Apocalypse Weird: Genesis (The White Dragon Book 1) (6 page)

“Tell me,” the voice behind him said. Jack turned his head. The man sat in a light blue armchair. He was probably in his sixties. His reading glasses had slipped all the way to the tip of his nose. He was wearing a gray vest, long sleeved shirt and dark pants. Jack searched his memory for the corresponding image. He knew the man but couldn’t place him.

“Tell me again why, when your parents’ house burned down, you ran outside and left your sister in her room to die?”

The heat came up from his stomach. From there it went into his chest. He had not thought about his sister in weeks. As he lay there, looking at the man in the armchair, Jack felt the pressure in his chest just like so many times before when he spoke about the day his sister had died. Dr. Martens. That’s it. The man in the armchair was child psychologist and early trauma specialist Dr. Gerald Martens. Little Jack had begun to see him regularly when he was six years old and he went on seeing him until he was eleven.

“I was six years old,” Jack answered.

“That doesn’t matter,” the Dr. Martens thing said.

“I couldn’t have saved her. Even though I wanted to.”

“Bullshit, Jack.” The doctor thing took off its glasses — just like Dr. Martens always used to do. “You knew she was in there. All you needed to do, Jack,
all
you needed to do was open her door and get her out. But you didn’t. You screamed like a baby and ran downstairs.”

Jack pressed his eyelids together despite the pain that it cost him, despite the abyss he peered into.

“You are not Dr. Martens,” Jack said.

“That may be true,” it said. “But that doesn’t change the facts, Jack. The fact is, you’re a coward. Look at you. Lying there in your own piss. You are weak and I know for a fact that you know that. Don’t you, Jack?”

“No.”

“Oh come on. You don’t have to pretend with
me
! I’ve known you since you were six years old.”

“No!”

“Jack, Jack, Jack.” The doctor thing shook its head in disgust. “All of us, including your parents, had thought you’d end up differently, you know. But here you are: high school dropout, no prospects, nothing to show. What you think you’ll do, Jack? You think your dad is going to get you a job in his company one day? Is that what you think?”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“He won’t and if you still believe that, you’re not only naive, you’re plain stupid. I’ll tell you where you’re going to end up. In some program for drug addicts on and off the streets until you get a job at Walmart greeting people when they come in. Only you’re going to be in your fifties and it’ll be in a city where nobody knows you because you just can’t stay in one place long enough to make any sort of connection.”

“Shut up.”

“Uh-oh, Jack is getting upset—”

“
Shut up!”

The thing got up and moved toward him. Actually, Jack saw it standing next to the armchair and one second later it stood in front of him. There was a blurry movement in between. It went down on one knee.

“I tell you what. You know why we’re here. You have something I need — that thing around your neck. I have something you need — your life. Easy trade. No hard feelings.”

Jack looked at the thing. He felt as if his mind was caught in a vice and someone turned the spindle, increasing the pressure inside the jaws with each revolution. The hopelessness he felt was unbearable. He had to use all the strength he had left not to give in, not to slide into it and abandon his life altogether.

“Go to hell,” he said quietly.

“Uhh, Jack, let’s not get metaphorical here. Listen to me—”

“
No you listen to me!”
Jack cried out. He couldn’t breathe but as he had just decided to fight for his life, he didn’t care. “Here’s what I think and… correct me if I’m wrong,” he spoke a few words at a time, pushing each one out with force. “You need this, whatever this necklace is I’m wearing. You can’t get it off yourself. Can’t touch it.” Jack laughed a little even though it was painful. “I have no idea why, but let’s just say it somehow messes with your evilness. The people you’ve hired to do your dirty work can’t touch it either, otherwise they would’ve ripped it off of me a long time ago. You want me to take it off myself. I gotta tell you, the bit with my mother worked. It really did and I’m scared as shit right now lying here, not knowing what you’re gonna do next and what’s going to happen to me. And I know you know that, as you seem to know everything I’m thinking. But here’s the thing. I won’t take it off. You must know that by now. Why should I? I’m dead anyway. And once I am, you’re gonna have to wait until I decompose to get it off…”

Jack’s head was spinning and he had lost his train of thought.

“We don’t need you to take it off, Jack. Not anymore.” The thing walked around him as if to inspect a piece of merchandise before the purchase. “Someone will take it off for you. And we know she will, because you’re going tell her to do so.” Those last words were whispered into Jack’s ear.

“You won’t find her,” Jack said defiantly.

