Darkest Hour

by Rob Cornell

  All the warriors were dead.

  Only Lockman remained.

  Alone in a fight he could never win.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Still think your father can save you?

  Gabriel strolled through the exquisite death spread out across the open snow. Many of his new followers still suckled on the strewn bodies. He had never seen so many well-fed vampires at once. Some that had fed enough walked with Gabriel like acolytes on a pilgrimage. The worship in their eyes was so plain. And how could they not worship him? He had taught them how to shed the last of their weaknesses on the mortal plane. He had made them all but invincible.

  I see dead vamps, so maybe not so invincible.

  The girl made herself sound confident. If she did not reside within him, Gabriel might have wondered if she felt any fear at all. But he could sense it. Plenty of fear. Plenty of doubt. Finally, she had begun to understand Gabriel’s true power.

  Don’t get cocky, asswipe. This ain’t over.

  No. Not over at all. In fact, this conquest on the outskirts of Barrow marked the beginning. The millions of ancient voices had proved their worth. At Gabriel’s hands lay immortality, and the ability to pass it around like candy to sweet-toothed children.

  The smell of cold blood surrounded him. Gabriel inhaled deeply. Barrow had worked out well beyond his most extreme fantasies. He had over two-thousand vampires at his beck and call. But he couldn’t wallow in his success. His plans stretched well beyond having a vampire army. Time to honor Otto’s memory and continue their quest to awaken the world to the darkness. Let them know of the power around them. Let those strong enough to wield it, rise up against those who wished to oppress it. And let the weak become fodder for that rising.

  Beautiful. One day, he would have to write a book. A new Bible. The whole world would worship him for bringing about their dark salvation.

  “Come,” he shouted, turning back toward the city. “We no longer need to hide in the night. Let us finish with this small place and move on to greater horizons.”

  He led the way back to Barrow, surrounded by his two-thousand fanged worshipers.

  My dad will still stop you.

  Gabriel laughed. Please. By now your father is probably dead.

  The girl said no more, because she knew it was true. Craig Lockman had become but a footnote in the history of Gabriel’s reign.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Since when had airfare become so damn expensive?

  Kate had to clean out her bank account in order to buy the ticket for her flight to Texas. Of course, she didn’t plan on returning to New York, so she saved some money by skipping on her apartment’s last month of rent. The flight itself seemed to take an age. Her seat felt like a coffin. She sat trapped between a snoring old lady and a chatty businessman that kept insisting every ten minutes that he normally never flew coach.

  The air in the terminal smelled as fresh as a spring day in a pine forest compared to what she suffered through on the plane. When she actually stepped outside, she squinted like Gollum coming out of his cave for the first time.

  At the rental counter, she used one of the credit cards Craig had given her seemingly forever ago. For some reason, while establishing herself in New York, she had refused to use the card, though it would have come in handy on several occasions. A kind of petulant rebellion, she guessed. She felt no qualms about using it now. The finish line was in sight.

  She was finally going to see Jessie.

  The rental service provided her a car with a GPS system that Kate fooled with for a bit, but couldn’t make work for her since she didn’t know her destination. She knew the path there instinctively, as if it had been imprinted on her subconscious. When she gave up on the GPS and started driving randomly, that instinct took over.

  She did not notice the scenery. Paid no attention to the names of streets or the numbers of exits on the expressway. She drove, half-asleep it seemed. And when she woke up, she found herself turning onto an unmarked dirt road all but invisible with the amount of brush obscuring it. Not invisible to her, though. She made the turn as if she had done it a hundred times before.

  Trees and brown brush, along with dried up swales, on either side of the road acted like a tunnel. She had no sense of her destination until after a quarter mile when the scraggly forest suddenly gave way to open land. In the distance about another half mile, up on a hill stood an old farmhouse. The afternoon sun settled behind the house, casting a long shadow down the front of the hill. Kate couldn’t see what lay beyond the hill, but the open sky seemed to go on for miles.

  All this time, Craig and Jessie had lived on a farm?

  Kate hadn’t expected something so mundane. Though she wasn’t sure what exactly she had expected.

  As Kate continued along the dirt road—which turned out to be more of a really long driveway—and crested the hill, she discovered she needn’t have worried about disappointing her expectations. The farmhouse was just a front. The real essence of this place sat tucked behind the hill. It looked like a military base of some kind. Several buildings with corrugated facades circled a central court with an American flag fluttering on a pole. The oddest feature was the large metal arch outside the main circle of buildings. It reminded Kate of the St. Louis Arch, only smaller.

  Something else odd about the place—it was clearly deserted. At the top of the hill, by the farmhouse, the dirt strip turned to crushed gravel and continued down to the encampment. Kate stopped the car on the hill’s peak. From here she couldn’t spot a single sign of life. A mess of tire tracks marked the ground in front of the arch, some of them deep and wide, as if made by large trucks. Among the tracks, she could make out dark spots in the brown grass, though she couldn’t tell what caused them. Just patches of mud maybe.

