Taken World (Book 2): Darkness Page 9

  Hardly any of the other survivors were up, so none came to see them off. They normally didn’t do so anyway.

  The inside of the Humvee smelled like blood and sweat. It wasn’t a pleasant scent. Grease sat in the front seat while Devin drove. Logan was sitting next to Jane, Brad behind her.

  Jane looked forward through the windshield. She had an assault rifle, a gun almost as tall as she was. She didn’t know a thing about it now, but when the time came for her to use it, she figured she’d manage.

  Through the windshield, the road curved ahead. Devin didn’t have the headlights on, only the fog lights—they were less noticeable that way. This stretch of road was seemingly untouched. Not even cracked. Jane hadn’t been out since they’d arrived at Ironlock months ago, but even then, the roads and the world in general had seemed to be steeped in chaos. Now, there was an odd calm about the place.

  A graveyard calm, Jane thought. Unnerving, but in a weird way, relaxing.

  They came out of the suburbs about fifteen minutes later. Their progress was slow going, even without any traffic. They passed caved-in houses, flipped cars. On the sidewalks, corpses lay incomplete, their bones and rotted flesh having been dragged off to some dank cave, or wherever the monsters out here brooded. There was no sign of life at all. Jane kept telling herself to look away. She couldn’t.

  They slowly rounded an army tank. It was nearly split in half, as if some great axe had come down from the heavens and struck it. A pale hand dangled out of the top hatch.

  Logan touched her then, causing her to jump.

  “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  The ruined landscape rolled by them. No one was talking much. An intermittent burst of radio chatter came through the speakers: garbled voices, static.

  The outside world was perpetually in darkness. The days were short and overcast, while the nights were long and as black as any void.

  Before the Ravaging, Ohio was usually granted three good months of fair weather; the rest were full of cold, rain, snow, and ice, the skies the color of gunmetal… The type of weather that could drive a person to depression. But it was the good three months that an Ohioan lived for. Even in the fall when the sun no longer offered its summer warmth, an Ohioan could get by, because the changing of the season was pretty. Leaves turned deep reds and oranges. Fresh apple cider was sold at nearly every market. The air was cool and crisp in the day.

  That was all gone now.

  The seasons were gone, replaced with cold and depressing weather that would turn colder and more suicide-inducing. The outside world had the same effect on a person’s psyche as living in Stone Park for those weeks that the void had remained dormant. Dark thoughts ran through the mind; a longing to be anywhere but here.

  Logan was not immune to these thoughts. The loudest of them all was hoping for the voids and the monsters to just go away.

  However, the monsters were not going anywhere, and neither were the voids.

  Last Logan had heard, they were still out there. Whether or not monsters still came from these voids was anyone’s guess. Whoever had been close enough to them to say would be long gone by now, devoured or fled or turned into monsters themselves—unspeakable, unholy abominations.

  The military had lost their battle with the creatures a long time ago, back when the world was still in a functioning state of chaos. Now it was just chaos.

  Logan looked out at a fire-blasted school bus. It was still upright, sitting on flattened tires. The front end of the bus had plowed through an antique store called Maddy Anne’s. Large claw marks raked the sides of the metal transport. Most of the windows were gone.

  As the Humvee rolled by the ruined vehicle, Logan couldn’t believe how fast things had changed—still couldn’t believe.

  He shook his head. Not long after this, Jane grabbed his hand. He faced her, noting how out of place the assault rifle looked, sticking up from the side of her seat.

  Quicken Loans Arena was a weathered tombstone sticking out taller than the rest in the graveyard that was Cleveland. Windows broken and gaping like eyeless sockets and the maws of monsters. A stretch of ruined buildings stood next to it. Smashed. Obliterated. As if one of the mammoth-sized monsters had rolled over it. More than likely, a great battle had been fought here.

