Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller (21 page)

     Though she was a constant worrier, Jenna had never been a planner. She’d not stocked groceries beyond the week. She didn’t sew, couldn’t make anything more complicated than a cake from a box. She wasn’t a skilled woman when it came to home duties. She’d never gone camping. Frank took his weekend trips with the boys, but Jenna was content to stay in a home she worked to maintain, as cleaning was one thing she was very good at. She had her own cleaning business, in fact, and a large number of clients and a whole set of ten employees. Business she was good at. Working hard, she could do. But she simply had never been a woman whose thoughts extended beyond what she was doing at the present time and what was needed in only the foreseeable future. Even in her business, Frank handled the money and long-term investments. Jenna concerned herself with the people aspect: employees and endearing herself to customers. People work she was good at and it was people she wanted currently.

     “They won’t turn us away,” Jenna urged as she stood and shrugged her way into a thick winter coat. She grabbed Frank’s off the hanger and handed it to him, having decided their course of action without any further input from her husband. This was usually the way it went in a discussion between the two.

     Frank took the coat, and stood to don it. As always, he had simply mulled long enough to allow Jenna to come to the decision she was after from the get-go. He was a laid-back kind of man, and he was content with the fact that Jenna drove most of the decisions in the house. He planned, but she decided for what. It had been a great marriage of opposites, and he loved his wife in that moment as much as he had the day they’d married. More after the two decades they’d weathered together than there at the first, he knew, because he’d seen her grow into a more beautiful, more intelligent and more wonderful woman every day.

     He placed his cigar in the ashtray on the table beside his plush brown lazy chair and smiled down at it. Like his wife, he’d become fonder of the piece throughout the years. He laid his hand on the back of it as he leaned in to kiss Jenna’s cheek.

     “Shall we go pay our neighbors a visit then, darling?” he asked in a gentle tone of voice as he played with the strand of hair she’d been worrying earlier.

     Jenna smiled at her husband, glad that he rarely argued and the way his silence had always seemed like a form of communication in itself. She squeezed his hand as he let her hair fall, and they walked together to the foyer.

     Jenna and Frank were already dressed for winter weather and had been since the night before. They’d slept fully clothed in their living room. All they needed to add were gloves, hats and boots and they were ready to brave December cold.

     They locked the door upon leaving. Jenna felt only a small pang of regret at leaving all of their things inside. They took their cell phones, which still weren’t working, and Jenna’s laptop. Why she felt the need to take the thing, she couldn’t say, but it had felt wrong to leave all the family pictures, communications and important documents that existed within. They also gathered all cash they’d had in the house, which had amounted to a little over five hundred dollars. Jenna had suggested to her husband that maybe if neighborly concern didn’t sway Sam and Laura, money would. Jenna thought money would be useful again sometime in the future, or maybe it hadn’t lost its use quite yet. Either way, she and Frank had more, in the bank and in investments. What they had on hand was well worth it if it paid for their integration into a more prepared and peopled group.

     Frank took Jenna’s free hand once more on their front porch. They held hands often, and it was with great affection and a lifetime of love that she interlaced their fingers and smiled at him.

     They walked the short distance to the Walker home. Their booted feet crunched over frozen blades of grass that were easily crushed under the thick rubber soles. Though frost coated the early morning in a glaze that made everything look candied and glittery, still no snow had fallen. Frank took it in and decided that when the snow did come, it was going to come fast and hard and it would be a bitch.

     Knocking on the front door, as he had done many times before, Frank stepped back and waited hopefully for an answer.

     The knock at the door came while Sam sat on the couch, marveling over how much it felt like he’d had the shit kicked out of him. Every wound burned like mad. He felt he’d been pummeled, abused, thrown over jagged rocks, and for some reason, every breath he pulled into his lungs seared like he’d inhaled half of a campfire.

     The smoke in the house, he thought to himself as he walked gingerly toward the door. He left Trevor sleeping on the couch, deep in thought as he was, as he continued to replay the events of the previous day. He’d been pretty much hyperventilating that smoky shit right into his lungs, he reminded himself. What a drag, he mused, and almost laughed aloud. The comparison to cigarettes in his own mind amused him, as many things within his brain tended to.

     He reached the door and looked back at Trevor, hoping the boy was still asleep. He thought perhaps he should go back and wake him so that he could keep an eye and hand on the boy, but decided against it. His peaceful sleep was soon to be a rarity, Sam guessed, and wanted to let his son have what was left of their normal, familiar lives while he could.

     Taking a quick glance through the peephole, Sam saw the neighbors, Frank and Jenna. He was pleased to see them alive, and not suffering any of the evidence of full corruption that he’d seen in others. They stood fully in the sun, after all, and looked as normal as he did. Feeling the interest of the malign presence within him directed at the middle-aged couple, Sam reminded himself that looking normal and actually being normal were two different things now. He urged himself to handle the situation as warily as he’d decided to handle everything in the world the way it had become.

     Cracking the door, he leaned out a little ways and said, “Hello there, neighbors. Good to see you about and looking no worse for the wear.”

     “Glad to see you,” Frank answered as he waved his free hand companionably. “You know what’s happening, I assume?”

     “Probably no more than you do,” Sam replied noncommittally as he opened the door a little more and leaned against the jamb. He was sure to face them with the injured side of him, so that his face and shoulder wound were fairly obvious in the soft morning light. He let them see a small slice of the hell he’d been through the day before, in hopes it would make their dealings cautious and also leave them with no harsh feelings should he decide to turn them away. He had a family to protect, after all, and it was obviously a difficult job.

