Darkness.
In bed with his arm draped over Ridley, Tom’s shirt lifted above his bicep, revealing a red crescent where one of the creatures in the locker room had bitten a strip of flesh away. The edges of the wound had turned a dark grey. Veins of purple and green radiated from the infected bite.
His mind spun in a full panic, recognizing the imminent danger to his family and that he had carried it to their doorstep. They needed to get away. They had to run!
Ugliness washed over him, this time the current so powerful, he couldn’t surface. The thing inside him that was no longer Tom pushed him down, down, down. It needed Tom’s family to be near. It was hungry. It would saw into their flesh with its teeth.
Shivers wracked Tom’s body. He curled up next to his wife and wrapped himself in her warmth.
Black.
CHAPTER 19
THE VOID AND FORMLESS INFINITE
Scott woke up at 5:00 A.M., his circadian clock so firmly set that he found it impossible to sleep any later. He sat in a chair on the front porch, fighting the urge to go for a run. It seemed irresponsible to leave his house after a night like the one before.
It was the optimal time for Scott’s runs. The early hour coupled with the darkness made the experience surreal. Each morning, he would stagger out of his house, get in good workout, and return to the house to start the day. By the time he hit the shower, the run seemed to him like a hazy memory from the distant past. That amnesia-like effect helped him venture out of the house every morning, even in the most extreme New England temperatures that swung from skin-boiling heat in the summer to bone-splintering cold in winter.
When he first started running, a sense of isolation provided privacy while he labored to get in shape. It embarrassed him that it took several weeks before he could run one continuous mile without needing walking breaks.
Scott had been thin into his early thirties, obliviously inhaling double cheeseburgers and jumbo fries with abandon. After reaching his mid-thirties, an extra forty pounds landed on him. His career in sales consisted mostly of meetings, excessive travel and a bottomless expense account, lulling him into gluttony and muscle-killing inactivity. Even walking up a flight of stairs caused his thighs to burn and his lungs to wheeze for a full ten minutes after reaching the top.
It wasn’t just his physical body that suffered. His former profession, while lucrative, strangled his soul. He had no purpose, no mission other than making his sales number every year. One day, he sat across the table from the VP of Sales, a miserable human being, who considered himself someone with the edge needed to get things done where others failed. In fact, he was only a narcissist with a tan and a firm handshake.
That night, Scott consumed a zero-calorie movie, his hand buried in a bag of chips and examined his life. He loved his family but was otherwise unhappy with himself. Scott made the decision to change. He said out loud “I want to do something with my life that has meaning.
The next morning he got up at five and started running. Over eight months and several hard miles, he dropped his weight to a more wiry 170 pounds on his six-foot-two-inch frame. Stairs were nothing. Now he could knock out a few miles at a good pace.
For him, the solitude was meditative. Scott untangled the knotty strings of his life and began to mark a new path for himself.
He quit his job and started his wilderness program. No seminars. He led four trips a year regardless of weather. Stripping away all they had and knew, he helped them forge new lives for themselves by recognizing the power they possessed at their core: the power of decision. He told them frequently:
“Decide to have a life that means something.”
It was hard to start up and just as hard to keep going. In spite of it being hard, Scott loved it, sharing what he believed, living what he taught. It inspired him to see the youth become a mighty force for good when previously they were meandering their way to be blights on society.
Scott had more demand than he had capacity. Surprisingly, many of his “graduates” asked to come back and participate in more trips. He put them to work as mentors and doubled the number of programs.
With global malaise caused by environmental changes and ravaging illnesses, there were several no-shows for the last trip. Cancellations put his whole program in jeopardy. He’d meant to spend the weekend figuring out a strategy to save his business and continue to help the legion of people who badly needed it.
He sat on his porch getting more and more restless. His nostrils were filled with earthy fragrances from landscaped yards and garden soil rich with compost. An early morning run was just what he needed to figure things out. He asked himself whether or not he really believed what he’d told Tom a few hours before, that their peaceful community would continue to be so for at least a few days.
