Defy the dark, p.17
Defy the Dark, page 17
“Ugh, gross.” Tasha groaned. She stepped halfway into the light, and everything but her face was illuminated. “Why would you want to do something so boring?”
“We’ve been standing in this parking lot for the past hour.”
“Yeah,” Tasha admitted. “But that’s because we’ve been trying to think of a good place to put our ball.”
She pointed at my feet, where a neon-green bowling ball was nestled against our bags. We’d stolen it from the Country Lanes bowling center along with four others and placed them at various locations throughout the night. It was our tradition: a sort of delinquent version of a game that started when Tasha and I went through a rebellious phase in seventh grade. Think regular bowling, only outside with fewer lanes and more thievery. Tasha wanted to make the last one count. I wanted to go to the dance and run into Zach.
It’s hard for me to describe what I found so appealing about Zachary Feldman. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about him—he was average looking and a mildly terrible conversationalist. But he appeared to want me, and when you live in a small town, you lower your standards and take what you can get.
There was always that part of my brain that wondered if he was lowering his standards for me, too—if we were caught in some sort of limbo made up of ignored aspirations. But that part of my brain was easy to overlook when I was too worried about how many winky faces I could send in one text message before it became overkill.
“We could leave it here,” I suggested, casually checking my phone for a text from Zach. Nothing. “In penance for the hour of our lives wasted in this godforsaken parking lot.”
“How can you call it godforsaken?” Tasha exclaimed. “This place is magical! It’s full of so much opportunity. We could meet time travelers or find a cursed necklace.”
“Why would we want to find a cursed necklace? Wouldn’t it kill us?”
“I can’t believe you want to leave,” she said, not acknowledging my comment.
I sighed loud enough for words to be unnecessary. My broken nail found its way to my mouth and I bit it, fighting the urge to check my phone for a text I knew wasn’t there.
Tasha shrugged and mounted a new shopping cart. She twirled out of the light and around the parking lot like no one was watching, and no one was. Not even me, which I regret, because it was one of the last times I got to see Tasha as Tasha and not as a poster child for homicide.
When I imagine it, her red hair is fanned around her head like a halo, and her eyes are closed in a kind of bliss that I’d resent. There was something about Tasha that always made me inherently angry, because I knew I would never get to be her, and it wasn’t fair.
I told that to a police detective once. He asked if Tasha had any enemies. As if Tasha could ever alienate someone enough to make them want to kill her. At that point I was an emotional mess, and I just wanted to help, so I mentioned the natural jealousy that she caused. He looked at me like I’d just confessed.
“I am ninety percent convinced that if we stay here, something brilliant will happen,” Tasha called across the parking lot. She gripped the handle of the shopping cart and leaned back. Even in the dark I saw how close her head was to the ground, and it made me wince. It was a wonder she didn’t fall off and split her skull on the pavement.
It probably would’ve been better if she had.
I abandoned my place under the dingy light and followed her into the dark.
“There’s so much potential in the air,” she whispered, excited. “Can’t you feel it?”
“I can feel my patience wearing thin,” I snapped, but regretted it once I saw the disheartened look on her face. “Come on. It’s time to go.”
“One more ride,” Tasha insisted. She pushed herself toward me. “It’s your turn.”
“I don’t want to ride the stupid shopping cart,” I muttered, annoyed.
“Okay,” she said shakily, biting her lip to hide a frown. “Then I’ll ride. All night if I have to. Until the time travelers come.”
“It’s time to go,” I said, emphasizing the last word. I was so sick of humoring her pointless fantasies.
“How can you know that? Did the weatherman forecast our destinies this morning?”
She was about to smirk. I saw the early formation of it before the streetlights cut out and we were engulfed by darkness. And then I couldn’t see anything at all.
“Looks like the Fates have decided for us,” I said as I pulled my phone out of my pocket. The screen lit up, its weak glow barely cutting through the night. Shadow covered Tasha’s face, but I could still make out her green eyes, wide with anticipation.
“See?” Tasha beamed. “This is something.”
“This is electricity,” I retorted. “Come on, Tasha. Even the streetlights are going to bed. Time to go home.”
“Carmen,” she whined, “quit being such a grouchy face.”
“I am not being a—” I started to object, but I cut myself off when I noticed the headlights. I squinted, and through my eyelashes I surveyed a truck idling toward us. At first I didn’t recognize it and my heart skipped a beat. I fumbled for Tasha’s hand in an attempt to sedate my fear, but she was still annoyed with me and slipped her hand from my grasp. The truck came to a stop and the driver stuck his head out of the window.
It was Zach.
“Hey,” he said, smiling. “I thought that was you. What are you doing?”
“Just hanging out,” I said. I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear in an effort to feel less flustered.
“In a parking lot?” Zach questioned. “It’s, like, almost midnight.”
“Someone felt potential in the air,” I told him. Tasha casually shifted her foot so that it rested on top of mine. She proceeded to put all of her weight on it to let me know that she was pissed. This wasn’t the adventure she’d imagined. “But it is clearly and tragically absent. Can you give us a ride?”
