What Happens in the Darkness (12 page)

“Start with those,” Patrick said, pointing toward a group of about ten soldiers huddled around a campfire, briskly rubbing palms to keep warm, or wrapping their arms around themselves.

“I’ll start with them,” he added, pointing to another group of about twelve guards. “When you finish, move in. Advance on the guards nearest the prisoners. Move fast, and be quiet. No gunfire if you can help it.”

Luke nodded and they took off, tearing into the crowd of unsuspecting guards, who were foolishly complacent and relaxed in a night as dark as their uniforms.

At first there was no noise, no shrieks, and no gunfire, but then the thick smell of blood and death filled the air, panicking prisoners and guards alike. 

*** 

This isn’t possible.

Janelle stared in disbelief at the carnage. She crossed her hands over her throat, pulling her arms protectively into her body. The night was cold, and the jeans and T-shirt she wore were inadequate. The wind made her shiver, and terror made her teeth chatter.

She’d been trying to think of a way to help those prisoners, but now it didn’t matter. One by one the guards were being killed, and she could barely see it happening.

The screams came from terrified men and women soldiers being torn apart by unseen forces, chunks of flesh being ripped from their scalps and throats. Then the attackers slowed down long enough to lap at the flow of blood, smirking bloody grins, seeming to love the carnage.

Guards dropped rapidly. Even in the darkness the prisoners sensed something wrong and began to panic. They kicked the wire fencing, but it was holding.

The attackers had butchered more than half the guards, but there were still dozens left, and now they were screaming their commands in foreign languages. The shooting started, and prisoners began to drop, some from fear, some from being hit.

“Get down!” the attacker in the red T-shirt yelled at the prisoners.
“Get down!”
He leapt at two guards still shooting into the crowd—and Janelle was sure she saw him get shot repeatedly by a semiautomatic machine gun—but he kept going, as if the bullets hadn’t hurt him at all, as if they had been shooting blanks.

He landed beside them, grabbed the head of each one, and brought the guards together, their faces smashed together. Bits of bone and teeth shattered, flying between them. Their faces were bashed together with such force one head caved into the other, skulls exploding on impact, brain matter coating everything and everyone around them.

The attackers dodged bullets or seemed unaffected by them. They tore through the remainder of the guards until they’d slaughtered every single one.

Blood dripped from their bodies, their faces, from the bodies of the prisoners. It pooled around dead guards and prisoners. The air was thick with its coppery odor; Janelle could taste it in her mouth. She stared at the ground thick with shallow pools of blood-soaked viscera; stringy, ropey strands of intestine; and mangled body parts. Minutes ago those guts had been on the inside of the soldiers. Now they looked like something that belonged in a butcher shop.

They didn’t even look tired, the attackers. They weren’t even out of breath.

The one in the red T-shirt held his hands out to the crowd, the way Reverend Newman had so many times as he was about to start his sermon at Janelle’s church on 162nd Street.

“People! Calm down,” he told the prisoners. “We’re going to let you out.”

But Janelle got a closer look at the red-shirted guy and realized it was Patrick, the guy who had been in the bank vault yesterday. The other one had been there as well, but she didn’t know his name.

“Oh no,” she muttered, near tears. She sucked in a breath and looked around quickly for an escape route, but it seemed safer to stay still for now. No one seemed to know she was there. If she moved now, they would surely see her.

The attackers gathered near the gate, which was also covered in barbed wire and secured with massive chains and an enormous lock.

Whatever they discussed Janelle couldn’t hear, no matter how hard she strained.

They began to climb the barbed wire.

“What are you doing?” someone screamed. People tried to shove them back out, over the barbed fence, but were unsuccessful.

The prisoners panicked, almost as a whole. A few froze, stood with mouths hinged open, screams pouring out of their heads.

The attackers were quick, moving amazingly fast from victim to victim, but the prisoners were hysterical by now, and they were oblivious to the pain of the barbed wire tearing through their clothing and skin as they desperately tried to clamber over the top of the fence.

