Dark Matter(64)

Glancing back, I see two SUVs make aggressive turns onto Pulaski.

Up ahead, I can just make out the pair of familiar smokestacks spearing the starlit sky.

Our speed is under twenty miles per hour, and though the SUVs are gaining fast, I don’t think their high beams have touched us yet.

I see the fence.

Our speed keeps dropping.

I steer across the road, and the grille smashes into the locked gate, splitting the doors apart.

We roll slowly into the parking lot, and as I maneuver around the toppled light poles, I look back toward the road.

The sirens are getting louder.

Three SUVs streak past the gate, trailed by two Humvees with machine-gun turrets mounted to their roofs.

I kill the engine.

In the new silence, I listen to the sirens fading away.

Amanda climbs up from the floorboard as I grab our pack from the backseat.

The slams of our doors bounce off the brick building straight ahead.

We move toward the crumbling structure and all that’s left of the original signage: CAGO POWER.

A helicopter buzzes overhead, a brilliant spotlight scraping across the parking lot.

Now I hear a revving engine.

A black SUV skids sideways across Pulaski.

Headlights blind us.

As we run toward the building, a man’s voice through a megaphone orders us to stop.

I step through the hole in the brick fa?ade, give Amanda a hand inside.

It’s pitch-black.

Ripping open the pack, I quickly dig out the lantern.

The light reveals the destroyed front office, and the sight of this place in the dark takes me back to that night with Jason2, when he walked me naked and at gunpoint into another version of this old building.

We move out of the first room, the lantern piercing the darkness.

Down a hallway.

Faster and faster.

Our footsteps pounding the rotten floor.

Sweat runs down my face, stings my eyes.

My heart beats so hard it rattles my chest.

I’m gasping for breath.

Voices call after us.

I look back, see lasers cutting through the black and splotches of green from what I assume are night-vision goggles.

I hear the noise of radios and whispered voices and the rotors of the helicopter bleeding through the walls.

A torrent of gunfire fills the hallway, and we flatten ourselves against the ground until the shooting stops.

Struggling back onto our feet, we push on with even more urgency.

At a junction, I take us down a different hall, mostly sure it’s the right way though it’s impossible to be certain in the dark.

We finally emerge onto the metal platform at the top of the open stairs that lead down into the generator room.

We descend.

Our pursuers are so close I can pick out three distinct voices reverberating through the last hallway.

Two men, one woman.

I move off the last step, Amanda right on my heels as heavy footfalls clang on the stairs above us.

Two red dots crisscross my path.

I sidestep and keep running, straight into the darkness ahead, where I know the box has to be.

Gunshots ring out above us as two figures in full biohazard gear launch off the bottom of the stairs, hurtling toward us.

The box stands fifty feet ahead, the door open and the metallic surface gently diffusing the light of our incoming lantern.

Gunshot.

I feel something zip by my right ear like a passing hornet.

A bullet strikes the door with a spark of fire.

My ear burns.

A man behind us screams, “There’s nowhere to go!”

Amanda is first into the box.

Then I cross the threshold, turn, dig my shoulder into the door.

The soldiers are twenty feet away, so close I can hear them panting through their gas masks.

They open fire, and the blinding muzzle flashes and the bullets chinking into the metal of the box are the last I see and hear of that nightmare world.

—

We shoot up immediately and start walking down the corridor.

After a while, Amanda wants to stop, but I can’t.

I need to keep moving.

I walk for a full hour.

Through an entire cycle of the drug.

My ear bleeding all over my clothes.

Until the corridor collapses back into a single box.

I throw off the pack.

Cold.

Coated in dried sweat.

Amanda is standing in the center of the box, her skirt dirty and ripped, sweater torn off completely from our run through the abandoned power plant.

As she sets the lantern on the floor, something inside of me releases.

The strength, the tension, the anger, the fear.

Everything flooding out at once in a stream of tears and uncontrollable sobbing.

Amanda turns off the lantern.

I crumple down against the cold wall, and she pulls me over into her lap.

Runs her fingers through my hair.





AMPOULES REMAINING: 40


I come to consciousness in the pitch-black, lying on my side on the floor of the box, my back to the wall. Amanda is pressed up close against me, our bodies contoured together, her head resting in the crook of my arm.

I’m hungry and thirsty.

I wonder how long I’ve slept.

At least my ear has stopped bleeding.

It’s impossible to deny the reality of our helplessness.