Taken World (Book 2): Darkness Page 8

  His mom started cackling. Her whole body shook with the force of these tremors. Then she changed right there in front of him. Arms and legs and face turning into an unrecognizable blob. His father’s decapitated head was swallowed up. It floated around the membranous middle of the monster. Words repeating on his lips over and over again: Be a fucking winner for once! Be a fucking winner!

  That was when Brad woke up screaming into his pillow. It was the worst nightmare yet.

  He grabbed the Bible and began riffling through the pages. His mind wasn’t totally into it. He kept thinking about what the decapitated head of his father was saying. Something big was coming. But what could be bigger than what was already here?

  Brad turned the page. Book Two: The Second Book of Moses. Exodus.

  He didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

  Another two hours passed. Through the window in the corridor, the sky hadn’t lightened. It seemed to be something the sky had forgotten how to do. Brad was no scientist, but it didn’t take a scientist to know that the voids and the coming of the monsters had seriously fucked up the Earth’s atmosphere.

  He still lay in bed another hour later. It was around four in the morning.

  ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’

  These were the words Brad repeated in his head, over and over, to quell the dark thoughts that had been implanted there by the dream.

  Ironlock was quiet; the world outside was not. Even through the heavy stone walls, Brad heard the barking laughter of the mad abominations. Their footsteps. The destruction they left in their wake. He began feeling guilt, guilt he didn’t think he had any reason to feel. His mother had become one of these abominations.

  But that wasn’t your mother anymore…that was…something else.

  Still, he had left her behind. He had fled.

  Some part of his mind told him his father had done the same thing the day he had sealed their garage off and run a length of hose from the exhaust pipe into the front seat. He had left them. He had been selfish, only thinking about himself. Brad thought maybe he was a genius for that because surely, wherever Kevin Long was now, it had to be better than here.

  As Brad drifted back to sleep, the first line of Genesis on repeat in his head, a crackle of static drifted through the silent prison. Brad did not hear it.

  The only other person awake that cold night was Devin Johnson. He’d always had trouble sleeping, even before all this shit. His insomnia stemmed from three tours in the Middle East; two in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. He couldn’t sleep worth dick over there.

  He got up from the two twin mattresses pushed together that equated to his and his wife’s bed, sat on the frame of the mattress-less bunk, his head in his hands. He was tired. Fuck, he was always tired. Had he slept a solid eight or nine hours a night, he knew he’d still be tired. But he didn’t even sleep three hours at a time.

  Regina snored. Lying on her side. Her hands under her head and shaped the way they would be if she was praying.

  The damn incident today. Joe’s death. That had rocked Devin Johnson harder than he cared to admit to himself. He’d liked Joe a helluva lot. In fact, he liked just about everyone in Ironlock. He felt a certain paternalistic way about all of them, and they looked up to Devin. They waited for his commandments and his directions.

  If you would’ve asked Devin twenty years ago if a group of people would ever look up to him, back when he was a chain-smoking, beer-guzzling piece of shit twenty-five year old, that version of Devin would’ve laughed his ass off and probably punched you right in the face. But people change. His grandmother had always said that times, things, and people always changed, and Pammy Johnson had been right about that, just like she’d been right about a great many things.

  No longer was he that punk kid looking for a fight, for a reason to pull his sidearm and shove it in your face. Now he was a family man. Not just to Regina, but to the nineteen—Make it eighteen now, Devin—civvies that had found their way to Ironlock. Devin Johnson wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  He thought about trying to lie back down. Sleep was good, even if he wasn’t getting too much of it. Didn’t seem like anybody was getting much of it these days. Except for Regina, of course. She could’ve slept through a damn tornado.

  He knelt down and kissed her on the cheek. She didn’t stir, only continued snoring softly.

  “Love you, Gina,” he whispered.

  He grabbed his sidearm—a reflexive habit—and went out the cell door. The place was quiet. No voices. No televisions on—the place didn’t have enough power for that. With the winter fast approaching, they needed to save the little fuel they had so they could heat this vast place. The stone walls didn’t do them any favors, either; seemed like it was an icebox more than a prison.

