Dark Days (Book 3): Exposure:

by Lukens, Mark

  Luke jumped up from the couch and darted over to the front door. He pushed the curtain over the door to the side just a little so he could peek out through the window. The street was filled with rippers—it looked like there were a hundred of them. Many of them were turning towards the house, like they’d just spotted the woman. Now they were all running towards the house.

  The woman was going to be torn apart in minutes.

  Luke hurried through the house to the kitchen. He already heard the spitting shots of his own gun. He heard the screeches and screams of the rippers in the back yard. He got to the kitchen door just as the woman bounded back up the back porch steps, running to the door. At least she still had his backpack clenched in one hand.

  He opened the back door for her, but the rippers were right on her heels, reaching for her. She got in through the kitchen door just as one of the rippers tried to grab at her, grabbing hold of her backpack. Luke pushed against the door, pushing against the ripper, bringing an elbow down on the ripper’s wrist, and that got the ripper to let go of the woman’s backpack. The woman was right beside him in a flash, helping him push against the door with all of her weight.

  More and more rippers were running onto the porch, piling up on the door, adding their weight to the first one, all of them pushing. Others were at the windows, smashing the glass.

  With a growl, Luke summoned all of his strength and pushed the door all the way shut. He twisted the lock on the door.

  One of the rippers stuck his hand in through the glassless hole in the window of the door, grabbing at the woman, trying to claw at her, but she pulled free from him and shot the ripper in the forehead right through the glass panel in the door, shattering that pane of glass.

  Luke and the woman both backed away from the kitchen door. The woman turned and aimed Luke’s gun right at him.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Hey, what the hell are you doing?”

  The woman didn’t say anything. She had her finger right on the trigger as she aimed the gun at Luke. She looked scared, but not too scared to fire the gun.

  “I saved your life,” Luke told her. “I could have shut the door on you. Locked it. I could have left you out there.”

  The woman seemed to be considering Luke’s argument. She glanced at the rippers right outside the kitchen door. Many of them had thrust their hands through the panes of glass, shredding their skin, blood leaking out, dripping down the door and onto the floor as they pawed at the doorknob, trying to figure out how to open it—and it would only be a matter of time before they untwisted the lock and turned the knob, even if by accident. The rippers screamed and screeched as they crushed themselves against the door. Some of them yelled something almost similar to words, but most of it was just unintelligible gibberish. Their eyes were wild, mouths open, drooling, blood smeared on their faces and teeth. Their clothes were ripped and soiled with stains.

  Other rippers were smashing the two windows in the kitchen on either side of the door. Rippers had been pushed through the glass like they were battering rams, their bodies bent down over the window sill with pieces of jagged wood and glass sticking into them. It almost looked like the rippers had been pushed into the window purposely, like they had been sacrificed and were now a safe ledge that the other rippers could crawl over.

  The woman lowered Luke’s gun and looked to the archway that led into the living room. “The front door,” she said, already running for it.

  “They’re out there, too,” Luke said as he caught up to her.

  The rippers were at the front door, and they were at the two front windows that looked out onto the wide front porch. Two more rippers were pushed through the living room windows, shattering the glass and strips of wood that divided the window panes. They were pushed forward, flopping down over the window sills, probably already dead. Other rippers were using the baseball bats and metal bars they had to clear the jagged glass away and beginning to crawl over the other rippers as they pushed the curtains out of the way.

  “Shit,” the woman said.

  “We need to get upstairs,” Luke told her. He was already at the foot of the stairs.

  The woman shot at the rippers crawling in over the first ones through the windows. She hit two of them—one in the forehead and the other in the neck, dropping both of them.

  “You’re just wasting ammo,” he told her.

  As she shot the next wave of rippers trying to get through the windows, Luke realized that their dead bodies were beginning to clog up the windows, buying him and the woman a little extra time.

  She was at the foot of the stairs in a flash. They ran up the steps that led to an upstairs hallway.

  “Down here,” Luke said. He had already searched the house last night and figured their best bet was the master bedroom at the end of the hall.

  The woman didn’t argue with him—she ran right behind him down the hallway. They darted inside the bedroom and closed the door, locking it. The rippers hadn’t climbed the stairs yet, but it would only be a few more seconds before they were up here and at the bedroom door.

  “The backpack,” Luke told her.

  The woman looked a little wary, she raised Luke’s gun again, aiming the weapon at him.

  “Please, we don’t have time for this. I need the nail gun out of the backpack.”

  The woman seemed to sense immediately what Luke’s plan was. She dropped his backpack to the floor and opened it up. She found the nail gun and tossed it to him.

  Luke caught the nail gun and flipped the switch on it, hoping there was still enough juice left in the battery for him to use it. He pressed the tip of the nail gun at the edge of the bedroom door and pulled the trigger, toe-nailing a long framing nail through the door and into the door jamb, nailing the door in place. He shot several more nails up and down the edge of the door. Maybe it wouldn’t hold forever, but it would hold for a little while.

  “Help me with the bed,” Luke said after he tossed the nail gun across the room, dropping it on the floor. The bed was on the same wall as the door, the foot of it pointing towards a TV on top of a long dresser that sat between two windows.

