Dark Inside (7 page)

It remained miraculously intact—a bit surprising considering the store beside it was a pile of rubble and the road looked like a construction crew had taken several jackhammers to it. There were five cars in the parking lot, all of them with shattered windows. Whoever owned them wouldn’t be driving away anytime soon.

“Why didn’t it get destroyed?” she wondered out loud.

“Is it new?” Daniel’s voice was calmer than before. Even the tenseness in his shoulders had eased up a bit.

“The school? Yeah, about ten years, I think.”

“Earthquake regulations. It’s probably reinforced.”

“Still. It’s creepy.”

“But it’ll keep you safe. Come on.”

They crossed the lawn and headed over to the side where Aries knew the entrance would be unlocked. Just around the corner were the doors that led to the theater. They were supposed to be having rehearsals. There was a good chance that some of her friends would be there. Right about now she could use a familiar face.

As they moved closer she could see that some of the windows were shattered. Bits of grass lay in the flower beds below. Still, there was very little damage considering the quake was so massive.

“Maybe we’ll find Colin,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the coward came here. I hope he did. I really want to have a word with him.”

“You’d be better off if it’s empty,” Daniel said. “Groups are bad. People do stupid things when they’re together.”

“But you’re here,” she said.

“Not for long.”

She paused, her hand on the door. “What do you mean? Are you taking off?”

“You’ll be safer without me.”

Her stomach lurched and ice shot up along her spine. The thought of being alone in the school was enough to bring tears to her eyes. She didn’t want to be on her own. She’d freak out. She grabbed hold of his arm, holding on tightly.

“You can’t leave me. I need you.”

She peered into his eyes, but it was impossible to read his expression in the darkness. Did he really think his being there was going to be dangerous? She couldn’t imagine why he
believed this. People worked better in pairs, didn’t they? Two sets of eyes were better than one. She thought of being alone in the school, in the darkness where anyone would be able to effortlessly sneak up on her. The same panic she’d felt outside the grocery store coated her body, forcing her to shudder involuntarily.

“Please don’t leave me,” she finally said.

“Fine,” he said.

“Promise?”

“Sure.”

The school was dark and the silence was heavy in the air. Up ahead she could see that the emergency lights were on in the hallways, so at least there would be a small amount of light. It would help; at least they wouldn’t be groping at the walls blindly to try and find the theater.

“It’s so quiet,” she said.

“That’s a good sign,” Daniel said.

“We should check the theater first,” she said. “There might be people there.”

“Where is it?”

“Just down the hall on the right. Follow me.”

As they walked, Aries continued to talk. She’d never experienced the school so quiet before, and it creeped her out. At least by talking she could almost block out the eerie silence that was louder than any of the words that escaped her lips.

“Maybe Ms. Darcy will be there,” she said. “She’s really cool for a teacher. I get good marks in her class. She’s the one who’s directing
Alice in Wonderland
. Colin was against it, but that’s only because there’s no male lead. He always wants to be the center of attention. You’ll like her. She’ll probably know what to do. Not because she’s an adult but because she’s pretty smart.”

She paused when she realized she could hear her own footsteps on the tiled floor but nothing else.

Turning around quickly, she saw nothing but empty hallway.

Daniel was gone.

They know we’re here. They’re coming for us. What lies beneath has pushed its way to the surface once again. Time to get away while there is still air left in our lungs.

But they will still come.

No matter how much we run and jump and hide.

They’ve known all along.

It’s a game, you see. A simple ploy. If they were to get rid of all of us, then it would be Game Over for all eternity. What fun would that be?

So they will keep some of us alive. Let us breathe and eat and hide. Every now and then they will even let us breed. Then they hunt us anyway. But make no mistake, this is a calculated plot. They will take the ones they need for their future and destroy those they see as worthless.

They have plans for us.

They’ve already won.

They will remain smart during the annihilation their rage brings.

They walk the riverbed in their fancy clothes and diamond rings. They slouch through the streets with their shopping
carts and mismatched shoes. They walk among us, which makes them especially hard to find. A family member perhaps. A lover. A child. This is how they survive and we die out. They are much cleverer than us.

