After Darkness Fell (25 page)

That was impossible. Reed was dead. He couldn’t possibly come back from the dead and talk to me like this.

Could
he?

Reed? Is that you
?
Am I dead? Or did you come back to
...
?

“Moss, get up. We’re here.”

Someone was tapping my arm. I opened my eyes. A gray dashboard. My Ruger sat in my lap. A harness kept me fastened to the seat. My jeans were covered with dirt and leaves and stickers. My hands were filthy, and blood streaked my right forearm. A blood-soaked bandage covered my right bicep.

I was sitting in someone’s SUV. It wasn’t Fields sitting beside me, it was Shaw, and he was nudging me. His door was wide open behind him. “C’mon, Moss. We’re here. Get up. We’ve got things to do.”

I turned and stared straight ahead, at the frighteningly-familiar view just beyond the windshield. About a hundred feet beyond us, at the top of the gravel drive...

My grandparents’ barn.

We’d come back home.

Shaw hadn’t taken me to an abandoned farm out in the boonies. He’d brought me back home ... to my grandparents’ farm.

Confused, overwhelmed and suddenly painfully alert, I gawked helplessly at the bizarre sight. Then, when the harsh realization slammed through me, I saw something else that struck me as very strange.

Parked farther up the drive, about fifty feet from the barn’s huge sliding door, sat two vehicles. One was a gray Ford pickup, the other the light-blue electric compact that had followed Fields and me the day before.

Simon’s car.

The bastard had found out where we lived and had brought his gang back to my grandparents’ farm.

Enraged, I scrambled with the seat harness and the door handle at the same time. My mind had gone berserk. Simon had found out about my home and came to take whatever he could find. While his gang of armed psychos had been hunting me all night long, he’d come here to invade my home.

Had he brought Fields with him? Had he threatened her to bring him here?

I was going to find out.

As soon as I began struggling, an avalanche of hot, screaming pain danced up my arms and down my sides. I quickly grew light-headed, and sank back in the seat.

“Easy,” Shaw said. “Don’t pass out on us now.”

“I’m fine.” I knew that was a lie, and I was sure Shaw knew it too, but it didn’t matter because I’d come this far and wasn’t about to stop because of a little queasiness. But as I waited for the waves of dizziness to subside, something began nagging at me.

Shaw had just said “us.” What did
that
mean? The two of us? Was it just a figure of speech? Or another reference to what he’d said earlier, when he’d used the word “we”?

This was something I was going to figure out later, after I’d confronted Simon and forced him to tell me what he’d done with Fields. Right now I had to concentrate on more important matters, such as staying alert. I couldn’t pass out; I refused to. “That bastard’s here, isn’t he?” I asked, my voice unsteady. “He’s here, and God only knows what he’s doing or what he’s done.”

Shaw had already got out and climbed down. He held his .45 in his right hand. With his left, he pointed to the barn, then eased the door quietly shut.

It registered immediately: Simon was in the barn. That was what brought me back: the cold, harsh reality that Simon had come to my place and gone into the barn. His reasoning didn’t matter. Neither did half a dozen questions that came with this scenario. The only thing that did matter was that the same bastard responsible for taking away the love of my love, for sending two killers onto our property, had come back, and now that he did, I was going to end this right here and now.

My adrenaline thundered right back, and I went right back and tackled the seat harness. This time I was successful, snapping it open on the first try. I grabbed the Ruger, kicked open the door and slid out of the truck. The bottoms of my feet smacked the gravel, sending a torrent of hot tingling pain scurrying up my legs. I nearly collapsed, grabbing the door handle for balance. My legs would eventually work. They’d been through much more than this. All they needed to do was carry me up that hill.

Once the tingling subsided, a heavy gush of heat flowed down my legs. It felt like I’d been lowered into a tub of warm water. Good. It was safe to start moving again. Shaw was already halfway up the hill, but I knew better than try and catch up with him. I gripped the Ruger tightly as I forced myself forward.

About half a minute later, just as we were twenty yards or so from the barn, we heard a gunshot. It sounded like it had come from inside the barn.

Shaw and I both stopped cold, and for several tense moments we listened to the silence. My head grew hot and my pulse pounded. My imagination ran wild, and once again I wondered who’d come with Simon in that truck. And why Simon was in the barn. And who’d fired that shot.

Just then, Shaw took off in a dead run, heading straight for the barn.

Another fresh batch of adrenaline shot through me. I veered off to the right, into the thick grass, toward the overgrown path that led to the lower floor of the barn that faced the road. This section contained the horse stalls, access to the silo, and the long row of stalls where Uncle Joe kept the cows when the farm was fully operational many years ago. I trudged through the weeds, the Ruger held straight out in front of me.

When I was about twenty feet from the far corner of the barn, someone staggered outside. It was a man, and he held a gun in his hand.

I froze.

He turned toward me and I saw a large dark circle of blood growing in the center of his white sweatshirt. His arm hung loosely at his side, the barrel of the gun pointed at the ground.

He looked strangely familiar—about my age and bulky, with a receding hairline and a scraggly brown beard. He looked like he’d once been muscular but had let himself go. He was a couple of inches taller than me, but at least twenty pounds heavier.

It only took me a few moments to remember him. He was a year ahead of me in high school—a member of the football team and captain of the basketball team. He’d been voted Most Popular as a senior, made good grades, was popular with girls and had been offered several athletic scholarships. Last I’d heard, he’d studied Phys Ed at Carnegie-Mellon and had taught at one of the local high schools.

