Emily’s voice shook. “It might be. It could also be by Mark or Kevin. I don’t know! Just hurry, please!” Her legs buckled. “Try Kevin’s pockets!”
BANG. CRACK. CRACK.
That doesn’t sound good.
“Dan, hurry! Get your ass back up here!” Emily screamed as she stepped down onto the landing, facing the steps down to the first floor. Jon stood by the locked door, heart beating fast with the weight of a sledgehammer into his ribcage. He watched Emily as she looked down the steps, waiting for Dan’s return with the keys.
BANG. CRACK. CRACK.
The bench was being pushed into the door faster now and jagged pieces of glass were peppering the carpet beneath the spotlight of the emergency light beams.
“Dan! C’mon!” Emily shouted.
“One sec, I’m grabbin’ the bat!” Dan shouted back up at her.
BANG. CRACK. SHATTER.
Emily saw the end of the bench break through the door. Glass blasted into the library. Cool, wet air flowed in and the sound of rain became more audible. She could see the maniacs outside start to funnel inside. Emily recognized the flat-brimmed man among the few coming in.
Dan appeared at the bottom of the steps, walking backward with the bat held out against the three people that were now walking toward him. The flat-brimmed man and two girls wore wet clothes. One wore a gym outfit and the other a black pair of yoga pants and white bra. More were getting through the shattered hole in the door behind them. They were dripping-wet maniacs.
“Stay back! I don’t want any trouble, alright?” Dan said to the three psychos. They were approaching him with furious and focused faces.
The flat-brimmed hatted man spoke. “Why didn’t you let us in? We were knocking and knocking and knocking. Now you’re gonna pay. YOU’RE GONNA PAY!”
Dan quick looked behind him, up the stairs. He saw that Emily was standing on the landing and removed one of his hands from the bat. He had Kevin’s key. “Em!” he shouted up at her, keeping his eyes fixed on the now four maniacs coming at him. Another man wearing shorts and a red shirt that said WHITE HAVEN HONOR SOCIETY on it was gazing at Dan with gritted teeth. “I’m gonna throw you the key.”
“What are you gonna do with that bat, huh? Kill us? You wanna FUCKING kill us?” the woman in the drenched gym outfit said.
“Dan, it’s too dark. I can’t see it. Just run back up here! C’mon!” Emily cried out to him. There was no time for more tears. “Get away from him!” Her legs felt as if they would give out any minute.
Jon stood frozen by the locked, wooden door, too afraid to move. What could he do? His heart couldn’t beat any faster. Please, Dan. Get up here. His hand moistened as it remained gripping the handle of his backpack.
Dan gave it his best shot to run up the stairs, but the four maniacs grabbed his legs and pulled him back down to the first floor. He tried to swing his bat to shoo them away, but once it made contact with the flat-brimmed man’s arm and knocked him back into the others, he was overrun as the horde let loose. The flat-brimmed man grabbed the bat. Dan tried with all his might to climb back up the steps, but the bat came down onto his back. CRACK. It made Dan scream. Emily ran down after him, but Dan shouted, “Stop! Emily, stay back. Take the key and go!” The four lunatics tugged and pulled on him as he tried to climb up the steps with only his hands. CRACK. Another hit to his back. His body squirmed. The maniacs yelled but the words were lost within all the chaos.
“You monsters! STOP!” Emily shouted as her hands tried to cover her face from the slaughter below.
Jon dropped his backpack and ran down to the landing by Emily to see the horror that he wished he didn’t have to see. Four maniacs were on top of Dan. A fifth one came up behind the fighting and stared up at Emily and Jon.
“Take the key! Go!” Dan yelled as best as he could and flung Kevin’s little, golden key up a few of the steps. It dinged on the step before the landing and Jon picked it up without hesitation.
He grabbed Emily by the arm. “C’mon!” he shouted. Emily moved with him, but her eyes kept on Dan for one last moment. Dan now had his hands covering his head as the maniacs punched and beat him with his own wooden bat. The Louisville Slugger rained down on his spine. All Emily could make out was the green and yellow John Deere logo on his hat as the violence overtook him. PUNCH. CRACK. PUNCH. CRACK.
