The Dark Trilogy (76 page)

When the next one hit, it sounded like a bomb had been dropped on the neighborhood. The bedroom walls rattled as several more bursts echoed. Megan tensed, unsure of where they were coming from and if they were getting closer to her house.

She gripped the covers close, knowing they would provide no protection, but having no idea what else to do as she stared at the windows. The rumble of another blast set them vibrating.

Megan remained stationary for several minutes, even after the thunderous explosions ceased. She listened, waiting for something, anything else to happen, but there was nothing. Not even the ever-present moaning of the dead.

What the hell just happened?

It was the only thought that raced through Megan’s mind as she slid off the bed and searched for her shoes. Her actions were automatic. She hadn’t slipped on her sneakers in weeks, but it seemed like the thing to do as she pondered the explosions and the meaning behind them.

It had to be the military. They had been working all this time to clear the city of infected, and they’d finally reached the suburbs. It was the only explanation that made any sense.

Limping as her sluggish limbs woke up, Megan made it to her closet. She needed to get dressed. For the first time in five weeks, the close caress of the nightgown she’d been wearing repulsed her. It stuck to her skin and smelled foul, almost ripe. And as she stripped it away, it was as if layers of fear and intimidation disappeared with it.

Two minutes later, Megan was moving down the steps, weak but excited. She had snatched the revolver off the nightstand and held it in front of her like some sort of shield as she stared at the front door.

Memories of her nightmare returned. Megan closed her eyes as a vision of the baby she had held in her arms jumped into her head unbidden. She sucked in a sharp breath and opened her eyes again, determined to push the nightmare aside so she could focus on the aftermath of the explosions she’d heard.

After staring at the front door for a couple of minutes, her heart racing, Megan shook her head to clear it of all the confused thoughts that had been swarming through her mind since she had been so abruptly awoken.

“Shit happens,” Megan mumbled as she stepped closer to the door. Her voice sounded odd. Scratched, deflated. It was not the voice with which she had lived her entire life, but instead sounded weak, insecure … frightened.

Steeling herself, Megan took a deep breath before leaning toward the window next to the front door, putting her hands on the blinds. There were a few more moments of second-guessing before she was able to get close enough to pull a slat down.

Megan had to line up her eyes with the area between the boards nailed in place. She blinked a few times and tried to adjust to the light of the midday sun after having spent weeks in shadow. When she was able to focus on her front yard and what lay beyond, it took her mind several more seconds to accept that what she was seeing was real.

Several houses, with their neutral-toned brick and vinyl siding and their manicured lawns, were gone entirely. They had been replaced with a palette of blackened and burnt wooden and stone skeletons. Some houses were smoking and ruined, while others remained unscathed. All the lawns were overgrown, and bushes were beginning to run wild. Fires had destroyed some structures while leaving others intact. Cars out on the street were covered with layers of dust and ash, and garish splashes of blood.

The burnt houses with timbers jutting into the sky mirrored the corpses littering the street. While the human debris comprised mostly bones and splatters of blood, a few unidentifiable chunks of fleshy residue were scattered about. Several younger saplings that had been planted in the grassy patch between the sidewalk and the street had been bent and broken, and Megan blinked as she spotted what looked like an arm dangling from one of the snapped limbs.

She took little comfort from the fact that she saw only a scattering of bodies. There were bones strewn about her yard and what appeared to be a torso stripped free of its flesh sitting on the Millers’ porch across the street.

Megan stifled a whimper as she saw the remains. A wide trail of blood led away from the torso to the front door of the Millers’ house, which had been ripped from its hinges. Several of the other houses Megan could see from her vantage point looked broken into as well.

Rubbing her eyes, Megan took a short break from looking outside while she tried to keep her breathing even and controlled. She’d seen nothing lurking in the shadows outside, and the silence from earlier had reestablished itself. There had been no noise since the explosions. No tanks rolling in, no gunfire, and no more moans. She took a small amount of solace from the possibility that the dead had migrated away from the neighborhood, but was disappointed that the cavalry had not appeared.

