What Happens in the Darkness

by Monica J. O'Rourke

  He hated that Jeff had left them in that cell to rot, concerned only with his own survival and that of his kind.

  Martin was calling him. He could hear it, even at the great distance he had traveled. Could feel Martin’s voice on the wind. Patrick stood, stretching his arms overhead. The trip back would only take minutes, even though he was miles away.

  Patrick would never be allowed to harm Jeff in any way. Martin had already warned them all that Jeff was the one human none were allowed to touch.

  But there had to be a way. Had to! His hatred for Jeff was so tangible he wanted to chew and swallow it. But he couldn’t hurt Jeff … couldn’t tear a hole in his throat and watch his life’s blood pour out of his body … couldn’t eviscerate him and watch his intestines puddle to the ground like a rope of chain link.

  He wasn’t allowed to harm Jeff. But he suddenly realized the best way to exact his revenge.

  Chapter 12

  Now there were thousands … men, women, even a smattering of children, all devoted to Martin, waiting to follow his commands, willing to sacrifice themselves for him. There was no love but there was a strong sense of devotion, of unity.

  Martin had made many speeches before this crowd and felt confident they were ready. Time for speeches was over. Time for action had come.

  Their living quarters were well hidden in a building now leveled by another attack, and the entrances were strategically concealed beneath the rubble. Martin had been concerned they would be discovered by the enemy at a most inopportune time, but he thought that even if soldiers discovered the underground barracks and offices, they would have virtually no reason to go spelunking, and even if they did—Martin was a light sleeper.

  Beginning that evening they were to fan out and would encompass the perimeter of the states. Their orders were to kill the enemy as they found them. Simple, except for the fact that many would travel too far from home base to return in time and would have to find shelter. Before sunrise. And they would have to make sure their movements went undetected, that no one discovered where they were hiding. This was the reason Martin had instructed them to change locations nightly. He hoped his training had been thorough enough.

  Jeff stood at Martin’s side as Martin addressed the massive crowd. He listened to Martin’s instructions, to learn how the attack would be handled, to see how it would be worded.

  “You forgot something,” Jeff whispered.

  Martin slowly turned his head and met Jeff’s eyes. “Have I?”

  “You know you have.”

  “I have no intention of adding anything.”

  Jeff swallowed, and his hands clenched into fists. “No new recruits,” he said through gritted teeth. “You promised.”

  “Yes, well.” Martin crossed his arms over his chest. “We all make empty promises, don’t we? You promised Walter you’d always watch out for us, keep us safe.”

  “And I have!”

  “We nearly died because of you,” Martin yelled, inches from Jeff’s face. “Because of your ignorance and prejudice we almost starved to death. It was your selfish need that freed us, nothing else.”

  “I gave you freedom!” He stepped closer, his nose almost touching Martin’s face.

  Martin had always been impressed by Jeff’s nerve. A man who stood up for his beliefs, even now when he was so possibly close to death. But Martin’s annoyance was quickly exceeding his patience.

  “We based this on a verbal agreement, Martin. You promised me—”

  “Go to hell! There’s nothing you can do about it,” he snapped.

  “I thought you were a man of your word.”

  “That’s just it, my friend. I’m not a man at all. You just can’t accept what I am.”

  “I know what you are, but I expected honor and respect to be part of it. You owe that to Walter, if not to me, dammit!”

  Martin finally dropped his eyes. He realized suddenly how quiet the room had become, how silently the crowd stood by and waited. No one shifted or even dared clear their throats. He could hear light whispers of air sneaking through hairline cracks in the stone walls.

  “I can’t do that,” he said quietly. “But I can offer this—” He turned again and spoke to his vast audience.

  “I won’t tell you not to sire others along the way. Some of you will feel the burning desire for companionship. If this happens, I won’t deny you. But under no circumstances are you to choose the enemy. If in doubt, don’t select that person at all. Is this understood?”

  There were nods and murmurs.

