What Happens in the Darkness (17 page)

No. Going through that tunnel was a
bad
idea. In fact, it was a
terrible
idea. There had to be another—

“Hey you! Kid!” A voice behind her, still some distance away.

Janelle saw an enemy soldier running toward her. She gasped, tripping over her own backpack as she ran toward the tunnel, having nowhere else to run.

“Stop!” she heard him yell.

She looked back as she ran, and he rushed toward her, raising a gun almost as big as her onto his shoulder.

She yelped and took off deeper into the tunnel, the dim flashlight beam pointing the way.

A shot screamed past her ear, shattering the windshield of the car beside her.

She screamed again, trying to accept the reality that the guard was firing at her, a
kid
. What would make him want to shoot a kid?

He followed her into the tunnel. She heard the pace of his whip-crack footsteps echoing behind her.

The unbearable stench of the rotting, unburied dead drifted through the tunnel. Janelle stopped short, not wanting to go any farther. But she had no choice.

Another gunshot, and the bullet smashed into the side of another car.

Why was he shooting at her? Was he insane?

The flashlight beam was making her a target. She turned off the light and dropped to her hands and knees and began to crawl away. She shook so badly she could barely move. Her bladder relaxed, liquid dripping through her underwear and jeans, and she nearly cried out.

She strained to hear his movements. Janelle leaned against a car and held her breath, her chest aching, tears running down her cheeks.

No sound. Was he doing the same thing? Was he waiting for her to reveal her location?

A sudden light sliced a hole in the blackness.

The soldier had turned on a flashlight.

Janelle moved again, much more quickly this time, her hands slapping along the pavement as quietly as possible. She couldn’t stand and run because before her was such an overwhelming darkness; finite and consuming.

Trying not to make any noise was increasingly difficult. The farther into the tunnel she went, the thicker the terrible smells, and the blacker the darkness. She was petrified, and what made it even worse was that she couldn’t release her terror.

He was getting closer, swinging that flashlight beam in sweeping arcs, searching beneath and inside cars.

No place to hide.

Moving deeper into the tunnel, deeper into that pitch black maw. No choice.

She prayed she could beat him to the other side, and then somehow hide before he caught her over there.

He was heading toward her, and for a moment she supposed being a prisoner wouldn’t be so bad. It had to be better than continuing in the tunnel. She just couldn’t go any farther. Who knew what was waiting in that dead darkness?

Then again, he’d shot at her twice now. She thought that maybe he wasn’t taking prisoners.

She started to crawl again.

A wall of rock blocked her path.

There was no way of knowing if there was passage over that rock, but if there was it was outside the scope of her reach. Her hands ran frantically over the surface but found no exit holes.

Her heart, which had already been pounding wildly against her ribs, picked up to such a frenetic speed it hurt. It felt unreal that her heartbeat could sound so loud, and she was sure it was going to give away her location.

The soldier was carefully inspecting every vehicle he passed. He’d wave the light below, above, and then finally inside.

There was no way to trace her steps back and pass him unseen.

There
had
to be a place to hide.

She gingerly ran her hands over the side of the car. The doors were shut, the windows rolled up. She crawled over to the vehicle on her other side and ran her hands along the surface. The doors were shut here as well, but when she reached up to touch the glass, her hand found air. The window was rolled down.

She slowly reached her hand inside, not wanting to do this, expecting to feel the spongy, moist flesh of the dead. The air was rife with their stench, and her stomach roiled.

Reaching inside the window, her hand touched a mass of curly stickiness that felt like hair. She squeezed her eyes shut—even in the blackness, pointless when unable to see a thing—and pulled her lips into a tight line. Her fingers made contact with the cold flesh of a pulpy, rotting face. She felt the nose beneath her fingers, then its mouth, the flesh so cold, so waxy. Her fingers probed further until they came across what felt like an eyeball, and she jerked her hand away from it.

