Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller (2 page)

     “Fuck that, man,” Sam retorted as he used his free hand to shove Dennis toward the door. “Move your ass. Let’s go!”

     Though he wanted to stay behind and watch their backs, Dennis allowed Sam to push him toward the door. He still insisted the girl and his partner with his unfortunate burden go through first.

     Sam panted. Sweat poured in rivers down his face and every other body part. It felt to him like he’d fill his suit up with the acrid moisture and he’d drown in the liquefied expression of mortal terror.

     The girl was off the porch first, seemingly unperturbed by the hard, cold ground her bare feet landed on. Sam stumbled off after her, trying with monumental effort to keep a steady hold on the unmoving man. Sam almost guaranteed he was dead, and felt hysterically for a moment he had merely ‘rescued’ a life-sized doll belonging to the girl instead of retrieving the body of an unfortunate victim on a night fat and bloated with victims. The hysteria passed as Dennis made it out behind them.

     “Around to the front,” Dennis said, and his voice came out far calmer than Sam expected his own would be. “Let’s get back to the others.”

     Dennis went back to supporting half of the man and used his other hand to push gently on the girl’s shoulder.

     “Come on, sweetheart,” he told her in a soft voice. Dennis had always been good with kids. “Let’s get you to your mama.”

     When they rounded the house, Dennis and Sam saw the truck had been abandoned. No one stood near it or sat inside it, and the woman who had made the emergency call was nowhere to be seen.

     “What the hell?” Sam asked incredulously. “Where is everyone?”

     “Doesn’t matter yet,” Dennis said grimly, though of course it did. “Let’s just get them in the truck. Warmer in there and we can get some blankets on them and call for backup.”

     “Man, we
were
the backup,” Sam hissed. Dennis didn’t respond.

     As Dennis moved toward the truck, Sam began to sense an even greater feeling of imminent catastrophe looming over them. It was impossible to breathe through, impossible to think around, and impossible to identify for the threat that it truly was. Something about the darkness was different, just like the thing in the house had been a shadow different from the other shadows. There was a layer of the world that had been revealed, and the revelation was something far darker and far more terrifying than anything Sam could have anticipated in his bleakest nightmares.

     Tears choked him, and they were not easy tears. They burned his eyes, closed his throat, and reverted him to the age of four; when he was
sure
that not only was there a monster beneath his bed, but it had tasted blood before and would again.

     As the girl bared teeth that looked more suited to the mouth of a wolf than a child and pounced on Dennis’s back, Sam was swallowed up by the new darkness and knew nothing more of the old world. Even in the unconscious state he slipped into, he could still feel the omnipresent, choking fear.

Chapter Two

     Slightly after 10p.m. along America’s eastern coast, the wind was wild in the deep darkness of the night. It blew in frustrated fury like the breath of an asthmatic old man fruitlessly dueling a candle flame he wished to extinguish. Demanding entrance, it pummeled the siding of houses in great gusts, prying at the structures. No walls granted passage to the wind of the winter night, and the houses remained warm. Where the cold wind could not go, however, the Shadows slithered in.

     In one of the many small towns of southern Michigan, while an unnatural darkness claimed the eastern states one by one, a more expected fall of shadows had hours ago taken hold of the day. December had a way of abandoning the world to nighttime early on, and on the nineteenth at 10p.m. darkness had already possessed the sleepy town for several hours.

     Moody and pensive, Laura Walker consulted her chicken noodle soup as an herbal witch above her scrying bowl. She found no answers to her pertinent questions, which was no surprise to her. If she believed herself connected in any way to the supernatural (which she didn’t) she doubted the ability to foresee events and answer questions through the medium of liquid in a bowl would be hers to possess.

     She wanted to know if Sam was all right. Her husband’s well-being weighed most heavily on her mind. She’d been watching news broadcasts, mostly involving fires in their area raging out of control, for more than an hour. Her concern rose as each new story unfolded.

     Sam was out there, in the thick of whatever was happening in their town and, Laura believed, in many others. The hour of devoting her attention to the news stations had caused Laura to suspect the situation in Michigan wasn’t unique, but what was closest to her heart mattered first and foremost. Sam was out there in it.

     Idly, Laura picked chunks of what were supposed to pass for chicken out of her soup. She didn’t know if she actually planned to eat, but she wanted to prepare the brew for her consumption if she did. She’d never liked the processed meat in chicken noodle soup.

     With a sigh, Laura agitatedly dropped her spoon on the saucer she’d carried the hot soup bowl to the living room on. She was edgy and frustrated. Doing something as mediocre as being picky about her chicken at such a time seemed downright foolish, possibly even unsafe. An insanity akin to cabin fever began to mount as she wished Sam was anywhere else except in the thick of things. The thoughts were pointless and angered her. She felt the need to do something, to be productive, or just to move.

     Brushing her short, tawny hair out of her almost copper-colored eyes, Laura became even more unreasonably annoyed. The new pixie cut flattered her face, but at the moment she wished she’d opted out of adding the messy bangs to the look.

     “Cool it,” Laura ordered herself out loud. She tried to banish the irrationally irritable thoughts as she reclaimed her spoon and returned to her task.

     She tried calling Sam again, and the voicemail requested her message midway through the second ring. Either Sam had continuously ignored her calls intentionally, or something was wrong with the phone system. With the scraps of viable information she’d been able to glean from the highly unreliable news channels, Laura harbored a suspicion it was the second option.

     Flipping the channel as she had periodically throughout the night, Laura caught another exchange between two attractive news anchors, each of them smiling as though their mouths had been molded into the expression with expert surgery or at the urging of some magical puppeteer.

