Patrick D'Orazio - Coming the Dark

It was hard to believe the person looking back at him was Jeffery Blaine. The gray streaks in his scraggly beard and the drawn and haggard expression made him feel a couple of decades older than his thirty-five years. His hair was a tangled, curly mess that hung in greasy clumps around his face.

He flashed a peace sign at the mirror and assumed his best stoner pose. “Dirty fucking hippie,” he mumbled under his breath. If he could just find a pair of Birkenstocks in the closet, it would complete the look.

After stripping off his filthy clothes, Jeff splashed water on his face and body, unconcerned with the mess he was making, since they were leaving anyway.

A few minutes later, after having found a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt that fit reasonably well, Jeff felt like a new man. The headache had subsided, and the scent of soap on his skin smelled good. When he walked down the steps, he was actually cheerful.

When he hit the first floor, he spotted Megan sitting at the kitchen table facing away from him.

“Where’s my breakfast, woman?” he demanded, lowering his voice with exaggerated irritation.

When Megan ignored the snarky comment, Jeff shrugged and moved into the kitchen. “I guess I’ll just have to fix it myself.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re already shirking your womanly duties.”

He found no breakfast food in the cabinets, though there were plenty of baking supplies. “Hey, Megan, you could bake me a cake. That might make up for no eggs and bacon laid out for breakfast.”

He smiled and turned to her, wondering why she wasn’t laughing or tossing off a snide riposte. When Jeff saw that she was staring off into space, he moved slowly toward her.

“Hello?” He snapped his fingers and waved his hand in front of her eyes. “Anyone home?” Megan finally looked at him. His demeanor immediately changed from annoyed to concerned.

“Megan?”

“They’re back.” Her voice was subdued.

Jeff stared at her for a moment before moving toward one of the windows at the front of the house. Carefully bending the blinds to peek out, he scanned the street as he heard Megan’s voice drift over to him.

“I wanted to see what the weather was like. I opened the front door and saw one of them. It was about a block away. I don’t think it saw me, but then I saw another moving around across the street. I went to shut the door…and…there was another. I’m not sure, maybe there were more…” Her voice trailed off, the monotone account becoming background noise as Jeff searched the street. He began counting the stiffs he saw on his fingers and had to stop when he realized there were too many.

Megan stared at him as he came walking back to the kitchen. The spark he had seen in her eyes just a little while ago had dimmed, but Jeff could still see both the hope and the fear that had always been there. Any thoughts of renewing their argument about sticking around the neighborhood vanished completely.

Jeff forced a smile to his lips. “Grab everything you can. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

It had been a busy intersection at one time but had fallen silent over the past few weeks. The fires had long since died out, and only charred residue remained. Destruction ran in random patterns-one building wiped out, the one next door left undamaged.

A Dodge Intrepid teetered precariously on a brick wall at the entrance of a convenience mart. Wind made it creak and sway on its perch. The store shelves beyond the wreck were ransacked. A few items remained, but everything of any value had been cleared out.

The Quick-n-Go across the street was in far worse condition. Two of its gas pumps had been sheared off at their bases. The burnt-out husk of the vehicle responsible for the damage had come to a crunching stop at a concrete barrier housing a dumpster on the back side of the parking lot. One of its tires had blown out before it connected with the pumps as it jumped a ditch, and sparks from the undercarriage had ignited both the pumps and the vehicle’s gas tank. The resulting explosion had sent the corrugated metal roof above crashing down, where it slammed into several cars parked underneath, crushing them and the people inside. Billowing flames from the two squashed pumps caused a chain reaction, and the rest of the pumps had erupted into fireballs as well.

All that remained was a few burnt-out vehicles and bits of human remains baked into the cement. The corpses were seared carrion for scavengers to pick over. The building’s contents were annihilated by the heat and pressure of the explosions. Glass and metal superheated and fused together, and the ceiling tiles collapsed on top of the mess, bubbling as they melted and turned into a black ash that created a fine patina over the entire mess. The outer frame of the building was all that remained standing, and it resembled the charred skeleton of some giant beast.

The drugstore diagonal to the Quick-n-Go was mostly intact, though heaps of trash and blistered vehicles populated its parking lot. The building still looked new. It was made almost entirely of stone with a few faux windows running along its side. Only at the entrance facing the intersection were there any building materials besides granite. The glass doors were shattered, though the surrounding entryway, also made of glass, was still intact. The metal doorframes were bent and pressed inward, and small pebbles of glass lay scattered across the tile floor. The metal racks that once held copies of Auto Trader and real estate magazines were crushed flat on the floor, and shredded paper splattered with bloody footprints was strewn throughout the vestibule.

A ladder truck from the Milfield Fire Department sat in the intersection, along with an Army vehicle known as a deuce and a half. There were also several local township police cruisers and a camouflaged Humvee with a Squad Automatic Weapon mounted on the roof. They had been parked around the exterior of the intersection, forming a barrier to traffic coming from all directions. An ambulance stood sentry inside the jury-rigged stronghold, its rear door hanging open with the remnants of medical supplies scattered on the ground, smashed and useless. The vehicles were all wrecks, torn and shattered. There were dents and scratches, flattened tires and burst gas tanks. Expended cartridges lay scattered across the pavement by the hundreds.

Above the vehicles, a cable holding up the traffic signal units had snapped, and they had crashed into the fire truck. Shards of red, amber, and green glass lay scattered across the roadway. The culprit was a car that had slammed into a light pole at one of the corners. The pole had collapsed into the parking lot of a pizza delivery joint. A rusted-out old Cadillac now rested on top of the pole, its front tires slightly off the ground. There was a spider web of cracks radiating outward from the bloody spot on the windshield where the driver’s head had hit the glass.

Scavengers had picked most of the scattered bones clean, and even the remnants of blood and tattered clothing had been washed away by rain or blown away in the wind. The sun had baked the rest of the gore into the pavement, but the area had been purged of most signs of the former human inhabitants. It was a dead zone.

* * *

In the distance, something shattered the persistent silence.

It was a car engine, its roar reverberating off the buildings as it gunned and hesitated repeatedly. It grew louder and quieter in turn, the noise coming and going at random intervals.

The roads surrounding the intersection were clogged with stalled and demolished vehicles. It was a maze, the navigation of which would challenge any driver, even at a snail’s pace.

Jeff and Megan found freedom from their residential prison by plowing through a fenced-in yard at the edge of the subdivision and avoiding the vehicle blockade entirely. Their journey of less than a couple of miles afterward took thirty minutes and gave them a bitter taste of what the outside world now had to offer.