Dark Days | Book 7 | Hell Town

by Lukens, Mark

Jacob stepped back from the table, standing nearly against the wall.

  “You’re not joining us?” Petra asked.

  “Nope. This is your dinner date.”

  Petra waited. As nervous as she was, she found that she was hungry. Just the sight of the plates and silverware got her stomach growling. Odors of food drifted in from the kitchen.

  She wondered if she was going to be brought up here every time to eat, or was this a one-time thing? Again, she was worrying about things she didn’t know and had no control over at the moment. She would find out the answers soon enough.

  Footsteps sounded from the living room, someone coming this way. More than one person.

  And then she saw the Dragon in the archway to the living room, two guards dressed in black right behind him.

  CHAPTER 26

  Petra

  Petra hadn’t been sure what to expect when she first saw the Dragon in the archway that separated the dining room from the living room. She’d seen him in her dreams, but he’d always been a shadowy figure in those dreams, blurry and dark, his face mostly hidden either by the hood he wore or shadows. The man who stood before her wore dark clothing—a long-sleeved black shirt, black slacks, black boots, but no gloves or hood or coat, his pale hands and face exposed.

  “Petra,” he said with a small smile.

  She didn’t respond, just staring at him like she was seeing a mythical figure.

  The Dragon didn’t seem upset by her silence. He walked to the other end of the table and sat down. His movements were quick and sure, the movements of a confident man. He was tall and thin but exuded strength and power, his shoulders broad, hands large, limbs long. He had a long, narrow face, a strong jaw, a sharp chin. His dark hair was combed back, slicked down. He had no facial hair. His dark eyes were set deep, and he had the same expression in them that Jacob had, a lack of empathy but a sick amusement, like he was holding a magnifying glass on a bunch of burning ants and enjoying it.

  The two guards dressed in black stood watch, one at the archway, and another in the far corner on the Dragon’s side of the room.

  “Thank you, Jacob, for bringing Petra upstairs,” the Dragon said.

  “Not a problem.”

  The Dragon looked at Jacob and gave him a curt nod.

  Jacob left the room, leaving Petra alone with the Dragon and the two armed guards, both staring straight ahead like they were doing their best to ignore everything going on in the room. But Petra knew they would react like a sprung trap if they needed to.

  “Would you like some wine before dinner?” the Dragon asked. He had a lilting Southern accent, an almost hypnotic cadence to his words.

  “I don’t drink.”

  He seemed surprised by her answer, eyebrows shooting up, a smile playing at the corner of his lips. “Neither do I.”

  A woman came in from the kitchen carrying a bowl balanced on a plate. She set them down before Petra. It was some kind of soup with a dozen club crackers fanned out like a hand of playing cards on the plate around the bowl. She hurried away with just the rustle of her white dress. She was back a moment later with a bowl of soup and a plate of crackers for the Dragon.

  “Chicken noodle,” the Dragon said. “I hope that’s okay.”

  Petra didn’t respond.

  “My mother used to say chicken noodle soup could cure all ails. But I’m afraid this isn’t homemade. It’s from a can.”

  Petra grabbed the spoon. She couldn’t control the grumbling in her stomach. Her mouth was salivating. She ate a spoonful of the soup, then another.

  “Soon, in the spring, we’ll have gardens. We’ll grow carrots, celery, potatoes, green beans. All kinds of vegetables. We’ll raise chickens. Eventually we’ll be able to make our own soups.”

  “Behind these walls?” Petra asked while taking another slurp of her soup.

  “It might not be these walls, specifically. It might be other places. We’ve got many places. We’ve got an office building on the edge of one town. A hospital in another city. A cave. An underground bunker. You’d be surprised at what we have.”

  Petra didn’t comment.

  “The rippers are a problem now, but they won’t be a problem forever. They’ll die off, and the rest we will kill off. Many will freeze to death, get sick, starve or eat each other. Their numbers will dwindle drastically over the next twelve months. They’ll die off—the old species—making way for us, the new species. A new beginning. A chance for us to start over.”

