After Darkness Fell

by David Berardelli

  The boy’s large blue eyes were wide-open and glazed. Drool had gathered on his lower lip as he kept the barrel of his gun pointed dead-steady at my face.

  FIFTEEN

  As I stared at the gun pointing at my face, I thought not of my own mortality, but of Fields. Because of me, the woman I loved was going to die.

  I’d also failed Walter. He’d given me his dead son’s beautiful classic car, and I hadn’t gone three miles with it before letting this pack of armed killers tear it apart with gunfire.

  As I lay bleeding in the brush, I trembled with rage. It was all I could do to keep from raising my wounded arm and emptying the mag into the little idiot who’d just shot me.

  This nightmare was difficult to accept. It was bad enough the terrorists and the superpowers of the world had destroyed society. But even though the worst of it seemed to be over, the survivors weren’t able to pick up the pieces and do what they could to start afresh. The nightmare continued, moving into an even darker and more frightening phase, one that paralleled the bleakness of Hell itself. What was left were zombie-like souls shuffling around aimlessly while others ran around like a pack of wild dogs, killing and taking what they wanted.

  “Got ’im, dudes!” This boy was around five-six and probably tipped the scales at slightly over a hundred pounds. He stood there in his baggy black jeans, turquoise baseball cap, blue tee shirt and scuffed tennies. His gun belt was much too big for him; the rawhide strips dangling from the bottom of the holster nearly touched the ground. In the old world, a boy his age would be permanently fixed to a couch, sitting through endless video games, or texting illiterate nonsense to other members of his species.

  “How old are you?” I could barely get the words out.

  “What’s it to ya?” The kid’s large, glazed blue eyes stayed on me. “Old enough to drop ya.” The gun in his hand didn’t waver. On such a small, slender hand, the effect was terrifying.

  “Yeah. You dropped me, all right.”

  “We’re comin’, Marlon!” shouted one of his friends as the three drew nearer. “Hang tight!”

  “No problem, dudes! Take your time! He moves, he’s so dead!” He tilted his head. “Hear me, pops? You move, you’re so dead.”

  “I heard you.” Despite the circumstances, I found my growing anger difficult to contain. “And I’m definitely not your daddy.”

  “Lotta blood there.” The kid seemed fascinated.

  “That usually happens with a bullet wound, brainiac.”

  “Bet it hurts like a mother, too.” He kept staring. I couldn’t tell if that was amazement or pride showing in his eyes. Neither quality made me feel any better.

  “Keep ’im covered, Marlon! Simon wants ’im in one piece when we take ’im down to the basement.”

  The “basement.” It sounded like something out of a horror flick.

  “Andy was my bud.” The glazed eyes, mixed with the grin, disturbed me even more than the gun in his hand. “You fragged ’im, you bastard. Wasn’t for Simon, I’d frag your ass. Right here, right now.”

  Frag. I hadn’t heard that term in over twenty years. I never expected to hear a kid use it.

  “Frag?”

  “Yeah.” A shrug. “Never heard that one before? Gotta frag the enemy. Those are the rules.”

  “I heard it once or twice before, thanks.”

  Frag. Enemy. Rules. When it finally dawned on me, I realized just how bleak this situation really was. An opportunistic survivor named Simon had taken in these kids and made them useful to him by turning them into soldiers, thieves and killers. They’d been living a fantasy existence ever since. It wasn’t their fault. The big shots running the world had made life and death an epic video game. Reality hadn’t died, it had been replaced. Only this giant deathmatch remained.

  “So what happens now?”

  The boy shrugged. “We take your ass back to the house and hand you over to Simon.”

  “Who’s Simon?”

  The glazed eyes beamed. “Simon’s the Dude. The Man. Enough bullshit. Toss that piece over here.”

  “Piece?”

  “Don’t be a retard. Fucker’s right there, in your hand. Hand it over easy.”

  “Everything okay, Marlon?” shouted one of the others, and I could tell by the crunching of leaves that they’d come closer.