  Logan found he could not see very far in the darkness. Since they’d pulled the Humvee up to the outskirts of the city, the sky had turned a few shades darker. The clock on the front console read 6:55, but whether that was a.m. or p.m., no one could tell by looking up. The sun was barely there. Was it trying to rise? Or was it going down for the night?

  In the quiet of the car, Logan could hear the monsters. The big ones were always loud. Their footsteps. Their roars. Their fights. They moved around in the darkness. Crushed cars. Crushed buildings. Stepped on the bones of the endless dead.

  “Do you see it?” Devin Johnson was pointing.

  “I see, boss,” Grease replied. “Cleveland’s fucked.”

  He pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket and lit it. Logan expected Devin to tell Grease to put it out. He didn’t; he actually looked like he wanted one himself. Or at least a very strong drink.

  Brad leaned forward and peered through the windshield. Jane wasn’t looking. Her head was bowed and her eyes were closed, and it looked to Logan like she was praying silently.

  He had never known his wife to be a religious woman. In fact, he had never heard her mention God or Muhammed or Buddha at all. Religion was simply not a topic of conversation between the Harpers…but here she was now, her lips moving soundlessly and her eyes squeezed tight.

  A moment passed. A heartbeat. Two heartbeats.

  Logan noted how beautiful she was. How he didn’t want anything bad to ever happen to her. How he had joined the hunters because it was a subconscious way for him to protect her, to rid the world of these things one at a time, even if it eventually killed him. Yet here she was, his wife, right in the middle of a war zone, ready for battle.

  He suddenly felt guilty and stupid. How could he have let her come with them?

  The ground shook. Logan gripped the seat in front of him. The shaking reminded him all too strongly of the day the Ravaging began. Those tremors in Stone Park. Then the earthquakes powerful enough to rip the roads in half. Then the emergence of the monsters. Then the end of the world.

  “Active tonight, aren’t they?” Devin said.

  “Sure thing, boss,” Grease said.

  Devin pulled a map out of the middle console. He unfolded it and scanned it in the dim overhead light. His finger followed the red lines like arteries and veins in the human body.

  “We’re about a mile out. I’d drive us further in if I could, but we all know how that’d go. The roads are ruined. There’s too much shit everywhere. And then there’s the monsters. So, bad news, we’re gonna have to go on foot. Safer, believe it or not.”

  This last was directed at Jane, who had since opened her eyes and was now staring at Devin with what Logan thought was disbelief.

  “As always,” Brad said.

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Logan added.

  “You fuckers are crazy,” Grease said, grinning, the cigarette drifting smoke from the corner of his mouth.

  “That’s why they’re on the squad,” Devin said. “Mrs. Harper—Jane—I apologize for all the vulgarity.”

  Jane laughed. “I don’t give a shit.”

  Devin chuckled and tilted his head back. “I like her, Logan. I like her a lot.”

  “Jane swears like a sailor sometimes,” Logan said. “I like her, too.” He gave Jane a little elbow nudge.

  She smiled slyly. They all were grinning. The atmosphere in the Humvee was the stark opposite of that outside in the ruined city.

  “It won’t be easy. Certainly won’t be easy,” Devin said once they’d stopped laughing.

  “Never is,” Grease said.

  “Not supposed to be,” Devin said. “I wish it was. But this world has never been
about wishes. You want something, you work for it. You go out and get it.”

  Jane leaned over and whispered to Logan, “Does he always give a pep talk before a run?”

  Logan nodded.

  Brad had heard and said, “Believe it or not, this is one of the better ones.”

  “I heard that,” Devin said. “All right. If you think you don’t need a pep talk, then let’s get this shit over with.”

  “’Hunters’ on three?” Jane put her hand out in the middle like one might do when breaking a football huddle. No one put their hand on hers. “I tried.”

  They laughed again, and then they were out of the car, breathing the death-tinged air and making themselves walk toward the arena.

  Nearly a dozen steps into their journey, the group stopped.

