Darkened

by Bryan Smith

She let go of the door and fell unconscious to the floor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  October 7,

  High Noon

  “It’s time.”

  Flash heard the voice in his head in those last blissful moments of sleep. He’d been dreaming of a better, happier life in a lush and green paradise somewhere far from this blighted world. A place where the sun always shone and the sky was always the same achingly brilliant hue of blue. And the most common sounds were laughter and birdsong. There’d been a smile on his face while he dreamed of this place, but the expression faltered at the sound of those two words. In the final seconds of the dream the bright blue sky suddenly darkened and a cold wind came sweeping across the verdant land.

  Then his eyes snapped open. The first thing he saw was the damnable billboard. And the washed-out, faded blue of the sky overhead. He was still in the truck, but the old man was gone now. Flash knew he’d never see him again.

  “I’m on my own from here on out,” he said, addressing the comment to the peeling image of the female country singer. “With only you to watch over me. And somehow I don’t think you’re gonna be any help.”

  Flash sighed. “Ain’t nothin’ for it, I guess.”

  He pushed open the truck’s creaking driver’s side door and stepped outside. He moved to the front of the truck, where he groaned and stretched, working out the kinks in his body. Sleeping in the truck meant surrendering a significant degree of physical comfort, but that he could deal with. He’d found a strange measure of peace during his time in the truck and wished like hell he could drive it down Salvation Road. He’d feel so much more secure and confident behind the wheel of a vehicle like the F-150. But this was like wishing away the last few weeks or something else equally impossible, so he put it out of his mind.

  Flash could almost hear the old man’s voice again: So get on with it, then.

  So he started walking. A tremor of excitement swept through him as he crossed the dealership’s parking lot in the space of a few seconds and started down the road. He felt fear, too. A lot of it. He dreaded the confrontation with the dark thing. But he was going to meet his destiny. Which wasn’t quite the destiny he’d envisioned initially. He wasn’t going forth as a warrior. Not exactly. He was more of a vessel. A messenger of salvation. A means to a noble end.

  Emphasis on ‘end’.

  The old man had made it clear that Flash was in the last hours of his mortal life. He had to know and accept this before carrying out his mission. And though he was afraid (terrified, even), accept it he did. At least in part because he had an inkling that the glimpse of paradise from his dream was something more than a wishful fantasy. He wouldn’t have been able to precisely say why he felt this way, but he did. Felt it down to his bones. He’d been granted a peek at the better place that awaited him beyond life in this broken world.

  With each step he took down Broadway, he grew more anxious to make the transition to that place. It would be such a relief to be delivered from this land of nightmares.

  First things first, he told himself. You’ve got a job to do.

  As he passed beneath the billboard and took his first steps down Salvation Road, it was exactly ten minutes past noon.

  “Do you know what I am yet?”

  Emily looked up from her kneeling position on the apartment floor. Warren’s smirking face loomed over her. No, not Warren. She willed herself to think of the thing standing before only as an it. An unfathomable monster in a pretty mask. The creature’s lips and chin were smeared with blood. She looked into its eyes and tried to discern even the faintest flicker of her lost love’s essence there. But she saw only that infernal malevolent glee, a gleaming enthusiasm for slaughter and degradation.

  She coughed. “You’re the devil.”

  It threw its head back and laughed. Then, still grinning broadly, it looked at Emily again. “How quaint. I’m aware of your devil concept, of course. Do you know that when I touch the minds of you humans I absorb every bit of knowledge gleaned throughout the course of your pitiful lives?” It laughed again. “I know everything about you, for instance. Your most private thoughts. Your most shameful fantasies. The things you can’t bring yourself to tell even those closest to you. And I have to tell you, Emily, I don’t think even Warren, masochist that he is, would go for some of those things. You’re a sick little bitch, you know that?”

  Emily said nothing. She was beyond feeling mortified now. Since coming to after her fainting spell, she’d been made to endure levels of humiliation she would never have dreamed possible. And had been made to do things so revolting she was now beyond being shocked.