Scott pondered Tom’s behavior. There was something beyond the uncharacteristic hostility. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the person standing across from him. It simply wasn’t his friend.
He took in another deep breath of the sultry air. The compulsion to run was too strong. As if entranced, he put on his shoes and hit the street.
Running in the predawn hours on the empty country roads gave Scott the sense of being entirely alone. He loved the rhythmic jarring of his feet. Their quiet scraping blended with the ambient sounds of the sleeping neighborhood around him. His breaths were steady as he took the first of four turns of his usual route that carried him over a five-mile circuitous route back to his house.
He had rationalized that the run was the perfect opportunity to reflect on what to do for his family. But he failed to achieve the state of thoughtful reflection for which he’d hoped.
Last night had been one of the ugliest experiences in his life. He wanted to exterminate Bill and the two men who had intended to assault his wife and daughter. He believed they were just the advance force of the legions of depraved men who would make similar attempts if he stayed near civilization in collapse.
Indistinct forms wavered in and out of his sight. Furtive shadows stalked him, ducking and weaving through the mature trees that clustered between the houses in the neighborhood. The dim shapes never took form, instead dwindling and disappearing as he ran closer to them.
He left the cocoon of residential streets and entered the world of vast farmland carved out of ancient untamed forests. Nature’s perfume from greening fields of cereal rye replaced the scent of lawns, glazed with treated water and chemical fertilizers. Sounds of nocturnal insects grew louder in the final hour of night before the sun rose.
Pools of perfect blackness stretched between the distantly spaced farmhouses set a hundred yards or more from the road. From lampposts, soft lights bored through the soupy humidity. Running on the forlorn country highway was like traveling in an infinite universe, sparsely peppered with dimly twinkling stars.
A moving form quivered at the edge of his vision, startling him. The indistinct shape materialized too slowly. As it got closer, Scott shouted “Hello!”
Nothing came in response. No reaction of any kind.
He heard grunts, gasping breath, feet slapping the pavement. Uneasiness began to eat into his gut. He remembered the lurkers that had spurred him to quit his confrontation with Bill.
Blond hair and bright pink running shoes splashed into his vision as a lone runner glided near. Loud, tinny, musical sounds emanated from her ear buds. Her music must have been at a brain-scrambling volume. It explained why she hadn’t answered him. She gave a slight jump when she caught sight of Scott. She smiled and shook her head at herself as she disappeared. “Yeah, me too”, he thought. At least he wasn’t the only person so addicted to exercise that it overwhelmed common sense, leaving the house despite the calamities in the world.
Mystery solved, Scott steadied his pace, rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck from side to side to help clear the tension of his paranoia. He took a deep, cleansing breath and let it out in short bursts. His attempt at relaxation didn’t banish the nervo
usness in his stomach.
The new firehouse that sat on the corner of the old country road and the main street that led to Smithfield. The red-brick building was surrounded by a parking lot with plenty of room to maneuver the three fire engines it housed. From the bright light inside the building, Scott could see the gleaming yellow trucks through the large windows that made up a significant part of the bay doors. He thought of the sleeping firefighters trained to jump into action in an emergency, with glaring lights and blaring sirens that could shatter the stillness of the silent morning. The firehouse stood dark and silent.
He was grateful for that. It meant the riots playing out in cities all over the world had yet to touch his small town.
A strong smell emanated from two ethereal shapes ahead of him. He had come to know the “regulars” who shared the road with him in the pre-dawn hours. The spicy fragrance was a familiar signal that he would soon see the two elderly ladies who hosed themselves in heavy perfume before their early morning walks.