She desperately wanted to scream. She shook her head, and the tears streamed down her cheeks. There was no way she could do this. There was no way she could get in there with that dead body.

But the soldier grew closer. If not for his methodical search he would have caught up to her by now.

Janelle climbed on tiptoes and hoisted herself in through the rear window, desperately trying to avoid making even the tiniest noise. She fell forward, cushioned as she landed against the body. The air reeked of rotting sweetness, like sour fruit but not. It wasn’t a smell Janelle recognized, but it reminded her of the smells that used to come from the garbage dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant near her building.

She had no choice but to feel around, to discover what was in the car with her. Her roaming hands touched something small in the corpse’s arms, something soft and almost rubbery, with downy wisps on top of a small round head. To the other side of the grown-up body Janelle felt other small forms with curly hair. Janelle squeezed her blind eyes shut again, the screams fiercely building, building in her chest, on her lips, hanging off the tip of her tongue. She tried to force the thought, the image of those dead bodies out of mind, but her hands tried to communicate with her what they were feeling, tried to put visions in her head of what this dead family looked like. In her mind’s eye she saw their bloated faces, their mushy features, their screams of terror locked forever in frozen expressions.

She quickly shifted the dead children as best as she could, pushing one aside until it rested on the mom’s lap. She pulled the child behind the driver’s seat on top of herself. It rested half on the floor and half on the seat. If the soldier took a long look he would probably notice the extra pair of sneakers belonging to Janelle. He would probably even notice the extra set of arms on the child corpse.

But she’d noticed he wasn’t checking the insides of the cars too well, probably believing no child would ever climb inside a vehicle filled with dead bodies.

And under different circumstances, no child would.

She lay as still as the dead piled on top of her, her terror so thick it numbed her brain and body. Her breath had slowed to almost nothing. She’d gotten used to the smells of the dead, and the constant, overwhelming need to vomit left for the moment.

He was so close now she could hear him breathing. Had he spotted her, climbing inside the car? Had he heard her moving the dead bodies? Facedown in the car, curled into a ball, she couldn’t see the movement of his flashlight beam, but she knew he was there, could sense his presence.

Something wriggled on her arm, tickled with tiny movements and tiny feelers and oh my
God
how she wanted to brush it off, to jump up and scream and get it off her skin, but she didn’t move a single muscle; she endured the creepy, slimy squirming thing. She suppressed the bile rising from the pit of her stomach.

His footsteps stopped by her head. She opened her eyes and saw nothing but blackness. Then … a sensation of added weight … him pushing down on the body on top of her. Maybe feeling for life, testing to see if it was her. She thought at that moment he’d found her, that he was about to pull the dead child off her. Which didn’t seem like such a bad thing anymore. As much as she didn’t want to get caught, she didn’t know how much longer she was going to be able to stand this.

He finally moved away from the car, deeper into the tunnel once more, but then she heard his footsteps abruptly stop. He must have found the cave-in.

He yelled angrily, words she had never heard before in an accent unknown to her, and there was a small crash—like his boot kicking a car bumper.

A hail of bullets filled the air, slamming into the cars, ripping chunks of tile from the walls, debris pelting her exposed back like raindrops. Janelle tucked her head down and squeezed her lips together, suppressing a scream. Then there was a loud creaking sound and a terrible crash. The soldier yelled again, but this time it sounded like he was in pain. Something huge landed on the hood of Janelle’s car, smashing it.

Panting heavily, coughing from the dust assaulting her lungs, Janelle slid out from beneath the dead child, unable to stay there another second. Gasping, she pulled herself out of the car, stumbling over huge chunks of rock that hadn’t been there before.

She retrieved her flashlight from the back of the car and searched the area when she could finally see again.

Chunks of brick and rock had fallen, crushing the soldier, pinning him against the caved in wall. The moron must have shot his own cave-in. She couldn’t tell if he was dead and didn’t care, but it was time to get out.