  “Fuckin’ A, Jake!” Marlon’s glazed eyes remained steady. “C’mon, dude.” The gun in his hand hadn’t wavered. “Toss it. Don’t have all day.”

  I had no choice. I had to do something before the others got here. I figured I had less than a minute to do it.

  “I can’t ... raise my arm ...”

  “I’m gonna fuckin’ cap your ass.” The boy’s cold eyes remained fixed on me. I could see the quiet rage in them and was confident he’d shoot me without batting an eye.

  I realized in that one frightening moment that the figure standing before me was a stone-cold sociopath trapped in the body of a teenage boy. A killing machine in the body of a child who believed life was nothing more than a game. The young Muslims I’d faced in my military days all had that same icy darkness in their eyes. But unlike them, this boy was not killing in the name of religion, but because reality had become very simple, and life had been reduced to killing those who didn’t suit your purpose.

  “Simon wants you brought in alive. See, he wants to do some cool shit to ya before he wastes your ass. But you pissed me off when you fragged Andy, so I really wanna frag you right here. Simon’ll understand. He frags dudes all the time. But I’ll give ya one last chance. You toss that piece by the time I count to five and I won’t put another fuckin’ hole in ya.”

  “Give me a second to...”

  “One...” The barrel moved slightly to his left and pointed to my right thigh. If I didn’t soon move, I wouldn’t be able to do much of anything anymore.

  I couldn’t let it end like this. I wouldn’t let them kill Fields—not as long as I was still alive.

  “Two...”

  My wounded arm felt as if it had been dipped in hot wax, but I managed to raise the elbow a couple of inches from the ground. I gritted my teeth while raising my arm, which felt even heavier because the Ruger suddenly weighed a ton. As I raised it, I snatched up a large clump of dirt and dead leaves in my left hand. I kept raising the Ruger while focusing on thinking through the red-hot waves surging through my wounded arm. Fight it. You’ve been through this before. You know you can do again.

  “Three...”

  The boy was watching my right hand. All I had to do was raise the gun a few more inches and toss it toward him. While he bent to reach for it, I’d toss the dirt and leaves at his face. If I could pull the Bobcat from my pocket quickly enough, I might be able to put a round or two in his chest before he got the dirt and leaves out of his eyes.

  “Four...”

  As I raised the gun the last few inches, I kept my left arm close to my side and out of sight. I grabbed as much dirt and leaves as my grip would allow, squeezed it into a ball and...

  “Five...”

  The deafening explosion came from a considerable distance behind the boy. The slug slammed into his back, forcing out a fistful of blood, bone fragments and tissue through the center of his skinny chest. The boy’s gun flew to the ground; his legs collapsed under him, and he was propelled three feet forward. He landed face-down in the dirt just a few feet from me, and did not move.

  Ten seconds of silence.

  “M-Marlon?” came a voice about fifty feet to my right.

  More silence.

  “Marlon?”

  “What the fuck happened, Jake?”

  “Marlon! What happened? Still there? Still got ’im?”

  “What’d he do, Marlon? What’d that fucker do?”

  “That sure was one helluva fuckin’ blast!”

  Silence.

  “Fucker fr-fragged Marlon, Jake.”

  “No way! Impossible! Marlon said he got the bastard. Had ’im cold.”

  “Why
ain’t he sayin’ nothing, then?”

  “Why ain’tcha sayin’ nothin’, Marlon?”

  More silence.

  “Jake? Didn’t Marlon say he had ’im?”

  “Marlon?”

  “Motherfuckin’ asshole! You’re fuckin’ dead!”

  A gunshot thumped into the tree next to me ... then another, into the bushes.

  Ignoring the searing pain in my pulsating arm, I pushed myself up, retrieved the Ruger and scrambled deeper into the brush just as more gunfire slapped the foliage and trees around me.

  ***

  I didn’t have time to analyze what just happened. As I reached the next rise and slid carefully down the steep, heavily wooded decline, I had more important things to worry about. The pain from my wound had increased. I gritted my teeth as I slid down the bumpy slope, keeping my bad arm cradled against my body while covering the bloody wound with my free hand. My entire arm throbbed steadily. I had to dress the wound and stop the bleeding as soon as possible. It would have helped immensely if it had been a clean shot, but I wasn’t optimistic. Most small calibers tended to splinter, and it often took a painfully thorough examination to locate all the pieces. But I couldn’t worry about that now.

