Darkened

DARKENED

by Bryan Smith

Copyright ©2011, Bryan Smith

All rights reserved

www.bryansmith.info

Cover design by John Hornor Jacobs

www.bastardizedversion.blogspot.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of the author.

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

Published by SmashWords

This one’s for Rachael.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I’d like to thank each of the following people and organizations for various reasons. Rachael Wise, Cherie Smith, Jeff Smith, Eric Smith, Keith Ashley, Shannon Turbeville, Dorothy C. May, Jay & Helene Wise, Ben & Tracy Eller, Derek Tatum, Kent Gowran, Joe Howe, Mark Hickerson, KAOS, Tod Clark, Paul Synuria II, Paul Legerski, Brian Keene, Mark Sylva, John Barcus, Liz Rowell, Brittany Crass, Blake Conley, John Hornor Jacobs, Steven Shrewsbury, Kim Myers, Shane Ryan Staley, Scott Nicholson, Doug & Jamie Dobbs, Paperback Horror blog, Jeff Burk, Carlton Mellick III, Rose O’Keefe, Deadite Press, Delirium Books, Jonathan Maberry, Gregory Solis, The Creeping Cruds, Ronald Kelly, and all my regular readers through the years. Your support and encouragement is appreciated.

Prologue

The first thing—and, really, one of the very few things—you’ll need to know about me is that I survived the End Times. This should be obvious. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here to put pen to paper. Of course it’s questionable whether anyone will ever read what I have to say within these pages, but I think it’s important to at least attempt to establish some sort of record of what happened.

There are precious few of us left, we humans. Whether those of us who remain can repopulate and renew this decimated world remains to be seen. I frankly wouldn’t bet money on it. Not that money really means anything anymore. On the off chance I’m wrong, however, my hope is this manuscript might serve as a cautionary tale. It is my intent to be as honest as possible in this account. Therefore I’ll be adopting the role of third person narrator for the rest of these pages. If I do the job I’ve assigned myself properly, you shouldn’t be able to guess which of the players in this tale is me. At least not until very close to the end of my story.

What follows is the truth as I know it. I was privy enough to the thoughts and feelings of my compatriots to feel confident that I can accurately portray events from their points of view. Here and there will be bits one might interpret as ‘fiction’, though I prefer to think of them as artistic license. These are included to convey the grand scale of what happened during those first calamitous End Time days. In these instances the specific event might not have occurred, but many things like them certainly did.

Once upon a time we lived in a fairy tale world in which the only monsters we had to worry about were of the human variety. Madmen and terrorists. Crooked politicians and corporate greedheads. An ordinary world inhabited by billions of ordinary human beings. A flesh and blood, concrete world built upon an unquestioned foundation of solid, non-malleable reality. This was our world, earth, and anything beyond it was unknowable and purely the theoretical province of theologians and spiritualists.

Until, that is, that unbridgeable gap between our reality and the unknowable began to decay. Until the denizens of that dark place came howling into our world, bringing with them a storm of death and destruction, and planting a seed of rot that would infect each of the intermingling alien worlds.

This is my story.

This is everyone’s story.

This is how the world died…

CHAPTER ONE

From out of the blackness, a shape emerges and hides in shadow.

It is a formless, amorphous thing. A shifting, slithering mass of a substance resembling raw petroleum. It looks like nothing that has ever drawn breath in this world, like nothing that could possibly be alive, but alive it is and within it resides an awful consciousness, a black-tinged, malevolent intelligence that pulsates with hate and a gnawing need to destroy all that is alien.

All that is of this strange new world it has invaded.

But to do this it must adapt.

It begins to discern the shape of the world beyond these shadows and what it detects sickens it. So strong is this initial repulsion that it nearly attempts to retreat to the world from which it has come, a realm it subjugated and made its own long ago. So long ago that this new world may not have existed then. But it is an ancient thing and time is a concept so small, so abstract, that it attaches no significance to it.

All that matters is beginning anew the process of conquest and annihilation.

To that end, it casts a net with its mind, searching for a place to begin…

Searching for a suitable Host.

Then…here.

Yes, this will do.

* * *

The day the world watched the president of the United States of America die on live television began for most as uneventfully as any other.

For most, but not for all.

* * *

Nashville, TN

September 25

6:00 a.m.

