Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller (31 page)

     In waking life, she gave a soft, distressed moan that made Shane turn from his perch at the window to check on her. She quieted by the time he looked and seeing her and the babies snuggled together gave him reassurance.

     The night was quiet.

     As Shane watched the outside world and the other slept, the door to the room that had kept its bed swung soundlessly open.

     The girl who had been hiding beneath the bed was corrupted. She was inhumanly thin and pale. Shane and the others hadn’t even thought to check under that bed because it was so close to the floor. She gained some plumping of limbs as she slithered across the floor but she still maintained the form of a gangly, emaciated specter, with sunken, white, soulless eyes and limpid hanging hair of the same cataract shade.   

     Shane wasn’t looking for threats from the inside; he didn’t even hear the corrupted as it snuck on hands and knees into the communal space. It didn’t recognize the people in the room as human beings, but simply as the most attractive form of food: uncorrupted prey. And it was starving.

     The bed closest to it had a woman sleeping alone but the prey that drew it was on the other bed. It crept around the one nearest it, and then slid soundlessly beneath the bed with the woman and two babies.

     Shane stared out the window. He’d heard gunshots once, seen something against the horizon that could have been fire. He’d also heard the echoes of terrible screams pealing through the darkness. None of the noises had awakened the others, and he was glad. It’d be time soon enough for Stephanie’s shift.

     He’d heard a shuffling sound and attributed it to one of the girls or babies moving in sleep and didn’t turn around.

     The corrupted reached a hand up from under the bed toward the baby girl. It didn’t have a preference for the gender. The girl was just the furthest away from the man who was awake. The twisted, tined fingers twitched with excitement. The female was asleep–deeply asleep, it seemed–and her arm was so loose around the infant. The corrupted knew it could ease the bundle of flesh and breath and sweetness from the female if it just went slow, so slow, so slow…

     Darcy awakened with a jolt but out of habit kept stone still so she wouldn’t roll on or accidentally hurt Dylan. 

     Not knowing at first what had awakened her, Darcy felt the weight of both sleeping babies against her arms. She didn’t attribute her surge into alarmed wakefulness to either of them; in her experience, a baby didn’t just shift slightly in sleep. Usually, if Dylan moved, he was awake for the next thirty minutes and required soothing and song to return to slumber.

     Out of the corner of her eye, Darcy saw something incredibly white against the general darkness of the room. Long, thin fingers twitched hungrily toward Leila, and Darcy felt them as they just barely brushed her arm.

     Without needing further incentive to act, she in a quick and continuous set of movements clutched Leila and Dylan tightly, angled them for their best safety, and rolled all of them off the bed, away from whatever was next to her while screaming for Shane to look and Stephanie to wake up.

     Stephanie was instantly alert after hearing Darcy’s yells for help. Though she’d previously been a heavy sleeper, the emergency situation seemed to have altered her entire sleep personality. Not only was she a light sleeper now, she was no longer groggy on awakening. She jumped out of bed with no bleariness in his mind or eyes and looked toward where Darcy and the babies were.

     Shane sprang away from the window, turning around in time to see the gruesome-looking corrupted fling the bed away as though it wasn’t a queen sized mattress and box spring on a metal, wheeled frame but simply a pillow fort to be knocked down and out of its way. It looked too thin for such strength; too thin to even be alive, for sure. But Shane had seen stranger things of the corrupted, and wasn’t even surprised by its features, frame, or massive strength.

     It shrieked, furious to have been found out.

     “Where the hell did that thing come from?” Stephanie snapped as she looked around for a weapon. She thought she’d left her hatchet, a recent acquisition, nearby but she couldn’t find it.

     “Like it matters,” Shane said back as he tried to move around out of the corrupted’s line of sight. It snarled, looking from Darcy and the now-wailing infants to Shane as he moved toward Stephanie.

     Before Stephanie could shout out a warning that the thing was going to charge, it sprang toward Darcy and the babies with its witch-like hands outstretched. Stephanie rushed into action right behind the corrupted, darting across the room so fast she made Darcy breathless. She got the corrupted in a tackle hug from behind and, using both of their forward momentum, changed the thing’s course from Darcy and the kids to the window.

     When the glass shattered, Stephanie was sure she was going to go out with the corrupted, but even as she let go of the creature, she felt strong arms lock themselves securely around her waist. Shane pulled her back, and the corrupted plummeted to the pavement a story below them.

     Landing on its head and shoulder, the corrupted bounced once on a shrill screech and then laid still. Shane didn’t know if it was dead or not, and really didn’t care because he doubted its ability to get back in, especially with them on alert now.

     “Let’s put a table over this window,” Shane suggested, amazed at how shaky his voice was. He hadn’t released Stephanie yet. “And let’s get a look at your dumb ass,” he said to her. “You’ve probably got a pound of glass in you.”

     “In my arms, maybe,” she retorted, and her voice was as unsteady as his. “I doubt it’s my ass you’ve got to be looking at.”

     Shane laughed shakily and put his forehead against the back of her head, enjoying the smell of her hair.

     “You’re insane,” he told her, but finally loosened the death grip he had around her waist.

     “Just the way you like it.” Stephanie turned to him with a smile. “Thanks for pulling me back.”

     Shane returned the smile as Darcy approached and handed off Leila so Shane could soothe her and Darcy could see to Dylan.

     “Thanks for shoving that bitch out,” Darcy said to Stephanie, and then returned to cooing and stroking her son, hoping to return him to sleep.

     Stephanie grinned. “Now that was my pleasure,” she declared.

     Because both of the other adults were preoccupied with calming babies, Stephanie lugged the table in front of the window and propped it up long-ways. Even if it wouldn’t exactly be a barricade, they’d hear it if it fell and it would block out the light from the candles. Job done, she sat on the bed she was using and by the light of a lantern she switched on, began to address the state of her injuries.

