Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller (6 page)

     “Calm down there, sweetheart,” Sam said. “What’s wrong? Do you need help with something?”

     “I-I…” the woman stuttered again and this time her mouth hung open after she spoke. She stared glassily through Sam, clutching that little blanket. The thing was disturbing the hell out of him.

     “Is there someone around who needs help?” Sam tried. “A family member or a child?” He hesitated to say the last, fearing the worst for the owner of that blanket.

     The young woman’s eyes cleared marginally and her gaze locked on Sam, seeing him for the first time. She whispered, “My baby…” and then quickly sank back into her state of shock.

     Sam wanted to curse. He wanted to roll up the window and drive away. He wanted to know his family was safe and, because he already felt a strong pull of attachment and responsibility for the boy, he wanted Austin safe, as well. However, responsibility was not something Sam Walker was in short supply of, and it was this that made him slide the Aveo into the driveway the woman had walked out of.

     She followed them out of the street in a daze. Sam hadn’t known for sure if she would but he was glad she wasn’t standing there waiting to get hit. Of course, there was still not a soul to be seen on the road no matter which way Sam looked.

     Rolling up the window so he couldn’t be heard, Sam spoke softly to Austin before getting out of the car.

     “Can you drive?” he first asked the teen without preamble and Austin responded, “a little.”

     “Good,” Sam said. “Good. You know my address. If I’m not out of this house in fifteen minutes, you take this car and you drive to my place. My wife’s name is Laura, my son’s name is Trevor and my daughter is Melissa. Laura, Trevor, Melissa. Knock on the front door and ask for them by name and they’ll know they can let you in. It’ll do you no good to sit here waiting for me if something happens to me, kid. Just take the car and go.”

     “You think something’s wrong in that house,” Austin said in a tone Sam would have applied to a faux psychic trying to spook gullible clients.

     “I know something is,” Sam admitted before he even knew what he was going to say. Apparently, the unease wasn’t felt by the boy alone. “But I have to go in, anyway. It’s my job to help people and someone’s hurt in there. But I won’t risk you to do my job. Fifteen minutes, then you cut and run.”

     “I got that,” Austin said, and he sounded like he was trying to convince Sam of some deeper, more important thing. “My dad’s a cop, you know. I know all about doing your job to help people. A nurse and a cop. I know
all
about it.”

     The admission indeed gave Sam a deeper perspective into the boy’s life, his sense of morality and his family. His parents were helpers; they were like Sam. No wonder Austin reminded Sam so damn much of his own boy. The same sense of purpose and ethics had been instilled into them both just by being around the parents who had raised them.

     “I know that you’re a good kid,” Sam told Austin, rousing a tired smile from the teen. “Fifteen minutes,” he reminded as he pointed to the clock and then stepped out of the vehicle.

     The young woman was standing next to the car, staring blankly at the home Sam assumed was hers. She still tightly gripped the bitty blanket and Sam wanted to tear it from her hand. Instead, he rubbed her arms briskly, trying to bring her focus back to the present time and current location.

     “Hey, sweetheart,” he said soothingly. “Why don’t you tell me what happened? What happened in there that makes you not want to go back in?”

     She didn’t answer at first, and Sam continued rubbing the frigid skin of her upper arms. He could feel the chill through her thin night clothes and disliked it. Being in shock was as hard on a body as it was healthy-for the short term, at least-on the mind.

     “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong,” Sam insisted gently. “I want to help, but I want to know what I’m walking into, as well. Do you understand, honey?”

     “My baby,” the young woman whispered again, and Sam judged her age by her voice to be barely under twenty. She seemed even younger than that, but trauma probably played its part in causing that impression.

     Tears sprang to those pale blue eyes and slipped down her porcelain cheeks. She looked like a pretty doll, full of emotion but void of life.

     “What happened to your baby, sweetheart?” Sam pressed as he continued to rub her chilled skin.

     “My baby…can you help my baby?”

     She locked eyes with Sam, fixing him with a desperate stare that held more of her than her previous expressions had.

     “Can you help my baby?”

     Sam sighed and gave a quick nod. “Is there anyone else in the house?” he asked, because he was trained to and a habit like that had a way of sticking.

     Before the young woman had finished saying, “my baby,” again, Sam was moving toward the cracked front door. A wellspring of information the traumatized young mother was not, and Sam felt he’d wasted enough time trying to get anything useful out of her.

     “Where’s the baby’s room, sweetheart?” Sam asked as they entered the unnatural stillness of the house.

     “The…” Trailing off, the young woman merely pointed in a direction and Sam moved the way her finger was aimed.

     He passed a kitchen on his right; a closed door he assumed was a pantry or bathroom on his left. In the back was a laundry room, and attached to this was a hallway that branched to the left. Down this hallway, Sam passed an open door-empty bathroom, he saw-and then approached the last door to his left. This one was closed, and Sam assumed it was the young woman’s bedroom.

     On the quick trek through the house, Sam had gotten the feel of a much older presence, and figured the young woman was a single mother living with her parents. Multiple pairs of shoes by the front door, a man’s jacket draped on one of the kitchen chairs, family pictures on the walls and several other small indicators had brought Sam to his conclusion. It made him wonder where the young woman’s parents were.

     The door was closed, and Sam hesitated before opening it. The young woman gasped quietly when he put his hand out to touch the knob, and made a sound of pain low in her throat when he turned it. Neither reaction helped to lower Sam’s sense of unease.

     When Sam eased the door open, it didn’t cast any revealing light on the interior of the room. The hallway was dark, having no windows and no lights on, and the inside of the room was cloaked in shadows thanks to black out curtains. Without the lights on inside the bedroom, it was like stepping into the mouth of a cave and not knowing if the first few feet would drop you into some bottomless pit or underground lake.

