Darkness Falling

by Peter Crowther

  Johnny fired the gun, a single explosion, and the shot peppered the backs of two men, one in a suit jacket and one in a shirt, sending them flailing forwards face-first onto the roadway. The jacketed man didn't move, just lay there. The man in the shirt – who, Johnny now saw, was wearing a toupee – tried to pull himself forward, scrabbling his fingertips on the road towards the far sidewalk where a Chevy Camaro sat with its engine idling. A woman in the front seat watched the man and then lifted her head. Johnny thought she was looking at him, could feel the woman's eyes behind those fucking glasses, but he couldn't be sure. When she opened the car door, she did so without any noise or display of emotion.

  "Hey, Johnny, leave them," Rick shouted. "They're going."

  Johnny didn't respond. By the time he had reached the crawling man's side, he had chambered another round. He put his foot on the man's back, around about the bottom of his spine, and then fired the rifle into the back of the man's head.

  "Johnny!" Melanie shouted.

  The man jerked once as his head split wide open, and then he slumped against the blacktop and lay still.

  The woman in the Camaro got to her feet, the car door still open, and stood there. She still showed no emotion. Didn't move.

  Johnny chambered another two shells.

  Somewhere behind him – he didn't turn around – an engine started up. But he ignored it and pulled the trigger.

  The pellets hit the woman right across her chest and shattered the glass of the passenger window. She bounced back against the car, slid onto the seat and then fell forward onto the road, her ass up in the air.

  Rick stepped away from the wall and out onto the blacktop, his handgun hanging by his side. He was around halfway across when Johnny caught sight of an elderly woman in a nightdress, her hair in rollers. She seemed to be in the process of walking back, away from the melee in the street, pausing at the entrance to an alleyway between a five-and-dime store and a little drugstore that looked bereft of products. Johnny fished in his pocket for two more cases. He had almost got them slid into place when Rick took hold of his arm.

  Johnny turned around in terror, staring at the hand on his arm. When he looked up at the hand's owner, he visibly relaxed. That was when he noticed that he was humming. Rick took the shotgun from him and said, "She's going."

  "And now she's gone," Melanie said quietly from just alongside. She pulled the trigger on her handgun four times. Two of the bullets hit the woman, one ricocheted off of the wall with a high pitched whine, and the other just kept traveling. The woman spun half around when the first bullet made contact, in her left side, and then the second one got her in the belly. The woman was already falling when the third one hit the wall in a small explosion of brick dust and shards of cement.

  Melanie threw the weapon onto the blacktop and buried her face in her hands.

  "Mel," Rick shouted. "Get the gun. We may need it later."

  Virgil nodded without saying anything. Hell, it was as sure as shooting they'd need it later. And probably just as sure that it wouldn't be enough.

  As a revving sound started up from the fire engine, the cars in the street began to move off into the now lightening air.

  (53)

  The skies were clear when they finally lifted up from the street.

  Johnny was driving again, the two young boys – Junior and Wayne, they'd finally confessed – standing just behind him and watching through the smashed front windows as the buildings moved downwards alongside them until, at last, there was just air and, way over behind them, the tall buildings of Denver.

  "Another day," Ronnie said. He couldn't help thinking about Martha, wondering where she was, knowing that he would never see her again. No, a tiny voice in the back of his mind corrected, you're hoping you'll never see her again.

  Melanie was shaking, shuddering like jello, the occasional ripple rolling through the length of her body and finishing at her neck and head with a flick. Virgil watched her from across the aisle, his back against a window that showed tiny fractures where bullets had hit the glass. The Sally Davis woman was consoling Melanie but that was a job that Virgil would have enjoyed himself. And for once – perhaps the very first time, in fact – he thought of what life might be like with this woman, here in this brave new empty world.

  Sally Davis watched him.

  Watch him, mommy, one of her voices insisted.

  I'm watching him, honey, Sally thought back to them. I'm watching him.

  Virgil saw that the girl was watching him, too – the girl and her fucking doll. Seeing that Sally had closed her eyes as she stroked the trembling Melanie, he stuck his tongue out at Angel Wurst and imagined the brat's eyes bulging as she strained for breath against the surgical tape he would so dearly love to spread across her mouth and nose. The girl narrowed her eyes and then quickly looked away. But the doll stayed facing in Virgil's direction. Virgil stuck his tongue out at that as well and then turned to look out of the window himself.

  "Hey, they're out on the streets," Virgil said.

  Down below them, gathered in small pockets in the shaded areas of building doorways and alley entrances as though avoiding the steadily growing lightness, people stood motionless and watched them pass by. And as though as one, they then turned and drifted away into buildings.

  "I think they're… they're singing?" Virgil got up from his seat and pulled at the sliding window section above his head. "Can you see that?" he said, pulling it open and pointing. "Their mouths are moving."

