by Dan Padavona
A cool rain drummed against the Camaro’s roof. The scent of wet pavement wafted out of the parking lot.
“You can’t kill him. We haven’t done anything to you. You can’t.”
“Shut her up,” James said, giving Tyler a meaningful look.
“Ricky said he’d take care of it. Back off.” Ricky’s eyes were lost and frenzied as he scowled down at Blake. “You ain’t closed your eyes yet.”
“What does it matter? You’re going to shoot me anyway.”
Ricky grinned, then giggled, then leaned his head back and laughed into the rain. A water droplet hung precariously off the tip of his nose. “You’re damn skippy, I’m gonna shoot ya. I’m gonna waste the both of ya, and party like it’s 1999.”
Thunder rumbled distant.
Tori cried out. “This is crazy. You don’t even know us.” A fever burned through her. She felt faint, and her eyes began to droop.
Ricky’s finger, dripping with rain, tightened on the trigger.
“One.”
Wind raced into the lot as though summoned.
“Two.”
Sheet lightning flashed. A paper bag caught in the strengthening gale whipped through the lot like a tumbleweed.
“Three.”
Time slowed to a crawl—Ricky’s finger tight on the trigger; Blake’s eyes closing in slow motion; white-hot anger upwelling through Tori; the drawn out sound of James’ voice, as he screamed at Ricky to shoot Blake.
Ricky began to pull the trigger, and then he screamed. The gun flew from his hand and ricocheted against the asphalt. James watched in disbelief as the gun skidded past the Camaro.
“What in the fuck are you doing?” James turned the shotgun on Ricky.
Ricky’s eyes were wide with shock. He clutched his right hand, nursing reddened-fingers. “Jesus. The gun, man. It was hotter than hellfire.”
“Bullshit.”
Ricky raised his hand, palm out. “Look at my fingers, shithead.” His palm and fingers were red, beginning to blister. “You think I did that to myself?”
“The hell with him, James,” Tyler said. “Let’s kill the kids and get this damn job done with.”
“Fine.” James glared at Ricky, who slunk back toward the shops, clutching his hand like he’d slammed his fingers in the car door. “We’ll take care of this ourselves. The punk kid obviously doesn’t have the stomach to back up his mouth.”
Tyler stepped forward, gun centered on Tori’s forehead. The wind howled like a banshee screaming.
Tori’s stomach lurched, and just before she was certain she would faint or vomit, her fever blazed white-hot. Her eyes rolled back in her head as a crash of thunder shook the ground.
“Kill the bitch!” James yelled over the storm.
Tori began to tremble. Her fingers twitched as if tiny electrodes were attached to her hands. The sky, the parking lot, the men holding guns—all faded to white.
Tyler started to pull the trigger and froze. He stared at Tori, whose eyes looked white as snow. Her body convulsed as though something hideous was inside of her, trying to tear its way out through her skin.
“Jesus,” Tyler said, swallowing.
“Shoot her!”
The gun flew from Tyler’s hand. James screamed in rage, and then he saw Tyler’s body tremor. James glanced between Tyler and the boy on his knees. His eyes fell over the girl, and for a moment he saw white light shimmer around the perimeter of her body. When he saw the milky whites of her eyes, he nearly fumbled the shotgun.
The air bristled with electricity.
James looked to the sky for a bolt of lightning, and then Tyler exploded. Chunks of flesh whistled past James. Blood splattered against his chest and face. Wide-eyed, he looked down and saw what was left of Tyler—crushed bone tangled with sinew, clumps of flesh, and what appeared to be burned hair, the gore drowning in a pool of blood.
James bent over to wretch, then his body lifted into the air, as though an invisible giant grasped hold of him from out of the clouds. Ricky turned and ran back through the park as James’ body hurtled through air. Blake’s eyes opened to the macabre scene, seeing James’ torso slam against the wall of the fireworks store with a sickening crunch.
Lightning forked across the sky, and the wind moaned a somber elegy. The life left James’ crumpled doll-form.
Blake’s head swiveled back to Tori, seeing her eyes roll back to their natural position. Her convulsions lessened to cold quivers. Her eyes were full moons in the gloomy morning.
Blake scrambled to her on his hands and knees, and the skies opened into a cloudburst. He reached a hand toward her, then pulled it back.
He tried to speak, but all that came out of him was a croaking sound.
She moved her eyes across the bloody remnants of the man who had wanted to kill her.
“Blake—”
The wind groaned, sheets of rain pouring down from the sky.
“Blake…”
Thunder rolled through the valley.
“What have I done?”
Lightning exploded over the sleeping carnival. Shivering, she collapsed into his arms, and he held her as the rains soaked them to their skin.
“You’re safe now, Tori,” he said, the cloudburst masking his tears. “I won’t let anybody hurt you.”
When she was able to stand, he walked her to Ricky’s Camaro and sat her in the passenger seat. Finding the keys in the ignition, he gunned the motor and drove away from Grogan’s Wonder World, headed south on the interstate.
