“All right, the ladder’s all up,” Wyatt said.
“Let’s go inside,” Phil said. “Davey, head in and turn that headlamp back on. We’ll follow.”
David opened the door and headed inside, and when he turned the headlamp on the pitch-black darkness, like that of the inside of a deep mine, was banished for a few yards by the soft glow. Phil helped Alice up and onto her feet, and then she, Wyatt, and Phil headed in through the door, which Phil quietly closed behind them.
And deep inside the school, figures waited in the shadows, listening to the unexpected sound of footsteps echoing through the hallways, and they curled their fingers around their weapons.
22
“Stay close,” Phil said to the others as they moved cautiously through the darkness. He didn’t want to use the LED headlamps unobstructed, because while they would flood the hallways with light, that light would certainly be seen from outside. With David’s headlamp dimmed by the shirt wrapped around his head, the soft glow it emitted only enabled the group to see a couple of feet in front of them.
The others didn’t need to be told this. If they lagged too far behind, they would be swallowed up entirely by the darkness, which was so dense in here it felt like a physical presence, as if it were fog or mist. One could not see one’s hand even an inch in front of one’s eyes in this blackness.
All of them were on edge. It didn’t seem likely that anyone else could be in the school, but the fact that they were in a huge and unfamiliar building, moving through almost impenetrable darkness meant that they couldn’t help imagining danger lurking around every corner.
“The nurse’s room is likely to be on the ground level,” Phil said. “There’s gotta be some stairs around here somewhere.”
This floor seemed to be all classrooms, with the only other rooms being bathrooms. David stared forlornly at the rows of lockers as he passed them and wondered not only when he would go back to school again, but if he ever would. Considering everything they’d seen and experienced thus far, a return to normality anytime soon didn’t seem likely.
They rounded a corner, and at last came to a stairwell. They headed down the first flight of stairs and were about to go down the second when Wyatt held up his hand. “Hold on,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “Does anyone else smell that?”
“Smell what?” David asked.
“Kerosene,” Wyatt answered. “I swear I caught a whiff of it. Very faint, but it was there.” He sniffed at the air again, as did everyone else.
“I don’t know. I can’t smell anything,” Phil said after a while.
“I can’t either,” Alice said.
“Neither can I,” David added.
“It might be the edginess of this situation making you pick up phantom smells,” Phil said. “This place is spooky as hell, and your mind might be playing tricks on you.”
Wyatt shook his head. “No, Phil, I didn’t imagine that. I promise you. I smelled a hint of kerosene in the air.”
“All right, well, let’s be extra cautious then,” Phil said, doing his best to sound confident and assured. “Guns at the ready, everyone…just in case.” The truth was, he was feeling very jittery and on edge, and the creepiness of this ultra-dark labyrinth was getting to him. He didn’t want to look nervous or worried in front of the others, though. He knew they needed strong leadership, and he had to provide that to get them through this situation.
They headed down another flight of stairs, and again, Wyatt stopped them, sniffing at the air again. “Dammit,” he muttered. “Didn’t anybody else smell that? I swear I caught another whiff of it.”
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s keep going,” Phil suggested. Actually, he too thought he’d caught a hint of kerosene in the air, but he didn’t want to stop moving. The more often they stopped and obsessed over these phantom smells, the more their minds would start screwing with them. He just wanted to get Alice to the nurse’s room, get her wound stitched back up, and then get the hell out.
They headed down the final flight of stairs, the one that took them to the first level, but just as they were about to exit the stairwell, they heard a sound that was definitely not a phantom conjuration of their troubled minds. Echoing through the hallways was the sound of footsteps, somehow sprinting through the darkness. It only lasted a few seconds, but they all heard it and froze in their tracks.
“Oh my God,” Alice gasped, her heart hammering in her chest. “You all heard that, right?”
“Shit,” Wyatt grunted, raising his revolver and aiming at the impenetrable darkness in front of him. “I told you I didn’t imagine those smells. Someone’s down here.”
