Dark Days (Book 4): Refuge

by Lukens, Mark

  Luke walked past a man who hung upside down from a light pole, the plastic cord threaded through his ankles, between his tendons and his bones, and then attached to the top of the pole. He twisted there in the cold wind, his hands tied behind his back, his face puffy and bleeding from a beating, eyes swollen shut. He begged for help, but Luke couldn’t help him.

  Luke ventured deeper into the town because he could hear a voice carried on the wind. The voice was deep and loud, excited as the man spoke—no, as the man preached. It was the Dragon Lord, Luke was sure of it.

  The voice pulled Luke deeper into the town. The embers of anger flared up inside Luke. The Dragon Lord was here, the one who had given the order to kill Wilma. And now Luke was going to kill him.

  He rounded a corner onto another street and saw a mass of people gathered together, all of them facing a stage that had been recently constructed, built right in the middle of the street. The shadowy man prowled the stage, dressed entirely in black, his eyes shining bright in the gray gloom as he preached to his congregation.

  “. . . and I tell you a dark storm is coming,” the Dragon said. “We are that storm, washing over this land like a tidal wave, cleansing this land, purifying it. After we wash it clean, we will create a new world. Our world.”

  There were murmurs of agreement in the audience, shouts of joy and excitement, many of them nodding their heads or raising a hand or fist towards the Dragon Lord.

  The Dragon Lord stopped pacing on the stage, a frown on his face like something terrible had just occurred to him, something terrible he needed to share with his flock. “But there are those who oppose us. There are those who will want to destroy us. Destroy you!” He pointed at the crowd in front of him.

  The crowd murmured in agitation, shifting a little, suddenly anxious and unsettled.

  “Yes, you need to stop this threat to us and our mission. You need to seek these people out who would jeopardize what we’re trying to do.” He smiled and seemed like he had just noticed Luke standing at the end of the street, his shining eyes locking with Luke’s. “And there’s one of them now.”

  The crowd turned as the Dragon pointed at Luke.

  Luke watched as all the men and women turned around. Their faces were carved messes, like the DA symbol had been carved so many times into their faces that they were nothing but bloody masks now. Mouths opened in those bloody masks, cries of rage roared as they all rushed towards him.

  Luke pulled out his gun, shooting at the approaching mob, bullets spitting out of the barrel of his gun. But there were too many of them. He didn’t have enough bullets to kill them all.

  CHAPTER 18

  Luke

  Luke woke up with his breath caught in his throat, barely able to breathe for a moment.

  Where was he?

  He sat up on the couch, looking around. It was still dark, but he could see the living room a little, able to see the dark blobs of shapes slowly turning into the familiarity of furniture. It was dawn, the sun probably not even above the mountains yet, but the sky was lighter. For just a few seconds he couldn’t remember where he was, but then it came back to him—he was in the farmhouse, somewhere in West Virginia.

  He took a deep breath. His mouth was dry. He licked at his lips. There were a few swallows of water in the bottle on the coffee table and he drank it down.

  The dreams came back to him in a rush. He saw the woman and the girl in the motel lobby again, and that sense of helplessness washed over him. They were in trouble, maybe even right at this very moment, and he couldn’t help them. He tried to convince himself that they weren’t real, just faces his subconscious mind had made up, nothing but shadows on the wall of his mind. But he knew the Dragon Lord he’d seen in his dream was real, the man prowling the stage in front of his mutilated congregation. Yes, that man was real because the Dark Angel Luke had tortured had told him the man was real. And if the Dragon Lord was real, then maybe that meant the other ones he dreamed about were real, too.

  He had to get up and move around. His body was stiff and cold. Moving around made him feel a little better. Even though everything was quiet, that didn’t mean there wasn’t a threat out there somewhere. Rippers had been trying to kill the horse in the stables until Luke killed them (well, in all fairness, the horse had killed one of the rippers with a kick to the head and had hurt another one badly). He couldn’t let his guard down, and occupying his mind with dreams and things he didn’t know for certain were real was a waste of time right now; he couldn’t do anything about the things he’d seen and felt in his dreams. He needed to focus on the tasks at hand, a skill he had honed over the years, a skill he prided himself on.

