by Ike Hamill
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1: Robby
Chapter 2: Judy
Chapter 3: Robby
Chapter 4: Judy
Chapter 5: Robby
Chapter 6: Judy
Chapter 7: Robby
Chapter 8: Judy
Chapter 9: Robby
Chapter 10: Judy
BLACK FRIDAY
BY
IKE HAMILL
WWW.IKEHAMILL.COM
Special Thanks:
Cover design by BelleDesign [BelleDesign.org]
Copyright © 2015 Ike Hamill
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events have been fabricated only to entertain. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the consent of Ike Hamill.
This is dedicated to everyone I still miss.
This novella is a sequel to Extinct. If you haven’t read Extinct, it’s available in eBook and print. If you can’t find a copy, let me know and I’ll help you track one down.
[email protected]
CHAPTER 1: ROBBY
THE WIND WOKE HIM up, and he flopped his gloved hands from underneath a pile of sweatshirts on his lap. Robby blinked his eyes and they adjusted quickly to dim moonlight. He was looking through a windshield at the parking lot of a rest stop on I-95. Nothing on the other side of the glass moved except the waxing and waning shadows. The moon’s light filtered through the raveled blanket of clouds overhead.
The last two days reloaded into his consciousness in bursts of images. They’d been the worst two days of his short thirteen-year-old life. He’d fled his home and lost his friends and family. Robby remembered the blizzard. He remembered the panicked car trip when his dad had disappeared. He remembered the queasy boat ride back to the mainland and how his mom had disappeared. But mostly he remembered the corpses. Everywhere he went, he found dead people with their eyes exploded and running down their lifeless faces.
Robby shivered with the recollection, and from the cold. The driver’s-side window beside him was shattered—he had broken it with a jack handle when he’d stolen this Volvo from its dead owner. The socks and shoes on his feet belonged to that dead man as well.
Robby looked up to the car’s visor, at the mirror mounted there. He remembered the trick he’d discovered earlier that evening. If he looked in the mirror and saw his eyes, they looked just like his father’s eyes, and that gave him confidence. Robby moved forward a little to perfect the trick.
He could barely make them out in the dim light, but when he saw his father’s eyes in the mirror, he heard his father’s voice in his head—“You should switch cars, Robby. Find one without a broken window.”
Robby whispered back to himself—“They won’t have keys in them. I’d have to go search one of those corpses and find their keys. I don’t want to search any bodies in the dark.”
“It’s too cold, Robby. It can’t be more than fifteen degrees out, and you’re already shivering. You can run the engine for the heat, go in that building, or find another car, but staying here is not a smart option.”
“I’m not going back in there,” Robby whispered. “Not at night.”
A flash drew his attention away from the mirror. He let his eyes wander over the parking lot and wondered where the flash had come from. It could have been the moonlight reflecting off of something, but what? Robby scanned the parked cars and looked for one with a body close to it. Most of the corpses were stretched out on the sidewalk in front of the rest stop’s main entrance, but he figured he might find one close to a car. It might not be so bad to search a body if it were all on its own, away from the big group of corpses.
This time, he saw the flash.
It was a blue streak, like faint lightning, and it traveled from right to left, the wrong way down the middle of the highway. Robby held his breath and waited for it to come again. He ran out of air and had to gasp for more, but the flash didn’t come.
He glanced up to the mirror. “That can’t have been natural,” his father’s voice said in his head.
Robby nodded in response. He returned his eyes to the highway.
He reached to turn the key and start the engine but then pulled his hand back. Where would he go? The only way in or out of the rest stop was by the highway.
Two more blue streaks flashed down I-95, only a second apart.
Robby bit his lip and tried to think. He could be counted on to reason through a situation—consider all the facts and come up with a plan—but he had nothing, nothing but fear. Back in the mirror, his father’s eyes offered no solution. Should he risk trying to drive? Hide out in the building with the dead bodies? Try to make his way on foot?
An idea broke through his panic.