“What do we do?” David asked, the shakiness of his voice betraying his fear. His heart was thumping in his chest, and his hands were shaking.
“We go on,” Phil said grimly. “There’s no other option. Your mother has to get to the nurse’s room. And if whoever’s out there has a gun, we’ll see them if they want to try anything with us. You can’t see your hand in front of your face in this darkness, so if they want to take aim at us, they’ll have to use a light source of their own.”
With everyone feeling jittery and nervous, they pushed on through the pitch-black hallways. In the distance, perhaps a few hallways down, they heard the frightening sound of someone sprinting through the darkness again. They all froze, aiming their guns into the shadows, but as quickly as the sound had appeared, it was gone, evaporating into silence.
“Dammit,” Wyatt muttered. “Who the hell is out there, and why the hell are they sprinting around in complete darkness? I don’t like this. I don’t like it one bit.”
“Come on,” Phil said, trying to bolster the group’s courage. “We’ve just passed a couple of offices, so the nurse’s room has to be around here somewhere. As soon as we find it, we can get out of here and leave whoever this freak in the darkness is behind.”
They rounded one more corner, and David let out a sigh of relief when, in the weak glow from his headlamp, he spotted a welcome sign above a nearby door. “There it is!” he said. “The nurse’s room!”
Phil made a beeline for it; he couldn’t wait to get out of the school. When he tried the door handle, though, he found the office was locked. “Shit,” he muttered.
“Man, let’s just shoulder-barge the damn door open,” Wyatt said. “Whoever’s in here already knows we’re in the building, so making some noise won’t matter.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Alice said. “There are a lot of addicts in the city, and plenty of the schools around here have beefed up the security around their nurse’s rooms in recent months. The door might be a lot stronger and better reinforced than it looks, and you might just end up hurting your shoulder. The last thing we need is more injuries to deal with; I’m already feeling so weak that I hardly know if I can stitch myself up properly.”
“Well, we have to get into this damn room somehow,” Wyatt said.
“Dad, you were an engineer, what do you think?” David asked. “What’s the best way to get in?”
Phil, who’d been examining the door up close while the others had been talking, simply chuckled in response. “Well, ramming or kicking it would be a real bad idea,” he said, “because this door opens outwards. It wasn’t designed to be a secure door back when they built this school, and I don’t think they took that into account when they put new locks on it. I’ve got some screwdrivers and hand tools in my backpack. We can take the hinges off and get in like that.”
“I think…I’d better sit down while you guys do that,” Alice said. She was feeling even woozier than before, and her energy was draining out of her like water from a leak.
Phil could hear that she was in a bad way, and he helped her to sit down on the floor against the wall next to the door. “Is there anything we can do to help you get some energy back?”
“Sugar and caffeine…will give me enough of a temporary boost…to get me through the task of…stitching myself up again.” Alice sounded very ha
ggard and weary.
“I saw a vending machine with sodas and candies and stuff in it on the third floor,” David said. “They’ve probably got Red Bulls or stuff in there. I could go get some for you, Mom.”
“You’re not going up there on your own,” Phil said sternly.
“I’ll go with him to make sure he’s safe. You stand guard here,” Wyatt said. “We’ve got the other headlamp you guys can use.”
“Let them go, honey,” Alice said weakly. “I need an energy boost to get through this.”
Phil didn’t like this, but he knew that it would have to be done. “All right,” he said. “But just go straight to that machine, grab what you need, and come straight back.”
“Believe me, I don’t want to be wandering around in this darkness any longer than necessary,” Wyatt said. “We’ll make sure we haul ass.” He handed Phil the headlamp he’d used on the bike, and Phil put it on and wrapped a spare shirt around his head to dim the light.
“Okay,” Phil said. “You’d better get going. I’ll work on the door in the meantime.”
