Darkened

by Bryan Smith

She would have to leave her home.

  Probably forever.

  The thought made her eyes fill with moisture for a moment. But she refused to succumb to emotion. There would be time for tears later. Maybe. So she steeled herself and returned to the bedroom, affording the ruined bathroom door only the briefest of glimpses. She snatched her purse off her nightstand and hurried out of the room.

  Back in the kitchen, she dropped the purse on the counter, grabbed a canvas bag from a hook in the pantry, and filled it with canned goods. She added a can opener and a few utensils from a drawer. Next she climbed a step-stool and took a Styrofoam cooler down from the pantry’s top shelf. She filled this with ice from the freezer, then packed it with a few perishables from the fridge.

  Packing the food felt a bit absurd—a little like preparing for a weekend getaway—but she didn’t know what kind of world was waiting for her out there. She didn’t want to have to go foraging for sustenance her first night away from home.

  Next she returned to the bedroom and quickly filled a bag with several changes of clothes. She glanced one last time at the bathroom on her way out. Through the shattered lower half of the door, she could see only white tile and the sink. She was tempted to pull the remnant of the door away from the frame and give the room a closer inspection. But the impulse was fleeting. Her common sense took over and carried her back to the kitchen.

  She returned to the living room, where she removed a small photo album from a shelf and placed it in her handbag. Then she walked out of her home for the last time. In the garage, she placed the Styrofoam cooler in the trunk of her BMW. Everything else went up front with her.

  Before she could leave there was one last bit of business to attend to. She lowered her panties and squatted at the rear of the garage. Peeing on the cool concrete made her feel like a savage. She suspected, though, that this particular indignity would soon rank among the least distasteful she would have to endure. When she was done, she returned to the car and drove away from her home without a single glance back. Looking back would hurt too much, maybe more than she could handle.

  Instead, she kept her gaze on the road ahead and didn’t glance at the rearview mirror until she was several miles down the road. She scanned the yards of houses she passed, searching for signs of other survivors. But there was no indication anyone else remained alive in the neighborhood. She saw abandoned cars and houses in ruins. Other houses appeared essentially intact, but they somehow conveyed an emptiness that was as depressing as the ruins. And the overall impression of utter desolation failed to improve as she moved out of the neighborhood and drove toward town. To the contrary, the ruin of Harrisburg was nearly as depressing as the violation of her own home.

  In the end, it was more than she could take.

  So she drove out of town and headed out to the highway.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Nashville, TN

  September 27

  10:05 p.m.

  Jake Dunham stood shirtless at Emily Sinclair’s bedroom window. He was watching the street below, scanning it for signs of Aaron Harris. Emily watched him from the bed, where she lie naked beneath a single sheet.

  He was a tall man. Maybe not quite NBA-level tall, but certainly tall enough to be a star player on most college basketball squads. But he was scrawny, the kind of skinny where he might disappear altogether if glimpsed from a side angle. He was a good guy. Sweet and adorable. He was no Rick McAllister in the looks department, but he was cute in his own gawky way.

  Still, she couldn’t believe she’d fucked him. The sex had been imbued with a sense of desperation, an unarticulated hope that they might reach a center of pleasure within each other so pure that it would somehow overwhelm the death and darkness surrounding them.

  But when it was over there’d been no sense of transcendence. For Emily, there’d only been more tears, an inevitable crash. Jake had been mostly silent in the aftermath of that desperate passion. He’d even slept for a time after Emily rebuffed his attempt to console her. After he woke up, he seemed to have gone to a dark place within himself, a deeply contemplative state that took his mind away and left only a physical shell here. She’d looked into his eyes at one point and realized he wasn’t seeing her at all.

  So she slept some herself. Sleep that was fitful and filled with dreams of death and chaos. In one of them Aaron returned to her room. He grinned a demon’s grin. His eyes were red and bulbous. In one hand, he held Michelle’s severed head, the length of spinal column depending from the stump of her neck like the limp corpse of a snake. In his other hand was the hunting knife. He hissed at her. His mouth opened and a black, forked tongue rolled out. Michelle’s mouth formed a crooked grin and opened slightly to emit a wheeze of something that might have been laughter.

