him. Funny enough, he looked kind of like Lincoln himself, or maybe his brother Tommy — brown hair, brown eyes, natural tan complexion — but that didn’t help much.

  “You’re awake again,” the guy stated in a deeper voice than Lincoln would have expected from his slim build.

  Lincoln wasn’t sure which part of that to tackle first — the “awake” or the “again.” Instead, he asked, “Where am I?”

  The guy slipped his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “You’re in hospice. Because of your paranormal condition, and the nature of your injury, you didn’t really need to be taking up space in some hospital somewhere. And, to be honest, it was cheaper to keep you here than anywhere else.”

  Lincoln clenched his jaw, trying to stop the small room from spinning, but all it did was make his headache that much worse. “I guess I should ask about my ‘injury’—”

  “Yeah, I figured that’d be next. Let me give you the short version, okay?”

  Not sure what else to say or do, Lincoln settled for nodding and gesturing for his visitor to continue.

  “You were on a mission for the PCA, and you were attacked from behind. Your team — Shockwave and Vortex and all them — found you, fought off the rogue who was doing something to you. You see, this rogue could pass through solid objects, and it looks like he did that to your brain.”

  Lincoln had a quick flash of being grabbed and pulled through a window, then getting punched in the back of the head, but another wave of dizziness and nausea passed through him, so he closed his eyes and continued to listen.

  “So this rogue got through your otherwise impenetrable skin, and he scrambled your brain. The alien people, the ones that Shining Star belonged to, they did what they could, but you were still basically human and different from them, and regular Earth surgery wouldn’t really work on you, so not much else could be done. So, to sum up ...”

  The guy began ticking items off on his fingers.

  “Thanks to Shining Star’s people’s effort and your tough paranormal power, your brain is healing itself, slowly.

  “You wake up from time to time, and each time you’re usually a little better.

  “It looks like you don’t really need to eat or drink anymore, so your long-term care isn’t a problem. Which is good, because ...

  “Like I said, you are taking a very long time to heal.”

  Lincoln did his best to wrap his apparently-damaged brain around all that. He looked around the room, again observing its lack of decoration but this time with a pointed focus.

  “No equipment,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  Lincoln raised his voice. “There’s no, you know, medical equipment in here.”

  The guy sighed. “Well, yeah. I mean, since there was nothing more that could really be done for you—”

  “I got that. What I mean is, I don’t even see a heart monitor, or whatever.” He looked up and around, again wondering about the lack of ceiling but making closer note of the absence of cameras. “How did you know I was awake? Know it was time to come in here?”

  The guy shrugged. “About a day or so before you wake up, you start tossing and turning a little, moaning or talking to yourself, getting louder as you get closer to coming to. When you finally got quiet again, I knew it was time. And I’m sorry if I seem a little rushed, because you almost never remember anything from the last time, and I do my best to re-explain it all before the opportunity ends.” For the first time, his expression shifted to something other than fatigue; he looked sad. “I keep hoping that this will be the time, the time that some of it will sink in, that you’ll remember more the next time. When you first started these little wake-up periods, they lasted less than a minute, but they’re getting longer and longer each time. We just never know how long.”

  As if on cue, the dizziness surged, along with the urge to close his eyes. Lincoln tried to fight it, to ask more questions, to learn more, but the desire to sleep grew stronger by leaps and bounds.

  “Yeah,” the guy commented, still sounding sad, “I guess that’s about on schedule. Still longer than the last one, though. So ... yay.” He sighed again.

  Lincoln fought the sleep, fought to keep his eyes open, fought ...

  The guy was suddenly standing right there, right in front of him, pushing his shoulders back and onto the cot. Lincoln, supposedly the strongest paranormal on record, was unable to resist.

  “Go ahead, Linc,” the guy said, his voice so much warmer than before. “One of us will be here when you wake up again. We always are.”

  “Who ...” Lincoln tried to say, licked his lips, tried again. “Who’re you? Wha’s ... wha’s’r name? R’you ... my nurz ... or whatev’r ...?”

  Lincoln eyes closed, and he felt himself slipping down ... down ...

  “It’s Tommy, Linc,” the guy said. “I’m your little brother, Tommy.”

  What?! Lincoln wanted to blurt.

  But he couldn’t, because he was already gone.

  PCA

  When Lincoln next came to, his headache was better, and he wasn’t quite as dizzy or confused, though he still felt pretty nauseous. It took him a few seconds of staring at the blank wall past his feet to put some of it back together, but he found he was able to grab those strings and tug th
em better than the last time.