  The flag looked lonesome in the middle of the quiet base. Like the farmhouse, it also cast a shadow, long and pointed, like a clock hand on a giant clock. Before she bothered heading down to the base, she decided to check the house. She cut the engine and climbed out of the car, greeted with a silence tainted only by the sound the breeze made against the cups of her ears. The air carried a faint scent of ozone. Her gut told her the odd smell came from the arch. Out of the car and at a better angle, she could tell it was some kind of machine.

  The hairs on her neck stood on end.

  She wasn’t sure if it was part of what her vision of Jessie had plugged into her head, like the directions to this place, or her own animal sense working, but she knew beyond doubt that something here was not right.

  The farmhouse’s front porch faced east and sat in the shadow of the house itself. With the wood planks and the painted white railing and spindles around the edges, it looked like the kind of porch where you would find a couple of old-timers in rockers. There weren’t any rockers, though. No porch swing. No furniture at all. Just a fine layer of dust without any tracks. The porch obviously didn’t get much use.

  Kate decided not to break that tradition of disuse and headed around back instead. The back porch consisted of little more than a cement slab. A row of gas cans lined the base of the house to one side of the slab, probably for the vehicles parked in a nearby pen, the pen’s wooden fence broken down in most places. The pen probably used to keep horses or cattle, but not for some time.

  She found the back entrance open except for the screen door. Long peels of green paint had come off the door’s frame and the screen looked as old and broken down as the pen, with so many holes it was functionally useless. The inside door was swung wide. She peered in, but with the sun behind her, she found mostly darkness. No lights on. No sound. She reached for the rusty handle on the screen door. Stopped herself.

  Did she really want to waltz in there? She didn’t have anything to defend herself with. The gun Craig had given her she’d had to leave in New York since she certainly couldn’t have carried it onto the plane. Then she smirked. She looked at the scaring on her arm—not all of it had disappeared. Apparently, the m
ore she used of her own flesh and blood for magic, the less she could heal afterward. She didn’t exactly understand the “rules,” but she thought it through on the flight over and came to some conclusions about how it might work. The magic fed on the blood, the pain, and the emotion. The healing was actually a subconscious use of additional magic, a sort of self-preservation reaction that happened on a purely instinctive level. But the more power you needed for the magic, the less you had left over for the healing.

  This was probably why using other people’s blood worked better, and why those other people didn’t heal unless the magic user needed them to stay alive. Basically, human sacrifice was more efficient. Not to mention, the added trauma and pain would generate more energy for the magic.

  What a sick system. And so blatantly unnatural. How this kind of power ever came about in the world was beyond Kate’s understanding.

  Nevertheless, she had now inherited the ability to use such power. Which meant, judging from her performance at Kress’s dinner party, she didn’t need a gun. She needed a knife.

  She found one in a truck parked in the pen. A nasty looking blade with both a smooth and serrated side and a set of brass knuckles built into the hilt. It came in a leather sheathe that she strapped to her belt, feeling a tad ridiculous about it.

  Look at Little Miss Rambo with the scary knife on her belt.

  That she found such a knife so easily on the premises said a lot about her present environment, though. No matter how innocuous the farmhouse looked, she had entered dangerous territory. She couldn’t forget that.

  She returned to the door and slowly pulled it open. The hinges didn’t squeal as loudly as she had expected. Apparently those had received better care than the screen. Once inside, it took her eyes a moment to adjust to the shadows. After a short turn to the left, the entrance led directly to the kitchen. The yellowed curtains over the windows gave the incoming sunlight the color of dusk. None of the cupboards had doors. Rows and rows of canned goods stuffed the cupboard shelves. The room smelled like a root cellar, dank and musty.

  Hand on her sheathed knife, Kate paused in the entry and listened.

  Silence.

  She moved through the kitchen into what was once probably a living room. A desk sat in the middle of the room with an office chair behind it and a pair of metal folding chairs in front. A pair of handcuffs lay on the desk. A filing cabinet stood in one corner of the room. The rest of the wall space around the room was lined with crates of bottled water.

  Here Kate waited again, listening.

  Nothing.

  The silence emboldened her. She conducted the rest of her search of the house more quickly. Upstairs were three bedrooms, mostly stuffed with more non-perishable food and bottled water. One of them had a cot with a pillow and sheet tucked in among the shelves of supplies. Otherwise, it didn’t look like anyone actually lived in the house.

  Back on the main level she found the bathroom and realized she hadn’t used one in a while. She had to work up some courage, but biology trumped caution and she used the toilet, holding her knife out and close to her arm the whole time.

  She thought she had searched the entire house and was about to head back out when she noticed a door in the kitchen she had missed. Based on the house’s layout, the door opened into the space under the staircase leading upstairs. Could be a pantry of some kind. If so, the space wouldn’t be all that big. Probably stuffed with more food stores. But she had checked all the closets she found, she might as well stick to being thorough.

  Turned out the door led to another staircase. The old house had a basement.

