The Darkening

by Paul Antony Jones

  The first thing that hit him was how cold the building was, as though the heat had been turned off for hours. For a second he relaxed. That played into his theory that the street had suffered a localized brown-out, lost all power. That theory lasted for approximately two more seconds before his nose picked up on a scent, so strong he thought he might gag; it was the unmistakable coppery smell of blood. Lots of blood.

  He played the flashlight across the lobby from wall to wall.

  With the entrance at his back, the lobby had two more exits at three and nine o'clock leading to ground-level apartments. A stairwell gave access to the upper floors. The steps led from the ground floor to a small landing then a second set of stairs 180-degrees opposite it. Next to the stairs were the cold aluminum doors of the elevator. The floor was made of some kind of tile or linoleum; it was impossible to tell which because it was covered in pools of congealed blood.

  Sova's breathing doubled, his heart began to thump hard in his chest. He swept the flashlight and pistol left and right; a trail of blood led up the stairs, another through each of the ground floor doors. There were footprints in the blood, so many Sova could not tell how many people had been here when whatever had gone down had happened. And he could see what looked like drag marks, as though a body had been pulled through the still-fresh blood then down the corridor to the right. He played his light over the walls and then the ceiling, revealing the unmistakable marks of arterial blood splatter. No bullet holes. No spent casings, either. Not a one.

  Vomit pushed its way up the officer's throat. He gagged, covered his mouth with the back of his hand, and barely managed to keep the gorge down. It was a charnel house. He swallowed hard, clearing the residue from his throat, and backed up until he felt the door at his back. Only then did he holster his pistol so he could key his radio's microphone.

  "William-Mary-four-two. Officer requires urgent assistance at my location. I repeat, officer needs urgent assistance. Multiple homicide, assailants may still be on scene. Send SWAT." He was surprised at how level his voice sounded, a calm that belied the gut-wrenching fear he actually felt in the pit of his stomach.

  His radio crackled an acknowledgment, followed a second later by the dispatcher transmitting his request for assistance at his location.

  Sova played the light over the interior one last time and pushed his back against the door until it began to open.

  Thump! Thump! Thump!

  Sova froze, the flashlight's beam instantly flicking to the source of the sound.

  It was a ball, a child's bright yellow toy ball. It rolled across the first landing of the stairwell, dropped off the lip and bumped its way down the remaining steps, rolling across the floor until it stopped in a pool of blood six feet from where Sova stood.

  Sova flicked the beam of his flashlight back up to the stairwell.

  "Hello?" he called out, painfully aware of the note of nervousness his voice carried. "Los Angeles Police Department, come out with your hands above your head."

  Someone giggled. It was a child's laughter. A boy, Sova guessed, maybe six or seven years of age.

  Sova kept his weapon trained on the stairwell and took a step closer, then another, and another until he was just a couple of feet from the first step. "It's okay," he said, "I won't hurt you. Can you come down to me?"

  There was another giggle, this time longer. Something dropped from the darkness, too fast for him to follow, and landed with a wet splat at his feet.

  Sova looked down and saw eyes staring back at him; it was the head of a man, maybe mid-forties, his eyes wide open, mouth agape in a final scream of fear. A jagged ridge of skin hung around the neck of the head. The flap of skin was ragged, as though it had been torn from the torso it belonged to. The man's windpipe still hung limply from the remains of his throat.

  Sova staggered backward. His boots slipped on a thick pool of half-congealed blood and he fell hard on his ass, jarring the flashlight from his hand and sending it rolling off to his right, the beam pointing back toward the street.

  "Jesus! Oh, Jesus!" Sova's voice belonged to someone else now. The panic he felt coursing through his body felt distant, his awareness regressing deep into the center of his brain as fear took over his body. He flipped over and began to move on all fours, instinctively heading for the light of his flashlight.

  Someone was moving down the stairs, he could hear the sound of them hopping down each step, giggling to themselves.

  There were just a few feet between him and the flashlight. He ordered his arms and legs to move faster, but his limbs found little traction in the slick of blood he was crawling through.

