What Happens in the Darkness (2 page)

Get out. Have to go. Go get help. Have to
—

She raced to the other side of the room. “James? Jamie?” Janelle shoved his arm.

The intermittent outside spotlight again lit up the bedroom.

The ceiling above James’s bed had collapsed. She could barely see him beneath it.

“Get up,” Janelle cried. “Please, Jamie! Get up!”

Something had pinned him to the mattress. Something like a stick of wood. She couldn’t see his head, but she could see his stomach. His hands lay beside the wood, as if he’d tried to pull it out. Something like thick rope trickled out of his stomach. His dead fingers clutched the wood as if his last effort had been an attempt to dig it out of his own flesh. His fingers, bloated and bluish, were half-embedded in the wound.

She wanted to pull the wood out.

But she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t touch him, couldn’t stand the idea of her skin rubbing against his, knowing his would no longer be warm like hers, knowing he was dead now and that meant his skin would be cold. She couldn’t do it. As much as she loved him, she knew she couldn’t touch his dead body.

“I’m sorry!” she sobbed, tears falling so hard they blinded her. Her heart was broken, and she was sure it had exploded inside her chest, could feel the fragments of it floating around in there. She’d never known such pain, the death of her heart. She just wanted the pain to stop.

“Jamie,” she wailed, not wanting to leave her brother but unable to touch him. She wanted to stay with them both, stay with them forever, and she waited to die beside them.

The apartment shook again and threw Janelle to the floor. She didn’t really want to die. She just wanted everyone else to not be dead.

Mom had stopped screaming.

Janelle stood up in the center of the room. Mom wanted her to live. Mom had told her to run. Where? Maybe if she stayed, help would come. Someone would rescue her.

They had to.

She smelled smoke and glanced out into the hallway. The living room was on fire.

Couldn’t stay here. Had to get out. Had to listen to Mom and—

She took a single step, and a second later the floor where she had stood disappeared, fell into the downstairs apartment. Janelle leaped over the collapsing floor, landing hard in the hallway, smashing to a stop against the baseboard. She glanced back and watched Ray’s bed disappear into the hole in the floor.

She struggled to her feet and raced to her own room. The rest of that ceiling had caved in, had destroyed just about everything. Plaster and wood coated her furniture, her stereo, the clean clothes her mother had constantly told her to put away.

She dug out yesterday’s jeans and sweater and sneakers. They were covered in dust and plaster, and she had to beat it off the clothing. She quickly struggled into her outfit and fled the apartment.

Outside the apartment, the hallway was destroyed. The air was thick with dirt and plaster, and she began to choke. Her eyes watered. She rushed back inside, fighting black plumes of smoke from the fire, thick burning air that smelled powerful, smelled like gasoline, black smoke that tried to force its way into her throat. Janelle dropped to her knees and crawled to the bathroom and grabbed a towel, quickly wetting it with water from the pipe that had burst behind the tub. She wrapped it around her head, covering her mouth the way she had learned during fire safety at school.

She raced past the burning living room and was back outside, in the hallway. She knew not to try for the elevator, to never use an elevator in an emergency. The exit stairwell was blocked by its own walls and the bodies of other tenants who’d tried to escape. She heard voices down the hall, frantic voices, people crying for help and muttering words she couldn’t understand, words cut off by sobs and coughs. They seemed to be headed in other directions and not toward Janelle.

She climbed over smashed doors and chunks of ceiling and wall, finding footholds in crushed beams of wood, stepping on doorknobs and metal and bodies. The stairwell was dark, lit only by an occasional emergency light that hadn’t gotten smashed. Janelle had seven flights to descend.

She stopped short, sure she knew one of the people lying in the stairwell. Not that Janelle could help—the woman was clearly dead, or quite a mess, anyway—but the shock of seeing the body made her stop. This one looked like Mrs. Cole, the lady from upstairs who used to babysit Janelle and her brothers. Mrs. Cole was so nice and liked to wear purple and used honey instead of sugar in her tea. Now she was dead on the top of the sixth floor. Mrs. Cole, who used to read
Cat in the Hat
to Janelle and had a finch named Josephine and bought fresh tomatoes every Tuesday from Carlos’s bodega around the corner. Now her head was twisted way too far to one side. Her eyes were open but they weren’t blinking. Mrs. Cole was missing a shoe.