  Cross that bridge when you get to it, Devin. No need to worry about it yet.

  But he did. He was always worrying.

  He went through the cafeteria then walked by the armory, which was locked tight. At a window, he looked out at their measly garden. Nothing was growing much. The tomatoes were runts, the corn tasted like dirt. Not good signs. Without the sun as powerful as it once was, everything had been thrown off.

  Devin looked up at the sky. Inky black. Void-black.

  “If you’re up there, God, help us get through this.”

  God didn’t answer. But a staticky voice did. He heard it loud and clear in the quiet of the prison.

  He left the garden. Went down the corridor toward that ghostly voice.

  In a room featuring a wall of blacked out monitors, three radios were set up. They were always left on in the hopes of catching someone else’s broadcast, someone close.

  The man meant to be monitoring these broadcasts was named Manny. Manny weighed close to three hundred pounds. Where lack of proper nutrition should have shed the pounds off of him, it hadn’t; Devin thought he might be squirreling away extra food, but he would save that conversation for another day, when he had definitive proof.

  Quite frankly, it didn’t matter much now. What mattered was the voice coming from the radio.

  For a long second, as Devin stood in the doorway, he thought he was still asleep back in the cell, lying next to Regina, dreaming. He thought the voices might have been phantoms… Old echoes of prisoners that had never been there. His mind playing tricks on him.

  Another crackle. Another hiss.

  “Help us. If anyone is out there listening to this, please help us.”

  A woman’s voice.

  He wasn’t sleeping.

  Manny was. He leaned back in the computer chair, snoring, his girth hanging over the seat, his head tilted back.

  Devin came up behind and slapped him on the back of the head. Manny instantly shot up, moved quicker than a man his size should’ve. Perhaps that’s how he’d survived long enough to find Ironlock.

  “What…huh?” Manny mumbled.

  He wiped drool away from the corner of his mouth. Didn’t get it all. Some still glinted in his heavy beard.

  “A transmission.” Devin was pointing at the blinking lights on the radio.

  “Oh, shit,” Manny said. “Oh…shit.” He scrambled for the headset. Devin took it from him, slipped it over his head.

  Devin flicked a button, twisted a dial. “This is Devin Johnson. I repeat, this is Devin Johnson. Come in. Over.”

  Nothing.

  For a long time, nothing.

  He and Manny exchanged a glance. Devin clenched his hands into fists so tight his knuckles cracked. The little hope he held within himself was burning away, getting lost in the hot flames of fresh anger. Anger at Manny for sleeping on the job. Anger at the monsters for coming to his goddamn planet.

  Manny started to speak. “I’m sorry—”

  The crackle of the radio came again, loud and clear. Devin’s heart plummeted, then did a couple of flips.

  “Hello?
Mr. Johnson, are you there?”

  “I’m here. What is your situation? Over.”

  “We’re at Quicken Loans Arena. In Cleveland. We have twenty people here. Men, women, and children. Some are sick. The city is overrun. We’re running out of food and medicine and I don’t know how much time we have left.”

  The woman’s voice on the other end choked up. A sob. A sniffle.

  “If you can hang on until sunup, I can have people there to help you,” Devin said.

  He didn’t even think. No hesitation. When it came to helping others in times of crisis, there was no looking out for your best interests, not if your name was Devin Johnson. If he could help, then by God, he would help.

  The voice again. “You—you can?”

  “We can,” Devin replied.

  Tears, more sobs. “Thank you so much.”

  9

  Cleveland

  An hour after the call over the radio in what Devin called ‘the transmissions room,’ a knock came outside Logan’s cell.

  He heard it almost immediately. Sleep did not come easily for Logan Harper these days, though unlike Brad, he was not plagued by nightmares and terrible thoughts.