  "Tee-hee-hee!" This time the childish giggle was directly behind him.

  "Oh God. No! No!" Sova reached a hand toward the flashlight.

  Something heavy landed between his shoulders, knocking the air from him, pinning him to the floor.

  Sova threw out his right hand, scrabbling for a grip on the flashlight that lay just beyond his fingertip's reach.

  Whatever had him in its grip now began tearing at his uniform, pulling his tunic away from around his neck, shredding the cloth and skin beneath it. He felt something terribly sharp pierce the skin of his throat. Felt warmth begin to flow out of him.

  Officer Sova screamed but there were no humans left in the building to hear him.

  •••

  The street was still, with only the constant thunder of rain to disturb the otherwise silent world that existed within the two block radius of Officer Sova's cruiser, its lights still painting the road red, blue, and white. A minute later, the first strains of approaching emergency vehicles began to echo off the buildings.

  The SWAT team arrived first, their APC roaring to a halt next to Sova's cruiser. The twin doors at the rear of the armored personnel carrier flew open and twelve black-clad figures exited, weapons drawn. They immediately began to fan out into a defensive configuration, taking up firing positions around the apartment entrance where Sova had radioed his position from, their weapons sweeping across the front of the building.

  Four more cop cars arrived, pulling up around the APC to form a cordon, the uniforms jumping from them, their weapons at the ready, using their vehicles for cover.

  Lynda Turner pulled her ambulance up to the perimeter, making sure the vehicle was out of the line of any potential fire but close enough she could move in at a moment's notice if the need arose. Her partner, Jeb, sat in the back, his arm resting against the headrest of her chair as he leaned in and watched the circus unfold in front of them.

  A stillness settled over the street as the police waited for their go signal.

  When the signal came it was from one of the SWAT members, his arm chopping the air toward the apartment entrance. As one, the SWAT team flicked down their night vision goggles, leveled their weapons and advanced at a quick jog to the entrance of the apartment. The lead cop pulled the door open, waited as his team flowed inside, and when the last man was in, tagged onto the end.

  The door slowly swung closed behind the last man.

  Minutes passed with only occasional radio chatter as the SWAT team updated their position as they moved through the apartment building, level by level.

  "Holy shit!" Lynda jumped as gunfire suddenly erupted from inside the apartments. She could see muzzle flashes behind the windows on the second floor, hear glass shattering as bullets, fired wildly at God knew who, exploded out of the walls of the building.

  The screams began seconds later; horrible, terrifying yells that the cops on the street heard over their radios and through the walls separating the SWAT team from safety. It created an eerie Doppler effect as the delay of the transmission played back the sound of the men's screams a quarter-second after the wind carried the actual screams to their ears. Twenty seconds after the first shot had been fired, silence descended over the street yet again.

  Then all hell broke loose. The cops out on the street were either yelling into their radios or sprinting toward the apartment bu
ilding, weapons in hand.

  "We're gonna need more units here," said Jeb from the back of the ambulance. Lynda could hear him busying himself prepping equipment. There was little doubt in either of their minds that this was going to be a mass casualty situation.

  "I'll close th—" Jeb's sentence was cut short.

  Lynda glanced in the rearview mirror but couldn't see him. The back door of the ambulance was wide open. She turned to face the rear compartment, but it was empty.

  "Jeb?" she called, confused. There was no answer.

  A scream sliced through the night, cutting Lynda's nerves as sharply as a scalpel. It was coming from above her, the paramedic realized, from the roof of the ambulance. She looked up in time to see a hand appear at the top of her windshield. The hand moved down the glass as Jeb, his face contorted with terror, pulled himself over the windshield toward the hood of the ambulance.

  Lynda was barely aware of the other screams that had erupted around her. Her mind registered the barrage of gunshots filling the night with thunder only in passing, her mind stuttering as it tried to deal with the horror of Jeb's face as he thumped weakly on the windshield with a bloodied fist.