Wyatt nodded, and he and David moved off into the darkness while Phil got busy working on the door hinges. Being alone now, with his weakening wife, made him feel a lot more vulnerable, and when he heard someone suddenly sprinting along the hallways—this time quite close to them—he almost jumped out of his skin. “Dammit!” he roared into the darkness, almost cracking. “Who the hell is out there?!”
“Just get the door open, honey,” Alice said, feeling almost too weak to be freaked out by the creepy stranger who was running through the hallways in complete darkness.
Feeling rather shaken and very much on edge, Phil got busy with the door. They didn’t hear the running stranger again, and Phil managed to get the hinges off the door. He helped Alice inside, and to their relief, there was an extensive range of medicines and medical supplies in the room. Phil helped Alice up onto the bed in the nurse’s room, and she instructed him on how to remove the dressing and clean the wound so she could sew it up again.
Upstairs, meanwhile, Wyatt and David had reached the vending machine. Inside it were plenty of high-caffeine energy drinks, candy bars, and other items that would likely give Alice enough of a boost to make the final trek to the truck in her weakened state. Of course, like everything else electronic, the vending machine was dead and would never work again.
“How are we gonna get the stuff out?” David asked. “I guess we could just use a chair or something to smash out the front glass, right?”
“There might be an easier way,” Wyatt said. “Come here, use your light to have a look around the side of the machine.”
David took a look around the side and saw that the front glass was a door locked by a simple padlock. “All we have to do is break this lock, and we can get in,” he said.
“I’ve got a hatchet in my backpack,” Wyatt said. “A few good whacks with the back of it should break this lock. Then we don’t have to risk getting shards of broken glass all over the food and drinks.”
Wyatt dropped down to his knees, set his revolver on the floor and started to look around in it for the hatchet—and that was when someone veered around the corner and sprinted right past them. The figure was visible only as a dim blur on the periphery of the circle of weak light emitted by David’s headlamp, but it was enough to scare the hell out of both of them. Wyatt grabbed his gun and jumped to his feet, growling wordlessly and aiming at the impenetrable darkness the figure had run into, and David pointed his gun in that direction too.
“Shit!” David yelped, his hands shaking.
“Whoever you are, I’m gonna kill you, you son of a bitch, if you come near us again!” Wyatt roared. “You hear me, you crazy psycho? I’m gonna—”
A dull thud cut Wyatt’s shout short, and David swung around in terrified surprise as he saw Wyatt’s limp form crumple to the floor. He barely had enough time to swing his gun around before a percussive blow thumped through his skull. There was a flash of bright light behind his eyes from the impact, and then everything went black as he slipped into unconsciousness.
23
“Did you hear that?” Phil asked, looking out at the pitch-black door while Alice stitched herself up.
Her hands were moving with painstaking slowness, and it seemed to her that every stitch took a monumental effort to complete. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “I’m just…trying to concentrate…on this.”
“I swear I heard Wyatt yelling something,” Phil said, looking concerned. “And he didn’t sound too happy. I don’t like the sound of this…at all.”
“If you want to…check it out…I’m okay here…by myself,” Alice said, breathing hard.
“I’d have to leave you here and use the Zippo for light, and I don’t want to leave you alone anyway,” Phil said. “We’re just gonna have to wait. Hmm, and I guess we’d have heard gunshots if there was any real trouble. Maybe they just caught sight of that freak who’s been running around in the dark.”
“Maybe honey,” Alice said, distracted by the task she needed to complete, “maybe…”
David and Wyatt, meanwhile, were coming to upstairs. They did not awake near the vending machine where they’d been knocked out, however. Instead, they found themselves in an office, lying on their stomachs on the ground, with their hand zip-tied behind their backs. A candle, giving off a dim orange light, was burning in the office, which seemed to be the principal’s or vice principal’s office, from what David could see. Two pairs of shoes—both large men’s shoes—stood in front of their faces.
“What…the hell?” Wyatt groaned as he awoke. Both he and David were feeling groggy and disoriented and had throbbing headaches pounding through their skulls.
