Dark Days | Book 8 | Avalon

by Lukens, Mark

  Maybe he was cracking . . . his mind finally snapping.

  “Hear anything?” Josh whispered.

  “No,” Ray answered, shining the light back on Josh again.

  “We should check around the bunker,” Josh suggested.

  “Yeah,” Ray agreed. “We need to pull the bodies out into the hallway first. I don’t want to leave them inside with Mike and Emma.”

  Josh turned around. He looked like he might argue that they didn’t have the time to move dead bodies around, but he didn’t.

  Mike rushed up to them when they got back inside the lab. He still had his gun in his hand. “Did you get all of them?”

  “We got one more,” Ray said. “We need to check the rest of the bunker.”

  Mike stared at Ray.

  “Where’s your flashlight?”

  Mike holstered his gun and pulled his flashlight out of his jacket pocket.

  “We’re going to get these dead bodies out of here before we leave,” Ray told Mike. “You shine your light so we can see what we’re doing, okay?”

  Mike turned on his flashlight.

  Josh was over by Emma, making sure she was okay. She walked back with him, standing by Mike.

  Ray and Josh made quick work of dragging the rippers out through the doorway, each of them grabbing a foot and pulling them outside, leaving behind wide smears of blood on the floor, painting the threshold with it.

  As they pulled the last ripper into the hallway, then down away from the doorway, Ray’s skin tingled with fear. An almost electrical impulse raced through his body. They worked in the weak sphere of light that Mike’s flashlight provided, but it barely pushed the darkness back. And it felt like something was sneaking up on them in that darkness.

  Moments later they were back inside the lab.

  “Maybe you got them all,” Mike said.

  “We have to go check, Mike.”

  Mike didn’t like the idea of it, but he nodded solemnly.

  “You stay here with Emma.”

  “We’ll be okay,” Emma said. She gave Josh a hug. “You be careful,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER 63

  Ray

  Fifteen minutes after they had dragged the dead rippers out of the lab, Ray and Josh were in the hallway again. Mike closed the door, locking it. Josh had his M-16 in his hands, his magazine fully loaded again. Ray had his gun in one hand, his flashlight in the other.

  “Let’s start with the lobby first,” Ray whispered. “Then we’ll work our way back down the hall, checking each room along the way.”

  Josh nodded. “You got it, boss.”

  Ray let the sarcasm slip. He walked beside Josh, the air a little better the farther away they got from the dead bodies. They walked through the archway into the lobby, passing the desk to the left with the computer monitor on top. Ray shined his flashlight around slowly.

  No rippers.

  They stopped at the elevator doors. The keypad next to the doors wasn’t lit up, but Ray pushed at the buttons anyway.

  Nothing.

  Ray counted up the rippers they had already killed. Four when they had first rushed down the hall from the elevator before the power went out. Then two more that had attacked Gerald when they made their way down to the lab after Mike had crawled through the ductwork. And just now five more. That was eleven altogether. Could eleven of them have fit in the elevator? Had some of them come down the stairs? Could there be more of them somewhere in Avalon?

  He stared at the elevator doors for a moment, shining his light on them. He tried to remember how big the elevator car had been. It had fit him, Mike, Josh, and Emma easily enough. Eleven rippers wouldn’t have been such a tight squeeze, would it?

  Maybe rippers had come only from the elevator and none had come down the stairs before the doors were blown. If some had come down the stairs, there could be a lot more of them roaming around in the darkness.

  But so far there were no sounds anywhere else in the bunker.

  They headed back down the hall, checking the doors along the way. The doors to the computer rooms were locked. Before they got to the lab and the dead bodies, they entered the shorter hallway that led to the dining room and cafeteria. They entered the large room slowly, letting the flashlight beam illuminate their way. If there were any rippers hiding in the dark, they would see them coming from a mile away.

  Ray shined his light across the tables and chairs. No rippers. Nowhere to hide.

  They went behind the serving tables and cafeteria rail. Ray shined his light down the galley-style kitchen area, lines of shadows racing across the counters and equipment.

  No rippers.

  They went deeper into the rest of the kitchen, checking around all the equipment, even in some of the lower cabinets. No rippers and no sounds.

  Ray was beginning to relax a little.

  They checked the pantry. No rippers inside. No rippers in the freezer or walk-in cooler.

  They left the kitchen and dining area. They were back in the main hallway a moment later, moving past the dead bodies that littered the floor. They checked more doors along the way. The storage closet was locked, but the door to the sleeping quarters was open.

  It took twenty minutes to check all of the sleeping quarters and bathrooms.

  No rippers.

  They checked the gym and the locker room. Still no rippers. All the other doors to the other labs were locked. The last door led to the stairway. They climbed the stairway, but only got halfway up when they saw the rocks, dirt, and twisted metal blocking the rest of the way.

  “No way we’re going to get through that,” Josh said.

  Ray just nodded, shining the beam of light at the rubble blocking the way. He was happy there were no rippers in the bunker, but they were trapped down here now until someone turned the power back on so the elevator would work. The claustrophobia pressed in on him from all sides, panic building, but he pushed it back a little. He wasn’t going to panic in front of Josh, and he damn sure wasn’t going to let himself panic in front of Mike.

