Out of the Dark (Light & Dark #1) Read online

  “Mine too,” I say and smile.

  She doesn’t smile, but she does take my hand, and I feel her warmth thread through her fingertips and wrap around me. Her cheeks have a little rosiness back to them, her curls are drying and they bounce lightly when she walks, her lips are no longer blue but a soft pink, and her eyes have their spark back in them. I feel happy that she looks like my Lilly again. Like a little girl. Right now, in this moment, we are mother and daughter walking along the beach.

  We walk back along the overgrown path, back toward the truck, and when we get there I help Lilly inside it, buckling her back into her seat. I grab some of the fruit and vegetables from the plants in the back, and then I sit next to her and we eat with the windows open, the sound of the water hanging all around us and the fresh air cleaning out our smoke-damaged lungs.

  The tomatoes are incredibly juicy and I moan when I bite into one, my mouth salivating, desperate for more. I swallow it down, almost certain that I can hear the fruit hit my stomach with a resounding splat. I look over at Lilly every now and then, watching her eat with gusto, biting carrots and tomatoes, eating beans and lettuce. Her eyes begin to get heavy again, and I smile and tell her to go to sleep.

  When she’s snoring softly I get back out of the truck and slide myself up onto the hood, and I smoke my very last cigarette. It seems fitting to smoke the last one now. We are clean, and fed and watered, she is happy—she even laughed today. I feel something that might be happiness. So yes, I smoke my last cigarette to finish off the brilliance of this day. I do not think about Peter or Mary, or the monsters that are chasing us. I decide that if today can be this good, then tomorrow could be even better. That tomorrow we could find the safe spot on the map and they would open their doors to us, and we wouldn’t need to run and hide any longer. I decide that the people there will be good and true, that I can trust them. I pretend that I don’t have a haze of red blanketing my vision right now, and that it isn’t nearly time for me to die. That the tomatoes were really good, and that I didn’t crave Lilly’s blood the entire time I was eating, and that I can’t hear her little heart thumping in her chest, slow and melodic. The sound soothes me; it reminds me that she is still alive and there is still a reason to keeping on living myself, to keep on fighting.

  I pretend, and I force myself to hold on. Because I have to. Because that’s what mothers do. I am Lilly’s mother and I will protect her until I can’t.

  I fall asleep on the hood of the truck, the sun warm on my face and body, my blood pumping languidly through my dying veins. I sleep, but I don’t dream of anything. I feel content in my sleep, I know this, even with the lack of dreams.

  *

  When I wake, I see that the sun is beginning to fall and the sky is becoming darker. Rain is coming, making the daylight fade faster than it should. My heart stills for a fraction, my ears pricking and searching the world for the first wicked screams of the monsters. It’s still quiet though, barring the crack of the storm brewing somewhere in the distance. I am panicked, frozen in fear because I fell asleep and I have slept for far too long.

  The first screams pierce the sky like a balloon exploding. It is sudden and loud, startling me enough that my body jumps and I slide a little off the hood. I sit up, finally free of my terror-filled stupor, and I jump down from the truck, glancing in to see Lilly’s brown eyes staring back at me. Her face is blank, her eyes a bloodshot pink like I know mine are. She is frightened, and that forces me to move, to conquer and move past my own fear.

  “It’s okay,” I say as the first drops of rain begin to fall.

  I tip my face up to the sky, letting the drips splat on my hot skin. I dart my tongue out, flicking it across my parched lips, and then I look back in at Lilly. She is still watching me, her eyebrows pinched together. Another scream echoes out to us, and I know she feels it too, though possibly not as strongly as me…the pull. The pull of the scream. My heart constricts, wanting more of the scream, my body feeling the tug of the call.

  I swallow, knowing that they are coming, that they are searching for us right now. They can feel us like we can feel them. I can almost hear their panting thoughts as they hunt us down. And they are close because I didn’t drive us far enough away. I didn’t put enough distance between us and them. Instead I slept, in the sun, letting my happiness kill us both.

  The next scream is so loud it chills my blood. The rain is coming down harder and plastering my hair to my face, and I sob because I’m stupid and they are here. My breaths are coming too quickly for me to keep up with, and I feel dizzy and sick from it.

  “Mama!” Lilly screams.

  Her face is panicked, and I know—as my mouth fills with blood, as I feel the pinch of too-long nails and deformed toes in my boots—that I am almost gone. I shake my head, as if dazed and needing to escape from the cage in which I am trapped, and I run around to my side of the truck just as the first monster charges out of the trees. I drag the driver’s door open and jump in, slamming the door shut behind me. With a scream of agonizing pain I force the door back open and release my now broken hand, and then I slam the door closed again, clutching my crushed and bloody fingers to my chest as I cry loudly.

  “Mama, Mama, Mama!” Lilly calls my name over and over as we are surrounded by red, glowing eyes and angry screeches. “Please Mama!” She begs and begs, but I can’t stop shaking, can’t stop the red and black blood from dripping from my crushed fingers.

  A monster slaps my window with its own deformed hand, and I look at it and see the pearl necklace hanging at its throat. It snaps its teeth at me, looking almost gleeful, which is peculiar as I’ve never seen any expression other than anger and hate on their twisted and bony faces. I reach across my own body and turn the key with my left hand, and try to grip the wheel with my right hand while I change gears with my left, but it hurts so much.

  “Lilly, I need you to help me,” I say, my voice sounding far away, like I’ve been swallowed under water. I am almost not me.

  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 ma
y 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 eye
s, 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.