The Darkening

by Paul Antony Jones

  Birdy turned and saw her mom's head peeking around the door frame.

  "Nothing much," Birdy said, grabbing a stray sock she had dropped. "I was thinking of going to the mall before it rains."

  Elizabeth Finch smiled at her daughter. "Just make sure you get your chores done by the time I get home from work, okay?"

  Birdy nodded.

  "Good girl," said Elizabeth, moving aside to let her daughter squeeze past. "Wash them on cold," she called after her kid as she disappeared toward the kitchen.

  •••

  By the time Birdy got out of the shower, her mom had already left for work.

  Birdy toweled herself dry, slipped on fresh underwear, then pulled a pair of running pants from the closet. She finished her ensemble with a gray hoody over her t-shirt, and her ratty pair of sneakers.

  If her mom had still been at home, Birdy would have had to take the stairs. Instead she decided she would go the back way. It would save her a five-minute walk to the bus stop.

  Birdy grabbed her MP3 player and plugged the headphones into her ears. She walked over to her bedroom window, eased it open and looked down toward the flat roof of the adjacent apartment block, a couple of stories below. She climbed nimbly up onto the windowsill, switched on her music player, and swung herself out into thin air. She grabbed ahold of the thick drain pipe that ran from the roof gutter two stories above her along the face of the apartment down to a drain grate at ground level. The pipe was cold and bits of paint flaked off as Birdy grasped it with both hands, then placed her feet against the apartment building's wall on either side of the pipe. She quickly lowered herself down until she was parallel to the flat roof of the building butting up against her apartment block, and stepped off onto the roof.

  •••

  Tyreese sat at the bedroom window and looked out over the neighborhood.

  The screech of a window sliding open drew his eyes down, just in time to see the girl who lived in the apartment below his deftly swing herself out onto the ledge of her window. She grabbed the drainpipe running up the side of the apartment building and lowered herself into the gully separating his building from the upper level of the adjacent apartment's roof. The only reason he knew she was a girl—she dressed her skinny frame in a drab charcoal hoodie, army surplus pants and a similarly colored baseball cap on her head that effectively made its owner androgynous—was because he had heard her mother call her Annabelle.

  Tyreese smiled as he tracked the girl's movement across the roof; the kid was something to behold. It would have been easy to be jealous of the girl, watching her move so sublimely, while he was stuck in this damn wheelchair, but he felt only awe at her speed and agility. This kid was fast. He looked down to where his own legs should have been, felt a brief ghostly memory of the pain from when he had lost them, and dismissed it. On the other side of the room, leaning against the wall near the door were his legs; two prosthetic limbs that were as repellent to him as his own missing, decomposed legs would be. A wooden walking cane leaned against the wall next to the boot-shod prosthetics. Tyreese looked away, his eyes instinctively moving back to the girl.

  The first time he had seen her, Annabelle, do this little trick, he had about had a heart attack, sure she was going to fall the thirty feet to the broken concrete path below. But he had quickly learned that this girl was as gifted an acrobat as one of those performers he'd seen on America's Got Talent.

  This was the part he always loved to watch. It never ceased to amaze him how a girl her size could be so strong and so damn nimble too. She was fast as a jackrabbit and about as agile as Spiderman. Still, he held his breath as he watched Annabelle lower herself hand over hand down the pipe until she was almost parallel with the flat roof of the adjacent building. In one fluid movement, she let go of the drainpipe and launched herself backward, pushing away from the apartment wall with both legs, rotating through the air before landing sideways on the concrete roof ten feet away. She rolled once across the ground before disappearing between two large aluminum air conditioning vents.

  When Annabelle reappeared, she was on her feet and jogging across the roof to the opposite side of the building.

  •••

  Halfway across the roof, Birdy stopped. She had the distinct impression that someone was watching her. She turned and looked back at her apartment block and found the window to her bedroom. Her eyes drifted up one floor to the window above hers... and there he was. The Window Guy, she called him. She didn't know his name, she just knew that he always seemed to be sitting there at his window. So he became the Window Guy.