  He said to Jeff, “That’s the best I can offer you.”

  Jeff’s cheeks were spotted with flecks of red, and the beaded sweat on his forehead trickled down his temples, despite the chill in the cave. “This is not acceptable.” He slammed his fist into his thigh to emphasize the words. “Do you know what this means? Do you know what’ll happen out there?”

  “Of course.”

  “Jesus …”

  “You haven’t thought this through, Jeff. What did you expect was going to happen? That when this is over, we would commit mass suicide? That we’ll all just roll over and die, or parade back into a cell? Survival means as much to us as it does to you.”

  “You can’t kill us all.”

  “Of course not.” His face grew hard, angry, his eyes somehow darker. “I’ve told you before—we need to eat.”

  Jeff licked his lips and blinked repeatedly, as if stalling for seconds, trying to form his words. “You have to stop this.”

  Martin smiled. It was a small smile, a reaction. He shook his head. Then he reached out and took Lana’s hand as she strolled in from the next room and now faced the crowd at his side.

  Jeff grabbed Martin’s shoulder. “You said a few. You said you would recruit a hundred vampires. This is a mob, not a few! There are thousands here.”

  Lana stroked Jeff’s cheek with her fingernails, and he jerked back his head. “I think maybe it got a little out of hand,” she said softly.

  “A little?”

  “Ignore him, my dear,” Martin told her. “We’re losing precious time. We need to get started.”

  She nodded and stepped back, giving him full view of the cave. He had to shout to be heard by everyone, but his voice was strong and full, and the cave’s acoustics suited him well.

  “You have your instructions! You know what needs to be accomplished. If you have any problems and can’t find help, you report back here as soon as you are able. Under no circumstances are you to jeopardize yourself.”

  The mass of vampires began clambering to their feet, milling about, talking to one another, breaking off into groups.

  Martin slowly dropped his hands from their raised position, as if he were finishing a blessing. “Be careful, each of you!”

  The thousands filtered out of the cave, rushing into darkness under cover of night. Once outside they split into various assigned groups and began their trek across the countryside, headed toward cities and smaller communities to start their attack on an enemy they had yet to meet.

  ***

  Janelle was more afraid of sleeping in the darkness than she was of traveling in it. Besides, she knew vampires only came out at night, and she wanted to be awake should one ever cross her path.

  Watching horror movies with her dad had taught her which few items she might need. So she found garlic in a bombed-out supermarket, otherwise picked clean by scavengers—furry and human alike—and gold crosses in a jewelry store, which were small enough to wear on a chain. She didn’t come across a crucifix, anything large enough to stick in her backpack, but she probably wouldn’t have wanted to carry one anyway. She stopped at St. Mary’s Church and filled small plastic shampoo bottles with holy water from the font, muddy from dust and dirt that fell into the water from crumbling walls. Janelle wasn’t a superstitious child, but then again, a few days earlier she hadn’t believed in vampires either. She wasn’t taking any chances.

  New Jersey was on the opposite side of the Li
ncoln Tunnel. She stood and stared into the impossibly black maw, gaping at her like a toothless mouth. With a trembling hand she aimed into the darkness with the new flashlight she had picked up.

  This wasn’t such a great idea after all, she thought, dropping her hand to her side. There was no way she could go inside there. Lines of cars filled the tunnel, some jutting at peculiar angles, blocking the road. She thought people might have died in their cars after a bomb hit. Chunks of tunnel—tiles and concrete and beams—lay across some of the cars.

  Even worse, body parts were everywhere—arms and legs and limbless torsos and unidentifiable chunks of flesh were splayed across hoods of cars; headless bodies dangled limply from car windows. For a fleeting moment she wondered what had attacked here. It didn’t look like the bomb damage she was used to seeing. This looked like someone had attacked the crowd with an axe. She suddenly stopped moving, her mouth and mind unhinged, her body trembling at the sight of such carnage. Here was her real first taste of death. The deaths of her family members hadn’t been tangible, the deaths of her friends in the subway had happened in blackness, and she’d been able to somehow pretend it wasn’t real. Even the deaths of those in the bank vault didn’t have to be accepted. After all, they had stood up and walked away!

