Dark Vanishings: Post-Apocalyptic Horror Book 1 Read online

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE Tori Wakes Up

  CHAPTER TWO Viper Goes to the Dentist

  CHAPTER THREE The Dagger of Geldon

  CHAPTER FOUR Blake

  CHAPTER FIVE Darren Takes a Vacation

  CHAPTER SIX Here, There Be Demons

  CHAPTER SEVEN Thou Shall Not Steal

  CHAPTER EIGHT Ricky and Hank

  CHAPTER NINE Red Oak

  CHAPTER TEN A Guest at The Bay Palace

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Travel Plaza

  CHAPTER TWELVE Burn It Down

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Home Sweet Home

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Atlanta Goes to the Dogs

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Lupan

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Mickey's Game

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Signs

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Country Roads

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Stranger In The Night

  CHAPTER TWENTY The Man with the Baseball Bat

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE What Have I Done?

  Dark Vanishings Two - Sneak Preview

  Keep Reading!

  Author's Note

  Copyright Information

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Tori Wakes Up

  In the gold-and-flaxen late afternoon sun, cumulus clouds threw cottony shadows against the land, and the park unwound in a lord’s ransom of jade and ruby.

  Where am I?

  Tori awakened to the thick scent of cut grass. Bleary-eyed, she raised herself up onto her elbows and examined her surroundings. Her mountain bike dozed on its side like a sleeping lion. Fifty yards ahead was a blacktop parking lot dotted by three cars. Behind her bicycle, the grass tunneled down between bordering elm rows and sprawling blackberry bushes embellished with white flowers.

  She remembered biking to the park after lunch. But had she stopped to rest? She didn’t recall.

  She did remember promising her mother to be home by three so she could shower and make it to the hairdresser by five. Ted Harrison was picking her up at seven for dinner before the high school prom, which gave her just enough time after her hair appointment to slip into her dress and—

  I am so freaking late. Mom is going to kill me.

  Her red, shoulder-length locks, ablaze in the late day sunshine, were littered with bits of grass and leaves. She thought of Rip Van Winkle and a beard which grew for years and years while life passed him by. How could she have slept for four hours in the town park? Hadn’t the park been crowded with picnickers and fishing boats when she had biked in after lunch?

  Within the desolation of the park, she felt strangely exposed.

  What if Jacob had come for me while I was asleep?

  Jacob Mann, the boy from third period study hall who stared at her daily with a twisted grin that never touched his slate-gray eyes. Jacob Mann, who she had seen last summer, standing among bed sheets hung to dry in her backyard, watching her through her bedroom window. Jacob Mann, who was permanently expelled for threatening Mr. Gilder, the school guidance counselor, with a switchblade.

  Last December she had volunteered to distribute food at the Red Oak homeless shelter, and he had been there, standing across the street among leafless deciduous trees, winter cloak billowing like a vampire’s cape, his dead stare burning holes in her.

  And last month, when the ground had thawed and the community garden had become ready for planting, she had looked up from her trowel, over the rows of leafy greens, to see him watching her from the sidewalk. Crow-black hair matted to his forehead. Those lifeless eyes. That grin: at-once, vacant and baleful.

  Feeling eyes upon her, she sprang to her feet. The copse of elms bordering the decline swayed to the lake breeze, and as dappled light danced amid the branches, she thought she saw a pallid face watching her from the trees.

  Jacob?

  Her heart thundering, she turned her head toward the bike. If Jacob burst from the trees, would she be able to pedal her way to the parking lot before he cut her off?

  When she turned back, the face was gone. Shadows ran deep within the copse, as though night was pooled within, waiting for the sun to depart. But there was no deranged stalker watching her, and she began to feel a little embarrassed for letting her imagination get the best of her.

  Feeling along the back pocket of her cutoff jean shorts, she pulled out her phone and checked the time.

  4:51 p.m.

  She still had time to make the hair appointment.

