Out of the Dark (Light & Dark #1) (12 page)

“Mama?” she says.

I climb up, and then I lower the hatch door back in place and I turn and smile at her. She’s getting anxious and so am I, but we need to stay calm so I do all that I can to relax her—which isn’t much.

“Are we safe?” she asks, her eyes looking tired, with deep black rings below them.

I look around us, seeing the sun getting ready to dip below the trees. The air is cool up here, and I know that we will be cold tonight. Cold and hungry. Lilly holds up her arms to me and I pick her up. She nestles into me, and I kiss the top of her head.

“Right now we are,” I say to her.

“What about when it goes dark?”

“I hope so,” Is all I can say. “Do you want some more gum?”

“Not yet. We should save it so that it lasts.”

I nod. “Yes we should. Do you like it?”

She nods, her face still scrunched against my neck. “Yes I do,” she mumbles, and then I feel her breath hot against my neck as she yawns.

I find a spot to make a makeshift bed, and then I gather some of the leaves that are scattered across the roof. I pile them up and lay Lilly down on them, hoping that they will soften the hard ground for her. I use the carrier bag with the T-shirts inside as a pillow for her, and she lays her sweet little head upon it. The bag gives a small rustle, and then she falls asleep right away. I stroke her hair as I watch the sun set, my thoughts empty of anything useful. I don’t even have the energy to feel worried or sad anymore.

I just am.

Chapter Fourteen.

#14. A new dawn.

I wake fitfully throughout the night, the sound of screeching and claws scratching hanging in the air like a stench that you can’t wash away. Minutes later it goes quiet again, and I slip into unconsciousness. An hour passes and I wake to the sounds again. On and on it goes: I wake, I tremble, I squeeze Lilly close, and then I slip back to sleep when it all goes quiet.

They are searching for us—for anyone, really—but they don’t know we are up here, and I am too tired to worry too much about anything. There are places that your mind will take you when fear takes hold, horrible places where you will scream into the darkness and beg for it to end. And then there are times when you are just a black void of nothing. You suck the air into your lungs and you breathe it back out. You blink, you stare, you feel your heart beating, but there is nothing else. It’s a place beyond exhaustion but not without compare.

I am there right now. Drifting in and out of consciousness. Hoping that Lilly gets to sleep the full night through. Hoping that we find food tomorrow. Hoping, hoping, hoping. Even though it pains me to do it. Hope seems to be the only thing left.

The final time I wake to the screeches, I cannot get back to sleep. So I lie there, staring up at the stars, blinking every once in a while. I cuddle Lilly’s warm body to me, feeling her breath on my neck. She is silent, barring the soft noise of her breathing. I stroke her hair and let my thoughts wander aimlessly until the sun begins to rise.

The soft orange glow builds slowly in the distance at first, the night being banished for another day. The monsters go back into hiding, and everything is as it should be again. I slide Lilly’s arms from around me and sit up. I creep to the edge of the roof and look down. There are signs of the monsters’ presence but nothing that is impactful—no shattered glass, no blood or dead bodies. They came, and they moved onward to another destination before morning.

I pull my cigarettes from my pocket and light one. I take a deep drag, pulling the nicotine into my lungs, and then I release it slowly. My stomach hurts with hunger, and there is a low throb in the base of my skull. I turn to look at Lilly, seeing that she is still sleeping, and I’m glad. She will be very hungry when she wakes, and I have nothing to offer her but stale gum. I feel bad—wretched, even. I feel like a failure to her. What kind of mother lets her child starve to death?

I finish the first cigarette and light another one immediately afterwards, needing the buzz they give me. I hear the rustle of leaves as I finish the second cigarette. Lilly comes to join me at the edge of the gas station roof. We dangle our legs over the edge as we look into the distance, imagining all the things that could be just over the horizon.

“I’m hungry,” she whispers.

I know that she feels bad for telling me that, because she knows that I can’t do anything about it. But I’m glad that she tells me nonetheless.

I hug her and kiss the top of her head. “I know, Honeybee. So am I.”

She goes silent after that. No point in wasting energy talking about the things we do not have. We eventually climb back down from the roof. I take some more of the dirty T-shirts and put them in our carrier bag. There is an empty bottle, which I take as well.
If we find water then we can fill this bottle and keep it with us
, I think.

