Taken World (Book 2): Darkness Page 11

  Regina was the first one through the front, though Manny had been out of the broadcast room, a hot dog slathered in ketchup in his hand (which he wasn’t supposed to have at this hour, with their limited stores of perishable food, but this was the least of Regina’s worries).

  Two men rushed past Regina: Gregg and Billy Griner, father and son. Gregg was holding a rifle, wearing his pajama pants and no shirt. His flesh stood out in goosebumps. The air was always cold, but the night air was colder.

  Regina couldn’t believe what was happening. She pushed past the gathering crowd—not too difficult, since once she got through a few people, the others started clearing a path for her.

  Though she wasn’t fully aware of it, without Devin at the compound, Regina had become numero uno. A few of the men didn’t like this, being ruled by a woman, but they were too chicken to speak up. Had they done so, Regina would’ve easily put them in their place—gently, sure, but the point would be made.

  “Shit,” Al Hart said from behind her. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily Cyrus answered.

  Billy and Gregg went past the fence and approached the car. Smoke billowed out of the crumpled hood, swallowed up by the black sky. A ticking-grind came from the engine. One headlight still worked, but the glass covering it had shattered, and the bulb was blindingly bright. Regina held up a hand to shield herself from it as she tried to see into the cab, but the car looked like it had gone a few rounds against a monster truck. Gashes on the sides, the back bumper dented, two of the tires sitting at canted angles. None of it had come from their crash into Ironlock’s fence; the car had been damaged beforehand. It was almost like they were—

  Running from something, Regina thought as her stomach sank.

  Inside the cab were two bodies.

  Dead? Alive? She didn’t know yet.

  Billy rounded the driver’s side door. He bent over, peered in. A gun was at his side, not yet raised. Regina figured he had grabbed it because his father had grabbed his, and his father had grabbed his because he’d thought the worst after hearing the noise, and the worst was monsters. If Regina hadn’t seen the car coming from the roof, she would’ve thought the same thing.

  Ironlock had remained standing for the past months, but their time was coming. It had to be.

  “Billy, don’t,” Gregg said. “Step away, son. They might be infected.”

  Regina moved closer. A question died in her throat. She couldn’t seem to find her voice. Who is it? Who might be infected?

  Since she couldn’t speak, she decided it best to see for herself. Gregg stepped away from the wrecked car, a navy blue Dodge Charger, and kept his mouth shut when Regina’s hand closed over the warped driver’s side door handle. She opened it. The hinges squealed bloody murder as she did.

  A man who’d been slumped over the crumpled steering wheel suddenly fell to the side, one arm dangling, streams of blood running down flesh. He was black, like Regina, but the skin of his face had gone an ashy color—the color of death.

  Regina thought of her father, lying in his casket. The makeup the morticians had put on his face hadn’t done much good. No amount of foundation could cover what happened to him. Except—

  This man was still breathing, his chest rising and falling in ragged hitches. Then someone in the front seat moaned in pain. Regina’s eyes flicked from the man in the driver’s seat to the passenger’s side. There sat a woman, a white woman—well, ‘woman’ was being generous, she couldn’t be too much past twenty years old. Her nose was bleeding, and the shelf of her forehead had already begun swelling.

  “It hurts,” she said. “It hurttttttttts.”

  “I know, honey, I know,” Regina replied in a whisper, shaking her head. Still alive… somehow, these two survivors of the apocalypse were still alive. She turned toward Billy and Gregg. “Help me get them out. They’re hurt. They’re hurt real bad.”

  Billy was looking into the cabin, through the fractured windshield. Someone had turned on a light in the courtyard, and it illuminated the blood.

  When Billy and his father didn’t move, Regina raised her voice, and she almost never raised her voice—at least not to the people of Ironlock.

  “Help me, dammit! We need to get them to the infirmary!”

  Still, no movement.

  “Now!”