     Jenna gasped softly as she came forward, pulling a reluctant Frank with her. There was something wrong with Sam, the same something Frank knew was wrong with him and his wife. The beasts within Frank and Jenna hadn’t lashed out at each other, mainly because the concept of either of them hurting the other was so unfathomable to Frank and Jenna that the creatures couldn’t take hold for malicious action even for a tenth of a second. But what was inside Sam was like those things, those beings of darkness that had taken up residence within Frank and his dear wife, and Frank was sure the entity within Sam felt no qualms against attacking either of the two newcomers.

     “Stay a little back, darling,” Frank suggested in a gentle tone as he kept Jenna from joining Sam on the porch.

     Sam nodded, appreciating Frank’s intuition. “You know that much, at least,” Sam said. “Something’s wrong with a lot of us. I feel it in the two of you, as well. But we have two here who haven’t been touched by it. They’re uncorrupted, and we’re protecting them. I know you’re good people.”

     “Good people who’ve always been friendly with you and your family,” Jenna reminded him with a winning smile. “That’s why we were hoping to join up with you. If things keep going the way they are, there’ll be problems, Sam. The cold, food. Snow’s coming, sure as anything.” She hesitated, not knowing whether to get her intentions and thoughts out there immediately or hold off. “We have money, if you’re thinking it’ll be of use to you now or later. We’ll pull weight.”

     “It’s not about money, Jenna,” Sam said, and he sounded both scolding and almost embarrassed. “You’re friends. It’s not lack of supplies that I’m considering; it’s those under my protection.”

     “More people could help with protection,” Frank suggested in a nonchalant tone.

     Sam shivered, finally feeling the cold air against his skin. The bite in the wind was almost as malicious as the thing shifting curiously inside of him, with claws and teeth just as sharp. He’d come out onto the porch so he could be closer to Frank and Jenna for their discussion and was about to hold it open in invitation when someone else came through it.

     Trevor was barefoot, but he didn’t seem to feel the cold that radiated up from the porch and fell around him. His hair was tousled from sleep, his cheeks pink with it. Except for his eyes, he looked the picture of a sleepy child on a winter morning. His eyes were fathomless black. The Bringer of Wounds was in possession of the boy’s body, and was ready to make its presence known.

     Before Sam could reach out and touch the boy to drive back the presence of the special being that inhabited his son, Wounds had already unleashed the power of its namesake on the two humans who had approached the Walker home seeking companionship and sanctuary.

     The process started from the feet up, from the smallest injuries to the largest. Frank and Jenna stood, paralyzed by what the Bringer had done to their bodies. Bruises spread and blossomed, like sickly, time-lapsed flowers blooming to life on their skin. Painful as they were, bruises were just the start. Thousands of tiny cuts, from paper cuts to other shallow wounds, hundreds of different types and positions, sprang up and soaked the skin of Frank and Jenna with bright, startling red.

     Jenna cried out and grasped at her arms, but the burning was everywhere. There was no way to ease the ache and sear of almost maddening torture. Frank grunted in pain and surprise. The effect of having countless wounds accrued throughout one’s lifetime revisited at once was excruciating.

     Stunned motionless and momentarily numbed in body and mind by what was happening, Sam took a moment to react to Trevor’s presence and the actions of the Bringer. As soon as he gained his composure, he reached out and took a firm hold of Trevor’s outstretched hand, jerking the small body of the boy toward him in one shocked, desperate motion.

     Cutting off the Bringer’s power at that point was moot. The process had already begun, and would finish it with or without the Bringer of Wounds in possession of Trevor Walker’s small, fragile form.

     Sam silently urged Trevor’s eyes to clear as he watched even worse evidence of the Bringer’s power work its way over Frank and Jenna. The older man tore off his winter jacket and screamed. His blue shirt looked black with all the blood that had soaked through it. Having a great love of them, Frank had gotten many tattoos throughout his life. He now felt as though every inch of skin ever touched by the artist’s needle had been drenched in acid and then lit aflame. Having a tattoo done once could be painful, but having to relive them all simultaneously ignited a pain reserved for some of the lower levels of Hell.

     Jenna collapsed and wailed in agony. Blood poured from her mouth, from every part of her body and soaked the frosted ground, melting it with the heat. The finale was afoot, and the Bringer smiled with Trevor’s body before being banished by Sam’s touch.

     Frank lifted his shirt, feeling a pain not quite like any other he’d ever experienced. It stood away from the others, both in unfamiliarity and brutality. With horror, he noted that the incision from his open heart surgery, which had just happened last year and had left an ugly scar he was ashamed of, was reopening. In the few seconds it took for the wound to spill his heart and other viscera onto the street, Frank came to the conclusion that he’d never feel ashamed of anything again. As he died, he had a thought for his wife, whom he knew without question was dying as well, and then he had no others.

     While Frank slumped over onto the ground (Dead. God, Sam knew he was dead.) Jenna gave one last piercing scream of agony and then lay still as well. From the area of her hips and waist, blood pooled out in a greater quantity than any other location. They were dead, both dead. Bled out on the ground in front of Sam’s home and nothing he did could have stopped it, nothing he had done had saved them.

     Wondering at all that blood, blood that had taken Jenna Coleman’s life in the final red wash, Sam thought back to if he knew what kind of injury could have caused that. With a sickly feeling in his stomach, he remembered that when they’d been discussing Mel’s birth, which had resulted in an emergency c-section, that Jenna had had her last child that way, as well. Sam guessed that was where the finishing flood of blood had come from to soak the pavement in front of his porch.

     “Oh, God. Oh, God,” Sam whispered as he wheezed burning, disbelieving breaths in one after another. He was hyperventilating, he thought, having a panic attack at having two people opened from the inside up just by being
looked
at, by being noticed by that singular evil that had possession of his boy and being
thought
at. The Bringer had killed with
nothing more than a thought
!

     “Daddy,” Trevor said softly, in an almost mewling voice. “Daddy, Daddy, what happened?”