What Happens in the Darkness

by Monica J. O'Rourke

“I’ll find your shoe,” Janelle whispered, and the heart that had betrayed her before, the heart that had hurt her so badly wasn’t gone after all. It was still there, and it hurt all over again. Only it was worse somehow, this fresh hurt. Somehow it was worse. Poor Mrs. Cole was missing a shoe. How was she supposed to get anywhere with only one shoe? There was so much broken glass everywhere; she was going to badly cut herself.

  Janelle searched around Mrs. Cole’s body but couldn’t find the shoe. “Please,” she sobbed. “Stay here. I’ll find it.” She forgot the woman was dead. Forgot she wasn’t about to get to her feet and search for her missing shoe.

  “I’ll come back,” Janelle cried. “Someone’ll come, Mizz Cole.” Janelle inched her way past, careful not to step on her.

  But her foot caught the woman’s shoulder, and Janelle went flying headfirst down the stairs. Her arms flew up, trying to break her fall. One hand landed on the banister, and she tried to catch hold. She twisted sideways and shrieked, landing hard on a man’s body lying halfway down the stairs. Her knee slid in a puddle of something wet, something slippery and sticky, and it was too dark to see what it was. She had to use the man’s body to push herself back up, could feel his nose and mouth beneath her fingers, and her hand slid into a spongy mess.

  Janelle started crying. She managed to get back on her feet, but her clothes were smeared with what she guessed was blood and her hand was coated with the dead man’s brains. She shook her hand, trying to get the oozy mess to fly off, but it wasn’t working.

  She sobbed and wiped her hand on the dead man’s jeans, frantically trying to get rid of the disgusting mess. Moments later she was on her feet and fleeing down the stairwell.

  She finally escaped the building.

  In the streets, people ran around as if they had no idea where they were running to but ran anyway, ran like mad, their screams and cries almost louder than the air-raid sirens, louder even than the screeching emergency vehicles. Others sat in quiet huddles as if waiting for the earth to swallow them.

  Vehicles raced along the streets and plowed down the people in their way. Cars smashed into traffic light posts, into buildings. Car alarms were heard over everything, their endless beep-beep-beeps and squeals and shrieks only adding to the confusion.

  Fires everywhere filled the air with harsh, bitter smoke, burning Janelle’s eyes. Storefront windows exploded, spearing anyone nearby with torpedo glass.

  Air-raid sirens turned into a message telling people to “Stay Calm, Don’t Panic.” Then hours later it abruptly stopped, as if someone had pulled the plug.

  Janelle ran. She had no idea where she was heading but wouldn’t stop. She just ran. She later discovered she’d been running toward Manhattan. Janelle never looked back. She’d been afraid to.

  She’d wandered aimlessly until she found something familiar. Until she’d reached Eighty-Sixth Street and Third Avenue and the Papaya King store where they used to buy hotdogs.

  She shook her head to clear it, bringing her back to the present.

  A small army of rats seemed to come from nowhere and raced toward her. Scavenging rodents gone topside from the sewers were ravenous, anxious for a taste of flesh.

  Janelle scrambled to the roof of a Chevy hardtop, wishing she had a stick or a weapon of some kind. She stared down at them, waiting for them to attack.

  But they abruptly changed direction. Wherever these rats were headed, Janelle was no longer of interest. Even weirder, the rats suddenly seemed to be fleeing. She stared in the direction they had come from. Nothing was there. Nothing hiding in the shadows or behind cars or trashcans. Nothing she could see, anyway.

  Janelle scrambled off the car and stood in the center of what had been a four-lane street, once dangerously thick with traffic. She stared toward Harlem—toward what used to be home. Not a single vehicle passed. Not a single person.

  She stopped clawing at the concrete dust plastered to her face. Inside her nostrils, death-smells like raw wounds resided, and she tasted the dust that coated her tongue and gums and tonsils.

  The stillness of the air weighed her down, a stillness disturbed only by the occasional pop of a dying chunk of smoldering debris. A stillness foreign to Manhattan. The stillness of death and destruction had sucked away the taxi sounds and laughter and car alarms and street hawkers.