  Billy was the first to break his statuesque stature. He came forward, head turned toward the blood and the jut of bone sticking out of the woman’s forearm. Gregg opened the passenger’s side, and then, almost unbelievingly, the others, the survivors of Ironlock, stepped forward, the crowd moving as one. Hands plunged forward into the dark cabin. They grabbed the limp bodies as gently as they would hold a newborn. The woman from the front seat was moaning and saying, “I killed Bachman,” over and over again.

  Delirium from the crash, Regina thought.

  She helped guide the crowd up the steps and into the prison, a hand on the woman, another on the man. In the bright light from the guard tower shining down on them, Regina saw that the man actually wasn’t too beat up, by some miracle, by God’s grace. He had a cut across his forehead that would certainly need stitches, perhaps a concussion, but no sign of broken bones, no white knobs jutting out from opened skin, like the poor woman from the front seat—at least not that Regina could see.

  Grace was in her night clothes, sweatpants and a hoodie, but she was already pushing past the crowd, heading to the infirmary—her infirmary—and Regina was close behind her. She smiled despite all the fear that had built up in her chest, despite longing for her husband, who was still not back from the potentially suicidal mission he had taken his hunters on. She smiled because she was proud, proud of those men, women, and children of Ironlock. Their species may have been on the outs, but there was no denying the underlying compassion of the human psyche. They helped, they got their hands dirty with blood because they knew the stakes. A life lost was more than just a life lost: it was one step closer to extinction.

  The woman was still repeating, “I killed Bachman. I killed him,” through mouthfuls of blood.

  Regina reckoned she’d broken a few teeth in the accident, probably swallowed them, unless they were on the floor of the Dodge.

  Poor girl. Poor girl.

  But she was alive for now, and that was what mattered. Grace would do her best, try to nurse them both back to proper health, and Regina would sit by their beds every day and say her prayers to a God that she knew was always listening. Matter of fact—Regina paused, and the crowd went around her, their frantic babbling echoing loudly in the halls, the smell of their excitement and their fear hanging around them like a cloud—she would say a prayer now. For them.

  “You can’t waste our resources on dying people,” a voice called from behind her.

  Regina opened her eyes. She recognized that voice. Manny. She turned around; in the bright light of the corridors, she saw that he had a smear of mustard at the corner of his mouth. Ate the hotdog, didn’t he? Swallowed the evidence.

  “Excuse me?” she said. She did not want to come off as rude, but the jarring tone of Manny’s voice surprised her.

  “Those two people. They’re dead, ‘DOA’ is what they call it.” He grinned a little at this, as if talking about the end of human lives was a joke.

  “Oh no, Manny, I saw them myself. They were quite alive. Not as bad as you might think, actually.”

  Regina was just now realizing that she hadn’t seen Manny among the crowd that had descended on the wrecked Dodge. He had stood back in the shadows. Was he scared? Disgusted? Probably both. She suddenly disliked him more than before.

  “Resources,” Manny repeated. “We need them for people that are alive, you know?” Somehow, he talked as if he still had food in his mouth.

  Regina shook her head. “No, the resources are meant for people who need them. Right now, those two certainly need our help. Who are we to deny them?”

  There was no immediate answer, and that satisfied Regina. It
satisfied her very much.

  Billy and Gregg were able to get the man on the table. He was slowly coming back to consciousness. The blood from the wound on his forehead had dripped into his eyes and down his cheeks so it looked like he was crying red tears.

  The woman dipped in and out of consciousness, still saying, “I killed Bachman. I had to kill him. I killed him.”

  Grace wore a smock, which was now smeared with red. Regina stood in the doorway and watched with a heavy heart.

  Grace said to Billy and Gregg, “Hold her down, please. I have to set the bone.”

  Regina stepped forward. “I’ll help.”

  “I killed Bachman. I shot him in the head,” the woman said.

  Regina brushed the woman’s hair back from her eyes. “Look at me, honey. Just look at me. It’s going to be okay.”

  The woman’s eyes fluttered then focused on Regina, as if she had become fully aware. That wasn’t good. Not with what Grace was about to do.