They’ve been here for a very long time.

Just like animals can sense an earthquake, they felt it coming. They could taste the fear on their lips. It ignited a spark inside of them. Chaos. Perfect, lovable, candy-coated, goes-down-oh-so-sweet anarchy. A time to surge forth. Arrange their massacre. Send out their messengers. Plenty of time for preparation. They gathered their numbers and organized their attack. They didn’t even need to RSVP.

It was the perfect plan, and they are the weapons that our leaders keep warning us about. They are the things that hide in your closet and fuel your fear. They lurk in both alleyways and living rooms. They sit across from you at restaurants and push past you to ride the bus.

They are the dark thoughts inside of us we pretend we don’t hear. We ignored them but they didn’t go away. They grew stronger. Louder. They began to make sense.

I can feel them inside me. The voices are tonguing secrets in my ears that travel down my vertebrae. A thousand squirming insects are chewing on my stomach lining. Mice crawl around inside my intestines. Cockroaches pick at the veins behind my eyes. The voices scream inside my head, but yet they never say more than a whisper. I can’t breathe. I can’t think.

I’m being eaten alive.

I look forward to death. It will be peaceful compared to this.

Sometime after two in the morning, Mason’s mother drew her last breath. No one noticed or bothered to come. They probably wouldn’t know what to do anyway; the morgue was filled to maximum capacity. He hadn’t seen a doctor or even an orderly in over six hours. The hospital was in chaos.

Mason was holding her hand when she went. He’d been sitting by her bedside all night, unable to do anything except watch the rise and fall of her chest as the machines helped her breathe.

Thousands of people had died in the past twenty-four hours. Maybe even more—he’d heard nurses talking in the halls about the earthquakes. But he didn’t know anyone on the West Coast. Besides, there were more important things on his mind. Hearing about the deaths of strangers didn’t fill him with a lot of sadness.

But the bottom dropped out of his world when his mother joined them.

Earlier he’d had the television on to try to gain some understanding. The media was reporting that 123 schools had been bombed. People were screaming words like “terrorism,”
“mass suicide,” and “organized plots,” but so far there was nothing to show that the attacks were anything but random.

Then there were the earthquakes, six of them all over the world. Each of them measured at least 9.5 on the Richter scale. The West Coast was utterly destroyed. The quakes caused tsunamis. Rumor had it that most of Hawaii was gone and the casualties in Asia were in the millions.

The television networks were no longer scheduling regular programming. A thousand channels around the world were broadcasting nothing but news.

None of that mattered to Mason as he clung tightly to the cooling hand of his mother.

His friends were all dead. Only a handful had made it out of the school alive. His teachers were dead, even Mr. Yan with his dented Honda Civic.

Something horrible was happening, but Mason was too numb to truly care.

Earlier the taxi dropped him off by the 7-Eleven and he walked over to the school. The situation was surreal; he spent a bit of time wondering if he’d stumbled into someone else’s dream. The sky overhead was thick and dark. Above his school was a continuous murky mountain of ash and smoke that sucked up all the scenery. The air burned his throat when he inhaled. It made him light-headed and he tripped over the sidewalk twice until his lungs and brain grew accustomed to the lack of oxygen.

The remains of his high school lay out before him, a pile of rubble and fire. No one even noticed as he crossed over the barriers set out for crowd control and moved toward the gymnasium. The firemen were busy and the police officers were over by the growing crowd of panicky parents and curious onlookers. Ambulances and paramedics rushed about, but
there didn’t seem to be many survivors left to take to the overcrowded hospital.

Chaos.

There was already a memorial section, and he moved among the lit candles, flowers, and pictures of his former fellow students and friends. He saw Tom’s dad talking to another parent while his mother sobbed uncontrollably. Quickly, he moved on before anyone noticed him. He didn’t want to have to explain why he was still alive.