  But then the whispers. The other sounds.

  Something was coming, something she could sense but couldn’t see. Something more than what hid in the shadows. Taunting her with subtle sighs and heavy breaths that came from nowhere, from no one.

  On scabbed knees, her reminder of now-dead brothers and rough tomboy play, she prayed. “God …” She looked toward the sky as if hoping to make eye contact. “I’m scared,” was all she could think to say, and her words sounded foreign. The first words she’d heard in days.

  When Janelle wanted to play kickball with her brothers, they made her sit on the curb waiting to chase the ball after it went wild. Chasing after a stupid soccer ball that landed between parked cars or rolled over dog poop. It always gave her hope that they might let her join the game. But they never let her play. And when they all headed back into the apartment for Kool-Aid she trailed behind, learning a lesson in disappointment early in life. She resented having wasted so much time on nothing.

  This was how she felt now. Like she’d been cheated out of playing.

  She glanced at the sky and realized night was coming. Nightfall scared her the most. That was when the sounds came—not human sounds, not talking or crying or yelling—but groans like buildings settling, scratches against stone, like something attempting to escape from the rubble.

  Nowhere to go, no one to talk—

  “There you are …”

  Janelle’s pulse quickened. She dropped to the ground and hid behind the Papaya King cardboard cutout. That hadn’t been a whisper, not just a hint of a word. Someone had said something. She’d heard it clearly but still couldn’t see where it came from.

  A man’s voice. He was still hidden from view. She frantically scanned the area to no avail.

  “Little girl,” he crooned. “Come out, come out. I won’t hurt you.”

  Something about the voice—too sweet, somehow fake.

  “I see you there,” he said. “Hiding like a little sewer rat. Why are you hiding?”

  She still couldn’t see him. She swallowed plaster dust instead of spit, almost choking. Her legs refused to cooperate when she tried to run. She hugged the Papaya King cutout, fingers digging into the moldy cardboard.

  Out of the shadows he appeared, his lanky legs stepping over chunks of concrete as if they were pebbles. A few feet away now.

  Janelle recoiled and backed into the building. “What do you want?”

  “Just to talk, child. Come here so we can talk.”

  Something felt wrong. Everything in her urged her to run. “Leave me alone.”

  “Leave you alone? You don’t mean that …” He grinned, his eyes narrowing, bony features stretched against the diminishing light. “This is my time. This is my world now.” He sounded as if he’d forgotten to clear the phlegm from his throat. “I’ve been waiting for you …”

  “What?” she whispered, near tears. That was impossible. He couldn’t have been waiting for her—how could he know where she would be? He couldn’t know who she was. No … this was the thing she’d feared, the thing following her in the shadows. She knew it was. She felt it.

  And looking at him, she knew why she’d been so afraid.

  He leaned toward her, bending almost in half, long bony fingers pointing blame. His blackened halo of hair gleamed in the waning daylight. His long coat was covered in dust and was buttoned up to his neck. He smiled, the edges of his mouth upturned like a clown’s.

  Janelle tried to back away but pressed against the bricks behind her. Her lips trembled. “Wha—” she said, the word a grunt, almost unintelligible. “What are you?”

  Fingers snaked toward her in the darkness, and “Come
now,” almost a whisper.

  Janelle cowered, terrified, dreading the feel of those fingers against her flesh.

  A rat crawled out from behind a rock. It glanced from the man to Janelle and back again. Janelle’s direction offered no escape, so it darted toward the rock it had been hiding behind.

  The man was faster, and he scooped the rat up and brought it toward his face, holding it up, examining it. “Didn’t get away, I see,” he said, stroking its head with one bony finger. The rat was the size of a housecat, and although it bared its teeth, it looked terrified. It trembled and squealed and jerked, clearly trying to escape.

  “Too bad, too bad,” he said in his singsong way and turned the rat over. His fingers pet the belly of the rat, holding it still against its frantic struggles. “You see?” he said to it. “Nothing escapes. You can’t get away from me.”

