Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller (41 page)

     “You won’t try to make me stay?”

     Armani smiled sadly. “You know all my arguments by now. I won’t repeat them if your heart is set on going.”

     Instead of continuing the conversation, Gwen burst into loud, heart-wrenching tears. She wrapped her arms around herself, leaned forward, and sobbed until her breaths came hard and fast. She moaned her agony around the painful gasps and shudders.

     Dave looked up from his place near his wife and son, concerned for the sudden outburst. Armani waved his attention away and Dave settled back down.

     Armani pulled Gwen practically onto his lap and hugged her hard. He knew what it was like to lose the person who mattered most in the world. He’d experienced it four times over the day of the Onset.

     Gwen didn’t hug Armani back but she did allow herself to be held. Her tears didn’t gradually taper off but instead were cut off abruptly. She breathed low and ragged. Every breath poured into her in a way that made her whole body shake and releasing the air through her mouth sounded more like a growl than an exhale.

     Armani felt the shift an instant before it happened.

     As Gwen turned with her physiology rapidly changing, Armani shoved himself back from the wall with his feet. The chair he was in went flipping over and Gwen landed hard on the ground in front of him instead of on top of him.

     Dave was up and on his feet in the short few seconds before all hell broke loose within the church. He reached for his weapon, a short barreled shot gun, and raised it toward Gwen. From beside him, Ivy launched herself at him. She aimed her gaping, fang-filled mouth at his neck and let her shiny new needlelike teeth sink into his flesh.

     Kim slept through the sounds of her husband screaming and trying to gain the upper hand on the small child. Blood gushed into her mouth and she swallowed it all down as Brooke went for Kirby.

     The twins had devolved into the same kind of grotesquery–with teeth too long to close their mouths around, lengthened and sharpened fingernails, bloody holes where their eyes had been sucked into the sockets, and skin peeling away from their spines. Beneath the dark colors of their plain shirts, the heat of the skin acting as the opening petals of some macabre flower singed through the fabric and spilled gelatinous blood onto the floor.

     The splashing of the thick fluid could be heard even over the sound of David losing his fight against Ivy. His scrabbling hands fell away from the girl’s waist and he slumped over onto the ground.

     Ivy began to eat as Kimberly’s eyes slid open. Her mouth turned down and she looked around with jerky motions. Even though her gaze passed right over her husband’s prone form, she didn’t react to the gruesome sight of the tiny cannibal burrowing into his chest to find some crimson goodies hidden in his chest cavity.

     Kirby had his gun up but didn’t seem to have the fortitude to take a shot at the girl attacking him. In the middle of the leap Brooke had taken, Eric swung the heavy pike he’d had on him for almost as long as the craziness in their world had been going on. The metal connected soundly with the girl’s body and she bent over it almost in half at her middle.

     Blood gushed out of Brooke’s mouth but Eric didn’t know if he’d caused it or if the strange affliction was to blame. The only thing he did know was that he hadn’t stopped the turning girl and there were more threats to think about.

     “We need to get out,” Kirby said. His voice sounded rugged and raspy as he took in the amazing amount of damage done to their group in just a few short moments.

     Armani kicked the chair at Gwen, giving himself some time and space to scrabble back and away from her. She growled at him from the mouth of something that looked like a wolf snout with the teeth of angler fish. Her eyes glowed an eerie green and acidic yellow slime dripped from her elongated tongue. She hissed at Armani and pounced at him.

     Spinning away from Gwen, Armani pulled the pistol he’d picked up along the way from the holster on his ankle. He got to his knees; the farthest Gwen allowed him before she came at him again. As soon as she slammed into him, Armani let himself be taken down so he could use the second she took to wedge the barrel of the pistol into her mouth. Her eyes were empty of concern or awareness as he pulled the trigger.

     Armani’s right shoulder and that side of his neck began to burn. He jerked his shirt off, trying to take as much as the eroding fluid off with the fabric as he could. He still felt it eat down into his skin and groaned around the pain as he stood.