  Emily awoke then with a cry.

  The sound triggered Jake’s return from the dark place. She was so relieved when he took her in his arms again. Seeing Jake so gloomy—even in these circumstances—had frightened her nearly as much as her encounter with Aaron. That darkness was so out of character for the normally affable Jacob Dunham.

  Emily sighed. “Do you think he’ll stay away?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” Jake’s gaze went back to the window. “No. That’s not what I think at all.” He laughed, but there was no trace of humor in the sound. “I have this typical guy impulse to tell you what you want to hear, what I think will make you feel better. But I can’t do that. Not anymore.”

  Emily frowned. “So…you think he _will_ be back?”

  Jake shrugged. “It’s hard to know what a headcase like that will do, but I have a hunch he’s not gonna stay away just because we told him to.”

  “Dammit.”

  “Yeah, it sucks. But we have to face some hard facts. There’s nothing to keep him away. We can’t file a report with the police. There’s no official authority of any kind to keep him at bay.” Jake’s expression darkened again, and seeing it sent Emily’s own mood spiraling downward. “I hate to say it, but I have a feeling guys like Mr. Harris are gonna thrive in the days ahead. It’s their world now.”

  Hearing Jake say this made Emily feel like crying again, but her eyes remained dry. Despite her fear, there was a center of numbness inside her and it was growing outward by the moment. Soon, she supposed, she would feel nothing at all. Part of her thought that might be a good thing, but the rest of her was terrified by the notion.

  But she knew Jake was right. They’d tried calling the police numerous times. In the beginning there’d still been a faint level of hope. A glance out the window revealed that the power was still on in many parts of the city. And the phone was on. Surely if these things were working some semblance of the former power structure must still exist. But the calls to the police station and 911 went unanswered. They called other people. Friends. Relatives. And the result was always the same. Nothing.

  She threw the bed sheet aside and climbed out of bed. She retrieved her clothes from a pile on the floor and hurriedly put them on. She grabbed her boots, plopped down in a chair, and pulled them on.

  Jake frowned. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting dressed.”

  “I can see that.” Jake, perhaps feeling compelled to emulate Emily, found his t-shirt and pulled it on. “Are we going somewhere?”

  Emily walked over to the window. She peered out at the same dark and empty street Jake had studied so intently earlier. She saw lights in the distance, but not as many as before. Most of the lights that were on were concentrated in one area. They appeared to be somewhere in the vicinity of the Vanderbilt campus. Another, smaller grouping of lights farther away emanated from the downtown area.

  She looked at Jake. “We can’t stay here. Not with that creep maybe lurking around. Not with pieces of my neighbor strewn all over the living room.” She moved away from the window, strode across the room toward the closet. “We’ve stayed too long as it is.”

  Jake sat now at the foot of his bed, one leg propped over the othe
r while he tied a shoestring. “I don’t know if leaving now is such a good idea.”

  Emily came out of the closet with a traveling bag. She opened it and laid it on the bed. “I’m not staying here, Jake. I can’t. It’s not just the possibility of Aaron coming back. This place feels…tainted. It’s not a place where people live anymore. It’s a mausoleum.”

  “The whole fucking world is a mausoleum, Em.”

  Emily glared at Jake. “I know that,” she snapped. Then she sighed and her expression softened a bit. “I’m sorry. It’s just that this particular mausoleum was my home for the last two years. And I just can’t stand to be here any longer.”

  Jake nodded. “I can understand that. And I’ll go wherever you want to go, I guess.” A corner of his mouth twitched. “But I think we shouldn’t leave just yet.”

  Emily shoved clothes into the bag. “Why not?”