  The Warren-thing’s nostrils flared. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Emily. The worst is yet to come for you. You have my most sincere promise on that count.”

  Emily’s gaze went back to the floor. She shuddered, feeling the thing’s hot gaze roam over her body. She was naked, but her torso was soaked with gore. Most of this derived from the things she’d been made to do to Zeke Johnson with the kitchen knife. Some of it was from cuts to her own flesh. The coagulated blood felt sticky on her skin, and she ached to wash it off. Every time she shifted her body, dry brown flakes of it fluttered to the crimson-stained carpet.

  The creature put two fingers under her chin and forced her to look at him again. Those nostrils flared again. It was becoming excited. Emily knew what was coming next. She somehow managed not to whimper.

  “Know this, Emily—I’m worse than any imaginary devil.”

  Emily did know it.

  Then the thing was pushing her backward and forcing her legs apart. Her body, manipulated by the drooling creature, shivered with excitement.

  She screamed.

  Jasmine screamed, too.

  Her eyes snapped open and her body lurched on the floor as she emerged from a nightmare of screaming demons and unspeakable atrocities. Short-lived relief flashed through her like a jolt of electricity, then true awareness returned and she realized with despair that she was only trading one nightmare for another. And this one, the waking nightmare, was infinitely worse than the one she’d left behind. Because it was real. Regardless of how desperately her mind tried to rebel against it.

  Warren was on top of the girl again, his butt pistoning up and down in fast but precise strokes, like a machine in a factory. The girl screamed and screamed. The sound was agony laced with pleasure. Jasmine was sickened to find herself dimly aroused. This was the creature’s influence at work, she suspected. The taint of its intrusion into her mind. A twisted, infected part of her wanted what Emily was getting.

  But another, increasingly strong impulse was making itself known. A desire to get up off the floor and get the hell out of here while that vile thing was occupied with the other woman. The idea frightened her as much as it tempted her. Because if that thing caught her in the act of trying to flee, it would stop her. And it would surely punish her in some exquisitely awful way.

  Perhaps instinctively seeking some vivid evidence of the worst that could happen, Jasmine glanced at Zeke Johnson. The former newsman was alive and conscious, but he’d been made to endure hours of seemingly endless tortures. His sat shivering on the couch, his nude body swathed in gore, his eyes glassy and staring. The memory of his shrill, almost girlish screams was so clear in Jasmine’s memory it was as if she was hearing them all over again. He was just a shell now, an irreparably ruined thing. She looked at the cauterized stumps where the fingers of his right hand had been and recalled that awful stench of burning flesh. The thing made Emily do most of the dirty work where Zeke was concerned.

  But Jasmine hadn’t been left out of the festivities. She’d wielded a knife of her own on Emily, inflicting dozens of non-lethal cuts on the younger woman’s torso. At its direction, but not necessarily under force. Not by the strictest definition of ‘force’, at least. Something inside her had snapped in the midst of that orgy of blood and madness, some crucial bit of her sanity had temporarily fled her. She’d felt debauched, lik
e a willing participant in some satanic ritual. She did what he ordered without hesitation, eagerly, reveling in it, as if she believed the only way to survive this time of madness was to embrace it.

  But then there’d been a long period of unconsciousness. Now that she was awake again she felt like a mental patient jolted out of a delirium, temporarily transported back to the land of (relative) sanity via the miracle of psychotropic medication. She experienced a surge of horror at the memory of the things she’d done, and especially at the way she’d felt while doing them.

  Her gaze flicked back to Warren and Emily.

  The machine was still pounding away.

  Get out, a voice seemed to whisper in her ear. This felt strangely like more than an internal voice, almost like some disembodied consciousness giving her direction. Get up and take a walk down Salvation Road.

  She frowned.

  Salvation Road?

  What the hell is that supposed to mean?