“Hop in,” he said. I walked over to our stuff and picked up my bag. I didn’t touch the bowling ball; I didn’t care what happened to it. I tried to brush past Tasha, but she shot me a look.
“What?” I asked sharply. “It’s late and it’s cold and I want to go home.”
“Whatever,” she sighed. She grabbed the ball and hugged it to her stomach while I got into Zach’s truck. It was a bench seat, so I awkwardly scooted toward the center when Tasha shoved her way in.
He didn’t have to ask where we lived. Our town was too small to even bother. There were about four neighborhoods, and they were all pretty close together. He’d get there eventually through trial and error.
“So,” I said meekly, trying to make the situation feel less awkward. “What were you up to tonight?”
“I went to the dance,” he replied.
Tasha snorted. “How cool.”
“Would you lay off?” I demanded, and turned to look at her. “What more were you expecting, huh? We went bowling. I listened to you ramble about potential in a parking lot for an hour while you waited for something to happen.”
Tasha’s eyes widened in shock. I never attacked her like this. Quietly, she protested, “Nothing was going to happen if we just sat at home or went to a stupid dance.”
“For all you know it could have happened there,” I said.
“That doesn’t mean it would,” she mumbled.
I heard Zach cough and I blushed, embarrassed that I was arguing in front of him. Sighing, I looked away from Tasha and stared straight ahead.
That’s the thing about Tasha that I keep forgetting: she always wanted something to happen. She never said what. It was like she expected life to hand her an adventure and she’d just go on her merry way with no consequences. She grew up thinking she lived in a fairy tale. No one knew it was actually a horror movie.
We drove in silence until Zach pulled up to a stop sign. Before I could comprehend what was going on, Tasha had unbuckled her seat belt and ducked out of the truck.
“What are you doing?” I asked, exasperated.
Tasha stepped up to the window, a grim look on her face. “Carmen,” she said slowly, urgently, “this is important. This is our chance to live and breathe and do something.”
“Do you even know what you want?”
“No.” Tasha stared at me with a glint in her eyes that said she didn’t like what she saw. “But I’m not going to find it here.”
Then she walked into the darkness, away from me. I knew that I was supposed to go after her. That was what best friends did. And we were, I reminded myself. Best friends.
But I hesitated.
Something was ending. Like a story coming to a close and there would be no epilogue, no To Be Continued.
I thought that it was the end of our friendship. I didn’t know it was the end of her life.
Anyway, my hand hovered over the door handle and I was going over the pros and cons of following her when Zach put his hand on my leg. Well, not really my leg. More like my thigh. My really upper thigh, which, now that I think about it, might’ve made it third base instead of second. But whatever. I was still staring out the window, unable to shake that sense of foreboding.
Then Zach pressed his lips to my neck.
Suddenly, trailing after Tasha yet again didn’t seem so appealing. I tilted my head back and let him do his thing, trying to relinquish the knowledge that this would be awkward and involve an unsexy amount of spit.
I caught one last glimpse of Tasha’s fiery red hair before I closed my eyes. She looked so small, all alone in the dark.
The sheriff found us, parked at a stop sign. He knocked on the window and we broke away, mortified. I never made out with Zach again after that. We didn’t even kiss. I mean, nothing kills the mood quite like getting busted. But when it’s by the police, and it’s because your best friend is missing, not even the strongest of hormones can prevail. I stopped talking to him.
And then they found her body. Then I didn’t talk to anyone.
There were five other girls besides Tasha. At first they thought it was a one-time deal, that Tasha was horribly unlucky and nothing like this would ever happen again. But then they started finding more girls, all in sunflower fields, all chopped up into itty-bitty pieces. Then it was a serial killer. Then it was worthy of national news coverage and the FBI.
Then it was the Sunflower Murders.
I went out to Tasha’s field last week. You know, where they found her. It’s bare now. The guy who owned the land got sick of the media coverage and mowed the flowers down. When I found out they were gone, I was angry. Everyone in town seemed so relieved, but I was livid.
Tasha was dead. I understood that. But she was still there, in that sunflower field. If she was going to be dead, then she should at least be somewhere beautiful. Not in an empty field.
So I went.
It was two in the morning, and there was no moon and everything was bathed in black. I thought I’d feel closer to her there, but I was as empty as the field. I tried lying down; the earth was dry and scratched my face. There were no sunflowers. There was no sun.
There was no Tasha.
I stared at the stars and waited for the tears to come. They never did, and when the sun came up, I went home. It was like I hadn’t even gone. So I thought that if I wrote it down, it would help. But it hasn’t. Nothing’s changed.
My best friend was murdered, and I made out with a boy in his truck. My best friend was all alone when someone grabbed her from behind, and I worried about what to do with my hands.
She had unspeakable things done to her that everyone spoke about anyway, on national news, with official-sounding words meant to mask the unpleasantness of it all, and I let Zachary Feldman do things to me that would’ve been whispered about in locker rooms and hallways if everyone weren’t already talking about poor Natasha Robeck. The lost little girl. The angel in heaven.
The first of the six Sunflower Murders.
