“What’s wrong?” the doctor asked.
But neither the man, whose name was James Miller, nor the woman, whose name was Michelle Wright, got to answer.
The EKG that showed Mike Ryan’s heartbeat in jagged lines went straight as an arrow, and Mike Ryan died. The last image he held onto before he went was not of the void, but of Trudy, whose name he could no longer remember.
Mike Ryan, the void’s first known direct victim—disregarding the mass suicides that had happened in South America and other places, of course—had passed away. Major Hammond was among the first to know. The consensus was that whatever that thing was, it was dangerous. Very dangerous.
But Hammond had made up his mind; at 0900, the day after tomorrow, the mission was a go. No matter the consequences.
11
Mandatory Evacuation
A day before Hammond’s forced experiment would commence, and only a few hours since Mike Ryan had passed away thinking about his wife, someone rapped on Logan Harper’s door at six in the morning.
Logan woke easily enough. He hadn’t been sleeping heavily, if at all. Beside him, Jane stirred and snorted, her breathing rising and falling back to normal. She’d always been a heavy sleeper.
Despite the shoddy sleep he’d gotten, a dream was fresh in Logan’s mind. In this dream, when he’d reached Mike in the forest, kneeling at the base of that…that thing, Mike wasn’t bleeding. He was fully conscious, aware, and he was whispering over and over again, ‘They’re coming, Logan. They’re coming. Get out while you still can. Get out… Get out!’
But who was coming?
That was the most popular question in all of the world right now. After the mass suicides in São Paulo, the victims chanting ‘Our blood for them!’ many wanted to know just who exactly ‘them’ were.
Logan was under the impression that those men and women were just crazy—at least that was how the worldwide media was painting them, and what he hoped. Jane suggested it might’ve been something in the water or maybe all the sun they’d been getting. The weather channel had said South America was boiling.
The president had given a national address a couple nights before, telling the citizens of the United States not to panic, that everything was under control.
Whether it was under control or not, the United States government was taking precautions. Logan had noticed an increase in the army vehicles trundling down Front Street, and had even thought of marching down to the borders they’d set up around the woods and demanding some answers. He would’ve done it, too, had he not heard about what happened to Derek’s father.
Mr. Fritz had gone down a few nights before—drunk, naturally—and the military had turned him away, but not in the politest of manners. No, he was sporting a black eye and a busted rib now. Logan certainly could attest to the military’s brutality, after what had happened to him at the hospital on that first night.
Jane wasn’t the nurse who’d treated Mr. Fritz, but she’d gotten the gossip from Brittney, the way she always got the hospital gossip. Fritz told Brittney he was lucky to get away with so few injuries. One of the men who’d beat on him was, he thought, the one in charge.
“He was vicious,” Mr. Fritz had said. “Woulda tore my damn head off if someone hadn’t told the fella there was a call waiting for him from D.C. But I’m gonna sue the camouflaged pants off that son of a whore, believe you me!”
The news of that incident traveled through Stone Park fast, like news always did in small Midwestern towns. The military was slowly becoming public enemy number one around the community, right up there with the media—and the voids, of course—for the inconvenience they were causing everyone.
The knocking came from the front door again. This time it was harder, believe it or not—Logan couldn’t.
He stood up, his knees popping, his back crackling. He felt slightly lightheaded.
“Coming,” he muttered sleepily.
Down the creaking steps, through the hall. At the door, Logan could see through its window, a tall silhouette standing on the other side. The sun hadn’t completely risen yet, and there was a red-purple light coming through the curtains.
“Who is it?” he asked.
No answer. Just the knocking again.
Six in the morning, can you believe that?
Logan peeked through the curtain, not having to stand on tiptoes to do so. He wondered for a short moment if he was dreaming, if he was actually still in bed, half asleep.
He saw a man dressed in army fatigues, standing straight as an arrow. A young guy. They met each other’s eyes through the opening in the curtain.
Logan cracked the door.
“Good morning, sir,” the soldier said.
“What can I do for you?” Logan asked. His tone was polite, if a little confused.
On the soldier’s right breast the name RODRIGUEZ was stitched in black. His hands were clasped behind his back in a soldier’s stance.
Now Rodriguez brought his hands around. He was holding a stack of papers. With the door opened nearly all the way, Logan realized for the first time that Rodriguez wasn’t the only member of the military going up and down the streets at this ungodly hour. Two more—one a female, the other a tall man—were canvassing Front Street, each with their own stacks of paper.
The bad feeling came back—As if it ever left, Logan, he thought—and he had a hell of a time trying to shake it off.
“What is this?” he heard himself saying.
Rodriguez handed him the paper. Logan took it, but before he could read the words written on it, the soldier answered.
“The United States military is ordering an evacuation, sir, effective by 2200 tonight,” Rodriguez said. He didn’t show any emotion—that’s weird, isn’t it? His face was a mask of unflinching stone.
Sweat trickled down the back of Logan’s neck. The air conditioning was on and the morning breeze was chilly, but he was feeling the heat now; the heat of anger, no doubt.
“Evacuation?” he heard himself saying, his voice echo-y in his own ears, like he wasn’t even there.