     Eric watched Armani weakly raise the pistol he held. The man was uncertain of a target and hesitated as Kirby had done when the gun found the back of Ivy’s head. Unlike Kirby, Armani’s hesitation did not last. He pulled the trigger once more and the small girl slumped forward over her mostly-devoured meal.

     On the floor with Kimberly, baby Alec began shifting beneath the blanket covering him.

     Armani locked eyes with Eric as the big man stared down at Brooke. The twin had a permanent maniac grin torn into her face with the widening of her now incredibly toothy mouth. She swayed back and forth as she studied the two men. Kirby still held his gun but he was not in a shooting stance. Eric had the pike up near his head, held like a baseball bat. If the creature inside Brooke was smart, it would know to target the big man wouldn’t end well. He’d swing for the fences, and the result wouldn’t be pretty.

     Instead of attacking anyone else, Brooke turned and rushed for the patio. Armani shot at her once, twice, three times, but only nicked her once. She crashed through the large window and disappeared into the darkness.

     “Where’s the doctor?” Eric asked as he whipped his head around, looking for Ken.

     “Son of a bitch, I think he went out the patio, too,” Armani said with a grimace of disgust.

     Kirby and Eric looked around at the people lying dead and broken in the place that was supposed to be their sanctuary.

     “What the fuck just happened?” Kirby asked.

     Armani approached Kimberly. “I don’t know yet. Kim, honey, how are you doing?”

     Kimberly looked up at Armani, her eyes wide and scared. Her mouth opened and closed but no words formed. The only sound she made was a hushed kind of panting, as though she was having a panic attack in the dark and was trying not to gain notice of the creatures she feared waited there.

     “Kim, hon, look at me,” Armani said in a gentle voice as he approached. He held his free hand out and kept his gun in his dominant hand. Until they were out of this place and in their vehicles, he was not parting with the weapon.
Hell
, he thought,
maybe not even then…

     “I…I…” she mumbled. “Armani, there’s s-something…something’s w-wrong…”

     “I want to help, sweetheart. Tell me what’s wrong.”

     Instead of giving him a verbal answer, Kim cast her wide, worried eyes to the blanket Alec rested underneath. If she’d seen the state of her husband, she hadn’t responded to the sight. Armani guessed she was in shock and would react once they were away and out of danger for the moment.

     “Okay, honey, I’m going to lift the blanket up. You just stay still and calm until we figure out what’s wrong, right?” Looking to Kirby, he jerked his head toward the patio. “Guard that area. We’re even weaker there now.”

     Kirby shook his head and placed one hand against his temple. “There’s something out there, Armani. The full corrupted, it’s like I can hear them in my head. They’re saying something’s coming. The corruption gets stronger when this thing is around. If I go near the dark, nearer to whatever this thing is, you might lose me, too.”

     Armani caught Eric’s gaze. The big man nodded and took the gun Kirby held, trading him for the pike Kirby had a hard time holding. He was strong enough to use it for the short term, so he didn’t argue.

     “Sorry, bro. You stay here and have Armani’s back. I’ll go watch the patio.”

     Armani hated to have Eric there. Of the five who were left in the church, Eric was the only uncorrupted beside Armani himself. He didn’t want to be alone with only people who had those things inside them.

     “Okay, Kim, let’s take a look.” Armani drew the blanket away as Kim lifted her head, closed her eyes, and shook her head back and forth. The muscles in her neck strained with the force of her movements, making them more pronounced against the paleness of her skin.

     “Shit.”

     Armani agreed with Kirby’s sentiment. He was at a loss for words or ideas on how to handle what he was seeing.

     Connected to Kim by what seemed to be a newly-grown umbilical cord, the baby Alec had organically latched himself to his mother once more. Instead of through her womb, the fleshy, throbbing cord connected the two of the from bellybutton to bellybutton.

     Kimberly’s belly swelled as though she was pregnant once more.