Like a lighthouse amid stormy seas, the first of Carina’s signs emerged an hour down the road under clearing skies.
“We’re going to be okay,” he said.
She saw the signs, too, and for a moment he thought she might have smiled. As she dozed off to sleep, he pressed down on the accelerator. Safety awaited at Florida Bliss.
Dark Vanishings: Book 1 ends here. The story continues in the next episode with the publication of Dan Padavona’s novel, Dark Vanishings: Book 2.
Download Dark Vanishings: Book 2 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B010EQ8OX4
You can read a free preview of Dark Vanishings: Book 2 on the following pages.
Read on for an excerpt
From
Dark Vanishings: Episode Two
“Dan builds tension like few others can. His prose is rich and his characters are memorable. I dare you to read a Padavona story with the lights out." - Zach Bohannon, author of the Empty Body Series
The village had no name. Or rather, it was identified by its generic description—VILLAGE—on a wooden weather-beaten sign that had lost two-thirds of its facing in a windstorm. The decaying remnants of the sign lay as shrapnel strewn along the roadside of a dark country road a half-hour east of Red Bud, Illinois. When intact, the sign had read—
Village of Okbeth
Population 487
EST. 1835
He stood in a field at the village’s northern border, waist-high in wheat, the wind slithering through the grass like invisible snakes. To his side sat an animal that vaguely resembled a humongous wolf or dog, but with crooked, hooked fangs jutting below its lower lip and orange eyes that glowed like twin hurricane lanterns.
Victor Lupan observed another of the strange beasts from a mile away as it stalked through the village center, past a general store, and then past a gas station whose windows had been boarded shut since 1992. The store’s sign advertised unleaded gas for $1.09. The beast stopped and sniffed the air, catching scent of prey upwind, then padded into the shadows as though confused.
As he searched the village and surrounding countryside for his vanished third beast, everything felt wrong with the night to Lupan, though he couldn’t determine why. No mortal could stand against him, and it would take a pack of wolves to challenge a single one of his beasts, yet as he peered into the thickening gloom, his skin prickled. The village concealed danger.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on the beast prowling Okbeth.
What
do you see?
The beast did not respond. Lupan considered entering its mind to see the village from the beast’s perspective. He queried the beast again, losing patience. This time it answered. The beast couldn’t find anyone inside Okbeth, but it sensed the same undefinable danger as Lupan.
Where is the third beast?
He watched the second beast as it stopped behind the general store. The beast sniffed at the air, its fur standing on end as though surrounded by enemies. It couldn’t sense the vanished beast, which was troubling because the beasts sensed each others’ presence from several miles away. That left only one possibility. The third beast was dead. Lupan’s heartbeat quickened. Since entering the southern third of Illinois, he had felt eyes upon him. The beasts acted skittish, howling and darting erratically into the night in pursuit of shadows. Now as he watched from the outskirts of Okbeth’s abandoned shell, the danger felt more immediate, more palpable.
He was not far from a glut of interstates—surviving people from the northern and western thirds of the country would travel these highways to reach the southeastern United States. If he reached I-24 and I-40 before daylight, it would be easy for him to kill anyone intending to join the organizers in Florida.
But there was a more pressing concern. Something had occurred Thursday morning in the first light of day. He had sensed magic to the southeast the way one might feel the aftershocks of a distant earthquake. There was only one explanation: the girl. Tori Daniels had used her power, and if he did not stop her, soon she would harness her magic and become a danger which even Lupan might not be able to handle alone. It was imperative Lupan get south, but something lay hidden in the night between him and his target.
Could it be the girl? Is Tori inside Okbeth?
In a moment of cold clarity, he considered calling back the second beast and retreating to Iowa. His fingers curled and straightened, curled and straightened. His eyes twitched. How could the third beast have disappeared?
The beast inside the village squealed. Lupan’s eyes, fixed on the darkness west of Okbeth, darted toward the village. Only shadow existed where he had last seen the beast.
Impossible.
As he searched the dark for the creature, he almost forgot the beast still at his side. Snarling at the ghost village, the creature pawed at the fecund earth. But even as the creature growled, it slunk backward, deeper into the wheat. What entity lurked within Okbeth that could challenge a single one of his beasts, let alone vanquish two without making a sound? Lupan looked down and realized that he too, had backed into the field, and this caused his blood to boil with rage. He hissed through his teeth, silencing the beast.
If the girl is here, I will gut her and end this battle for all eternity.
Lupan stepped out of the field. With the beast at his side, he entered Okbeth.
While the first beast lay dead, already collecting flies, a man whose eyes and hair blended with the night crouched against the paint-chipped general store at the village’s center. The sharp outline of his hawk nose was barely discernible in the gloom cast by the cloudy, moonless sky. Joshua Geldon felt the man from the field’s presence pressing against the village like black water overflowing a dam. He couldn’t see the man, but he was sure it was the one who walked the earth for time eternal. The eternal one wore the face of a man, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
The dagger, still glistening with the first creature’s ichor, felt warm in his hand. The hilt vibrated as though the blade needed to kill again. From across the road, he spied Severin blending into the night, crouched behind the service station pumps. He sensed what he could not see—Severin centered both guns on the wolf-like monster sniffing at the air. The bullets were useless against the beast, and worse yet, the gunshots would attract the attention of the man watching outside the village.