  A large pyramid of dead trees lay in a huge cluster at the bottom of the hill, a hundred feet or so in front of a narrow, winding creek. I reached the bottom without further injury. Keeping low, I dragged myself through the tall brush. It was slow going. I was careful to keep most of my weight on my left side, forcing my left arm to do most of the work. I used my wounded arm primarily for balance and to hold the Ruger.

  As I crawled toward the wooden fortress, ignoring the sudden stabs of pain from protruding branches and sticks, I began wondering once again what had happened.

  I was fairly certain one of the riflemen from the roadblock had come back to finish me off. He was no doubt angry that I’d not only escaped, but had also killed two of his buddies and nearly him as well. He could have lost his patience when he’d seen me, and took a quick shot, hitting Marlon instead.

  Further thought suggested that unlikely. For one thing, both riflemen were skilled shooters. One or both of them had managed to hit the side mirror, gas tank, and back seat of a car moving away from them at a hundred miles an hour, in the peak of darkness.

  Something else told me why this couldn’t have happened. A skilled shooter wouldn’t risk taking such a wild shot. Our location had been too dense and uneven, and nearly invisible from the road. The terrain—as well as the overgrown brush—concealed me almost completely. No one standing more than ten feet behind Marlon could have seen me. Even if they’d been able to, they would have seen that Marlon had the drop on me and would consider such a risky shot unnecessary.

  It didn’t make sense that the same capable shooters who’d disabled Walter’s Nova had mistakenly hit Marlon squarely in the back while I lay on the ground just a few feet from him.

  This reasoning brought me to one and only conclusion: The shooter had Marlon in his sights.

  With all families, there would be rivalry, peer pressure and, given their young ages, temper tantrums. Favoritism would enter into the equation, as well as the constant need for approval by Simon, their patriarch. The overwhelming obsession to become leader of the pack could be a common priority with these punks.

  Was that the reason? Had Marlon made a lethal enemy amongst this dysfunctional brood of killers?

  Or was this merely an accident? A simple case of a misfire?

  Several more shots whizzed above my head as I crawled toward the massive stack of fallen limbs and tangled branches. A slug slapped the pile a couple of feet on my right. Another spray of gunfire came at me from my left. A moment later, when two large-caliber slugs slammed into the enormous dead pine lying at a 60-degree angle on my right, I knew then that they’d surrounded me.

  My fortress sprawled just fifteen feet straight ahead. By this time, my left arm was aching from the massive effort of supporting and dragging nearly two hundred pounds over rugged terrain, but I forced myself to keep going, staying low in the weeds.

  I finally reached the massive pile. I scrambled over a thick log and dropped behind it just as three successive slugs thumped into its side. I crawled along the length of it, where it supported a cluster of knotted limbs at the end. I soon saw some bushes moving around near the top of the hill, about eighty yards away. Gingerly raising my wounded arm, I aimed the Ruger at the center of the brush and got off three quick shots.

  Immediate silence followed.

  Just as I lowered my arm, a shot came from the right, ricocheting off a log a few yards in front of me. Staying behind the jagged wall of gnarled branches, I peered through a narrow opening on my right and saw some bushes twitching unnaturally a few feet from a group of pines. I grabbed Fields’ .38. Using my left hand and bracing my elbow on my left thigh, I popped off three rounds. “That’s for you, Brooke,” I whispered. A scream echoed down the hill. Someone yelled, “Motherfucker!” Instinct told me to get down. Seconds later, a torrent of gunfire slammed into my barricade from three different directions.

