We were never a very religious family. My grandmother was though, and through her is where my family got our second hand religion. She lived with us for the last 4 years of her life, and I know that I owe my own life to her. Had it not been for her constant teachings, I'd be dead. I know that as strongly as I know my own name. I tried to tune her out, like my parents and brother would do, but what little bits I was able to retain, stuck, dug deep into my soul waiting for the day I'd need them.
I never would have believed I'd ever need them, certainly not at the age of 20.
It's been a year since it happened, and while the few of us that have survived try and forget, I've not been so lucky in those attempts.
It's not just the trauma or the memory of those 3 awful days. I don't think it's even the guilt of surviving when so many didn't. Although the memories and guilt are still there, still fresh like a burn that hasn't healed.
No, I think more than anything it's the knowledge that it all will happen again, and this time, it will happen on a larger scale, in a place much larger than my town, with a meager population of 1,307.
Next time it may be the world.
They called it a freak occurrence.
"Occurrence" that word suggests something average, something still normal. This was nothing like normal. This was a nightmare.
But occurrence was the word they used. A freak accident. They used that word too. An act of God…
Co2 was the culprit, they told us. A deadly cloud of Co2 that had built up in the bottom of our lake. That "deadly cloud" was responsible for the deaths of 1,289 people. Men, women and many children.
There were just 18 survivors, only one of which was a child. 18. We didn't even fill the bus that was used to transport us out of town, away from our home, our families, our lives. Away from the bodies that still littered the streets and fields as we drove passed. The many that had gone outside, possibly for help.
For those of us who experienced it, the Co2 theory was a bit hard to swallow. It was worse than that. It enraged us. It was a laughable excuse, one made to quiet the media. Quiet any fears, prevent hysteria.
We tried to argue against their claim, but our accounts were quickly written off as effects of the gas.
How could a single town be covered in darkness when the rest of the world was still functioning as normal?
No one would listen. So we all stopped talking.
We were given money, a new place to live, but we know that it doesn't matter where we go. It'll happen again, on a much larger scale and when it does, how many will be left then?
I want to tell you my story. Not just to unload it off my conscience, although that may help, my true motive is that maybe my story will help someone, somewhere. Maybe a few someone's. They may just hear my story, and like me with my grandmother's teachings, they just might retain it and keep it for the day their world goes black, and demons walk the earth.
It all went dark one morning in June. I was living with my brother and a friend of ours, and we were all quickly shoveling cereal into our mouths before we went our separate ways to work.
One second I was staring into the colorful mess of my Fruity Pebbles, and the next, darkness. The kind of dark that makes you wonder if you suddenly and inexplicably went blind.
And that's exactly what I thought. I dropped my bowl, hearing the crack of the glass on the countertop, and the feel of cold milk running down my legs, and could do nothing else but stare. In a cold fear like I hadn't felt since I was a 12 and almost choked on a gumball.
I brought my hands to my eyes, waved them, and frantically rubbed them, opened and closed them, as though these things would somehow cure my blindness.
Yes, I thought I had gone blind. That is, until I heard my brother Aden cry out, followed by his own bowl of cereal crashing to the floor. This was immediately preceded by Kyle, screaming, and more shattered glass.
The first few minutes after it went dark, was chaos. Screaming, panic, bumping into things and knocking them over, obsentites hurled out into the void.
No real coherent thought entered my mind then. It was all madness. Terror. Were we dying?
I waited to feel my air cut off or the loss of my ability to stand, to move. But it never came. Only the darkness. So thick and black it almost felt as though I could reach out and touch it, feel it on my fingers like velvet. Before that day, I never realized that I'd never actually seen darkness. Not truly. No matter how dark you are imagining, it was so much worse.
I was pressed up against the living room wall for the first few minutes, desperately trying to see anything, and seeing nothing but the void.
I heard my brother and Kyle screaming, colliding with furniture, sobbing. Faintly I could even hear screams from outside, explosions in the distance.
Still, somehow in all that noise and fear and chaos, I heard my grandmother's voice. Not out loud and not in my head, but a memory of her voice. Somehow it reached me at that moment, like a lifeline.
It was a memory of my grandmother in her bed, her precious bible in her lap, the room smelling a gentle mix of her face cream and peppermint candies. I was 17, and was painting her fingernails hot pink, while she talked about God and heaven. I was doing my best to tune her out, when she stopped speaking and gripped my hand. It had been so sudden, so unexpected that I almost dropped the bottle of polish on her bed.