With hands trembling, Jon unlocked the second-floor door and picked up his backpack. He grabbed Emily and the two of them entered and locked it behind them.
Lightning flashed outside.
Chapter TWENTY-FOUR
One Way Out
“Oh my God!” Emily shrieked.
She and Jon were now shaking and alone on the second floor of the White Haven College library. The lights from outside beamed up through the water droplet covered windows, casting their blue and red flashes onto the still bookcases and the single-person study booths that surrounded them. The emergency lights were still lit on the corners of the ceiling up here.
Emily and Jon knelt together against the locked door.
“I can’t believe this,” Jon said, wanting to cry. But he knew he couldn’t now. The night had just begun, and once the maniacs finished with Dan, they’d be up to the wooden door, ready to bust it down, ready to kill Jon and Emily without hesitation.
“We’re gonna fucking die up here, Jon. This is it,” Emily said with her familiar tears winning her over again. Her black hair was covering her face now and the messiness made it hard to see the blue streak in the dark. She put her head into Jon’s chest and wept. Jon placed an arm around her. He wanted to hold her forever and cry with her.
No time for that.
It didn’t take long for one of the maniacs to BANG on the wooden door. It made Emily clutch onto Jon’s arm tighter.
“I know you’re in there!” a shadowy man shouted from the other side of the vertical glass window. Jon looked up to the window on the door, convinced the psycho couldn’t see him. It was as if the man on the other side had no face and was nothing more than a rage-filled entity. A phantom banging at the door, wanting nothing more than to come in and let loose on them.
Behind his BANGS were the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Thunder.
Dan’s dead, Jon thought to himself, but it came out as a slight whisper.
“Now they’re coming for us,” Emily said in response, also in a frightened whisper.
“We can’t stay here,” Jon whispered back to her. He put his backpack over his shoulder.
They had no other choice but to run into the aisles of bookcases. Jon went ahead with Emily behind him. He was holding her arm as he guided them through the infinite pieces of literature. The backpack’s zippers jangled as they bounced on Jon’s back. The BANGS on the wooden door were almost in sync with their footsteps that ran through the rows of textbooks. They both knew at any second that those BANGS would be followed by CRACKS and then the THUD of the door falling to the floor. God knows how many maniacs are on the other side, waiting to come in. It made them run even faster. But to where were they running?
The emergency lights beamed lines of white through the rows of books, casting shadows on the thick stacks of pages.
They got to the end of the bookcases and took a left toward the back-right corner of the second floor, beneath another emergency light. Jon wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he wanted to get as far away from that wooden door as possible. They both stood with their hearts pounding. Somehow, Jon could smell a hint of that metallic scent from before. It mixed with the cool, stormy night’s air. He made loud sniffs in between breaths.
“Do you smell that?” he whispered.
“What?” Emily tried to compose herself and take a whiff. “Smell what?”
Jon sniffed again and started walking forward, between the rows of study booths that sat along the windows to his left. The smell became stronger as he walked with the red and blue lights streaming up, making him a shadow to Emily. The bangs still came but weren’t as loud n
ow.
“Where are you going? Don’t leave me here!” Emily said in a rising whisper. She wiped her nose and began to follow behind Jon. Her nose was too stuffy from all the crying to pick-up any scents.
Jon stopped when he felt that he was walking into a slight breeze. The smell came with it. He came to a window with a large piece of tarp covering it. It was between two study booths and swaying in the storm. The broken window. The popped glass. Sure enough, Jon could make out a big, rectangular pane of glass leaning up against the back of one of the study booth chairs that were smaller versions of the ones they had in the dorm rooms. Little, blue-colored cushions on wood.
“Over here,” Jon whispered back to Emily, who was several feet behind him. She hurried up and was now standing over his shoulder. Jon pulled up the tarp, making the cool breeze and metallic scent flow over them. Emily still couldn’t smell it, but Jon could. He tore the entire tarp off. It made a ripping sound.