  “I killed him. I didn’t want to, but he was sick and turning into one of the monsters,” the girl said. “I shot him in the head.”

  Regina took her hand. It was cold and stained pinkish by the blood. The girl was squeezing back fiercely.

  “Okay,” Grace said. “Here it goes.”

  Her teeth gritted together as she gripped the girl’s arm, the knob of bone jutting out from the sea of red like a white rock.

  “I killed—”

  The girl didn’t get to finish this thought, as a scream took hold of her. She sat up, even against the force of the men holding her down. Then she passed out, hitting the table—which was a padded physical therapist’s table—hard, her head bouncing up and down. But that was the end of the screaming and the delusional sayings.

  Almost simultaneously, the man sat up. His eyes were wide, still bloody.

  “Where am I?” he asked. “What happened?”

  No one answered. The four of them—Billy, Gregg, Regina, and Grace—looked at one another.

  The man swiped at his eyes, smearing the blood. “Where am I? Is this Ironlock?”

  “You’re coherent?” Grace asked with surprise.

  She took a flashlight pen out of the pocket of her smock and shined it into the man’s eyes. He jerked away, putting his hands up to shield himself from the light. The infirmary was already bright enough, Regina supposed, with its sterile overhead lights. Devin was not much of a supporter of these lights, said they drained the generator’s power, and pretty soon they’d run out of gas. Regina always told him not to worry, but now there was a chance he wasn’t coming back—she knew this deep in her heart—and it would be her who would have to worry about the amount of gas they had for the prison’s few generators.

  No, don’t think like that. He’ll be fine. Worry about these two strangers now, she told herself.

  “Is this Ironlock?” the man asked again.

  “It is,” Regina answered.

  The man’s wrinkled brow smoothed, the unease going out of his features. He smiled and stood up, and Gregg put an arm on him, a fatherly arm despite these two men being relatively close in age.

  “Don’t think you should be getting up, pal,” Gregg said. “You were in a crash.”

  The man’s eyes suddenly ballooned. “May? Is May okay?” He turned his head, saw the pale, limp body of the woman with her bloody arm, and lunged over to her.

  “She’s fine,” Grace said. “Well…she will be. She needs rest, like you. I’ll fix her right up. Don’t worry.”

  The man seemed to relax. He sat on his table, which was another padded physical therapist’s table, but of a different color and quality.

  The room was quiet for a moment until Grace turned and opened a drawer in one of the cabinets. From it she took a large cotton pad and a bottle of peroxide. She began cleaning May’s wound.

  “What’s your name, sir?” Regina asked.

  The man looked up, knitted his eyebrows together. “Name?”

  “Yes,” Regina said.

  “I’m—I’m Tyler, Tyler Stapleton.” He looked around almost dazedly. “Where’s Devin Johnson? I heard him on your broadcast. That’s why we came.”

  “Why did you crash?” Billy asked. “What happened?”

  He was only a young man, barely eighteen, but he seemed wise beyond his years.

  Regina answered Tyler’s first question. “Devin is out on a mission. A rescue mission.”

  Tyler nodded, then he said, “We were chased. There was a big thing, a monster, and I panicked. But before that, one came out of the woods and hit the car, rocked us pretty good, nearly knocked me off the road. May hit the side window and passed out. I was bleeding bad, losing consciousness. I don’t remember what I hit. Probably the steering wheel. I knew I had to keep going north. I guess…I just couldn’t hang on any longer. Who knows how long I drove without realizing it?” He shook his head, which looked like it was quite difficult. His neck cracked loudly.

  “It’s a miracle you’re still alive,” Grace said.

  She was almost finished cleaning May’s wound. The poor girl was still passed out, but that was probably for the better. While she was sleeping, she wouldn’t need any painkillers, which were already in limited supply within the compound.

  “I guess so,” Tyler said. “Thank you all for helping me.” He laid back down, and his eyes started fluttering. Sleep was on the horizon for him.

  Regina offered a warm smile. “You’re welcome,” she said in a low voice. “Ironlock is a haven. We accept any and all, the broken, the beaten, and the damned.”