  The woman was right there beside Luke, helping him turn the bed towards the door, shoving it against the door long ways. They also piled the end tables on top of the bed for a little extra weight. Luke ran over to the dresser, and the woman was already on the other side of it, helping him push it across the carpet. The dresser was even heavier than the bed. They pushed it right up against the bed, adding more weight to their barricade.

  Just as Luke and the woman stepped back from the barricade, they heard the rippers thundering down the hallway, screaming and screeching. A moment later they were pounding at the door.

  Luke turned back to the woman. She had Luke’s backpack over her shoulder again, Luke’s gun aimed at him. He put his hands up a little. “This is getting a little old, don’t you think?”

  “Just stay back,” she warned, taking a few steps back towards where the dresser used to be. The flat screen TV that used to be on top of the dresser was leaning against the wall with a trail of cable wires snaking across the carpet.

  “What’s your name?” Luke asked. “My name’s Luke.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. I could’ve locked you out there on that back porch, but I didn’t.”

  The woman just nodded. She seemed to be giving in a little to his reasoning.

  “We’re in this together now,” Luke told her. “What’s your name?”

  “Wilma.”

  “Okay, Wilma,” he said, smiling. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You said this is your cousin’s house.”

  “That was a lie.”

  Luke nodded—he already knew that. “Okay. So what are you doing running around alone? I see you’ve already got your own weapon, your own backpack of supplies.” He could see the butt of a pistol poking out from a shoulder holster underneath her zippered hoodie, the zipper pulled halfway down now
.

  “What are you doing running around out here alone?” she asked. “Why do you have a silencer on your gun? Why does the tip of your nail gun have dried blood all over it? Why are you carrying around all of this extra ammo, the extra two weapons, and thousands of dollars of cash?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  She didn’t say anything. She waited for an answer.

  “Look, I’ll tell you everything when we have some time, but right now we need to figure a way out of here.” He lowered his hands all the way, testing her. “We need to trust each other for a little while. Work together on this. And when we’re out of here, then we can part ways. Deal?”

  She lowered the gun, but didn’t offer to give it back to him. But it was a start.

  “Okay,” Luke breathed out. He looked around the bedroom. The door was fastened with long framing nails and barricaded with most of the furniture. The rippers were pounding on the door, but it would hopefully be quite a while before they managed to get through that door. They could always start tearing away at the drywall on the walls, get into the room that way, but they didn’t seem to be trying that yet.

  Luke walked across the room to the master bathroom. He turned one of the faucets on, hoping for water—but it was bone-dry and only made a gurgling sound from somewhere deep down in the pipes. There was a small window in the bathroom, a small closet loaded up with towels, extra sheets for the bed, half a pack of toilet paper, and other bathroom supplies.

  He went back out to the bedroom. Wilma stood in the same spot, the backpack by her foot, the gun still in her hand. He rushed past her to the closet, which had bi-fold doors on the front of it and a dreamcatcher hanging on the wall next to it. The closet wasn’t very deep. There was a line of clothes on hangers, the floor stacked up with boxes and plastic tubs. The top shelf was overflowing with more boxes and plastic containers. He pulled a box out and searched through it, and then he searched through the plastic storage tub underneath it—packs of financial papers, extra shoes, stacks of old DVDs, some kind of collectible toys and baseball cards. Nothing of much use to them.

  Luke darted across the bedroom and inspected the two windows; they were both on the one side of the room. One window looked down onto part of the back yard where the gate was, and the other window was farther down the wall and looked down onto the side yard and the vacant lot beyond that. There weren’t any rippers in the side yard, but there were some milling about in the back yard. And there were a few more still in the street. Some of the rippers were heading down the street, past where his pickup truck was parked. Maybe they were losing interest in this house, searching for other prey. The rippers walked right past the pickup truck, not paying any attention to it, and that was good.

  “Okay,” Luke said as he turned back to Wilma. “The rippers are still out there, but some of them are moving down the street. Maybe the ones outside the door will get tired of pounding on it and go away, eventually.”

  Wilma didn’t seem too convinced by that idea.

  “If they don’t go away, we’re going to have to go out through this window,” Luke said. “I don’t suppose you have a rope among the supplies in your backpack, do you?”

  CHAPTER 12

  Wilma didn’t have a rope in her backpack, but they decided to make a long rope out of the bedsheets in the bathroom closet. Luke and Wilma sat on the floor across from each other, cutting and tearing the bedsheets into long strips. They each used their own knives to cut the sheets into strips. Luke used his pocketknife, and he noticed that Wilma had some kind of survivalist knife. They each sipped the last two bottles of water that Luke had in his backpack, and they split a bag of pretzels.

  “Nice knife,” Luke said as he watched her for a moment. “Did you rob Rambo before you got to me?”

  “Funny,” she said, but she smiled.

  “Where does someone get a knife like that?” he asked.

  “Where does someone get a silencer for his gun?”

