Dark Days (Book 4): Refuge

by Lukens, Mark

“I was, but I got arrested on that Friday morning, the day of the Total Collapse, as your friend Doug calls it. They took me to a FEMA camp.”

  “A FEMA camp?” Ray said, hope springing inside of him. “So there are FEMA camps?”

  “What’s a FEMA camp?” Mike asked.

  Josh just shook his head no.

  “Maybe the military and government have some areas under control,” Ray continued quickly before Josh could answer, unable to hide his excitement. If there was a safe place Josh knew about, then he was ready to turn this Trailblazer around right now and drive there; it had to be better than taking a chance on Doug’s cabin in the middle of the woods.

  “No,” Josh said. “The FEMA camp, it wasn’t really a FEMA camp. There were a lot of men there like me and . . .” He let his words trail off.

  “And what?”

  “And they brought us there to experiment on us.”

  “What do you mean, experiment on you?”

  “They were looking for a cure to the plague. They were experimenting on the rippers at first, or so I heard, but then they started experimenting on the ones who weren’t infected, the ones who were immune. One of the weird things is that some of those guys had been rounded up days before I got there. Some of them had been there for weeks.”

  “So they knew this plague was coming?” Ray said.

  “Yeah,” Josh answered. “But even with all of their experiments, they couldn’t find the source of the plague. No bacterial or viral infection of any kind. No pathogens of any kind.”

  Ray was reminded of the CDC and government articles he’d read on Craig’s laptop. He nodded. “How did you find that out?”

  “A guy there told me about it.”

  Ray gave Josh a puzzled look. “Some guy told you that?”

  “His name was Ethan. He was a scientist there. He told me I needed to get out of the camp, and he helped me escape. He said that people were turning into rippers there and they didn’t know how to stop it. They couldn’t figure out what was causing the disease.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I heard, too,” Ray said. “It’s like they can’t find out where this disease came from or even how it works, how it spreads from person to person.”

  “But some of us are immune,” Josh said. “At least they knew that much at the camp. I escaped from the FEMA camp. Barely made it out of there alive. I got to a house, found some supplies and this shotgun, and a vehicle. I was attacked in a small town, a group of rippers ran me off the road and I wrecked my truck. A man named Isaac helped me. I stayed in his attic for a few days. He was a really smart guy, and I learned a lot from him. But I needed to get back down to Pittsburgh. I needed to find my sister and nephew.”

  Ray already knew Josh hadn’t found his family.

  “But when I got there,” Josh continued. “They . . . they didn’t make it. And the city was burning. I found the electrician’s van on the street in front of her apartment complex and I drove south.” He turned around in his seat and looked at Emma. “I saw you in my dreams every night. It was the only thing that gave me hope.”

  Emma didn’t say anything, but she smiled at him.

  Josh looked at Mike. “I saw you in my dreams, too.” He looked at Ray. “And you, too.”

  Ray nodded.

  Josh looked back at Emma. “You told me to come find you.”

  Emma shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember any of those dreams.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Emma

  Emma knew what she had just said had shocked Josh, and it had probably shocked Ray and Mike, too. All three of them were quiet as Ray drove.

  “What do you mean, you don’t remember talking to me in the dreams?” Josh finally asked.

  Emma could tell that Josh was turned around in the passenger seat, staring at her. She could imagine the expression on his face as he waited for her answer. “I don’t remember dreaming.”

  “But you . . . you spoke to me,” Josh said. “I saw you. And it seemed like you could see me. I mean, I could tell you were blind, but it seemed like you were looking right at me.”

  “She wasn’t always blind,” Mike said. “When she was a kid, she could see.”

  Emma just nodded. “I had a genetic defect that led to my blindness.”

  “But I don’t understand how you could talk to me in my dreams and not remember them,” Josh said, clearly trying to get the conversation back on track.

  “I think a part of me was there, but not all of me.”

  “What? Like your subconscious?”

