Left to Darkness

by Craig Saunders

  She still had time, didn’t she?

  Dawn let that truth out into the open. And the simple fact was that no, she didn’t have time. It had hit.

  She stared through the windshield at the sky as the first of the dust and ash rained down. She didn’t cry or despair.

  “It is what it is,” she told herself and the child in her belly. “It is what it is.”

  Just as it didn’t matter now where she went, because the end had already begun. So Dawn Graves drove toward nowhere in particular. Lights on against the dark, and wipers brushing away the earth and dust that fell all around her car, she drove on.

  A storm of earth, and odd purple lightning flashed in the distance. She saw this, and her lights, those both outside and inside her car.

  Am I still alive? Really? Or is this now some kind of hell…some kind of afterlife for a dead earth?

  She wondered. Figured it could go either way, and until she could find out for sure, to play it safe. Just like she knew she should, and like her friend Richard would have wanted.

  III. London

  19

  Frank Liebowicz wasn’t much for running. It wasn’t anything to do with the amount of extra weight he was carrying around. It had nothing to do with being a coward, either. It just didn’t sit right.

  Since killing his handler Johnny, and the weasel man, he’d made a seriously powerful enemy. First thing most people do when faced with a fight they couldn’t win? Run. Keep running. Don’t put down roots, change your name, get the fuck out of the country and off the grid, if you can.

  Run.

  But Liebowicz wasn’t much for running.

  He liked sitting down, and he liked vodka. He was largely indifferent about most everything else.

  So he sat and watched the news, close enough to three months since he’d committed a double homicide and pretty much fucked himself out of any chance of promotion.

  Now that, he thought, was worthy of a drink or two. People had their priorities all screwed up. You got promoted, you got to work harder, effectively doing more work while under more pressure with a great chance of a bigger fall. Being promoted wasn’t cause to crack open the champagne, to Frank’s mind.

  He tipped back the small glass he held in his big fist, emptying it completely. Then he filled it again.

  He drank cheap vodka from the freezer, because once vodka reached a low enough temperature, it all tasted fine to him. While he drank from a shot glass he held between the first two fingers and the thumb of his right hand, he sat in a comfortable chair in someone else’s house.

  It was easy enough for Frank to spot an empty house. He’d been in his particular line of work long enough to know if he was going to walk in on someone when he didn’t want to. He knew how most people thought, just as he knew how a house would be laid out, for the most part, just by looking at it from the outside. Certain things made sense to the majority of people. They did those things in their daily habits, in their decorating, in their driving and walking. Those people, the little sheep that filled the world, they needed their routines, their habits, their mental lists of acceptable behaviors. Frank watched people. He liked figuring out how they worked. Their little foibles, their weird ticks, their insecurities.

  It gave him no satisfaction to be good at what he did. But he was good at it, and it was all he was good at.

  “Fucking maudlin tonight, Frank,” he said to no one in particular and filled his shot glass again with cheap, freezing vodka.

  It was a nice place, this borrowed house. Big houses were easier to break into than smaller places. Try stealing into a flat in a high-rise and living there unnoticed for any length of time: simply put, you couldn’t. People notice that kind of thing because it was small…like life under a microscope.

  Big houses? There was usually space between neighbors. Rich people had to figure on a strong likelihood of travel, maybe for long periods. Either through work, visiting family, or just expensive jaunts away.

  Rich people had a false sense of security. Sure, an alarm and a high gate might put off someone casual. But someone who’d been around the block a time or two?

  Plus, it was a hell of a lot nicer resting up all safe and warm from the winter in this place than on the street like a useless tramp or some dirty old armed robber hiding out in a lock-up garage.

  The big man yawned and stretched both of his big arms right out behind and above his head.

  The room was swirling, slightly, to Frank’s eyes. With the room shifting when he wasn’t, Frank figured he’d had enough to drink, and he’d sure as hell had enough of the news. Big fucking deal. The meteor was all they talked about, but he didn’t care.

  What he did care about could fit on a very short list. Top of that list?

  James Finley O.B.E., primarily. Secondarily, he supposed, he cared about James Finley’s death.

  Liebowicz stood easily enough, despite his large frame and slight inebriation. He wandered through the house as if it were his, from the living room where he’d been, and off to the kitchen. He opened the massive, excessively expensive freezer and put the vodka back inside in case he wanted more in the morning before he left.

  The carpet on the way to the bedrooms was thick and warm on his bare feet. His clothes were already laid out on the floor beside the bed. The house was warm; Frank didn’t need his clothes on when he was warm anyway and there was no point in rumpling up his outfit just for false modesty.

  The bed sighed as he laid down his large frame. He pulled the covers over himself because he liked to be covered when he slept, not because he was cold or shy. He liked to be covered because if someone did manage to get close to him while he slept, he had a weapon. The duvet was a weapon if it needed to be. Frank also had a gun, which he rested, safety on, in the space between his gut and thighs as he turned and curled.

  Between the duvet and the gun, his confidence, and his luxury hide, he felt safe enough to sleep. As Frank drifted off, he wondered what it would be like to be in the direct path of the big one when it hit. He mulled that over for a couple of seconds. Maybe as many as five. Then he was asleep.

