The Darkness. Matt Brennan

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      All I hear is silence.

      Great.

      I start jogging again in the direction I think she was heading and see a long passage that leads to a big door that is part way open. She must have gone through there. I race down the passageway and nearly fall into a raging river below me. The doorway goes to nowhere.

      I look below and see Lyssa struggling with a canoe below me. I scream to her, but the water is so loud she obviously can’t hear. I look back and see some stairs going down. I hope her plan is not to hop into that river because that would be the dumbest idea ever.

      I run down the stairs and find the door out to where she is with the canoe.

      “Are you kidding me? This water is way too crazy to get in that canoe!”

      She frowns. “We’re not getting in the water. Come on, help me!”

      I help her drag the canoe into the building and then down another set of stairs to a landing next to a really calm canal.

      “Oh crap, we forgot the paddles! Go back up and get them, I’ll put this baby in the water.”

      By the time I get back with the paddles she’s already launched the canoe, loaded my gear and the guns, and is sitting inside.

      Lyssa rolls her eyes and shouts, “Look, don’t just stand there looking stupid, give me the paddles and get in!”

      I hand her the paddles and jump in the front of the canoe (well, to be honest I carefully and awkwardly board). I kneel down just like Lyssa and she hits me on my shoulder with one of the paddles and yells for me to grab it. She pushes us away from the building and starts paddling like crazy, yelling, “Paddle, you moron!”

      I’m paddling as fast as I can. It amazes me how quickly we move through the water. I guess, I always thought canoes were really slow. But once you get a good pace going with the paddles, it almost glides along the water.

      We round a bend and enter into the part of the canal that has sheer walls, at least forty feet on both sides. Way down at the end of the canal I see a bridge. “Is that it?” I ask. “The bridge you were telling me about?”

      “I wish, no we have a bunch more like that one before we’re safe. But we’ll hit the river there.”

      I stop paddling and spin around. “Are you crazy? That river is way too wild!”

      Lyssa smiles. “Don’t worry ya nancy, the river up there moves, yes, but not like back at the plant. It’s just a river. Once we get there, you’ll see what I mean. The good news is we won’t have to paddle as much, which I know you’ll like. You know, since you’re so out of shape and everything.”

      Why does she always do that? It’s not like I’m a complete loser. I mean, I carried a sixty-pound backpack twenty miles! Well, it was probably closer to ten miles, okay, maybe eight... but still!

      “Look, I would really appreciate it if you stopped giving me crap.”

      Lyssa laughs. “I would, if you’d just stop being so pathetic.”

      I splash her with my paddle. I thought we’d get into a nice little war of splashing each other, at least that was my intent. But apparently Lyssa had never seen those romantic comedies where couples would play around, splashing each other with water while the soft music played.

      No, she just hit me in the back of my head with her paddle. Hard.

      Everything turns black. Just as I’m sliding into the abyss of unconsciousness, it reminds me of The Darkness, and how it felt to die.

      CHAPTER THREE

      The blackness engulfs me like a blanket. There’s no sound, no thought, and no pain. Just nothingness and cold.

      An image of my mother pops into my brain from the ether.

      It strikes me as odd, because I kind of hate my mother, but there she is. Young and beautiful. She is smiling at me and gently raking her fingers through my hair. I’m lying with my head in her lap and she’s looking down at me. And I feel safe. Safer than I have felt in a very long time. Not since I was four or five and I felt like my mother could protect me from anything. She is so beautiful I almost forget that I hate her.

      Suddenly my brain is flooded with images of her doing things like wiping my face/hands free of chocolate cake and frosting. And other images of her smiling at me because I’d just drawn a picture and was showing it to her. I had forgotten how beautiful her smile was. It emanated from every cell in her body. And her laugh! Oh god, did she have a great laugh. It sort of took hold her whole body and she would do this bouncing, shaking thing till she finally had to collapse at the waist in a desperate attempt to get oxygenated blood up to her brain. But the best part about making her laugh was that she would always pull me into a hug and kiss me on top of my head, then lean my head back and tell me she never loved anyone or anything as much as she loved me.

      I almost forgot about that.

      It’s funny what you forget about when someone abandons you to absolute solitude and loneliness for the rest of your life. Because no matter how you look at it, that’s what her suicide did. She left me on this miserable rock and doomed me to a life where the nearest human being was 3,000 miles away. Actually, to be completely honest, the biospheres weren’t that bad. Mine used to feel more like a security blanket than it did anything else. It gave me three square meals a day and I didn’t even have to smell my own farts for more than just a few seconds. Dad and I used to call the biosphere a womb away from home.

      He was a genius, did I mention that? (My head is kind of fuzzy so I hope I’m not rambling or repeating myself.)

      This isn’t your typical “kid idolizing his father” kind of genius. My dad was legit. He graduated from MIT with a dual Masters in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering when he was only seventeen years old. Then, instead of getting rich in the high-tech world of the 21st century, he went back to college to become a doctor.

      You know, so he could really make the rest of the planet feel like chimps.

      He told me once that the medical degree was much harder for him and so it took a bit longer. Well, longer for him. He started his residency when he was twenty-one. Yeah, you heard me right, twenty-one.

      Did you do the math yet?

      Genius.

      You know, time is crazy. I have zero idea how long I’ve been knocked out. Could be ten minutes, could be ten hours. But it’s weird, even when I’m out cold my mind still occupies itself by thinking about my parents.

      They met during his residency at the Vancouver General Hospital. My mom was a virologist and was a bit paranoid about her work. She began to see the steady increase of drug resistant strains of lethal bugs and got a little bit panicky. She convinced my father to build the biospheres as a safety net. Originally, the idea was to seal themselves up inside, as a worst case scenario solution kind of thing. That way they could live out the remainder of their years safely tucked away from harm. Though that was long before we ever heard of The Darkness or The Melding. It just never occurred to them that surviving the plague meant that they would end up being completely shut off from everything and everyone they ever loved—including СКАЧАТЬ