  "Bastards," Melanie said softly.

  "Should I drop lower?"

  "Be careful," Rick said and he nodded to a small park over to the right, between two banks of single- and two-story buildings. "I don't really think we want to come down into that lot." A small bandshell in the middle of the rolling greenery housed a large group of people, all of them standing in the shadow of the bandshell's roof, most of them either naked or semi-naked or dressed in what was obviously nightwear. Plus the gloves. Plus the sunglasses. The grass around the bandshell was strewn with vehicles, some with their doors open but all of them empty, parked up with no apparent thoughts of neatness. Not so much parked as abandoned, Martha Mortenson used to delight in saying when she and Ronnie used to pull Ronnie's old Corvette up near the golf course in Cuyahoga Falls, Ronnie shaking so hard with the anticipation of getting into Martha's pants that she thought he was likely to have a cardiac arrest. Those, of course, had been the days when she might have cared about such an eventuality.

  Ronnie pulled the door open as Johnny banked the bus to the right.

  "Hey, I think I'm getting the hang of this," Johnny said.

  "I think we need to change our transportation as soon as we're able," Rick said. He held onto the leather strap from the overhead rail and bent forward to look at the people in the bandshell.

  "What the hell are they look–"

  Ronnie waved a hand behind his back. "Listen."

  It was a symphony of sorts, and perhaps a prayer – far off voices speaking as one, with no intonations or emphasis or emotion. Just words, spoken in perfect harmony by every single man, woman and child in the shadowed recesses of the bandshell – and, Virgil Banders now noted, by all the similarly poorly attired folks huddled in store doorways and even, he now saw, standing in huge trash bins down an alleyway, their elbows propped on the edges and the heavy lids resting on their heads. He could see the first faint display of sunshine creeping along the opposite wall in the alley and he knew, before too long, those folks now standing in the trash bins would hunker down and wait once more for night. For darkness.

  "Jerry," the voices sing-songed, a choir now.

  "It's me," they insisted.

  "Oh God," Melanie moaned.

  "Geoff," the voices said.

  Melanie sprang to her feet and pulled open her own window, straining her face so that her mouth could almost taste the fresh early morning air. "No, you're not him," she screamed. "You'll never be–"

  "Jerry," they said o
nce more, their one collective voice a towering testament of timing.

  "Close the window," Virgil snapped.

  "It's me," the voices confided.

  Sally struggled to push closed the small window above Melanie's head.

  "Geoff."

  The window banged shut and Melanie slumped onto her seat, sobbing.

  Ronnie managed to close the concertinaed entrance doorway, blocking out the bulk of the sound. "How we doing for gas?" he said as he stepped back onto the bus's deck and slid onto one of the bench seats. "I don't relish the idea of another forced landing so soon after the first one."

  Johnny tapped the dial and nodded. "Fine. No gas required. Not for another hundred or maybe hundred and fifty miles."

  "It's OK, honey," Sally Davis cooed to Melanie. "It's good to cry."

  "They've stopped," Rick said. He moved over behind Johnny, pushed open the window by the driver's left shoulder and put his head out. The air tasted good, fresh. And best of all, the voices had stopped.

  Johnny said, "You see how they all just turned away from us? Back there?"

  Virgil nodded.

  "I don't think we scared them off, if that's what you were thinking."

  "No, I wasn't thinking tha–"

  "More like they knew that dealing with us wasn't urgent," Junior said, his voice low.

  His brother Wayne looked up at him but failed to register any real understanding. His eyes were lifeless.

  "Like they had plenty of time," Junior finished.

  "And right now – right then, I mean," Rick said, "they had to get out of the light."

  "Hence the dark glasses," Johnny suggested.

  They all nodded. And then Rick said, "Hence the dark glasses."

  Nobody showed any desire to consider the relevance of the gloves.

  EPILOGUE

  They brought the bus down on a vehicle-littered stretch of Highway 34 outside of Greeley, just a few miles south of where the Pawnee National Grassland began. Nobody said anything. Only the noise of the wind in the muffle of an upturned Dodge Rambler and various members of the party stretching legs and arms disturbed the stillness. Ronnie couldn't help but imagine the ghosts of the Pawnee and maybe the buffalo that used to roam the southwest. Although nobody said anything for a few minutes, they all felt the same way: lonely.

  They had made a decision that they'd look for a vehicle that was not anywhere near someplace where people could hole up out of the sun. The logic was that they simply were not sure how these folks worked and they would simply feel a lot easier in their minds if they knew that firstly the sun was up – that was a key point, Rick said – and secondly, that all buildings and anywhere else that a person could hide were more than a long sprint distant. (That, according to Virgil Banders, was belt and braces.)

  Of course, what it also meant was that the vehicles they had a choice of had not been "souped up" – Virgil again – and a lot of them were pretty banged up. And it also meant that they all, every single damned one, had a flat battery.