  Let me in, he mouthed silently, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. Help me, please.

  And then he was gone. Something had snatched him back up onto the roof of the ambulance, leaving a slick red mark across the windshield that almost instantly began to dissolve as the pouring rain washed it away.

  Jeb's screams of horror weakened to a bleat and then nothing.

  "Oh, God! Oh, God!" Lynda repeated as she stared through the blood-smeared glass of the ambulance out into a scene of utter confusion and horror beyond.

  Through the haze of falling rain, Lynda saw shapes moving among the shadows. She didn't remember there being so many people here a moment ago, where had they all come from? Gunfire exploded from her right. She saw a shadow get hit, fall to the ground, and a moment later spring back up and charge the cop who had fired at it. In a second, the cop had disappeared beneath a wave of darkness.

  Get out of here. Got to get out of here now. Lynda's brain had finally found a low enough gear to begin functioning again. She reached a hand toward the gear stick, throwing the ambulance into reverse.

  Machine gun fire crackled through the night. Lynda yelped in fear and turned just in time to see a lone cop standing on the roof of his cruiser blasting away at a ring of human-shaped shadows surrounding the car.

  Lynda released the brake and began to reverse the ambulance away from the nightmare.

  The cop was still firing even as he was pulled from his feet. Lynda saw him drop hard to the roof of his cruiser. She had just enough time to register the muzzle flash of his weapon before the first stray bullet shattered the windshield and struck her in the shoulder. Mercifully the second bullet struck her a second later just below her right eye, and all pain ceased.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A breath caught in Tyreese's throat and he startled awake. The unmistakable sound of small-arms fire rattled nearby, and for a moment his sleep-confused mind told him he was back there, in Afghanistan. It took him a couple more seconds before he realized he was actually lying in his bed and it was probably just a—

  A scream, bleeding pain and terror, pierced the night, louder even than the constant thrum of the rain against the building.

  Tyreese sat bolt upright in his bed, throwing back the covers. The scream—it belonged to a man, he was sure—echoed through the bedroom, followed by another short burst of gunfire, this time from a pistol. Something major was happening, and close by, too. Tyreese swung his lower torso off the side of the bed, used his powerful arms to move from the bed to the wheelchair and pushed himself to the window, staying as low as he could.

  Blue, red, and white light leaked through the space between the apartment buildings across the street; the telltale imprint of LAPD's presence. Whatever was going down was either happening in the street directly behind the adjacent apartments or the one beyond that, it was hard to tell where exactly because the rain-covered windows diffused the light from the emergency vehicles into wispy splotches and streaks. Tyreese released the window's security latch and forced the complaining window up, blinking away the rain as it splashed against his face, the cold air bringing goosebumps to his naked arms and chest. He squinted and listened.

  Gusts of wind cut through the street, rattling the branches of trees, whistling between gaps, making it hard to pick out other sounds that might explain what was happening. Tyreese thought he heard raised voices, panicked voices, but couldn't be sure. There was another burst of gunfire, multiple weapons firing simultaneously, some of them full-auto, followed by more screams for help. He could see the flashes of the weapons as they discharged, followed by the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of gunfire.

  Then there was nothing.

  Tyreese craned his neck to try to get a better angle, ignoring the rain. Tyreese felt a chill, colder than the one blowing over him, run up his spine and down his arm to the tips of his fingers. Over the entire length of the street that was visible from his window, some nine or ten apartment buildings, only three lights had turned on. Every other window was dark. Hell, he had known nights when the entire street would light up just so the locals could listen (and offer their own commentary and opinions) on a couple's squabble that got out of hand. Tonight, with this kind of excitement, the response was as good as nothing.

  For the first time in years, Tyreese felt a hot knot of fear begin to tie itself in the pit of his stomach. Something was terribly wrong here, and he had no idea what it could be.

  •••

  Birdy's eyes flickered open, her mind foundered for a moment unsure of what the noise that had startled her awake was, or where it was even coming from. It took a few moments for her sleep-misted brain to realize she was in her mom's room; she had fallen asleep on her bed. Her mother's scent still lingered on the pillow, and she breathed it in deeply.