  As she ran to her bike, her shadow followed her, stretching as though it was reflected in a fun house mirror. Clutching the phone, she double-clicked her mother’s smiling face. After a burst of dial tones, the phone began to ring. And ring. No answer. Stuffing the phone back into her pocket, she pedaled across the bumpy grass and hopped the bike onto the blacktop, picking up speed.

  She whipped past a black Volvo—unoccupied—and accelerated across the lot, catching a glimpse of an empty red Honda Civic. The lot branched out to a winding, tree-lined park access road. She leaned to the left, taking a blind turn without checking first for traffic. Her heart pounded, and she expected to hear a car horn blare before the metal grille crushed her from the side. But the road was empty of traffic, and there was only the leafy-green smell of summer’s approach on the air as she rushed toward the town center.

  Below the shoulder-less two-lane, the land dropped away from a rocky cliff to a gurgling brook thirty feet below. The rear tire caught the edge of the pavement, and as the bicycle wobbled, she leaned hard to the left, righting her balance.

  Two minutes later she left the access road behind and coasted into Red Oak proper, past the town courthouse and village green. Catching her breath, she pedaled harder.

  4:55 p.m.

  As Tori veered north onto Main Street, the modest three blocks of the town center came into view. She passed the police station on her right. Set off to her left was Bob and Mary’s 24-hour diner, the gray, aluminum-sided rectangle flying past in an indistinct blur as her legs pumped faster. Beyond the diner, a half-mile west, meandered the sparkling waters of Cayuga Lake.

  A landscaped island divided Main Street with parking spaces aligned diagonally against the island and along the sides of the street. Though the spaces were choked with vehicles, Tori never saw their red brake lights flare to life. In fact, there didn’t seem to be a single car moving along the street.

  At the center of downtown, on Main Street’s east side, stood Barbara’s Boutique—a red, brick-faced square squashed between a florist and the Red Oak Cafe. Squeezing the brakes, she wiggled the bike between two SUV’s and hopped the curb onto the empty sidewalk.

  That was the moment when she started to worry. Where is everyone? Downtown was resplendent with potted flowers and cardinal splashes of low-angle sunshine. On such a warm Saturday in the upstate New York village, the street should have been busy with pre-Memorial Day shoppers and people going out for an early dinner. But there wasn’t anyone to be seen despite the rows and rows of cars up and down Main Street. She half-suspected that everyone was hidden inside the shops, waiting to jump out in unison and yell Surprise! as if part of a “Twilight Zone”-inspired version of “Candid Camera.”

  Leaning the bike against a maple tree which spread a blanket of shade across the sidewalk, Tori ran up the steps. Her heart sank at the sight of the empty boutique. The boutique never closed its doors early on prom night, yet the interior was vacant.

  Tori grasped the door handle and pulled, expecting to find the boutique locked. She was surprised when the door opened and the chill of air conditioning spilled down her legs.

  Black leather swivel chairs were aligned along the mirrored walls. As she s
tepped past the cash register into the heart of the boutique, she had the impression of walking through a graveyard. Her reflection paced her on both sides of the elongated room, following her like twin phantoms.

  “Hello?”

  Her voice reverberated hollow against the walls.

  “Mrs. Donnelly? It’s Tori Daniels. I have a five o’clock appointment?”

  Barbara Donnelly did not answer because Barbara Donnelly was not there. Yet the lights were on, the air conditioner was rattling through the ceiling vents, and the front door was unlocked. Anybody could have walked through the doors and cracked open the cash register.

  “She probably just stepped out for a moment. Maybe I should wait for a few minutes,” Tori said to herself. She sat upon one of the swivel chairs at the back of the store, idly spinning back and forth as her doppelgangers watched from the mirrors. The cool air felt nice on her skin.

  Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she dialed her mother again. The phone went on ringing.

  “I know you’re there, Mom. Pick up. Please.”

  Apparently Cheryl Daniels lay hunkered down with the rest of the townsfolk, playing their little game of hide-and-go-seek on Tori. She nervously scrolled through her messages and noticed no one had written her for several hours. Several text messages had arrived during lunch hour, the last a 12:30 p.m. note from Jana Davies, suggesting that Tori and Ted meet up with Jana and her boyfriend after dinner. Since then, nothing. No missed calls. No frantic voice mails from her mother wondering where Tori was.