  But was it the last time? If I keep forgetting, over and over ...

  “T-Tommy?” he whispered as he sat up. He cleared his throat and got out a stronger, “Tommy!”

  The door opened, and Tommy walked into the room.

  Lincoln opened his mouth to start asking questions, ask if it really was him, plea to God for some way to fix this, to do this all over again so he could be there for his sweet brother and sister ... but instead he just sat in stunned silence, his mouth hanging open in shock.

  Tommy was older than before. Last time (if it was the last time), Lincoln had gauged him to be a “thirty-something,” but this time he guessed he was well over forty. His hair was thinner, with scattered grey throughout. The worry lines on his face — wrinkles which Lincoln hadn’t really noticed before — were a lot deeper. And he had lost weight, weight he really didn’t have to spare.

  Tommy still looked sad, but he smiled as he said, “You remembered my name this time.”

  “Yeah,” Lincoln choked, again trying to stand but finding he was just too dizzy to make it happen. “Yeah, but Tommy ... Tommy, why do you look so much older? How much time is passing? How long has it been?”

  “Years, Linc,” Tommy sighed. “Years and years.”

  “Years ...” Lincoln reached up to touch his own face, found little enlightenment that way. “Jeez, Tommy, if you’re ... I mean, I gotta be...”

  Tommy shrugged. “Not that you’d know it.”

  “Wh-what do you mean?”

  “You don’t age, Linc,” Tommy told him. “Not that we can tell, anyway. I guess you might be aging really, really slowly. But in the thirty years you’ve been—”

  Lincoln gasped. “Thirty years? Thirty - years?!”

  Forgetting himself, he shot all the way to his feet — and instantly regretted it. The room spun like a top, and he collapsed to the floor beside the cot, struggling not to vomit.

  Tommy crouched next to him. “You shouldn’t push it like that, Linc. We lose time when you push it too far. The damage to your brain...”

  And Lincoln felt it. The dizziness, the urge — the need — to sleep engulfed him like a tidal wave. He managed to say, “Sarah ... is ... where ... Sarah ...?”

  Tommy called over his shoulder. “Sarah! Sarah, you better get in here!”

  As Lincoln’s eyelids marched downward, he heard a woman say, “But the surprise—!”

  “We don’t have time! He’s already slipping back!”

  Lincoln heard footsteps racing toward the open doorway ...

  No, no, I have to hold on, Sarah’s coming!

  ... and then he heard nothing.

  PCA

  This time, the confusion and dizziness were barely there; the nausea continued to stick around, but he could live with that.

  Sitting up more carefully than before, Lincoln called out, “Tommy? Sarah?”

  The door opened within seconds, and a short, cute, old lady stood in the—

  No. “Sarah?”

  “Yes, Lincoln,” said his sister, a woman who could easily be his grandmother. She smiled, and her eyes overflowed with tears even as they disappeared into the wrinkles on her face. “It’s me.”

  Lincoln’s eyes swelled with his own tears. He leaned forward to stand and take her into his arms and hold her close, but she waved him down.

  “Don’t, don’t,” she said. “Don’t do anything to shorten your time. I’ll come to you.”

  She leaned her cane against the wall — he hadn’t even noticed until that moment that she was using one — and shuffled over to him. She appeared to have gained very little height over the years (that, or she was already shrinking with age), and even though he was sitting on the cot, their heads were almost level as they melted into one another.

  She cried, and he cried. After a minute or so, Lincoln sniffed back his emotions as he held her at arm’s length. However long his time would be, he couldn’t waste it.

  “How long?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Too long, Lincoln. Too long by any count. I’m just glad you seem so lucid this time. How do you feel?”

  “My head’s better — still wobbly, but less achy. And I still feel like I could throw up. But ... I think this is the best I’ve been, at least since Tommy explained ...” He craned his neck to look past her at the open doorway, which displayed nothing but a dim hall that matched the boring starkness of his room. “Where’s Tommy? I want to see both of you.”

  Sarah released something between a gasp and a sob. “Tommy isn’t here anymore, Lincoln. He ... he died.”

  Lincoln’s gut rolled, and it had nothing to do with his nausea. “Wh-what ...? How ...? How ...?”

  Sarah lifted her shoulders in a weak shrug. “A car accident. He hadn’t been getting enough sleep, and when the rogues started fighting in the middle of the street, he didn’t react fast enough.”

  “Rogues ...?” He felt as though he had never before heard the word.