  “They trapped us down here hoping the rippers would get us,” Josh said. “They’ll wait for a while and come back down here and get us,”

  Ray nodded again. “We can wait them out a little while. We’ve got plenty of food and water.”

  “It’s going to get awful cold down here,” Josh said.

  “We’ll grab blankets from the sleeping quarters.”

  They left the stairwell and walked back into the hallway.

  “What about the elevator shaft?” Josh said.

  “What about it?”

  “I could climb up the shaft. Get out through the doors. Sneak up on the Dark Angels before they come down here.”

  Ray didn’t say anything.

  “You know they’re coming. We know that, we just don’t know when.”

  “You don’t know how many there are.”

  “I’ll have the element of surprise.”

  Ray sighed. He had to admit that Josh’s plan could work if there were only a few Dark Angels up there.

  “There should be an emergency ladder embedded into the walls of the elevator shaft,” Josh said. “Most newer elevator shafts have them. I’ll take a light, my trusty M-16, the ammo I have.”

  “Let’s rest first,” Ray said. “We’ll get some water, some food, some rest. Then we’ll talk about it.”

  They were back at the lab door. Ray knocked three times on the door, then twice.

  Mike opened up the door and let them inside.

  CHAPTER 64

  Luke

  It was only thirty minutes away from sunset when Petra spotted the white church sitting alone on top of a hill, the woods all around it in the distance. A dirt road wound around the side of the hill and up to the church. There were no vehicles there, no rippers wandering around. They hadn’t seen any rippers in the last twenty minutes of driving. She pulled off the road and drove up the dirt trail, the other four vehicles following hers.

  It wasn�
�t a huge church—just the one building with a steeple—but it was probably big enough to hold one hundred people at full capacity. Luke could almost hear the bell in the steeple ringing, the sound of a choir coming from inside.

  They parked their trucks around the building, one blocking the rear doors, another vehicle on each side of the building, and the last two vehicles in front.

  It was dark by the time they searched the church and then unpacked some of their supplies from the trucks, taking all of their weapons and ammo inside with them. Three of the Dark Angels agreed to take the first watch with a pair of night vision goggles and assault rifles, two spotters in front and one in the back. The two in the front had a walkie that they could use in an emergency to warn them if rippers were coming.

  Everyone settled inside the church at the far end, near the stage and the pulpit. Kate and Rebecca laid Brooke and Patrick down in the second row of pews, both of them exhausted and ready to sleep. Rebecca laid with them, keeping them company. A few of the others laid down in the pews, sleeping, but most sat in the first row of pews and on the carpeted steps that led up to the stage. It was very dark inside the church with only one battery-powered lantern on low to give the barest of light, enough to just make out their shadowy presence. A faint moonlight shined in through stained glass windows, most of the panes cracked and broken, allowing the cold air to seep in.

  Luke got the Dragon’s guard settled down at the end of the stage, checking to make sure his hands were still bound securely in front of him. He left the man’s ankles untied if he promised to be good.

  The guard just nodded, staring daggers at Luke.

  Luke sat down next to Petra. Jo and Gil sat close to each other. Dawson and Kate were there. Lisa and Wade sat next to each other. Some of the other townspeople and Dark Angels were among the group, too.

  “What do we do now?” Kate asked.

  “We stay here for the night,” Luke said.

  “I mean after that. Where are we going after that?”

  “The rippers got a lot of the food in the store,” Jo said. “But there’s still a lot of canned food they can’t get into. There are still a lot of supplies there. The rippers won’t stay there forever, at least not as many as there are now. We could go back eventually, rebuild the fence, make it stronger. Rebuild the doors. Make it a fortress again. Now, with the Dragon dead, we’ll only have to worry about the rippers getting inside.”

  “Yeah, but when can we go back?” Lisa asked. “Two days? A week? A month?”

  “What about Hell Town?” Kate asked.

  “It’s burning,” Luke said.

  “It could be rebuilt too,” Dawson suggested.

  “I don’t want to live in that place,” Petra said.

  “The supplies in the basements might be okay,” Martin said. “The fires might not have gotten to them, might not have destroyed everything down there.”

  Luke sat still and listened to them talk. He watched Dawson and Martin, and then he watched the other Dark Angels and townspeople. He trusted Dawson and Martin somewhat—they had proved their loyalty—but he still couldn’t be sure about the others from Hell Town. He couldn’t be sure about the Dark Angels outside spotting. He didn’t differentiate between Dark Angels and townspeople; to him they were all Dark Angels whether they had taken the brand or not. He stayed tense, ready for anything. He could see the spotters outside moving away when the horde of rippers came, not warning them, allowing the rippers to get inside the church. He glanced at Petra for a moment, barely able to make out the outline of her face in the weak light. For some reason he was sure she felt the same way he did.

  “Maybe we should find somewhere else safe to stay tomorrow,” one of the townspeople said, an older man who was stick-thin. He brushed at his mustache as he talked like he was wiping away sweat from his upper lip. “Somewhere safer than this.”