     “What the fuck?” Kirby whispered. “What’s happening?”

     Eric looked over at them but was smart enough not to make any noise that could draw attention from whatever was beyond the shattered patio window. He cast worried glances toward his sister and alternated equally concerned looks at the dark curtains that blew in with the frigid, angry breath of a winter storm.

     Armani cleared his throat. He held out his hands toward Alec but was hesitant to touch the baby.

     “I don’t know what to do.” Armani looked at Kirby and his wide eyes said he was unfamiliar with the inability to make a sound decision. “What do you think we should do?”

     “What’s going on?” Eric whispered from his place near the patio.

     Armani waved him off. “Give us a minute. I need to think.”

     The corpulent cord pulsed with considerable force. It grew larger as they watched and veins on the surface twisted with the amount of biological material flowing through the bodily tether.

     Kimberly kept her eyes sealed tightly shut. Alec began to shrivel as even more unknown viscera continued to pump through the faux umbilical cord to his mother. Before long, his limbs curled up toward his trunk, twisting up like old tree bark as his face flattened and all definition of form melted away.

     The cord dried up, as well, and fell off of Kimberly. She kept her eyes closed but gave several nauseating groans. Her arms hung limply at her side and her hands fluttered against the blankets but she didn’t otherwise move.

     Kirby backed a step away, too repulsed to stay near the curiously afflicted woman.

     Kimberly looked far heavier than even a woman days beyond her due date. Her stomach swelled, stretching the skin to impossible limits.

     Armani looked from Kim’s swollen stomach to her face, twisted into a pained grimace with her eyes still squeezed tightly shut. Knowing nothing better to do, he said, “Eric…come here, please.”

     Eric jogged over, a concerned frown pulling his lips down. When he rounded the short wall that divided the kitchen area and patio entrance from the living room, his eyes filled with tears and he quickened his pace.

     “Kim,” he said as he dropped to his knees beside his sister and took her hand. “Kimmy, hey.”

     Kimberly shook her head but squeezed her brother’s hand until the skin of her fingers glowed white with the effort of her grip.

     “What do we do?” Eric directed at Armani. “What can we do? What’s happening to her?”

     Armani waved one hand at Kim’s massive belly. His mouth moved as though to form words but he made no sounds.

     “We have to go, soon,” Kirby interrupted from a few feet away. He looked around the church, as though hearing the enemy forces moving in. “That thing, it moved past us. But it might come back this way. The corrupted around here are all a hell of a lot more active now that it’s out there.”

     “We can’t leave her like this and I don’t think she can move,” Armani said as he sympathetically offered Kim his hand, as well. His fingers went numb almost at once as she gripped them as tight as she had her brother’s.

     “Then she needs to stay and we need to go,” Kirby said harshly. He didn’t even debate with the angry expressions Armani and Eric shot his way. He shrugged, shook his head, and said, “Just telling it like it is. We lost our doc. You think we have a good chance to find another? You think even if we did, he’d know what the fuck to do with this?”

     Armani was trying to piece together some kind of answer that didn’t leave him a coward or a monster when Kimberly’s body lurched with movement.

     Kim cried out and tried to curl up but she couldn’t get her body to bend over her expanded tummy. She dropped Eric and Armani’s hands as she tried to twist away from the pain. It was inside of her, though, and no matter where she moved, she couldn’t escape the agony.

    A fissure appeared on the stretched skin in a jagged lightning strike of purplish red as Kirby said, “Get back, you guys.”

     Kirby started moving forward, intent on pulling Armani and Eric away from the trembling, heaving woman. He reached out one hand and saw the other two getting their feet underneath of them in preparation to stand.

     Kimberly shrieked, a sound pulled from the bowels of Hell and amplified until it rang in their ears like the resonance of the Devil’s choir. More tears in the skin erupted from her quaking stomach. Shapes seemed to churn beneath her bleeding skin and tried to force their way out of her.