Constant Danger (Book 1): Fight The Darkness

by Westfield, Ryan

  But she wouldn’t.

  She’d hurt him instead.

  Taking the handgun now in just one hand, she wrapped her fingers around the barrel, its handle jutting out.

  She smashed it down against his skull.

  It was satisfying. More satisfying than it should have been.

  Peering down at him, her eyes somewhat adjusted to the dim light, Meg saw that he was out.

  Out cold.

  Slowly, she stood up.

  She stood there, swaying slightly, the gun clutched in her hand.

  It began to dawn on her what had just happened. And what she had just done.

  Shit.

  This wasn’t good.

  She’d hurt him pretty bad. Maybe more than she should have.

  Could she be blamed? No, she didn’t think so.

  But what about the law?

  Shit.

  She glanced over at her truck, the situation with her dad suddenly flooding back to her.

  Shit.

  She needed to get out of there. She needed to get her dad to a hospital.

  If her truck could drive, she’d have to just drive out of there.

  Plus, what would happen if the man came to? She’d have to worry about restraining him.

  No, better to just leave. Get to the hospital. Get her dad treated.

  If she could have contacted the cops, she would have. She’d have to check her cell phone again. Maybe it had been some coincidence before. Maybe it wasn’t really dead. Or maybe it was just the battery. She always carried a charger in her truck, plus a spare, after all.

  She rushed over to her truck.

  The airbag was a surprise. She’d forgotten it. Would it be possible to drive?

  She’d heard that it wasn’t possible. That once an airbag was deployed, the vehicle was likely totaled.

  But was that true?

  Maybe it just meant that the insurance companies didn’t want to pay for the repairs.

  Maybe the truck was drivable.

  She glanced at her dad. He was in the same state as before, his breathing perhaps a little shallower.

  No point in worrying about him too much. She couldn’t do anything for him except get the truck working and get the hell out of there.

  No way to drive with the airbag in the way.

  There had to be some way to deal with it, to get it out of there.

  The knife that her attacker had used to slash the bag initially had fallen somewhere, clattering to the pavement in the inky blackness.

  Knowing that her dad always had a knife on him, she reached over and felt around on the side of his belt. Finding the leather sheath he’d had for decades, she pulled out the fixed blade with the decorative handle.

  She slashed at the airbag like she’d never slashed at anything, cutting all around where it was attached to the inside of the steering wheel. It was tough work, but she kept at it, gritting her teeth.

  Her adrenaline must have been starting to come down a bit, possibly because the fight was over, because by the time she got the airbag pulled away from the steering column, she was feeling pain. A lot of pain. As if her body had been run through some kind of machinery, as if she’d gone tumbling for an hour in an industrial dryer.

  Her insides hurt.

  She felt shaky and her heart still thumped wildly.

  The fight was over. She needed to remember that.

  But her dad still needed to get to the hospital.

  The key was still in the ignition. The engine had stalled out.

  She slammed in the clutch and turned the key to “off,” then flipped it back around, holding her breath until the engine miraculously roared to life.

  Shifting into reverse, she floored it, swinging the wheel.

  The steering still worked. And the truck still backed up.

  It was a tough vehicle. A Toyota Tacoma. “Built like a tank,” the man who’d sold it to her had said. Apparently he’d been right.

  As she pulled away from the car she’d crashed into, she saw it clearly. It was one of those fancy electric cars. It looked like a sports car. Like something futuristic.

  As she swung the wheel around, the headlights bore through the darkness, casting light on the man who’d attacked her.

  She paused only long enough to see that his belly was rising and falling as he breathed. He was alive.

  Then she shifted into first and peeled off, driving into the night, her unconscious father at her side.

  Who knew how long her dad had?

  She didn’t want to lose him. Not like she’d lost her mother. She couldn’t deal with it.

  Fumbling at the center console, she finally found her cell phone, got the charger, and plugged it all in.

  But nothing happened. No lights appeared.

  Weird, she thought, as she roared down the pitch-black road, her headlights boring through the night.

  She still had the man's gun.

  Well, she'd wipe her prints off it and toss it out the window in a couple of minutes. She had a good arm on her and she could fling it far into the woods.

  Part of her told her it was the dumbest thing she could do, tossing the gun away.

  But she didn't want any problems with the law.

  4

  James

  James walked through the dark parking lot, only the fluorescent street lamp illuminating the cars that sat in the freezing cold.

  He shivered in spite of himself, and despite his warm jacket. The cold air seemed to cut right through his pants and his head felt like it had been dipped in a bucket of ice water.

  James was from Florida and until this year his idea of winter still involved wearing shorts and a tank top. He was up here in Western Massachusetts-Northampton, to be exact-to go to college.

  He was here on a scholarship and to say that he was a fish out of water would have been about as far from an exaggeration as you could get. He wasn’t like the other students in mindset, work ethic, or culture.

