Escape The Dark (Book 3): Into The Ruins

by Fawkes, K. M.

  Just a little farther, he thought. If we can jog for one mile, I’ll feel safe. I’ll feel like those guys are far enough in our rearview that we can slow down and take our time for a bit.

  But when they passed a mile marker that told him they’d come one mile, Adam found that he didn’t feel any less fearful. Just knowing those men were out there was enough to change the way he saw the world. Suddenly, he was jumping at shadows. Suddenly, everything was terrifying.

  He slowed their pace anyway, knowing it would be no good if they wore themselves out early. He wanted to make sure they covered enough ground today. He wanted them to reach Napa Bay by nightfall. With luck, this would be their final day on the road.

  When the sign for Napa Bay appeared up ahead, Adam half thought he must be imagining things. He hadn’t felt that kind of pure, unadulterated relief in what felt like forever. A lifetime.

  Had it really only been a few months since the onset of the virus? Could it be true that, less than a year ago, he had been spending his days in front of the TV, bingeing on streaming shows and eating frozen meals for dinners? Could it be true that such a short time ago, his social life had consisted primarily of NA meetings?

  The idea of a social life had ceased to mean anything in the new world. His days and nights were spent with Ella because it was safer to be together than apart. It didn’t matter whether he found her company pleasurable—some days he did—or whether he would have preferred to be alone—at times he would have. He stayed with her to stay alive.

  Now she ran past him, finding a new reserve of energy, approaching the sign by the side of the road.

  “This is it!” she called back to him. “This is it, Adam! Napa Bay, one mile!”

  Excited, Adam accelerated his pace so that he could join her. She was practically skipping as they continued down the road. “We’re almost there,” she said, her eyes bright and happy. “Almost to Julie. I can’t believe it.”

  He thought of cautioning her against too much hope, reminding her that Julie might not be there waiting for them, but the truth was that in this moment it felt almost inevitable that she would be. How could she not be? They’d come so far, they’d seen so much, but now they were here. Surely they were about to be rewarded.

  The world doesn’t work like that, he reminded himself. Artem did nothing but good for us. Where was his reward?

  Still, he couldn’t shake the belief that, after all this time, something was finally about to go right.

  Napa Bay was as dead and deserted as San Álvaro had been. But that doesn’t mean anything, Adam reminded himself. Don’t forget about those soldiers, or whatever they were. You were in San Álvaro for a whole night before they showed up. You thought you were safe there. Don’t make the same mistake here.

  “This is it,” Ella said eventually, when they’d come a considerable distance down the main thoroughfare. “This is the turnoff for Julie’s place. Just down this road here.”

  “It’s a dirt road,” Adam observed.

  “Yeah, she lives a little way up the hill,” Ella said. “Back behind the tree line. Julie always did like her privacy.”

  “Have you been here before?” Adam asked.

  “Once,” she said. “I came a few years ago. I’ve never met her kid, though. This is going to be so exciting.” Her eyes were shining. “I’ll have a family. And you’ll be one of us, of course. I hope you’re not worrying about that. You’ll be more than welcome to stay.”

  “I wasn’t worried about it,” Adam said. “But it’s nice of you to say so.” He knew Ella well enough by now to know that she’d never turn on him. She would never abandon someone she had built trust with just because a better living situation came along. She would make it clear to her sister, when they arrived, that she and Adam were a package deal.

  Adam just hoped Julie would be okay with that.

  They reached the crest of the hill. “It’s just here,” Ella said. “Just past those trees—”

  She froze.

  She didn’t speak, but she didn’t have to. Adam was taking in the same view, and he felt as if he might pass out from the horror of it. Spots danced before his eyes, and he heard his blood rushing in his ears. He kept his wits about him just enough to keep one hand on Ella’s wrist. He didn’t want her going any closer to that house.

  Something horrible had happened here.

  There was a chance that, whatever it was, it was still happening.

  Two men in military garb had been mounted on wooden stakes on either side of the road. Although Adam couldn’t bring himself to look at either of them for more than a few seconds, it was clear that they’d been attached to their spikes with nails and had been allowed to bleed out onto the dirt below them.

  This isn’t just murder. This is torture.

  And it was something more than that as well. It was a sign. It was a warning. A warning to people like him and like Ella, who might dare to venture this way. They were being told to turn back.

  You don’t need to tell me twice, he thought. Whoever did this might still be here. They might have taken over Julie’s house. They might have slaughtered her family—hell, for all I know, one of these men might be Julie’s husband. But we definitely can’t go any farther down this path. We need to back out of here, and we need to do it quickly and quietly, before someone discovers that we’ve seen their handiwork.

  He was a bit shocked that he was capable of thinking so logically. But his head felt surprisingly cool. It was almost as if he could feel the storm of shock and horror building up at the back of his brain, but he wasn’t ready to let it out yet. Later, he supposed, he would scream or cry or vomit. Later, it would occur to him that this world might not be worth living in anymore, that maybe Tucker had had it right. But in the moment, all he could think about was what they needed to do next to survive.