  Sarah nodded. “Yes, I’m ... I’m afraid the world has gone to hell without you, Lincoln. The PCA’s gone, the Taalu left, God only knows whatever happened to Vortex and the other vigilantes. Without you ...” She sighed. “They didn’t all go right away. But they got older, and slower, and more and more paranormals started going rogue again, and ... Tommy was just the latest victim. That’s all.”

  “Jesus, ‘that’s all’?”

  Her expression shifted, drawing away from sadness and a little more toward anger. “Yes, Lincoln, that’s all. There’s nothing else to be done, or said about it. Tommy and I traded shifts, each of us taking eight hours here or twelve hours there, making sure you were never left alone, in case you woke up ...”

  Oh, God.

  “... hoping you would come back to us, hoping you could be the hero again. But you ... you just kept sleeping. You slept our lives away, Lincoln ... but you haven’t aged a day.” She touched his face. “You’re as young as ever. And soon I’ll be gone, like Tommy, and you’ll eventually wake up for good. And you’ll be all alone in this shitty world, all by yourself.”

  His heart pounding, Lincoln closed his eyes and leaned into her caressing hand. “Sarah ... Sarah, I am so, so sorry. I ... I feel like I let you down, let Tommy down, I ...”

  He opened his eyes to see Sarah had tilted her head in confusion, and had the strangest smile on her face. “Well ... yes. You did. Of course you did, Lincoln. You let everyone down. And to rub salt in the wound, you’re going to outlive us all.”

  Since his injury and his starting to remember more between awakenings, Lincoln had seen and heard a number of things that felt like gut-punches and face-slaps. But this was the worst one of them all, a huge, raging spear of agony straight through him.

  And all he could say was, “Wh ... what?”

  Sarah explained it to him as though he were an idiot child, all with that strange smile on her face. “You - let - us - down, Lincoln. We were counting on you to protect us our whole lives. But what did you do? You let yourself get blindsided in the field, and you went to sleep. And you still look the same, Lincoln. Exactly the same. Never aging, never changing. At all.” She sighed, and it was filled with tired pathos. “I think you’re going to outlive the whole world, Lincoln. And then you will be alone for the rest of eternity.”

  Lincoln shook his head, closed his eyes again. He had been wrestling with this, this fear for so long ... but to learn it was true like ... like ...

  Sarah giggled.

  Lincoln opened his eyes once more. They were still together in the small room, but instead of sitting on the cot, he was plopped on the bare floor as Sarah stared down at him, and he had no idea how that had happened. The odd smile on her face had grown both larger and darker, and her giggling didn’t sound especially filled with warmth, either.

  “Sarah?”

  She waved it off as she got her tittering under control. “Sorry, sorry, it’s just ... some of you people are so easy. I can’t decide if that makes it
more fun, or less.” She chuckled.

  Lincoln shook his head a little. “Sarah, honey, what are you talking about?”

  In response, her weird smile grew bigger still — almost impossibly wide, taking on an undeniable “mean” quality — and she actually winked at him. “I don’t know, Powerhouse. What am I talking about?”

  With that, she turned on her heel and — walking without the former, delicate care of an elderly limp — left the room.

  Lincoln was so bewildered by the sudden shift in her behavior, in the tone of her whole demeanor, all he could think to call out was, “Sarah? You forgot your cane.”

  Nothing. She did not reappear in the doorway.

  Because there was no doorway. No door, no hallway beyond, no walls, no table with its lamp. And no cane.

  Lincoln blinked several times, trying to make sense of everything in the sudden darkness. Twisting on his butt on the floor, he looked around himself, and all that he could really see was the impotent light bleeding through the window.

  Window? What window?

  Lincoln found he was sitting on the dirty floor of an abandoned warehouse. And while he saw nothing left of his hospice room, he could barely make out his broken phone lying on the floor near him.

  Now he really, really wanted to throw up.

  What ... what happened here? Where am I? What time is it? What year is it?

  Lincoln had no idea. About any of it.

  THE SHINING STAR

  After Vortex, the Shining Star was the next to notice the unnatural quality to the darkness that fell over the area.

  Once Earth’s sun fully set, Callin was able to see to a decent degree, at first, but when he scouted a narrow alleyway that had fallen into pitch black, he glanced around, took one step into the alley, and willed a small amount of energy from his palm. He planned to have it glow just long enough to check for obscure doors or windows ...

  ... except it did not have the desired effect, at all. His hand began to glow, yes, but it was muted, as though he were deep underwater rather than just standing between two buildings.