  Jake stood and in a moment resumed his previous position at the window. “Because it’s dark. Because there’s no telling what’s going on out there. There could be more of those things around. Even if they’re all dead, which I doubt, there’s those openings between their world and ours. I’ve been out there, Em. There’s a lot of them. It’s like the world itself is coming unraveled. In the dark you could walk right into one and not realize it until it’s too late.”

  Emily felt a mounting frustration as she listened to Jake. She knew he was only telling her the truth as he saw it, but that made it no less maddening. The core of it was the continuing disintegration of the world, of reality itself, and that remained a concept she had great difficulty wrapping her head around. She wanted back the world she’d known. Solid, unmalleable reality. This new world, this twisted bizarro realm where the very air before you could turn black and loose hideous monsters from another dimension, this was unacceptable. A world in which the substance of reality could be shredded like the pages of a book was not one she wanted to inhabit. The bitch of it was she felt no real eagerness to die, either.

  She zipped the bag shut and looked at Jake. “I’m aware of the dangers. But I mean to walk out of here within the next few minutes. I wanna see if anyone else is alive out there. Unless you’ve got a better idea. One that doesn’t involve staying in this apartment.”

  Jake’s brow creased as he thought about it a moment. “Maybe I do have an idea.”

  Emily folded her arms beneath her breasts. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Like I said, my main worry is the dark. Going out there now would be tantamount to a kamikaze mission. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to die just yet.”

  Emily sighed. “Yeah. Me, either.”

  Jake moved away from the window and stood directly beneath the ceiling light. The way the light struck his shaggy light brown hair and ragged goatee made him look almost angelic. His pale blue eyes twinkled in a way she might have interpreted as mischievous, or even seductive, under other circumstances. Emily thought again of their frantic coupling and wondered whether there might be a potential for something greater between them beyond the desperation of the moment. The thought brought forth another wave of depression. Because what good could something as fragile as love possibly be in a doomed world?

  Jake said, “I agree with you. We should leave.” Then his tone became firmer, more emphatic. “But we should wait for morning.” He raised his voice and pushed ahead when he sensed she was about to protest. “Now, hold on. Hear me out. There’s a compromise to be made.”

  “There is?”

  Jake nodded. “We’ll leave this apartment. Right now, if you want to. We’ll spend the night in one of the other apartments in this building, then head out after the sun comes out.”

  Emily’s frown deepened. “What if we break into an apartment that’s still occupied? I know some of these people, Jake. More than one of them would shoot an intruder under normal circumstances. Now…”

  Jake sighed. “I think your neighbors are either all dead, or are gone and not coming back any time soon. Think about it. We’ve been here all night. We haven’t heard a thing. No voices. No creaking floors or stairs. I’m willing to bet we’ve got the whole building to ourselves. And if I’m wrong, hell, we’ll knock first and announce our presence. If we find anyone that way, I don’t think they’re gonna shoot us. Shit, they’ll probably welcome us with open arms. Just think how happy we’d be if we looked out the window and saw other living humans walking down the street.”

  Emily pursed her lips as she thought about it. Jake’s proposal made a certain amount of sense. A significant part of her still ached to be gone from this dead place, but a new voice of reason was speaking within her now—and she found she was willing to listen to it.

  She smiled. “Okay. We’ll do it your way. This time.”

  The relief that filled Jake’s face then almost made Emily laugh. He smiled broadly. “Great!” He grabbed her bag and slung it over his shoulder. “Let’s get moving, then.”

  They left the bedroom. On their way out to the living room, Jake detoured into the kitchen alcove and opened a drawer. Emily heard a clink of silverware as he sorted through its contents. He tossed a couple of steak knives onto the counter and threw the drawer shut.

  “You don’t have a big carving knife, do you?”

  Emily shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Damn.” Jake sighed. “I guess these’ll have to do.”

  He shoved one of the steak knives into a front pocket of his jeans and passed the other to Emily, who took it but regarded it with a skeptical frown. “I doubt I could stop a charging poodle with this thing, much less Aaron Harris.”