  "All had their lights on," Ronnie said.

  The rest of them nodded, even Angel Wurst and the two boys.

  "So what do we do?" Sally asked.

  It was Rick who answered.

  "We get back in the bus and head for Greeley, pick up a couple of cars that were parked up when the–" He looked around for someone to finish his sentence for him but they just nodded some more. "And maybe we'll be able to freshen up, too."

  It was a longer job than they would have liked it to be.

  Sally, Melanie and Angel Wurst went into 1298 Medicine Road – once Rick and Johnny had confirmed that the house was indeed as empty as it first appeared – and then Rick, Ronnie, Johnny and the two boys went into number 1296. With there being more of the guys than the girls, by the time Rick and Ronnie emerged with car keys for a bottle green Pontiac Grand Am Melanie was already leaning against the door jamb brandishing a plate of thick sandwiches.

  By the time the clock ticked over into the afternoon, they were all showered and shaved and sporting fresh clothes. They set off with Rick leading in the Pontiac and Sally following in a Nissan Pathfinder. All three children were with Sally and Melanie. After one more stop for gas at a filling station at Fort Morgan, they continued on the I-70 heading for–

  "Where are we heading for?" Virgil asked when they'd gotten moving again.

  "East," Rick said. Johnny was asleep in the Grand Am's back seat.

  Virgil nodded and looked straight ahead as Rick negotiated the car around a truck lying on its side. "What happens when we reach the ocean?"

  When Rick didn't answer, Virgil said, "It shouldn't be dark like that, should it?"

  "Nope."

  "You think something's happening out there?"

  "Yep."

  They were silent for a while and then Virgil said, "You don't talk much, do you?"

  "Well, you pretty much said it all. The sun rises in the east and it sets in the west. So, sure, the dark rises in the east just the same way." He shrugged and leaned forward so that he could look straight up into the sky. "See that?" he said.

  Virgil craned his neck and looked up. "The sun."

  "Right. The sun's overhead – in other words, it's not going down in the west – and yet over there–" He nodded in the direction they were travelling – darkness covered the sky way over in the distance: it wasn't dark clouds, not a storm or anything resembling it – just rather an absence of light.

  "Over there it's dark."

  "Very dark," Rick corrected.

  "And it shouldn't be."

  "It shouldn't be."

  It was several miles before either of them spoke again.

  Virgil said, "I guess we need to get the cars off the road before the dark comes."

  "Yep." Rick checked the mirror to make sure the Nissan was still following him. "And we also need to find ourselves a better mode of travel." He glanced sideways at Virgil. "You follow me?"

  "You mean we need to get ourselves one of those flying veehickles? Hoo-eee, Musky, that could be a mite tricky."

  Rick nodded. "Yep," he said.

  And as they continued on into Kansas, the sun moved across them heading for California and all points west. Up ahead, the darkness seemed to be waiting for them like a feral animal, knowing that they were heading its way.

  TO BE CONTINUED IN

  DARKNESS RISING

  FOREVER TWILIGHT 2

  About the Author

  Peter Crowther wrote short stories in the Seventies before embarking on a sixteen year career in music and arts journalism and as the head of corporate communications for one of the UK's biggest financial institutions, before releasing his first fiction work for more than a decade in 1990.

  Since then he has sold more than one hundred stories, novelettes and novellas to a variety of anthologies and magazines and has had work reprinted in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (three times), 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories (twice) and Year's Best Crime and Mystery Stories.

  In addition to his own writing, Peter is also a prolific editor of other people's work, served for three years on the Board of Trustees of the Horror Writers' Association and in 1998 was a judge for the World Fantasy Awards. His PS Publishing imprint has received the British Fantasy Award for Best Small Press seven times while Peter himself received the 2004 and 2008 World Fantasy Award for Best Professional. In fact, since its inception in 1999, the PS imprint and many of its almost 200 titles have picked up almost thirty awards.

  Peter lives about five hundred yards from the sea in Hornsea, England with his wife, Nicky – their two sons (Oliver and Timothy) having 'flown the coop' for solo adventures – and several thousand books, magazines, comic books, graphic novels, vinyl records and CDs. He enjoys reading virtually anything, but also listens to a lot of music (again virtually anything… although he writes only to jazz) and loves watching old black and white movies and reruns of Sgt Bilko and The Twilight Zone.

  Acknowledgments

 
This book (three separate volumes in its first incarnation) has been a long time coming – my thanks to everyone involved for displaying patience that borders on the Biblical. As ever, I've had help along the way: special thanks then to Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris at Angry Robot, Richard Chizmar at CD and Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press, plus Nathan Blumenfeld, Nick Gevers, and, most of all, Nicky.

  ANGRY ROBOT

  A member of the Osprey Group

  Midland House, West Way

  Botley, Oxford