  With one long, protracted fingernail he dug into the rat’s flesh, slicing it down the center. It bucked wildly, but he held it tight. He spread the wound, exposing the pink flesh. Blood poured over his hands. He brought it to his mouth and lapped the blood, chewed the flesh. He pulled away, strings of intestine dangling from his teeth.

  The rat quivered and died. The man moaned, seemed to enjoy his meal. He sucked the flesh and licked the blood and then dropped it to the ground. “Tasty. One of the slow ones though. Not as tasty when they’re slow.” He wiped the blood on his coat and focused his attention on Janelle again.

  Janelle screamed and her body shook. She picked up a chunk of rock and swung it wildly in front of her. She threw the rock and it clipped his shoulder. She grabbed another one and held it up, ready to throw it.

  For a moment he looked confused, even upset. His lips quivered. Then he began to cry, his head thrown back, great sobs causing him to shake. But he was clearly teasing her. He looked at her and grinned. “Whiny little girl. Put down the rock.”

  “Get away from me!”

  He reached out again, and she smashed the rock against his fingers. He pulled his hand back. “That wasn’t nice.” He stood upright and towered over her. “That was mean.”

  Janelle blinked.

  “Come with me now and I’ll forgive you.” He grinned again.

  “Please let me go,” she whispered.

  “Go? You don’t want that. Come with me, little girl. I have something for you.” His grin disappeared as he snarled and took a giant step toward her, arms reaching out to catch her.

  She dropped low and he missed, catching instead an armful of air. Janelle dived forward and escaped through his long bony legs.

  “You can’t escape!” he yelled, and she fell to her knees and covered her ears, his voice like knives scraping her brain.

  Seconds later he was behind her, and she got up and ran. His fingers brushed against her back, hand skimming her neck. She ran faster, leaving a handful of hair behind in his fingers.

  He yelled again. This time she covered her ears without falling.

  Her lungs burned. She wanted to glance back, to see how close he was. She heard him breathing, panting.

  She felt him closing in.

  Janelle saw three figures in the darkness up ahead. Concrete and fires flanked her on both sides. She had nowhere to run.

  She shrieked and threw her hands over her head as three men raced toward her.

  “We won’t hurt you!” one yelled. He was wearing a Yankees baseball cap. The other two men were yelling too, promising not to hurt her. She didn’t believe any of them.

  She was unable to look, unable to believe anyone else was there. Someone other than that thing who had terrorized her moments before. One of these had to be a dream, and she was afraid to discover which one.

  “Please,” the same man said. “I won’t hurt you. I promise.”

  “Yeah, come on, kid,” another one said. “It’s okay.”

  She glanced around. The scary rat-eating man had vanished.

  Janelle’s trembling legs threatened to betray her.

  “Are you alone?” the third man asked.

  Why did he want to know if she was alone? “My brothers are across the street waiting for me. They’re big too. And real strong.”

  The man smiled. “I promise, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  She still didn’t trust him. Not him, not any of them. Maybe they were with the scary man.

  “Don’t come near me!”

  “Okay, I won’t. See? I won’t hurt you,” the man with the cap said.

  “Take it easy, kid. No one’s gonna hurt you.”

  The three men stepped back.

  “Where did he go?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “The man. That awful man! Did you see him?” Janelle had been looking but it seemed as if that horrible man was gone.

  “What man?”

  “He was right behind me. He was really tall, and he was, he was—” She couldn’t think of a word to describe him.

  The man with the cap shook his head. “I didn’t see anyone else. No one’s there. Just us.”

  Janelle began to cry. “But he was there. He was after me!”

  “No one’s there now.”

  She stepped away from the men, trusting no one. She wanted to run, even looked around to choose a direction.

  But the man with the Yankees cap said, “It’s not safe out there, kiddo. We won’t come near you until you’re ready. Okay? But please don’t run.”

  Don’t run.

  She gazed toward Harlem and wiped the tears off her face. She watched the orange glow of hundreds of fires, so close yet so far away.

  Chapter 2

  Dread.