We push our barricade out of the way of the doors and step out into the warm sun with heavy hearts. Lilly slips her hand into mine and wordlessly we begin to walk again.

We need to find water. And soon. That is even more important right now than food, even though my stomach angrily disagrees. But we are very quickly dehydrating. Lilly is hot, so I help her out of her tatty cardigan and tie it around her waist. I note the thick black lines that run down Lilly’s arms and I squeeze my eyes shut, not wanting to have seen them. She smiles up at me, unaware, and I see that her gums are bleeding. I don’t say anything, though. What would be the point? Instead I smile back and we start to walk again.

I think that we might be getting close to a town. There are more cars around now. I check each one but don’t find anything useful in them. None of them work anymore, either, which is disappointing. There’s a small bridge up ahead and I am both anxious and happy when we get closer.

A bridge means water, and water means we can drink and wash. But there may be shadows where the monsters can hide. I give Lilly the carrier bag to hold, and I make her stay in the center of the road while I go to check.

The bridge is small—only big enough to get over on foot. It’s rickety also, and I don’t think walking over it would be a good idea at all. I climb down a small embankment carefully, seeing that there are no shadows, and there is a small stream of water running underneath it. I climb back up and gesture for Lilly to come over. She does, and I help her down the embankment.

She looks unsure of what to do, but she stares at the water thirstily. It isn’t clean water, but it is coming directly from a stream somewhere, so it’s fresh. We decide to drink it because we are really thirsty now, and we are dehydrating, and I don’t have anything to make the water sterile for us anyway. I take the carrier bag from Lilly and pull out the bottle, and then I fill it with water and take a sip to show her that it is okay. She smiles when I hand her the bottle and then drinks it greedily, letting it spill down her chin and T-shirt.

I scoop handfuls of water up, and drink and drink and drink until my stomach feels weird and sloshy. I smile as Lilly fills the bottle back up and drinks some more. When she’s had enough she hands the bottle back and stares at me wide-eyed.

“We should wash now,” I say, and she nods.

We undress until we are in just our underwear, and I rinse our dirty clothes in the water. I lay our clothes down on the embankment to dry a little and then I begin to wash myself. Lilly is splashing in the water, kicking it and giggling as the cold droplets land on her head. I smile. It comes easily. I try not to look at the thick black veins that now cover almost a third of her body. I look at my own body and see the same thing, though my lines are much darker. But I don’t care about me. Only her.

“Mama!” Lilly whispers urgently.

My eyes look up to meet hers. “What is it?” I ask.

“Something touched my toe,” she whispers, sounding worried. She looks back down into the water, watching in fascination.

I stand up quickly. The water is only a couple of inches deep, so it can’t be the monsters. I splash over to her, looking into the water the entire time, but don’t see anything. I stop next to her, waiting for the water to settle, and when I do, I see a little fish. It’s only a small one. Barely the size of a sardine. We stand there in the water, watching as more of the little fish come out from wherever they were hiding. They swim around our toes and Lilly smiles happily at the sight of them.

“Fish,” I say.

“Fish,” she repeats, still smiling.

We both watch in silence for several moments. Their little silvery bodies reflect the light off them every time they turn with a small flip of their tail. Lilly’s smile grows every time one swims over her toes.

“We should catch them and eat them,” I say.

Her smile falls. “Okay.”

I look across to her. “We need to eat, Lilly.”

“I know,” she says sadly.

“I’m sorry,” I reply, but she doesn’t say anything back.

I use the carrier bag to catch some of the small fish by scooping it through the water. They flip and splash in the bag, and I lift it out of the water and let it drain away. I take them to the embankment and I tip them out onto the mud there. We watch them flip some more as they try to get back to the water, but I don’t let them. Their movements become slow, their gills opening rapidly as they struggle for breath. I can’t stop staring, fascinated at their fragility as they suffocate.

Lilly puts her hands over her eyes and begins to cry, and I look up at her, at her skinny body, her ribs protruding almost painfully. Thick black veins trace up and down her body, some faint, some vivid. Her hair is a mess and her skin is pale. I look back to the small fish. They no longer move. They are dead.

I gather some sticks to make a fire, but then I remember watching a program once and that it said that you could just eat fish raw. I pick up one of the little slimy fish, placing it in my palm. It doesn’t look very appetizing, but it has nutrients in it that will give us energy. It might stop the painful tug in my stomach. It might help to stop the ache in my head and let me think properly. I pick up the little fish using my thumb and forefinger and I drop it into my mouth, and then I crunch down on it.