Scott usually picked them up from a distance. They sounded like an aviary of squawking birds as they chattered loudly while trekking the rural roads. From overhearing their energetic trading of news about families, friends, TV shows, and health problems, Scott knew pretty much everything about them, except their names. In his mind, they were “Betty and Wilma”. Betty was the doppelganger of Betty White. Seeing her for the first time, he’d done a double-take. Her walking companion was taller and thinner, and she wore a red wig that she always styled in one sweeping curl across the top of her crown. She could pass for a grandma version of Wilma Flintstone.
When he saw the pair, it didn’t feel right. Part of it was the unsettling silence. Betty and Wilma were mute. No chatter. Not even an audible breath from either of them. They were only a couple of yards from him in the darkness. He made out their forms crawling from a shallow ditch that ran parallel to the road.
Scott wondered what they were doing in the muddy canal. Maybe they had fallen. Maybe they were hurt. He approached them to offer a helping hand.
As the ladies lurched onto the street, they seemed bewitched. Close enough to make out their features, there were no smiles. Their faces jerked bizarrely from blank expressions to their normally sweet smiles then sagged to blank again. They shifted their unblinking eyes in his direction.
Scott’s body clenched in fear and his mouth went dry. He stopped abruptly. They’re just old ladies, he thought, confused by the irrational dread that washed over him.
Betty’s expression continued to morph. She raised her arm, her hand outstretched, her eyes imploring.
“Are you OK?” Scott asked her.
No sound came from her. Wilma took two stuttering yet determined steps closer to him. Her face ceased its strange spasms. Her expression was fixed and menacing. Ravenous.
His voice cracked past his dry throat and tongue. “What’s wrong?” He posed the question to himself as much as her. She didn’t answer. A primordial instinct shouted from deep within Scott’s bowels, rapidly gathering volume and urgency. Run, run, RUN!
Reason bolted and then so did he.
CHAPTER 20
ANTIC SHIFTS
His lungs ballooned and deflated at a frenetic rate, struggling to keep pace with his hammering heart. Wilma and Betty were almost a mile behind him. He’d sprinted the entire distance. Scott felt ashamed, believing his actions were indefensible.
He skidded on a patch of gravel and stopped. The pace he had set over the last mile had left his body numb. He locked his knees and arched his back, interlacing his fingers behind him, extending his arms in a stretch. Queasiness hacked at his insides, and he attempted to throw it off by holding air in his lungs then whooshing it out.
Scott had stopped in the middle of Smithfield. On his left side stood the tall Protestant church. Much of the glass was original, bubbles rippled the surface of the windows. The creative messages posted on the billboard by the church entertained and, occasionally, inspired him. The current one read, “To be almost saved is to be totally lost.” Clever.
Next to the church sat a centuries-old cemetery crowded with tombstones, some as much as 300 years old. A sharply pointed wrought-iron fence framed the graveyard. The town had annexed the ancient burial place, did some restoration, and prominently posted a brass plaque on the archway over the entrance. “Our pro-active board has shown great concern in both managing Smithfield Cemetery and planning for its care in perpetuity.”
Advertising, even in death, was inescapable.
A rustic breakfast-and-lunch place sat directly across from the church. “Ruth’s Café” had been built in a large Victorian home, its white paint now peeling. Strings of unlit Christmas lights bordered a meticulously painted white billboard in the front, which read “OPEN SUNDAYS!” to attract famished parishioners as they left after long sermons.
Behind the café, the road curved in a sharp right turn that then ran straight uphill at a steep thirty-five-degree angle to a newer residential neighborhood of about fifty homes—a perfectly bundled small New England town, ready to be scooped into a snow globe.
Scott was still berating himself over Betty and Wilma. How could I be afraid of two little old ladies? What if they were hurt?
His rational mind reasserted control. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, he’d run away from the chance to help someone. When he’d gotten out of his van to help the stricken man in the parking lot the night before, it was as if a giant hand shoved him back into his car. He’d had the soul-thumping impression he must leave immediately.
It had bothered him the entire way home. He wouldn’t forgive himself if he abandoned those little old ladies, too. He turned around, preparing his apology for jack-rabbiting away.