“What the hell?” Emily sniffed.
They both looked out toward the night sky that shed no moonlight beyond the storm clouds. Rain pelted their heads. Water streaked Jon’s lenses.
There was no one below them or toward the parking lot, but when they turned their heads to the right, they saw a couple of people fighting in the middle of the campus grounds. Two guys pushing and shoving one another. Bodies were scattered around between puddles of blood. The concrete paths were all dark from being soaked with rain and gore.
Beyond that was the police cruiser and the ambulance still flashing beams of light. Jon couldn’t see exactly, but the rear door of the police cruiser was open, and Michael was gone. The dorm area in the backdrop still had bodies lying in piles beneath the now inoperable orange-colored streetlamps.
It was quiet for a moment as Jon and Emily looked over the wet, bloody and night-covered campus. It seemed like another dimension to Jon, a more sinister version of White Haven College. The quietness ended when Emily asked if they could survive a jump from the second floor.
“I don’t know.” Jon took a deep breath. “But it seems like we don’t have a choice. What do you think?”
“We either die from the fall or die from those psychos. Which one do you think will be better?”
Jon leaned out of the open window as far as he could to get a better grasp of the length of the drop. Twenty feet? Thirty? There was shrubbery below them that sat along the brick of the building, separating it from the walkway which had grass on the other side of it. “Jumping would be better.”
Another distant bang came from the wooden door.
“I got an idea,” Jon said. He turned to the chair under one of the single study booths and snagged the blue, square-shaped cushion from the seat. “If we throw enough of these down there, we can soften the drop.”
“Jon, you’re a genius!” Emily almost broke from her whisper.
Jon smiled and nodded. “Help me gather more cushions.” He took off his backpack and put it down by the booth. The two of them worked and ran up and down the side of the second floor, taking as many cushions as they could, using the harsh emergency lights to guide them. The BANGING continued, louder now. Soon enough, they had stacked up a few piles of cushions by the open window. One by one, Jon and Emily would let go of the cushions by extending both of their arms out and releasing the grip so that each would fall flat. A couple had got caught in the shrubbery and rustled the leaves on it. Jon stuck his head out of the window to see if the two fighting men heard it. They hadn’t.
“We have to aim for the walkway and grass. As long we throw enough of them close together, we can jump down and it won’t hurt as much,” Jon said as he demonstrated his dropping technique. The cushion fell to the walkway. It made a soft, wet clap sound and bounced. The two men fighting on campus remained in their duel.
Emily dropped the last cushion they had down onto the cushioned-covered walkway below. Not all the cushions were side by side but there were enough of them on the path and grass that it created a puzzle-like blanket over the ground.
“Good work,” Jon said. “Let’s test it out.” He picked up his backpack and brought it up to the edge of the window. With all the commotion, he didn’t realize how heavy it was. But then again, Jon always had a filled bag. He never forgot his supplies. The main compartments held his laptop, textbooks, a few shirts, and notebooks. But the small pocket in the front held the most important item of all: car keys.
Jon’s bag with most of his wardrobe sat downstairs by the door of the library. He’d have to go on without them. Good thing he showered and changed.
The weight of the backpack allowed for a better test of the cushions’ safety below. Jon threw the backpack outwards and toward the left where the grass met the concrete and where most of the cushions had landed together. It dropped and landed against the cushions. The laptop and books rattled against each other inside, the keys making a hard jangling noise on top. Still, the maniacs fought on, unaware of Jon testing his escape plan.
“Alright, perfect,” Jon said. “We’re going to aim for my backpack. Are you ready?” His right foot was already resting on the ledge. Emily nodded. “I’ll go first, okay? If I survive, I’ll give you a thumbs up to signal you to jump and I’ll catch you,” Jon said with a crooked smile. He didn’t even realize he had smiled until Emily gave a slight one back. It was a moment that took Jon out of the madness for a moment.
I’ll catch you.
“Ok,” she whispered. Then she pulled her hair back away from her face and wiped her nose. “Be careful.”
