Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller (27 page)

     “No,” Sam said gently. “I want you to not hate me, not hate Laura, especially for what happened. I’m trying to explain to you that just as I need to be able to trust you to protect the people with us, the people dearest to me, that we were just trying to protect you, too. We’re heartbroken over what happened, as well, but we felt we had to protect you. Because we need you.”

     Sam hoped that continuing to insist that all-important point would begin to form a balm that would help Austin through the nightmare that had befallen him since the Onset. He’d lost at least one parent, possibly both of them, and it hadn’t been to the corruption, to an alien entity that had taken over a human body. Somehow, it made it worse that one of the remaining humans had been the one to kill his mother.

     “I’ll stay with you, Sam,” Austin finally said. “I’ll help you out, I’ll contribute. If something happens to you…”

     “God forbid,” Sam interjected.

     “God is dead,” Austin said carelessly. “If something happens, I’ll do what I can to help the group. Don’t ask me to feel what you want me to feel or heal on your timeframe. I do hate you, and I hate Laura more. And we’ll all just have to deal with that.”

    
‘God is dead.’
The words echoed heavily in Sam’s head. He’d seen terrible things since the Onset, things he wished he could burn from his brain with a hot poker of forgetfulness. But never once had he doubted God’s presence. Never had he felt abandoned by whomever reigned on high. Yet this kid, this poor kid had lost everything. He was absent of his family, absent of hope, absent of faith. Sam considered himself a tough man, but he suddenly wanted to cry.

     Sparing him from this, something up ahead caught his attention. They’d travelled a fair distance by this point and had made it into the bustling center of the city they lived in. There was a strip mall, several sit-down and drive-through restaurants, two car dealerships, gas stations, another set of stores on the other street and, in the same parking lot as a Chinese eatery, a walk-in emergency clinic. In this parking lot, three vehicles sat idling. Sam could tell they were occupied because their taillights glowed in the thickening dark. He could even see people occupying the seats. Lots of people, it seemed like. His heart galloped.

     “Hey, hey, hey. What’s this?” Sam asked as he slowed his truck to a crawl. He’d seen Laura slowing the Aveo behind them, as well, but she didn’t stop. It was likely she was waiting for his decision, and would turn easily across the four-lane road if he decided to turn into the parking lot.

     “Are we going to talk to them?” Austin questioned, and curiosity pushed the edge of despair out of his voice.

     Sam saw a large van; white and without character, a black car that looked to have recently been involved in a minor accident, and a bus. His heart skipped a beat in its mad race as he realized he
recognized
that damn bus. It had obviously been taken from a church not far away. He’d seen it on his way to work more times than he could count. Recognizing the bus lent a very surreal quality to the whole situation, and he passed by the parking lot not quite knowing why.

     “No,” Sam said, as surprised by the decision himself as Austin was. “We don’t want to add too many more people. What if they’re all the way corrupted?”

     “Then they wouldn’t be driving,” Austin pointed out.

     “They aren’t driving,” Sam countered with a frown. He accelerated, adding cementation to his resolution.

     “You know what I mean,” Austin retorted in a surly tone.

     “I do, but we don’t know exactly how the corruption works,” Sam agreed. “Maybe it can strike a whole group with shared madness at once. We don’t know enough to seek out other people yet is all I’m saying.”

     “I hope you’re right,” Austin told him as they pulled onto the freeway. Sam’s mouth was set grimly as he nodded his agreement.

     “So do I,” he admitted.

Chapter Twenty-One

Armani’s Journal

… I dream about them…

     Armani didn’t even see the other vehicles as they drove past. He was too focused on what he was watching: the last recording on the video camera that he had rescued from the floor of the gas station. He wished he hadn’t. He didn’t need any more nightmares, but he’d inadvertently added another one, anyway.

     While Dave and Gwen, two of Armani’s stealthiest movers, began to check for potential entry points into the clinic, Armani examined the recorder. A light flashed on the screen, indicating a critically low battery when he tried to turn it on. Unperturbed by this, Armani grabbed some AA batteries from his pouch, in which he had an open pack of eight that he carried for his flashlight. He put two in the camera to replace the dead ones and the device turned on with no further protest.

     The most recent recording had been easy to access. The video preview was shadowed, giving Armani no hint as to what he was about to view. He pressed play, and watched.

     The first time the female voice, bright and cheerful, issued from the recorder, Armani jumped instinctively and looked around, feeling guilty. Because he couldn’t see her, Armani decided the female speaker was holding the camera.

     “Paulie!” she exclaimed with obvious affection as a man came into view.

     Armani saw they were in the store where the camera had been abandoned. It was lighted and in operation, so Armani concluded the recording took place sometime before the Onset.

     “Jess,” Paul responded, and his voice was more measured and reserved than the young woman’s that he spoke to. The look on his face, though, was amused and friendly.

     “You’re doing a fabulous job training me,” Jess told Paul, exaggerating her words and making him smile. She moved around the counter to focus on the other cashier, who stood at the register. He watched her in an almost-exasperated but mostly affable way. “But I’m
bored
!” She dragged out the word, overstressing it with a heavy, dramatic sigh. Paul smiled ever wider.

     “Well, we’re third shifters,” he reminded her. “We get the bar rush and then at the ass end of the shift, we get the people going in on firsts. Gotta do something to pass the time.”

     “Nap?” Jess suggested in a hopeful yet joking tone.

     “Not on your life,” Paul replied with a chuckle. “Go stock the cooler, you spaz.”

     “Right on,” Jess responded easily. The the camera moved with her through the store.