  James had known it’d be different, moving to Massachusetts after spending his first eighteen years in sunny, humid Florida. But he’d assumed that most of the differences would be climate-related. He’d heard that the culture was something like where he was from in Florida, sort of that backwoods culture, with plenty of pickups and practically-minded people who still occasionally hunted and fished for food.

  And while that was true for much of Western Massachusetts, Northampton itself turned out to be quite the surprise. It was what was known as an extremely liberal enclave in the otherwise more neutral rest of the state. People listened to NPR and shopped at health food stores. And James, not being a very politically-minded person, had no problem with any of that. He figured it was their prerogative to do what they wanted.

  But what had come as a shock was that the others here didn’t think that James had a right to do what he wanted.

  The other students had, for instance, looked down their noses at him for so many things. For being from Florida, for not knowing exactly what they knew, for not having read the books they’d read, and even for driving a pickup truck.

  They seemed to hate him for his accent, his interest in hunting and fishing. Even the professors seemed to assume, or take it for granted, that he was ignorant just because of the way he walked or where he was from.

  The first semester was pretty much over,and James, having put up with so much for so many months, had about had enough. He was half considering just driving out of the university parking lot and heading straight to I-90, not stopping at his apartment, and just driving right down to his parents’ house in Florida.

  James shivered violently as he unlocked his old, beat-up pickup, tossed his backpack into the passenger seat, depressed the clutch, and cranked the engine.

  The engine roared to life. It was a strong engine. An eight-cylinder F-150. It was one of the older models, back when pickup trucks were still small. But he liked it because he’d done most of the work on it himself, slowly learning from YouTube video
s what was what and how to fix it.

  As James waited for the engine to warm up, he let his mind wander, and he wondered if he wouldn’t be happier leaving this university lifestyle and just training to become a mechanic. His parents, after all, didn’t have college educations and they seemed to be doing just fine. Not to mention the fact that they were happier, far happier than anyone seemed to be here in Northampton.

  Suddenly, the lights in the parking lot went out. Everything went dark.

  James leaned down a little to get a better look at the rest of campus as he peered through his windshield

  To his surprise, there was nothing but darkness.

  What had happened to the lights of the campus building?

  Granted, he wasn’t exactly right next to them, but he could have sworn that their lights had been visible.

  Maybe there’d been a power outage.

  James waited for about another minute, still looking with some puzzlement at the darkness beyond him.

  Then, just as he was about to put the truck in gear and finally get on out of there, there was a loud sound to his left. It sounded as if someone was knocking loudly on his window.

  Startled, he spun his head around.

  There, in the darkness, he could just barely make out a face. It was lit up only by the dim light of the truck’s dashboard.

  It was an eerie sight, a face seemingly floating in nothing.

  James felt his heart pounding.

  Then, gradually, it began slowing down, as he recognized the face as belonging to his English professor.

  Sighing with relief, James began rolling his window down, once again exposing himself to the bitter New England air.

  “Professor Walter?” said James, not quite knowing what to say.

  It was fair to say that the two of them weren’t on the best of terms. While James had done well in Professor Walter’s class this past semester, Professor Walter was the one, out of all his teachers, who gave him the hardest time. When anything vaguely political came up in one of the books they were studying, Professor Walter would always single James out, demanding an opinion or a point of view. Then, when James was finally forced to show his cards, reluctantly speaking his mind, Professor Walter would attack him viciously, mocking him, encouraging the rest of the class to do the same.

  “Uh, hi, James,” said Professor Walter, sounding extremely embarrassed and unsure of himself.

  Then, there was a long pause.

  “Can I help you?” said James, struggling to remain polite. After all, he’d just come from Professor Walter’s final class for the semester, where he’d had to endure yet another long session, mocking everything to do with the South, mocking any part of the country that wasn’t New England.

  “My car won’t start,” said Professor Walter.

  James was extremely tempted to say, “So?” in a nasty tone of voice. After all, how was it his problem?

  But, James had been raised right. His parents had taught him the importance of civility. They’d taught him to be polite, turning the other cheek when necessary, but also to fight. They’d told him there was nothing wrong with fighting, hard, if necessary. But that there was a time and a place for everything.

  As much as Professor Walter had given James a tough time, James couldn’t see himself leaving the man stranded in the cold. After all, it seemed as if all these New England types didn’t know the first thing about cars.

  “You want me to take a look at it?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  James sighed, swung open the door, and climbed down out of the cab, leaving his engine on so that his truck could warm up.

  “Campus sure looks dark, doesn’t it, Professor?” said James, as he followed Professor Walter through the dark, freezing parking lot.

  “Looks like some kind of power outage or something,” said his professor.

  James thought that Walters didn’t sound so eloquent or fancy, now that he wasn’t discussing ancient books, but rather just everyday things. Talking to him outside of class sort of took the mystique away from the whole professorship thing.