The gymnasium was at the rear of the building, and Mason slipped away from the noise, ignoring the heat waves cascading from the destruction. What was he looking for? He couldn’t answer that. Maybe there was some tiny bit of hope that a few of his friends might have escaped. But was he really expecting to see them being pulled, miraculously alive, from the rubble?

“I just need to see,” he spoke out loud.

The parking lot at the back of the building was eerily empty of people. Hundreds of cars, his own somewhere in that sea of metal and concrete. If someone stopped him he’d say he was there to pick it up. Holding his car keys in the open for evidence, he moved as close to the school as possible, searching for any signs of life.

There were no bloodstains on the sidewalks. No bodies piled on one another for morgue removal. No half-burned books or personal items that might have been thrown through the air during the explosion. Had he been expecting that?

There was nothing to suggest that beneath the debris, hundreds of bodies waited. No proof at all that his school had become a tomb.

He methodically checked around the gymnasium doors to see if there might be a way to slip inside and take a look. But
the entire back wall had collapsed, and the only way in were a few cracks big enough for a small animal. Heat poured off the building, burning his face, and the back of his neck grew wet with sweat. Getting down on his knees, he poked through the remains, hoping to find something that might have belonged to one of his friends. Eventually he found a pencil case, bright blue with pink flowers, that looked familiar. Inside were a few pens, an eraser, and a folded note. He opened it.

SEE YOU AT THE MALL AT
FIVE.

Yeah, nope.

No one was meeting anyone at five.

He held the note tightly and reread it several times.
I must be in shock,
he thought.
I’ve lost all feeling in my body. This is what they mean when they say we go numb inside. Everyone’s dead and I don’t feel a thing. Mom’s dying and all I can do is come down to the school and pick up a pencil case? What the hell’s wrong with me? It’s like they never existed.

There it was again, that feeling as if he were in someone else’s dream.

“Hey, you.” A voice broke through his daze. Off in the distance a fireman was moving steadily toward him. “This is a restricted area. Get the hell away from here.”

Mason turned and sprinted toward the parking lot. He found his car exactly where he left it that morning, right beside the blue truck with the broken window. Less than a day had passed, but it felt more like weeks. He’d been happy this morning. Hadn’t Tom told him that great joke and made
him laugh? They’d been planning a camping trip to Chestnut Lake for the weekend. Swimming, camp fires, some hiking—the kind of stuff he and his friends loved doing.

How did the world change so quickly?

He knew he probably shouldn’t be driving in such a weird condition, but it didn’t stop him from starting the ignition and pulling the car into reverse. Wheels squealing, he tore out of the parking lot, putting on the sunglasses he’d left on the passenger seat a few hours ago.

He didn’t go home. Instead he drove around until his gas tank was nothing but fumes. Stopping to refill, he grabbed a bag of chips that he ate but didn’t taste. Glancing at the clock, he decided he’d spent enough time away as the doctor ordered. He headed back to the hospital because there was nothing else he could do.

His mother’s hand was so cold. Her body was relaxed; most of the wrinkles she fussed about had disappeared from her motionless face. Her hair fanned the pillow, dark brown like his own, thick and shiny, only a few gray hairs showing her age. She was beautiful, his mother, the woman who’d always been there for him. Two weeks ago he’d given her roses for her birthday and she’d been so happy. They’d gone out for dinner together, but she’d paid the bill. She wouldn’t let him treat her when she knew he was saving his money for college.

Gently he touched her cheek and pulled the covers up to her shoulders before he turned off the light and left the hospital.

It was quiet outside. The night air was cool on his face and the moon was half a sliver in the sky. He got into his car and was surprised to see the cashier booth unmanned, with the barrier open. He’d been at the hospital for several hours and probably owed at least twenty bucks for parking. But since no one was there, he left without paying a dime.

There were very few cars on the streets. Everyone was inside, glued to their television or on the phone, desperately trying to reach foreign relatives in faraway places. Hadn’t he heard something on television about the phone lines being down in several countries? Could the earthquakes really have caused all that? How many people were out there dialing and getting nothing but dead air? Hundreds or thousands must be desperate for news on their loved ones. Lucky them, at least they still had hope.