Out of the Dark (Light & Dark #1) (26 page)

She nods, her chin trembling, her eyes bleeding frightened tears.

“I need you to do the gears. I can steer with my left hand if you do that.”

She scoots closer to me, putting both hands on the gearstick, and nods quickly. I flick on the headlights and see the many monsters surrounding us back away with yelps and screams of pain. Smoke from their singed flesh flying into the sky. The sound of tearing metal makes me flinch, and I tell Lilly to put it in first gear but she stares at me blankly, so I tell her first looks like a line and then she does as I ask and I press down on the accelerator and steer us around in a large circle. The monsters jump out of the way of the light, and then they throw their hard bodies against the side of the truck to get us to stop.

“Second,” I yell to her. “It looks like a duck,” I say, and she uses all of her strength to change gears as quickly as she can. I press all the way down on the accelerator and yell at her to change to third and then fourth and then we are speeding away, the monsters chasing closely behind us.

Lilly is sobbing, her hands still clutching the gearstick, ready to change when I need her to. I am breathing hard. The infection has hit my lungs now; I can hear it crackling through the small pockets that should be filled with air and not poison. The world is red and vibrant, alive and dead all at once, but I am pushing my way through it. It won’t end like this. It can’t.

I glance at Lilly, seeing her tear-stained face, and I grit my teeth, swallowing down the blood that has filled my mouth. It won’t end like this. I will protect her.

I will protect her until I can’t.

Chapter Thirty.

#30. The end is only the beginning.

I once had a goldfish. I was around six at the time, and my father won it when we spent the day at the fair. My mother said that it wouldn’t last a day, and my father agreed. “Those fish never last more than a day,” he had said to me, but he won it fair and square and I promised I would look after it until it died, no matter how long or short that may be. I carefully carried it all the way home and I found a bowl for it to live in. I filled it with water, dropped some pebbles along the bottom of the bowl, and fed it breadcrumbs. I called it Henry. The funny thing was, it wasn’t even gold; it was white and black, with speckles of yellow. Not a goldfish at all, really.

I stared at Henry, with his speckled gills, swimming around and around his little bowl for over an hour, his bulging eyes staring back at me blankly. I was waiting for him to die, like my mother and father had told me he would.

My parents eventually told me that I had to go to sleep because I had school in the morning and I wouldn’t be able to concentrate if I were tired from having watched my goldfish all night. I cried myself to sleep that night, knowing that it would possibly be the last time I saw Henry alive. I knew he would die, and I felt like I must have done a terrible job of looking after him for him to die so soon.

Sure enough, when I woke in the morning, Henry was floating on his side at the top of the bowl, his eye staring unblinking toward the ceiling of my bedroom. I cried all day, and I refused to eat my dinner. My mother bathed me and washed my hair, and then she gave me some warm milk before bed, and still I cried. Father came in and sat on the edge of my bed, wiping away the tears that still trailed down my cheeks. He spoke to me in his deep voice, his hand stroking my hair as it splayed out across my pillow.

“Death is inevitable, my darling,” he said. “It comes for us all in the end.”

I cried even harder at that, because I didn’t want to die and I certainly didn’t want my mother or father to die either. “Why can’t we live forever?” I asked him.

“Because life would not be life if we did not die,” he soothed.

I still cried, unhappy with his answer, because who could ever be happy with that answer?

“To love means to sacrifice. I would sacrifice myself for you, my darling, just as your mother would, too. When you love someone, you never truly die. You live on in them, a part of your soul forever touching the earth and gracing people’s lives.”

I didn’t understand. It made no sense to me. I vowed from that day on to never love anyone, not if it meant saying goodbye to them eventually. I was scared to die—of death and saying goodbye—and I was scared for people to leave me. So I grew up lonely. Until the day I met my husband.

He was handsome and caring and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He begged me over and over to go on a date with him, and then one date led to another and another and then one day he asked me to marry him. I said yes, because I knew that it was too late then, I knew that I had fallen in love with him and to lose him at that point would be like dying. We had a child not long after that, and I was happy. Until the world died and everyone I had ever loved died right along with it. And then I was alone again, and I was glad it was quick for the people I loved, only I wished I had gotten to go with them.

