What Happens in the Darkness Read online

  What Happens in the Darkness

  Monica J. O’Rourke

  Sinister Grin Press

  Austin, TX

  www.sinistergrinpress.com

  June 2013

  “What Happens in the Darkness” © 2013 Monica J. O’Rourke

  All characters depicted in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without the publisher’s written consent, except for the purposes of review.

  Cover Art by Billy Sagulo

  Cover Design by Shane McKenzie

  Text Design by Brian Cartwright

  For my brother Brian, who knows why. Thank you for making this one so much better.

  Author’s note: I’ve taken a few liberties with the layout of NYC, but not many … the main one New Yorkers will notice is changes in the Central Park Zoo. Please forgive my poetic license …

  What happens in the darkness will surely reach the light of day.

  —Wicked Lester, “What Happens in the Darkness”

  Chapter 1

  October

  Manhattan died.

  This was how she imagined it, that nothing had survived. Only Janelle. She knew this wasn’t true, but she also knew she was afraid to know who (what?) had survived.

  Janelle kicked the Pepsi can, and it scattered over rocks and debris like a pinball. Her stomach ached, and her cheeks burned where she’d rubbed too hard, had desperately tried to scrub away layers of dirt and soot and human ash.

  Chunks of what might have been arms and legs … charred remains, torsos missing heads—torsos missing everything—strewn through the streets or sitting propped up on sidewalks like empty potato chip wrappers. Bizarre, just … sitting there, those human parts. She wondered where the rest of the bodies were but only wondered this when she was feeling especially alone and terrified and her mind would drift. Times when she didn’t care whether she lived or died. Not that she planned on killing herself, but there were times she just couldn’t care. Fair enough, she guessed, since everything else really sucked after the first attack. And when you’re twelve, things aren’t supposed to suck this bad. When you’re twelve and things aren’t fair, nothing really matters. Including whether you suddenly dropped dead or just never woke up again.

  She glanced over her shoulder. That feeling was back, and she hoped (prayed) it was her imagination. She stood in the street and listened. The wind whispered, carrying distant sounds of gunfire and screams.

  She kicked the soda can hard, pretending she was anywhere but here, pretending her dead brothers were alive and playing a really mean joke on her. The can disappeared beneath the burned-out shell of a Honda.

  The upper part of Manhattan, where Janelle used to live, had been almost impossible to get through. Collapsed buildings blocked the streets and sidewalks, blocked anywhere she tried to walk. Thick smoke choked the air. Cars burned until they were unrecognizable piles of melted metal, stores were gutted and spitting smoke and ash, dead bodies lay every place she turned: dead animals and dead birds and dead grown-ups and dead kids, smells wafting off them so strongly, she walked around for days and weeks feeling like she was going to puke until she finally just got used to the smell. So much blood, so many people hurt or dead. People crying and screaming and moaning, and Janelle afraid to touch them, afraid to go near them, afraid to help. Scared they might touch her, might pull her in and kill her too. That she might catch the death that coated their skin like a rash. Until slowly their numbers began to dwindle, until Janelle was so often alone on the streets.

  She’d managed to reach Eighty-Sixth Street. The street sign was pitched sideways, hanging from a post. The Third Avenue sign had fallen into the gutter, and Janelle had to cock her head to read it. She knew where she was. Her mom used to bring her and her brothers here to buy them hotdogs and papaya drinks. It was on the corner next to the movie theater. Used to be, anyway. The only thing there now was the creepy cardboard Papaya King with the crown that flopped off his head. The king was now half-buried in dirt. Her fingers trailed along the edge of the cardboard sign. For a moment she lowered her guard. She knew it was a mistake the second she’d done it, the second she had allowed her thoughts to trail, to hook on to a memory or a wish. Stupid!