  Petra ate more soup.

  The Dragon slurped a spoonful of his soup, then munched on one of the club crackers.

  She felt his dark eyes on her. She looked at him.

  “You think I’m evil, don’t you?”

  Petra wasn’t sure if she could trust herself to answer that question. “You’re killing people. Taking everything. Hoarding everything.”

  “Only to eventually redistribute it.”

  “To control it.”

  “Yes, you could look at it that way. But, unfortunately, it has to be that way. People can’t be trusted to distribute among themselves. They can’t be trusted to govern themselves. Never have been able to, and certainly not able to now. They will always need rules and laws. They will always need someone to lead them.”

  “And you’re the one to lead us?”

  “People need laws. Anarchy only works so long. Little communes only work for so long before one village gets greedy and wants the other villagers’ stuff. People need a leader and laws to abide by. If not, we’re just a bunch of animals. Only one notch above the rippers.”

  “Why aren’t your eyes glowing?” Petra asked. “I’ve seen you in my dreams and your eyes glowed.”

  He showed a secretive smile. “I manipulated myself in your dreams.”

  “And this town? Did you manipulate this town in my dreams too?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She wondered what else about him was a manipulation . . . a lie. “What happened to Lance, Dale, and Crystal, and the others?”

  “They’re dead.”

  A jolt hit Petra, then anger like the warmth of the soup spreading in her stomach.

  “They attacked us,” the Dragon said. “We fought back.”

  “The store?”

  “We just want what’s inside. You call me a hoarder? Those few people in that store are sitting on years’ worth of food and supplies, which should be shared with everyone. I can lay the groundwork to share everything. I can provide an army to defend us against the rippers. I, all of us together, can rebuild humanity.”

  Jacob entered the dining room through the archway with a cell phone in his hand, holding it up.

  “You’re filming me?” Petra asked Jacob.

  “Ignore that,” the Dragon said. “We still have so much more to discuss.”

  Petra found her attention drawn back to the Dragon. Maybe he wasn’t the supernatural being he pretended to be in her dreams, but there was something about him that captured her attention, something darkly hypnotic about his voice. Even though his eyes didn’t glow, there was something magical in their darkness.

  “Do you believe in God?” the Dragon asked.

  Petra didn’t answer. She had finished her bowl of soup and crackers. The young woman in the white dress appeared at her side to take her empty bowl and plate away. Her face was an emotionless mask, a blank slate. Petra wondered if she was on some kind of sedatives.

  “You’ve heard the story of Noah’s Ark, I’m sure,” the Dragon continued.

  Petra nodded, sighing.

  “God found man wicked, so he flooded the world, started everything over again. He saved only a few of us, Noah and his family. Eventually, he sent his son to forgive our sins. But I believe we got too corrupt again in these last days. I believe God had to do another re-set, another do-over. The Ripper Plague came, turning us back into the animals we were before God allowed souls into our bodies, And, like Noah and his family, there are only a small percentage of us to start over, to get th
ings right this time.”

  “And you’re the messiah? Is that it?”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said, smiling bashfully. “But I know I’ve been called to do this, to lead us out of the darkness. I’ve had premonitions my whole life that I was meant for something, that I was meant for this.”

  Petra didn’t touch the dessert that was brought to her by the same servant woman.

  Jacob stopped shooting video with his cell phone and left the dining room without a word.

  “Why are you filming me?” Petra asked. “For some kind of ransom?”

  “We just want a peaceful end to everything,” the Dragon said. “We just want you to join us. We want your friends at the store to join us. And the ones you’ve seen in your dreams.”

  Petra didn’t say anything.

  The Dragon smiled. “Yes, you’ve seen the blind woman. All of you have.”

  “Are you afraid of her?”

  The Dragon laughed like the idea of it was silly.

  “Scared of her?” Petra pressed. “Scared of the others? Why? They’re just a small group of people.”

  “It only takes a few to be dangerous. It only takes a few to spark a resistance.”

