Enter Darkness Box Set [Books 1-5]

by Fawkes, K. M.

  “‘For in such an hour as you think not, the Son of Man cometh.’” Anna clung tight to his arm, looking half-starved and oddly small. “That’s one of the verses they made us memorize, at the compound. I wasn’t sure what it meant at first, but I think I get it, now. Death could come at any moment.”

  Brad wasn’t entirely sure he agreed with that interpretation, but he wasn’t about to pick a fight with Anna in her current state. He gazed up the road ahead of them, where another abandoned car waited. It was the third they had passed in the last half hour.

  “This must have been what it felt like to live through the Black Death,” he said, deciding to change the subject rather than dwell on Scripture.

  “If there are history books in the future, they won’t look too kindly on the last hundred years, will they?”

  Brad didn’t answer. He had paused at the front of the red Civic and was now rubbing away the frost on the driver’s side window with his gloved fist.

  “What is it?” asked Anna. “Is something in there?”

  “No, I was just thinking.” Brad took a step back. “Night’s going to be falling in the next hour or so. It’ll get colder, and we’ll need a place to rest for the night. In the absence of a house, I think a car might be our best bet.”

  “Do you think it’s…big enough?” she replied dubiously.

  “I was hoping for a fancy hotel,” he said in a chilly tone, “but they’re all booked for the night.”

  This silenced Anna for the moment, though she continued to peer through the window with a dubious stare as if wondering how they were both going to fit inside.

  Brad had been thinking hard about this ever since he spotted the first car.

  “We could fold out the two front seats,” he said, “or you could take the front and I could take the back. It won’t be the snuggest sleep of your life, but it’s better than sleeping in the snow.”

  “I’m not opposed to sleeping in a car,” said Anna. “But how are we going to stay warm?”

  Brad had been wondering this, too. He had slept in cars before, in the middle of winter, and unless the engine was running and the heat was turned on, they were only marginally warmer than the air outside. But the car couldn’t be working, or it wouldn’t have been abandoned.

  “Look, it’s the best idea I’ve got,” he said finally. “We’ll sleep with our coats on, and maybe that will be enough.”

  “If only we had a dog or something,” Anna said. “I read somewhere that travelers in the polar regions used to sleep with two or three dogs on their beds at night to keep warm without the benefit of a heater.”

  Brad thought briefly of Remington, the retriever who’d kept him warm and his spirits up during his search for Anna and the kids. As good as it would have been to have him here, he was glad to have left the dog in the safety of Vanessa’s place. He’d been through enough.

  “No dogs here, sorry,” he said to Anna. “The only bodies we’ve got are each other’s.”

  He would have been thrilled, Brad reflected as he lit a fire in the snow, if Anna had come to him a few months ago while they were living together and suggested sleeping together to keep warm. Probably he would have taken it as her way of expressing romantic interest.

  They hadn’t talked about their feelings since shortly after that first aborted encounter, the night Brad had brought out the bottle of Scotch, but it was a sure sign of how much things had shifted between them in the ensuing months that they were now talking about spooning not from any mutual attraction but because they might die otherwise.

  Brad wasn’t sure the concept of romantic attraction retained much meaning in an age when the choice of one’s partner was so limited. Before the collapse, during the internet era, a person was able to choose a romantic partner out of all the world’s available singles. Now, with the population thoroughly gutted, with few means of travel and no means of meeting people online, his prospects were limited to women he met in person. It made the notion of “soul mates” seem like a sentimental relic of a past that was already rapidly being forgotten.

  He had always hoped that eventually he would find someone with whom he shared a spooky connection, some thrilling intellectual and emotional chemistry that was uniquely theirs and that would be the envy of other couples. He had spent much of his twenties fruitlessly seeking this woman. He had dated an aspiring actress, the lead singer of a power-punk girl band, and even entertained a brief fling with the wife of one his college professors, though he was embarrassed to think of it now.

  Anna wasn’t like any of those women. He had thought, once, that perhaps the two of them would end up together, but it appeared increasingly unlikely that that would ever be the case. If they were destined to be nothing more than friends, he decided, he could live with that. But first they had to live.

  Once he had finished building the fire, Brad walked over to where Anna was seated in the back of the Civic, droplets of ice forming on the fringes of her coat sleeves.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” he said, “and I think we ought to get that wound cleaned now rather than later. I don’t want to wait another day and risk something happening to you.” He didn’t have to specify what he meant.

  Anna winced, as if sensing he was right but not relishing the prospect. “You said it wasn’t safe to perform a medical procedure out here in the snow—that the wound might get infected.”

  “I know,” Brad said, “but the back of this car might be the best we can hope for right now. The roof will keep the snow out, and the seats are sufficiently dry that you won’t have to worry about water leaking into the cut and infecting it.”

  Anna reached instinctively for her leg, somehow looking even paler than she had done before. “Do you have anything that might act as a painkiller? Alcohol or anything?”

  “Anna, I’m going to need you to trust me on this.” The old tone of impatience was returning to Brad’s voice. “Tell me, what was the most painful experience you ever had?”