“Where do the workers park?” he asked himself. “The last entrance was more than ten miles back. How do the people who work here—the clerks and janitors—how do they get to work?”
Robby took the keys from the ignition and stuffed them in his pocket before he eased the door open. The interior lights came on and he hurried to shut the door behind himself. The Volvo dimmed the lights slowly and Robby cursed the speed while he crept over to the fence near the trees. In the shadows of the overhanging branches, he inched his way towards the building. While he moved, he kept watch on the highway, waiting for the next blue flash.
He circled the parking lot, staying next to the tall chain-link fence that stood between the grass and the woods, until he could see the back of the rest stop building. The building had loading docks on the far end and a couple of doors closer to Robby. A sidewalk led away from the doors and through a set of tall hedges. Robby crossed over the lawn—just starting to crunch with forming frost—until he could round the hedge and see what it was hiding. Between the tall bushes, the sidewalk led to a ramp that descended down to a lower parking lot.
At the bottom of the stairs, the sidewalk split off to his left and right. In front of him, a couple of rows of parked cars sat in the moonlight. Robby guessed that he had found the employee parking lot. Around the north side of the lot, the pavement ended near the trees. Robby kept to that side so he could move in the shadows. He hoped for a nearby neighborhood, or perhaps a convenience store.
He hoped for anywhere he might find shelter or a set of car keys hanging on a hook in someone’s kitchen. Until he rounded the back corner of the lot, and could see that the two-lane access road for the employees stretched off into the night, he had high hopes for an easy solution to his problem.
Robby paused. The wind in the trees made the only noises Robby could hear. He grew up on a sparsely populated island—he was accustomed to quiet nights—but this silence felt empty of life.
Robby walked. He kept to the edge of the road, right where the pavement ran out and gravel covered the gap to the grass.
The movement warmed up his core, but his feet and hands remained frozen. Robby counted his steps and decided that he would walk one-thousand paces and then turn around if he didn’t find any houses. At about three-hundred, the road rounded a slow turn and Robby saw a big straight length of road ahead. He kept going. By eight-hundred steps—two curves later—Robby could see where he would eventually turn around, but he kept going. At one-thousand, the view was the same. The two-lane access road was flanked with wide, grassy shoulders, and then were bordered by deep Maine woods. He didn’t know what town he was closest to, but it was clearly not close enough to offer him easy shelter against the cold night.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
Robby’s young legs threatened to cramp, so he turned and trudged back towards the rest stop. Even a car with a broken window was better than no shelter at all, he figured.
As he walked, Robby’s thoughts returned to the turkey sandwich he’d had for breakfast. Even when fleeing the house, his mom had tried to make responsible use of the Thanksgiving leftovers. Now that she was gone—sucked up into the air and evaporated, right before his eyes—Robby wondered if he would ever have another turkey sandwich.
“The power hasn’t been out that long,” he whispered to himself as he thought. “I’m sure I could find a grocery store where the meat is still reasonably fresh.”
But that wasn’t the point, and he knew it. His mom was gone, and his dad was gone. Both had disappeared and he couldn’t kid himself—they weren’t coming back. For that matter, all his friends were gone, too. As far as Robby knew, he was the last person left alive on the planet. The days of turkey sandwiches were finished, along with his parents, friends, and warm cozy beds where he could sleep until breakfast without worrying about rotting corpses lined up in the moonlight.
Robby felt his panic rising. It threatened to take over and take away his reason. Like a reflex, an image of his dad popped into Robby’s head. His dad could handle any situation. He would listen carefully to the problem, form an opinion, and immediately return to a carefree, jovial state. That’s what Robby admired most about his dad—his ability to stay positive, regardless of the crisis. Or, Robby corrected himself, that’s what he used to admire most, before his dad had disappeared.