She stopped at the car where she had been hiding and glanced inside, seeing flashes of the dead family that had saved her life. The smell of their death had become embedded in her skin; she didn’t want the visual to go along with it.

She turned abruptly to flee but stopped short. That …
man
… was back … grinning at her like he knew the world’s best joke. Her brain tried to work this out. How had he found her?

“Little girl,” he crooned, his syrupy voice an assault on her senses.

She looked over her shoulder, as if expecting an opening in the solid wall of debris, as if somehow one had just opened up to allow her to escape.

“What do you want?” she whispered, facing him again. He’d inched slightly forward. “Leave me alone!” she cried, swallowing back the taste of dust and rot.

Behind her the soldier stirred, cursed quietly in some language unknown to her. He shouted, “You!”

She looked back. The soldier was struggling to his knees and searching for something—his gun, she was sure.

If she stayed, it would surely mean her death. But she had to get past.

“Screw this,” she muttered, running full speed at the man blocking her path, no longer afraid of him, realizing she had faced far worse than him and not wanting to have her head blown off by some moronic soldier.

She charged the skeletal figure and ran right through him. She glanced back and watched him evaporate into a wisp of smoke. No time to reflect on whatever the hell all
that
had been …

The flashlight beam led the way toward the exit, and up ahead she heard voices. Foreign voices. Foreign words. Janelle hid beneath a car as more soldiers rushed past her, searching for the missing soldier, she guessed. They must have heard the gunshots.

The soldier’s cries still deep inside the tunnel sent the other soldiers following his voice.

She waited another minute and then left, this time making it out.

Oh great. Dusk.

Janelle wondered if she would be safer inside the tunnel.

Chapter 13 

Patrick traveled as far south as Delaware before halting his procession, instructing them to go on without him.

They looked confused and upset, still unsure of themselves and how to proceed, despite their thorough instructions.

Patrick ran his fingers through his slick dark hair, shaking his head. He looked at the ground for a moment, as if fascinated by the dirt. “Listen to me,” he spat. “You’re not children, for Christ’s sake.”

No one responded.

He pointed to one. “You. What’s your name?”

“Paula,” the young woman—who would forever remain a young woman in her thirties—answered quietly. Her fingers twisted in the ends of her long, dark, kinky hair, and her skin, pale now in death, was once similar in color to her hair. Her African heritage gave her a regal ebony tone, and even now it stood out, as if protesting the night.

“Paula, you’re the leader now. You know where to take them. You know what your mission is.”

Chewing on a cuticle, she nodded.

Patrick threw up his arms. “You’re
vampires
. React—do
something
!”

They were afraid, and he was impatient. He’d forgotten how it felt to be a new vampire—forgot the terror, the knowledge that life no longer existed and death would never come. Not the death they had once known. To be immortal … he now took it for granted, yet two hundred years earlier it had terrified him as well.

But the passage of time had made him forget. And it had made him hard.

Paula yelled for the group to follow, and they fled into the southern darkness, and all that remained beside Patrick was the wind whipping through the trees.

He headed back north. Close to the home base, a small outfit of soldiers sat huddled over a campfire, roasting marshmallows on birch sticks like they were on a family outing.

Patrick approached them so quickly and quietly that he had attacked one, his fangs finding the man’s throat, and then severing the carotid artery of the other before the third even dropped her marshmallow into the flames.

She threw her hands up like shields before she remembered her gun. But it was too late.

He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to him, sinking his teeth into her throat, blood gushing from her fresh wound, drenching her uniform, pouring down her neck and chest.

Her body dropped to the ground, toppling across the other two.

Patrick sat in front of the fire and crossed his legs. The marshmallow stick still dangled above the flames, so he picked it up, examining it, and popped the toasted candy into his mouth. Food wasn’t the sensory pleasure it had once been—once upon a time he had even studied to be a chef—but he remembered the pleasure it had once given him.