  He probably thought she didn't see him, hadn't noticed him all those times she'd watched him from the corner of her eye while he watched her. But she had noticed, she just hadn't bothered to let him know. She didn't think he was a creeper, he just seemed, well... lonely. What was that word she'd learned today? Melancholy. She had come across the word in a book she was reading. The author's name was Emily Brontë. She absolutely loved that name. Why couldn't her mom have given her a name like that? Instead she was labeled Annabelle Finch. But it wasn't the writer's name that had attracted her to the book, it was its title: Wuthering Heights. What was that about?

  She'd begun reading and had immediately been drawn into the world of Heathcliff and Catherine and their doomed love story. That was where she'd come across the word... melancholy. She'd looked it up on her phone and found the definition meant perpetually sad. That seemed to fit the Window Guy; perpetually sad. He looked crumpled, like he was folded in on himself.

  She didn't know why she chose to make it so obvious, maybe she just wanted to make a connection with someone, it wasn't like she had a lot of friends, none at all really other than at school. Her eyes took a second to adjust to the glare of the diffuse light trying to force its way through the cloud-packed sky; there he was, the Window Guy. He was looking right at her; she could see the sudden tip of his head as he realized that she could see him looking at her.

  Then it was Birdy's turn to be surprised when the Window Guy raised a hand and waved. Beneath the cowl of her hoodie, Birdy felt her face flush red and a smile crease the edges of her mouth. She waved back. Then, embarrassed and a little confused, she spun around and sprinted toward the edge of the roof, looking for the spot, the one safe spot. She aimed for it as she had a hundred times before. She used her right leg to propel herself off the edge of the roof, forcing her body to relax as she flew through the air, until her feet hit the iron landing of the fire escape fixed to the side of the opposite building with a metallic clang that rattled the entire structure. She rolled once and then was up. Two paces to her left and she dropped through the space where the ladder to the ground should have been (that lay ten feet below, rusted and broken and useless) and caught the metal lip with her fingertips, allowing her momentum to carry her forward then backward. On the second swing she let go.

  This was where Birdy felt she finally lived up to her name; when she was airborne. And in the eternal second between her fingers releasing the cold metal and her feet hitting the concrete of the alleyway, she was truly flying.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  His real name was Gerald, but no one had called him that in over fifty years. Everyone just called him Rat. He hadn't gotten the nickname because he looked like a rodent, he'd gotten it because he'd lived on the streets of LA longer than anyone else most street people knew. And, just like his namesake, Rat knew where all the best places to hide, sleep, and find food were.

  At 68, Rat was also the oldest homeless person any of them knew, and he knew just about everyone who lived out here. So if you needed information, Rat was the one you asked. But tonight, he was having problems answering the one question the five other people standing with him all wanted to know: Where had all their friends gone?

  "I ain't seen Jimbo or Wonky Alan or Delilah in three days," said ChoCho, a fragile looking Asian woman with a permanent look of fear in her eyes. "Now you know those fools as well as I do, and they ain't gonna mi
ss a meal at the Kitchen."

  "Yeah," said Jay, "and when was the last time you didn't have to wait in line at the Kitchen? I can't even remember."

  He was right, Rat thought, he was definitely right. The others huddled around the flaming oil drum nodded in unison.

  The Kitchen was the nickname for the church over on Burbank Boulevard where a meal was served every night like clockwork. Normally the lines could stretch fifty people deep at the door and some days you'd have to wait a good hour or more to even see the inside of the building. But for their last three visits, Rat and his friends had barely had to wait at all. And every night it seemed like the wait was getting shorter and shorter.

  "The cops rounding us up?" Piper asked. She was only seventeen, but she was smart.

  Rat shook his head. "The cops don't do that no more. Besides, it would've been in the papers. Ain't seen nothing."

  "Well they sure as shit ain't moving to Miami," Eugene joked.

  Everyone laughed, but it was half-hearted, nervous. They had all been on edge since the first street people had turned up missing about eight days ago. Sure, people came and went all the time, that was the nature of living on the streets. But the majority of homeless were out here for years, and you'd see their faces on a daily basis. So when old timers started to vanish, that was when people really started to notice.