  “Maybe. I could feel something in my dreams. I knew there were others out there, people like you, and we needed to come together. But I couldn’t let myself experience them.”

  “Because of the shadowy man,” Ray said.

  Emma nodded. “I think I have to kind of shut down part of myself when I dream, because if I reveal myself too much, he will know where we are.”

  “That’s crazy,” Josh whispered. “I saw that guy in my dreams, the big guy that looked like a shadow. His eyes, they like glowed or shined in the darkness.”

  Emma felt her skin grow cold. She could see the shadowy outline of the man in her mind, but it was more of a sensation of evil that she felt rather than something she saw, like a pressure pushing down on her chest.

  “I saw him, too,” Mike said, excited to be part of the conversation. “I think he’s a real bad person.”

  “Me too, buddy,” Josh said. “Before the cops took me to that FEMA camp, they took us to a high school gymnasium so they could watch us for twenty-four hours and make sure none of us were infected. All the cops and workers there wore gas masks and gloves. Well, there was this one guy that was in the paddy wagon when I was picked up.”

  “What’s a paddy wagon?” Mike asked.

  “It’s slang for a police van,” Ray said.

  Emma could hear the edge in Ray’s voice—she could tell that he didn’t like Josh very much.

  “Yeah,” Josh said, continuing to talk to Mike like he was telling him a scary bedtime story. “But this guy they picked up, he was big and tall. He had long hair, and his eyes, they shined in the darkness. He said he needed to kill me. You think that was the same guy we saw in our dreams?”

  Emma could tell that Josh had shifted the direction of his conversation from Mike to her.

  “Because if he was,” Josh continued, “the cops killed him outside the gymnasium. After he attacked me in the bathroom, they took him outside and shot him. We could all hear the gunshots.”

  “He wasn’t the same man,” Emma told him. “The one in our dreams, he’s still out there.”

  “You can feel him?” Mike asked.

  Emma nodded.

  “Then why was the guy’s eyes shining in the dark?” Josh asked.

  “I don’t know,” Emma answered. “It could have been a trick of your imagination, a leftover image from your dreams that you superimposed over the man’s face because he was a threat to you.”

  “That sounds very psychological,” Josh said, chuckling. “But I don’t remember ever dreaming about the shadowy guy before seeing that man in the gym.”

  “Maybe you dreamt about him, but don’t remember it,” Emma suggested. “Maybe we all have. Maybe we’ve all seen this coming for days or even weeks.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Josh asked.

  Emma didn’t answer, because she really didn’t have an answer. She’d felt this coming for weeks, this catastrophe that she couldn’t define, but she had felt panicky for quite a while. It’s why she had begun stocking up on food and water, it was why she had paid someone to reinforce the locks on her condo doors and windows, it was why she had paid someone to install the bars and panels of wood over the windows in her condo. She knew something terrible was coming, a calamity that humanity hadn’t seen in such a long time, if ever. And she knew the shadowy man had seen the same thing coming. It wasn’t a stretch to think others had seen it coming, had dreamed about it, but hadn’t
remembered those dreams and premonitions.

  “I’ll tell you something else weird about that guy in the gym,” Josh said. “The guy with the shining eyes. It was like he knew me even though I’d never seen him before in my life. And believe me, I would’ve remembered a dude like that. When he attacked me in the bathroom, he was trying to kill me. He was bashing my head into the wall and choking me. But he was also talking to me. He told me he needed to kill me. He said he couldn’t let me go with the others. I think he might have been talking about you guys.”

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. And it was true. There were still so many things she didn’t know. It was like she had a few pieces of a large puzzle, but not enough pieces to even begin to see what the image might be.

  “Well, like I said. They got that guy. Anybody acting crazy, anybody the guards even thought might be infected, they took them outside and gave them the old double tap in the head. Pow. Pow. I met a guy in there, his name was Gardner, he told me what they were doing and warned me to keep cool. Guy probably saved my life.”

  “I saw you in my dreams,” Mike told Josh. “And I saw another guy.”