Megan was still rubbing her eyes when she heard another noise off in the distance. It startled her even though it was nowhere near as loud or abrupt as the explosions had been.

Letting go of the blinds, Megan stepped back and felt her legs give way as she collapsed onto the floor. Raising the revolver with a quivering hand, she pressed it against her temple.

It was those things. She could hear them moaning. They were coming back.

“Where’s my goddamn rescue?” Megan whimpered as she tried to fight back the tears.

She refused to believe that the explosions had been some sort of freak occurrence. No! It had to be something else—something more than just another fractured, hopeless misery in a world already filled with them.

Megan remained beside the door, listening to the moans getting closer with her arms on her knees and her head slumped between them. She held the gun up and began tapping the butt gently against the back of her skull. This went on for another minute or so until she heard a new sound and raised her head to stare up at the window.

At first Megan couldn’t place what it was. She’d been subjected to the muffled wailing of flesh-eating predators for far too long, and her ears needed time to adjust to the subtleties of this new noise. When they did, Megan jumped up so quickly she almost fell on her side as a grin split her dry, cracked lips. She rushed to the window and clawed at the blinds. Flattening her face to the board again, Megan scanned her street and the one that crossed it nearby.

Megan’s street was at the bottom of a hill, the road feeding into her section of the subdivision on a downward slant. With the thin slit between the two boards showing only a little of the outside world, Megan couldn’t see that far, but as she waited, her patience was rewarded a few seconds later.

“Oh my God …”

Megan could hardly register what her eyes were trying to tell her brain.
It’s a goddamned minivan!
She nearly fell on her butt as her legs threatened to give out on her again. The dark blue van sped toward Nelson Street, where Megan lived, getting closer by the second.

Giggling hysterically, Megan wondered why the Army was using minivans instead of Jeeps or Humvees. The vehicle continued to get closer, but appeared to be slowing down. A twisted part of Megan’s mind whispered to her that it was illegal for someone to be driving that fast anyway. The giggling ramped up, and she wondered if she should call the police on the driver. Megan felt dizzy from all the laughter, but she was determined to get the attention of the person driving the van. Otherwise they would drive past her house, hit the dead end at the end of Nelson, turn around and speed out of the neighborhood without a single backward glance.

The laughter cut off as Megan realized she had a choice to make. It was either time to leave this house, which was not only Dalton’s tomb, but was fast becoming hers as well, or to give up and end it all.

That was when Megan realized there was still a spark of life left inside of her. This was her one chance for redemption, her one chance for freedom. The hell residing outside the house was beginning to look no worse than the hell that had been living inside her mind for the past few weeks. Megan heard herself whimper as she reached for the first board that covered the front door.

Tears replaced the anxious laughter as she tugged at the lumber hammered into the top of the solid oak door. As she did, Megan wiped at the small beads of moisture coming from her forehead and her eyes.

The boards didn’t budge with her feeble efforts. Megan was already out of breath after a few tugs, and her arms felt like dead weights.
Need to get to the gym more often.
She rubbed her forearm and glanced over at the window. Dalton had spaced the boards across it so they could still look outside. That would give her a place to slip her fingers as she gripped the boards when she pulled at them. Setting the gun down on a small table next to the front door, she moved to the window.

Megan felt the itch of panic as she heard the minivan’s engine continue to creep closer to her house. It was taking way too long to get here. Hadn’t the driver been flying down the road? Now what was he doing? He’d been slowing down, but how slow could he possibly be going now?
The speed limit is 25, and every good citizen should observe that limit, even during the apocalypse.
A new wave of giggles threatened to return with that crazed thought, but Megan was able to force them down as she struggled with the boards over the window.

