Authors: Stephen O'Rourke

Come Into The Light (8 page)

BOOK: Come Into The Light

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“Yea, it is, now get in the truck.”

Amy was struck by a feeling that they were being watched. She looked about and saw sunbies appearing on the roofs, on the streets, some of them were armed. She grabbed onto Harold’s arm and pointed them out to him.

“Okay, Seth, now we’ve really got to go.”

“But my son. He’s here somewhere, I know it.”

A shot rang out from the rooftops and Seth was hit in the chest. Harold and Amy quickly grabbed hold of him and threw him into the truck, not bothering to look and see where the shot came from. There were more. The truck was besieged with bullets. The driver’s side window was shattered, the windshield was cracked, and a headlight blown out as Amy sped away from the curb. The left front tire was hit seconds later and then a rear tire. They had to abandon the truck. They carried Seth into a shopping center under gunfire and hid behind the jewelry counter as the shooting continued checking Seth’s condition. The bullet missed his heart but hit a lung. He was bleeding from the mouth and struggling to breathe. Of all the talents Amy had she didn’t know how to remove a bullet and neither did Harold.

“I know of a doctor who could help him but we need a vehicle.” Amy said.

“We can’t go out in that.”

“I know, but she isn’t in the city and we don’t have the time.”

There was more shooting. A larger barrage, a battle. Sunbies were flooding into the store with Rosa at the head. Her golden eyes had zeroed in on Harold and Amy with uncommon efficiency as if instructed to do so.

“I can help. You know I was a nurse, Harold. Let me help.”

Harold was shocked. It seemed like all his friends were lost to him. Amy had to get him to focus, to not look at Rosa, to not be swept into her spell, its spell.

“Let me help. Let us bring him to our lord for healing.”

There was a hallelujah expelled from the followers at her side yet before they could make an advance a commotion from outside made them turn and go. Rosa promised they would be coming back so they knew they couldn’t stay there. Luckily Harold found a wheelbarrow in the gardening area as they made their way to the back of the shop and into a corridor ranked with other shops toward the loading area at the rear of the center. All of this took time and Seth was finding it harder and harder to breathe. They kept him on his side in order to clear his air passages but he still had problems breathing. They were afraid they were going to lose him but no other ideas came to them. They tried getting him to talk, to stop from fainting.

Harold broke a lock to pull up on the overhead door. There was a service van parked in the loading area, possibly illegally but who cared, there was no one around. There would be no greater opportunity. They worked quickly with Harold carting and distributing Seth into the van while Amy busied herself with the ignition system.

It was getting dark even though they were in the middle of the day. After Harold removed Seth from the wheelbarrow and laid him out on a canvas at the back of the van he looked up to see what was making things dark. He thought it might be a wave of clouds creating a storm but it hasn’t rained in ages. What he saw instead seemed even less possible and it left him speechless. The sun was being eclipsed. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it happening right there before his eyes. He thought he had to be dreaming.

“Amy, look, do you see?!”

“Shhh, someone will hear you.”

By the time he got to the front of the van he found her waiting for him with an expression of absolute amazement and a ring of keys jingling in her hand.

“They were wedged in beside the seat.”

“Damn.”

The van was opened in the back so Harold could keep Seth company while still talking to Amy as she drove. They had to take the long way back to the library, curving around the sounds of battle.

Amy told Harold to stay in the truck as she went into the library. Seth’s breathing was becoming shallow. He told Seth to hang on but he was becoming anxious. Seth wouldn’t survive much longer and Amy seemed to be taking too long. She could be in trouble. What if there was someone inside waiting for her? He wasn’t sure if there was any place that was safe and it was getting darker by the moment outside. At the same time it was getting darker he could feel a weight being lifted from his mind. The inhibitors worked but there was still the weight of something there yet now that something had lifted off of him. He could hear the distant sound of howling, of people in the midst of bewilderment and pain. The air of battle had turned silent.

He saw Amy’s pale face shoot through the gloom. She was carrying a back pack and a satchel as he flew open the doors in the back for her, grabbing on to the pack and the satchel as she handed them to him. He closed the doors as she got inside. She was out of breath but fine otherwise.

“I was afraid. I was almost going to go inside to look for you.”

“I’m okay. We have at least an hour’s drive ahead of us. Do you think he’ll make it?”

Harold looked down at Seth. What could he say? It was anybody’s guess.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there’s a first-aid kit in the satchel if you think of anything that could help.”

The howling had gotten worse.

“What in the hell is that?”

“Just drive, okay.”

There was sporadic graffiti on the side of the library detailed n red ink saying FUCK THE SUNBIES, SINNERS REPENT, BLESS OUR GOLDEN CREATOR, and HOLY WAR as they pulled out of the parking lot. They encountered a mob after they went a couple of blocks. Amy, without missing a beat, locked the passenger door as someone tried to get in. All those sets of radiated golden eyes were coming out of the gloom and merging toward them. Rocks were thrown at the van. The passenger side window was busted in. A hand reached into the lock. Seth grabbed hold of a crow bar near the wheel wedge and stabbed at the hand sharply until he heard a scream and the hand recoiled. The butts of rifles were slammed against the metal sides of the van. The mob howled, they roared that God would not forsake thee. The sound was chilling, ear-splitting, but Amy kept her eyes on the road and pressed the accelerator to the floor running over bodies along the way. More objects flew within her sight and she had to duck when one of them came in close contact with her, poking a hole through the windshield instead and tumbling off the dashboard. It was a rock, some kind of rock, or maybe a piece of concrete from one of the cracked structures.

She kept driving and the howling, the clashes against the van continued. The sky had turned into a dark hole now, a dark abyss that shrank the sun’s light out of existence. One headlight blared into the night showcasing the devastation as Amy touched a knob on the steering column. The other headlight hung in shatters.

The road ahead of them stretched out to the city’s limit. They had to make it. They had to keep going while all around them there was madness and the darkened, cooling sky.

-The End-

About The Author

Stephen O'Rourke is a graduate of Scripps-Howard School of Journalism and the Hollywood Script-Writing Institute. He has done everything from being a farmhand to selling solar panels. His work has appeared in magazines and he lives in upstate New York.

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