  Artem would be proud of me, he thought. This is exactly the kind of thing he would have done if he was faced with a horror like this. He would have set it aside for later and figured out how to survive.

  He had been holding his focus firmly on his shoelaces to avoid seeing the bodies up ahead. Now he allowed himself to look up at Ella. She was hyperventilating, little whines escaping her with every exhale, and it was clear she was building up to a scream.

  “Ella,” he tried. “Ella, look at me.”

  She acted as if she hadn’t even heard him. He supposed he could understand that.

  He put his hands on her shoulders and tried to turn her away from the bodies, to make her look at him instead, but she jerked at his touch and pulled away from him. Before he could get a grip on her again, she was off and running, racing up the path to the house.

  Don’t scream, he thought. Please don’t scream.

  A scream came echoing back through the woods toward Adam.

  Shit.

  He took off running after Ella. She had only a few seconds’ start on him, but she was no longer in sight thanks to the curve of the road and the density of the woods. If she had strayed from the path, Adam knew, it might take him forever to figure out where she had gone.

  When he rounded the corner, however, he found that she was still standing on the path, staring straight ahead. As soon as Adam closed with her, he saw what had made her scream.

  The house ahead of them must have been Julie’s, but it didn’t look as if it had ever belonged to a normal person. Ominous symbols had been painted on the outer walls in what might have been blood, and the yard was littered with bodies. Some of the corpses looked new, others might have been there for weeks. Some had been mutilated, carved into, even skinned. It was like something out of a horror film, the kind of horror film Adam would have declined to watch in the old days. It was sickening.

  He felt his stomach heave, and this time there was no holding back what was about to happen. He turned away from Ella and vomited into the weeds by the side of the road.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and forced himself not to lose his cool. “We nee
d to get out of here,” he told Ella. “Whoever did this—they might still be around.”

  She didn’t answer, just continued to breathe heavily. She was scaring him.

  “Did you—” He swallowed. There was no good way to ask this question, but he needed to do it all the same. “Did you see your sister? Or any of her family?”

  He thought for a moment that she was going to ignore that question too, but then, slowly, she shook her head.

  “Okay,” Adam said. “Okay. That’s good, Ella. That means they might still be okay. They might have left here a long time ago. This might not have anything to do with them, you know?”

  She was shaking. Her eyes were glued on the bloody massacre arrayed before them.

  “Come on,” Adam said. “I’m going to take you down the road, okay? And then you and I are going to come up with a new plan. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll get ourselves somewhere safe, we’ll have some water, and then we’ll talk about this and figure out what we need to do next. Okay?”

  She didn’t object. She didn’t say anything at all.

  He crossed to her side and laid a hand gently on her shoulder. If she felt it, she didn’t react. Adam wrapped his arm around her and turned her gently away, and this time she allowed herself to be steered. Adam breathed a sigh of relief at that; he had been worried that she might lose her cool if he tried to touch her, and he hadn’t been sure what he would do if she had.

  They started back down the path, putting the grisly horror show behind them. “Listen,” Adam said. “If your sister and her family aren’t there, that’s good news. Okay?”

  She looked up at him and he was stunned by the bleak hopelessness in her eyes. It was like staring into an abyss. He had never seen Ella look like this before, and for a moment he wondered if this would be the incident that broke her. Maybe this time there would be no coming back.

  Desperate to reassure her, he kept speaking. “I left my house months ago,” he pointed out. “You and the Birkins did the same, right? Anything could be going on in those houses now. Anybody could be living there, using our old homes for any kind of activity. And that doesn’t mean we’re not okay.”

  Ella said nothing.

  “Hey,” he said. “Breathe.” He brought them to a stop and braced her with a hand on each of her shoulders. “You’re okay. We’re okay. Whatever else is going on in the world, you and I are still okay, right?”

  She managed a nod.

  “I’ve got you. I’m on your side, Ella, and I’m not going to let anything bad happen. I’m sticking with you. Remember what we promised each other?”

  “No matter what,” she croaked. It was a breathy sort of groan, but it was speech, actual words, which was more than she’d given him since they’d come in sight of her sister’s house.

  Adam nodded. “You’ve got it,” he said. “Let’s go. We’ll find someplace safe to hunker down for a while.”

  He turned back toward the path they’d come in on.

  And stopped dead.

  An array of military-grade assault rifles were leveled directly at their heads.

  Chapter 18

  Not again.

  Adam knew it wasn’t the most rational response to having a gun pointed at his head, but this had just happened too many times now. He supposed he was becoming desensitized to it.

  Back before the nanobots, back before Adam had left home, he had lived in a world where guns were a hypothetical thing. He had known of their existence, of course, but he was a relatively wealthy retired actor in Southern California. He didn’t own a gun. Nobody he knew owned a gun.

  Now it seemed that everywhere he went, guns were being pointed in his face.

  He wasn’t sure whether to be more or less afraid of these men than he had been of Rhett Birkin and his family. On one hand, these were military men, outfitted in uniforms. They weren’t teenage kids who had misappropriated their family’s hunting rifles for home defense. They had training. They weren’t apt to shoot Adam or Ella just because they had gotten a little trigger-happy.