     Both the distinguished-looking older man and his ten-years-younger female counterpart advised the audience in the most soothing of tones to remain in their homes and avoid unreasonable panic. The ‘unfounded gossip’ of catastrophe of any sort sweeping over the east coast over the past few hours was laughable at best and at worst was being considered maliciously criminal.

      Laura’s bright eyes jumped once to the wall clock, which read 10:09p.m. It seemed the night had already gone on much longer than that, and should be creeping toward the witching hour at the least.

     Her cell phone trilled once, and the unexpected noise jolted Laura like an electric shock. “Sam!” she gasped hopefully.

     Before she could even get a hand on it, the ringer cut itself off and did not sing again. Frustrated, Laura picked up the damnable thing and checked to see who had called. The number was unknown to her and to the phone. A wrong number. What a night for it, she thought.

     The wind raged, frantic and mournful outside, but the chill could not find purchase within the walls of Laura’s home. She shivered anyway just looking into the night’s foreboding darkness, imaging how cold the bite of December had to be at that moment. They hadn’t seen snowfall once the whole year, unusual for Michigan. Even without the snow, the bitterness in the air had been bone-grinding.

     “I need something better to do than this,” Laura claimed aloud as she stood and muted the television. It hadn’t told her anything useful, anyway.

     Moving soundlessly through her home, Laura occasionally touched the things she passed. Ten years into her marriage and they still had the powder blue sofa gifted to them by Sam’s mother and father the year of their wedding. Laura took good care of things, and the couch was the most comfortable piece of furniture she ever expected to own. Even after two kids, it had suffered so little wear and tear, and experienced such meticulous upkeep, that Laura had based the whole living room design off its color and personality.

     The next thing she ran a hand over was a framed picture of the family, a tasteful portrait taken in the time of heat and fun this most recent summer. The sand near the lake looked like a sheet of sugar, nearly white in the brightness of the sun, not golden as it had seemed when she, Sam, and their children sat in their Sunday best, posing for the picture which Laura now had a hand on.

     The frame was chocolate brown and had been decorated craftily by Laura. The color and style had been chosen to match the uniform color the family wore for the shot. The reeds that framed Laura, her husband and children, almost as though they’d been arranged for that purpose, seemed ready to blow in the wind as they had that day. Laura knew, from being there herself and from the choppy look of the waves behind her family, that the wind had been almost frantic. Both her and her daughter’s hair had not withstood the onslaught of the devious gusts, and blew around their shoulders in the picture; the only sign of disarray. The inconvenience of the wind had caused laughter, though, and made the portrait that much more real to Laura, that much more sentimental. Her family had never been short on laughter.

     Moving away from the family picture, Laura felt thoroughly disquieted. She walked through her home as though it had become a tomb, a memorial to her family and to Laura herself. She moved, perhaps, as a ghost through familiar space, mourning the loss of belonging to the same realm as these things that were so recognizable to her and yet somehow now beyond her reach.

     It was a silly thought, and Laura scolded herself for it. She was and had always been too fanciful for her own good. In her youth, Laura had hoped her nature would lend itself to a career that rewarded the wistful mentality of the dreamer. An artist, she hoped, or perhaps an author. She’d at different points in her life wished to be a singer, a dancer, an actress. Something in a field of creativity and passion. Instead, she’d ended up the wife of a wonderful man and mother to his two fantastic children. She’d not have traded one life for the other.

     The hallway beckoned Laura, and the doorways of her children seemed to draw her magnetically. Melissa was six and Trevor was eight, both of them old enough to sleep with their doors shut if they preferred, which they did. Though they undoubtedly loved the cats, both of the kids were bed hogs and preferred not to share with their furry, four-legged siblings.

     One of the three cats, as though conjured by her thought of them, twined itself around Laura’s legs and gave a soft, mournful-sounding greeting to its favorite human. Rifkin had been named after a character on one of Sam’s favorite television shows, and had actually been chosen from the shelter by Sam himself. After getting home, Rif had never paid the man another mind, and instead had devoted his entire world to Laura, whom he followed around the house without fail. Laura had always been amused by how that had turned out.

     Kneeling by the slinky black and white feline, Laura scratched Rif behind the ears as he preferred and let him guide her rubbing down his back and up to the tip of his bushy tail.

     “Silly kitty,” Laura murmured. “Don’t you have somewhere to be lounging?”

     Rifkin, strange for a cat, rarely lounged. His bemused expression seemed to remind Laura of this fact. When Laura returned to her feet, Rif padded after her, down the hallway toward her children’s rooms.

     Laura couldn’t explain to herself why she roamed her house like a ghost hunter desperately seeking contact with the other side, trying to be quiet and confident while her nervous heart thundered away beneath her breast. Nor did she know why an inexplicable fear suddenly leapt into her throat at the thought of opening the doors to the rooms of her children. The fear and her mood were both so unexpected and unexplainable that she wanted to force herself to go to her own room and read a book, or maybe sleep.  

     “What’s the matter with you?” Laura asked herself as she found a hand on the door to Trevor’s room.

     Just a quick peek, she decided. A quick peek like she’d allowed herself hundreds or thousands of times over the years since her children had been born. There was nothing wrong with a mother’s concern. Perhaps there was something wrong with the irrational way her throat had tightened and tears sprang to her eyes, she thought, but there was nothing,
nothing
wrong with maternal concern.

     She pushed the door open. The light from the hallway spilled inside, anxious fingers moving eagerly to sweep away the darkness that pervaded the room. Trevor slept soundly on his side, one hand fisted beneath his cheek and the other tossed carelessly over the side of the bed. Most of his blankets were on the floor, his brown hair was tousled, and his bright blue eyes, so lively when he was awake, were peacefully closed. There was nothing wrong with the room, or with the boy who slept within.