  Time to focus.

  Luke picked up his backpack from the floor and slipped it on, adjusting the straps so that it was a little tighter. He grabbed his gun from the coffee table. He didn’t bother searching the upstairs again, there wasn’t really much up there he wanted. Instead, he went into the kitchen. The floor was a mess: a sea of crushed food containers, stained liquids, scattered kitchen utensils, jigsaw pieces of broken dishes, shredded paper, torn cardboard. The countertops had been cleared, like an arm had shoved everything onto the floor. Most of the cabinet doors were open, some torn off the hinges, one just hanging by a single hinge. There was the faint scent of decay and urine among the debris.

  It took ten minutes of carefully sifting through the debris on the floor, but finally Luke found what he was looking for: a set of keys to the pickup truck parked outside. Had it been human scavengers, they would have taken the keys and the truck, but rippers weren’t interested in a set of keys or a vehicle they couldn’t operate anymore—all they cared about was satisfying their hunger and thirst. He pocketed the keys and looked through the food and containers on the floor, but anything edible had already been eaten or smashed. There were three dented cans of food that the rippers obviously couldn’t get open. Luke pulled his backpack off and stuffed the cans of food inside. He set the bag down on the cleared countertop and went to the corner to take a piss, his urine adding to the faint urine smell. Obviously either the rippers had relieved themselves somewhere in here, or some animals had. It felt strange pissing inside the home, but it wasn’t going to make this place any worse. He didn’t want to pee outside until he was sure it was safe to go out there. After he was finished, he grabbed his backpack and slipped it on.

  He looked out the window in the kitchen, studying the driveway for a few moments. Then he went to the front windows in the living room, parting the curtains and looking outside. Everything seemed to be okay, so he headed outside.

  He stepped outside into the chilly morning air, standing on the front porch for a moment, listening and surveying the vast front yard that rolled gently down to the edge of the woods, with the driveway off to his right disappearing down into those same trees. Everything was quiet. He stepped off the front porch and walked across the lawn to the pickup truck.

  When he got to the pickup truck, which was parked right in the middle of the driveway, halfway between the home and the large three-car garage, Luke slipped the key into the door. The lock popped up. He opened the door and got inside, adjusting the driver’s seat. The inside of the cab was cluttered with papers. There were a few hand tools on the passenger floorboard—a hammer, three screwdrivers, and an adjustable wrench—along with empty soda cans and some fast food wrappers. There were more tools in the back seat of the pickup, along with what looked like a set of dirty clothes and an extra jacket. Luke didn’t see any work boots, but the truck smelled a little like dirty feet.

  Luke inserted the key into the ignition, turning the key just enough to light up the instrument panel, but not enough to start the truck. The needle on the fuel gauge jumped up to half-full. The radio came on, but there was nothing but static. He turned it off.

  He turned the key back off and pulled it out of the ignition, pocketing it in his hoodie. He checked the center console and the glove box. No weapons, but he found a stack of CDs, some crum
pled receipts, a few ink pens, two packs of cheese crackers. He ate the crackers while sitting in the truck, his stomach growling before he could even get the first pack open. He looked around as he ate his breakfast, looking and listening for any rippers.

  After Luke was finished with the crackers, he got back out of the truck and walked to the garage. The side door was unlocked and he slipped inside. He found several plastic cans of gasoline. He filled up the truck with the cans of gas, and had one can left over to take with him. There wasn’t much else for him to take from the garage.

  He was ready to go now as he left the garage the last time. But there was still one more thing he wanted to do first. He walked to the corral gate, looking for the brown horse. The horse wasn’t in the field, so he must still be in the stables.

  Luke unchained the corral gate and opened it up wide. The rattling of the chain sounded so loud in the morning silence. The birds were even silent in the trees, perhaps sensing danger. Luke walked towards the stable, his black hiking boots crunching along the frozen grass.

  The horse was still inside the stables, in his stall, peeking his head around the wall to watch Luke enter. It seemed like the horse recognized him from yesterday, but maybe that was just Luke’s imagination. Luke wasn’t even sure if animals had memories like that.