  Dread of being forced to live a life no longer worth living, of plodding through, faking the motions. Who are you trying to kid, when everyone else is doing the same? Fight the hopeless fight. Then face the dread of having to share with someone the news that you can’t help, that there’s nothing you can do. That queasy knot in your stomach that feels like you’ve eaten a ball of grease. The feeling—the knowledge—that nothing you say can make a difference now. It’s too late.

  Jeff knew the feeling and knew he had to face it.

  How do you tell someone he’s doomed?

  “Where’ve you been?” Martin muttered, and Jeff sensed the despair, but more so the anger. The way Martin’s fingers clutched the cell bars like a weapon. The way his clenched jaw muscles worked. The way his speech was deliberate, cautionary. This was a man practiced in the art of patience. Jeff knew him well.

  “Things have been a little crazy lately,” Jeff said.

  “A little crazy? Is that what you’d call it? I watch the news. Or did until you cut the satellite.”

  “Wasn’t me. Power’s out all over.” Jeff collapsed in the armchair outside the bars and pulled up a folding chair to use as a footrest. Sweat coated his brow despite the cool temperature of the room.

  Martin smirked. “Not your fault. So what’s going on out there? How bad?”

  “Bad.” He shut his eyes and clasped his hands beneath his chin as if in prayer. But prayer was not something Jeff was familiar with. He glanced at Martin. “We’re fucked.”

  Martin sat on the confined side of the bars, opposite Jeff. A place where the two had faced one another in a comfortable familiarity, shooting the shit or just playing cards. Jeff had one hell of a job. Until recently, it had been rather cushy.

  “You still haven’t seen combat?”

  “Combat?” Jeff snorted. “I’ll be lucky if they ever let me off base again. I’m just as trapped as you are.”

  “Somehow I doubt that.”

  Awkward silence fell as Jeff realized his gaffe.

  He’d never wanted this assignment. He’d wanted to travel, wanted to have a life. His parents were dead, and he had no other family. Never married. He’d been the ideal choice for a job that normally meant secrecy and isolation. The army had promised he would be given a better assignment after two years, but that had turned into twenty.

  “So what abou
t us? What happens now? To me and my family.”

  Martin glanced over his shoulders into the shadows, as if his family stood behind him. They probably did, those stealthy fuckers. Jeff snorted. “I don’t know,” he said wearily, not caring much for what would happen to Martin and his family. Not anymore. Sick of playing tedious babysitting games.

  “We have no chance in here.” Martin’s voice rose, growing more forceful with every word.

  “I can’t let you go.”

  Martin slammed his fists into the bars. “Goddamn you! We’ll die in here!”

  “You know I can’t let you out. But I’ll think of something. You’ll be okay.”

  “Bullshit,” Martin said, hands rattling the bars as if he’d be able to separate them. Jeff was grateful he couldn’t get out. “We’d be willing to take our chances out there along with everyone else. You can’t do this—” Silence again. Martin breathed deeply, clearly attempting composure. “We’re starving in here.”

  “I said I’d think of something.”

  “The news said prisons have been emptied.”

  “They have, but—”

  “There’s no reason to keep us here!”

  “You know I can’t let you go.”

  Martin yelled, kicked the bars. “Goddamn you. You’re killing us! We have to feed. We have a right to survive like anyone else!”

  From the shadows in the back of the cave Martin’s family moved toward them. Jeff knew them all but didn’t feel like sticking around to continue this argument.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, moving away. “I’ll find you some food. There’s nothing else I can do.” He quickly left, separating himself from the misery of the cavernous cell, not wanting to deal with Martin or his family.

  He heard them shouting at him, yelling for him to come back. Mostly they were okay to deal with, pleasant enough. Mostly.

  Few people knew about Martin and his family, as they referred to one another, though perhaps two of the seven were actually related. The military housed them, but only a handful knew what they were, why they were here. Jeff knew the army was great at keeping secrets.

  He slammed the door and sat at his desk, dropping his head into his palms. Not only had he inherited the office from his father, he’d inherited the assignment.