     Blood dripped steadily from where she’d met the glass with the backs of her forearms. Her left elbow had a particularly bad cut, and there was indeed a phenomenal amount of glass in her skin. She started meticulously picking it out and placing it on the small end table beside the bed, hissing at the occasional deep pain as she pulled out a piece that was embedded further than the others.

     “Need help?” Shane asked as he sat beside her. Leila had been calmed quickly, and was now sleeping on the bed Shane had taken as his own. Darcy was, quite understandably, no longer willing to sleep on the bed the thing had attacked her from beneath.

     “I think I’ve got it all,” Stephanie told him with a smile. “But you can help me clean and bandage it. I think that’ll be quite the little task.”

     “Seems familiar,” Shane said as he gathered up one of their many first aid kids. “Me seeing to your injuries. Best part of my job was meeting you, Steph.”

     She didn’t shift nervously as she wanted to do whenever Shane said things like that. He’d been polite and had moved slow for a long time now. He’d mocked her boyfriends for their simplicity and shallowness, and had expressed with sincerity and seriousness that he thought she deserved better.

     It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Shane. She’d trusted no one
but
Shane since they’d met years back. She’d been abducted, raped, and left for dead on the side of a seldom travelled road. Her then-boyfriend had been into the worst thing she could imagine: human trafficking for sex slavery rings. When Stephanie had found out, the information had nearly gotten her killed. She’d been left in the care of some of his less reputable associates who thought she was close enough to dead when they’d dumped her in the ass end of nowhere. Stephanie was the most resilient creature she knew, though, and had her fair share of luck. After pulling herself into the middle of the road, she’d been fortunate enough to almost be run over by an elderly lady heading out to check on her homebound sister. She’d called the paramedics and it had been Shane’s ambulance that had picked Stephanie up and saved her life.

     Shane had become an immediate friend after the way he’d handled her; joking about her situation instead of treating her like cracked glass. Somehow, he’d instinctively known what Stephanie needed to bring herself back from the edge and go from trembling victim to pissed-off avenger. With Shane’s help, the bastard who’d left her for dead had been wrecked financially, thrown in jail, and had the shit beat out of him, courtesy of Shane.

     No matter how great a guy she knew Shane was, Stephanie had kept the bond that had developed between them as it was. She refused to and nurture their connection into something beyond friendship. She did trust Shane, but she didn’t trust the promise of him always being there. A person could always change, or reveal themselves as something you could never imagine, or die. Especially in the new world, the chances of Shane leaving her by dying were astronomically high. She trusted him, but not his ability to stick around.

     “Yeah,” Stephanie said belatedly as she watched Shane carefully secure gauze pads to her arms. “We make quite the kick ass team. It’s good to have you here.”

     Shane was privately frustrated by her words, but he didn’t let it show. Instead, he carefully finished his task and sat back after ensuring the bandages wouldn’t be falling off or rubbing Stephanie’s lacerations anymore than absolutely necessary.

     “I’m not leaving you,” he said simply before standing. On impulse, he touched her cheek and kissed her forehead. “No matter what, okay?”

     Stephanie nodded, not able to talk around the lump in her throat. Shane wanted from her what she couldn’t give, and she wanted from him what couldn’t be.

     Darcy watched the exchange from where she was leaning against the couches that blocked the stairway. She sat on two sleeping bags with a thick comforter on top of her legs. Dylan was nestled against her chest and had thankfully returned to sleep. Shaking her head, she smiled.

     If only she and Dylan’s father had had that level of concern and caring for each other; that obvious desire and dedication to each other. Even if Stephanie didn’t want to feel anything like that for Shane, it was all so clearly there. Of course, if she and Dylan’s dad had been connected like that, Darcy wouldn’t be where she was, with the people she’d found.

     Content that she was in the place she was supposed to be, Darcy willed herself to do away with useless thoughts and bad dreams and snuggled down with Dylan to sleep. Shane placed Leila on Darcy’s free side. The baby’s presence was acknowledged by the sleepy Darcy, so Shane returned to his own bed while Stephanie took her watch. The night could not be over soon enough, but until it was, Shane figured they might as well get what sleep they could.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Armani’s Journal

     I don’t know if we have a valuable ally in the doctor. Having a healer on hand, how can that be bad? But he almost got me and David killed. That thing that came out of him–one of those is in every one of the people with me except Eric. Even the baby, even the girls. God, what kind of thing is this? What kind of infection of the soul can’t be banished even by the purity of brand new life? What is the darkness of this new world we’re living in? If only I knew, maybe we could figure out how to fight it…

     Armani checked in on Eric as he, Dave, and Ken made their way toward the waiting room, where the rest of the group had gathered for discussion. Entering the room as quietly as possible, he closed the door behind him and approached the man on the bed.

     Eric awakened as Armani moved to stand at his bedside, and winced at the pain in his neck.

     “We’ll have to see if the doc has some pain meds for you,” Armani said as he checked on the bandage covering Eric’s wound. He spoke in a conversational tone, and appraised Eric from the corner of his eye.

     “It’d be much appreciated,” Eric said, and his voice sounded gravelly. From sleep or the injury, Armani wasn’t sure, but the man didn’t sound very good.

     “How’s it feel?” Armani asked.

     “Like a real mean son of a bitch tried to tear my throat out.”

     Armani shrugged. “Sounds about right,” he said agreeably. “You going to be able to move today?”

     In response to Armani’s query, Eric tried to sit up. He moved slowly. He was no stranger to injuries, and knew the best way to screw himself up further was to do too much, too fast, too soon.