But the dagger proved effective against the first beast to prowl Okbeth, and the weapon killed silently.
Joshua crept along the wall toward the front of the store. One wrong move, and the beast would sense him. The creature’s fangs severed whatever it caught—fingers, a hand, an entire arm. The dagger’s hilt pulsed against his palm, desiring to penetrate the beast’s hide, to snuff out the abomination’s life.
He remembered the long stalks through woodlands along the Minnesota-South Dakota border. He recalled silent hunts through meadows and spruce groves, and the sweet smell of conifers after a cool rain. How many decades had he prepared himself for the end of days? He couldn’t recall.
He moved without sound, the edge of the wall so close that he could grasp it. The huge beast spun toward him, and he froze. It crouched down. He couldn’t see the monster’s body—only its eyes, floating in the darkness like a specter’s candelabra. The beast sniffed the air and grunted.
Joshua held his breath. Severin, hidden across the street behind the gas pumps, vanished. The situation grew more dangerous by the second. Joshua couldn’t kill the beast in the street without attracting unwanted attention from the man in the fields. Without Severin, any battle with the creature was too risky.
As Joshua retreated toward the back of the store, a hand pressed against his mouth. He twisted his head, and there was Severin, his forefinger held to his lips. In the darkness, Severin’s emerald eyes glowed, eerily reminiscent of the beasts’ eyes.
Crouching low to the ground, Severin crept away from the wall, concealed by darkness. Joshua realized what Severin intended: he planned to lure the beast to him, behind the general store where the man in the field would not see. Severin pawed at pebbles. The sound, too quiet to hear outside the village, caused the beast to snarl. Burning eyes turned toward Severin.
Severin snapped his finger, and the beast attacked, bounding out of the road, a mammoth shadow amid the darkness. Contours of the monster’s bristled fur sliced through the night. The beast headed straight for Severin. In seconds, the beast would tear him to pieces. Joshua leaped out of hiding, the dagger glistening despite the sky’s infinite gloom. The weapon grew warmer, wanting to kill.
The beast’s maw opened.
As the beast sprang at Severin, Joshua attacked from the side, burying the wicked blade into the monster’s neck. In one blinding motion, Joshua sliced through its larynx as Severin spun away. The creature thudded against the ground, twitching. The lights of the beast’s eyes flickered out. The dagger’s blade glowed red and white. In his hand, Joshua felt the dagger’s need to eradicate the evil. He sensed the blade’s hunger and felt the hilt alternating between hot and cold, as though the dagger drained the life force out of the beast.
The beast lay still.
As Joshua pulled the blade free, Severin snatched him by the arm. As attuned to the night as Joshua was, Severin’s senses were more potent. Looking into Severin’s eyes told Joshua what the danger was—the man had left the field. The eternal one came for Okbeth, accompanied by another beast.
Joshua and Severin rushed for the wall of a dilapidated country home on the village’s southern border. Beyond the house stretched the gray ribbon of a county road, and beyond that, flat rural lands for as far as the eye could see. Though Joshua couldn’t hear the pursuit of the man from the field, he felt him drawing nearer, portending death like autumn’s first chill wind.
Ready to find out what happens next? Download Dark Vanishings: Episode Two at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B010EQ8OX4.
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“[Padavona's] descriptions paint vivid portraits in the mind and help with the visual 'Drive-In movie feel'."
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"[Padavona's] descriptive imagery is outstanding. I truly 'see' this town and the characters."
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Author’s Note
I cannot express how much fun I had writing Dark Vanishings: Episode One. A mix of action and horror, Dark Vanishings was a wild ride from beginning to end, and I cannot wait to finish the story with you.
As I wrote Dark Vanishings, I found the characters almost wrote themselves, coming to life in unexpected and exciting ways. From Ricky’s outlandish behavior and volatile temper to Viper’s take-no-prisoners attitude, from Blake’s self doubts to Mickey’s psychosis, the mysterious Joshua Geldon and Severin, the characters nearly leaped off the page and demanded I tell their tale.
I initially experienced trepidation about writing in the post-apocalyptic and dystopian genres. Every post-apocalyptic story will ultimately be compared to Stephen King’s The Stand, for The Stand is not only the best post-apocalyptic tale ever told, it’s also one of the fifty best novels written in the last one hundred years. I had no intentions of following King’s path, nor did I wish Victor Lupan to be compared to Randall Flagg. They are different villains with disparate personalities, although each wishes to rule the world. And so when I opted to go forward with Dark Vanishings, I made it my own, mixing adventure and unforgettable personalities into thrilling scenes.