Suspense

Dark America, Part 11 – Road Trip! Road Trip!

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Continued from Chapter 10, here.

Sergei sat in the driver’s seat of the heavy American-made truck, one hand on the steering wheel, trying to decide if he was annoyed or amused by the child’s constant chatter.

Perhaps a bit of both, he decided after a few minutes. After all, there was no reason why the two emotions had to be exclusive. He would readily admit that he much preferred companionable silence to filling the air with empty words, but the light in Sara’s eyes as her mouth babbled on was enough to warm even his frozen, cynical heart – if only slightly.

She was looking at him in the rear-view mirror, he noticed, and he replayed the last couple of sentences. “Yes? What about mountains?” he asked, not quite sure what her point had been. Continue reading →

Dark America, Part 10 – What’s Best for the Child

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Continued from Chapter 9, here.

Once I was totally certain that Sara was asleep, her little frame gently rising and falling in time with her slow breaths as she curled up beneath the blankets on the air mattress, I turned to the others. “So,” I began. “We’ve got a decision to make.”

“We need to take her back,” Corinne said immediately. “No question about it. She doesn’t belong here.”

“It is her home,” Sergei pointed out mildly, his tone neutral. Continue reading →

Dark America, Part 9 – Cooks in the Kitchen

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Continued from Part 8, here.

Even after agreeing to share her story, Sara pulled another truculent maneuver, one that only worked when its user was under fifteen years old.

“I’m hungry,” she announced, crossing her arms and glaring at me. “And all I’ve had is cold food because I don’t know how to plug an oven into a generator.”

Want proof that I don’t know how to handle kids? For a second, I considered arguing with her, trying to get this girl to tell me her story before I bothered helping her with warming up any food she might have. Continue reading →

Dark America, Part 8 – Introductions I

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Continued from Part 7, here.

I stared down the barrel of my gun, my mouth falling open.

In combat, everyone started a virgin. The term didn’t refer to their prowess in bed, although we never failed to give them crap about that, either. No, they all started as virgins, because they’d never shot another human in combat.

Killing another human being… I hated the stereotypical response, but it changes people. It changed me. I grew harder after I lost that virginity, felt like all my empathy burned away under the blowtorch of combat. Continue reading →

Dark America, Part 7 – The Survivor

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Continued from Part 6, here.

“Survivors. It’s got to be survivors, there’s no other explanation.” Henry looked around at the rest of us, as if he could be more convincing by maintaining eye contact. The Frenchman’s thin mustaches practically quivered with the force of his words.

“Yeah?” Jaspers countered, not bowing to this insistence. “Then where the bloody hell are they? And why are they leaving cryptic billboards instead of getting on the radio?”

“Radios don’t work, Jaspers,” Sergei pointed out mildly. “And maybe they don’t understand what has happened. Americans are weak, and all people disappearing is scary to think.” He glanced over at me. “No offense, yes?” Continue reading →

Dark America, Part 6 – A Message

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Continued from Part 5, here.

“I’m not feeling quite so confident about this route you’ve picked, Brian,” Henry muttered, as we gathered around the map that I’d spread out on the back gate of our pickup.

I looked over at the stringy Frenchman. “Why’s that?”

He reached out and, with one finger that had its nails nibbled down almost to the quick, tapped on a city that lay ahead. “That’s why,” he said shortly. “Must we really pass through here?” Continue reading →

Dark America, Part 4 – Inconclusive

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Continued from Part 3, here.

“Food’s a bit flat, I must admit.” Henry frowned into his tin can, picking at it with a fork as if probing the innards of a dead combatant. “What do you call this disgusting mixture? Spaghetti and hoes?”

“Spaghetti-Os,” I corrected. “And it’s classic American comfort food.”

His grimace grew. “Explains a lot about you lot, doesn’t it.” Continue reading →

One Shot Kill

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*Author’s aside: Goddamn, that’s a cool picture.*

“Come on,” the man repeated implacably as he dragged me along. “We can’t stay here. It isn’t safe.”

I wanted to shout back at him, but focused instead on keeping my feet beneath me. I’d already stumbled and nearly fallen, and learned the hard way that my new captor didn’t slow down to let me recover. Continue reading →

Retirement, Part 4

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Continued from Part 3, here.

Garrick didn’t need anything, but of course, that didn’t stop him from finding some way for me to help him out.

I grunted as I bent down, struggling to keep my fingers under the heavy box without them getting crushed.  “And all of these need to be moved from the storage area out into the back of the kitchen?”

“That’s right,” he nodded, watching me through slitted lids as he picked at the dirt under his fingernails with a little shard of metal.  We weren’t supposed to have actual knives, of course, since the Company felt that this would pose an unnecessary danger to the inmates – er, workers – but that didn’t stop most folks who wanted a knife.  Most of them, like Garrick, found a bit of metal and used a grinder to sharpen down one side to hold an edge.

Bam, instant knife. Continue reading →

Retirement, Part 3

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Continued from Part 2, here.

The next morning, one thought stuck with me from my nightmares, the night before: Lyman hadn’t been the only one down there, ghostly, ghastly, grinning under the waves.  There’d been other faces, faces of other men I’d come to know during my contract here, men who finished before me and headed home to their families.

Had they all made it home safe?  Or were they in somebody’s stomach, just like most of poor Lyman?

I did my best to make my inquiries discreetly.  I knew who some of those former guys had been friends with, who they’d been most likely to contact after they got back home.  I dropped by those guys, reminisced about old times, tried to figure out if they’d heard anything from their buddies since their departures. Continue reading →