  Logan was the first one to notice what would make them all stop. He was straining his ears.

  In a soft whisper, Brad said, “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Fucking right,” Grease said.

  He swiped his forehead with the back of his hand then began adjusting his Travolta-esque hairdo. The same hand jittered as it patted his breast pocket and the pack of cigarettes that lay behind the cotton. He wouldn’t spark up, though; not now, when they were out in the open. That little orange fireball at the tip of the cigarette probably wouldn’t be enough to give them away, but there was no reason to take chances that they didn’t have to.

  Out here, the air was cold, but still heavy. Jane found that it was harder to breathe; then again, one didn’t get the freshest air in downtown Cleveland, even when cars and buses weren’t clogging the streets.

  “Bad feeling about this,” Brad was saying. “We always hear them. Especially this close to the city and the water.”

  “The water?” Jane asked.

  She looked past Brad, toward the Humvee parked in the rubble of what used to be a community college. The vehicle was hardly visible, but the little of it she saw was quite inviting. They could just hop back in, turn around, and be safe behind the fences and brick walls of Ironlock.

  You know that’s bullshit, Jane, she told herself. You’re not safe behind the fence. Look around. Look at this city now. It looks like a landfill.

  She listened to herself and looked around, past the ruined buildings in front of her to the ones beyond. Not far down the road, she could see what was left of a few parking decks and the field where the Indians had played their games. Each of these places had been toppled over, leaving only a pile of bricks and steel beams. The walkway from Tower City to the arena lay like a kickstand, with one end pointing downward and touching the street. Cars were flipped everywhere. A bus had been ripped in half.

  If those unholy abominations wanted to get into Ironlock, they could. Jane didn’t doubt that they would eventually do just that. It was only a matter of time. Every bit of time spent on this earth after the Ravaging was borrowed time, she felt. She, Logan, and Brad, as well as the rest at Ironlock, may be survivors, but she wouldn’t call them lucky. Not with the way the world was now. Not with winter coming upon them.

  “I don’t like it either,” Devin said, “but we gotta take our victories when we can. God don’t give us no monsters in our way, then we best keep going.”

  Jane thought he’d sounded like Regina for a second there.

  Devin turned and went down the street, heading toward the arena. It stood while the other buildings surrounding it did not.

  They continued on.

  They got to the arena after about ten more minutes of walking, sticking to the shadows, their guns held out in front of them. One large building made up the place, one side connected to a casino’s parking garage, the other side connected to a different parking garage. This parking garage was a pile of rubble and broken concrete. Inside that pile, flashes of metal and gleams of broken glass caught the hazy sunlight, just barely visible through the dark clouds above.

  Jane’s stomach sank.

  In the square between the arena and the baseball stadium, a bevy of army trucks was parked crookedly. Some were smashed, others were demolished. There were tanks with the armor stripped clean off, or gashed by claws seemingly as long as the tank’s main gun.

  Devin took a right toward that square. Two large, metallic structures about thirty feet in height stood at the entrance. What they were for, Jane wasn’t sure; she thought maybe they were antenna. She couldn’t remember if she had seen these things the last time she and Logan had been dragged to an Indians game, which had been a few years before. But one of these structures hung crookedly. Something had broken it, smashed right into it. She saw the black marks down the sides from the sparks thrown by the abundance of overworked wires.

  Above them, the dark clouds rippled with electricity, while most of the world no longer did. Thunder didn’t follow these bolts of lightning, nor would it. Jane knew the only thunder now came from the creatures.

  Then they moved past these metal structures, and she saw what lay beyond, in the middle of the square. Besides the parked military vehicles, there were bodies. A lot of bodies. Soldiers, and some people dressed in the white and blue scrubs of medical personnel.

  Bloodstains on the concrete. Detached limbs.

  One of the bodies had been burned black, a statue now, its jaw wedged open in its last dying scream, arms wrapped around their knees. Jane had to look away, but wherever she looked wasn’t much better.