  Jake shrugged. “I’m sure we’ll have a chance to better arm ourselves before long. There’s a world of weaponry out there for the taking.” A shadow seemed to fall across his face. “That’s another thing, we’ve got to acquire firepower before our nemesis does. You know damn well Mr. Sleazebag will lift a Glock off the first dead cop he sees.”

  The notion made Emily more anxious than ever to leave her apartment. “Let’s get out of here. Now.”

  Jake nodded. “Yeah.”

  Emily caught a quick glimpse of Michelle’s remains as they moved through the living room, then averted her gaze. They stepped through the space formerly occupied by Emily’s front door and stood in the dark hallway. One glance at Michelle Anderson’s apartment was enough to rule it out as a possible destination. Its door was missing as well, and the darkness beyond that opening was of a quality that was more disturbing than ordinary darkness. Something was there. Aaron, perhaps, or a reality rift, or some otherworldly presence with a newly acquired hunger for human flesh.

  A turn to the left would take them down a staircase leading to four more apartments on the floors below. They descended the staircase to the second floor, where they paused at the door of apartment 3A. Jake tried the closed door, but it was locked. He looked at Emily. “What do you want to do?”

  Emily remained uncomfortable with the idea of breaking and entering. Someone could be lurking silently on the other side of that door. Someone no doubt as terrified as she’d been during all those hours under her bed. She didn’t know all her neighbors and wasn’t sure who lived in this apartment. It would be better to try the door of someone she knew, a person whose reaction she could possibly predict. She crossed to the other side of the landing and tried the door to 4A.

  It, too, was locked.

  She took a deep breath and slowly expelled it. She knew these people. Laura and Kelly. Two twenty-something lesbians who occasionally stopped in at the Villager for a pitcher of Shiner Bock. She rapped softly on the inlaid glass window and said, “Kel? Laura? It’s Emily. Are you in there?”

  She waited. Jake stepped up beside her. “Em, you can’t be timid about this. If they’re in there, they probably didn’t even hear you.”

  Emily sighed. He had a point. She didn’t want to make a lot of noise, but she didn’t see how there was any alternative. She banged the base of a fist against the window. “Kelly
! Laura! Come on, guys, open up. It’s just me and Jake out here.”

  Again, they waited. They stood perfectly still, barely breathing, straining to detect any hint of movement from within the apartment. The interior of the apartment was obscured by a piece of plywood that had been nailed into the other side of the door. This was to deter potential smash-and-enter burglars. All the apartments in the building were similarly protected. Emily had always thought it was a sensible measure for the building’s owner to take, but now it was just another source of frustration.

  Jake said, “I think we ought to try getting in here. They know us, Em. If they were in there, they’d let us in.”

  Emily frowned. She loathed the idea of forcing her way into a friend’s apartment. But Jake was right. Damn him. They could, right now, enter an apartment likely to be unoccupied, or they could waste who knew how much of the rest of the evening searching for a more easily accessible place to crash.

  She sighed. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s get in there.”

  Jake handed her the bag and she took it by the shoulder strap. “Step back.”

  Emily shuffled backward and watched as Jake braced himself squarely in front of the door, then surged forward, driving the flat of his right foot forward with every ounce of strength he could must. There was a cracking sound, but the door held. Jake braced himself and kicked again. Then again. Each time the cracking sound was louder. Then, after maybe a dozen kicks, the door came away from the frame.

  Jake grinned. “After you, my lady.”

  Emily peered into the dark kitchen. The emptiness and shadows unsettled her. Beyond the kitchen was a small dining room. A small table and chairs occupied the middle of the room. Except for an empty napkin holder at its center, the table was bare. And aside from the piece of plywood on the kitchen floor, there was no evidence of destruction. Nor was there a death smell.

  Still…some instinct held her back. She looked at Jake. “Could you go first? It’s not that I’m scared or anything—”

  Jake laughed. “Well, personally, I’m scared shitless. But your wish is my command.”