Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller

by Ashlei Hawley

  Darcy drove the only car they had with a front seat open. The trunk and every part of the back seat that wasn’t occupied by Dylan’s car seat had been packed full. Shane took the van he’d commandeered from Leila’s family home and Stephanie drove the one they’d appropriated from the motel parking lot. Both vans would end up having overhead storage containers on their tops if they were able to find them. Otherwise, they’d have to figure out another way to store and transport the things Shane had put on his sporting goods store shopping list.

  Stephanie glanced over the list again. Shane had wanted her to have it in case they got separated. He had rationalized that if she were the one to get lost from the group, Shane still had the list in his head. When Stephanie asked if it was Darcy who got cut off, Shane just said something noncommittal about how Darcy would be able to fend on her own if she did. Stephanie didn’t know if that was a cut against her own survival instinct or an offhanded admittance of Shane’s preference that if something bad were to happen, it be to Darcy and not the woman he’d known and loved for years.

  “Why did he put ‘gas for the boat’ on the list?” Stephanie mused as she put the van into drive to follow the others, who’d already pulled out of the parking lot. “We won’t find gas there…”

  She decided he’d probably meant gas cans and had just put the two together on his list because that was how Shane’s mind worked. She knew the sporting goods store Shane was talking about was right off the freeway.

  When she had an impulse to take out her cell phone and talk to him about the huge, still burning mall they passed as they drove, she cursed. It was a several times per day occurrence since the Onset. Though she kept her phone charged and always at the ready using the car charger, it hadn’t had service since she’d been able to get the miracle text through to Shane. It annoyed her to be cut off; all alone in the van with no company except bedding, clothes, some of the weapons and a variety of food that would keep for months at a time.

  “Walkie talkies,” Stephanie announced aloud, though she had no one around able to congratulate her on the brilliant idea. They’d be able to stay in touch even while driving if they had the walkies that had the couple mile ranges, and she was sure they’d find top of the line models at the store. She grinned, pleased with herself and turned the radio–which had one of her favorite CDs playing–way up.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Shane pulled into the sporting goods store that he’d decided was the best route for them to take concerning supplies and sat with his vehicle idling. He didn’t want to go inside. The whole drive, bad feelings had been stirring in his gut. Talking to Leila hadn’t eased them, nor had singing along softly with the CD he’d put in when she’d fallen asleep.

  Without anything good to keep him in the car and a hundred reasons he needed to step out, Shane killed the engine. Though he was afraid Leila was going to get cold, he was more afraid of wasting gas. With a last glance at the sleeping girl, he eased the driver door opened. He didn’t want to wake Leila when he exited the vehicle by a slamming door.

  Darcy and Stephanie pulled in right behind him. They’d agreed that they’d turn all of their vehicles to preserve fuel. Darcy bundled a fussy Dylan so he wouldn’t catch a chill. Leila, looking like a chubby pink caterpillar in her snowsuit, was buried under two blankets and the whole seat was covered by another so that the warm air she breathed stayed in her small little cocoon-like environment. Dylan accepted snacks to placate him. The boy loved his food.

  It was agreed that Shane and Stephanie would be the ones to enter the store, with Darcy standing watch outside. In a pinch, she was the one with the most experience getting a baby seat in and out of a vehicle, and she would not abandon Leila if a situation occurred where she needed to take both of the babies and flee. Shane felt an aching emptiness in his chest when he thought of Darcy needing to take Leila away from him for any reason. Perhaps due to the situation or some deeper, arcane tie he couldn’t place, Shane could no longer fathom a day in his life without Leila in it.

  “Walkie talkies,” Stephanie said simply as she handed Shane’s list to him. She’d found a pen in the van and had scrawled the two words underneath his neat handwriting. Hers was awful. He smiled at it, and then at her.

  “It’s a good idea,” he praised as they moved toward the door. They both had weapons out, quiet ones because they didn’t want to draw any unpleasant entities to the area with gunfire if they could help it. Stephanie had her hatchet and Shane had a lightweight pry-bar that had what looked like a wrench head on one side and a hooked tip on the other. Though it wasn’t heavy, Stephanie bet it didn’t just look wicked but could be a real bastard if Shane swung it hard enough.

  “Are you sure you’re all right to do this?” Shane asked Stephanie as he gestured to her bandaged arms. “We get into a fight and you’re going to tear yourself up even more.”

  “We get into a fight and I won’t even give a shit,” Stephanie retorted. “Adrenaline will help with that.”

  “And afterwards you’ll be in a lot of pain,” Shane pointed out. Stephanie rolled her eyes.

  “Are we doing this or not, princess?” she asked him in a tone that told Shane she was just as nervous as he was. She didn’t want to, but they both found the necessity too worthy of the risk to turn back.

  “For once, act like the girl, would you?” Shane asked of her as they approached the door and pushed it open.

  The Onset had occurred late at night, later than operating hours for the sporting goods store. Shane didn’t like that the door opened for them, and he knew as he chanced a glance at Stephanie that she was disconcerted by it, too.

  “Hours were only until seven,” she pointed out as she gestured to a sign on the door. “That means this door was left open because someone was a shitty employee or we’re going to find someone unfriendly in there.”