Like most jocks, he’d been an arrogant bully, but hadn’t been known for causing trouble. Apparently he’d decided to spend the rest of his days in charge of a psychotic gang of killers preying on what was left of the neighborhood.

“Simon Ettinger.” I couldn’t believe this.

He took a breath and blinked, squinting, trying to remember. His eyes were glossy and seemed out of focus. His nose was running as well. “Moss?”

“Yeah.”

A cough. “Figured it was you.”

It was time to end this. “Where is she?”

He lowered his head and coughed again, wetly.

I could barely contain myself. It didn’t matter who this bastard was or if I once knew him. He’d taken the woman I loved from me, and now he was going to die.

The strength in my numb right arm had mysteriously returned, and I found no difficulty raising the Ruger. My hand trembled a little at first before turning deadly still. I took a breath and aimed the barrel at Ettinger’s right eye. “Did you ... kill her?”

He raised his head and blinked, and I caught the beginnings of a smile.

A
smile
? Was this maniac kidding?
You asked for it, you bastard
. But just as my index finger began applying pressure to the trigger, Ettinger coughed up phlegm mixed with blood. Slobber covered his lower lip and chin. His voice was a throaty whisper when he said, “That’s ... a laugh.” Then his head fell forward. His gun dropped to the ground and he collapsed in the grass.

Another figure emerged from the barn.

It was Fields. She was wearing the same outfit she’d had on the night before, but her jeans were dirty and smudged, and her hair was mussed. Long, matted strands fell in front of her face. She held a long-barrel revolver in her right hand and stood looking down at Simon, her gun aimed at his motionless body. She slowly raised her head, but her hair blocked her view. With her free hand, she pulled it back. When she saw me, her jaw dropped, and she gawked at me as if she didn’t believe her eyes. She let her gun drop in the grass.

I quickly discovered I could not move. I wanted to run to her, wrap my arms around her and hold her, but my legs had gone numb again.
Of all the damned luck
... I tried to say something but my voice was gone as well. I’d turned comatose, and once again the fear that I’d died came drifting back. This had to be death. It certainly was hell, or as close to damnation as I could imagine. I’d finally been reunited with Fields, but all I could do was stand there like a zombie, gawking at her.

She rushed toward me.

A moment later, someone else appeared behind her—another man. He was large and broad-shouldered. Like Shaw, he was dressed in camouflage slacks and matching jacket. His arms hung at his sides. A gun extended from his right hand. He approached Simon cautiously, knelt and felt for a pulse. Then he straightened and watched Fields and me. He holstered his gun, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled something out of it. He brought it up and placed it next to his ear.

It was a
cell phone
.

My eyes glazed over. A cell phone. Right. Why, of course. In this world of death, corpses and walking zombies, no electricity, satellites or any other power sources, there had to be
some
miracle that defied all rational explanation.

Roaches and cell phones would always survive a holocaust.

When Fields was only a couple of yards away, I tried raising my arms. Like my legs, they’d gone numb. The Ruger was still in my hand. I no longer needed it, and let it drop. I figured that without its weight, I could raise my hands and wrap my arms around her.

But a heavy curtain of blackness dropped over me, and I collapsed beneath it.

***

Fields sat on a chair beside the bed, applying a fresh wrap to my arm.

Just a few minutes earlier, when I opened my eyes and saw her, I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven. But when she touched me, kissed me lightly on the lips and told me I’d been asleep for nearly forty-eight hours, I realized we were both still alive, had survived the nightmare and had made it safely back home. It wasn’t exactly Heaven, but it seemed as close to it as one could get in this horribly dark, frightening world.

“How’d I make it up the stairs?” I asked. “I don’t remember anything once I blacked out.”

“I carried you.”

My expression must have been classic. She laughed. “Two big, strong guys happened to be walking around at the time. They came over and asked if I needed help. They didn’t seem to have anything better to do, so I asked them to lend me a hand.”

“Nice of them.”

She was silent for a few moments. Her smile vanished, and she told me how sorry she was.

“For what?”

“For causing all this. For feeling so sorry for myself that I left the house alone at night and let myself get picked up by a bunch of crazy jerks.”

“It happened on our property. It wasn’t your fault.”

“But it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t just left the house half-cocked. Or if I’d just stayed closer to the house. Or just went over to the stoop, sat down and brooded right there.”

“You were upset. You needed time by yourself. You didn’t deserve anything that happened out there.”

“But it happened. To make it even worse, it happened just hours after I’d chastised you for leaving the house that morning without telling me.”

She was right, but I didn’t feel this was the time for an I-told-you-so. She was already punishing herself. “That was different.”

“I nearly got us both killed. That’s going to be hard to live with.”

“Like I said, it wasn’t your fault. You’d had a really close call earlier that day and it freaked you out. Actually, it had been a horrendous day on several different levels. You needed time to sort things out.”

“You didn’t want me to go for that walk. I should have listened to you.” A shadow had drifted across her face. I figured she’d just gone back to relive some unpleasant memories. I wanted to know where she was, what exactly had happened. I wasn’t sure if I could handle it, and told myself I should ask about this later, when I felt better. Right now I was weak and tired, and didn’t want to deal with violent emotions. I wanted only to bathe myself in her wonderful presence.

She noticed my inner turmoil almost at once. “You want to know what happened that night? After they picked me up?”

I just sighed.

“I promise it won’t upset you.”

“How can you promise something like that?”

She shrugged. “Nothing really bad happened.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing as bad as what you’re probably thinking.”

I suddenly realized that I could no longer stand the suspense. In spite of my instincts, my fears, I said, “Then tell me what happened.”