  And that was also when Rat had taken action. He hadn't lived this long by being a sucker. He'd pulled the people he trusted the most; the ones that weren't sick, or whose drug habit was at least under control.

  "Safety in numbers," he'd told them. "We all stick together and we'll be safe."

  So it was thanks to Rat that the six of them now sat under this concrete overpass, huddled around an oil drum fire, while cars and trucks rumbled across the Ventura Freeway above them. It wasn't like it was cold out here, not compared to some nights. The rain was bad, sure, but everyone just gravitated to the fire because it felt safe. The night was closing in quickly. And darkness was when people disappeared.

  "We just gotta stick together," Rosy said. "We stick together, we'll be okay." She took a swig from a can of Old Milwaukee and passed it to ChoCho who also took a pull then passed it along.

  Rat had his people organized; during the day he'd sent some off to grab water and food, while he and two others had scrounged up enough wood and cardboard to keep the fire burning for the next three nights. Have to be prepared. Have to be ready for anything, Rat had told them. Which was why they also had an array of makeshift weapons from knives to spears. The spears were improvised from the firewood they had collected. If whoever was targeting the homeless came looking for Rat and his people, they were gonna be in for one hell of a surprise, yes sir.

  "Thing is," Rat said, "Whoever's doing this, they gonna slip up some time. Gonna make a mistake. And when they do, the cops are gonna—"

  "Hey! Hey! Who's that out there?" Marcellus called out, as he tapped Rat rapidly on the arm with one hand and pointed into the darkness beyond the light of the fire with his other.

  Rat strained to look where Marcellus was pointing, but his eyes had gone to shit years ago and all he could see was a blur of shadows and shapes and darkness. "I don't see—" he started to say but was interrupted by ChoCho.

  "It's Jimbo," ChoCho said. "Jimbo's back."

  Rat could hear the excitement in ChoCho's voice. She and Jimbo had been an item at some point in the past, and everyone knew she still had a thing for the poor guy. ChoCho scrambled to her feet and started to walk toward where Marcellus was pointing.

  "Hey, ChoCho; wait up," Rat said.

  "It's Jimbo," ChoCho repeated matter-of-factly, and continued on her way.

  Despite his crummy eyesight, Rat could still see ChoCho's shape as she walked off into the darkness. He also saw her stop abruptly and heard a collective gasp of surprise from the others still standing around the fire.

  "What... What's wrong with his eyes?" Jay whispered. "Why they shinin' like that?"

  Before Rat could ask what Jay was talking about, a terrible scream filled the night, drowning out even the constant thrum of vehicles on the overpass above their heads.

  "Oh Jesus, what's he doing to her? Oh my God! Run!"

  Rat saw his group break and run in all directions and he ran too, although he didn't know why. More screams erupted from all around him and he willed his old legs to move faster while trying to avoid the scattered junk and potholes that littered the waste ground around him.

  Ahead of him, he saw Marcellus' broad back. He was heading toward a pile of rubble that half-hid an entrance to one of the storm drains interlacing the city.

  "Marcellus! Wait for me!" Rat called out.

  The big Mexican stopped and turned to look back at Rat. "Come on," he said, beckoning for Rat to hurry. "You got to run." Rat could hear real fear in Marcellus' voice, which was frightening in and of itself because the bear of a man had been an Army Ranger back in the eighties, until drugs, PTSD and Reagan had gotten the better of him. And up until today, the former Ranger had never given any indication that he was afraid of a single goddamn thing.

  Marcellus turned and began to scramble up the mound of rubble, but as he did, something inhumanly fast burst from the shadows and covered the thirty feet between it and Marcellus in four loping bounds.

  "Look out!" Rat shouted, just in time for Marcellus to half-turn and see the shadow leaping at him. Marcellus screamed and tried to duck but the shadow hit him hard, bowling the big man over like a cat would a bird. Marcellus began to scream and thrash at the silhouette fastened to his throat like some giant tick.