  “Uh, when I was twelve, I had to get a root canal,” said Anna. “But they gave me—”

  “And you survived that, and you’ll survive this,” Brad cut in. “When it was happening I bet it seemed like the pain was never going to end. But then it was over and you never had to think about it again.”

  “I had nightmares about it for the next year,” Anna replied.

  Brad was beginning to think he maybe hadn’t chosen the best example. “Look, you’ll be thanking me in another ten years when you’re not dead. Either we clean the wound out now or we risk an infection that could kill you. Either you choose to suffer now or you suffer later.”

  Anna went quiet at that, and Brad was sure that she was holding back tears. Something inside him softened.

  “Look. I wish Lee hadn’t shot you in the leg,” he said, “and if I could go back twelve hours and stop him from doing it, I would. But there’s no point in wanting to change the past unless you can figure out a way to do it. I can guarantee you that as painful as this is going to be, it will be over in fifteen to twenty minutes, at most. And then—”

  “Then what?” asked Anna, sensing his hesitation.

  “Then we’ll try and survive till morning, and go from there.”

  Judging from Anna’s hesitation, Brad had assumed that cleaning the wound was going to be an arduous task in which she screamed and moaned and dug her nails into the soft flesh of his arms while he struggled to hold down the injured leg long enough to clean it. But, having learned that she would be given no pain relief, Anna seemed to have lost the will to resist.

  Instead, she retired to the back of the car and lay against the passenger-side door awaiting his arrival, reminding her of a young caribou Brad had once seen in an animal documentary who gave up in defeat and allowed itself to be eaten by a pursuing polar wolf.

  This curious display of resignation and resolve softened Brad, and the frustrations that had been building between them ever since he announced that he was going to clean the wou
nd again slowly ebbed.

  To make the task easier, he did his best to distract her, first by telling stories from his days working as a vet in Bangor. Anna struggled to listen; she fought back tears of pain; but he could tell she wasn’t sufficiently interested and cast around for a new topic. Realizing with a shock of embarrassment that although they had lived together for some time he still knew almost nothing about her, he asked her questions about herself, her hobbies, and her life before the disaster as they occurred to him. What was her favorite color? (Velvety crimson.) What was the best meal she had ever eaten? (Baked salmon paired with sauvignon blanc.) When did she first kiss a boy? (Anna glared at him and hesitated for about half a second before saying, “Fifteen.”) Had she liked it? (“He kissed me, actually, and no.”)

  He kept interviewing her as he applied the new bandage, torn from another strip of his thin T-shirt, and although Anna let out a few panicked gasps, and although at one point she nearly kneed him in the shin as he stooped over her, the whole procedure only took about fifteen minutes, at the end of which Brad rose with a paternal smile and said, “There, now. You’re all done. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  He was teasing, mostly: performing an impromptu surgery in the back of an abandoned car with no anesthetics was about as bad as it gets. But after Anna had registered the fact that he wasn’t going to be digging into her wound again for the rest of the night, and that a fresh bandage had been added, and that she wasn’t in any immediate danger of dying—which admittedly took a minute or two—she turned him a look of surprised gratitude. “You didn’t have to go through the trouble,” she said softly. “But thank you.”

  “No need to thank me,” he said quietly, though his heart gave an unexpected leap at the sight of her face looking back at his in relief.

  Before long, they were turning in for the night. Having talked it over, they had decided that if they folded out the rear seat there should be enough room for the two of them to sleep in relative comfort. Brad would sleep with his arms around Anna, so that they might stay warm during a night when the temperatures were threatening to descend into the upper twenties.

  Brad had built the fire close to the back of the car, and the flames illuminated Anna’s dirt-smudged face as she lay back against the reclining seat using her coat as a makeshift blanket.

  “The fire ought to last us the rest of the night,” Brad said as he sat down beside her.

  “What about the noise you heard earlier?” asked Anna. “The hunter?”

  “I guess if he sees us, he sees us.” Brad had been thinking about it and didn’t see that they had any other options. “Maybe we’ve put some distance between us over the past six hours or so. I don’t know. I just know that without the fire, we might go to sleep tonight and not wake up, and I don’t want to chance that.”

  “At least we have the axe,” Anna said, “in case he does show up.”

  Brad murmured his agreement, even as inwardly he questioned what she expected an axe to do against an experienced hunter wielding a high-powered weapon. He didn’t voice his disagreement, of course; he had no option at this point but to maintain the pretense of optimism.

  Quietly, though, after Anna fell asleep that night, Brad slipped the pistol out of his ankle holster and placed it into the pocket of his coat.

  Chapter 5

  Anna had long since fallen asleep by the time Brad began to nod off. They lay there awkwardly for about half an hour, adjusting their bodies until they had found the least uncomfortable positions for sleeping in. At one point she complained that his elbow was digging painfully into her ribs; Brad apologized, but she continued to wriggle anxiously.

  With mounting impatience Brad pulled away, his face warmed by the glow of the fire that blazed on the snow-covered roadway. Anna turned sullenly over, hooking her arms into the sleeves of her coat, and Brad waited for a respectful minute before lying back down and gingerly placing his arms back around her waist.