  And now. Behind her. She sucked in her breath and looked. No. Nothing. Just that awful feeling. But something was there, she knew. She wasn’t stupid. Something hidden. Hiding in shadows, hiding in darkness that came too early and took forever to leave the next morning. But something had been hiding, and following, and she thought maybe it was waiting, whatever this thing was, maybe it was hiding there in the blackness because it knew Janelle had to let her guard down sooner or later. That she had to lose herself thinking about her mom, and that would be all the chance it would need. This was what Janelle figured. And it couldn’t all be imagination, could it?

  Sometimes she heard voices. Mostly whispers; sounds, not words. Never words. Following her, sneaking up. When she saw other people she wanted to run to them, but she had seen people stabbing and shooting each another, and she was afraid they would hurt her too.

  Then there were the soldiers. Janelle hid from them, watched as they forced people away at gunpoint. Some dragged prisoners off to camps or loaded them onto the backs of trucks. Or shot people dead in the gutters. The soldiers stormed the streets, their black uniforms too shiny, too scary, their guns even scarier.

  She kept thinking about her mom and dad. Prayed sometimes to have them back but knew that was stupid, foolish. They were dead; everyone was dead. They weren’t coming back. They weren’t coming to save her or take her away from this or do anything at all because they were dead.

  Her dad had been a hotel porter, her mom a chambermaid, though Mom would get kind of pissy and say, “Room attendant, girl. I ain’t no maid.” And sometimes her mom would bring home tiny bottles of shampoo and doll-sized bars of soap and Janelle would make believe she was a princess.

  When she’d hide from the soldiers and from the night and from the howls and screams and tearing sounds like bodies being ripped apart by starving dogs … her thoughts would betray her, and she would remember how her whole family had died one terrifying night. How it had taken forever but seemed somehow to last only seconds. She could never understand how that was possible, for something to take forever and take no time at all, at the same time.

  She remembered falling out of bed, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. All around her were sounds of explosions, like firecrackers that never stopped. She heard people screaming outside, and she threw her hands over her ears, trying to block out the noise. “Mom!” she’d screamed. “Mommy!”

  Another explosion threw her to the floor. Her bedroom walls shook, and plaster dust landed on her head. She choked on the dust and crawled across the room, reached the closet. She planned to crawl back and hide under her bed until her mom came for her.

  If she could only find it. Where was her bed?

  Gone. The ceiling had collapsed and dropped the bedroom above hers directly on top of her own, landing on her bed, dresser, a case full of books, crushed her Wii and DVD player, destroyed nearly every one of her Littlest Pet Shop dolls.

  A noise like someone coughing or choking came from the spot where her bed used to be, but then the sound was gone. Janelle climbed to her feet, swaying unsteadily—swaying, she realized, with the apartment itself. Nothing to hang on to. Hands on her knees, her body tilted forward, and she walked—tried to walk—tried to keep her balance. She stumbled down the hallway toward her parents’ bedroom, her fingers scraping along the wall. Light from outside flooded the hallway, d
isappearing for a few seconds and reappearing moments later.

  Something was wrong with the apartment. But that didn’t make any sense. How could there be something wrong with an apartment? Maybe a wall or the floor or something, but the whole apartment? She blinked quickly, bit down on her protruding tongue. Apartments didn’t move, but somehow this one shimmied and swayed.

  Then something clicked in her overworked mind: the upstairs apartment was sitting in her living room. Gaping holes in the walls spat insulation. A blanket of glass covered every surface. Everything was gone. Buried somewhere. Probably beneath the fallen ceiling, she figured, staring at the mess but not really absorbing anything she was seeing.

  Mom screaming from her bedroom, shrieking words Janelle couldn’t understand, startled Janelle into moving again. “Mommy!” She rushed toward her mom’s voice as light flooded the hallway again.

  Janelle stopped short, had almost fallen through the hole into the apartment below. She slammed her back into the wall, hands out, fingers spread. Heart pounding, sweat trickling down the sides of her face. She slid to the floor and wrapped her arms around her knees and made herself as small as she could. Janelle sobbed and tucked her head down until her forehead rested on her bent knees. She couldn’t move. Wouldn’t move. Mom would find her.

