Nightfallen (Vol. 1): Books 1-4

by Schvercraft, S. G.

  They lifted the gurney I was on, and the leaned it against the van so that I was essentially standing upright. We were in a mud pull-off a little ways from an unlined road. This was the only clearing. Surrounding us like soldiers at attention was a dense formation of leafless trees.

  They had driven the van to the far end of the clearing, as far as one could get from the entrance I now faced.

  Nightfallen tend to notice paths of escape. Another hardwired instinct, no doubt, to protect us from would-be Van Helsings. So it struck me as strange at first that they’d park so far from the only exit.

  Then I noticed the freshly turned earth by the entrance Jackson would be coming through, and it began to make sense. I’d hoped to be able to shout Jackson a warning, but then they used a couple feet of duct tape around my mouth.

  The hour passed. Smitty and Hitch had loaded themselves into the van, no doubt to help prevent Jackson from sneaking up on them if he came on foot through the woods. The others had fanned out into the forest.

  I could hear them as they sat waiting, starting to wonder if he wasn’t going to come as Smitty noted that the hour was up. Five minutes passed, then ten. The arc of the Milky Way was no longer visible. The sky was still black, but the coming sun had already chased the fainter stars away. Visions of molten daylight flashed before my eyes.

  Then I saw it. Headlights slowly making their way down the road—clearly a jeep.

  Jackson pulled in slowly, stopping near the entrance where the hunters had dug.

  Hitch and Smitty left the cover of their van, took up positions beside me. Smitty had his rifle at the ready, but Hitch left his slung across his back, his hands casually inside his fleece.

  Jackson killed his headlights and exited the jeep. “I’m here,” he called to them. “Before you idiots do anything you won’t live to regret, let me propose a trade.”

  At that, Jackson quickly went around the back of the jeep. I heard its rear gate open, and he reemerged, dragging someone by the arm.

  Dressed in a silk nightie, she was blindfolded, with duct tape around her hands and mouth: Emily Lin.

  “Oh shit,” Smitty said, turning to Hitch.

  “It goes like this,” Jackson yelled. “You give me my friend, I give you the girl. You guys stop your hunting parties, and I agree not to hunt down you and your loved ones like Ms. Lin here.”

  There it was: Jackson’s attempt to save everyone. As much as the mortal morality of his solution annoyed me, I had to give him credit for his plan’s elegant simplicity.

  Smitty kept looking at Hitch to say something. “Dave, what do we do?” he whispered.

  Hitch was silent, just stared at Jackson and Emily. For her part, Emily looked markedly more human than the perfection I’d seen in her pictures. She crossed her exposed legs against each other, instinctively trying to keep warm against the late winter cold. Jackson had his right hand on her upper arm, but it looked like he’d already managed to break the fight in her.

  Wet streaks running down her face from the blindfold. Even with almond eyes covered, she seemed to be pleading for whoever Jackson was calling to, and I wondered if she instinctively knew it was Hitch that now held her fate in his hands.

  Yet still, Hitch said nothing.

  “It’s a good deal,” Jackson shouted. “Everyone can walk away from this a winner. Everyone can go home alive.”

  “Maybe we should,” Smitty whispered. Hitch swallowed hard, and I thought he might go for it.

  He removed his hands from his fleece. One of them held a small remote. “In every war, there are going to be causalities,” he said. Then he depressed the button.

  It wasn’t a fireball like you see in the movies. More of a concussive force, erupting from the ground like a geyser of earth.

  The explosion flipped the jeep on its side, bursting all its tires.

  In all the dirt that had been kicked-up, it took me a second to spot where the bomb had thrown Jackson and Emily. I guessed that the jeep had been directly over the bomb, and taken its brunt and most of its shrapnel—it was the only reason why the both of them hadn’t been cut into a dozen slabs of beef.

  Blood was coming out of Jackson’s right ear, and there were a few pocks in his flesh where ball bearings had hit. Emily had been closer to the jeep, though, had taken more of the blast. As Jackson quickly shook his head clear, he looked over at the girl he’d kidnapped, and noticed her missing right foot.