  Logan stood up. The loose feeling in his body was unexpected. He had thought the day’s events would’ve translated to stiff and sore muscles, and there was no way he could’ve gotten more than a few hours’ worth of sleep. In the end times, though, he figured a few hours of sleep was actually pretty good.

  He peeled back the curtain draped over the iron bars and saw Devin Johnson standing there, wearing regular clothes. This almost made Logan take a step back. Since their arrival at Ironlock, Devin Johnson had worn the same uniform day in and day out: sand-colored khakis and an army green t-shirt, his dog tags hanging down his chest. Tonight he wore a white shirt and striped pajama bottoms.

  “Yeah, yeah, you don’t look so good yourself, Harper,” Devin said.

  Logan averted his eyes. He must’ve been gawking.

  “Everything okay?” Logan asked.

  “Who is it?” Jane said from behind him. “What time is it?”

  She did not sleep as heavily as she once did, either. No one did anymore.

  “Devin Johnson, ma’am,” Devin answered. “Sorry to disturb y’all.”

  Jane sat up as if she’d never been asleep in the first place. She knew what the head of Ironlock showing up at their cell in the middle of the night meant just as well as Logan did. It meant nothing good.

  “We’re moving out at sunup,” Devin said, putting the cancerous theories currently growing in Logan’s mind to rest.

  ‘Sunup,’ of course, didn’t actually mean when the sun rose. The main reason being that the sun no longer rose in the same sense it had always done before. It was just an old saying that died hard among army vets like Johnson. One could hardly see the sun anymore, behind the heavy and dark clouds. The sky would lighten, but that was all. Each day seemed darker than the last.

  “Why?” Logan asked.

  “Communications came through. There’s a group stuck in Cleveland, at an arena. Quicken Loans.”

  “I know it.”

  Jane got up now, slippered feet pitter-pattering on the cold floor. She snaked a hand around Logan’s bicep, clenched it tightly.

  “He just got back,” she said, staring daggers at Devin Johnson, a man who was as dagger-proof as they came. “He’s not going out at sunup. And that’s a dumb term, by the way. In case you haven’t noticed, the sun doesn’t come up.”

  “Yes, it does, Mrs. Harper. We just can’t see it behind all that junk in the sky.” Devin sighed. “Your husband is a grown adult. He is capable of making his own decisions. When I took him on as one of my hunters, it was expected that he always be ready at a moment’s notice.” He paused to let the words sink in.

  Logan thought he probably should put himself between Jane and Devin, or at least close the gate so she couldn’t get at him, because she looked about ready to claw his face off.

  Devin continued. “We’re doing God’s work out here, ma’am. We’re helping people in need.”

  “God is gone,” Jane said. “If he was ever here in the first place.”

  The stern face Devin Johnson so often wore evaporated before Logan’s eyes, but only for a moment. “That’s all the more reason we have to do what we have to do.”

  “Then I’m coming with you,” Jane said. She folded her arms across her chest.

  Devin’s stern face vanished again, replaced with a smile. He brought a hand up to his mouth, stifled a laugh.

  “I’m serious,” Jane said. “Joe’s dead, and you need another body out there with you guys.”

  “Well—” Devin began, but Jane cut him off.

  “The camp already knows he didn’t come back, and trust me when I say I don’t think anyone is going to be lining up to join your death crusade,” she said.

  Logan took a step back and looked at his wife. “Jane, c’mon. Out there is no place for—”

  “A woman? Is that what you’re gonna say? That it’s no place for a woman?”

  Logan shook his head. “No, I was gonna say out there is no place for anyone. And I want you to stay safe, as safe as you can be, because I love you more than life itself.”

  It was Jane’s turn for the stern look to vanish. She couldn’t meet Logan’s eyes, as her own filled with water; she would later blame this on being disturbed from her sleep and being tired and having to stifle a yawn.

  She took a deep breath, composing herself. “I love you, too, Logan.”