  But here. Here was the proof, here was the result of the war and the bombs, and it stank far worse than she ever imagined or remembered. The odor here surpassed the smells of death she had already been subjected to. The stench of death seemed to claw its way into her skin, attach itself like a dark and poisonous perfume.

  No. Going through that tunnel was a bad idea. In fact, it was a terrible idea. There had to be another—

  “Hey you! Kid!” A voice behind her, still some distance away.

  Janelle saw an enemy soldier running toward her. She gasped, tripping over her own backpack as she ran toward the tunnel, having nowhere else to run.

  “Stop!” she heard him yell.

  She looked back as she ran, and he rushed toward her, raising a gun almost as big as her onto his shoulder.

  She yelped and took off deeper into the tunnel, the dim flashlight beam pointing the way.

  A shot screamed past her ear, shattering the windshield of the car beside her.

  She screamed again, trying to accept the reality that the guard was firing at her, a kid. What would make him want to shoot a kid?

  He followed her into the tunnel. She heard the pace of his whip-crack footsteps echoing behind her.

  The unbearable stench of the rotting, unburied dead drifted through the tunnel. Janelle stopped short, not wanting to go any farther. But she had no choice.

  Another gunshot, and the bullet smashed into the side of another car.

  Why was he shooting at her? Was he insane?

  The flashlight beam was making her a target. She turned off the light and dropped to her hands and knees and began to crawl away. She shook so badly she could barely move. Her bladder relaxed, liquid dripping through her underwear and jeans, and she nearly cried out.

  She strained to hear his movements. Janelle leaned against a car and held her breath, her chest aching, tears running down her cheeks.

  No sound. Was he doing the same thing? Was he waiting for her to reveal her location?

  A sudden light sliced a hole in the blackness.

  The soldier had turned on a flashlight.

  Janelle moved again, much more quickly this time, her hands slapping along the pavement as quietly as possible. She couldn’t stand and run because before her was such an overwhelming darkness; finite and consuming.

  Trying not to make any noise was increasingly difficult. The farther into the tunnel she went, the thicker the terrible smells, and the blacker the darkness. She was petrified, and what made it even worse was that she couldn’t release her terror.

  He was getting closer, swinging that flashlight beam in sweeping arcs, searching beneath and inside cars.

  No place to hide.

  Moving deeper into the tunnel, deeper into that pitch black maw. No choice.

  She prayed she could beat him to the other side, and then somehow hide before he caught her over there.

  He was heading toward her, and for a moment she supposed being a prisoner wouldn’t be so bad. It had to be better than continuing in the tunnel. She just couldn’t go any farther. Who knew what was waiting in that dead darkness?

  Then again, he’d shot at her twice now. She thought that maybe he wasn’t taking prisoners.

  She started to crawl again.

  A wall of rock blocked her path.

  There was no way of knowing if there was passage over that rock, but if there was it was outside the scope of her reach. Her hands ran frantically over the surface but found no exit holes.

  Her heart, which had already been pounding wildly against her ribs, picked up to such a frenetic speed it hurt. It felt unreal that her heartbeat could sound so loud, and she was sure it was going to give away her location.

  The soldier was carefully inspecting every vehicle he passed. He’d wave the light below, above, and then finally inside.

  There was no way to trace her steps back and pass him unseen.

  There had to be a place to hide.

  She gingerly ran her hands over the side of the car. The doors were shut, the windows rolled up. She crawled over to the vehicle on her other side and ran her hands along the surface. The doors were shut here as well, but when she reached up to touch the glass, her hand found air. The window was rolled down.

  She slowly reached her hand inside, not wanting to do this, expecting to feel the spongy, moist flesh of the dead. The air was rife with their stench, and her stomach roiled.