“Thieving scum,” one of the men standing over them growled.
David couldn’t see much of him beyond his pants, but he seemed to be a large, heavyset man and sounded as if he were in his fifties or sixties. The other man, who, judging by the style of his shoes and pants, was a lot younger, perhaps college age, didn’t speak. “I suspected,” the older man continued, “that some no-good assholes would come in here and loot the place before long, with all this power-outage craziness, but I didn’t figure it’d happen so soon. Well, me and my boy, we were ready for punks like you.”
“We’re not looters,” Wyatt growled. “Now get these zip ties off my wrists before I get real mad.”
“Ha!” the man scoffed. “You ain’t in any position to be making demands. We didn’t have guns before…but now we do, thank you very much.”
“Look, uh, my friend Zack goes to this school, okay,” David stammered, anxious and fearful. “We just, look, my mom, she’s hurt bad, she needed to stitch up her wound, and, uh, um, we just needed—”
“Shut up!” the man snapped. “It’s my job to protect this school from thieving scum like you, and that’s what I’m gonna go! My boy and I are gonna go get your friends next, and y’all can spend the night tied up in here. We’ll turn you thieving pricks over to the cops tomorrow morning. I don’t care about your lies and excuses, so shut your goddamn mouths!”
“There won’t be any cops, you idiot, not tomorrow, not next goddamn week!” Wyatt said. “This was no simple power outage. The power’s never coming on again! This is how things are gonna be from now on, do you understand?”
“Bullshit!” the man snapped, but there was a hint of uncertainty in his tone.
“There’s been an EMP attack,” Wyatt explained, trying to rein in his flaring temper, but not quite succeeding in eliminating the growl from his voice. “Do you know what that means?”
“EMP? Uh…yeah, nice try, asshole. Making up bullshit to try to confuse me!”
“Maybe we should listen to ‘em, Dad,” said an uncertain new voice, that of the younger man. “You said yourself that this ain’t like any power outage you’ve ever seen.”
“Shut up, Jason!” the older man yelled. “You do what I say, boy, and you don’t listen to these assholes’ lie
s! Come on, now that we’ve got us some guns, we gotta go get those other two. It’ll be a lot easier than what we had to do to get these ones.”
“But Dad—”
“No! We do things my way, boy! Now get these assholes up into the chairs so we can go get their friends.”
“Uh, okay, Dad,” the young man said nervously. He sounded even more frightened and anxious than David was. “You heard him,” he said to David and Wyatt, trying to sound more confident. “Stand up, do it nice and slow. We’ve got your guns, and we’ll use ‘em if you try anything.”
Wyatt and David struggled to their feet, which was a difficult job with their hands bound tightly behind their backs, but they finally managed to stand up. When they did, they were able to see their assailants. The older man was dressed in a janitor’s uniform, while the younger man was dressed like a college student. What was most immediately striking about the younger man, however, was his eyes. Even in the dim candlelight, Wyatt and David could see that he was completely blind. This, they suspected, was why he’d been able to sprint around in the complete darkness to frighten and unsettle them. The darkness made no difference to his abilities of perception, and since his father was the janitor here, and likely had been for a long time, both the young man and the older one likely knew the layout of the school like the backs of their hands.
The younger man was holding a .45 he’d taken from Wyatt, while the older man had the .357 revolver in his hand. They’d also taken Wyatt and David’s backpacks, and were wearing them. Both of them were pointing guns at Wyatt and David. “Sit on them chairs there,” the older man said, pointing at two office chairs in the corner and keeping a good distance between himself and his prisoners. “Move slowly, or I’ll put some goddamn holes in both of you.”
Glaring at the two men with naked wrath in his eyes, his jaw clenched with anger, Wyatt strolled over to the chairs and sat down in one of them, while David followed and meekly took a seat in the other.
EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 19 | EMP Ranch Page 12