James Decker - Fallout

Dragan moved his flashlight through the dark waiting area, searching along the walls.

“There,” he said. He shined the beam on a sign for the shuttle lot, whose arrow pointed down a dark corridor.

Broken glass crunched from back behind us as something entered the terminal. Chairs toppled as something heavy began to move in our direction.

“It’s inside,” I said. “Hurry.”

Another sign guided us right at the corridor’s end and we followed it as more footsteps began to creep closer behind us. As we reached the top of a stairwell, it sounded like whatever had followed us was right on top of us.

“Where is the lot?” Nix asked.

“Should be just below us,” Dragan said. He began to head down the stairs, into the darkness when Nix stopped, and stepped back into the corridor.

“Nix, what are you doing? Come on,” Vamp urged.

Nix removed something from his jacket and pointed it at the floor. A white point of light appeared, and grew brighter until it cast frantic shadows down the hallway where dark shadows approached.

Dragan joined Nix, and aimed his gun down the corridor while the point of light expanded into a large hexagon that spanned the entire width of the hall.

“I don’t have an endpoint in Hangfei,” Nix said. “But this will take us to the lot below. Jump.”

Eyes glinted in the gloom as the things crawled toward us, and I jumped into the portal.

After the moment of limbo, I fell through the air to land on a cold concrete floor. Vamp landed next to me, then Nix, then Dragan with Alexei. I looked up in time to see the gate closing, a cluster of black, marble eyes staring down through the shrinking hole until it vanished. Above us, something crashed.

“They will make their way down here soon enough,” Nix said. “We must leave, now.”

We ran through the underground lot, looking for a vehicle. A row of them had been parked at the far end, and having been shielded from the devastation above, they seemed to have fared pretty well.

“Here,” Dragan said. He’d picked a heavy truck, a road vehicle, and used his security override to unlock the doors. We piled in, and he started the ignition as a jumble of footsteps began to echo from deeper inside the lot.

“There!” Alexei shouted, pointing out the back window.

“They’re here, go!” I said.

Dragan slammed it into reverse and screeched out of the parking spot. The headlights flashed past something big as it headed toward us, and he slipped it back into drive.

“Hold on,” he said, and stomped on the gas.

Something lashed against the rear of the truck and the vehicle bucked hard, jumping into the air as something stopped us. The rear bumper popped free, and I saw a black tentacle wrapped around it as we hit the ground with the tires still spinning. Rubber burned as the vehicle fishtailed, and then began to accelerate.

Dragan took us around the corner hard, brushing a row of parked cars and sending sparks flying as he picked up speed. The sounds behind us faded, until only the sound of the engine remained.

“We lost them,” Vamp said, looking back through the rear window.

Dragan didn’t slow down. He screeched around the next corner and headed up the ramp there. Ahead, I could see an empty guard station. A restraining bar jutted out from it, blocking the exit that looked out into a wall of raging gray smoke.

“Hang on,” Dragan said.

He barreled straight into the rail, which broke loose and crashed onto the concrete in front of us. I felt it go under the tires, and then we launched out of the gate and back into the storm.

I reached over and brought up the GPS. The screen flickered, but it came on and it looked like it still worked. Sand showered the windshield like gray snow, and Dragan flipped on the wipers to keep it from accumulating too much. The headlights could make it only about a car’s length, but I could make out a patch of street there. The broken line of the divider drifted between the beams.

“Try and turn left,” I told him. “The western gate is left.”

“How far?” he asked.

“Not far, if you—”

Dragan cut the wheel, causing the truck to lurch to the right as something big, a wrecked car I thought, huffed by. He found the road again and regained control, staring forward over the wheel with his knuckles white.

An intersection appeared out of the smoke and Dragan veered left, the broken pavement rumbling under the truck’s big tires. Something glowed through the storm up ahead and I realized they were the lights of Hangfei, towering up over the security wall. As I watched, a portion of them flickered and went out.

“I can see the gate,” Dragan said. The smoke seemed to be thinning. Ahead, an archway had appeared, spanned by a chain-link gate. On the other side, neon and electric light blazed.

The last of the cloud disappeared, and the uneven pavement turned smooth again as Dragan aimed for the gate, and picked up speed. In the distance, the city lights flickered.

“The power’s going,” Vamp shouted, pointing. “The failure’s started.”

A few blocks went dark as the truck’s grille struck the gate and it crashed open.

Dragan stomped on the brake as people from the scattering protest appeared in the headlights in front of us. He leaned on the horn, revving the engine and then easing the heavy vehicle forward. The people scattered, some shouting and thumping on the side of the truck as he inched through the crowd. When he reached the end of the square he stopped at the side of the strip and killed the engine.

The doors popped open. As soon as they did I heard an electric crackle rise up over the crowd noise. We all piled out, struggling to hold our ground as the mob surged past. People had come out of shops and clubs to try to see what was happening, spilling out onto the sidewalks and into the streets.

The crackle rose in pitch, and then ended in a single distant boom. The crowd turned their attention to the far end of the strip where street by street, the lights went out. The darkness came like a wave, extinguishing the lit office windows, neon signs, and streetlights. In seconds the darkness reached us, and as the last of the light faded with the winding down of machinery all that remained were the headlights of the vehicles on the street, and in the skylanes above us.

It kept the blackness from being complete, but being outside on the streets of Hangfei in such darkness stirred some primal fear inside of me. The people around us stared at it, transfixed, as drivers got out of their vehicles to see. Even Dragan stared, Alexei clinging to his side.

“Is this it?” I asked. “Did we do it?”

“We did it,” Vamp said.

“The force field,” someone nearby said, pointing.

I turned to follow the woman’s finger and my eyes went wide. The haan force field, the glowing blue dome that had been part of the cityscape for my entire life, had gone. The top of the haan ship towered above the surrounding skyscrapers looking much darker and imposing without the veil of soft light.

“The force field is down,” someone else said.

The air rippled around us, and the sudden dizziness that accompanied it made my stomach turn and my head ache. In the dim light, my surroundings began to change… colors became less saturated, and I felt disoriented as if blurry vision I’d lived with my whole life came into focus, and I had to struggle to compensate. Others around me experienced it too, I could tell.

“Sam…” Vamp said, and I could see that no matter how many times he’d told me he believed me, part of him hadn’t been sure. Now that he realized it might be true, it scared him. I took his hand, lacing my fingers through his.