“I’ll find your shoe,” Janelle whispered, and the heart that had betrayed her before, the heart that had hurt her so badly wasn’t gone after all. It was still there, and it hurt all over again. Only it was worse somehow, this fresh hurt. Somehow it was worse. Poor Mrs. Cole was missing a shoe. How was she supposed to get anywhere with only one shoe? There was so much broken glass everywhere; she was going to badly cut herself.

Janelle searched around Mrs. Cole’s body but couldn’t find the shoe. “Please,” she sobbed. “Stay here. I’ll find it.” She forgot the woman was dead. Forgot she wasn’t about to get to her feet and search for her missing shoe.

“I’ll come back,” Janelle cried. “Someone’ll come, Mizz Cole.” Janelle inched her way past, careful not to step on her.

But her foot caught the woman’s shoulder, and Janelle went flying headfirst down the stairs. Her arms flew up, trying to break her fall. One hand landed on the banister, and she tried to catch hold. She twisted sideways and shrieked, landing hard on a man’s body lying halfway down the stairs. Her knee slid in a puddle of something wet, something slippery and sticky, and it was too dark to see what it was. She had to use the man’s body to push herself back up, could feel his nose and mouth beneath her fingers, and her hand slid into a spongy mess.

Janelle started crying. She managed to get back on her feet, but her clothes were smeared with what she guessed was blood and her hand was coated with the dead man’s brains. She shook her hand, trying to get the oozy mess to fly off, but it wasn’t working.

She sobbed and wiped her hand on the dead man’s jeans, frantically trying to get rid of the disgusting mess. Moments later she was on her feet and fleeing down the stairwell.

She finally escaped the building.

In the streets, people ran around as if they had no idea where they were running to but ran anyway, ran like mad, their screams and cries almost louder than the air-raid sirens, louder even than the screeching emergency vehicles. Others sat in quiet huddles as if waiting for the earth to swallow them.

Vehicles raced along the streets and plowed down the people in their way. Cars smashed into traffic light posts, into buildings. Car alarms were heard over everything, their endless beep-beep-beeps and squeals and shrieks only adding to the confusion.

Fires everywhere filled the air with harsh, bitter smoke, burning Janelle’s eyes. Storefront windows exploded, spearing anyone nearby with torpedo glass.

Air-raid sirens turned into a message telling people to “Stay Calm, Don’t Panic.” Then hours later it abruptly stopped, as if someone had pulled the plug.

Janelle ran. She had no idea where she was heading but wouldn’t stop. She just ran. She later discovered she’d been running toward Manhattan. Janelle never looked back. She’d been afraid to.

She’d wandered aimlessly until she found something familiar. Until she’d reached Eighty-Sixth Street and Third Avenue and the Papaya King store where they used to buy hotdogs.

She shook her head to clear it, bringing her back to the present.

A small army of rats seemed to come from nowhere and raced toward her. Scavenging rodents gone topside from the sewers were ravenous, anxious for a taste of flesh.

Janelle scrambled to the roof of a Chevy hardtop, wishing she had a stick or a weapon of some kind. She stared down at them, waiting for them to attack.

But they abruptly changed direction. Wherever these rats were headed, Janelle was no longer of interest. Even weirder, the rats suddenly seemed to be fleeing. She stared in the direction they had come from. Nothing was there. Nothing hiding in the shadows or behind cars or trashcans. Nothing she could see, anyway.

Janelle scrambled off the car and stood in the center of what had been a four-lane street, once dangerously thick with traffic. She stared toward Harlem—toward what used to be home. Not a single vehicle passed. Not a single person.

She stopped clawing at the concrete dust plastered to her face. Inside her nostrils, death-smells like raw wounds resided, and she tasted the dust that coated her tongue and gums and tonsils.

The stillness of the air weighed her down, a stillness disturbed only by the occasional pop of a dying chunk of smoldering debris. A stillness foreign to Manhattan. The stillness of death and destruction had sucked away the taxi sounds and laughter and car alarms and street hawkers.

But then the whispers. The other sounds.

Something was coming, something she could sense but couldn’t see. Something more than what hid in the shadows. Taunting her with subtle sighs and heavy breaths that came from nowhere, from no one.