  But the screams … from her mother, from the apartments above and below—what was left of them. Jesus—what about here? Had this apartment fallen? She couldn’t get her bearings, couldn’t really understand what she was seeing. Thick dust coated the air, scratched her eyes and nostrils. What had happened? Where was Mom’s antique clock on the living room table? The clock was gone, it seemed. So was the table.

  No one was coming to save her. And her mother was still screaming. Janelle forced herself up on shaking legs and edged around the gaping hole in the floor. She stumbled into her parents’ bedroom.

  The first thing she saw was the bassinet …

  … upside down at the foot of her parents’ collapsed bed, crushed beneath the heavy weight of the frame. Her baby brother’s arm sticking out … tiny fingers like thin pretzel sticks, smeared with blood.

  Mom shrieking, paralyzed beneath the blankets.

  Daddy not moving. Daddy a mangled bloody mess twisted in sheets and blankets … head smashed beneath a caved-in ceiling, a chunk of tile embedded in a ceiling-fan light sitting where Daddy’s face should be.

  Mom screamed the baby’s name as if he could answer, the only word coming from her mouth Janelle could understand.

  Mom yelled at Janelle standing in the doorway. “Get out! Get out, Janelle! Get out! Get out! Get out!” Each time she said it louder, harsher, until her eyes bulged, until they looked like they would explode in their sockets, until her voice grew hoarser and the words on her lips became soundless.

  Mom covered in blood. Mom clutching the blanket to her chest. Janelle wanting to go to her but Mom screaming over and over and over for her to get out get out get out.

  Janelle moved toward the bassinet. Maybe Daniel was alive. Maybe she could save him. But she staggered backward into the hallway, afraid to approach her bloody baby brother. She couldn’t think. Mom was supposed to make this better. Mom was supposed to tell her what to do. Mom was supposed to fix everything.

  She raced to her brothers’ room, her heart hammering in her ears, pulsing behind her eyes. She tripped over something and looked down. Her brain couldn’t process what was on the floor. Then she looked up. Most of the ceiling was gone.

  She rushed to her oldest brother’s side and shook him. His arm fell toward her. God! How could he sleep through this?

  “Ray?” she cried, shoving him again. Shoving hard. “Ray! Get up! Get up!”

  She moved toward his head. He was staring at her. Staring but not blinking. She wondered why he was being so stupid at a time like this. No time for games. No time to play a staring contest. She pushed him again, frantically shaking his shoulder, punching at him, fists connecting with his ribs, his upper arm. “Ray! Ray, please! Get up. You gotta help! Somethin’ wrong. Somethin’—”

  But she threw her hand over her mouth when she looked closer at her big brother.

  A slab of ceiling had caved in his head. Blood and brains soaked the pillow. A chunk of his skull was missing, and something liquidy … but thick … oozed out of the hole. His mouth hung open as if he’d been screaming.

  Janelle’s hands flew over her eyes and she bolted away from him, tripped over her own bare feet and landed hard on her butt. She slid across the floor, shoved hard away from him, away from her poor dead brother who was lying in a puddle of his own brains, her eyes covered the entire time, not caring what she ran into, not caring if she fell into a gaping hole that ate her and spat her remains into hell. She lay in the middle of the room. Breathing was almost impossible. She didn’t want to breathe, and she let it leave her, tried to make her lungs deflate, tried to force herself not to take a breath. But her stupid lungs betrayed her and she sucked air and tried to yell, tried to make any sound at all. And at once it came, a gasping, ragged scream so hard it hurt.

  Get out. Have to go. Go get help. Have to—

  She raced to the other side of the room. “James? Jamie?” Janelle shoved his arm.

  The intermittent outside spotlight again lit up the bedroom.

  The ceiling above James’s bed had collapsed. She could barely see him beneath it.

  “Get up,” Janelle cried. “Please, Jamie! Get up!”