"Emmy. Listen now, cuz this is important." She'd said. She'd been getting sicker, the cancer had reached her spine, legs and lungs, but not her brain, not yet. But for a split second I thought it had. But the clarity in her gray eyes, the strength in her grip, and the urgency in her tone pushed that worry from my mind.
"There will come a day, likely not too far from this one, that you may experience something terrible. There will come a blackness to the earth, a darkness so profound that any who look upon it shall tear out their eyes and die. It will last for three days less a night. During that time you must not go outside. Nor must you look outside. Stay away from the doors and windows. Cover the windows and lock all doors immediately. You must not speak to anyone outside. The demons will try to trick you. They can mimic voices. They will try to lure you out. You must not fall for these tricks.
"There will be no light. The only light will come from blessed candles. One will be enough to last the duration, and it will not go out, not even if the house should fall down around it. During these days you must pray and ask for forgiveness and pray for the souls on the earth to be spared. Many will die. Use holy water. Pray. And by God, do not go outside."
She said these things seemingly in one breath, a feat not easy for her at that time when saying more than a sentence meant having to stop and catch her precious breath. When she finished she released my hand and looked down at her fingernails and smiled.
"What a lovely job you've done. Can you get my water Em, my mouth is very dry all of a sudden."
And that was it. For days, weeks even, I wondered if I'd somehow imagined the entire thing. But a slight scratch on my hand from my grandmother's ring, was proof that I hadn't.
I slowly forgot about that conversation, but after her death my mother gave me a box of my grandmother's things, things she wanted me to have.
I kept it in the closet, though I honestly never believed I'd need them.
I remembered that day and my grandmother's warning with almost perfect clarity. It calmed me in that moment of total panic.
I took a deep breath, and still shaking, still blind, I called out to my brother and Kyle.
It took more than a few tries of shouting their names before they finally stopped. It was Aden who answered. His voice was trembling, breaking, as if he were on the edge of madness. I guess we all were.
"I need you to stop, stand still. And I need you to listen to me, okay?" I said, my own voice stronger and calmer than I felt.
There was a moment of silence, except for their ragged breaths, and still the faint screams coming from somewhere outside. Were they closer now?
I was about to speak again when he finally answered.
"Ok." He said. I could hear the desperation in his voice. Like he was relying on me, his little sister, to somehow fix them all.
"Kyle, you too. Are you there?" I asked. I could hear him sniffiling.
"Yeah." He half whispered.
"Okay, now I'm guessing that you both can't see. I can't either. But we're okay otherwise. I don't know for sure what's going on, but we have to try and calm down if we're gonna figure it out." I said.
"Calm down?" Kyle said, as if he couldn't understand how I could expect them to be calm. "Em, we can't fucking see!"
"I know that. But screaming about it isn't going to help. We need to -" I started, but Kyle interrupted me.
"What we need to do is call the fucking ambulance!" He shouted. I wanted to tell them that it wouldn't do any good, but I still didn't know yet. What I felt was that we were running out of time, as if somewhere an hourglass had been flipped and the sand was falling much too fast.
"Fuck!" Kyle yelled, and something crashed across the room. "There's no fucking signal. Anyone got a signal?" His voice was dripping with desperation, just like Aden's.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, and despite feeling in my gut that there would be no signal, I tried. I tried because I was just as desperate for help as they were. Making a phone call, even one with just 3 numbers while blind wasn't as easy as it sounds. I tried to remember where the phone icon was, tried to mentally recall where the 9 and 1 would be.
I tried a dozen times or more but it didn't work.
I heard Aden mutter the same, and once again we were back at square one.
Then a scream pierced the quiet, this one wasn't the faint screams from outside, this one was coming from Kyle's room.
"Oh fuck!" Kyle said, "Jenna. I forgot she was here." He said. A second later his bedroom door flung open, and a crying Jenna stumbled down the hallway. Kyle called her name, and they found each other. Through hitching sobs she told him that she was blind, something happened to her eyes.
It took a long time to calm her down, to explain that we all were blind. She was scared. She wanted to leave, to call her father, but just like everyone else's, her phone had no signal.
After a while she was finally quiet, still crying but softly.
"Guys, I know you're scared. So am I. But I feel like something bad is happening outside and if we don't secure the house, it's gonna get in." I said. Instantly I pictured the face of a demon I'd seen in one of my grandmother's books, and I was filled with ice cold terror.