Emily Sinclair awoke to the not-quite-dulcet tones of the morning zoo crew on one of the local Top 40 stations. She groaned and slapped the radio alarm clock, knocking it off the nightstand in the process. The clock landed on the floor with a thunk, but the zoo crew babbled on, the tinny, snickering voices drilling into her sleep-befuddled brain like a thousand tiny needles.

Gritting her teeth, she reached over the side of the bed, gripped the clock’s electrical cord in a shaking hand, and ripped it free of the outlet. She relinquished the cord and fell back into bed. She stared at the ceiling, just barely visible now in the dawning light of the new day, and tried to think of a good reason to get out of bed. She was unemployed, having been fired from her bartending job at the Villager Pub a week earlier. Rick McAllister, her boyfriend of the last year and a half, had dumped her the week before that.

Thinking about it now, as she lay half-awake in bed at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m., it seemed pretty obvious she had nothing to live for and so getting out of bed to face the day was really quite pointless. Except…

Except that she’d made a promise to her mom during an excruciatingly endless long-distance phone conversation the previous night. A vow that she wouldn’t allow herself to sink into depths of intractable depression. She wouldn’t sit around in her apartment moping all day. She wouldn’t keep drinking vodka until she passed out. Because, as her mother had so sternly reminded her, she’d gone down that path once before in her life and it hadn’t turned out so well, now had it?

Mom’s guilt-tripping worked its predictable efficient magic. Emily had gone to bed the night before fully intending to get up bright and early and go hit all the top temporary employment agencies in town.

But something had changed within her between the moment she turned out the light and closed her eyes the previous night and now. The sense of motivation instilled by her mother’s words had deserted her utterly.

Her gaze flicked to the right, where she’d laid out the clothes selected the night before for her temp interviews. Prim and proper dress clothes. The sort of buttoned-down, conservative outfit she could never comfortably wear. The blouse and skirt were cleaned and pressed. They were the clothes of a conscientious, careful woman. No wonder they looked swiped from a stranger’s wardrobe.

Emily’s normal clothes lay in a rumpled heap on the floor. Her cropped black t-shirt with the fishnet sleeves and her black, low-slung hip-hugger jeans. And the studded black vinyl belt she wore with nearly every outfit. Her rock ‘n’ roller clothes. The _real_ Emily’s clothes. Emily the songwriter and musician. For maybe the millionth time this week she lamented the fact that creative people couldn’t go out and apply for jobs in their chosen fields the way, say, a junior executive or customer service rep could. It seemed colossally unfair, but it was the way of the world. There was no temp service for out of work novelists or singers. A deeper darkness tinged her thoughts now, the way they always did when she allowed herself to contemplate the steep odds against ‘making it’ in any of the creative fields. It depressed her to think of all the genuinely gifted people who every year resigned themselves to a life spent working as automatons in factories, their talents left to wither while they did what they had to do in order to collect those meager paychecks, a bit of money that kept the lights on and kept food in the fridge. The hand-to-mouth life.

Emily sighed.

Fuck it. I ain’t doin’ it.

She rolled onto her side and lifted the cordless phone from her nightstand cradle. She punched in Phil Parker’s number and listened to the pulse of the ringing phone.

Phil picked up on the fifth ring. You better have a good fucking reason for calling me at this hour, Emily Sinclair.

Emily winced. I’m sorry. I know it’s early.

You’re fuckin’ A right it’s early. Christ… There was a pause. Holy shit, it’s six in the goddamned morning.

I’m sorry, Phil, really. It’s just that…can I please have my job back? Look, I know I freaked out when Rick dumped me, but that’s all over now. I’ve got my shit back together and I want to go back to work. The pleading tone in her voice made Emily cringe, but she couldn’t help it—there was just no way to mask this level of desperation. Look, I’ll do whatever you want to make up not calling those times I skipped work. Double shifts for a while. Anything.

Phil sighed. I don’t know, Emily. I already took on another girl part-time…

So fire her.

Phil laughed. You’re really something, Emily, you know that? I can’t fire a girl I just hired for no good reason.

Can’t you? You’re the boss.

A heavier sigh emanated from Phil’s end this time. He didn’t say anything for several moments. Then he chuckled. You said you’d do anything, right?

Emily’s grip tightened on the phone. She bit her lip, steeling herself for what she knew was coming. She managed one word: Yeah.

Phil cleared his throat. He at least had the courtesy to sound nervous when he said it: Will you…have sex with me?