Dark Creations: Hell on Earth (Part 5) (28 page)

Chapter 25

Amber sat in silence as Jack drove along a seemingly endless stretch of road.  To her, it felt as if they’d been driving for hours, but in reality it had
only been twenty minutes.  Twenty minutes when no time existed to spare was an eternity, especially when the fate of mankind teetered on the brink of a great precipice and Lord Terzini stood at its back, arms thrust forward, primed to pitch it over the edge to its demise.  His ambition knew no boundaries and had spawned mercilessness inconceivable to most.  He would overthrow humankind, soon. 

The realization of what would happen in a matter of days scratched and clawed at her brain, at her entirety.  If his plan came to fruition, and she believed it would, then all hope for the human species would end.  All would die. 

Her maker’s heinousness had entwined its barbed tentacles around her very veins as if it were a vicious parasite forcing its foul intentions through her lifeblood.  Every part of her felt tainted by awareness of his plans, pained by them. 

She lowered the window of the van and filled her lungs with warm evening air, hoping it would ease her agony.  She tried to focus on the road ahead, but her mind wandered.  She replayed her appeals to Jack and the others, how much convincing it had taken to get them to take her to the farm they were headed t
o.  Their resistance had been expected and only four men other than Jack had agreed to come.  The rest had eyed her skeptically.  She’d thought that every one of them should have volunteered.  After all, their lives depended on thwarting Terzini’s plan.  They were all in mortal danger. 

Amber did not want them to die, least of all Kyle and his sisters.  She had risked her life to save three human beings.  She did not want to see a planet f
ull fall.  As the van pulled onto a familiar dirt road, her heart began to hammer.  With every beat, torturous pain spread quickly, swelling and stretching like a great beast awakening inside her.  Of course, no beast resided in her chest, just Terzini’s deadly objective.  She only hoped to rid herself of that dark passenger in the coming minutes. 

Jack drove along the long and winding road.

“Pull off here,” Amber told him. 

He looked at her suspiciously.  “I don’t recommend trying anything.  There are five of us and only one of you,” he said and veered off to the right. 

The truck rattled to a stop beneath a willow tree.  Innumerable tendrils draped from the willow over its roof, canopying it with its blooming fronds.

“Now what?” Jack asked and leveled a hardened gaze at her.

“We go on foot,” Amber said beginning to resent his distrust of her.

“Where?” he questioned huffily.  “I don’t see a damn thing around here.  As far as I can tell, this dirt road leads to nowhere.”

Annoyance prickled inside her.  They did not have time to argue.  Jack and every other human being’s lives were hanging in the balance, all except hers. 

“Look, I get that you didn’t trust me before.  You saw me as the enemy when I first came to your camp and asked for Gabriel’s help.  But now there’s no reason to be suspicious of me.”

“Not from where I’m sitting,” Jack replied arrogantly.

“I brought Gabriel back, didn’t I?  And I brought three innocent people back, too.  Doesn’t that prove anything?” she asked heatedly.

Jack remained silent for several seconds, too long.  Amber was done waiting around. 

“You know what?  You can just sit here then!  I’ll head out and see if the virus is still there.  If I get killed in the process, good luck to all of you!”

“Wait!  What are you talking about?  A virus?  What virus?” Jack asked concernedly.  She suddenly had his attention.

“We don’t have time to waste, Jack!  By the time I explain, it could be too late,” she told him.

Still, Jack remained quiet.

“I don’t have time for you to deliberate, Jack,” she said evenly.  “
You
don’t have time for you to deliberate.  I’m going.”

Amber slid the rear door of the passenger van open and climbed out.  Her route was uncomplicated.  All she needed to do was continue along the dirt path until she reached a detached barn.  A heavily armed team assisting her would have been preferred to her solo mission.  She would have liked the coverage.  Members always manned the garage and she was certain they’d be awaiting her arrival.  By now, each of Terzini’s creations had been apprised of her actions.  They would shoot first without hesitating. 