One unfortunate woman got trapped between the wire and the crowd and was being used as a makeshift door, her body grooved into the razor-sharp edges. She screamed so loudly Janelle covered her ears, but no one else seemed to notice the woman’s cries. The woman’s face scraped against the razor wire, gouging out chunks of flesh from her cheeks, her tongue protruding through the new hole in her face, one blue eyeball popping as it became attached to a curl of wire. Her hands became entwined in the fence, and she tried to rip them free. Her fingers remained embedded in the wire, separating loudly from her hands as her body slid down the length of the fence under the relentless force of the crowd breaking free.

The prisoners pushed against her, shoving harder, breaking through, and at least half a dozen walked over her chopped-meat body and fled into the freedom of the streets.

Janelle ducked back into the doorway as the prisoners streamed past her, her vision clouded with tears and sweat, afraid the killers would pursue them and discover her.

Instead, the killers had waited at the prison’s makeshift exit, catching anyone attempting to escape, attacking them, lowering them to the ground.

Bodies of guards lay everywhere, like the attack the other night, but this time it didn’t seem like they were about to get up. Not like last time. But there was something different in the way the killers had attacked the prisoners, somehow less savage. They held the limp bodies and lay them gently on the ground while the guards had been discarded like trash.

Huddled in the corner of the prison was a man holding a small child. At first Janelle thought they were dead, but the man was talking to the killers now. He lay pressed up against the barbed wire, and blood trickled everywhere on his body, but he shielded the child from the attack and from the wire.

Janelle crept a few feet closer to the prison, not really wanting to but her overwhelming curiosity making her approach … wishing she would stop and at the same time hoping they wouldn’t attack because there was no way she was going to stop. She had to hear, had to see. Her stomach flipped, and her bowels cramped in terrified excitement. Like watching the lion tamer at the circus … it was safe but not quite. And sometimes … sometimes you rooted for the lions.

She realized she wasn’t breathing and slowly exhaled.

“This is stupid,” said one of the killers. “It’s a waste of time. Why don’t you just—”

“Easy, Luke,” Patrick said. Then he crouched down and extended his hand toward the man with the child. “We don’t want her. She’s too young. You can leave her. Someone will—”

“No, please! She’s my baby,
please
!” He wiped tears on his cuff. The child was wrapped tightly in his arms and was clutched against his body. Desperation filled his eyes, a knowledge that this was a lost cause, but he wasn’t willing to give up. He had a moustache that looked like a large fuzzy bug crawling across his mouth.

“Please.
Please
! She’s all I have!” He started sobbing and buried his head against the child, until they looked like one bizarre form, arms and legs entwined in a headless mélange.

“It won’t matter in a moment,” Luke said gently. “Trust me. You won’t care.” Then he said, “Patrick, we don’t have all night for this. We
really
don’t.”

Around them, the new vampires began to stir, sitting up. A few moans, some coughs.

Janelle realized she could be in serious trouble if they spotted her.

Patrick shook his head, waving his hand at the newly rising dead. “They’ll kill them both. They can’t help it. Take the child. We can use the man. They can have the child.”

“No!” the man screamed, but Patrick yanked the girl from his arms.

The child, who seemed to be about five years old, kicked and screamed in his arms, stretching out her hands toward her father, screeching for her daddy with all her voice.

Patrick turned suddenly and faced Janelle. “You! Girl! Come here.”

Janelle gasped, swallowing back a breath that stopped midway down her throat. Her bladder suddenly felt too full.

“I know you’re there, kid. Come out here.”

Her legs refused to obey. Tears streamed down her face. She wondered how she could have ever been so stupid.

“I won’t hurt you,” Patrick said quietly. “I promise. Now come here.”

He promises? Is he kidding?
But slowly she walked toward him. She knew she had no choice.

“Take her,” he said to Janelle, handing over the child. “Take her and get away from here.”

Janelle stole a glance at the crying child’s father, now flat on his back, blood gushing from a gaping hole in his neck. The one called Luke hovered over the man.

She clutched the child in her arms, a girl almost as big as Janelle, and ran blindly with her through the moonlit streets, the sky dark and heavy with fog and ash and smog. 

*** 

Dagan crouched beneath a tremendous rock and wiped his hands on his knees.