Now, the tip of the void sticking up from the tall trees seemed to buzz. Is it getting bigger? Logan wondered sickeningly. The red lights around its edges pulsed as if with an alien heartbeat. The ground shook with the force.
From the kitchen, glass shattered against the linoleum. If Jane wasn’t awake already, she would be now.
These tremors weren’t anything new. Stone Park had been feeling them since the void came, but this one…this one felt worse, didn’t it?
Rodriguez fell out of attention. A few notices from his stack floated lazily to the Harpers’ front porch as he gripped the nearby railing. Logan reflexively reached out, his fingers finding their way around the soldier’s bicep. He felt the man trembling. Though his face hadn’t shown it, Rodriguez was scared. Maybe even terrified, like the rest of Stone Park and the rest of the world.
“What was that?” Jane called from the kitchen.
Rodriguez, now righted and back at attention, said, “We’ve been detecting increased seismic activity near the border of the anomaly, sir—and ma’am.”
Increased seismic activity?
Here came that bad feeling again.
“Let me read it,” Logan said.
Logan read over the paper once, twice, and debated on a third time before Jane snatched it from his hands. Unlike Logan, she had no trouble emerging from the fog of sleep. She seemed as alert as if it were the middle of the day.
“You’re evicting us from our own house?” she said after reading through the note.
“It’s for your safety, ma’am,” Rodriguez said.
“What if we don’t want to leave? What if we have no place to go?” Jane put her hands on her hips now. Logan knew this wasn’t a good sign.
“We suggest you stay with family or friends in a neighboring town, but if that’s not an option for you, you are welcome to stay at the designated camp assigned to you in Akron.”
Ja
ne snorted. “Are we refugees now?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Failure to evacuate before the specified deadline will result in a forcible removal. Thank you for your time.” With that, Rodriguez turned and descended the few porch steps.
Jane lunged after him, but Logan grabbed her before she could knock the guy upside the back of his head.
They watched him go next door in a soldier’s march that reminded Logan more of a pallbearer at a funeral than anything else.
“Can you believe this?” Jane said. She looked the paper over again and then ripped it into little pieces. The pieces floated onto the porch, where the wind took them to the front lawn and scattered them in the street.
Across the way, a female soldier was leaving Ava Dean’s house, heading to the Peterson’s next door. Ava was a widow of nearly a decade. She had welcomed Logan and Jane to the neighborhood with open arms; though she may have been a bit eccentric, she was quite kind. Logan liked her a lot. In a weird way, she reminded him of his mother, even though Logan hadn’t seen his mother since in a long time. In fact, his last pleasant memory of her was that birthday they’d spent at Cedar Point.
Looking at Ava now, standing on her porch in her fuzzy pink bathrobe, her hair a light silver color, Logan couldn’t help but imagine this was how his mother would look, had the drunk driver never swerved into her lane.
He raised a hand to Ava in greeting. She didn’t raise one back. Instead, she went down her porch steps and crossed the street toward he and Jane, not looking both ways. He could tell she was fuming just by the way she stomped her feet, which was quite a sight in her fuzzy, pink robe and matching slippers.
“Can you believe this?” she asked, waving the eviction notice she held in her hand.
Logan pointed in the direction of the void, which he not only could see, but could feel, too. “Yeah, I guess I can, Ava.”
“It’ll only be for a little bit, right?” she asked no one in particular. The flesh around her mouth tightened.
Jane was too busy to answer, staring daggers after the soldier as he climbed up the next house’s porch steps.
“Yeah, just for a little bit,” Logan agreed, but he didn’t wholly mean it.
Ava nodded, visibly breathing a sigh of relief. “Good. Good. I better start packing. I have a sister in Northington. I’m sure she won’t be pleased about me staying there, we never got along too good.” She shrugged, as if to say ‘Oh well’.
Logan offered her a polite smile.
Ava turned and headed back to her house, scowling at a different soldier walking to the large convoy truck he came from. The soldier didn’t even notice her. Head held high, posture as rigid and straight as uncooked spaghetti.
Logan noticed something else about him, though. It was the same thing he’d noticed on Rodriguez’s stern face: That their minds were completely elsewhere; not in the clouds, but in the void.
12
Brad Goes Home
As the end of the world grew nearer, Bradley Long could feel it in his bones. An impending doom, a dagger held at the throat of the world’s people.
The voids were a ticking time bomb, but nobody knew this. At least, not the people Brad had seen on TV. Conspiracy theorists were saying that this was First Contact, that a higher intelligence from somewhere out in the cosmos had finally deemed the people of Earth worthy, but he didn’t know about that. All you had to do was look at America in its current state to see they were far from worthy of anything.
After he had seen the mass suicide in São Paulo, Brad fell into a slight depression. The first person he’d called was his mother. She lived in Ohio. At this point, he hadn’t known about the void that had moved into Stone Park, a mere fifteen miles from where his mother lived.
She didn’t answer his call. He tried again. It was the middle of the day, a weekend; she should’ve been home or at least available, her cell phone nearby. Unless she was in her garden—an activity she hadn’t been too fond of since she hurt her back a couple years before.
Panic began to settle into Brad. He didn’t like it.