She moved to the other window on the opposite side of the door and wrapped her arms around one of the boards over it. The fact that the driver was slowing down was some sort of cosmic nudge, urging her to try harder so she could let him know she was here. Megan yanked at the board, and it bent slightly toward her but had no further give in it. She shook it, but it remained securely affixed to the window frame.

Megan screamed in rage. “Let. Me. Out!” Each word was punctuated by a futile jerk at the board. She kicked angrily at the wall as she pounded on the wood. Exhausted, she almost slumped to the floor again, knowing she wouldn’t make it in time. The driver would pass by and never even know she was inside, desperate to be free.

Megan’s head snapped up as it dawned on her. The garage! She stumbled as she ran through the kitchen. She almost slipped on the linoleum but made it to the garage door and pawed at the knob. She was nearly hyperventilating and couldn’t hear if the van was still outside. She slid between Dalton’s Jeep and her little econobox in a rush to get to the big aluminum garage door. With no electricity, the door would just pull up.

Megan snatched at the handle on the door and nearly wrenched her arm out of its socket as she yanked on it. It didn’t budge. A wave of pain shot through her arm as she recoiled from the handle as if it were a venomous snake. The door was jammed.

Megan stared at the garage door, exasperated. The house didn’t want to let her go. Slowly her eyes grew wide, and she cursed her stupidity. Glancing up past the handle, she saw a rectangular protrusion halfway up the door. It was connected to two metal rods that spanned the door horizontally. Of course! Dalton had manually locked the garage door on his return from the failed supply run.

Megan wrapped her hands around the cold, dry metal and twisted to the left, but it did not budge. Turning it the other way met with success, and she heard the satisfying sound of the lock opening. She leaned down and tugged on the handle, receiving the result she was hoping for as the door began to rise. She let it go up about halfway and glanced outside, free of barriers between her and the rest of the world for the first time in ages.

Megan had been prepared to run screaming to flag down the driver, but as she looked out on the scene past her lawn, she realized that perhaps her grand vision of escape had been a mistake.

Things could be worse.

That was what Dalton had said to Megan when this whole mess started. He had been trying to raise her spirits and kept on trying until the end. He wanted her to survive, wanted her to keep on fighting and find a way out of the hell they were in. Now, despite her efforts to entomb herself in the bedroom in which they had slept, made love, and lived, she had finally woken up. She was somehow still willing to fight after all this time, not just for herself, but for her husband’s sake … because once she was gone, who would be left to remember him?

So when she saw the scraggly-looking man standing on top of the blue minivan, looking away from her as he stared at the top of the hill, she realized that despite how terrible he looked and how dire her circumstances were, things could be worse.

Swallowing hard, Megan stepped out into the sunlight.

“Hello,” was all she could think to say.

George and Jason, Part 1

The sandy-haired man took a swig from the bottle of lukewarm water. He glanced briefly at the image of ice-capped mountains on the label and grimaced at the taste. At least it wasn’t hot, although he wouldn’t gripe if it were. But a visual of a mountain stream filled with pure, ice-cold water was a stretch. His world was not filled with breathtaking vistas and bracing winds. Instead, there were dark, confining walls and thick, muggy air.

“Ahhh.”

The sound was exaggerated, and the marketers of Mountain Ice would have appreciated it … if they weren’t all dead. In fact, just about everyone to whom they’d pitched their product was dead too. So the sarcastic sound of satisfaction was pointless. George didn’t care, because nearly everything was pointless these days.

He stood in the dark back room and tried to push away the depressing thought. It was damned hard, but he had to believe it was still worth the effort. He was in one piece after everything he’d been through.
Be grateful for the little things.
It was his mantra these days.

George cut an impressive form. At six-two and slightly over two hundred and forty pounds, he was thickly built and muscular. The graying at the temples and creases in the skin around his eyes might convince some that he was past his competitive prime, but when they saw him move, they would likely backtrack on such an assessment. George was naturally athletic, but as he’d hit middle age, he discovered he had to work twice as hard to keep up with the kids half his age.