  After opening both stable doors, Luke just stood there, waiting for the horse to leave his stall. But the horse was hesitating, still watching Luke.

  “You can go now,” Luke said.

  The horse just looked at him.

  “You can go. You’re free now.”

  The horse wasn’t moving.

  Luke wasn’t sure if he should walk towards the horse, try to spook him out of the stall, but he decided not to. The horse would eventually wander outside the stables to eat the grass if he got hungry enough. But the grass would be frozen soon, maybe covered with snow in another few weeks. How would the horse eat, then?

  Luke wasn’t sure, but horses had survived for millennia in harsh climates, and he told himself that this horse would find a way to survive, at least until enough of the rippers eventually cornered it.

  Luke walked away from the stables, back to the gate, leaving it open. He went to the pickup truck without a look back at the corral. He climbed inside the truck and shut the door. He slid the key into the ignition and twisted. The truck started right up. At least it wasn’t a diesel truck, and that would make finding gas for it easier. There was definitely no shortage of abandoned vehicles, many with full gas tanks. It was one of the few things he didn’t have to worry about. Eventually the batteries in the vehicles would die and the gas would go bad, but that could take years. And he wasn’t going to plan months ahead right now, much less years—right now he was going to do what he’d always done, what he was best at, focusing on the tasks at hand.

  He studied the map as he sat in the driveway with the heater warming him up. He had a pretty good idea of where he was, and he guessed that the driveway of this farmhouse led down to a small county road. He traced his finger along the road on the map. It ran east and west. He would take it west until he came to the next road that led south. He would work his way down through the state that way, trying to stay on the back roads as much as possible and avoiding any cities or large towns.

  After folding the map and stowing it in the center console, Luke drove down the driveway and out onto the narrow road through the trees. Walking through the woods all day yesterday had been rough travel, but the good thing about the woods was that he hadn’t come across any towns or rippers. The truck was a faster means of travel, but there would be no avoiding every town along the way.

  He checked the radio for the hell of it, but there was mostly static and a few recordings or blaring emergency signals. He figured in the next few days whatever automatic generators were running those radio towers would run out of gas and everything on the radio would be either silence or static. A ham operator on the AM dial was preaching about God and the End Times. Luke thought it might have been the same man he’d heard back in Cleveland on the truck’s radio, but he couldn’t be sure—they all sounded the same to him. He thought of the prophet he had seen walking down the streets of Parma in his flowing white robe. The ham radio operator sounded a little like the prophet. But he knew the prophet wasn’t operating a ham radio anywhere; he was pretty sure the prophet was dead by now.

  He left the radio tuned in to the ham operator for a few miles, not really listening to what the man was saying, but just enjoying the sound of a human voice for a little while. But the ham radio operator made Luke think of Wilma manning the radio back at the safe house. He thought of the radios that the camp must have, but they were remaining silent—Wilma had told him that they would. He didn’t want to think about Wilma right now, so he turned the radio off.

  After driving over the top of a hill and down into the woods, Luke rummaged through the center console while trying to keep his eyes on the road. He remembered seeing a couple of CDs in cases somewhere down there. He pulled one out and didn’t even look at it, opening it and sliding the silver disc into the CD player. It was some country artist, a man singing in a low and sad voice. To Luke it sounded like most country songs, and even though he’d never been a fan of country music, this was better than the silence, better than listening to his thoughts looping over and over in his mind, better than thinking about Wilma and the dreams he’d had last night.

  An hour later Luke reached the edge of a small town, the town of Heaven according to the map. He saw some abandoned vehicles, including a pickup truck with a camper top on the back of it. A DA symbol was painted on the side of the camper top.

  The Dark Angels were here. Or at least they had been here at some time in the past, marking their territory.

  Luke felt that sudden anger rising up in him. He saw Wilma dying in his arms again. If the Dark Angels were here, then he would find them. He would kill them.