  Rat could see no other way but to run past whatever it was that had managed to take down Marcellus. He tried not to look—didn't really want to know, as he limped his way as fast as his gimpy legs could toward the storm drain opening—but Rat couldn't help himself. He glanced down at the two bodies tangled on the ground.

  Marcellus was pinned on his back, his eyes wide, face contorted in pain and terror as the... the girl—Rat could see it was just a girl now that he was close enough. It was just a little goddamn girl, but somehow she was stronger than Marcellus.

  The girl hadn't noticed Rat; she was interested only in Marcellus. Her face was buried in the man's neck and there was a strange sound, an obscene sucking noise. It reminded Rat of when he was a kid and he'd suck a Slurpee through a straw. Marcellus reached a hand toward Rat, his eyes beseeching him for help, his mouth moving but no words coming out.

  It's just a girl, Rat told himself, took a step toward his friend. "Hey!" he yelled, "Get off him."

  The girl's head spun in his direction and instantly dissolved all of Rat's remaining bravado. Her mouth was smeared with blood, Marcellus' blood, Rat could see the two puncture marks on the side of the man's neck, blood seeping from them both.

  Blood dripped from the girl's mouth, oozing over her chin in thick globules. And oh, dear God in Heaven, her mouth. Rat saw teeth, gleaming in the meager light from the fire. Awful, dreadful teeth. But it was her eyes that terrified him the most; they glowed a golden yellow.

  They were the eyes of a predator, of a killer with death on her mind.

  The girl opened her mouth wider than should've been possible and hissed at Rat as though she were a rattlesnake and he had disturbed her.

  Rat screeched an expletive and began to half-run half-stumble his way up the pile of rubble that hid the entrance to the storm drain system. He was aware he was mumbling to himself incoherently. He felt fingernails break and splinter as he pulled himself hand over hand up the rubble and debris. Something sliced his right leg and he felt warm blood trickling down his calf, but there was no pain. Not yet. As he neared the top of the rubble pile, Rat glanced back in the direction of the camp and saw the indistinct outlines of several bodies lying on the ground near the fire can. Shadows knelt beside or on top of them, golden eyes burning in the night.

  To Rat's right he saw someone being dragged into the deeper shadows. It was a woman, he thought, by the
sound of the screaming, but he couldn't tell who it was. He turned back and pushed himself up and over the top of the debris pile. Exhausted, he allowed himself to roll down the opposite side. At the bottom, Rat pulled himself to his feet and staggered toward the storm drain entrance, squeezing himself between the metal security bars he and Marcellus had forced open just two nights earlier. He turned and looked back through the bars; there was nothing there. Whatever those... things were, they had not followed him.

  Rat exhaled a sigh of relief and started to get his breathing under control. It was only when he turned to head deeper into the sewer and saw the four pairs of golden yellow eyes waiting in the darkness ahead of him that he realized he was doomed.

  Rat tried to scream, but the first pair of fangs ripped the sound from his throat.

  SATURDAY

  CHAPTER SIX

  A man's voice crackled from the speaker of the phone resting in Tyreese's lap.

  "Hello. How can I help you?" The store clerk on the other end of the phone sounded frazzled, tired.

  "Hi, yes, this is Mr. Douglass," Tyreese said, quickly pulling the cell phone to his ear. "I was expecting a delivery today. It's usually here by now, but no one has shown up."

  The delivery guy was always here by now; Tyreese was beginning to suspect that maybe there had been a screw-up. The sky was thick with gray and black clouds, pregnant with the threat of the storm to come. It sucked the color from the landscape, painting everything in desaturated, muted monochrome. It felt more like a winter evening than a Saturday morning.

  "I'm sorry Mr. Douglass—" The man's voice became fainter as his attention was drawn away by someone out of range of the microphone. Tyreese heard him apologizing to someone, then he was back again. "—half my staff haven't shown up for work today and that includes my delivery driver. It's this damn storm warning or the flu or something. I'm sorry but you're going to have to come in to the store in person."