When he heard his shoelace flapping against the pavement, Robby stopped abruptly. He cocked his head for a second. It seemed, just for a moment, like the sound of movement on the other side of the road had continued a tiny bit longer than his own footfalls. Robby knelt to tie his stolen shoe and scanned the tree line. If there was something there, it had hidden itself quite well. When he stood, Robby scuffed his foot on the pavement. He wanted to see if the noise he heard was just an echo off the trees. It took a quick calculation—at eleven-hundred feet-per-second, sound would take less than one-hundred milliseconds to cross the road, bounce of the trees, and come back. The movement he’d heard was way longer than that, and the echo of his scuffing foot proved it. Unless his ears were playing tricks on him, he’d heard something move.
When he resumed walking, Robby worked hard to quiet his stride, ears straining for any other sounds. He didn’t hear anything, but that only served to increase his paranoia. He picked up his pace and kept his head turning back and forth, waiting for another sign that something was following him. He reached the parking lot and breathed a little easier when he passed between the rows of parked cars. They didn’t offer him any safety, but they looked normal and tame compared to the shapeless dark woods that lined the access road. Robby crossed the parking lot in the open, but then moved to the shadows again as he walked back up the ramp towards the building.
Just as he emerged from between the bushes that flanked the path, Robby saw another blue flash streak down the highway and then disappear out of sight. Robby pressed himself back against a bush and stared off in the direction of the highway. The lightning faded away, leaving Robby’s eyes with a swirly-black afterimage burned into his retinas for several seconds.
The wind stopped. Everything Robby could see and hear became perfectly still in the wake of the blue flash. It felt like he’d been dropped into a diorama. The stillness made the building in front of him seem unnatural. It sat, poised to spring, like the jaws of a leg trap. Robby imagined that the whole rest stop had been built as a way to capture unwary travelers, a giant roach motel built to ensnare northbound I-95 traffic.
Robby rounded the hedge and moved farther away from the building, keeping it sight. He followed the hedge to the left, in the same general direction as the stolen Volvo. He didn’t like moving in the moonlight—he would have preferred dodging over to the tree line again, but he wanted to see how far the retaining wall extended. If he could find a spot to clear the wall, maybe he could get the Volvo out of the rest stop without crossing the lightning-infested highway.
Staying at the rest stop for the night no longer seemed like an option. Robby knew that fear was driving his decision, but that was another thing he’d learned from his father. Dad always managed to stay positive, but he also trusted his gut. The hedge didn’t grow as tall or thick over near edge of the woods. Robby saw the lower parking lot through the scraggly branches. He pushed through and got a look at the drop. Even at the farthest edge, near the fence that held back the woods, the retaining wall still dropped a good couple of feet—too far a drop for Robby to attempt with the Volvo.
Here, in the darkest corner of the dog-walking area, the fence looked ragged. Branches grew through the fence in spots, and in others, the chain-link had pulled away from the metal posts. In the direction of the Volvo, a big, jagged-edged hole had been torn in the fence. The interlinked bands of metal were bent and broken, like something had hit the back of the fence with enough force to burst through.
It wasn’t the most direct route, and it took him away from the shadows of the trees, but Robby decided to backtrack up through the lawn to give the hole in the fence a wide berth.
Robby hadn’t moved a dozen steps when he heard the voice.
He stopped, feet frozen mid-stride.
He stared at the hole in the fence. It had only been one word, so he couldn’t pin down exactly where it had come from, but he suspected the hole. The voice had come from the hole, if indeed he’d heard a voice at all. The longer he stood, one foot planted, the other outstretched and just touching the frosty grass, the more he doubted that he’d heard anything at all.
“Help,” the voice repeated. It was a high-pitched voice, perhaps a man’s falsetto, just above a whisper, but it sounded as loud as a gunshot in the too-still night.
The image of a roach motel popped back into Robby’s head. Not just the building, but the whole rest stop could be a big glue-trap designed only to lure you in and then trap you until you died of madness and dehydration.
Robby ran.
Behind him, he heard the tinkling rattle of the chain link as something pushed through the hole to give chase.
The vector of his panic-sprint was leading him towards the parking lot, but not towards the Volvo. His stolen car was parked pretty close to the fence. As Robby ran, a dark shadow kept pace with him at the edge of the fence. Robby bolted to his right, away from the fence and towards the front of the rest stop building.