     Armani saw shelves he had decided not to raid earlier, happily filled with bright wrappers, hanging bags of snacks, and bottled beverages.

     Jess entered the cooler.

     Armani saw other shelves, these ones metal and not meant to be decorative and appealing. They were packed full of boxes that contained the juices, pop, and water meant to replace those taken from the cooler’s front display. Jess moved through them easily, and her breath plumed on the air. The camera occasionally went foggy with it as she moved. Armani assumed the back of the cooler was kept relatively cold, so the beverages were chilled when the customers took them.

     “And this is the only part of this job besides working with Paulie I actually enjoy,” Jess said to the camera as she set it on one of the shelves.

     Armani saw the girl was a looker with bright blue eyes and a spill of fine, silky brown hair. She had high cheekbones and shadows of dimples in both her cheeks. Her brightness of spirit was radiantly evident. She obviously smiled a lot.

     Jess turned and grabbed something the camera couldn’t see. When she brought it back in front of the lens, Armani saw a box of juices. She pulled a few singles out to place them in their proper rows. After repeating the process a few times, she turned at the sound of the cooler door opening. Though Armani couldn’t see him, he guessed Paul popped his head in to speak.

     “Hey, your future husband is back,” Paul said teasingly. Jess groaned.

     “I can’t believe he came back again! He’s been here four times! Paulie, make him go away, please.”

     Armani heard Paul chuckle and the door closed with a solid thunk. The door was metal, thick, and weighty. It made plenty of noise when it opened or closed.

     Jess was once again all alone with her stocking, but she grabbed the camera and zoomed in so she could see between the rows of orange juice and chocolate milk as the front door of the store opened.  

     When shouts and sounds of a struggle sounded from outside the cooler, Armani glanced at the time display in the corner of the screen. It read 10:47p.m. The Onset had occurred or was in the process as Jess recorded; he knew it instinctively.

     Armani heard Jess breathing rapidly. She gave a distressed whine as the camera whipped back and forth, seeking her co-worker.

     “Paul,” she whispered, and Armani heard the fear and concern in the word. “Paulie…” She might not have been aware of speaking her co-worker’s name in that anxiety-laden tone, but her distress was nearly palpable.

     She couldn’t find Paul or his potential assailant. The jerky movements of the camera conveyed that to Armani easily.

     To her left, a crash of thunderous conflict sounded as Paul and his attacker fell, grappling, through the cooler door.

     Jess screamed.

     Quickly, Jess shifted the camera to Paul, who tried to pull what Armani immediately recognized as a full corrupted out of the cooler and away from Jess.

     The man was frenzied; mouth foaming blood and saliva. His teeth were pointed; incisors dug into his lower lip and drew his own blood, which only seemed to incite him further. The first word that came to Armani’s mind was ‘vampire’ and he’d seen enough fully corrupted by that point to make an educated assumption on how the blight morphed the host’s physiology. The psychology had a lot to do with it. The form was inherently dictated by the corrupted,
not
the corruption.

     “Jess, run!” Paul screamed, dragging Armani away from his thought and back to the drama on the little screen.

     The blood on the corrupted man’s mouth was mostly Paul’s, Armani could see. His arm, which he had locked around his assailant’s throat, had been torn open. Blood dripped steadily onto the floor, or was flung against the cooler’s shelves when the corrupted struggled against him.

     Paul shouted to Jess again, trying desperately to break her paralysis of terror.

     “Jess, damn it, go!” He roared the words, and it was finally enough to get through to the girl paralyzed by fear.

     Jess turned and fled. Armani was curious as to where she could possibly go. The valiant Paul and the corrupted man blocked the only door Armani had seen.

     The camera rocked and jolted as Jess sprinted. She stumbled, but met her goal quickly. The cooler was only about forty paces wide. There was another door, Armani saw. It opened to a deep freeze, where bags of ice were stocked and stored. Extra boxes of ice cream and microwaveable goods were neatly and unobtrusively nestled behind the display stacks of bagged ice.

     As soon as Jess got the door open, Armani heard two hellish sounds from behind her. One was something he tentatively identified as the cracking of bone and tearing of flesh. He assumed Paul was in very bad shape judging by the second awful sound: the nearly inhuman howl of pain he gave in response to the first noise. The agony inside his voice sounded like insanity, and it made his cries blend with eerie similarity with the bellowing hunting call the corrupted gave as it charged for the girl.   

     Jess never focused the recorder back on her fallen co-worker. The corrupted hit the door to the ice cooler, which Jess had had to pull open. The door slammed shut when the weight of the corrupted form struck it. With its thought process quickly devolving, it couldn’t find a way to get at its prey and therefore scrabbled and scratched in fury at the door, but never touched its handle to pull it back open.

     Jess had not given into her fear paralysis a second time. She stumbled through the front door of the ice cooler, which put her in the main body of the store. Panning the camera toward the big front windows, she let her audience–currently Armani–see that there were other potential threats outside.

     She moved low, quick, and made for the light switches.

     Armani mentally applauded the girl. He unconsciously rooted for her.

     He realized now why the lights had been off but the store was still running for all intents and purposes. Jess had been trying not to draw attention to the store by turning all of the lights off.

     “Smart girl,” Armani whispered, though she obviously couldn’t hear him.

     Jess moved toward the back room, behind the cash register. She wanted to be away from those big, exposing windows, Armani assumed.

     Before she made it through the door, some dark shape hit her. The camera fell and as it did, it captured her short (Armani felt, very final) scream.

     The camera hit the floor and the video stopped.

     There was nothing more.

     Armani sighed and turned the device off. Poor girl, he thought. Not smart enough.