  Was that what the people in her dreams were? The resistance?

  “You’ll be useful to me,” the Dragon said, and for just a moment his “gentleman” façade vanished, the true evil underneath showing just a little. Then he smiled again and ate a piece of his snack cake.

  “I’ll never help you with anything,” Petra said.

  “Oh you’ll help me. You’ll help me without even realizing it.”

  CHAPTER 27

  The Dragon

  After his dinner with Petra, the Dragon went back to his bedroom. It was the master bedroom in this house and it was upstairs, along with the other two bedrooms. Jacob slept in one of the bedrooms and the other bedroom was empty. There were always two guards in the house, one at the bottom of the stairs, and one patrolling the grounds outside the house. With Petra in the basement now, it was even more important that the guards stayed alert. The Dragon trusted Jacob more than anyone else here, but he had to trust his small band of personal guards, too. As superhuman as Jacob was, he couldn’t be available twenty-four hours a day—the man had to sleep sometime.

  The only other room upstairs was a guest bathroom in the hall that Jacob used to brush his teeth and go to the bathroom. They had buckets of water to flush the toilets with. The Dragon had his own bathroom in his bedroom, and his own bucket of water. The plumbing didn’t work, but one day it would. One day they would install septic tanks and get a water tower working. They would have electricity again, too. Someone out there had to possess the knowledge needed to get those services working again. And if not, there were books in the libraries.

  But before all those dreams could come true, he needed to have order.

  Absolute order.

  If he let everyone run around doing this and that, surviving in little hovels, always on the lookout for rippers, nothing would ever get done. It would be the Dark Ages, and it might last a thousand years, like the Dark Ages had.

  Couldn’t everyone see what he was trying to do for them, how he was ultimately trying to help everyone? They just couldn’t see the vision like he could. It was like talking to a child who couldn’t understand at the time why he was being disciplined and trained to do things the right way, but years later that child would finally understand why he had to go through hell, why he had to suffer.

  The Dragon thought of his own childhood, his own suffering.

  He’d grown up in a small town in northern Alabama, close to the Tennessee border, a rural county in the foothills of the Appalachian mountain chain. His father was a very religious man who had secretly wanted to be the pastor of his own church, but who had never had the determination, or the brains, to accumulate any success or possessions in his life. He worked in a factory for a few years, then he was a coal miner, then a day laborer. He would get fired from a job eventually because the other men couldn’t take the preaching from his father, his constant fire-and-brimstone condemnation of the others around him. When he was a child, the Dragon hadn’t known the reasons his father was forced to move from job to job, but he would see it later when he got older.

  The Dragon had one brother and one sister, both older than him, and neither of them wanted anything to do with him. He’d been the third child in a family where mouths were hard to feed; he was the straw that had broken the camel’s back, a curse straight from God—that’s the way his father, and his brother and sister, had always looked at him. Like they hated him.

  But there was another reason for their hatred, for their hidden fear of him. When the Dragon had been young—he couldn’t be sure of the age—he’d begun to exhibit psychic abilities. He didn’t think it was so strange; it was the only life he’d known. He could pick up random thoughts from other people or find things people had misplaced or lost. He could see the dreams others had, and sometimes they swore they saw him in their own dreams.

  It wasn’t normal—his father showed him how truly evil his abilities were.

  “Touched by the devil,” his father often said.

  The Dragon was beaten. He was thrown into a cellar, alone in the dark, sometimes for days at a time. At their small church, Pastor Johns, whom the Dragon’s father idolized and at the same time envied, was notified of the dark arts bestowed onto him by Satan. The Dragon was baptized over and over again. He was made to sit in a chair or tied down to a bed for hours, sometimes for days, while Pastor Johns tried to exorcise the demons from him. And eventually everyone in their small town (hell, probably half the people in their county) knew about his dark abilities, how he’d been touched by the devil, how he needed to be constantly washed clean. He had no friends. No one talked to him in school. No one played with him after school.

  He was alone.