“See, that’s where you’re wrong. You humans have such potential, but then you screw it all up. We don’t have to find her. She will find us. She will want to find
you
. And save you. Such is her heart. And when she finds you, we will have found her. And you will have fulfilled your purpose. So, you can be stubborn and spend the next day or five days or however long it will take for her to get here, on your knees, your arms tied to a metal pipe, or you either take it off or tell us where she is so she can do it for you.”

Jack looked at the doctor thing. There was no choice.

“Go to hell,” he said for the second time that day.

“So be it,” the thing said.

The abyss opened and Jack’s mind was swallowed by the unimaginable.

He awoke from the pain in his hands and arms. The chasm inside his eyelids was his sister’s room as the fire broke out. His knees were cups, filled with lava. He pushed his weight into them to lessen the strain on his shoulders. When he opened his eyes, he became aware that the four lights surrounding him were off. Through the narrow windows high up, the first light of dawn was visible.

There had been pain and not much else throughout the night. Sometimes it came from memories, other times from his tortured body. It was never absent and was almost part of him now. Twice, he’d heard helicopters overhead and once what he thought must have been a prop plane. At first, he was sure the plane was part of the search and rescue mission to get him out. But the sound faded, only to be substituted by another. That one was lower in tone, and through the red fog of pain that clouded his mind he recognized the sound as motorcycles. They approached from his left.

In the distance, at the other end of the large building, an overhead door opened. He felt the vibrations in his abdomen when the bikes approached. The cacophonous noise of two dozen engines filled the space. He could only see the bikes as shadows within darker shadows that soon surrounded him. One by one, the engines were turned off, but the riders never got off their bikes. He felt them more than he saw them. The ones he did see were dark silhouettes. Rider and bike sat motionless. No sound escaped them. Not even breathing.

Jack lost himself again — sometimes floating on top of the pain, at other times drowning in it. He didn’t know how much time had gone by when he turned his head and his gaze fell to something beyond the shadows. Where there was darkness before, there was now an opening. A door.

She stood in its frame, half in the shadows. He saw her silhouette against the light behind it. Kasey. She had come. She had found him.

This is a trap,
he wanted to scream.
Get out of here!

“Jack?” her whispered voice echoed through the space. Never in his life had he heard anything sweeter, anything that he’d cherished more and anything that he’d dreaded so much at the same time.

“Jack?”

No. Don’t come any closer!

She ran toward him and he fell into her embrace.

The combination of complete darkness and the sun burning her face at the same time was utterly strange. Kasey had opened the windows of the Jeep. She turned off the AC as well. She wanted to be able to hear what was going on outside, as disturbing as it might be. The fact that she could see a few shapes here and there was comforting at first but now she realized that it had given her a false sense of security. Somehow, the roofs and hoods of the cars, heated up by the sun, were visible as green, blurry, lines. But this was a residential neighborhood and most of the cars were parked in their driveways or in front of the garages.

Furthermore, the absence of cars didn’t necessarily mean an intersection. On the other hand, some of the cars were parked in the middle of the road. Some cars still had people in them, waiting for help to come. Kasey could only hope that nobody had collapsed on the street as there was no way for her to see anyone lying on the ground. By the second intersection, Kasey no longer knew where she was. She thought she’d just passed Marlborough Avenue but now she wasn’t sure anymore. She needed to get to Little East Neck Road in order to cross Sunrise Highway.

Then she had an idea. She stopped the car at what she thought was an intersection, got out and felt her way toward the nearest street corner. Most streets had signs. The first metal pole she came across was a stop sign. The next one, a bit further in, was thicker. She climbed up a few feet and even though the metal from the pole cut into her thighs, she managed to hold on long enough to feel the surface of the sign. The letters were slightly raised.
N Railroad. Good. Make a right. Go straight. Next right and you’re on Little East Neck
.

She went back to the Jeep and turned onto North Railroad. Except for the low gurgling sound of the car engine it was eerily quiet. She envisioned mothers and fathers with their children, inside their homes, cowering in corners in utter panic over not being able to see anything. Sudden darkness might be one of the most frightening things to any human.

The sound came out of her stream of thoughts. She wasn’t aware of it at first. As it became louder, its familiarity sent a cold shiver down her spine. To her right was a row of houses, just like on any of the other roads in the neighborhood. But to her left, there were no houses. To her left was the railroad. She had grown up with the sound of the train, had always heard it from a distance as it slowly approached and passed through the neighborhoods. She and her friends would wave and watch for anyone to wave back.

This one was too fast, its approach too quick. The trains slowed down significantly when going through densely populated areas. This one hadn’t. Kasey stopped the car. Even though she was about twenty feet away from the tracks, it felt much too close for comfort. The sound of the approaching train was suddenly more terrifying than anything she’d experienced today.