It wiggles and I realize that it wasn’t totally dead, and I feel bad as my teeth crunch down on its insubstantial little body. It tastes bad. Like really bad, and I gag and grimace, my body giving a little shudder as its broken body slides down my throat. I look up at Lilly who is watching me carefully with her wide brown eyes.

“It’s not too bad,” I say—a big lie, because it tastes really bad. I pat the ground next to me and she sits down. “Pick one,” I say.

She looks at the little dead fish—that might not be totally dead—and she counts them. Her lips move slowly, the whisper of numbers falling from her lips. Seven little fish. Eight including the one I just ate. That makes four each. I pick up another one and she does the same, and then we drop them into our mouths quickly. Our eyes are locked as we crunch our way through the fish. At one point I think she might be sick, but she holds it in.

Afterwards we drink lots more water, and then we each have a stick of gum to try and get rid of the taste of dead fish from our mouths. I rinse her hair in the water, tugging my fingers carefully through the knots, until once again her hair is full of ringlets and not just one giant knot. I hand her one of the musty T-shirts to wear and she slips it over her head, smiling at the picture of a cows head on the front. Apparently this used to be a big milk district called Collier County. That’s what the T-shirt says, anyway.

“We sure do love our milk!” Lilly says with a giggle, as she guesses what the smiley-faced man on her T-shirt might have once said.

I laugh with her and I slip mine on. It’s the same picture of a cow, but the words are different.

“Ain’t milk great!” I say with a smirk.

We laugh some more and then I fill up the bottle of water and we put our pants back on. I give Lilly one of the caps that I got from the gas station and she puts it on. Our pants are still a little wet, but that’s okay—neither of us mind, because at least they don’t smell like pee and sweat anymore. We climb back up the embankment, feeling better than an hour ago. I carry the carrier bag full of our sort-of-clean old clothes, the bottle of water, and the comic I found yesterday.

My stomach gurgles loudly, and feels a little swishy with all the water we have drunk. The fish tasted bad, but they have made my head feel a little clearer so I’m glad that I ate them. I blow a bubble with the gum and look down at Lilly. She stares in amazement at the pink bubble coming from my mouth and smiles widely. She tries to copy me but can’t manage it, so we stop and sit down right there in the middle of the road and I show her how to do it.

Half an hour later, we are both walking again and blowing bubbles happily.

The small milk town comes into view, and we stop as we look at the shadows of houses and stores in the distance. I glance down at Lilly but she doesn’t look up. She’s still blowing bubbles, almost like right now she is trapped in her own little bubble.

I tug her hand a little and we begin to walk some more, and I try to ignore the anxiety that builds in my gut. Because while this is good—houses, stores, cars, all ripe for us to look through and hopefully find supplies—it’s also bad. Because it could house the monsters.

We pass the first car. The skeleton of a man or woman are still inside, hunched over the steering wheel as if they were still driving. The monsters have picked this one clean. I think it is very old, right from the start of the outbreak. The monsters were less frantic back then. Less starving. So they were more careful. Not like now. Now they tear their prey apart. The next car must have been on fire, because it is a mere shell, the metal burnt and fragile-looking.

The first storefront comes into view. It’s a small souvenir store that was once filled with milk products and tacky gifts. The sign says it was once called Milk Products by Flo. There’s a picture of a cow hat with clapping hands. I strangely hope that I can find one of these hats for Lilly to wear, because I know that she will like it more than the one she is wearing.

The town finally comes properly into view, and I find myself smiling despite the fear that trembles in my gut and makes me feel nauseous—though that could also be the raw fish digesting. This town looks picturesque. Like every town, there are buildings that are destroyed—either by fire or by the elements, there is old garbage everywhere, and the remnants of bones. It is dirty, dusty and not as bright as I’m sure it once was. Yet there is something that is quite sweet about it.

The storefronts each have red and white awnings, and there is a strip of grass running through the center of the main road, with small trees. Some are dead and some are alive. Cars are crashed, burnt out and destroyed, luggage is strewn across the sidewalks, suitcases flung open, their contents now missing. Same old, same old. Yet I have a good feeling.