  “I know,” Tyler replied. “That’s—” his speech broken by a yawn, “—that’s why we wanted to come here.”

  Throughout this short conversation, Grace had stitched May’s wound up and then bandaged it. Now, with two thick pieces of wood, she was making May a splint, wrapping gauze tightly around the freshly cleaned arm.

  “Okay,” Grace said, “everyone out. These two need rest and plenty of it. We can make with the introductions in the morning.”

  Slowly, the others shuffled out of the room. Regina smiled solemnly at Grace. She was glad to have her here. Without her, who knew what would have become of these two strangers. Or the others before them. Once, Daryl Clark had shot himself in the foot with a pistol. Grace fixed him up as good as new that same day, and he had crutched out of the infirmary with a smile on his face and a lollipop in his breast pocket. They were all out of lollipops now, though. No big loss.

  Grace closed the infirmary door to go back to work as Gregg, Billy, and Regina left.

  Gregg gently touched Regina’s shoulder. “You think they’re okay? I mean, you believe that story about them being chased? Scouts haven’t seen a monster within a mile of Ironlock since the early days.”

  “I believe them,” Regina said, regarding Gregg carefully. “We’ll find out more about them when they’re up and about and in better health. In the meantime, we need all able hands on the fence. Get it patched up as soon as possible.”

  Gregg nodded. He wasn’t one to argue, but she could tell by the way his eyes were still narrowed that he didn’t exactly accept her answer.

  “There was a time, not too long ago, when a man and his son showed up at the gates of this very prison. They were raggedy and bloody, but we welcomed them with opened arms,” Regina said. “Just as we welcome everyone.”

  Gregg nodded.

  Billy said, “She’s got a point, Dad. If I saw a couple guys like us knocking on my front door, all beat-up and crazy-eyed like we were, I wouldn’t answer it. I’d act like I wasn’t home. Maybe even call the cops.” He chuckled.

  Gregg put his hand on the back of Billy’s neck and gave Regina a wink. Regina returned it with a smile, and the two men went down the corridor.

  What was left of the sun filtered through a collection of dark clouds, shining into the courtyard. Regina looked out there at the mass of people already starting to work on repairing the little damage to the fence. Then she looked past them at
the empty spot that Devin’s Humvee usually occupied, and said a silent prayer for his and the others’ safe arrival back home…because, right now, that was all she could do.

  13

  Captured

  Logan woke up in what looked like a dungeon. It took a while for his eyes to adjust, and when they did, he didn’t like what he saw. Stone walls, metal bars, and dark stains that could either be feces or blood, running down the floor in a shape that looked like someone had gotten shot. The smell was rank, too.

  “Jane?” he called out into the relative darkness. “Jane?”

  There was no answer.

  His mind started running frantically in a bad direction; it seemed to do that these days.

  Think, Logan, think.

  It was not easy; his head pounded like someone had taken a sledgehammer to the back of it. The only other time he’d felt this way was after his run-ins with Joe Millard back in middle and high school, before Logan had grown to the size he was today. There had been one particularly bad beating in a park; Logan had fought back, but being outnumbered and sickly skinny hadn’t helped his chances.

  In the back of his mind, he wondered what had come of Joe Millard. Where was he now?

  The reason for Logan being locked up was all coming back to him. The arena, the setup, the bodies outside in the courtyard.

  He leaned forward. He didn’t get very far. There were ropes around his wrists and ankles, tethered to the wall. He called out for Jane again.

  It was then that a small voice answered him. He recognized it immediately: it was Brad. He sounded pained, he sounded defeated.

  “They took her,” he said. “About fifteen minutes ago.”

  “They did what?”

  “They took her. They took Devin first. I don’t know what happened to Grease,” Brad said.

  A deep fear rippled through Logan. He began thinking the worst, though it didn’t get much worse than this, did it?

  “Who took her?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see them. But I heard her screaming. Logan, I’m sorry. I’m tied up, behind bars…I couldn’t do anything.”