  20

  Frank wasn’t a slow thinker by any means. He was aware of his own shortcomings, and did recognize that sometimes he was a little too methodical, perhaps. But nevertheless, a couple of days after he’d killed Johnny Muller and weasel man, he’d figured most of what he needed to know.

  But then things had changed and it wasn’t just about Finley anymore.

  The little guy he’d killed had stolen the briefcase. Johnny had been told to get the briefcase from Frank and then kill him. With Frank dead, the little weasel man would have been killed, too, and there would’ve been no leftovers for the pigs to scrap over.

  So, Frank knew the briefcase was important. Frank hadn’t found it. But then neither had Johnny, because Johnny was dead.

  None of which meant that the briefcase wasn’t already back in Finley’s hands. And Frank didn’t know what was in it…but then he didn’t need to know, did he? The briefcase was a McGuffin, far as he was concerned. Nothing more than a prop in the greater tale, and one of the classics at that. Revenge.

  Finley, the fucker, had tried to have him killed. Time was, Frank would have walked in on Finley and cut him to pieces. But then things changed, because Finley wasn’t there anymore. He wasn’t there, because Finley was in London, and London was slowly and steadily going insane, like the meteor really was Wormwood, harbinger of Armageddon, herald of a bitter kind of madness.

  When the news first broke, people did their usual. They acted like they didn’t give a shit. They didn’t panic, figured it was the same as all the other scares they’d had over the years. Terror alerts, weather warnings…everything was coded like a set of fucking traffic lights, even fat content on a supermarket sandwich. You saw enough amber and red warnings on things, they kind of lost their impact on you.

  But then as time passed, it became, somehow, more real. Pictures of the rock were aired, people
went on about it on the chat shows; famous people or chavs, paupers or the fucking aristocracy, it didn’t matter. Everyone and anyone had an opinion.

  Most everyone. Frank didn’t care if it hit or passed them all by. He cared about killing Finley, and Finley was in the wind. Gone, just like Frank himself.

  Even so, people joked on the television, not the end of the world, is it?

  They were wrong, though, weren’t they? Because a month ago, you could see that big bastard in the night sky. A week ago, you could see it in daylight.

  It was going to hit. Just a matter of when, and where, but worst-case scenario? Yes. It was a killer, an interstellar assassin, paid in a currency no mortal could ever understand, in a time when people hadn’t even been.

  Then, yesterday, as Frank Liebowicz was getting ready to leave his hide and his London behind, something happened that changed everything right back to the way it had been before. Frank’s plans were back on track, because after being in the wind for almost two months, Finley came back home.

  21

  Liebowicz didn’t care very much at all about his own existence or even his own demise. He liked certain things, sure. He enjoyed being alive well enough. But when he woke and dressed in the early morning and heard on the news that the rock had split, and the smaller portion was heading toward Britain, he realized he was a little sad about the prospect of getting hit by the meteor.

  To die like that, after all this time, unsure if Finley got it? That would be a failure.

  He had meant to make his move on Finley in another day.

  A day early, a day late…didn’t really matter, did it?

  Frank shrugged his coat on his broad shoulders and squared himself away.

  He tucked his gun (borrowed from Muller near enough three months ago) into his belt so that the barrel sat in his right-hand pocket. Beneath his heavy coat the gun would be all but invisible. Maybe a slight bulge, but nothing drastic enough to get paranoid about.

  Plan?

  Find Finley. Kill Finley. Get the fuck out.

  “Good,” said Frank to himself as he stood before a giant, excessively ornate mirror in the wide hallway.

  “Good,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

  22

  Walking through London since the early meteor showers began to strike Earth was dangerous enough, not because of the meteors themselves, but because people began to get a little…crazy. Frank wondered, not for the first time, if maybe there was some truth in the more lunatic ramblings he’d heard. Maybe the rock really was Wormwood. Maybe this really was the end of times, some kind of biblical shitstorm from outer space, fire and brimstone raining down from the heavens above.

  Frank wondered, but even so, it wasn’t like it made any kind of difference to his plans.

  Now, with the biggest meteor since the dinosaurs checked out (two meteors, most likely, thought Frank) looming in the sky, London was way past crazy.

  Mostly, it was just rumors. Things that didn’t make sense, being collated into some kind of make-believe by the newspapers and drunks…maybe one and the same. People were going missing, senseless murders were through the roof, dirty rapes, casual violence. Everything that made up a city, only larger. And more still, like the meteor showers were full of some kind of chemical or radiation that was making people lose all control.

  The big rumor, though…the big one? The cult.

  The cult?

  Nothing like the Salvation Army, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. A real cult, like a cult was supposed to be. Violent, degraded, mysterious. Like the Thugees, only sicker. Frank watched the news, read newspapers, listened to people talk. He kept his ear tuned to all manner of things…a man who spoke rarely but listened often and well.

  Cults worried him less than the government, or the police, but if the rumors were true, then things really were heading toward a dark future.

  Frank had done some sick shit in his time. He was aware of his own nature in a way that most men never are. But he’d never fucking eaten someone.