  With the door open, she could only see a handful of steps before complete dark swallowed the rest of the stairwell. The air smelled musty, but not as dank as a basement in a house this old might normally. Her skin prickled. While she didn’t hear anything, she sensed something in the darkness below. Part of her power? Or your average brand of paranoia fueled by too many horror films featuring deadly creatures hidden in dark basements?

  She found a light switch just inside the doorway. If it worked, she could cure most of her trepidation with a single flick. Still, something made her hesitate.

  Come on, you spent the last week as a plaything to a bunch of supernatural creeps and now you’re afraid of a little ol’ basement?

  Kate drew her knife, then hit the switch.

  An incandescent bulb in the stairwell sparked to life, illuminating the rest of the stairs. The steps ended in the corner of the basement, which gave Kate a view of a brick wall and nothing more. She would have to head down the stairs and turn the corner to get a full view of the basement.

  Holding her knife close to her bare arm, she descended the stairs.

  As she approached the bottom, she discovered more light coming from around the corner. Apparently, the switch at the top operated more than the bulb in the stairwell. It was a sharper light like that from a fluorescent bulb.

  With three steps between her and the basement floor, Kate stopped and listened.

  This time she heard something.

  She strained, trying to make out the sound.

  Breathing?

  Her pulse quickened, its beat throbbing in her ears. She rested the knife blade against her skin. She debated whether to cut herself now and have the blood ready when she turned the corner, or hold off until she knew for sure she faced a threat. Her footsteps had creaked some on the stairs. If that was breathing she heard and someone was down there, they had to have heard her. But what would this person be doing in the basement, waiting so quietly? They might have heard her before she even reached the stairs, walking around above during her search. So were they hiding? Hoping she would go away? Or patiently waiting for her to turn that corner so they could ambush her?

  Kate ran the smooth side of the blade across the inside of her left forearm. The knife cut easily as she knew it would. Blood ran freely from the three-inch slice. She gripped the knife tightly and at the ready for additional defense, then descended the last few steps and swung around the corner.

  He pointed a gun at her, but the first thing Kate noticed was his bloody knuckles. Then the gun. Then the naked surprise in his eyes.

  Kate must have looked equally shocked. She had prepared herself for a confrontation with some unknown assailant. She had not prepared herself to see Craig.

  His gaze skipped from her face, to the knife in her hand, to the cut across her arm. “How the hell did you find this place?” His voice rasped as if he had spent the night at a rock concert screaming to the music.

  Kate noticed he didn’t lower his gun. “Where’s Jessie?”

  The corners of his eyes pinched as he felt a sudden pain. He glanced at the nearest wall. The brick was dotted with fist-sized splotches of dark brown. Blood from his knuckles. He’d been punching the wall. Never in all her time with him had Kate ever seen Craig show such an outburst of emotion. If anything, he had always been too cool, even during times when Kate thought he should be tearing his own hair out.

  He sat on a twin-sized bed, one of a few plain pieces of furniture that demarked this basement as a bedroom. The squat, bunker-like windows situated at a couple points by the basement’s ceiling were completely blacked out, not allowing for any sunlight. The drawers to the dresser hung open, clothes spewing out of them in a familiar pattern. She made out a few specific articles—a black camisole, a denim skirt, a bra. This was not Craig’s room.

  “What happened to her, Craig? So help me, you tell me or I’ll...”

  His eyes turned to the cut in her arm again. “You’ll what?”

  “Don’t make me.”

  “Make you what?”

  The blood from her cut began to drip to the floor. Each drop tapped against the concrete. Kate took a deep breath. She felt like she might shake to pieces any second now. “Things have changed.”

  “You have no idea.” His voice trembled. His eyes glistened in the fluorescent light. “No idea.”

  “You can’t kee
p me from her anymore, Craig. She led me here. She can lead me to wherever you’ve sent her next.”

  “She led you here?”

  “I won’t ask again.”

  He pulled the hammer on his pistol back with his thumb. “You can do mojo now? That it? Whatever you’ve mixed yourself up in, it’s too late. You’re too late.”

  Kate’s throat closed. The tip of her knife drew tiny circles in the air as her hand quivered. “What did you do?”

  “Get out of here, Kate. I can’t talk to you.”

  “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch. Don’t think I can’t.”

  “Not really a concern.” He cocked his arm, pressing the barrel of his gun against his temple. “You caught me right before I was about to do it myself.”

  What?

  The Craig she knew would never sink so low as to take his own life. For a second she thought this had to be some trick. This wasn’t really Craig. Another illusion. Kress and his people had followed her, were tormenting her.

  “Wait,” she shouted. “Is she...gone?”

  “Good as.”

  “Then she’s still alive?”

  He closed his eyes. “I can’t talk about it. I can’t stand going through it anymore.”

  “You owe me an explanation, Craig. You want to blow your pathetic brains out, I won’t stop you. But you need to tell me exactly what happened to Jess first.”

  A twin set of tears skated down his cheeks. “Everybody’s gone.” His finger tensed on the trigger.

  Kate’s reaction came from a deep place, pre-thought, even faster than primal instinct. The only reason she knew she acted at all came from the sudden drop in her energy and the now familiar flash of her blood as the magic consumed it.