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Kyle asked. "What's going to get in?"
"I don't know. My grandmother warned me about this, said it would happen one day. I never believed it. But…." I let out a shaky breath.
Kyle snorted. "The bible nut?" He said. I felt my body tense. I wanted to slap him, but I probably wouldn't even be able to get to him without falling over the mess they made.
"Watch your fucking mouth." I said. "She wasn't a nut. And she might be right."
"So tell us, what did she say was happening?" He snapped.
"Kyle, shut the fuck up and just do what she says. We got nothing else." Aden said, finally breaking his silence. "Em. Tell us what you need us to do?"
I felt a brief moment of relief. I pushed myself away from the wall, standing on my own in the void, and said, "Help me get to my room. I have to get something out of the closet."
It took more than five minutes just to get to my bedroom. Traversing through the wreckage that was our living room was difficult. We tripped more than once.
But once I made it to my room the closet was easy to get to, and the box marked with my name in red sharpie, in my grandmother's handwriting, was even easier to find. It was as if she were guiding me through the black, guiding my hand in hers like she had so many times before when she taught me to sew.
I sat on the floor, the box in front of me, and ripped the tape off. Inside was her bible, her favorite passages marked, with notes scribbled in the margins.
There was her cross, the one she always wore. Three rosaries, all of them blessed. And the thing I needed most. What I stumbled through the dark to find.
A blessed beeswax candle. I gently lifted it from the box, carefully unwrapping it from the newspaper. Then we very carefully made our way back to the kitchen, where we kept the matches.
I felt the matches touch my fingertips, and I ripped one out of the book, and struck it. I felt the heat on my fingers, and smelled the sulfur, but I saw no light.
With trembling fingers, I felt the wick, and slowly brought the match to it, my heart pounding so hard in my chest I thought it might burst free.
And just like that, just as sudden as the darkness came, there was light. I saw the face of my brother before me, his hair tousled, and his shirt torn at the collar. He had a small cut over his eyebrow, and he looked very afraid.
Kyle was staring around the room, at me, at the candle in my hand.
"Oh thank God. Thank God." Aden whispered.
"We're not blind." Kyle said, stunned.
"No. We're not." I said, saying a silent prayer, grateful that this worked. We could see. But that relief was immediately replaced by terror. That meant that this really was happening. Hell was coming.
The light was bright, much stronger than a candle should be. It was like a beacon of hope. I set it up on our TV stand, yet somehow it lit the entire floor.
"We should go outside and-" Kyle started, already moving towards the front door. I quickly grabbed him by the waist, wrapping both arms around him tightly.
"No. You can't go outside! No one can. Not until the sun comes up." I said.
"Em, what's happening?" He said, turning to face me.
I let him go, and looked around the room, careful to avoid looking at the windows. We had blinds, but I didn't know if just looking through the thin slats was enough to kill you. Somehow I thought it was.
I looked at all of them, my own fear reflecting back at me from their faces, and said, "First we have to cover the windows. All of them. And close your eyes when we do it. If you look, even by accident, you'll die. I don't know how. But you will."
I thought they would protest, call me crazy. But they all nodded and together we gathered blankets and a hammer and nails and with our eyes shut tight, we covered every window.
Afterwards we locked the doors and used the sofa and Kyle's dresser to barricade them. I prayed it would be enough.
When we'd finished, I told them everything grandma told me.
It was obvious that Kyle didn't believe a word. But Aden did. I could see it on his face. Jenna just looked terrified and confused.
We argued. Kyle thought we needed to get out. Get to a neighbor, or something. But I was adamant that we were not opening that door. Not for anything.
He thought taking a peek out the window wouldn't hurt us, couldn't hurt us. But it would. I knew it would.
The one thing we could agree on was staying together.
We gathered our mattresses and made beds on the living room floor. We felt safer together.
Time passed. Hours, maybe a whole day. It was hard to tell without a way to gauge the time. Clocks didn't work anymore and with no sun or moon, it was like time no longer existed.
We did have running water, though Jenna felt we shouldn't drink it. Thought it could be contaminated. She was sure this whole thing was a terrorist attack.
Aden read a book. Kyle tried to sleep. Jenna relentlessly tried to get through to anyone on her phone, trying every social media, every app. But none worked. She was getting more and more panicked about not reaching her father. It worried me. I knew we'd have to keep an eye on her.
I held my grandmother's cross and prayed.