  “That’s right,” Josh said, excitement in his voice. “There’s another guy. He’s got dark hair, buzzed short. Muscular guy.”

  “But not as strong as my dad,” Mike said.

  “That’s right,” Josh said. “Not as strong as your dad.”

  “I was hoping that shadow guy in my dreams wasn’t real,” Mike said.

  “Me too, buddy,” Josh answered.

  “The man in our dreams is powerful,” Emma told them. “But he’s still just a man.”

  “But he’s a man with some kind of psychic powers,” Ray spoke up. “He has psychic powers like you do. Right? That’s why he can invade our dreams.”

  “Yeah,” Josh agreed. “Like you came into my dreams, Emma. You think he’s coming into our dreams subconsciously?”

  “No,” Emma said. “I think he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s just a man, but Ray’s right, he has some kind of psychic powers. A little like mine, but I think he’s much stronger than I am.”

  “I never used to believe in that kind of stuff,” Ray said. But then he let his words hang in the air, saying nothing further about it.

  But he believes now, Emma thought. She knew the shadowy man in their dreams had always been a powerful psychic, but he had become even more powerful since everything had collapsed. Emma’s psychic abilities had also become much more powerful in the last few weeks. She could tell people were changing; there was no denying that now. People were changing in strange ways, not only the rippers, but the survivors—the immune.

  “God,” Josh said. Emma could tell that he had turned back around in the passenger seat, facing forward now. “I was hoping the plague was only around Pittsburgh. Isaac told me it was everywhere, but I was still hoping that wasn’t true. But it is true, isn’t it?”

  Nobody answered Josh. Nobody needed to.

  CHAPTER 12

  Ray

  An hour before sundown, Ray turned onto a narrow dirt road. He drove half a mile and then spotted a house set far off from the road beyond a field of tall grass. The brush and trees had grown so thickly around the house that the home was almost invisible from the road, and Ray had nearly missed seeing it. He even had to stop and back up so he could see bits of the roof through the trees. There was a dirt driveway at the other end of the field of grass and weeds. A mailbox was nearly overtaken by the brush and weeds, like the vegetation was pulling it down slowly and devouring it.

  Mail will never be delivered there again, Ray thought as he drove down the bumpy driveway towards the house. No junk mail ever again. No Christmas cards from relatives. No bills. No letters from loved ones. Nothing.

  The driveway meandered around a huge collection of trees and bushes, and once they were around the brush and into a small clearing Ray saw more of the house, which looked abandoned and ready to fall apart. The little paint left on the wood siding was just flaking away, the wood underneath the paint dark and rotting. An awning had been built off of this side of the house. Ray turned around in the grass and backed the Chevy Trailblazer up underneath the awning. He couldn’t even see the road from here as he looked out the windshield; this place seemed safe enough so far—it was as good as they were going to get.

  “Okay,” Ray said as he shut off the Trailblazer. “Let’s just sit here for a few minutes and listen for any noises.”

  They were all quiet after Ray shut off the engine. He left the keys in the ignition in case he needed to start the SUV and drive away.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to inhale a long and slow breath, then exhale it slowly. He was so tired. He wondered if it wouldn’t be better to sleep in the Trailblazer, but he knew that wasn’t a good idea. If they were ever swarmed by rippers, they would be sitting ducks inside this vehicle. They would be surrounded. The windows would eventually be shattered from the rocks and sticks. They would be dragged out through the windows one by one, beaten and torn apart. Eaten.

  His eyes shot back open at the thought of it. He couldn’t let his guard down. He couldn’t close his eyes for even a few seconds; he couldn’t let his exhaustion overtake him right now.

  At least they hadn’t heard the screeches and calls of any rippers. They were pretty far out into the woods now, and according to the map, there wasn’t even a town close by. This house looked long-abandoned, possibly condemned. It wasn’t the sturdiest structure, and probably not the safest, but it would offer them better protection, and a better defense, than the Chevy ever would.