She patted her hip and felt the metal of her pistol, heated from resting so close to her body, and regretted that she would be forced to rely on it, and it alone, to save mankind. 

She began walking briskly down the lane and soon felt others behind her.  She turned and saw that Jack and his men had come to their senses and followed. 

All around her, the woods felt watchful, as if it had been waiting with bated breath for her to come.  She quickened her pace and began to jog.  Her shirt and pants clung to her body, damp with perspiration, as exertion and nerves worked against her.  Movement in the brush startled her.  She slowed and listened, reaching out with all of her senses.  Plants shifted, swaying from side to side and a breeze stirred treetops.  Beneath the sound of the stirring, however, another existed, lower and nearer to the ground.  A purposeful swish of dried leaves and tall grass whispered in the air and gained momentum.  Amber found herself faced with a decision to make.  She could stay and fight whatever lurked in the woods, or try to evade it altogether and run as fast as she could to the garage.  Either way she risked death, and worse, failure.  Failure carried with it a hefty price tag.  The fate of roughly six-billion people rested on her shoulders. 

Another footfall echoed, closer; too close.  She froze and raised a hand for the others to see.  They stopped, too.  She fortified her stance, spacing her feet shoulder-width apart,
arms at her side, and drew her weapon.  She waited for the sound again, waited to be attacked from any direction.  The rush of her heartbeat drumming dangerously behind her ears put her at a disadvantage, reducing her hearing to that of an average human being.  She felt fairly certain she was not under siege by a group of average humans and needed each of her faculties to stand even the slightest chance against more than one of her own kind. 

A branch snapped on either side of her simultaneously.  A quick glance at the others revealed that they had not heard what she’d heard.  She hadn’t considered the possibility of synchronized attacks, yet thought that exactly that was happening.  Two quick steps advanced to her rear.  With her heart knocking wildly against her ribs, Amber spun to face the assailant to her left and fisted her hand tightly, ready battle.  But when she turned, she saw that no one attacked.  Only a raccoon approached.  It saw her and her group then scuttled off.  She heard leaves and branches as it scurried and breathed a small sigh of relief. 

“Feeling a little jumpy, Amber?” Jack asked with the slightest hint of mockery.

“That’s an understatement,” she replied and breathed as though she’d just completed a marathon.  “I thought we were under attack.”

“An attack?” Jack chuckled softly.  “Now I can tell you a story about an attack,” he said making a clear reference to the earlier part of his evening.  “I’ll take the raccoon any day of the week over those monsters we dealt with.”

Several of his men mumbled in agreement.

“Trust me; you’ll see that the Hunters were the least of our problems when we get to the garage at the end of this path,” she said somberly.

“Are you going to tell us what the hell is in the garage
, or is it supposed to be a surprise?” Jack asked and attempted lightheartedness.  But his face was a picture of grimness. 

“We need to just get there okay,” she answered cryptically.  “I can’t explain it properly.  You need to see it to believe it.”

Jack looked at her with equal parts curiosity and dread.  He shrugged and nodded to the others and she continued marching toward the garage.

After several more minutes of alternating between walking and jogging, she arrived at the garage and stood before it.  She paused before moving to open it, listening.  She did not hear movement beyond its door, a strange and unexpected discovery.  She knew that inside a cargo van waited and held in it a large, stainless-steel vat containing a strain of virus more potent than any to ever befall the planet. 

The virus, created by Lord Terzini himself, was a fine-tuned mixture of both the Anthrax virus and the H5N1 bird flu; only his concoction was far more contagious than either alone.  His deadly virus was more of a plague, a plague that would pass easily between millions of people at a time.  It would eradicate every human being affected by it and would spread quicker than any expert would have time to identify it, much less stop it.  It would begin with flu-like symptoms that would rapidly degenerate to pneumonia and respiratory failure.  And the entire process would occur within the duration of the common cold.  His plague was the worst weapon mankind would ever come under attack from, and the last.