Then I found Lilly. She was in the field of sunflowers, surrounded by the yellow glow of their petals. By the buzzing of the honeybees, which were unaware that life had ended and no one needed their sweet honey anymore. And then we had each other, and I was glad I hadn’t died with my family, because I got to be with Lilly, and I loved Lilly as much as anything else I had ever loved before her.

I glance over at her. “Don’t cry, Lilly.”

“But I’m scared, Mama,” she sobs. “I’m scared to die.”

My heart aches for her, for her pain. For the goodbyes we must share. She has never shared with me her fears. Not like this—so fresh and vulnerable, like an open wound waiting to be healed. Only there’s nothing to heal her wounds with. “Don’t be scared. There’s nothing to fear,” I say, my words a gasp of pain on my cracked lips. “I’ll always be with you. Forever.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.” I say, almost choking on the word.

Lilly meets my aching gaze and then abruptly tears her stare away and continues to cry. She looks out of the window, ignorant to my words. I don’t blame her; I understand how scared she must be. I am too.

“Mama,” she whispers. “Mama, look!” She points into the distance, diving up to her knees and pressing her face against the glass, staring toward the bright glow of light across the field. “What is it?”

“A safe place,” I whisper in shock, daring to believe. I had gotten us here? It was true…

“Can we make it?” she asks quietly—as if by whispering it, we wouldn’t somehow jinx it.

I swallow down the blood that fills my mouth “I think so,” I breathe out. “God, I hope so.”

The bright glow of lights is in the center of a field—a large circle of light in an otherwise dark world. Around that great circle the monsters are swarming. The earth is thick with them. They have been called by the lights, by the humans just beyond their reach, but they can’t go any further toward the food source. Some of them turn their gnarled bodies toward our truck as I drive over the soft slope of the embankment. I crash over a collapsed fence and straight into the sea of writhing bodies. They part abruptly away from our headlights, but their nails claw and slice down the sides of our truck as we pass them.

“Lilly, the flashlight,” I say. We will need to run, I decide. At some point we will need to run, and we will need the light to do that if there is any hope of safety.

She leans over, but her seatbelt restricts her small body from reaching down. “I can’t get it,” she whimpers. She looks up at me, determination gritted across her small features, and then she reaches over and unclips herself, and I don’t scold her for it, because I need her to do this. I need her to be brave, just this one last time with me.

She tumbles to the floor in a heap and then scrambles through the small space between our seats until she is in the back. She fumbles around. The noise from the monsters is overwhelming, but her small mutters as she hunts through the toppled over plants and soil are louder, her resolve and strength a high-pitched call to my primal instincts.

I glance back and forth between Lilly and the field of monsters, the truck rocking from side to side as they attack it from every angle. We are close now, close enough that the lights of the safe place are brighter and they—whoever is behind those walls of steel and stone—can see us. More lights turn toward us, glaring in our direction, but they don’t penetrate far enough across the field of darkness to touch us. To protect us. We are so close and yet there is a world between this one and that.

A monster throws itself at our truck, ignoring the glare of our headlights and slamming itself against the hood. The force rocks us, unbalancing us, and the truck jerks to the side and slows its momentum. Another monster slams against my window, and I feel rather than see the glass shatter inwards at me, small fragments sticking in my arms and face. It reaches a bony hand in to me, scratching long nails down the side of my face and arm until I elbow it away with a scream of pain and fright. Claws tear at my door, finally ripping it free from its hinges, and then bodies are pulling at me, and pulling at the truck and then we are as one, toppling over and over, the world a spinning top, the lights and darkness colliding into one confusing blur. A mish-mash of metal and monster and human.

Screams assault my ears, both monster and child, until the spinning top stops and the monsters converge. The truck is upside down and I am folded into the footwell of it. I choke on bile and blood and the taste of hunger in my throat, the gasping pants of death dragging me under, begging for my change. My eyes glare into the darkness, searching for Lilly, finding her trapped in my arms, beneath me. I am hanging upside down, my seatbelt holding me in place. Lilly was flung forward when we crashed but I have caught her, still protecting her. Always.

I look down at her, her eyes squeezed shut, her sobs ceased, and my heart stutters. “Lilly?” I whisper against the onslaught of senses. So many new things I now see and hear. The sights, the smells, the tastes, the mind that is cracking, splintering into something else, someone else. “Lilly?” I say again, my voice a long moan.