On scabbed knees, her reminder of now-dead brothers and rough tomboy play, she prayed. “God …” She looked toward the sky as if hoping to make eye contact. “I’m scared,” was all she could think to say, and her words sounded foreign. The first words she’d heard in days.

When Janelle wanted to play kickball with her brothers, they made her sit on the curb waiting to chase the ball after it went wild. Chasing after a stupid soccer ball that landed between parked cars or rolled over dog poop. It always gave her hope that they might let her join the game. But they never let her play. And when they all headed back into the apartment for Kool-Aid she trailed behind, learning a lesson in disappointment early in life. She resented having wasted so much time on nothing.

This was how she felt now. Like she’d been cheated out of playing.

She glanced at the sky and realized night was coming. Nightfall scared her the most. That was when the sounds came—not human sounds, not talking or crying or yelling—but groans like buildings settling, scratches against stone, like something attempting to escape from the rubble.

Nowhere to go, no one to talk—

“There you are …”

Janelle’s pulse quickened. She dropped to the ground and hid behind the Papaya King cardboard cutout. That hadn’t been a whisper, not just a hint of a word. Someone had said something. She’d heard it clearly but still couldn’t see where it came from.

A man’s voice. He was still hidden from view. She frantically scanned the area to no avail.

“Little girl,” he crooned. “Come out, come out. I won’t hurt you.”

Something about the voice—too sweet, somehow fake.

“I see you there,” he said. “Hiding like a little sewer rat. Why are you hiding?”

She still couldn’t see him. She swallowed plaster dust instead of spit, almost choking. Her legs refused to cooperate when she tried to run. She hugged the Papaya King cutout, fingers digging into the moldy cardboard.

Out of the shadows he appeared, his lanky legs stepping over chunks of concrete as if they were pebbles. A few feet away now.

Janelle recoiled and backed into the building. “What do you want?”

“Just to talk, child. Come here so we can talk.”

Something felt wrong. Everything in her urged her to run. “Leave me alone.”

“Leave you alone? You don’t mean that …” He grinned, his eyes narrowing, bony features stretched against the diminishing light. “This is my time. This is my world now.” He sounded as if he’d forgotten to clear the phlegm from his throat. “I’ve been waiting for you …”

“What?” she whispered, near tears. That was impossible. He couldn’t have been waiting for her—how could he know where she would be? He couldn’t know who she was. No … this was the thing she’d feared, the thing following her in the shadows. She knew it was. She felt it.

And looking at him, she knew why she’d been so afraid.

He leaned toward her, bending almost in half, long bony fingers pointing blame. His blackened halo of hair gleamed in the waning daylight. His long coat was covered in dust and was buttoned up to his neck. He smiled, the edges of his mouth upturned like a clown’s.

Janelle tried to back away but pressed against the bricks behind her. Her lips trembled. “Wha—” she said, the word a grunt, almost unintelligible. “What are you?”

Fingers snaked toward her in the darkness, and “Come now,” almost a whisper.

Janelle cowered, terrified, dreading the feel of those fingers against her flesh.

A rat crawled out from behind a rock. It glanced from the man to Janelle and back again. Janelle’s direction offered no escape, so it darted toward the rock it had been hiding behind.

The man was faster, and he scooped the rat up and brought it toward his face, holding it up, examining it. “Didn’t get away, I see,” he said, stroking its head with one bony finger. The rat was the size of a housecat, and although it bared its teeth, it looked terrified. It trembled and squealed and jerked, clearly trying to escape.

“Too bad, too bad,” he said in his singsong way and turned the rat over. His fingers pet the belly of the rat, holding it still against its frantic struggles. “You see?” he said to it. “Nothing escapes. You can’t get away from me.”

With one long, protracted fingernail he dug into the rat’s flesh, slicing it down the center. It bucked wildly, but he held it tight. He spread the wound, exposing the pink flesh. Blood poured over his hands. He brought it to his mouth and lapped the blood, chewed the flesh. He pulled away, strings of intestine dangling from his teeth.

The rat quivered and died. The man moaned, seemed to enjoy his meal. He sucked the flesh and licked the blood and then dropped it to the ground. “Tasty. One of the slow ones though. Not as tasty when they’re slow.” He wiped the blood on his coat and focused his attention on Janelle again.