  They’d seen a few rippers wandering along the side of the road after leaving the small mountain town where the three men had set the trap for them, but they hadn’t seen any large groups of rippers. And maybe that was a good sign. But even a few rippers could be dangerous. Maybe the rippers could follow the tracks of their SUV down the dirt road, and then down the dirt drive. And again, Ray had to stop himself—once again, he was thinking of the rippers like they were a different species, like they were a pack of wild animals that could track them by their scent. They were only humans, only people.

  Just like the shadowy man in their dreams was only a person. Emma had said that he wasn’t a monster or a bogeyman; he was just a man, a human being with strange psychic powers.

  After another few minutes of sitting in the SUV, Ray was satisfied that it was safe to get out.

  “Let’s go check the house out,” Ray told Josh.

  Josh just nodded at him and got out of the SUV.

  Ray looked into the back at Mike and Emma.

  “I know,” Mike sighed. “Stay in the truck.”

  “We’ll be back as quick as we can,” Ray said. He thought about trying to say something else, something to comfort Mike, or even bring a smile to his lips, but couldn’t think of anything and he said nothing.

  After Ray caught up with Josh, they walked around the outside of the house, circling it, looking for any signs of inhabitance, even though Ray was pretty sure they wouldn’t find any. The front porch was partially collapsed, and a deathtrap, but there was a set of steps that led up to a door on the side of the home near the awning where their SUV was parked. Ray tested each step with his weight, then climbed the three steps and checked the door.

  Locked. Unbelievable. Who locked a house like this?

  “I can get it,” Josh said. He darted to the SUV and opened the back of it. He was back in a few seconds with a flathead screwdriver. It took him less than thirty seconds to pry the door open without damaging it.

  It was another sign that Josh was some kind of criminal. Ray was certain Josh had taken something from the cab of that U-Haul truck earlier, most likely some kind of drugs. And now he was showing off his breaking and entering skills. Yes, those skills were useful, but it was just one more thing that made it difficult for Ray to trust the man.

  After they got the door open, Ray and Josh entered some kind of small room that led to a kitch
en. The cabinets and countertops were still there, a few of the cabinet doors barely hanging on hinges, but all the appliances were gone. The wood floor had some kind of glue all over it, like linoleum had been on the floor but ripped up long ago. A few boxes were stacked at one end of the countertop next to the sink. Ray checked them out: boxes of wood laminate that had curled from years of hot summers and freezing winters. Two chairs were shoved against a wall next to a door that most likely led down to the basement.

  But Ray wasn’t ready to inspect the basement just yet. “Let’s check the place out before we get Mike and Emma,” he told Josh. “I’ll check upstairs.”

  Josh just nodded in agreement. He explored the living room as Ray climbed the steps to the second floor. The wood floors and the stairs seemed sturdy enough even though the house looked ready to fall over. There was hardly any furniture in the house, just a bookcase and another kitchen chair. A few buckets and some more building supplies along a wall. It seemed like someone had the idea of fixing up this house a long time ago but had never gone through with it.

  Upstairs was just as plain and empty as the downstairs. The wallpaper was coming off the walls in strips; the doorjambs were flaked with peeling paint, rust spots stained the sinks and the bathtub. There was a coating of dirt and dust everywhere. Limp curtains hung over some of the windows, and other windows were bare and had a film of dirt over them that made the glass opaque. There was a heavy smell of must and mildew in the air, but it was bearable.

  He was back downstairs a few minutes later.

  “Everything’s cool down here,” Josh said.

  Ray went to the basement door. He had his flashlight in his hand and he turned it on, shining the beam down the stairwell. He listened for just a moment, then pulled his gun out. Josh had the junkie’s pistol in his hand. He was a few steps behind Ray as he went down into the basement.

  The basement was nearly as empty as the rest of the house. There were more piles of construction supplies: lengths of wood, boxes of tile, bags of mortar. A rusty set of metal shelves against one rough basement wall held boxes and metal cans of screws and nails, a few rusty tools, and cans of paint.