  Fair point. Wilma obviously didn’t trust him yet, and he couldn’t blame her. He needed to steer their conversation in a different direction. “Do you know what happened to all of these people? Do you know what turned them into these rippers?”

  “It’s probably some kind of plague,” Wilma said. “Best guess is some kind of airborne virus. Maybe a mutated rabies strain.”

  “Rabies.” That didn’t sound good. Luke was quiet for a moment, already braiding some of the strips of cloth together and tying them into knots. “I thought people and animals that got rabies foamed at the mouth. You know, like Cujo.”

  Wilma didn’t smile at his joke. “It might not be actual rabies, but something like it. A manufactured virus maybe, something that mimics rabies in some ways.”

  “So you’re saying it’s something manmade?”

  She shrugged as she braided the strips of cloth, working quickly, her fingers nimble and even quicker than Luke’s. “Could be natural. Viruses and plagues mutate all the time in nature. But governments and militaries like to do their own tinkering these days, and that could be much more devastating than anything nature comes up with.”

  “You’re thinking this was a bioweapon? An attack of some kind?”

  “Could’ve been an accident, a plague that seeped out of a research facility. It could’ve been some amateur terrorist playing around with viruses. You ever heard of biopunks?”

  “No.”

  “They’re amateur scientists that like to play around with viruses, bacteria, genetics. They buy used scientific equipment online and then buy live viruses and bacteria, then they play around with them, try to mutate them.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “Of course my favorite theory is that our own government let this disease loose purposely.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Population control. That’s what they ultimately want. They know that the population on Earth is getting out of control; it will only be a matter of time before we run out of resources to survive. Scientists and governments know that the herd has to be culled. Culled quite a bit, actually.”

  “So you think our own government unleashed a disease to kill a bunch of us off?”

  “Yeah. It’s the best way to kill off a lot of people without irrevocably destroying land and resources like a nuclear or chemical war would. I bet the elites are safe and sound right now, hidden away in their bunkers; the leaders of the government, the super-rich. They probably knew it was coming and had time to plan for it. Now all they have to do is wait six months or a year, wait until most of the human population is dead, and then they can come back out and start over.”

  “If they wanted to control the population, then why did this disease turn the people into animals, into the rippers? Why not just kill them off with some kind of disease?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe the rippers will die soon. Maybe the disease was designed to kill them off, eventually. Or maybe they will kill each other off. Kill most of the survivors off, too.”

  Luke just nodded.

  Wilma shrugged. “Or maybe this plague really was just an accident or some kind of miscalculation.”

  “You seem to know a lot about viruses and plagues.”

  Wilma didn’t respond.

  “You’re some kind of doomsday prepper, aren’t you?”

  Wilma kept braiding the strips of cloth, still not answering.

  “You’ve obviously been trained somewhere. I was thinking cop or military at first, but you’re a prepper, aren’t you?”

  “It doesn’t hurt to be prepared,” she said, but there wasn’t much strength in her words.

  “Well, this is the day you guys have been praying for, isn’t it? Society has finally collapsed.”

  She stared at him. “We didn’t pray for this day, we were just prepared for it.”

  Luke could tell that he’d hit a sore spot with her. “I was just kidding.” He was quiet for a few minutes as he worked on another section of their homemade rope. “If
this is an airborne virus of some kind, then how come we’re not infected?”

  “How do you know we’re not?”

  A chill danced along Luke’s skin. “Why don’t you have a gas mask?” Luke always pictured preppers wearing gas masks and sporting AR-15s.

  “I had one, but I lost it.”

  “You lost it?”

  “I was with two others from my . . . my group. They didn’t make it.” Her voice cracked just a bit on the last word. She didn’t meet Luke’s eyes, concentrating on the braids in the rope.

  Luke took a moment to study Wilma. She was very attractive, striking in a way. “What were you guys doing? Looking for supplies?”

  She gave a slight shake of her head. “We have plenty of supplies. I needed to find someone and the other two volunteered to go with me. Now they’re dead.”

  Luke didn’t bother asking how they had died. “Who were you trying to find?”

  “My cousin. I wanted to get to her and her kids. I wanted them to come back with me.”

  Luke didn’t bother asking her where they were going back to. “Your cousin lives across the street?”

  Wilma looked at him and the ghost of a smile played at her lips. She seemed impressed that he had figured that out.

  “You knew the people that used to live in this house, didn’t you?” Luke said.

  “Not really. I met them a few times. I’m sure my cousin knew them pretty well.”

  “What happened to your cousin? Did she turn into a ripper?”

  Wilma shrugged. “I don’t know. She wasn’t there. Her kids weren’t there. The house was empty.”

  Luke was quiet. He could tell she was lying about her cousin, but he didn’t want to call her on it.

  “There was blood in her house,” Wilma added in a whisper. “A lot of it.”

  “I was at a friend’s house yesterday morning,” Luke said, deciding to volunteer his own story—maybe it would help ease Wilma’s tension a little. “He had turned into one of those rippers at some point. He killed his wife and his three daughters. Slaughtered them. Ate parts of them. When I saw him, he was just talking gibberish. He was covered in their blood. It was all over his face. All over his teeth.”