Sometime later came the screaming. A woman, and she sounded as if she were being torn apart. She sounded close. Too close.
We all sat up and listened with fresh fear. The screaming seemed to go on forever. It sounded as if it were happening right out front in the street.
When it finally stopped, I tried to picture the woman who'd made those screams. I wondered who she was. If I'd seen her, maybe a neighbor.
Then someone knocked.
First on the front door, fast and loud. Then on our front window, hard pounding, like with a fist. I prayed the glass wouldn't crack. We all looked at the door with wide eyes. All of us praying that whoever it was would just go away.
The knocking stopped after a few minutes, but we still waited, too afraid to speak.
We all jumped when we heard the voice, so close to the front door that I couldn't help but picture something terrible, too terrible to even understand, standing on our porch with its lips pressed to the door as it spoke. So close it felt like it was inside with us.
"Hello? I know you're in there. I can see the light." A woman's voice. Was it the same woman? The screaming woman?
Aden shook his head at us, and we all nodded. No one spoke.
"Please. It's dark. So dark out here. I saw your light, please just let me come in. I don't know what's going on." She said, pleading.
We said nothing, tension in the air so heavy it was hard to breathe.
I felt guilty at the thought of leaving the woman out there in that darkness. But I remembered my grandmother's words and held tight to them.
"Why won't you answer?" The woman begged, and she sounded as if she were crying. She knocked again, just one rap on the door. Then silence. We strained to hear if she went away but the only sounds we could hear was our own panicked breathing.
It took an hour or more for us to speak again. It was Kyle who spoke first.
"Think we should have let her in?" He asked.
"No." I said quickly. "We can't open that door for anyone. Demons will trick try to trick us."
He scoffed.
"Demons, Em? Are you even hearing yourself?" He asked. Jenna began to cry.
"You can believe what you want. But no one opens that door." I said. He stared me down and I wondered if I'd be able to stop him if he tried.
"This is crazy. It could be dangerous out there. She might have had a phone that works." He said, wrapping an arm around Jenna.
"It is dangerous out there. That's why we don't open the door." I said.
Kyle started to say something but Aden held up a hand.
"Em's right. We can't open the door. We don't know who's really out there." He said, standing. "We need to eat."
More time passed. We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and drank the last of the milk before it went bad.
Jenna only picked at her food, and didn't drink her milk.
Aden hadn't spoken much. Even Kyle was quiet. He slept a lot, or at least pretended to.
I continued to pray as my grandmother told me to do.
Eventually we all fell asleep.
We'd all awoken from our restless sleep sometime later, by knocking.
Not just knocking. But pounding. Someone, whoever pounded on our door, sounded terrified. Or angry. Like they wanted to break down the door. Like they were throwing their body into it.
I briefly wondered if it was the woman.
In between the thundering on the door there was a sound, something I struggled to hear, to isolate among the noise. I thought I almost had it but the pounding stopped and with it so did the sound.
I don't know why but that mysterious sound terrified me more than the hammering against the door did.
"Hello? Is someone there?" A man's voice.
"I know you are." He said, and somehow I knew he was smiling when he'd said it.
"There was a terrorist attack. Lot of people died. I'm going door to door to look for survivors, take them to safety." He said. Between each thing he said, faintly, was that sound again. And now I could make it out. Like something wet crawling up the sidewalk. Wet hands, wet feet, slapping against the ground. I looked to the others to see if they'd heard it but I could see that they hadn't. They were listening to the man. They were believing the things he said. They wanted to. I wanted to. But I held my grandmother's cross and knew he was lying.
"If I leave, no telling how long you'll be in there then. And there may be more attacks to come." He said, and still he was smiling. And through each word, something continued to move towards us. Something quiet and stealthy. That thing, that wet thing crawled ever closer, only moving when the man spoke. Using his words to cover the sound of its movement. Couldn't they hear it?
"Alright then, guess I'll be going-"
"Wait! We're here!" Jenna called out, jumping up from Kyle's mattress, nearly falling over her own feet.
There was a pause, then an almost laugh, as if something that had never heard a laugh before but tried it anyway. That thing that inched closer to our door had laughed. But there was no humor in it. My stomach twisted. I felt dizzy. I grabbed my mattress for stability.
"Well hello. I almost left you. How many are you in there?" He asked. "What's your name?"
Jenna ran to the door. I reached out to stop her, but she ignored me.
"Four. Where are you taking survivors? Do you know my father? Frank Mercer?" She asked, her eyes twinkling in the candlelight.