  When he was sixteen, his mother got sick. Six months later she was dead from cancer. The Dragon’s father blamed him, said he’d gotten her sick.

  When the Dragon turned seventeen years old he left home. He’d saved a little money shoveling shit at some of the small farms around the county, but mostly he’d worked for Old Man Chalmers, who didn’t seem to believe the rumors about him, yet he didn’t help him in any way besides giving him the worst jobs on his farm that no one else wanted to do.

  The Dragon packed a bag with the few changes of clothes he owned, his work boots, the little money he had, the few photos of his mother, and he left. He caught a ride out of town to a neighboring town where he bought a bus ticket to Florida.

  He worked jobs in Florida, day labor jobs, just like his father.

  But he wasn’t going to be like his father. He was going to be much more than his father, more than his father could have possibly imagined.

  On the jobs he worked, the Dragon got friendly with his co-workers. He finally had friends, people who liked him, people who knew nothing about his past. He went drinking with them. He got into trouble. He spent a few nights in jail. He moved on down the road to a new town, to a new job.

  There were a few women here and there, but nothing serious. He would get drunk with them, sometimes get high on pot or pills. He’d tell them about his visions of the future, of an apocalypse that he was sure was coming and how he was going to play an important role in it.

  And they’d laugh.

  He could read their thoughts. It wasn’t like a tape recorder in his mind, just feelings he got, a certainty of things. It was difficult to explain how it worked, and he didn’t bother trying. But he knew these women didn’t love him. They didn’t really even like him.

  He moved on down the road, to another town, to another job, to other people. As he wandered he picked up paperback books from thrift stores and library sales. He read books on philosophy and different religions of the world. He opened his mind up to other possibilities, but he still couldn’t get the idea of a God or a Supreme Being out of his mind. He saw th
ings from many sides, from all sides. He knew in his heart that some of what Pastor Johns had taught was right, but not all of it. There had been pieces missing, and the Dragon was able to fill them in; he was beginning to see the whole picture of the universe and his place in it. He felt the urge to preach about what he’d learned, to teach people the true vision.

  He got fired. He got another job. He got drunk. He spent half a week’s pay on a dragon tattoo on his chest and stomach. He got in a fight. He went to jail for two days before getting released with a fine. He left town again, traveled up the east coast of Florida, sometimes spending the night on the beach, bitten by sand fleas all night, waking up in the morning to find crabs inches from his face, skittering away when he moved.

  As he wandered more, the vision of the universe became clearer to him. He was meant to be here, on some kind of path. His gifts weren’t from the devil, they were from God. And that meant they were important. That meant he was important.

  Some of his new coworkers and girlfriends laughed at him, but a few were mesmerized when he spoke. He used them as sounding boards, honing his skills as a speaker. He saw a little of Pastor Johns in his own sermons . . . and maybe even a little of his own father.

  A month later he stumbled into a church in a suburb of Melbourne, Florida. It was a small church, the fire-and-brimstone kind of church he was used to. They had a guest speaker that day, an evangelist, an older man with electric-blue eyes who prowled the church’s stage like a panther, preaching his fury, holding the congregation in his hypnotic grip.

  The Dragon knew what he wanted to do, what he wanted to be . . . he’d found his mission, his purpose. He would become an evangelist like the man with the electric-blue eyes. He would travel from church to church, preaching the truths he had discovered, the secrets that had been hidden from the rest, the secrets that he had uncovered, the puzzle he had pieced together when no one else could.

  He moved north, up into Leesburg. He found a small church there. He told them he was an evangelist. They let him preach on Sunday. The pastor and his wife let him stay in a travel trailer they had in the backyard. The next Sunday when he preached, their small church was full. Word had spread. When he preached the next Sunday, dozens more people came. They crowded into the church, many of them having to stand against the back wall. They watched as he prowled the stage. He saw into their minds. He saw their loves, their hatreds, their prejudices, their secrets. He knew the things to say to them, the ways to reach them. They thought his words were coming straight from God; they thought God was speaking directly through him to them. And in a way, maybe He was.