  I balanced my weight on a small pile of torn branches, between two logs and beneath a large, broken limb, and listened. Silence. Taking advantage of the break, I tried examining my wound, but my sanctuary was too dark and I had to work by feel. I could tell the blood had already started clotting. If I was careful, and didn’t do anything to re-injure it, I could wrap it. I needed a little time to take off my jacket and shred my shirt. I cursed myself once again for ditching my backpack. The first-aid kit sure would come in handy right now. The alcohol could at least sterilize the wound. Even if I couldn’t get to the kit, I could douse the wound with the whiskey from the flask in the pack. The last thing I needed right now was an infection.

  Six more shots punched into my barricade. Silence followed for about a minute, and then three more shots ripped into the logs, vibrating the limbs and sending chunks of bark and dirt flying.

  “C’mon out, asshole! You’re surrounded!” The voice drifting down the hill sounded like the same boy who’d been communicating with Marlon earlier.

  A few seconds later, another voice, this one on my right, yelled: “You don’t have a chance, dickhead!”

  Then, on my left: “Come out now! Maybe we’ll letcha have a crack at that skinny bitch before Simon dumps ’er!”

  That perked me right up, but I knew they were baiting me. Kids seemed to know about such tactics at a very early age. I’d known quite a few sociopathic children during my school days. They always seemed to be on the defensive and were always looking for ways to hurt or shock others. When such a kid was allowed to turn into a predatory killer, human decency vanished and was replaced by cunning and a natural skill in manipulating his victims. Killer instinct came with the territory, serving as a powerful force.

  My survival instinct came from practical experience. I’d been in similar tense situations, probably more than this wild pack would ever see. Even if they were keeping Fields somewhere close, they’d never let me get near her.

  A couple of minutes later, the sound of a truck echoed through the trees. The screeching of brakes tore through the wooded area, and I knew right then that the number of my hunters had increased. Doors slammed shut; distant voices penetrated the air.

  About a minute later, a high-pitched voice swept down from the top of the wooded knoll. “Hey, dirtbag! We’re gonna take you down!”

  Laughter followed, and the woods exploded in gunfire.

  I dove down deep into my cocoon of felled logs and felt the vibrations as slug after slug pounded into the deteriorating wood. I didn’t know how many more of them had come, but it sounded like there were at least a dozen or more perched at the top of the hill, shooting at me. I could also tell by the increased volume of the blasts that they were moving down the hill as they fired into my shelter.

  I realized then that I couldn’t save Fields. Even if I knew where she was, I couldn’t possibly get to her in
time. I couldn’t do anything right now—not with this pack shooting at me.

  But I had to do something. I couldn’t let them pin me down like this, and I sure as hell couldn’t let them dump Fields down a well while I hid in a stack of fallen trees, cradling my wounded arm.

  Crawl through to the other side.

  Once again, that same strange voice disrupted my thoughts.

  I couldn’t tell if it was my own mind or my imagination inventing some unrealistic escape plan. Or maybe it was indeed that strange voice I’d been hearing erratically for the last several hours. Whatever it was, I felt I should listen to it. I figured I had no choice, and no other options. In fifteen minutes, they’d have reached the bottom of the hill, would have me surrounded, and would fire endlessly into the stack of timber until there was nothing left.

  I crawled through a heavy mass of fallen branches and limbs. As soon as I began making headway, the gunfire started up again. I lowered myself closer to the ground and waited for the heavy assault to stop. It went on for what seemed forever, but I knew they’d eventually have to take time to reload.

  After maybe a minute or so, the bursts trickled off, and a heavy silence followed.

  I took advantage of the lull and resumed crawling through the narrow, twisted trail, squeezing between limbs and forcing my exhausted body through intertwined branches, vines and weeds. I trudged on, careful to shield my bad arm while consciously gripping the Ruger. After slithering through the endless trail, bright shards of daylight glittered at the other end.

  I cautiously stuck my head out among the dangling vines and peered to my left, then my right. I saw no one, nor did I hear the crunching of leaves, the snapping of twigs or the clicking of a gun hammer. A sudden gunshot thumped into my fortress several yards behind me, but I heard nothing else. The creek awaited me straight ahead. Just beyond it, the heavy growth of pines and scrubs would provide concealment to enable me to get away. I might even have time to circle around and steal one of their vehicles.