It came toward her like a wave, an unearthly sound quadrupling in volume each second it approached. “Oh God,” she whispered when she remembered the switch point a quarter mile down the road. Very soon after the Little East Neck overpass, the rail split. One went straight. The other curved to the right and toward Farmingdale.

The train passed her. This wasn’t a commercial train. The typical dud-dud, dud-dud, as the boxcars passed was missing. This was a passenger train. When the last car flew by, Kasey found herself slowly releasing her breath. The noise faded. The switch point was most likely set to continue straight. She relaxed and started the car.

The shrieking sound reached her approximately two seconds later. It was the sound of steel grinding on steel, as the wheels of the train cars couldn’t counteract the centrifugal force of the curve and the train began to derail.

There were eerie screams buried in the massive echoing crashing sounds. Their distance didn’t lessen their impact on Kasey. She sat there in utter shock, trying to stop her hands from shaking. She screamed, mostly to drown out the chaos. But Kasey couldn’t stop the low vibration in her diaphragm that accompanied the cars crashing into each other and into the warehouses past the tracks.

“Drive,” she said to herself. “Drive!”

She started the car and drove forward. She wanted to push the gas pedal down all the way and escape the sounds and the darkness that was all around her, but she knew she had to drive slowly. She also knew that she had to drive not away from but
toward
the still-derailing train, at least for a while, until she hit Little East Neck Road.

In front of her, a green fireball shot up into the sky. A millisecond later, an explosion rattled the car. She heard windows break in the nearby houses and people scream for help in utter panic.

She thought about stopping the car to see if the people inside needed help. But she didn’t want to leave the Jeep and possibly risk not finding her way back to it. She decided that she needed to try to get to Jack first. So she drove on, fully aware that in doing so, she abandoned people who might be in dire need of help.

“Drive,” she whispered. “Just drive.”

She saw the flames ahead as light green tongues against a dark background. It helped her see the shapes in front of her better, like dark shadows of things before the sun. She found Little East Neck Road and turned right, leaving the fire to her left. She passed what she thought was Silver Gym. She recognized it by the row of parked cars.

Dunkin’ Donuts was next on her right where Farmingdale Road intersected. If she missed that, she would’ve gone too far west and would have to backtrack later on. She drove into the intersection, keeping to the right and steering the Jeep into what she thought was the continuation of the same road she was on. She passed a few streets on the right until she hit Sawyer again — the road her apartment was on.

“Drive!” she told herself, even though this couldn’t stop the image of her mother from appearing in her mind. For a moment, she thought about going back to the apartment to see if there was anything she could use. She was getting thirsty, and even though she wasn’t hungry at the moment, she hadn’t eaten since last night and low blood sugar always made her nauseated. She decided against it and drove on.

That was the moment when she made the mistake. There were two ways to get to Bay shore. One was via Sunrise Highway and 231, which turned into Deer Park Avenue. From there, she could have turned onto Grand Boulevard which was a straight shot that ended one block from the industrial complex and Corbin Avenue. But Kasey decided to cross Sunrise Highway and drive up to Southern State Parkway. It was only one exit from there to get to Deer Park Avenue and Grand Boulevard. She had only ridden on those roads as a passenger, never as a driver. Like all teenagers, she’d rarely paid attention to where she was and most of the time was texting with her friends or checking up on her Instagram account.

Were she a more experienced driver, she would have known that Southern State Parkway was a heavily travelled highway and major east west connector. When she got onto the ramp, two hours and twenty minutes after she had passed Sawyer Avenue, she didn’t know it yet. But less than a minute later, she almost crashed into the car in front of her. It stood thirty feet from the on ramp to the parkway, toward the right side of the lane. The driver had probably gotten onto the ramp when the blindness hit.

Kasey couldn’t see that, for the next seven miles, the Parkway — from her location all the way to Islip Terrace — was packed with stopped cars, piled up cars, turned-over tractor trailers and the dead and wounded bodies of those who crashed when the blindness hit. She saw none of it. What she did see were several green shapes in front of her.

By now, she knew they were car roofs. Her sight was limited, not only in how much she could see but also how far. After about fifty feet, everything was completely dark.

But when she drove around the car and onto the Parkway, she realized that she had made a mistake. It dawned on her the moment she saw the green shapes ahead. There were fifty, maybe a hundred of them. Some stood by themselves, others must have crashed into each other. She thought of how terrifying it must have been for the drivers to suddenly go blind while going sixty miles an hour. And once they got out of their cars — if they got out of their cars — and walked a few steps, they might not have found their way back.