  “Spare me all this sappy shit,” Devin butted in. “I got people out there that need saving. I got a dead man’s funeral to speak at, and almost two dozen hungry mouths hanging on every word I say. I don’t need the complications of a marriage mucking up my mission. You got that, Logan? You got that, Jane?”

  Devin had stepped into the cell. He was not a large man—certainly not as large as Logan—but he projected himself to be much bigger. Like Logan, though, Devin Johnson had a swagger, a kind of get-the-hell-out-of-my-way thing about him, and Logan did exactly that. Because he respected Devin Johnson.

  Both Logan and Jane’s eyes were glued to him, watching his every move. He looked tired. Older than he was.

  “Now, I know you two pretty well—about as well as I can know anyone over the course of a few months. Under different circumstances, I wouldn’t say I did, but, as Jane was so apt to point out in regards to my use of ‘sunup,’ shit has changed big-time. Sun don’t come up, and it’s the fucking end of the world. When you’re out there and all you can do is survive, you learn a lot faster than normal, that’s true. You see someone’s true colors. I know you have a good heart, Logan, and I know you wouldn’t marry someone who didn’t have a good heart, too.”

  “Thank you,” Logan said, but Devin waved a hand to indicate that he wasn’t done talking.

  “I’ve seen terrible things in my lifetime, in the war. Men killing women and children, children killing men and women, men killing men, you fucking name it. Once, I saw a man gutted in the cold for the warmth his innards might provide. I’ve seen it all, friends. You might think it’s evil, ‘evil incarnate,’ as my wife is so fond of saying, and yes, I’ve seen evil, but mostly I’ve just seen desperate people. When you get desperate, you do desperate things.

  “Out there in Cleveland, there’s a group of men, women, and children trapped. Their supplies are running low, and there are monsters outside their windows, trying to get in. Pretty soon, those people are gonna start getting desperate, too. I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t need another black mark on my conscience. I have the means to help them, so I’m gonna do it. Logan, you are part of those means. As are Brad and Grease. Joe, would’ve been, too, if we hadn’t lost him, and his help will never be forgotten.” He turned to Jane. “It’s a dangerous job. Your husband will be all right out there. I promise you this.”

  Jane was not backing down. Arms still folded across her chest, she said, “I know he’
ll be all right, because I’m gonna be out there with him.”

  Heavy silence weighed down upon the cell, the stillness and quiet of the entire world, it seemed.

  It was eventually broken by low laughter. Such an odd sound that Logan thought he may have officially gone insane. Lord knew he was growing ever closer to insanity each day, true, but the laughter seemed to be coming from Devin’s mouth. The big grin on his face contrasted the somber, depressive mood that being in a jail cell in the middle of an apocalypse was supposed to convey.

  “What?” Jane demanded.

  Logan put a hand on her forearm. She snatched it away.

  “I just never,” Devin said, still chuckling, “met a girl as tenacious as you, Mrs. Harper.” He was shaking his head as he stood up straight after being bent over with laughter. “I admire that. I truly do.”

  Jane watched him carefully. Logan watched her even more carefully.

  “So?” Jane said after another few seconds of Devin’s chuckling. “You want Logan, you get me too. What do you say to that?”

  “I say,” Devin said, looking at Logan, grinning wide, “we get you a gun, Mrs. Harper. You ever shot one before?”

  She nodded.

  “Ever shot an assault rifle?”

  “I’m sure I can figure it out. Aim and pull the trigger. That about the gist of it?” Jane said.

  Devin nodded as he turned and went out of the cell. “That’s about the gist of it, yeah.” Then he met Logan’s eyes; he was one of the few who consistently did, who consistently wasn’t put off by his size. “You got a keeper there, you know that?”

  Logan said, “Oh, I know it.”

  The former soldier left their cell.

  “Sunup,” he called. “Be ready. Both of you.”

  They didn’t say any sappy goodbyes. Devin Johnson kissed his wife firmly on the lips, hugged her, and gave her bottom a squeeze. He had done the same every morning when they had been stationed in Fort Worth. Just going to work. Another day on the job.