  The road he was on led to an intersection with a fast food place on one corner, a restaurant Luke had never heard of before, probably some local chain. There was a gas station on another corner, a strip plaza with a laundromat, a flower shop, a thrift store, a small church. A few blocks ahead there was another intersection with another small store on one side and another road shooting off to the left.

  Luke drove through the intersection which led to a town square with a spectacular view of the mountains beyond the town; those mountains encircled this little town like large green walls. The sky above was blue with a few wispy clouds, the first clear day he’d seen in a while. The sun burned brightly, illuminating the parked and abandoned vehicles, many vandalized with the DA symbols now, drawn in bright red paint. Some of the doors and hoods of the vehicles were wide open.

  The town square lay right in front of Luke, the road he was on went around the square, and he could turn left or right to go around it. The square had playing fields in it, and some kind of bandstand far off to the left at the other end. There was a statue right in front of Luke as he veered right, some important man in this area, maybe the town founder or something—someone already forgotten now.

  The road around the town square (which was actually more like a gigantic oval), led to a row of older homes, and down from those, at the other end of the square were rows of buildings housing businesses.

  But Luke didn’t make it down to those businesses. A machine gun opened fire from somewhere, a few of the bullets hitting the pickup truck. Luke ducked down behind the steering wheel and yanked the wheel hard to the right, speeding right towards a front yard where a dump truck had been parked half on the sidewalk, and half on the front yard. A full-sized Humvee, painted beige and camouflage, came roaring towards him from a small side road just past the few houses on this side of the street—that was where the machinegun fire was coming from.

  Luke couldn’t keep going forward down the street—he would run right into the Humvee and the gunfire. He couldn’t back up, and he didn’t have time to turn around. A sturdy woo
den fence protected the town square of fields to his left, so his only choice was to veer right into the front yard of the house where a dump truck was parked. He crashed right into the dump truck and then crawled across the front seat, opening the passenger door and getting out. He grabbed his backpack and ran for the house.

  He had wondered where all the Dark Angels were when he had first entered this town, and now he had found them.

  CHAPTER 19

  Ray

  As the sun peeked up over the horizon, Ray drove down the winding road through the hills. If he had planned the route out correctly, they should have smooth sailing, skirting most towns for the next fifty miles. The next town on the map that they could avoid was a place called Heaven, West Virginia. Heaven—couldn’t be too bad, could it? Well, he wasn’t going to take any chances. He turned left, driving down a long road through the woods, the road dipping down into a valley, the walls of trees suddenly closing in around them, darkening the bright morning a little.

  They saw a few houses here and there when there were clearings. They saw a road with lines of mobile homes down them. They saw the outskirts of a tiny town with businesses: a place that sold hand-built sheds, a gas station, a corner store, a church, a tiny pre-school. They saw farms, a clearing with a few ranches, bridges that covered rocky streams. But nothing too populated, and they hadn’t seen too many rippers, only a few wandering around. Two of the rippers tried to run after their SUV, but they gave up after Ray sped past them. Usually they didn’t even try to chase their vehicle if they were going too fast, but maybe some of them were getting desperate, getting hungry.

  Ray was a little worried about Doug’s cabin, but he didn’t want to share his fears with the others. It wasn’t that he didn’t think Doug’s cabin was there, or that Doug had made the whole thing up, it was just a fear that Doug had exaggerated about things, made his preparations seem better than they were. Doug tended to embellish. Ray could never prove it, but he was sure that many of the stories that Doug liked to tell were exaggerations, or even outright lies. But it seemed to make Doug feel better if he told his somewhat tall tales. Looking back, Ray was a little ashamed that he hadn’t treated Doug a little better. How many times had Doug asked Ray out for a beer or even to share a lunch somewhere? How many times had Doug invited Ray to a cookout or a baseball game? Doug wasn’t married; he had no girlfriend, and no family that he had ever spoken of, except for his wealthy parents who had died, but no siblings he’d ever mentioned. He wasn’t from the D.C. area, and now that Ray thought about it, he wasn’t really even sure where Doug was from. Not from the south, maybe somewhere in the Midwest, but he couldn’t be sure. And always, no matter how many times Doug had asked, Ray had always politely turned him down, just like everyone else at the office had done.