She opens her eyes, and all I see is her. Her sweet face, her cheeks tear-stained and scarred from this life, her curls a tangle around her ears. My body is protecting hers, curved over her like a cage of arms and legs, and crooked spine. My senses are tumbling, my body breaking, sweating, and transforming. But I can hear the call of humans, the people behind the wall. They are calling to us, yelling at us to get up.

“You need to run,” I whisper, the truck rocking sideways as the monsters scramble to get to us. We are blissfully trapped in our little bubble of life and death, and I know that this moment is our last, but it can’t stay this way, we both know that. Goodbyes have come and gone, the rest is all irrelevant now.

She lifts her arm, proudly showing me the flashlight still firmly in her grip, showing me what a good girl she was for finding it among the carnage. “Are they good people?” she asks, fear lacing her words, her brown eyes glinting up at me. The truck rocks and rocks, the scratching of nails on metal, of monsters screams, of hunger and anger and the promise of pain to come…

“I think so,” I say, but I can only hope and pray that they are. Pray that they are not all like Sarah. Sarah, who abandoned my Lilly by the side of the road but left me with a map to this place.

I cry out loudly as the poison burns away at my blood, absorbing itself into my body, and I feel myself lose my grip on this life. The world immediately goes silent outside the truck—in the other world that we didn’t want to explore—barring the rain and the thunder and the cry of men in the distance. The monsters have stopped attacking us, as if waiting for something to happen. Brighter and brighter the red glows inside of me, the rich black poison pouring through every one of my diseased organs and suffocating them. “You need to go now, Lilly,” I whisper, my throat constricting, my voice breaking into something else. A voice so deep, that it can’t ever be truly mine. “I need you to go.”

She blinks once, twice, staring up at me innocently, and then she nods firmly, because she knows it to be true. Because I would never send her away if I had a choice. She reaches up and places a kiss against my lips, and when my tears fall, dripping onto her cheeks, they are black, stained with the poison that is killing me.

“I love you, Mama,” she whispers. “I’ll see you soon.”

“I love you too, Honeybee.” But I can’t say anything else because it hurts too much, and I don’t want to see her soon. That’s the worst thing that could ever happen. Because I want her to live. I want her to be free. I want her to be safe, in the bright lights of life.

I scoop her up, ignoring the fact that my limbs feel longer and that my nails are able to cut away at the metal of the door. My fingers are hooked and bony, and my feet have torn right through my old boots. I stretch out of the hole I have made in the side of the truck, holding Lilly’s fragile body in my arms, protecting her from the sharp slivers of metal and glass. The monsters hiss and snap at me, and I hiss and snap right back, warning them to get away. I stride forward, the monsters always a single step behind me. They are confused, unsure of what is happening. I smell like them, I look like them, but I’m acting like a human. They stay back, wariness keeping them a step behind.

Their growls become more incessant, louder and louder the further toward the light I walk, away from the softened black that I yearn for. I look down at Lilly. My breathing hurts, my chest is burning as if it is on fire, and I set Lilly down on unsteady feet and shaky legs. A single trail of blood runs from the crown of her head to her jaw and I wipe a crippled finger along it, hungry. So, so hungry.

I press the flashlight to her chest and push her forward. She stumbles and then takes a single step away, and the monsters behind me scream in fury. With those screams my own words break free, and I turn and bare my sharpened teeth at the monsters that try to follow her. They back up a step, unsure. I am one of them, but not. I am their brethren, but not. They don’t know, they don’t understand. I see the monster with the pearl necklace. She cocks her head to one side, snarling at me, confused, unsure, angered that this is happening.

I look back to Lilly, seeing her steps uncertain, scared, sad…

I blink, feeling the rage inside of me burning my body up, my hands needing to tear and destroy. My breathing is ragged and I am drowning, choking on phlegm and hate, bile and death. My skull is moving, bones altering, and the feeling is agonizing. Lilly stands still, a steady stream of pee trickling down her legs as she watches me, her mother, disappear before her very eyes.

“Run, Lilly,” I whisper with a snarl, hating myself.

She still stares, unsure, confused, frightened for me and for her.

Are they good people?
She asked.

I hope so,
I replied.

“Run!” I scream, as blinding pain ignites behind my eyes.

She turns, her flashlight flicking on, and the bodies behind me converge, surging forwards in a stampede. She is still in the shadows, trapped between the light and the dark. She isn’t moving quick enough, she won’t make it…