  Luke stood up. All eyes were on him. “If we’re going to stay together as a group then we need unity. We need a leader to make decisions.”

  “And you’re the leader?” the thin man sneered, wiping at his mustache. “Is that it?”

  Luke would never be the leader. He’d never been a leader before and he had no intentions of starting now. “No. Jo is our leader here. For all of us. You answer to her. Anyone not okay with that is free to leave. You can take a few bottles of water, your weapons you have on you, but that’s it. If you stay, everyone will follow Jo’s orders. She’s in charge.”

  Everyone was quiet as Luke sat back down.

  Jo stood up and cleared her voice just a little. Gil was right next to her, still seated. “Hell Town’s burning,” she said. “The store is overrun with rippers. Food and supplies might still be salvageable in those two places, but not for a while. But there’s a place we could go, a place Ray, his son, Josh, and Emma went to, a place Ray tried to convince me to take all of you to . . . Avalon. I made the decision for all of you not to go with him. Maybe that was the wrong decision, so I don’t think I deserve to be your leader and make decisions for you.”

  No one spoke as Jo sat back down.

  “I’ll follow Jo,” Kate said.

  “Me too,” Petra said immediately.

  “You know where I stand,” Luke said.

  “Same here,” Lisa said. Wade put his arm around her and nodded in agreement.

  A few of the other townspeople and Dark Angels nodded and grunted that they would follow Jo.

  “I guess I will, too,” Gil said with a smile. Jo gave him a playful punch in the leg.

  “I appreciate all of your confidence,” Jo said, “but I’m not your leader. We’ll make all of our decisions together from now on.”

  More nods and agreements from the Dark Angels and townspeople.

  “We all need to do this together,” Jo said.

  “What’s Avalon?” Lisa asked.

  “It’s an underground lab associated with the CDC. Ray used to work for the CDC.”

  A few murmurs of interest.

  “As an accountant,” Jo said quickly. “He wasn’t a scientist. But one of his supervisors told him about Avalon, told him how to find it. He told Ray to go there. So, maybe we should go there too.”

  A few more murmurs and glances at each other.

  “So let’s go,” Kate said. “We can leave in the morning.”

  “There’s just one problem,” Jo said. “Ray didn’t exactly know where Avalon was.”

  Everyone was silent for a moment as her words sank in.

  “Ray had drawn a map before, when he’d researched the place at his supervisor’s house, but the map got burned up with all of his other stuff in a cabin in West Virginia.”

  Luke remembered the cabin exploding when the missile had slammed into it.

  “So how are we going to find this place, then?” the mustached man asked with a sneer; he seemed to be pleased by this impasse.

  Jo looked at Luke.

  “Ray followed us halfway to Hell Town,” Luke told everyone. “We stopped at a crossroads. I know where it is. From there Ray drove south. It’s somewhere to start.”

  “Yes,” Jo agreed. “Ray said Avalon was in northern Georgia.”

  “Northern Georgia?” the older man griped. “That . . . that’s a pretty big area, don’t you think?”

  “You think Ray found it?” Lisa asked, not bothering to hide her doubt. “I mean, you said he didn’t have his map anymore. And all the rippers everywhere . . .”

  “I don’t know,” Jo answered. “Ray, along with Luke, and the others they were with, they have survived a lot. I have full confidence that Ray and his group not only survived, but that they found Avalon.”

  “But you don’t know for sure,” Mustache Man said.

  “I’m confident he found it,” Jo repeated.

  A few of the townspeople whispered among themselves.

  “Maybe we should find another building to stay in,” a woman from Hell Town suggested. “Somewhere much more remote than this.”

  “Yes,” Jo s
aid. “We could find something like that, but we won’t be able to stay there very long. Or anywhere else. Rippers will eventually find us . . . a herd of them. Maybe thousands of them. More than we can fight.”

  “But we could be driving around in circles,” the man with the mustache said, a few of his townies agreeing. “It could be even more dangerous to look for Avalon than to just stay put somewhere.”

  “Yeah,” the woman who had spoken up before said. “I mean, this Avalon place sounds like a great idea—if we knew where it was.”

  “I know where it is,” a voice from the far side of the room said.

  Luke clicked his flashlight on and shined it at the Dragon’s guard sitting at the other end of the stage. The guard squinted at the sudden light trained on him, raising his bound hands a little to block the light.

  “What do you mean you know where the place is?” Luke asked him.

  “Avalon. I didn’t know that was the name of the place, but the Dragon had a bunker in northern Georgia.”

  “How did he find it?” Jo asked.

  The guard shrugged. “I don’t know. He just seemed to know where it was. He sent Dark Angels there a few weeks ago.”

  “Shit,” Luke breathed out, his stomach sinking.

  “So the Dark Angels were there the whole time?” Jo said. “And if Ray and the others got there . . .” She let her words trail off.

  “We still need to go,” Petra said.

  Everyone looked at her.

  “You came for me,” Petra said. “You had no idea if I was alive or dead, but you came for me. We need to do the same for them.”

  “She’s right,” Luke said. He shined his light back at the guard. “What’s your name?”