  “No!” Jackson shouted like an asylum inmate. “Why did you do that? You didn’t have to do that! It didn’t have to be this way!”

  “Move in, move in!” Hitch shouted into the woods, unslinging his rifle and taking aim at Jackson and Emily.

  Jackson grabbed the limp girl’s body, pulled them both behind the jeep’s overturned hulk for cover. Hitch’s bullets slapped holes into the sheet metal.

  More gunfire from the woods—Scott, Bobby and Matt opening up with their rifles. Jackson left Emily by the jeep, and rushed into the woods.

  At the same time, I saw three, painfully bright masses of light in the forest. Crosses. The idiots were going to try to use crosses on him.

  There was more of that painful light close to me—Hitch and Smitty pulling their cross necklaces out from under their shirts. I closed my eyes tight, but could still feel bloody tears in them.

  “Kill her,” Hitch ordered Smitty.

  “Dude, how could you do that to Emily?”

  “There’s no time for that!” Hitch raged. “Drive a stake through that bitch’s heart now—we have to help the others.”

  I heard a single shot, not as sharp as the hunters’ rifle fire. Something smaller, maybe. A pistol—Jackson’s 1911?

  It had to be, because the scream that followed wasn’t Jackson’s. I peaked despite all the nearby crosses’ light. Then another pistol shot silenced the scream. Suddenly, there was one less blinding brightness in the forest.

  “That’s one of our friends dead—now kill her!” Hitch shouted.

  Despite his necklace, I could make out that Smitty had slung his AR around his back. From his cargo pants, he took out a stake and mallet.

  His necklace right in front of me again, I couldn’t help but close my eyes. So close, I could feel its light burning my skin like microwaves. I braced myself to feel oak piercing my sternum.

  Then I heard another shot—this one the crack of a rifle—and just as quickly felt the wonderful warmth of blood gushing over my face.

  I opened my eyes, to see that Smitty had fallen to the ground before me, half his skull now missing, his body covering his cross necklace.

  Jackson, I thought. He must have gotten a rifle from the one he’d killed. If taking out sorority lights hadn’t been a problem for him, how much easier the larger target of a meathead’s skull?

  Matt and Bobby burst through the tree line, wildly spraying bullets into the woods as they backed up towards the van.

  “Crosses don’t work!” Matt shouted.

  “Scott was waving it in front of him, and it didn’t have any effect!” Bobby yelled between shots. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  From the woods, another crack, and Matt’s head jerked violently before he fell to the ground.

  Hitch and Bobby scrambled around to the other side of the van. They got inside through the passenger door, and behind me I heard the engine roar to life. The van accelerated, knocking me and the rusted gurney I was chained to into the dirt. Driving over me, its wheels missed me by inches.

  I felt some slack in the chains now, and I realized that the van must have damaged the old gurney. I managed to free an arm and shake loose the chain holding my head in place, but I was still too weak to break completely free.

  I watched as the van sped around the overturned jeep, trying to escape from the clearing for the road.

  Jackson emerged from out of the tree line, firing into the driver’s side window, glass exploding from it. Jackson had explained to me how AR-15s—basically civilian M-16s—weren’t fully automa
tic unlike their military counterparts. But as fast as the rounds flashed from the muzzle of Jackson’s rifle, it was hard to tell the difference.

  The driver dead, the van slowly rolled headlong into a tree.

  The passenger door opened, and Hitch fell out, blood spilling from his left shoulder where he’d been hit. His rifle fell out with him, and he left it on the ground, clutching instead to a small gym bag.

  From the bag, Hitch pulled three, foot-long lengths of pipe, with a cord extending from one of its capped ends.

  Jackson was swinging around the van, rifle extended, making no effort to hide his approach, ready to end Hitch.

  Still blocked by the van, Hitch pulled all the cords at once. Then he threw them in the direction of Jackson’s approach before dashing into the tree line opposite from Jackson.

