The Darkness
AFTER
Scott B. Williams
Text copyright © Scott B. Williams 2013. Design © Ulysses Press 2013 and its licensors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Published in the United States by
ULYSSES PRESS
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ISBN 978-1-61243-209-0
Library of Congress Control Number 2013931789
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Cover photographs: sunset © Hasloo Group Production Studio/shutterstock.com; archer © Mary Morgan/istockphoto.com
Arrow illustration: © Santi0103/shutterstock.com
For my dearest Michelle, always there for me, always believing I can do anything.
With you, I can.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PROLOGUE
Mitch was annoyed at how hard it was to control the shaking in his arms as he held the bow at full draw and took careful aim. It was certainly not the sixty-pound draw weight of the longbow that made him unsteady—the physical part was easy after years of practice. He was so familiar with the bow that the mechanics of holding, aiming, and releasing were unconscious. He acted only on muscle memory until the arrow was on its way to its mark. Sometimes that mark was a stationary practice target, and as long as he didn’t overthink it, he almost never missed. Other times the mark was a wary game animal that could at any instant hear a subtle sound, see the movement of the bow being drawn, or catch his scent before the arrow released. It was natural to have a touch of “buck fever” at such moments in a hunt, but with experience, he had long since overcome that nervous reaction. Every game species common to the area, from deer and wild hogs all the way down to rabbits and squirrels, had fallen to the arrows from that old-school wooden longbow. While he occasionally passed up a shot he deemed too marginal to take, he rarely missed a kill once he made the decision to let an arrow fly.
The shaking today was different altogether and much stronger than ordinary buck fever. His target was in easy range and out in the open, where no twig could deflect the flight of the arrow, but the stakes were higher than they had ever been. This time his arrow could save a life, but to do so, it would claim another—and not that of a game animal, but of a fellow human being. This was completely outside the range of experience of the sixteen-year-old archer, but then, so was most everything that had occurred this week.
The drama unfolding before him gave him no time to debate the moral implications of taking the shot. By whatever reason, maybe it was just chance, he happened to be in a position to impact a situation that had developed so fast it was a wonder there was even time to sneak close enough to get in range.
With a deep breath and slow exhalation, he regained control and willed his arms to stop trembling. The tip of the razor-sharp broadhead protruded just an inch beyond the back of the bent bow, ready to harness the power in those fibers of wood strained nearly to the breaking point. His breathing once again in control, Mitch corrected his aim and allowed the release of the string to happen automatically. There was the familiar snapping twang of the string, followed quickly by the dull smack of an arrow striking flesh.
He was shaking again as he reached for another arrow, but he placed it on the string and drew, breathing deep again to calm down. The element of surprise was gone, and the second target was running. There was no time to hesitate; he aimed for center of mass and let loose the arrow.
ONE
April held her breath as the Mustang’s engine went dead a second time. It had already sputtered, lost power, and died just seconds ago, so she downshifted to second gear and popped the clutch. It started right back up and seemed to be fine, but she had barely gotten up enough speed to shift to third when it died again. This time it didn’t restart, and after trying the clutch a couple more times, she steered for the shoulder of the road before the car lost all momentum and became another stationary object among the newer cars and trucks that were abandoned days ago. April turned the key again and again, spinning the engine with the starter to no effect until she finally gave up for fear of running down the battery.
Now what? What could possibly be wrong with this piece of junk now? The car had been running fine since she’d left New Orleans. It was far too old to be affected by whatever caused the power surge that fried the electronic engine controls in practically every vehicle built in the last thirty years or so, and despite cursing it, she knew she was lucky to have it. After getting it put back together and running, she was beginning to have hope she would make it all the way to Hattiesburg, until this.
She looked around before getting out of the car. The highway was a desolate scene of empty, parked vehicles with no sign of life or movement. Darkening clouds to the west promised approaching rain, and the heavy overcast sky that shut out the morning sun did nothing to improve the mood of this lonely place or lighten her spirits at the prospect of being stranded. Closer to the city, she had passed lots of people walking and even a few riding bicycles as she weaved in and out among the stalled cars and trucks blocking the lanes. But here, well out in the countryside, she was far from the crowds of stranded commuters and city dwellers, and pedestrians were few and far between.
She had made her way out of the city across the Twin Span Bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, staying on I-59 until she was beyond the outskirts of Slidell on the North Shore and across the state line into rural Mississippi. Along the Interstate, she had narrowly escaped people who had desperately tried to get in her car in places where she’d been forced to slow down to get through the obstacles on the road. One man had jumped on the Mustang from the rear and clung to the roof until she managed to fling him off with a sudden swerve. She knew that many of the people she passed along the way would likely do her no harm, but it was far too risky to take a chance. If she lost the car, she would be in the same situation they were in. Once she had made it over the bridge, she decided it was best to avoid as many of the walking refugees as possible, so she got off the Interstate and took a lesser-used highway that ran more or less parallel to that main artery out of the city.