  Then she yelped loudly as the unmistakable crack of gunfire reverberated around the room. It sounded close, very close. She held her breath and waited, counting the beats of her heart thumping against her chest: one, two, three, four, five...

  This time the gunfire was continuous, a sustained barrage of shots that sounded like it was coming from some war movie being filmed nearby. She crept to the window on all fours, afraid of stray bullets, raised her head just far enough above the bottom of the window to be able to look out at the street and see the red, blue, and white lights of cop cars leaking through the gully between the apartments across the street. The intermittent flash of what was obviously gunfire lit up the buildings, making millisecond-long shadows jump across the walls of the apartments. More flashes followed by the rat-tat-tat sound of a machine gun on full auto reached her ears a half-second later.

  Before she really knew what she was doing, she had pulled on her clothes, laced up her sneakers and headed back to the window. She pulled it up, turned her head from the sudden pinprick spray of rain that splashed across her face, grabbed hold of the slick drainpipe, swung herself out, and quickly climbed down.

  •••

  A scraping noise drew Tyreese's attention down to the floor below him just in time to see Birdy's hoody-covered body maneuver out onto the drainpipe and begin to climb down to the ground.

  Where the hell was she going? She couldn't be so stupid as to actually be heading toward whatever was playing out over there, could she?

  Never underestimate the amount of stupid a kid is capable of, his old man had once told him not long before he left, back when he was probably as young as she was now. He hadn't understood what his Pop had meant back then, but as he aged he had come to a grudging belief that his father was a lot smarter than he had given him credit for, God rest the old bastard's soul.

  Tyreese watched as Birdy dropped to the ground and, at a low crouch, crossed the road heading toward the gully running between the two apartment buildings opposite his.

  "St
op!" Tyreese yelled, just as a sustained burst of automatic fire erupted again, drowning out his voice.

  He saw Birdy duck behind a car. She knelt next to the rear wheel for a moment, then she was up again. If the kid had heard him she showed no indication. Tyreese felt his muscles tense as he watched her disappear at a jog into the shadowed mouth of the gully.

  •••

  The second Birdy's feet hit the ground, she ran to the safety of a nearby tree, listening to the darkness. Other than the constant hiss of rain and the creaking of wind gusting against the apartments, the block had become deathly silent.

  Birdy took a deep breath, then sprinted into the road. Halfway across, a short burst of machine gun fire hammered the night and she dove for safety behind the rear wheel of a car parked on the street, sure that someone was shooting at her. A man's voice, barely audible, began begging some unknown assailant for his life before abruptly shifting to a terrified, pain-filled scream, which then just as abruptly ended.

  Birdy's hands shook. And she thought she might have peed herself a little. She heard her mother's voice chastising her; What are you doing, Annabelle? Get home, right now. Do you hear me?

  No! Something had changed over the last few days, since the storm had shown up. It had brought something with it, something that had insinuated itself gradually into Birdy's community and then directly into her life. First the storm, then the people who had just vanished, then her mom's disappearance, and now this... a firefight just a few hundred feet away. It was all linked, all connected, Birdy just knew it was.

  Her legs felt soft and unresponsive, as though they were rebelling against her. She ordered them to move and used her hands to push herself up the side of the car until she was able to peek over the trunk toward a gully.

  A concrete path about a hundred feet or so long ran between the eight-foot high security fences of two apartment buildings. Tufts of grass grew along the edges of the paving stones, starting to turn green again after so much rain. A single streetlight stood midway along the length of the gully, but it was out, the cover shattered, the bulb busted too. There was still light though, it came in swirling blues and reds and whites that played over the opposite end of the gully. Water pooled on the uneven paving stones, reflecting the light of the cop cars into what would have been, on any other night, a pretty kaleidoscope across the walls and windows of the apartment buildings. Tonight however, to Birdy, it looked like searchlights scouring the area for her.