  Reaching inside the window, her hand touched a mass of curly stickiness that felt like hair. She squeezed her eyes shut—even in the blackness, pointless when unable to see a thing—and pulled her lips into a tight line. Her fingers made contact with the cold flesh of a pulpy, rotting face. She felt the nose beneath her fingers, then its mouth, the flesh so cold, so waxy. Her fingers probed further until they came across what felt like an eyeball, and she jerked her hand away from it.

  She desperately wanted to scream. She shook her head, and the tears streamed down her cheeks. There was no way she could do this. There was no way she could get in there with that dead body.

  But the soldier grew closer. If not for his methodical search he would have caught up to her by now.

  Janelle climbed on tiptoes and hoisted herself in through the rear window, desperately trying to avoid making even the tiniest noise. She fell forward, cushioned as she landed against the body. The air reeked of rotting sweetness, like sour fruit but not. It wasn’t a smell Janelle recognized, but it reminded her of the smells that used to come from the garbage dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant near her building.

  She had no choice but to feel around, to discover what was in the car with her. Her roaming hands touched something small in the corpse’s arms, something soft and almost rubbery, with downy wisps on top of a small round head. To the other side of the grown-up body Janelle felt other small forms with curly hair. Janelle squeezed her blind eyes shut again, the screams fiercely building, building in her chest, on her lips, hanging off the tip of her tongue. She tried to force the thought, the image of those dead bodies out of mind, but her hands tried to communicate with her what they were feeling, tried to put visions in her head of what this dead family looked like. In her mind’s eye she saw their bloated faces, their mushy features, their screams of terror locked forever in frozen expressions.

  She quickly shifted the dead children as best as she could, pushing one aside until it rested on the mom’s lap. She pulled the child behind the driver’s seat on top of herself. It rested half on the floor and half on the seat. If the soldier took a long look he would probably notice the extra pair of sneakers belonging to Janelle. He would probably even notice the extra set of arms on the child corpse.

  But she’d noticed he wasn’t checking the insi
des of the cars too well, probably believing no child would ever climb inside a vehicle filled with dead bodies.

  And under different circumstances, no child would.

  She lay as still as the dead piled on top of her, her terror so thick it numbed her brain and body. Her breath had slowed to almost nothing. She’d gotten used to the smells of the dead, and the constant, overwhelming need to vomit left for the moment.

  He was so close now she could hear him breathing. Had he spotted her, climbing inside the car? Had he heard her moving the dead bodies? Facedown in the car, curled into a ball, she couldn’t see the movement of his flashlight beam, but she knew he was there, could sense his presence.

  Something wriggled on her arm, tickled with tiny movements and tiny feelers and oh my God how she wanted to brush it off, to jump up and scream and get it off her skin, but she didn’t move a single muscle; she endured the creepy, slimy squirming thing. She suppressed the bile rising from the pit of her stomach.

  His footsteps stopped by her head. She opened her eyes and saw nothing but blackness. Then … a sensation of added weight … him pushing down on the body on top of her. Maybe feeling for life, testing to see if it was her. She thought at that moment he’d found her, that he was about to pull the dead child off her. Which didn’t seem like such a bad thing anymore. As much as she didn’t want to get caught, she didn’t know how much longer she was going to be able to stand this.

  He finally moved away from the car, deeper into the tunnel once more, but then she heard his footsteps abruptly stop. He must have found the cave-in.

  He yelled angrily, words she had never heard before in an accent unknown to her, and there was a small crash—like his boot kicking a car bumper.

  A hail of bullets filled the air, slamming into the cars, ripping chunks of tile from the walls, debris pelting her exposed back like raindrops. Janelle tucked her head down and squeezed her lips together, suppressing a scream. Then there was a loud creaking sound and a terrible crash. The soldier yelled again, but this time it sounded like he was in pain. Something huge landed on the hood of Janelle’s car, smashing it.