Both of them turned their heads back toward the darkness to hear one last BANG echoing through the lonely bookshelves. Jon stepped up on the ledge, crouching. Metallic air blew over his face and moved his messy brown hair. Here we go. His heart raced, but his mind was focused on landing. A little to the left, right by the backpack.
Now, Jon.
When he pushed off the ledge from the second floor of the library, he extended his body to maneuver himself toward the backpack and cushions on the left side. What he hoped would play out like the slow-motion instant replays before, turned out to be only instant. No slow motion. He fell as his backpack had. Before he knew it, Jon was face down in a blue cushion on the rain painted grass beside it with his legs smacking on the concrete. His glasses flew off his head and landed in the wet grass.
It didn’t hurt at first, but as soon as he composed himself, he wanted to scream out in pain. He thought he broke his leg.
“Jon, are you okay?” Emily asked, sticking her head out of the window. Her voice was a yell now.
Jon squinted his eyes in pain and clutched his left knee. He gritted his teeth and felt around, expecting to feel a bone sticking out from it. But he didn’t. Then, he extended his leg all the way out and felt the sting of pain right on the kneecap.
“Jon?” Emily’s voice was getting louder now and when Jon opened his eyes, he turned his head to see Emily crouched on the ledge, ready to plummet. He wanted a few more minutes to lay there on the ground, but he caught a glance over at the two fighting guys and noticed they were returning the gesture at him. Get up. He squinted his eyes hard and felt around the surrounding grass until he felt his glasses. Placing them on his face, he saw slimy dirt and bits of green on them. No time to wipe them down.
The rain continued to pour.
“I’m alright! I’m alright!” Jon said back up to her, trying to keep his voice low. He stood up as best as he could without limping. No way did he want to seem weak right before Emily jumped down. “Don’t jump yet! Let me move these cushions closer together.”
Jon gathered the surrounding cushions the best as he could with his injured knee. Every time he glanced over to the two guys, they were closer. One was wearing a bloodstained, yellow soccer jersey and the other a ripped up, plain white undershirt. Both wore shorts but no shoes or socks. They were walking over from the center of campus with their bare feet slapping wet concrete.
“Jon, are you sure you’re alright? Did you land on
your leg wrong?” Emily asked. She saw Jon’s limp, but her focus changed as she caught sight of the two men making their way towards him. “Jon! They’re coming!” Emily said, pointing over to them. She hesitated on what to do next. Her head went back and forth between the two men and Jon.
“I know! Get ready to jump down,” Jon said as he placed the last soaked cushion, creating a double-layered square of them beneath the window. A landing pad for Emily. He looked over his shoulder at the two men as they continued their pace toward him. “C’mon, Emily. We gotta go!” Jon said, waving for her to come down.
Emily was nervous, but she moved closer to the edge of the window. “Ok. I’m coming down now. You’re gonna catch me, right?”
“Yes! I will!” Jon said, glancing back at the two approaching men with his arms extended over the layers of cushions. “I’m right here. C’mon Emily!”
Emily looked back once more and saw a figure running toward her through a row of books, only seeing the whites of the eyes staring her down. She pushed off the edge of the window and her arms flailed in the night’s rain. Her thin body dropped as fast as Jon and his backpack had and she landed onto the padded square.
“Oh my God,” Emily said, breathing with her messy hair covering her face. “I made it!”
“Are you alright?” Jon asked. The rain fell like a shower.
“I’m okay!” She stood up from the cushions and straightened her shirt and tight, hole-covered jeans. Her fingers pressed upon her nose ring to see if it was still intact. It was. “Let’s get the hell out of here, there was someone on the second floor!” she said. This time, she grabbed Jon’s arm.
“Wait!” Jon shouted and picked up his backpack off the ground and slung one strap over his shoulder. The bottom was wet. The two men were almost to them. “Alright, let’s move!”
Emily and Jon ran down the concrete path and into the darkened parking lot. They were kicking up puddles. With the power out, they had no source of light coming from the giant light poles that hung over different lettered rows.
When the Sky Goes Dark Page 13