He heard the footfalls of the thing behind him pound across the frosty grass as Robby sprinted over the curb and across the parking lot. The line of corpses he’d hoped to avoid stretched out on the sidewalk in front of the building. When he’d entered the building earlier, at dusk to use the bathroom, the corpses out front and in the lobby had lit his head with fear. Now, they seemed like the least scary option.
Robby sprinted up onto the sidewalk and leapt over a pair of exploded-eye dead to find the doors of the rest stop building. He tugged the door open, ran across the tile floor, rounded to the back of the information desk, and crouched behind it. He knelt next to an old, uniformed man, who had fallen face down on his hand and then rolled onto his side. His thumb was jammed up into his own empty eye socket. Robby could just pick out these details from the moonlight that filtered in through the glass front of the lobby. He peeked around the edge of the desk to see the door.
The door slipped shut on its spring, and a split-second later swung inwards again. The shadowy shape of a man slipped through the gap and pulled the door shut. The man wore a long coat that swung like a cape when he turned his back on Robby. The silence of the lobby was broken by a set of jingling keys and the sound of a deadbolt thunking into place. The man put his back to the door and stood still. His head turned as his eyes scanned the lobby.
“Is somebody in here?” The man’s voice sounded high and unsteady, as if he was the frightened one.
Robby slowly pulled back around the corner of the desk. He held his breath and listened.
“I thought I was the only one who survived,” the man continued, “but then I though
t I saw someone come in here? Please tell me I’m not all alone.”
The man’s voice continued to quaver, but Robby thought he could hear a smile behind the man’s words. The man’s shoes made no sounds as he moved, but Robby knew he was moving because of the sound of his legs against the long jacket. They made a slow whooshing sound, followed by a low rustle as the folds re-gathered. The man was moving to the left of the lobby, over to the big doors that led to the men’s and women’s rooms.
On the right side, the lobby opened to the entrance of the gift shop, a counter for a coffee shop, and a room for vending machines. The tall ceiling of the lobby reflected and dispersed the sounds of the man’s movement, making it hard for Robby to pin them down. He waited for the man’s shape to appear on his left, past the end of the information desk, over near the entrance to the men’s room. When the man did appear, Robby saw his outstretched foot first, reaching to step over a corpse on the floor.
Robby shrank lower in his crouch and got ready to bolt if the man turned his way.
“My name is Lyle,” the man said. And then, after a pause, he asked, “Are you in here?”
Lyle put his hand on the door to the men’s room and then waited. He spun and surveyed the room. At one point, Robby thought that Lyle was looking right at him, but he kept spinning and returned his attention to the door. Lyle pushed it open and then stepped inside the bathroom.
As soon as the door swung shut behind Lyle, Robby was up. He shuffled over to the front door, tiptoeing around the dead bodies scattered on the floor, just to be sure that it was locked. He pushed on the door and it clunked against the deadbolt. When he heard the noise of the men’s room door opening again, Robby collapsed to the floor, right next to the corpse of a tall woman, and held himself still.
Lyle’s footsteps were brief, just long enough to move from the men’s room to the lady’s. Robby squeezed his eyes shut and hoped Lyle didn't notice the extra body laying on the floor. Robby didn’t hear another sound—not another question, nor the door to the women’s room opening. Robby waited with his eyes shut. The urge to open his eyes was nearly overpowering. Robby focused on keeping his breathing shallow and slow so he wouldn’t make any extra noise or movement. He pictured the man, Lyle, crossing the room on tiptoes, silently approaching to grab on to Robby’s ankle. Finally, the creak of the women’s room door came, and he heard footsteps. He pictured Lyle sliding through the door and letting it shut behind him. Robby was about to bolt from his spot to run for the back of the building when a paralyzing thought occurred to him—what if Lyle had only pretended to go into the women’s room? What if Lyle was still standing over by the door, just waiting for Robby to sit up?