This smaller, two-lane highway ran through a few towns and communities, but in between the landscape was mostly uninhabited swamps and woods. Where the Mustang had rolled to a stop, she saw one isolated house set back among a grove of pine trees west of the road, and
on the other side behind a narrow buffer of trees were railroad tracks that ran parallel to the highway about a hundred feet away. Looking closer, she could see a wisp of smoke coming from behind the house—something she had seen at many of the other houses along the way. People were building fires to cook and heat water by day, and they kept them going at night for the comforting light. It was insane how everything had changed so fast, how modern life had ground to a halt in an instant, and people were trying to adapt any way they could. In just four days, most people were already reduced to near primitive conditions, camping beside their homes or in their vehicles.
April got out of the car and walked around to the front of the hood. It didn’t make sense that it would go dead now when it was running fine so far. From the way it sputtered and stopped, her best guess was that it was simply out of gas. With a non-working fuel gauge, she had no way of knowing how much was in the tank when she’d left, and getting more in New Orleans was out of the question. David had spent more time working on it than driving it the entire time she’d known him, and with the latest carburetor problem, it was likely the tank had been well under half full while it had been parked in the alley beside their apartment for the past two weeks.
Money had been a struggle for them as long as they’d been together, and the old Ford had often been a source of resentment when April suggested that David should give it up for something more practical. He could barely keep the engine running, much less afford to fix all the nonessentials like the stereo, air conditioner, and gas gauge. The irony was that now his forty-something-year-old car was among the few that even had a chance of running, while her late-nineties Honda was practically worthless.
April pulled the latch and raised the heavy hood, it’s rusty hinges squeaking loudly in the silence that hung over the deserted highway. She could hear the ticking sound of hot metal from the engine as she removed the wing nut holding the breather cover to check the carburetor. She sniffed for gas fumes but didn’t smell any. The car was almost certainly out of gas and she had to get more, but how? She screwed the breather cover back on and slammed the hood in frustration.
All these stranded cars around her probably had fuel in their tanks, but how would she get it out? There had to be a way to siphon or drain some, but she didn’t even have a container to pour it in to refill her tank even if she could figure out how to get some out. She looked in the direction of the lone house across the road, wondering if she could get some help from the people there. She was almost afraid to go over and ask, but just as she looked that way, she saw that she wouldn’t have to.
Three men had suddenly appeared from around back and it was clear they had seen her. They were already striding across the lawn in her direction at a brisk pace. April stood by the car and waited. As they got closer, she began to wish they had not seen her. She had been around a lot of rough people in the various places she’d lived, and she was usually able to stay cool in such situations, but the looks of these three didn’t inspire trust, nor did they look like they belonged at a rural house this far out of the city.
Just from the way they walked she could tell they had an attitude that didn’t match the fear and confusion of most people she’d encountered since the lights went out. These three had the look of predators zeroing in on their next meal, but April knew better than to show fear and give them even more confidence. She stood her ground as they stepped up to the shoulder of the road from the grass. Now that they were just a few yards away, she could see that two of them were barely older than her—maybe just out of their teens but likely not over twenty-one or twenty-two. The one leading the way, though, looked like he could be forty or older. They all had the hard, tanned look of men who worked construction or some other kind of outdoor labor, but the leader, with his scarred face and tattoos of skulls and Rebel flags all over his arms, looked like someone who enjoyed fighting for his after-work recreation. He was the first to speak:
“Da-aaammn! What have we got here? Is that what I think it is? Is that a genuine 1969 Mustang Fastback?” The older man whistled as he took in the car. Clearly it was the kind of ride that had turned him on even before the blackout—before old relics like this were the only cars that would still run. “I told y’all it was a Ford V-8. I could hear it coming a mile away,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at his companions.
“That’s all right,” one of the younger men agreed, but his gaze had passed over the antique car and was fixed on April. He took her in from head to toe, not caring at all that his appraisal of her body was obvious. The third one was staring, too. It was like they hadn’t seen a female in a long time, even though the blackout had just happened earlier that week.
The older one turned his attention from the car back to April. “Where’d a teenaged girl barely old enough to drive get a car like this? Your daddy buy it for you, sweetheart?” He grinned as he walked to the driver’s side of the car and opened the door and slid behind the wheel. April was still standing in front of the car by the hood.