Dread slithered through her as she motioned for two of Jack’s men to lift the garage door while she and the others stood ready to shoot whoever waited on the other side.  When the door had been raised, though, no one waited on the other side.  In fact, the garage was empty.

She inhaled sharply in disbelief.

“No, no!” she breathed.  “This can’t be.”

“What?  What can’t be?” Jack asked.

“The van, the van is not here.  It’s gone.”

Jack just stared at her.

“Don’t you see?  We’re too late,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion.

“I don’t understand,” Jack said but she could see the unmistakable fear in his eyes.  “What is going on here?  What are we too late for?”

She looked to the concrete floor of the garage then back at Jack.  Her vision was blurred
by tears.  “The van that was supposed to be here, inside it is a plague, a super virus that Terzini plans to release in a heavily populated area.  Once it’s released, there’s no stopping it.  It spreads like the common cold, and will kill every person infected with it, everyone on Earth.”

Jack stepped back, his eyes wide, mirroring every bit of fear she was feeling. 

“Jack, the van is gone.  And the virus is gone with it, which means the plan has been set into motion.  Someone is delivering it now as we speak.  It’s over,” she said and clutched her head with both hands.  “Nothing we do matters now.  It’s over.  He wins.”

She raised her head and watched Jack.  He’d turned to his men, looked from each face to the next.  Guilt unlike any she’d ever imagined crashed against her with the force of a mighty wave, thrashing her about before finally slamming her into the painfully sharpened stones of the shoreline of reality.  Each of the men in her company would die; a slow, painful death.  What would begin as something as innocuous as the sniffles would fast worsen before ending with asphyxia.  They would fight and gasp for breath while their pulse rates skyrocketed.  Their heads would throb as their blood pressure rose and their skin turned blue.  They would convulse then suffer paralysis before unconsciousness and death claimed them.  Their last days would be spent suffering.  And she was powerless to stop it.

“God help us,” Jack said and closed his eyes.

But Amber knew that even
God could not help them now.  Lord Terzni was going to unleash hell on Earth. 

Coming Soon:

The final installment of the Dark Creation series

Dark Creations: Dark Ending

About the Authors

Jennifer and Christopher Martucci hoped that their life plan had changed radically in early 2010.  To date, the jury is still out.  But late one night, in January of 2010, the stay-at-home mom of three girls under the age of six had just picked up the last doll from the playroom floor and placed it in a bin when her husband startled her by declaring, “We should write a book together!”  Wearied from a day of shuttling the children to and from school, preschool and Daisy Scouts, laundry, cooking and cleaning, Jennifer simply stared blankly at her husband of fifteen years.  After all, the idea of writing a book had been an individual dream each of them had possessed for much of their young adult lives.  Both had written separately in their teens and early twenties, but without much success.  They would write a dozen chapters here and there only to find that either the plot would fall apart, or characters would lose their zest, or the story would just fall flat.  Christopher had always preferred penning science-fiction stories filled with monsters and diabolical villains, while Jennifer had favored venting personal experiences or writing about romance.  Inevitably though, frustration and day-to-day life had placed writing on the back burner and for several years, each had pursued alternate (paying) careers.  But the dream had never died.  And Christopher suggested that their dream ought to be removed from the back burner for further examination.  When he proposed that they author a book together on that cold January night, Jennifer was hesitant to reject the idea outright.  His proposal sparked a discussion, and the discussion lasted deep into the night.  By morning, the idea for the Dark Creations series was born.

The Dark Creations series, as well as the Arianna Rose series, are works that were written while Jennifer and Christopher continued about with their daily activities and raised their young children.  They changed diapers, potty trained and went to story time at the local library between chapter outlines and served as room parents while fleshing out each section.  Life simply continued.  And in some ways, their everyday lives were reflected in the characters of each series.