Kasey stopped the Jeep and turned it off. For a moment, she sat there listening. It didn’t register at first that all she heard were birds and a few chirping crickets. Nobody screamed for help. By her estimation, it was around two in the afternoon. That meant it had been approximately four hours since the blindness hit. Where did everyone go? She decided to find out. The Jeep had a unique enough roof line that she thought she could find it again. And she thought that leaving both doors open might help.

She grabbed the belt and holster from the passenger seat but decided not to take it with her and put it back down. She had no idea how to use the gun and trying to figure it out in the dark didn’t seem like a good idea. She took her baseball bat instead. It was aluminum, and her dad had insisted that she keep it in the car when he had given her the keys yesterday morning. A lifetime ago. At least she knew how to handle a bat.

Kasey opened the door and got out. She walked around the other side and opened the passenger door as well. Strange. It looked from here as if most of the doors on the other cars were left open, too. She could make out the contours fairly well.

She walked to the first car and slowly put her hand and arm through the open door. She touched the back of the passenger seat, the middle console and the driver seat. Empty. She did the same with the back row. Nothing. She went to the next car. The front doors were closed but the back doors were open. She felt the back seat. There was a backpack. A water bottle on the floor. She took it. She became aware of the flies while she drank from the bottle. It was the sound mostly. There were probably half a dozen in here.

When she opened the passenger door, something fell against her. She let out a scream and jumped a few steps backward. When she moved forward again, she could smell it. It was slightly sweet. Her foot hit something hard and she went down on one knee. The first thing she touched was hair. It was short. Thin. When she moved her hand, she felt glasses and the stubble of a beginning beard.

When she felt the crust of hardened blood around the man’s throat, she pulled her hand away and stepped back. Sweat was building in her right palm where she held the bat. She stood absolutely still, trying to listen for any sounds close or far. Her free hand moved over the door to the windshield. It was intact. This wound didn’t stem from an accident. The man was dead.

Her neck hair pricked up. Part of her was utterly terrified to follow the previous thought all the way to its conclusion. But she had to. There was no choice. She assumed this had been done after the blindness occurred.

“Check the next car,” she said quietly to herself. “Go.”

She moved past the hood and toward the next shape. It was bigger. An SUV perhaps. For a moment she thought of the black SUV from before. This one had a bike rack on top. Thank God. Slowly, she put her arm through the open passenger door. The leather felt hot under her hands but there was nobody there. Same with the back seat. Next one.

She took a few steps and stumbled over something on the ground. She caught herself but landed half on someone’s leg. It was a woman. She was dressed in a skirt. One shoe was missing. She lay half on her side. When Kasey reached for the woman’s head, she felt the dried blood on the woman’s blouse. She didn’t want to touch her neck and throat but she did it anyway. She found the same crust of dried blood there.

Her stomach revolted for the second time today. Most of the water she just drank she puked back out.

I have to get out of here,
she thought. She caught a movement far ahead. From left to right moving across the highway to her side about twenty cars ahead. She only saw it because it moved and the very movement created some kind of green glare in her field of vision.
If whatever this is can move as fast as it just did, it must be able to see. If it can see, it can see me.
Her thoughts came in fragments. Short pieces strung together. She wished she had taken the gun. The baseball bat felt like a silly stick, not at all a real weapon, especially in pitch black.

She moved backwards, toward the Jeep. She recognized its shape and ran the last ten feet, got in, and shut the doors and windows. Now what? That part of the Parkway had no emergency lanes. There were a few feet of grass and then bushes, trees and once in a while a guardrail. She drove the Jeep onto the grass, hoping that she wouldn’t roll over any bodies. The green shadow ahead moved again. And now that it came toward her it was harder for her to see it. She opened the driver’s window and stuck her head out.

“Identify yourself!” she shouted.

The shape moved from one car to the next, coming closer. Five cars ahead.

“Identify yourself!” her voice cracked.

Kasey saw that the figure held something in its hand. Something bowed, short. The green hue lay on it like a shimmer. A blade. She pushed the gas pedal down. The shadow jumped toward her car, probably trying to get over to the driver’s side. Kasey let out a scream when the Jeep hit the figure. The impact smashed the windshield. At least Kasey identified the sound as such. It was still in place but she knew it must be in a thousand pieces. The body slid off to the side. Kasey didn’t stop. In fact, she pushed the pedal down until the Jeep screeched alongside another car and she slammed on the brakes to come to a standstill.