I’m sorry, Tasha. I’m so, so sorry.
Carrie Ryan
Almost Normal
It was stupid of us and we knew it. The news said we had a few more days before the dead made their way this far south, and Wylie was the one to suggest we have one last blowout. The roads were too clogged to leave town and everyone’s parents were freaking out about how to secure their houses, so it wasn’t hard to sneak away once night fell.
All the restaurants were closed and everywhere else was packed with panic. It was Sarah who saw the lights down the hill and made the decision for us. “The coasters are still running,” she said. And sure enough, when I squinted my eyes up tight, I could see the streaks of cars sailing over the humps and ridges of the monstrous metal serpents writhing along the horizon.
The amusement park was still charging admission, which we all agreed was pretty stupid, but what else would we spend our money on, anyway? Almost overnight, currency became useless as, before the military hit town, people just broke into stores and took what they wanted. Apparently no one thought about breaking into the amusement park. That was one of the strangest aspects of the whole thing: the rules that persisted and the ones that were quickly lost.
My family was no exception to jettisoning inexpeditious rules, even though I know it bothered my mom an awful lot. I remember that first morning hearing my parents arguing about how they’d get enough food to stock up the pantry, and my father was telling my mom they had to get to Costco with the minivan and fight their way inside.
There were bodies piled up outside the store, she’d told him. They’d been shot by packs of soccer moms who’d taken control of the place and were only doling out food to people they knew.
“It’s a good thing Connor was an all-state keeper this year,” my father told her, and that was that. We got a full car of food because in the semifinal games of the state championship, I’d guessed their star forward would fake left and shoot high center. I’d been right and blocked it.
And here I was, no one caring about trivialities like high school soccer anymore because everything in our world was falling apart except for these roller coasters. As kids, this place had been our Mecca. During the summer, Sarah, Bart, Wylie, and me would spend every waking moment trying to convince our parents to drive us out here, swearing we’d take on any chore imaginable just for the chance to spend a day sticky with sweat and cotton candy, standing in line for the moment when our hearts would race loud and hard.
It was our own kind of rapture, the rides so fast they’d strip away all layers and leave us bare until the car came skidding back into the wheelhouse for the next group of kids to worship.
Though none of us said it, that’s what we were looking for: we thought we wanted to forget the crushing imminence of the end of our world, the dead walking toward us with a slow and steady determination.
But really we wanted to recognize the end of the mundane: unreciprocated crushes, failed tests, blank college applications sitting in a drawer waiting. These things that had once been so all-encompassing but were now rendered moot.
The park was emptier than we’d ever seen it before, which made sense with everything going on in the world. People were out looting stores for food and weapons, but there was nothing to take from this place. Besides, I think most people liked the idea that something could still be going on as it had before. You could see the lights of the coasters from nearly anywhere in town, and staring at the spinning and whirling of them almost made us forget about the truth of our new reality.
Our little group wasn’t the only one that had been drawn to the park that night. We stood in line for the Tower of Doom behind a slew of kids from the class below us, and we saw a few graduates attempting to bribe one of the Western bar slingers to tap a keg for them.
Beyond that there were several families trying to pretend that spending the night in an amusement park before the end of everything familiar made the most sense in the world. I had a hard time watching them all, kids’ eyes so bright with excitement over the heady combination of missing bedtime and getting access to the rides after hours, and the parents trying not to shatter under the strain.
“How many of them know they’re not going to make it?” Wylie asked, nodding his chin toward a family hovering by one of the maps to choose their next ride.
Sarah slipped her hand into mine. But it was too late. Already Bart and Wylie were turning it into a game, muttering “lunch” every time they collectively voted that a pack of strangers would soon become food for the dead.
Except we weren’t in the amusement park that night to remember that everything was falling apart, we were there trying to remember that once it had all been held together by something indefinable. Maybe we wanted to prove we weren’t friends just because we shared a second-period class or sat at the same table together at lunch but that there was something deeper bonding us and we wanted to hold on to that until the very end.
It was Sarah’s idea to ride the Screaming TerrorCoaster, and we joked about the name of it while we stood in line. Behind us, Bart and Wylie played their game of picking winners and losers in the impending apocalypse, but that didn’t matter as much to me because Sarah still had her hand in mine.
I began to wonder when she’d have to let go and if she could feel the sweat I was sure was gathering in my palms and slicking the webbing between my fingers. If she noticed, she didn’t seem to mind as the cars rumbled into the platform, disgorging their contents and sitting empty for more.
When we got to the front of the short line, it ended up perfectly with Sarah and me in the front car and Bart and Wylie behind us. As the operator locked the safety bar into place, I put my hand on Sarah’s knee.
She didn’t even glance at me, but she also didn’t make me move it.
That first trip down the rails was wind and rush, screaming and adrenaline, and the entire time my fingers gripped the contours of Sarah’s leg as the edge of her skirt fluttered up in the night air.
It was almost more than my body could handle, and when the car slid back into the wheelhouse, I found myself shaking as if I might crack apart. I wanted to rip Sarah free and run with her down the stairs into a dark corner and push her against the wall.