  I stiffened my free hand to a claw, hacked at the duct tape covering my mouth, lacerating my cheek in the process.

  Jackson turned the corner of the van and fired at Hitch, already in the forest. Bullets punched into tree trunks, but missed their intended target.

  He was about to continue after him when, my jaw finally free, I screamed, “Jackson, look out!”

  With my scream, the pipes in front of him registered, and he dove for the clearing’s muddy floor. The three pipe bombs exploded in unison, shrapnel pocking the van’s white rear and shattering a taillight, but missing Jackson.

  He ran over to me then and shot off my chains’ lock.

  “You okay?”

  “They bled me out pretty badly,” I said, as he helped me shake loose of the chains. “The flesh is weak, but the spirit is enraged enough I can help you run down Hitch.”

  Jackson shook his head. “There’s no time,” he said, looking to the sky.

  In the gunfight, I hadn’t noticed. Now even the brighter stars had disappeared. While it was still dark, the heavens’ canopy was a shade lighter than absolute black.

  The sun was coming.

  It took some effort to keep calm, but I tried to be reasonable. “We’ve got some time, but if we can’t make it back into town, there’s a tarp in the back of the van. We can use it for cover,” I said.

  “Emily’s still alive. We need to get her to a hospital first.”

  It made my stomach turn. “Who cares about her?”

  “Nobody but me,” he said, rushing over to the ruined jeep.

  Still blindfolded and bound, she had curled herself up into a ball. She was pale, shaking for the cold mud on which she rested, and all the blood she’d already lost. Her right foot was lost, but her left leg was also dotted with shrapnel as well. Her hands were covered in blood as though she’d been trying to hold her legs together.

  Jackson took off her blindfold, used the cloth as a tourniquet for her ruined foot. Loading her into the van, Jackson was going to make me drive, but I told him I hadn’t any idea how to get back to Echo Valley.

  So he left me in back with Emily. He backed the van away from the tree it had knocked into, and took off onto the road.

  As we made our way up the mountains, the sky continued to lighten. Beside me on the van’s floor, Emily lay shuddering. It was freezing inside the van, the wind rushing in through the shattered driver’s side window. The van rocked as Jackson took the road’s winding turns fast.

  I could see the life leaving her. Even with the tourniquet stopping the blood loss, her energy was dimming before my eyes. I was too weak—if I licked the wound, I doubted it would heal even a little bit. And I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop drinking once I’d tasted her.

  Besides, the issue wasn’t blood loss alone. Her will to live had been broken. It wasn’t hard to imagine why. A pretty girl, clearly popular, no doubt from a rich family, who had probably excelled at everything she’d ever tried. When all your life is ladled out to you with silver spoons, how likely are you to be able to deal with something like this?

  I tore the duct tape from her hands and mouth. She said nothing, her face frozen not in the tormented grimace of someone struggling to hold on, but in the sad visage of the resigned condemned.

  “Look at me,” I said. She didn’t. “Look at me,” I said again, this time grabbing her face. Her eyes met mine, and I hit my headlights.

  I stared at her as I had Ron, and countless other victims. I’d never tried what I was about to, though.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “The pain is going away.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said.

  “It’s going away,” I insisted. “Leaving from your body. You can feel it leaving your body, can’t you?”

  Hesitantly, “I … think I do. A little.” Often pain was enough to snap someone out of it, but already in agony, she ran into the oblivion offered by my iridescent eyes.

  “You do. It always starts that way, doesn’t it? Good things starting slowly, right?”

  “Right,” she said, the tears no longer quite a river.

  “The pain drifts away, slowly at first, but then faster. You can feel all that hurt leaving you faster now, can’t you?”

  “I can,” she said.

  “And replacing it, just warmth, the certainty that everything is going to be all right.”

  “I can feel it. Everything is going to be alright.” A slight, relieved smile broke on Emily’s face.

  “And all that horror you saw tonight, all the terrible things that happened—who needs them?”