"That's a lot of questions. I don't have time to go over them now. Not at the door like this. But there are many survivors left. Why dont you open the door and I'll take you to them, Jenna?" he said. Was there a hint of annoyance in his voice?
Aden ran to Jenna and pulled her back away from the door. The man had said her name, despite no one telling him. But Jenna didn't notice or care.
She kicked at Aden's legs but he was stronger.
"Stop! I want to see my dad!" She screamed. Kyle and I tried to help, grabbing her arms and holding her down on the mattress.
"I'm going to leave." The man said. Wet hands moving faster now.
"Stop babe. Please stop." Kyle whispered to her. She did stop then, laying still, panting, eyes still focused on the door.
Aden and I left Kyle to console her. The door was also our only focus.
"Leave. We're not going with you." Aden said, his tone hard and stern.
The man made a clucking sound with his tongue. "Well, okay. If you change your mind I'll be on this street checking houses for a bit." He said. A moment later we heard the sound of him walking away. Down the steps, down the walk, passed the thing that crawled towards our house. Did he see it?
"Jenna. You can't talk to them. They're lying. You have to wait for the sun to come out." I said, knowing how crazy it all sounded even to myself.
For a split second I wondered if I was wrong. If there really was a man out there looking for survivors.
But I remembered the sound of him ramming into our door. The sound of him smiling. The way he said Jenna's name. That wet thing.
"Just shut the fuck up Em." She said, rolling onto her side away from us.
We let her be. As long as she was still, we didn't have to worry about her opening the door. Or so we thought.
God, we were so stupid. So focused on the man, on surviving, on the dark that surrounded us, that we forgot to watch Jenna.
She waited until Kyle and I fell asleep, until Aden went to use the bathroom. I woke to the sound of the couch being dragged across the floor. By the time I opened my eyes, she was already unlocking the door.
I screamed, and hurriedly covered my eyes with my hands. I heard Kyle curse, stumbling up from his mattress. I heard Aden running down the hall.
"Close your eyes!" I screamed, and prayed theyhad heard me.
I heard Kyle shouting for Jenna, and the unmistakable sound of the door slamming open.
"Sir-" Jenna's words were cut short, so fast it was like someone had muted the world. I laid on my side, eyes squeezed tight and my hands pressed against them.
Then I heard her screaming. A sound I'll never forget.
She screamed and screamed and screamed.
Then she was laughing. Laughing and screaming all at once, and crying too. The sound of wet hands were close now, even closer than Jenna's screams.
"It's ripping meeeeeeee." She screamed and laughed. "It's taking it all ouuuuut!" Her voice changed near the end, like something big crawling up her throat.
The ripping, tearing, licking sounds were almost unbearable.
Finally it stopped, those wet feet slapping against the sidewalk, dragging whatever was left of Jenna along with it, while she somehow still gurgled and giggled and cried.
I was too afraid to move, but the thought of leaving that door wide open, the void and its inhabitants able to gaze in at us was worse. I was stealing myself to get up and close it when i heard someone moving towards it, then the door slam shut.
"Ah, fuck!" Aden yelled, breathing hard. "Why didn't we fucking watch her?!"
I opened my eyes and saw my brother locking the door, and dragging the couch back up against it. He fell against the wall panting, his eyes red and swollen. Kyle lay on the floor, his eyes shut tight, his hands over his ears.
I sat up and reached out to touch him. He recoiled away from me, and began to scream, like a switch had been flipped.
We tried to calm him down but what the fuck do you tell someone who just heard their girlfriend being ripped apart by demons? It'll be okay?
We let him cry and scream for a while, maybe hours.
Every once in a while we'd hear something knock on the door, on a window. Something wet moving around the side of the house.
Once we heard something laugh, low and demonic.
Kyle quieted eventually. It wasn't long after that that I heard a familiar sound, one I'd heard countless times. A melodic, jiggling. A sound I knew well.
I ran to my room and grabbed my phone off the floor by the closet.
Somehow it had worked, but not for long. It went dead again in my hands the moment I picked it up, the screen flickering before going black. But it was enough for me to see my alarm had been going off. Long enough to know that we were in real trouble. That no matter how bad we thought it had been, it would get worse. Much worse. Because as I looked down at my now dead phone, I knew that somehow we'd only been in the dark for one day. That meant we had two more to go. Two more days with hell at our door, and evil poised to knock. And somehow I knew that they'd find a way to get in.