  Past the square, opposite the side they came from, what was once a wall of glass connected to the parking garage was now just a pile of glittering shards. Bodies out there, too, ripped apart. Their bloodstains as black as oil.

  Logan asked, “Are you all right?”

  Jane didn’t see the point in lying. She shook her head.

  “Me either,” Logan replied.

  “Fucking hell,” Grease said.

  “Seen worse,” Devin replied. He paused at one of the soldier’s corpses and offered it a salute. “Best not to look. Complete the mission now, mourn the dead later.”

  The others grumbled their approval. Jane was not one of them. She couldn’t shake the bad feeling that had come over her ever since they’d parked the Humvee. This feeling wasn’t brought on by seeing the corpses scattered around the courtyard—though that didn’t exactly help. It was the quiet. The deadness of the entire block. Cleveland was a big city; it would be a while before the monsters had picked the place clean. They were nothing but scavengers at heart, right?

  But she noticed something when she faced the corpses again. She didn’t express it, because it was just an odd coincidence—of that, she was sure.

  By the time she would mention it, it would be too late.

  The bodies strewn across the square, she thought, resembled a deliberate pattern, one after the other, lined up like lambs to slaughter. It was almost as if someone had put them there…on purpose.

  10

  The Survivors

  Up ahead was the entrance to the arena. The group crossed the square, their heads on a swivel, their eyes darting from pocket of darkness to pocket of darkness. Brad checked his watch, a cheap thing he’d picked up from a CVS on one of the early trips he’d taken with Devin and the rest. Despite the plastic and the way the band pulled at his arm hair, the watch kept good time.

  The closer to winter they got, the earlier the sun went down. Black clouds hung heavy above, making the sky seem closer than it was. Every so often, lightning would run jaggedly through the overcast and brighten up the grisly scene now behind them, but not by much.

  Brad did not like the silence. He felt as if he were traveling through a cemetery in the middle of the night, and would eventually find that all of the bodies had been dug up.

  The glass doors at the top of the arena’s front steps had long since been shattered. Shards littered the area, but Brad thought that was a lot better than dead bodies. The doors, however, were barricaded with what looked like a million pieces of debris: bags of sand, chunks of concrete, entire pieces of furniture, and even an old
hot dog vending cart.

  He knew he should’ve been more scared than he felt, but this was nothing compared to the nightmares he’d been having. He’d had another one in the Humvee on their trip up here. He’d nodded off in the backseat, the rocking of the shocks somehow soothing, and he had awoken to find that they were more than halfway to their destination. This dream did not feature his mother, or the thing his mother had turned into, nor did it feature his father. In fact, it was a nightmare he had never had before.

  In it, he was standing at a void—which void, he didn’t know, but it had all seemed so real. This was curious, because Brad had never been close enough to one of the things for his mind to conjure up such reality, yet it had. He was standing in front of the void, and monsters, unspeakable monsters, streamed by him left and right. They didn’t notice him. They just kept on going, caged wild animals now set free.

  But then a voice came from deep within the void, speaking in an alien tongue that Brad had no understanding of, and something like a cold finger reached out and scraped at his heart. He screamed, and then jolted awake, only to see the ruins of the city.

  He wished he had his Bible now. He wished he could remember some of the words so he could repeat them in his head, and then maybe he’d feel better about all of this, and maybe it would all be okay.

  Devin made a motion for Grease and Brad to head left, while the others would head right. Brad nodded, readjusted the strap of his weapon, and kept going. His boots crunched on the glass, ground it into dust. Grease had another cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t lit. Slobber had worn the coloring of the filter away.

  “What do you think, kid?” Grease whispered at Brad as he scanned the barricade for an opening. “Think this is all bullshit?”

  Brad shrugged. “We’ll find out, I guess.”

  “Damn Johnson and his crusades,” Grease said after a moment, shaking his head.