  The professor’s car was a brand new Honda Accord, a fairly large car. The professor clearly didn’t know anything about cars, since he just sort of shrugged his shoulders when James started asking him questions about the engine and the battery.

  The first thing James did was try it himself, getting into the passenger seat and turning the key.

  To his surprise, nothing happened at all. The engine didn’t start, nor did it turn over. But what surprised him most was the fact that nothing else happened. No lights on the dash showed up. The car gave no sign at all that the key had been inserted. Even the little red anti-theft light, showing that the security system was active, wasn’t flashing.

  “That’s weird,” said James.

  “What’s weird? Can you fix it?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. It seems like your whole system is down ... the electronics, I mean.”

  “Well, wouldn’t that just be the battery? Do you think you could give me a jump start?”

  “That’s not going to do much,” said James. “As far as I know, the security system is run off a different power source entirely.... otherwise you could just rip out the battery and steal the car. No, something’s seriously wrong with it. Something beyond my expertise.... I know a little about cars, but these new cars have computers and everything that don’t want anyone but the dealership fiddling with them...”

  “Huh,” said the professor, sounding stumped. “So there’s nothing you can do?”

  “Sorry,” said James, not sure why he was apologizing. “I guess you should get it towed.”

  His professor shivered in the cold, his teeth almost audibly chattering.

  There was an awkward pause.

  “Shit. I’ve got a date too.... I’m already running late.”

  It was strange to hear of his professor going on a date. But James supposed he was human, after all.

  “Oh,” said James. “I guess I could give you a ride then...” He said the words almost automatically, just out of politeness, just out of feeling like he was supposed to be saying them. He didn’t really think his professor would take him up on the offer.

  So he was surprised when Professor Walters thanked him and said, “Yeah, sure, that’d be great.”

  “Uh, okay, Professor,” said James.

  “Call me Matt.”

  “Sure, Matt.”

  “Only tonight though ... back in the classroom, I’m still Professor.”

  “Uh, sure,” said James, having to make an effort to bite his tongue. There were plenty of sarcastic things he wanted to say.

  James climbed back into his pickup and his English professor climbed into the passenger seat.

  There was silence in the truck cab as James backed up, left the parking lot, and began winding his way through the serpentine campus roads, headed out to the main road back to town.

  “Looks like the power outage really affected campus,” said James.

  “Yeah, I’ve never seen it like this.”

  That was all they could really think to say to each other, except for the professor making some vague remarks about getting his car towed tomorrow.

  When they got to the main road, now off campus, they found that the lights were out everywhere.

  “There’s a power outage all over town,” said James, as he pulled onto the main road that headed into Northampton, where his apartment was.

  “Looks like it. Even the street lights are out. Shit. I hope the restaurant is still open.... it took me forever to ask this woman out.... she’s a nurse over at Mercy Thompson.”

  “Oh,” said James, not knowing what to say. It was weird talking to his professor like this, even weirder not to be insulted by him for being from Florida. “Hey, where am I dropping you off anyway?”

  “Holyoke,” said Matt.

  “Holyoke?”

  Holyoke was at least half an hour away. It would add about an
hour to James’s trip. An hour before he could get home.

  But what could James do? What could he say? He was at the professor’s mercy. If he had as good a reason to despise his student as he seemed to think he did, Matt wouldn’t hesitate to take out some petty grudge by subtracting points from James’s final grade.

  “Yup, Holyoke.”

  “Holyoke it is then,” said James.

  At this point, James was seriously annoyed and starting to get angry. He could feel the anger building up in his chest as he drove down Northampton Avenue, a long, winding two-lane road that followed the river and the train tracks all the way down into Holyoke, at which point its name changed to something James couldn’t remember.

  “Shit. My phone’s dead or something,” said Matt. “Could I use yours? Mine won’t turn on. I need to give her a call and make sure she’s still coming ... and I need to try to call the restaurant. What time is it anyway?”

  “About quarter after,” said James, glancing down at his watch. The digital clock in his truck had died years ago and he’d never gotten around to replacing it, preferring, anyway, to glance at his wrist.

  On his wrist, he wore, as he always did, an ancient watch. It was a Hamilton watch from the Second World War, inherited from his great uncle, who’d served overseas. He’d ponied up a good bit of money in order to keep the watch in good working order, to keep its timekeeping good. Most recently, he’d had a local watchmaker install some higher quality seals, giving the watch better water resistance than it had likely had in World War II. He’d also had the hands and hour markers relumed, so that it could be easily seen in the dark.

  “Shit, I’m late. Can’t you step on it?”

  This annoyed James even more. His professor wanted him to get a ticket for speeding?

  “Sure, professor,” said James, not increasing his speed whatsoever.

  “Anyway, can you give me your phone?”

  James almost denied the request, but in the end, he dug into his pocket and handed over his phone.

  “This one’s dead too. Don’t you charge your phone?”

  The professor seemed to be getting more anxious and more testy by the minute.