  “Those aren’t the only options,” Shane countered quietly as they moved through the first set of doors and toward another. “Someone with a key could have come back after the Onset to gather supplies. If they were a nice someone, they would have left the doors unlocked for other uncorrupted to come and get supplies.”

  “Hmm, that’s a good point,” Stephanie admitted as she put a hand on the door that would actually lead them into the store. “No alarms are going off,” she continued. “Maybe our wayward employee was nice enough to turn off the system to keep from drawing attention to the future looters.”

  “We can only hope,” Shane agreed as he put his hand gently on top of Stephanie’s. He wanted to take the lead, and she let him. Stepping back, Stephanie told herself it was time to be quiet as she tightened her grip on her weapon.

  Shane attempted to give the experience a positive spin and offer the best case scenario for why the doors were open and the alarms weren’t going off, but his insides felt like coiled snaked ready to eat their way out of him. He pushed the door open before he could talk himself out of it, and it swung inward toward the store with nary a scrape or squeal. The place was dark inside, but they had the natural light from the sun, weak as it was, in the front part of the store and their flashlights for the deeper areas that weren’t blessed with windows. Any corrupted would find the back parts of the store to be a nice haven for the daytime, and Shane would have bet his arm that was where most of the supplies that he wanted were located.

  “I still don’t like it,” Shane admitted, hovering in the wash of chilly light he knew protected them for what most likely lurked within the store. His breath plumed on the air and blew away almost as soon as it left his mouth. The wind had begun to pick up.

  “Is there anywhere else we can get this stuff and stick to the schedule you wanted?” Stephanie asked him. She fidgeted from one foot to the other, swinging her hatchet down by her right knee as she bounced on her heels.

  Shane frowned and answered, “Not really. Not that I know of.”

  “Then we’re stuck with this,” Stephanie told him with a shrug of her shoulder. “We jus
t stay safe and protect each other, right?”

  With a nod, Shane fully entered the glass box which served as the store’s entryway. Even though the power was off and the heat hadn’t been running, an immediate temperature difference made him sag slightly in relief from the harsh cold. Stephanie followed him in. She forced herself to loosen her grip on the hatchet and moved with Shane toward the second set of doors.

  He pushed the door open, expecting an alarm to sound or a voice to call out. Watching for movement which could indicate other survivors or corrupted, he stood motionless in the doorway for a moment.

  “I don’t see anything,” he said in a hushed voice. “Do you?”

  Stephanie opened the door to the right of Shane and stared into the store. The definition of the aisles deeper into the building blended together, creating a confusing canvas of shadows on darkness.

  “Flashlights?” she suggested. Shane hesitated.

  “I don’t want to use them until we’re fairly certain they won’t call bad company to us.”

  Straining her eyes, Stephanie sought the darkened interior of the store but saw no movement or shapes that struck her as human in nature. Of course, with the way some of the corrupted had changed, it seemed searching for human forms wouldn’t be the standard for long.

  She shivered at the thought. Removing her flashlight from her pocket, Stephanie pointed it into the darkness and flipped the switch. The light barely pierced twenty feet ahead of them, and Stephanie found herself thinking they needed to find something with more power.

  “Stephanie!” Shane hissed, but she shushed him.

  “Better to do it here,” she said. After a second of hesitation, Shane’s light joined hers.

  The beams played over each other, revealing the details of the store and shrouding them in shadow once more as soon as they’d passed the spot by. Shane spotted the aisle he needed for their clothing. To the left of it, the snow shoes could be found. The tents, rope, hunting supplies, and kits he wanted, which included basic repair and first aid, were on the other side of the store.

  “The shit’s so spread out,” he muttered.

  “I guess they should have just stocked everything together in a survive-the-apocalypse aisle for you, huh, princess?”

  “Call me ‘princess’ again,” Shane growled. Stephanie smiled sweetly at him and moved into the main body of the store. The door swung silently shut behind her. Glaring at her back, Shane followed her inside.

  Stephanie made sure to grab a cart that didn’t squeak and didn’t suffer from loopy wheel syndrome. She didn’t want to have to fight the cart to go the way she wanted if she needed to make a mad dash with it.

  “Wait, how did you say we were going to transport all of this?” she asked Shane as he wheeled his own cart up beside hers. It was just like they were shopping before a casual camping trip, she joked to herself.

  Shane pointed to their right and said, “Truck toppers.”

  Stephanie eyed the compact storage units designed to be strapped atop any variety of wide-roofed four-wheel-drive vehicle.

  “So we’ll just tie them to the roofs?” she asked. Her dubious tone made Shane think he hadn’t convinced her well enough of the chance of success his plan had.

  “Very tightly and with top of the line equipment,” Shane promised. “I swear it’ll be fine.”

  Stephanie shrugged and said, “You’re the boss.”

  For the moment, Shane thought to himself as they pulled up alongside the display of topper storage units.

  Shane chose the largest of the toppers and brought it down carefully. He avoided Stephanie as he eased the heavy, thick storage device from its place alone on a shelf. He repeated the process with a smaller one for Stephanie’s vehicle. When they sat beside each other, one balanced precariously on Stephanie’s cart and the larger one wobbling atop Shane’s, he wondered how they’d make it out of the store without one of them crashing to the ground.