  But the voice didn’t come again. That was okay, though. It’d given her the last extra bit of motivation she needed to overcome her terror of retribution. She braced her hands on the carpet and pushed herself slowly up, keeping a wary eye on the rutting couple all the while. First she got to her knees, then, very carefully, to her feet. She kept her mouth closed the whole time, not wanting the thing to hear her breathing.

  She was five feet away from the open front door of the apartment. She wasn’t sure she would even be attempting this had the door been closed. She sent a silent prayer of thanks to the God she’d no doubt offended countless times over the last several hours and began edging toward the door. She shot a quick glance in Zeke’s direction, worried that he might give her away in the last moment, but he still seemed catatonic.

  Jasmine moved backward through the opening, the bare soles of her feet bumping against the threshold. Though she managed not to stumble, she for the first time considered the potential difficulties of attempting a rapid getaway barefoot. It would be an impediment for sure, but not one she could allow herself to dwell on just now. She was in the hallway outside the apartment now, and all at once freedom no longer seemed like a remote fantasy. It was a treasure there for the taking. All she had to do was reach out and grab it. So, trying her best to step lightly, she moved quickly down the dusty wooden landing and reached the staircase in a matter of moments.

  Her heart raced as she descended the steps to the first floor, first with care and precision, then with increasing abandon. She glanced backward as she reached the first floor and saw no sign of pursuit. She heard more of Emily’s squeals and screams and knew she still had an opportunity to get one hell of a head start. But it wouldn’t do to linger even a moment longer.

  So she pulled open the building’s creaking front door and dashed outside. The diffused sunlight fell warmly on her skin as she streaked across the courtyard, and through the debris-covered front yard to the street beyond.

  She turned left on 21st and kept on running. If she had to—and if her body could bear it—she figured she might keep running until she was out of the city.

  As Flash moved at an unhurried pace down Broadway toward 21st, he allowed himself to be distracted for a time from the approaching rendezvous with the dark one. Nostalgia for the world he’d known washed over him as he surveyed the array of familiar haunts and landmarks. Coming up on his right was Noshville, the New York-style deli that had been one of his favorite places to have lunch. The once immaculately white facade was now tinged a deep brown and the windows were shaded with what looked to be an indelible layer of sludge and/or dust. A little farther along, up on the left, was the Great Escape, which, true to its name, had been a great place to hunt for rare old records and comic books. Its windows were smashed out and Flash had an amusing image of crazed comics geeks looting the place the day after the demon attack, carrying out armloads of Mylar-sealed treasures. Of course, those same geeks would all have been dead a day or two later, victims of the creeping, invisible infection from that other world. The realization was a sobering slap in the face, and Flash was no longer amused.

  Prior to beginning his fateful walk down “Salvation Road”, Flash hadn’t quite grasped the extent of the mystery malady that had struck down most of his fellow humans. What he’d known had been strictly limited to what the old man had been able to tell him. Things that meshed with his memories of his dying coworkers. That had been bad enough. What the old man told him was worse by far. When Flash had at last understood that nearly everyone else on earth was dead, he’d experienced a deeply cosmic, utterly unquantifiable horror. In some ways it’d been too big a thing to truly absorb, at least on that abstract level.

  But now he was seeing it for himself and there was no longer anything at all abstract about it. He saw bodies and parts of bodies everywhere. But they didn’t look the way he imagined bodies dead less than two weeks should look. The state of decay in most cases was so advanced the victims appeared mummified. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for these poor bastards. First realizing you were sick and getting sicker. Then knowing there was nothing you could do about it. That there was no one around to help you, and that it would only get steadily worse, until an agonizing death came and draped a thick, black blanket over the horrors surrounding you.