  To date, thirty-two bodies had been discovered, all over the capital. Gnawed on, body parts missing or excised.

  In a week.

  Which meant it was the work of more than one person. No one man was that hungry.

  Frank mulled over this and that as he walked through London in the early hours, the sky still dark enough to hide him and still dark enough for him to watch his back.

  Light from the burning rock above. Sounds of panic, screaming, shouting, cars colliding.

  Like a city at war with itself.

  The city really was mental. In a full-blown meltdown. If it were a person, someone would have sedated it, given it some kind of dribbling pills and shut it the fuck down.

  But they hadn’t, because the army were missing. Conspicuous in their absence, Frank guessed.

  More questions with no more answers.

  But even with the meltdown, Wormwood or whatever the fuck it was in the sky, there was very little gunfire, not yet. This was London, England, and guns were not commonplace. Maybe some of the gangs could get hold of iron, but most people could not. They had to make do with knives and bats and glasses and garden tools: good old-fashioned British iron. No fancy semiautomatics clacking away on the streets. Just the slow screams of bloody murder. Frank, strangely, did not revel in murder. It was his job. Senseless murder, in an odd way, upset him. Not so he’d lose sleep. But a little. Just a little.

  Frank walked tall, his back straight and his left hand swinging freely. His right hand he kept near to his weapon. No one challenged him. There weren’t many people around, but those few he did see weren’t nuts, and thought he was.

  Maybe he was. Maybe.

  It took him a while to get where he was going. When he finally reached the corner before Finley’s building, he paused to check the road, even though it was still technically night.

  A cyclist pedaled past furiously, on his way to God knew where. The man was toned and trim and he looked terrified.

  Frank didn’t bother to look up. He knew the rock was coming, and not for France, either. Its tail would be a bright slash across the dark sky.

  Not long now.

  He crossed the road, checking again because he didn’t want to get hit by a cyclist or one of those quiet electric cars any more than he wanted to get crushed by a big rock falling out of the sky.

  There seemed to be a small, localized riot or disturbance on the street ahead, but Frank didn’t worry about that. He wasn’t going that far, and whatever was going on, he didn’t care in the slightest.

  His concern was Finley. One thing, and one thing only.

  Nothing else mattered.

  23

  Frank figured that as far as Finley was concerned, Liebowicz was gone—dead or fled. So they weren’t expecting him. So they weren’t looking for him.

  Two guys were at a desk in the lobby. They were big, serious-looking men. Suited, packing, probably a little bit of training in something martial. Finley’s guys, without a doubt.

  The glass door leading into the building would be locked at this time in the morning. But Frank was in a long wool coat, new shoes on and trousers with a crisp crease. He looked like he belonged. He’d had a short, tidy haircut. He’d lost a little weight, grown a mustache. He looked respectable—like a thug all grown up.

  All he had to be was respectable enough to get to the desk. The rest could sort itself out. If he couldn’t make the desk, there’d be shooting. Shooting in the lobby would make the journey up to the top of the building a chore, and a dangerous one at that.

  He tried the key. It turned. He wasn’t surprised. Finley wasn’t worried about Frank, and that would work in Frank’s favor. He hoped.

  The grown-up thug pushed the door open.

  “Sir?” said one of the guys at the desk. He had short cropped hair that made him look tough…an illusion that was wasted on Frank as that first word told him the guy was an amateur. Cut-rate guard. The second guy was rising and coming
round the front desk toward Frank. Frank smiled, thinking the second guy, longer hair, a little stubble, small eyes, was a little more dangerous. Maybe he had more sense than the first guy.

  But Frank was still smiling, and just as importantly, still moving. The sun would be up in a minute, Finley would be dead and a big fucking rock would hit the planet. He had plenty to smile about.

  “Morning, chaps,” he said, all traces of his accent gone.

  “Sir?”

  The rest of it didn’t matter because Frank was right there at the desk.

  He grabbed the back of the crewcut guy’s head and rammed his face into the corner of the marble desk.

  Frank didn’t hold back. Never had.

  Long-haired guy went for his gun, which was stupid. Apparently he wasn’t as smart as he looked. Even though he was close enough to tackle Frank, he was wasting time with the clasp on his holster. Frank wrapped his right arm around the man’s head and hit him in the throat three times with his left fist.

  Two dead guards.

  He pulled them behind the counter—it would have to do. Maybe he could have found a better place to stash the bodies, taken some time to clean up the blood, but it didn’t matter. Now it was all about speed.

  He distrusted elevators, but it was the quickest way to the top. Plus, he really didn’t want to be tired and struggling for breath when he got to Finley. He needed to be fresh.

  He took the elevator. There was nothing fancy about his strategy. As the elevator rose, he knelt and held his gun pointing at the door. No sense in fancy planning. If worse came to worst, he’d get back to the lobby. There were two more guns stashed there, on the dead guys. But he figured he wouldn’t need more bullets than he had right now. Finley was careful. He’d always been careful. But not paranoid. There probably wouldn’t be more than a couple of men on the top floor. Besides, this was Finley’s office, yes, but it was also his home. Who wanted a team of tough guys hanging out, watching them sleep? No one, that’s who.