“It’s my fiancé’s car. Look, I think it’s just out of gas. It was running fine until now, but the gas gauge doesn’t work, so I didn’t know how much I had until it ran out. I was going to walk up to your house over there and see if someone could help me. If you don’t have gas, there’s probably some in these other cars. I just need to get a few gallons so I can get to Hattiesburg.”
“What’s your hurry to go up there? If this Mustang belongs to your fiancé, then where the hell is he? Don’t he know it’s dangerous for a pretty girl like you to be driving around out here all alone? Ain’t many cars that’ll run at all after what happened, and there’s a lot of people that would like to have a car like this about right now. Besides, you fill up with gas here, you’ll just run out again somewhere else. Don’t you know the situation is the same everywhere? It ain’t gonna be no different in Hattiesburg.”
April was about to explain the real reason she had to get to Hattiesburg, but then she thought better of it. These men were not likely to be sympathetic to her situation, and the best she could hope for was that they would leave her alone and give her a chance to figure out how to get more gas herself. But she already knew that wasn’t going to happen. The older man seemed to have taken possession of David’s Mustang as if it were his own. He pumped the accelerator and turned the ignition key, grinding the starter as April had done, with the same result.
“Yep, I think you’re sittin’ on empty all right. But that ain’t nothin’ to worry about. Like you said, we can get some gas out of one of these cars. But there ain’t no hurry, ’cause time don’t mean nothin’ no more anyway. You oughta hang around and party with us for a while. You might forget all about that fiancé of yours that let you set out on the road like this by yourself without any gas. What’s your name anyway, sweetheart? I’m Reggie, and that’s my nephew, T.J.,” the man said, nodding at the one who had stared at her first. “And that’s his buddy, Danny,” he indicated the other man, who had not yet spoken. “They ain’t much older than you, and I’ll bet they’d be glad to have a girl around to talk to.”
“Hey, T.J., why don’t y’all show her over to the house while I see if I can get some gas in this car and get it off the road?”
April said nothing, but glanced over her shoulders as the man was talking, trying not to be obvious, but looking at her options for an escape route. The situation did not look good. Even if she could outrun them, which she doubted, if she lost the car, her chances of getting to Hattiesburg would be slim. It would take days to walk there, even from here, and that was assuming she had plenty to eat and the strength to do it. She was determined not to give up the car without a fight.
The older man was still sitting in the driver’s seat of the Mustang, looking at the details, running his hand over the upholstery. “You just don’t know how much I always wanted one of these back when I was a kid your age. Say, where’d you learn to drive a stick anyway? I didn’t think anybody under thirty even knew what one was these d
ays.”
“Girls like her know a lot more’n you give ’em credit for, Uncle Reggie,” the one he’d called T.J. said. “I’ll bet that ain’t all she’s good at.”
April backed up against the hood of the car as T.J. stepped toward her, keeping her right hand behind her, out of his sight as she waited for him to close the distance. If she was going to do anything to stop them, she had to act now and act decisively before T.J. or all three got their hands on her. Their intentions were clear, and if they were this bold right out here on the open road in the broad daylight, they obviously knew there was no one else around to intervene. If they got her inside the house, all bets were off and she wouldn’t have a chance. She was determined to fight for all she was worth to make sure that didn’t happen. The rules had changed, and April knew that if she was going to survive, she couldn’t play by the old ones.
She waited until T.J. grabbed her by the left upper arm and pulled her in close to him. He reached for her hair with his other hand, so sure of his ability to drag her to the house with little resistance that he was oblivious of her right hand, with which she was reaching for something in the back pocket of her jeans. April felt the familiar textured grip of the Spyderco folding knife she kept there, and when her fingers closed around it, it was out of her pocket in an instant; the four-inch blade snapped to the open position with a flick of her thumb. T.J. was so preoccupied with thinking about what he was going to do to her that he didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.
April twisted her body beneath him and brought her knife hand up between his arms and straight to his unprotected throat, where the short blade could do the most damage with the least amount of effort. When she felt the serrated edge meet soft flesh, she sliced as hard and deep as she could, almost losing her grip with the force of the effort. The effect was immediate. The man staggered back and clutched at his wound, trying to stem the fountain of blood spurting between his fingers while his brain was still able to process the shock of what had just happened. April quickly stepped back and around to the passenger’s side of the car, putting more distance between herself and his companion, who was momentarily paralyzed with disbelief. But then the other one screamed “T.J.!” as he watched his friend collapse to the ground and then turned to her with fury in his eyes.
The Darkness After: A Novel Page 1