     Sam fumbled a hand to his right, seeking a light switch. He met the smooth surface of bare wall at first, and then moved his hand lower until he found the switch. He flicked it up, and the room revealed itself, though it seemed hesitant to do so to Sam. The light was weak, not one of the newer ones that burned more brightly for longer, but the older, yellow-hued variety that never fully chased away the night.

     The room was very obviously a girl’s room, but seemed suited to a female much younger than the one standing behind him. Posters littered the walls in lieu of papering, makeup was scattered over the surface of an old, abused dressed and on the floor, the blankets and sheets on the bed were a screaming mess of pink leopard print and bright neon green tiger stripes. It looked like the domain of a rebellious teen trying to convince herself and everyone else that her identity was the wild child.

     Shoved into the back corner, almost as though it was trying to be forgotten, a mini-crib was set up. The colors of the crib set were androgynous, pale greens and yellows. A hanging mobile allowed butter yellow suns and pale blue moons with faces to smile down on the infant within. On a smaller dresser than the one Sam assumed was the young woman’s, there were tiny diapers and a compact changing station. The soft yellow color did not give a nod to gender either way, and as Sam approached the crib, he still didn’t know whether to expect the woman’s son or daughter to be looking up at him from it.

     Sam moved in a way he thought was reserved for bad actors in cheesy horror films. His breath felt caught in his throat, and he was sure each step took him half a minute. He had his hands half-raised, as though to ward away blows from some invisible enemy.

     “You can hear them,” the young woman said in a confessionary tone as Sam continued his snail-crawl pace approach toward the crib. “If you listen, they’ll speak to you, and they’ll tell you what you want to know. They’ll tell you secrets. Secrets about people, secrets about you.”

     That whispery voice was beginning to stroke insidious, chilly fingers up and down Sam’s neck, raising the hairs in a way that made them resemble thousands of miniature, prickly warning flags. He wanted to look back at her, but his eyes were all for the tiny crib.

     The baby was silent inside. He couldn’t see within until he leaned over, because of the way she had blankets draped over all of the sides. He didn’t want to look inside.

     “They don’t have all of you, at first,” the woman continued. Her voice became more disturbing on each word, the pronunciation somehow wrong, the flow of her syllables somehow grating. “They’ll tell you that, if you listen. They told me after I saw what had happened. After I saw what I did…”

     A hitch in her breathing almost made Sam spin back around. For a moment, he was crazily certain she was about to leap on his back, tearing into him with misshapen teeth or lupine claws.

     “I didn’t want it,” the woman said, and her voice was softer than ever. “I didn’t want it!” The repetition of the statement was louder, almost a shriek, and the words crashed around Sam as he reached the crib.

     Nothing had helped him determine the gender of the baby, and now Sam guessed he’d never know whether the tiny infant was a boy or girl. The shape in the crib was indefinable, unrecognizable for what it was unless you knew what it began as.

     The bedding was red. The huddled ball in the middle of the soaked and stained blankets was torn and shredded to become something resembling nothing more than butcher’s meat. There were no features left, there was nothing left to identify the child for what it had been, and the quickly degrading part of Sam that was still sane was queerly grateful for that.

     “Oh, dear God,” Sam exclaimed thickly as his stomach joined his mind in utter rebellion. “What the fuck did you do?”

     When Sam turned back to face the young woman, he encountered not a shell-shocked pretty girl but something from a nightmare vista.

     Her hands clenched and unclenched. Having grown bird-like talons, scraps of skin were dug away every time she plunged them into and then loosened them from her palms. She drooled heavily, thick yellow and black liquid that Sam could smell from feet away-the sickly scent of pus and infection. Her eyes rolled like they were trying to escape the hated confines of her sockets. As Sam watched, her silky yellow hair began to fall out and her girl-next-door baby blues became milky like the eyes of a fairytale crone.

     “When I did it, I hated it,” the girl said and her voice was a repellant gurgle. “But then I listened and it told me. I didn’t want it. Didn’t want it, so they took it. And now, it will take me.”

     Sam didn’t know what had happened to her from one moment to the next, but he knew that what she had been was nothing like what she was now. This was something alien and infectious; something that had taken away the person she had been and replaced it with a darkness Sam was quite sure could not be eradicated.

     What he was seeing here was the same phenomenon that had claimed the girl that had killed Dennis. Different form, different appearance, but the same sickness. And, he was quite sure; the same ability to kill him the way the small girl had killed his partner.

     “Now just calm down, sweetheart,” Sam said in the voice he used to pacify victims of fires. “You don’t want to do anything rash.”

     She laughed and the sound crawled along Sam’s skin like some slimy, multi-legged thing. Sam was sure he had only a few moments before she was entirely gone and whatever had claimed her would try to do to him what the thing in possession of the little girl had done to Dennis.

     As Sam was starting his next sentence with, “Now just,” she leapt.

     With a grunt, Sam dodged to the left, missing being gutted by those vulture-like talons by scant inches. She came at him again, with a growl more suited to a bear in a darkened wood than what had just been a pretty young woman in a suburban home.

     Sam tried to bolt for the door, but she anticipated the move and caught him across the face with one of those clawed hands. Her nails tore through his skin and he cried out in shock and pain. Blood blurred his right eye and he stumbled into the long dresser with makeup all over it. Bottles of nail polish and perfume tumbled over and hit the floor as Sam tried to avoid doing the same.

     She didn’t say anything, but gave another one of those gurgling, hair-raising giggles as she raised her wicked, harpy-like claws in challenge. Sam knew if he didn’t make it out the door on this attempt, he most likely would not make it out at all.

     Sam looked quickly around the room for a weapon as blood burned his right eye. Through the red film, he saw nothing that would avail itself as an appropriate means of defense.