  It was the type of intimate gesture that in any other context would have presaged a night of passionate lovemaking. Months before, when the cabin still stood, that might have been the case, but Brad knew they were far past that now.

  He wondered how differently things might have gone if they had made love that night at the cabin. Maybe the experience would have bonded them; maybe it would have eased her insecurities; maybe she wouldn’t have been tempted to flee into the snow a few days later. Perhaps she would have fled all the same.

  When he finally fell asleep that night after listening for nearly an hour to the rise and fall of Anna’s breathing and the soft pounding of her heart, he dreamt that several days had passed and they were still walking along the same highway they had been following for much of the afternoon.

  As they made their way down the main street of what had once been a thriving industrial town atop a high hill, Brad spotted what were unmistakably lights in the distance. Thinking he must have been hallucinating, he waved Anna over.

  “Do you see that?” he asked, feeling perplexed and excited. “Tell me that isn’t what I think it is.”

  She didn’t have to ask what she was supposed to be looking at. “That isn’t just one or two lights; that’s a whole town.”

  “Within walking distance, no less.” The light of the setting sun shone on his face with a dull salmon color. “Less than a day or two ahead of us at the rate we’ve been going.”

  But Anna didn’t share Brad’s enthusiasm for the journey ahead of them. “I don’t get it, though,” she said slowly. “I don’t understand. How does one town come to have power? I don’t know a lot about the grid, but I know it doesn’t work like that. When we lost it, we all lost it.”

  “I don’t get it, either,” said Brad, feeling newly energized. “But what else could it be? Somebody’s obviously found a way to bring the power back.”

  “Who, though? And how?”

  “We’ll know soon enough.”

  He began to descend the hill at a steady pace and Anna followed a few steps behind, looking greatly troubled. “Brad, you can’t really be thinking of going down there!”

  “Why wouldn’t we?” he asked.

  “Because it gives me the creeps.” There was an urgency to her voice that unnerved him. “Maybe the lights are a trap. Maybe they’re hoping to draw the attention of travelers so they can murder them in their sleep. Like those deep-sea fish that hold lights in front of their face, and then, when you get too close—”

  “I think living on your own has made you paranoid,” Brad replied. “If we’re going to survive, we can’t afford to distrust everyone. We have to be willing to go where help is available.”

  Later, Brad remembered thinking it odd that although the dream unfolded from his perspective, he—the person watching the dream—sided strongly with Anna.

  They awoke the next day after a restless night’s sleep on the floor of a suburban barber shop and continued their walk toward the city lights, Brad having finally managed to quell Anna’s objections by telling her that if she didn’t want to go with him, she was welcome to stay behind.

  Walking at a pace of about three to four miles per hour, Brad estimated that they would reach the mysterious town that night at around sundown. “Which is fine,” he said. “We wouldn’t be able to see the lights as well during the day.”

  They reached town that night at around ten minutes past six. Brad couldn’t have been mistaken—he was a skilled navigator and there was no way he had gotten them lost—but his certainties crumbled as they walked down a dusky main street devoid of electricity or people.

  They walked in silence from building to building along the boardwalk, passing a conservatory, an antiques store with a strudel bakery attached, a hundred-year-old Unitarian church built of stone with a gated garden in back. As they walked, they peered into windows and knocked on doors with a sense of mounting futility. No one answered.

  “Brad, maybe there were no lights,” said Anna as they stood on the outdoor patio of an Italian r
estaurant in the dusky half-light. “Maybe we just imagined it.”

  “We couldn’t have both imagined it,” Brad said angrily. “Hallucinations don’t work like that.”

  “Well, maybe it wasn’t purely imaginary.” She spoke quietly, as if afraid of angering him further in his agitated state. “Maybe we saw something, it just wasn’t what we thought—like that married couple who saw a power line and thought it was a UFO.”

  She sat down in a wrought-iron patio chair, looking deeply tired. It was one of those restaurants that in an earlier time would have been bustling at this hour with uniformed waiters, traditional Italian folk music and the heady smell of oiled breadsticks. Now only rats scuttled across the overhead floorboards.

  Having come this far, Brad wasn’t ready to admit defeat just yet.

  “Maybe the lights only come on at certain times,” he said. “Or maybe the people are hiding. Maybe they sensed the presence of intruders and retreated into their basements or catacombs or wherever the hell they go when a stranger comes walking into town!”

  “Brad, why are you yelling?” asked Anna warily.

  “What does it matter if I yell? If there’s no one here—”

  He never completed the thought. At that moment they heard the distant shudder of a generator awakening to life and the patio was flooded with white light.

  It was the first time Brad had seen electrical light since the collapse of the infrastructure grid, and he wasn’t ready for it. Shielding his eyes, he waited for them to adjust.

  “We can’t be the only people here,” he said loudly.

  “Maybe it’s just one of those things,” said Anna. “I remember reading a story in school about a house powered by robots and computers, and the robots continued to work long after the family they served had been incinerated in a nuclear war. For all we know, we could be the only ones here.”