Danny opened the door. “Dude, we’re gonna go get some grub, you wanna…” but the look on Brad’s face stopped him from finishing. “You all right?”
“No, not really,” Brad said. “The videos…”
“Yeah, they’re pretty fucked up, but it’s not real. It’s all special effects, like a movie, dude.”
“What about the trending searches?”
Danny waved a hand. “All bullshit. The sheeple fell for it and now they’re ba-ba-baaaa-ing about it.”
How wrong Danny would turn out to be.
Brad skipped the grub, deciding to do his own digging about what he’d seen happen in São Paulo. He couldn’t stomach watching that video again, couldn’t deal with the screams and the blood and the mass confusion. It was all too much.
But in this digging, he discovered the void in Stone Park. He knew the place very well. Having grown up a few miles away, the Stone Park Boulders and the Woodhaven Woodchucks had a rivalry that made Ohio State and Michigan look like a pee-wee league. Brad played football all four years at Woodhaven; well, if you could call riding the bench playing. Still, that didn’t stop the boos and jeers nor kept overzealous high school kids from dumping popcorn and throwing empty soda cans at him and the rest of the team when they headed back to the visitors’ locker room.
Mom was fifteen miles away from one of those things. Now he pictured her on her knees in front of it, chanting, ‘Our blood for them! Our blood for them!’ and that about did it for Bradley Long.
He waited until his roommates left and then grabbed his gym bag from his closet and began packing clothes, socks, underwear, shoes.
Part of him knew this was a rash decision, that his mom was fine, just busy, but the other part of his mind kept playing that terrible video on repeat. He began to rationalize.
How long had it been since he saw his mother? It was June, now. The last time he’d gone back home to Woodhaven was during the holiday break in December. So more than six months. She’d be glad to see him, glad he was coming home. Besides, his birthday was only two weeks away; he could stay there until then, couldn’t he? They’d go out to Longhorn or Olive Garden, splurge, eat cake, maybe catch a movie. It always broke his heart how his mom went to the movies by herself. Well, she wouldn’t have to now, at least not for two weeks.
Yeah, yeah, he thought. That sounds fine.
He zipped the bag closed, grunting with the motion. The damn thing bulged so big there was no way he’d get it on an airplane without having to check it. Luckily, Stone Park wasn’t states away; it was only a little over a hundred miles, a couple hours in the car. That was if his piece of shit Taurus didn’t break down on him on the way. And didn’t he need to get an oil change? Yeah, yeah, he probably did, but it would be fine.
Just fine, he told himself.
His cell phone chirped. A text message.
“Mom?” he said, and as soon as the words escaped his lips, an overwhelming feeling of embarrassment came over him. What the hell was he, a five-year-old, calling out for his mommy after a nightmare?
Get a hold of yourself, Brad.
Still, he crossed his room quicker than he cared to admit and took the phone out from where it had lodged under his pillow. The screen showed that the text message was from Spencer, one of Brad’s coworkers at the pizza place he worked at just off of campus. Before Brad swiped to open his phone, he knew what the text message was going to say. Spencer was notorious for calling off, trying to pass his shifts on to someone else. When it came to judging other people, Brad was pretty lenient; he’d adapted the mindset of what he liked to call ‘Whatever floats your boat’. But Spencer was, in all honesty—excuse my French, dear—a lazy son of a bitch.
Of course the message read, ‘can u cover for me tonight ?? …thnx bro’
Brad looked at the phone in his hands, then he looked at the bulging gym bag, and it all seemed so silly. His mother was supposed to wo
rry about him—which she was quite good at, he might add—not the other way around. If he left now, without giving the pizza shop a warning, he’d lose his job. No shit.
He sat on the bed and opened up his phone, thumbs poised, ready to text Spencer back that he’d cover his shift. The extra money would be nice, no denying that.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. A jolt of fear struck him, and his eyes snapped back open. The images were too fresh in his head. That thing…that diamond thing. All those people. What the hell? And now his mom was less than fifteen miles away from one.
Brad couldn’t stand it.
He stood back up. Phone in hand, he didn’t even hesitate as he texted Spencer back. The message was simple, succinct, to the point. ‘Fuck you, dude’, and he added in the middle finger emoji just for good measure.
Spencer never texted back, and Brad was glad for that.
Now he was winding his way up the turnpike, heading into Woodhaven. He’d get off at 756 soon. Hopefully. The traffic was heavy coming out of the toll booth; people were honking, cars were bumper to bumper. Brad gripped the steering wheel tight, gritting his teeth. They were going about twenty under the speed limit. Hey, at least it wouldn’t hurt the Ford, driving at that speed. That was good. Like his mom said, there was a silver lining in everything.
His phone began to ring. He dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out the device. The name across the screen was not that of Max Cheese’s Pizza Parlor or Spencer, the derelict delivery driver, but Mom.
Brad fumbled to hit the little green phone icon.
“Hello?” he said.
The traffic started to flow now. A person behind him in a pickup truck as muddy as it was ugly honked. Brad’s foot came down on the gas pedal, and the Ford lurched forward, though not without letting out a painful wheeze.
Ravaged: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 1) Page 5