  Is the network down?

  The cooling system whispered white noise. Beyond the front door, shadows grew longer along Main Street, spilling off cars and trees like black ink.

  She glanced at a set of black double doors at the back of the store. The supply room. It occurred to her that anyone could be waiting behind those doors, watching her through the slit. She felt her skin prickle.

  “Mrs. Donnelly? Are you back there?”

  The double doors watched her. The cooling system clanged and bucked as though something was stuck in the pipes. Suddenly the elongated store felt like a crypt, the swivel chairs like torture devices in which scissors sliced and curling irons burned. Tori pushed herself up from the chair.

  The knobs to the double doors rattled behind her. Surely her imagination was playing tricks on her and she actually heard the pipes expanding and contracting, as the air conditioner pumped polar air against the afternoon heat. Tori walked straight toward the front doors. Between the swivel chairs. Past the combs and brushes set in jars of blue liquid like preserved body parts. She didn’t dare look back. Because if she did, those black doors would creak open, and something unspeakable would stalk out of the darkness, running its claws along the backs of the swivel chairs as its maw opened to reveal rows of blood-soaked fangs.

  No matter how fast she walked, the exit door never seemed to draw closer, as though she were walking on a treadmill. The pipes shook harder. Neglected hinges creaked behind her—the sound of the black doors inching open.

  Tori ran for the front door, pulling when she should have pushed. The impact rattled the plate glass, resounding as though a kettle drum had been struck. In her panic, she thought she was locked inside the boutique. Her head cleared. She pushed through the front door and ran for the mountain bike.

  The warm air felt stifling after the chill of the boutique. She threw her leg over the bike seat and pumped the pedals, racing northward past empty vehicles neatly aligned along Main Street. The streets were devoid of people. Her hair appointment and the prom long forgotten, she pedaled toward her house. As the hour passed six o’clock, Tori did not yet feel her world tearing apart at the seams. But she would. Soon.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Viper Goes to the Dentist

  When the police car bounced off a parked pickup truck and ramped the curb, Viper bolted awake. His eyes opened in time to see the trunk of a maple tree becoming unsettlingly large in the front windshield. The police car veered left as the side view mirror exploded against the trunk.

  As the car passed under the leafy boughs of the tree, flecks of afternoon sunlight drifted across the windshield in a confused assemblage of light and dark. The car barreled through a hedge and came to a stop five feet from the brick wall of a dentist’s office.

  Viper glanced out the side window and saw a large, smiling tooth with legs. The tooth, wearing a Kansas City Royal’s baseball cap and cleats, proclaimed—

  “Brush everyday and keep the cavity monster away.”

  “Well, that’s just fucking great. You nearly ran over a goddamn cavity fighting tooth. I’ll bet you boys got your drivers licenses from one of Sally Struthers’ correspondence courses.”

  But the two cops that had been in the front seat when Viper had dozed off were nowhere to be seen. Unless the cops crouched down beneath the seat backs, snickering about the fast one they pulled on Viper, someone owed him an explanation. The engine hummed, idling stupidly, awaiting its next orders.

  “What in the wide, wide world of sports just happened?”

  Viper, who was really Charles Sanderson—anyone who called him Charles got a value meal smackdown and a side of whoopass fries—tried to reason through the conundrum of a police car bounding down a city street with nobody at the wheel.

  Did the two cops bail from the vehicle?

  Viper felt a tinge of panic. The only plausible reason for two officers of the law to leap out of a moving vehicle was their car was about to explode. Wouldn’t that put a glorious point on the afternoon?

  The police had cuffed his hands behind the small of his back, and now the steel dug grooves into his wrists. A black mesh cage separated the front and back compartments of the vehicle. Craning his neck over the front seat backs, he read 4:45 p.m. on the digital dashboard clock. One of those pitiful pop country songs played on the radio. Viper would have kicked a hole in the stereo system if he could have gotten past the cage. The air conditioning had somehow gotten set to 56 degrees during the accident, and cold, stale air blew from the vents, raising goosebumps on his skin.