  Something had pinned him to the mattress. Something like a stick of wood. She couldn’t see his head, but she could see his stomach. His hands lay beside the wood, as if he’d tried to pull it out. Something like thick rope trickled out of his stomach. His dead fingers clutched the wood as if his last effort had been an attempt to dig it out of his own flesh. His fingers, bloated and bluish, were half-embedded in the wound.

  She wanted to pull the wood out.

  But she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t touch him, couldn’t stand the idea of her skin rubbing against his, knowing his would no longer be warm like hers, knowing he was dead now and that meant his skin would be cold. She couldn’t do it. As much as she loved him, she knew she couldn’t touch his dead body.

  “I’m sorry!” she sobbed, tears falling so hard they blinded her. Her heart was broken, and she was sure it had exploded inside her chest, could feel the fragments of it floating around in there. She’d never known such pain, the death of her heart. She just wanted the pain to stop.

  “Jamie,” she wailed, not wanting to leave her brother but unable to touch him. She wanted to stay with them both, stay with them forever, and she waited to die beside them.

  The apartment shook again and threw Janelle to the floor. She didn’t really want to die. She just wanted everyone else to not be dead.

  Mom had stopped screaming.

  Janelle stood up in the center of the room. Mom wanted her to live. Mom had told her to run. Where? Maybe if she stayed, help would come. Someone would rescue her.

  They had to.

  She smelled smoke and glanced out into the hallway. The living room was on fire.

  Couldn’t stay here. Had to get out. Had to listen to Mom and—

  She took a single step, and a second later the floor where she had stood disappeared, fell into the downstairs apartment. Janelle leaped over the collapsing floor, landing hard in the hallway, smashing to a stop against the baseboard. She glanced back and watched Ray’s bed disappear into the hole in the floor.

  She struggled to her feet and raced to her own room. The rest of that ceiling had caved in, had destroyed just about everything. Plaster and wood coated her furniture, her stereo, the clean clothes her mother had constantly told her to put away.

  She dug out yesterday’s jeans and sweater and sneakers. They were covered in dust and plaster, and she had to beat it off the clothing. She quickly struggled into her outfit and fled the apartment.

  Outside the apartment, the hallway was destroyed. The air was thick with dirt and pla
ster, and she began to choke. Her eyes watered. She rushed back inside, fighting black plumes of smoke from the fire, thick burning air that smelled powerful, smelled like gasoline, black smoke that tried to force its way into her throat. Janelle dropped to her knees and crawled to the bathroom and grabbed a towel, quickly wetting it with water from the pipe that had burst behind the tub. She wrapped it around her head, covering her mouth the way she had learned during fire safety at school.

  She raced past the burning living room and was back outside, in the hallway. She knew not to try for the elevator, to never use an elevator in an emergency. The exit stairwell was blocked by its own walls and the bodies of other tenants who’d tried to escape. She heard voices down the hall, frantic voices, people crying for help and muttering words she couldn’t understand, words cut off by sobs and coughs. They seemed to be headed in other directions and not toward Janelle.

  She climbed over smashed doors and chunks of ceiling and wall, finding footholds in crushed beams of wood, stepping on doorknobs and metal and bodies. The stairwell was dark, lit only by an occasional emergency light that hadn’t gotten smashed. Janelle had seven flights to descend.

  She stopped short, sure she knew one of the people lying in the stairwell. Not that Janelle could help—the woman was clearly dead, or quite a mess, anyway—but the shock of seeing the body made her stop. This one looked like Mrs. Cole, the lady from upstairs who used to babysit Janelle and her brothers. Mrs. Cole was so nice and liked to wear purple and used honey instead of sugar in her tea. Now she was dead on the top of the sixth floor. Mrs. Cole, who used to read Cat in the Hat to Janelle and had a finch named Josephine and bought fresh tomatoes every Tuesday from Carlos’s bodega around the corner. Now her head was twisted way too far to one side. Her eyes were open but they weren’t blinking. Mrs. Cole was missing a shoe.