  “I don’t want them,” she said.

  “So you forget them. You forget all the faces you saw and the noise, the things that were done to you. You don’t remember how you got here.”

  “I can’t remember,” Emily said.

  “All you know is that everything is going to be okay.”

  “I do.”

  “That’s good. Now you should rest.”

  “I will.” Emily laid her back down, closing her eyes. Her energy was still dim, but at least it wasn’t fading now.

  I looked up to see Jackson sparing a second from the roads to glance at me. It was so quick, but I liked the approval in his eyes. It was the only reason I’d done it, after all.

  Through the van’s windshield, I saw the sky was a middling blue. We were losing time.

  “Are we going to make it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You might want to be ready to dive under that tarp, maybe out in the woods. Or you can jump out when we hit Echo Valley, make a run for the campus steam tunnels or something.”

  Yes, do that, my predator mind checked in. I resisted it. Cut loose on him now, and if he survived what would he think of me?

  I moved up into the shotgun seat. “I’m good here, thanks.” On the interior of the mountains now, I could see Echo Valley below us. “But don’t feel the need to drive safely on my account,” I said.

  “Fair enough,” Jackson said, picking up even more speed.

  The cloudless sky was a blue-gray by the time we got to the Ramsgate College Medical Center. The tips of the surrounding mountains were now stained gold by daylight, and just like a cross, it hurt to look at.

  Sliding the side door open, I placed Emily on the sidewalk near the hospital entrance.

  Jackson tore off while honking the horn, and I saw in the side view mirror an orderly running out to see what all the commotion was about, only to find Emily.

  More sun streaming onto the mountains. We were still in the mountains’ shadows, but even seeing it was excruciating. I had to cover my eyes, my innards feeling like someone was spooling them around a fork like spaghetti. I covered my mouth fighting the urge to be sick. Sweat poured from me.

  By the time we made it to his house, the color had left Jackson, the ambient light starting to create toxicity even in his faux Nightfallen body. For me, though, it was much worse, and I couldn’t walk, felt barely conscious as he pulled the van behind his bungalow, out of sight from the road.

  Jackson carried me out, running as fast as he could up onto the porch. As he opened the door, though, he couldn’t cross the threshold
. He tried again, and again bounced back as if against an invisible force field.

  “Oh,” he said, realizing what was happening. “Come on in,” he said to me, still bundled in his arms.

  7

  Epilogue

  Just like with Mimi, we initiated the four hunters’ corpses for a Viking burial with homemade thermite and napalm. We even placed their bodies in the same furnace.

  After spending the day hiding in Jackson’s basement, we’d gone back to the scene of the firefight after sundown. Still too cold for most casual hikers, and too remote to find unless you were really looking for it, the battlefield was undisturbed. Jackson’s ruined Jeep remained on its side. The bodies of Matt, Bobby, Scott, and Smitty lay where they’d fallen.

  We’d loaded them up in the white van, then took the time to pick-up as many bullet casings as we could. The Jeep was inoperable, but with the holes in it from bullets and ball bearings, we needed to make it disappear. It had been a second trip to buy four new tires and a trailer hitch for the van. It wasn’t hard flipping the jeep back onto its belly, but replacing the tires took forever. We tarped it to hide all the damage, and pulled it to a junkyard before going over to collect our fee from Mansfield.

  “You found who did it?” he’d asked earnestly.

  “Sure did,” I’d said. “The bodies are in the van, if you want to take a look.”

  “I’d like that, thank you.” Staring at the corpses, though, Mansfield had said, “I thought this would make me feel better.” Evidently, some holes can’t be filled, regardless how many bodies you throw down them.

  In the factory basement, Jackson lit the fuses. The spark sizzled up the cord, climbing over the faces of the dead hunters before meeting with the thermite we had packed in their throats. In seconds, their bodies were engulfed in the flames.

  “I really wanted to save everyone,” he eventually said, the firelight playing off his face.

  “I know.”

  “Do you think those guys deserved to die?” Jackson asked.