  If the cops bailed, where are they now? Since several minutes had passed without the car bursting into flames, it was obvious there was no danger of the vehicle exploding. But why didn’t he hear approaching sirens? Why didn’t anyone seem to give a crap that a police car had careened off a truck and landed next to a giant tooth?

  He hadn’t expected the dentist to storm out of the office to find out what happened. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the good doctor was probably on the 18th green by now, completely unaware that his front hedges were flattened, and an abandoned police car was five feet from rolling through his office waiting room.

  But surely someone had seen. It’s sorta hard to miss a runaway police vehicle clipping trucks and blasting over landscaping.

  And that was what was so strange to Viper. Where were the looky-loos with their mobile phone cameras? Why wasn’t his picture already trending on Twitter? Looking out the back window, he saw a decided absence of people and no vehicles moving on the street. A car alarm blared up the road like a wailing infant, but that was the only sound he heard over the purr of the police car engine. No lawn mowers buzzing distant, no impatient car horns. Nothing but the susurrus of wind through the trees.

  The silence of the outside world grew more acute, as if the absence of sound had become a gelatinous, fleshy entity that squished against the police car.

  He cracked his neck and began to ponder how to get out of this mess. There were no door handles for backseat passengers in police cars. Imagine that. No power window controls so that a prisoner could enjoy a fresh breeze on the way to the pokey. He could forget trying to kick out the glass or the metal caging.

  His reflection stared back at him in the rear view mirror: clean-shaven head like a cue ball, goatee, and sky blue eyes that chilled.

  It’s time to get out of Dodge.

  Then he did something that nobody would have believed possible of a man with
country muscles. Bringing his knees up to his chest, he planted his boots against the seat cushion, bent backward, and slid his cuffed hands behind his thighs. He rolled backward and slipped his legs through his arms until his hands were in his lap.

  “Don’t try this at home, kids,” he said, leaning against the driver side back door. “This is some real David Copperfield shit.”

  The gap between the front seat caging and the door was just wide enough for him to wiggle his hands through. The cuffs caught on the leather seat, and there was a ripping sound as he forced his hands through the gap, tearing the leather. He stretched his fingers toward the power window controls just inches beyond his reach. A skinny punk would have been home free by now, but Viper’s forearms couldn’t wedge their way through the gap between seat and door.

  “Goddamn.”

  Straining, he pushed his shoulder into the seat back. The seat inched forward, and for a brief moment his fingers touched the cool surface of the side panel. But the window controls were still a fraction of an inch away. He rested for several seconds, and when he was ready, he threw his shoulder into the seat back like a linebacker. The seat bucked forward, and Viper jammed his boots against the backseat. His neck muscles stood out like cords, his face flushed red, every vein displayed on his body like a relief map of river-laden terrain. His fingers stretched and stretched, touching the control panel, extending toward the controls. His right shoulder screamed, and he was sure it was going to pop out of socket.

  His fingertips met the controls, and the back driver side window rolled down with an electric whine. Warm May air rolled into the car, replacing the air conditioning with the sweet smells of springtime in Missouri.

  He lay against the seat, his shoulder throbbing. The clock was ticking down until emergency crews arrived, but he had the odd sensation that he had all the time in the world. As gulf air blew through the open window, the morning’s timeline replayed in his head.

  Five hours earlier he was parked outside Davey’s Bar and Grill, a dive off of Route 65 outside of Aldritch. The morning had been a hot one, and while the faded wooden fronting of the bar reflected as twins on the lenses of his sunglasses, he had watched Buddy Loman amble his monstrous frame up the steps into the dark void beyond the bar’s front door. Creedence Clearwater Revival hit Viper’s pickup with a wall of sound, thumping out “Born on the Bayou.” The door closed, and the music became muted. John Fogerty seemed to be singing from under a couch.