  “Slow and steady,” he suggested as they began to move. “We don’t want them to fall and make a ton of noise if there’s unpleasant company around.”

  “Yeah, I can see that being a bad thing,” Stephanie said. She made sure to keep a tight grip on her topper as she navigated through the dark store. “If there’s unpleasant company nearby, one of these bad boys falling would be about as bad as ringing a dinner bell.”

  With short, hesitant steps, Stephanie and Shane worked their way back to the front of the store. No corrupted blocked their path. The doors remained unlocked, the alarms continued to blare only silent warnings, if any. The toppers had to be removed from their perches on the carts in order to turn them sideways and navigate them through the narrow doors, but other than that, there were no other issues. The knot in Shane’s stomach didn’t relent, and he wondered if his danger sensor, seemingly so fine-tuned since the Onset, had begun to malfunction.

  “How are the kids doing, Darcy?” Shane asked as he wheeled his portable storage space toward the van he’d been driving. He thought to himself that they should have brought a stepladder out with them. It would have made the process of securing the units to the tops of the vehicles much easier. He made a mental note to grab a step ladder when they went back for the rope they would be using to tie the toppers down.

  “Leila’s napping and Dylan is fussing,” Darcy said. Her tone brimmed with impatience, but Shane didn’t feel it was directed at him. Having an angry toddler to deal with who was normally a handful and a half without the trial the past few days had been had begun to drain Darcy. They needed to get to a safe place, he thought. Off the road, somewhere they could hunker down and let the kids be as kid-like as they could possibly be in a world gone absolutely insane.

  “Two more trips into the store,” Shane assured her as he eyeballed the van’s roof. It appeared as though the topper would be a good fit. “Then, we’ll be out of here and headed for the island. We get there and we can hunker down and wait for someone to sort this shit storm out.”

  “Hopefully,” Darcy murmured.

  Shane helped Stephanie unload her burden and they turned their carts back to the store. Darcy shivered and looked up as snowflakes began to tumble from the overcast sky. On the horizon, thick gray clouds hovered like an invading army. The blue sky they’d begun the day with was losing its advantage against the encroaching grayness.

  “Hurry up, you guys,” Darcy said under her breath. She watched them reenter the store and sent a small prayer heavenward. She hoped she’d see them both come back out again.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The instant Sam turned his large black truck onto the I-96, Laura knew where they were headed. He’d decided to head to the small wood cabin they had tucked away in the dense forests close to the Upper Peninsula.

  The kids had never even been up there. It was a survivalist investment which Laura had at more than one point argued with Sam over. The first summer after Sam had finished construction on the cabin and small storage shed, Laura had changed her opinion on it. The cabin had no electricity, but it did have a sturdy wood-burning stove, a shallow river nearby, and all the privacy they could ask for. On weekends when they sent the kids away with Laura’s dad, the pair had been able to enjoy days in each other’s company with no outside influences to take away from their time together.

  The cabin was the perfect spot. Bill hadn’t known its location, and Sam had been careful not to mention it to anyone else. They kept their forest hideaway off social media and out of neighborhood gossip. The only person who’d known about the place that Laura could think of off the top of her head was the old woman who’d sold them the property, and she’d died two years ago.

  The drive would take them another two and a half hours. Laura tried to curb her excitement at the prospect of having a legitimate safe place far away from the centers of corruption the cities had become.

  “Where are all the animals?” Amy asked from the passenger seat. It was the first thing she’d said the whole drive. “Shouldn’t there be s
ome out? It seems strange there aren’t any animals around.”

  “They’re trapped inside, I guess,” Laura answered with a shrug. The conversation wasn’t a road she wanted to go down. She disliked that it was the first thing Amy had decided to discuss.

  “So that means the corrupted probably are, too,” Amy said. “It was dumb to want to open the doors.”

  She rested her bare forehead against the passenger side window and exhaled, fogging the glass with her defeated breath. Laura didn’t know what to say.

  “You want to talk about something else?” the older woman suggested. Amy shook her head and stared out the window.

  Storm clouds gathered in the distance, Amy noted. Soon, the winter snow would be upon them in full force. She hoped what supplies they’d grabbed from the Walker home and what Sam had stockpiled at his safe location would last them until the spring. She found herself relatively certain they’d be snowed in until the thaws came around March or April.

  Laura spared one glance over her shoulder to check on her daughter. Melissa still slept deeply. Laura had been able to arrange the girl in her seat, buckle her in, and slip a travel pillow beneath her head all without waking her. She hoped her daughter would make it through the adjustment phase soon. Children were resilient, she reassured herself. She’d heard it a thousand times or more.

  Nearly as much as for her own children, Laura worried for Amy.

  “Have you been able to get ahold of your mom and dad?” Laura asked Amy. The younger woman shook her head again, this time more slowly.

  “My phone hasn’t worked since I got the message through to you. No Internet, texting, nothing. I’m pretty sure I won’t be reaching them, even if they are still…”