Rebecca stood over him, arms crossed, tapping her foot. “What are you
doing
?” she asked loudly, knowing it would irritate him.

“Shhhh!” he said, looking at her reproachfully, motioning for her to duck down.

The third member of their scouting troop, Tim—the other twin—followed Dagan’s lead and ducked behind a clump of bushes beside the large rock.

“Really, Dagan,” she said, tossing her head, her black-blue hair shining in the moonlight. “They can’t hear you. Stop playing cops and robbers.”

Dagan whipped his head in her direction. “You’re a spiteful thing, you know that?”

She laughed. “Poor Dagan! Always after me lucky charms! Can’t have his childish fun.”

“Stop makin’ fun ‘a me accent, ya bloomin’ harlot.”

“Harlot?” She shoved him hard, knocking him over a shrub.

“Quit that!”

Tim stepped between them. “Both of you quit that. Would you stop already?” He looked from side to side, as if expecting an ambush from the lush forests surrounding them. “Someone will hear!”

Rebecca stroked Tim’s face and kissed the tip of his nose. “It’s been too long for you, m’dear, sweet boy. Too, too long. They can’t touch us, remember?” She whooped loudly, throwing out her arms and twirling, head thrown back, laughter ringing through the still, black air.

Dagan grabbed her arm and shook her.
“Covert,”
he said through gritted teeth, his brogue stronger the angrier he became. “D’ya
know
what
covert
means?” Of course his accent was occasionally indeterminable, and it sounded like he said,
Dooya nuh whaa coova mains?

Rebecca always knew what he was saying. She’d known him too long and despite the teasing was quite fond of him.

She pulled away and smirked. “Lighten up, leprechaun.”

A commotion at the bottom of the hill, and moments later lights were flashed in their eyes.

“Now you’ve done it,” Tim snapped. “Can we go now?”

Rebecca grabbed his hand. “Wait. You boys wanna have some fun?”

Tim shook his head, an emphatic
no
, but Dagan was grinning mischievously, his green eyes dancing with delight.

Tim groaned. “I’m too old for such nonsense. I really am.”

Rebecca called out, “We give up!”

A dozen soldiers rushed them, surrounding them, guns aimed at the vampires’ heads.

“Vstanʹte na koleni!”
one shouted.

“What?” Dagan said. “English. What does that even mean? We speak—”

“It means ‘get on your knees,’” Rebecca said.

“How many bloody languages do you know?” he asked.

“All of them.”

A soldier shoved him to his knees.

“See?” she said, sticking out her tongue. “Told you so.”

“Y’know, you were right,” Dagan said. “This
is
fun.”

She laughed. “Wait.”

Metal flashed in the reflection of the flashlight beam, and their hands were cuffed behind their backs. Rebecca twisted and contorted her wrists, easily slipping out of the cuffs, letting them fall to the ground. Dagan and Tim followed her lead.

“What the
hell
?” Another soldier started yelling at the one who had cuffed the prisoners, cursing him out for being so inept.

Rebecca turned in a slow circle, examining face after face. “Come on,” she taunted, “I’m waiting.” When the guards began to laugh, she yelled, “Lets go!”

Dagan and Tim remained kneeling but attempted to move out of the way.

The first guard grunted, shaking his head, unzipping his fly. He kicked her feet out from under her, knocking her on her back.

“No,” she said without inflection, “please. Don’t. Stop.”

He backhanded her across the face and lay on top of her, fumbling with the zipper and button of her jeans, kicking her legs apart with his feet, strategically planting his knee, his experience at this sort of thing apparent.

She was more disgusted than ever.

Before he could enter her she wrapped her arms around his head, clasping her fingers at the back of his neck, drawing him toward her. She craned to meet him halfway, her movement startling him. She sank her teeth into his throat and tore it away, drinking the river of blood flowing from his now dead body.

Dagan and Tim quickly joined her, attacking and defeating the small troop of soldiers, enjoying the taste of blood they had been so desperately craving.

“This one’s still alive,” Tim said minutes later, poking the soldier’s leg with the toe of his boot.