Just as Scott took a skipping start from the Smithfield town center, headlights flared from the neighborhood above, seizing his attention. A Dodge Ram pickup truck exploded into view, rocketing down the steep grade with reckless speed. Scott watched as it approached the tight left-hand turn at the bottom of the hill. Its large tires screeched, somehow holding onto the road and miraculously avoiding the cemetery fence and the crumbling grave markers within.
The Dodge swerved crazily from one side of the narrow road to the other. Bright beams from the headlights danced erratically around buildings and trees in a strobe-like effect that lengthened, shortened and shifted the shadows around him, revealing the silhouettes of several clustered people walking near the road between Scott and the truck. They walked in exaggerated fits, resembling misshapen marionettes, dancing and bouncing crazily toward him.
Ear-splitting, mechanical wailing from the truck’s engine jolted him out of his nanoseconds-long reverie. The whine pitched higher as the behemoth hurtled at him. Adrenaline super-charged his senses. Tiny details snapped into focus.
The truck was painted a dark red that contrasted starkly the bright silver of the chrome grill. Pale hands flickered behind the windshield, spinning the steering wheel to send the truck skidding in a deliberate effort to run him over. The metal-stamped figure of the ram literally charged him, horns lowered.
Scott stood momentarily paralyzed, staring dumbly at the machine streaking toward him. Reflex finally jerked him out of the way a fraction of an instant too late. The driver’s side mirror smacked his left shoulder, throwing him to the ground. He rolled into the bushes surrounding the church. The bone-jarring collision left a grey haze over his mind. He barely hung onto consciousness.
Slowly, Scott returned to himself. Landscaping bark blanketed the ground underneath him cushioning his fall. A crisp pine scent emanated from the dew-laden shrubbery above him.
When he rolled to get up, fiery pain lit in the depths of his shoulder. He squeezed his eyes closed and gritted his teeth in anticipation of more pain as he rocked slightly to test the extent of damage. No grinding nor sliding of bones. At least those weren’t broken.
Scott’s neck, chest and arm were drenched in something wet. He dabbed at it. It lacked th
e thickness and the metallic smell of blood. Confused, he caught sight of the armband he used to hold his water flask and safety light lying on the road 15 yards from him. The bottle had taken the brunt of the mirror’s impact, saving his arm from more serious trauma.
The flashing red beacon of the safety light hadn’t worked in months. Perhaps if it had functioned, the Dodge wouldn’t have rammed him, but the collision with the mirror had caused the light to start working again. Life had a snarky sense of humor.
Somebody walked in front of the red flashers. He saw the outline of a tall man, thin with the exception of a paunch. A smaller feminine shadow shuffled into view. Behind her, another person shambled just outside the perimeter of the glowing crimson strobe. Scott presumed they were rescuers arriving at the scene of the accident.
He inhaled a short breath, just about to call them over. Before he could utter a sound, an internal force seized his throat, choking him off before he could exhale any noise through his vocal cords. Ice coursed through his veins as his instincts insisted, “Don’t move! Watch!”
Each figure moved stutteringly, as if multiple factions fought for mastery of its body. None appeared to be winning. Faces blinked red from the runner’s light. Dark, sticky-looking smears covered mouths and chins. Jaws opened and shut. Their expressions spun through confusion, insanity, menace, rage, craving, and emptiness. When they stopped, they landed on hunger.
The hunt was on. Scott was the prey.
He retreated slowly into the darkness by the hedge, hoping to stay undetected. He pressed his body more deeply into the damp landscaping wood. Hands whispered loudly around him, probing the bushes to both his right and his left. Dirt-encrusted feet stepped within six inches of where he lay.
Scott’s heart pounded violently. Strength surged into him. Instinctively, he knew they were on the verge of discovering him. He lunged to his right just as two hands reached through a gap in the shrubs, grasping empty air where he had lain an instant before.
The Hollow Men (Book 1): Crave Page 8