  Tears welled in Flash’s eyes, and he wiped them away as he moved along the curve in the road where Broadway gave way to 21st Ave. Behind the grief and tears, though, was a boiling rage. If what the old man had told him could be trusted—and Flash believed it could be—the dark thing he was about to meet had deliberately set in motion the process that shredded the veil of “reality” that separated the two co-existing worlds. It likely hadn’t known the two worlds were so thoroughly incompatible, as its original intentions had probably included a prolonged campaign of terror and subjugation. Decades, or even centuries, of a bloody reign. The dark thing had grown bored with its own world—or so the old man hypothesized—where there’d been precious few living creatures (other than the Shoth) left to kill. So though the tragedy that was the decimation of the human race was immense, Flash decided he was at least glad the goddamned thing had been deprived of its most coveted prize, a new world full of things to hurt and terrorize. Looking at it in that light, the creeping rot could be seen as a king of mercy, albeit an unintentional one.

  But knowing that did nothing to temper the fury brewing within him. A grim smile twitched at the corners of his mouth as he imagined the coming moment of confrontation. Especially that wonderful instant when the dark thing would realize what was about to happen—a thing it would have absolutely no defense against.

  The thing ejaculated into Emily, pounding her against the floor as hard as it possibly could. Emily cried out again, purely from pain this time. She was certain the creature meant to snap her spine before it was done. But then it abruptly withdrew from her and she was still intact, albeit bruised and battered. Some of the knife-wounds to her torso were bleeding again, but she didn’t care. At least the vile thing was off (and out) of her again.

  Her head rolled numbly to the left and she saw the kitchen knife she’d used to torment Zeke lying discarded on the floor. She considered grabbing it and drawing it quickly across her jugular vein, but she didn’t have the strength. Right now even breathing hurt. She closed her eyes and hoped she’d at least be allowed to sleep a while. It was the only means of escape currently available to her. She wondered vaguely how much more punishment her body could take. Surely not much more. She harbored a dark hope that the abuse would soon reach such an extreme level that her heart would simply give out. She didn’t really want to die, not down to the deepest core of her being, but death seemed the only permanent way out of the hell her life had become.

  She was drifting down toward unconsciousness when she was jolted wide awake by a yell so piercing it made her chest constrict with terror, and for a moment she was sure her wish for death was being granted. Then there was another yell, louder than before, and her heart kept on
beating.

  Somehow she found the strength to prop herself up on her elbows. The anger exploding out of the creature filled the room like the heat flash from a bomb blast and sent a burst of adrenaline coursing through her body. The thing stood in the middle of the room, spinning around in a fast circle, its eyes wide and searching. At first Emily couldn’t fathom the source of its rage—then it hit her.

  And she smiled.

  Jasmine…

  Though she hadn’t liked the woman, a thrill close to elation made her grin as she realized Jasmine was gone. Somehow, while the thing had been busy raping Emily, the other woman had managed to emerge from the state of near-catatonia she’d been in for hours and slip out of the apartment. All without making a sound. And it was plain that the creature hadn’t had the slightest inkling of what was happening. Which sort of blew its pretense of omniscience all to shreds, didn’t it?

  Emily realized there was a grin stretched wide across her face and made it go away before the creature could focus on her. She was happy verging on ecstatic at this turn of events, but this joy was tempered by the knowledge she would likely soon endure the brunt of the thing’s rage. She didn’t look forward to that, but she remained thrilled that the it had finally been thwarted, and she silently urged Jasmine on.

  Get out of town, you fucking bitch, she thought. Run like the goddamned wind!

  The creature was still stumbling about the room, its eyes still wide and uncomprehending. Emily saw what was about to happen a moment before it did. One of its feet landed on the discarded knife. It screamed and then was flailing backward, falling hard to the floor. Emily laughed. She couldn’t help it. Let the fucker do as it wished to her. This was too wonderful a turn of events not to express her delight.

  The thing groaned and managed to struggle into a sitting position. It looked woozy, its eyes red and glossy. Its gaze was unfocused for several moments—until another trill of helpless laughter from Emily caused its head to swivel in her direction. The expression it showed her exuded befuddlement. Seeing it caused her to laugh yet again.