  But on the other hand, trained soldiers would be a lot harder to overcome, if it became necessary to fight for his life. In fact, Adam thought, we don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at outfighting these guys, and it would be suicide to try. Best to just go along with whatever it was the soldiers wanted and hope they didn’t get killed in the process.

  If these men even were real soldiers. After what he’d seen back in San Álvaro, Adam had his doubts about the legitimacy of anyone claiming to be US Army.

  “Get down on the ground,” one of the men barked. He was standing slightly ahead of the other two, and Adam suspected he was probably the one in charge.

  Adam complied, lying facedown in the dirt. There was a time in his life when this sort of compliance would have chafed at him—after all, he’d done nothing wrong. There was no reason he ought to be treated this way. But things were different now. He didn’t care whose ass he had to kiss, as long as he got out of here alive.

  “You carrying weapons?” the man asked.

  “Yes,” Adam said.

  “Reach for them. Slowly. And put them on the ground in front of you.”

  “Mine’s in my bag,” Adam said. Peripherally, he could see Ella loosening her pistol from her waistband and dropping it on the ground.

  “Go ahead,” the soldier said.

  Adam shrugged out of his bag, opened the neck, and fetched out his pistol. He laid it on the ground before him.

  “Lieutenant Briggs,” the man said, “pick up those guns.”

  One of the other soldiers broke ranks, stepped forward, and picked up the two pistols. He trained them on Adam and Ella, his own rifle now hanging loose over his back.

  “Who are you two?” the leader of the soldiers demanded.

  “Who are you guys?” Adam countered.

  “We’re the ones asking the questions,” the soldier spat. “Are you coming from that house at the end of the path?”

  Adam could see no sense in trying to lie about it. “Yes,” he said. “The house belongs to my friend’s sister. We were hoping to find her there, but we don’t think she’s there anymore.”

  “Son, you don’t want anything to do with the people in that house,” the soldier who had picked up their guns said.

  “Shut up, Briggs,” the man in charge barked. “You’re not here to make friends with them. Do I need to send you back to base?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Where are you two kids headed?” the soldier in charge asked.

  “We don’t know,” Adam said honestly. “The house up the path was supposed to be our next stop, but—well, we’ve changed our minds.”

  There was a long, drawn-out pause. The air seemed thick and heavy around Adam, and he had the strange sensation that he was swimming from one moment to then next, pulling his way through the molasses that was each consecutive second. It’s because staying alive has become such an effort, he thought. From the moment I boarded the yacht, it’s only gotten harder. And every time I think I’ve come to a place where I can rest, every time I start to feel like I can relax and just live for a while, it gets worse.

  Artem, before he’d died, had reinforced to Adam how important it was to ensure that you were doing more than just surviving. If the only thing you had to focus on was keeping yourself alive, Artem had said, you would soon lose your mind. No, there had to be something more, something that was keeping you going, no matter how small.

  On the yacht, that thing had been his friendships—first with Cody, and then, as time had gone on, with Artem and Sara. But those had been yanked away from him.

  On the island, while he was staying at the Santa Joaquina, Adam had been learning new skills. He had also believed that he had people he cared about, people who cared about him. He had meant to help Chase McTerrell overcome his addiction. He had wanted to become one of them, eventually. Part of their little family.

  But now that was gone, too.

  What did he
have left? It was just him and Ella now, and though he cared for her, he couldn’t stay alive for her. Every morning he got up wondering if he would make it until sundown. Every day was exhausting. And there were no rewards, no breaks. Nothing ever got any better.

  He had been using the promise of Julie’s house, he realized belatedly, as a ray of hope. He had feared Ella might get her hopes up too high, but in fact it had been him who had done just that.

  Maybe it’s better if they just kill me now, he thought. He could almost feel the guns trained on his head, could almost feel death beaming at him from their narrow barrels. It would be over quickly. I wouldn’t even really know what had happened, I bet. Just—lights out.

  The thought horrified him. It was exactly the kind of thing Artem had always cautioned against. Once you started thinking like that, the end was near. You might as well give up trying to survive, because you were never going to make it if you thought of death as inevitable. If you thought of death as welcome.

  Adam steeled himself. No, he told himself fiercely. I’m not ready to go yet. I’ll go down fighting if I go down at all.

  “Tie them up,” came a voice that seemed to be miles away, snapping Adam out of his thoughts and back into the present. A moment later, he felt the weight of one of the military men behind him. The man pulled Adam’s hands behind his back and secured them with a zip tie. Beside him, he heard Ella let out a soft grunt and knew she was being given the same treatment.

  “What are we doing with them, sir?” the man behind Adam asked.

  “Taking them back to camp. Colonel White is going to want to talk to them before we make any more decisions. He might want to bring them back to base.”

  Adam was hauled to his feet and steered over to a thick black Humvee that looked as if bullets wouldn’t penetrate its sides. He allowed himself to be loaded into the back of the vehicle. A moment later Ella followed him in, and the two of them took seats on the long, low bench that ran along one side of the car.