And the Darkness Laughs

Suspense Stories | Dec 5, 2012 | 4 min read
16 Votes, average: 3 out of 5
Suspense Stories

And the Darkness Laughs

Rats scurry away into the darkness. And the darkness laughs.
Helen opened her eyes to the sinking sun, crossing off to replace itself with the jealous moon. The ground was surprisingly soft, and Helen Morthos woke up simply dazed. It was too dark to inspect the ground, but whatever it was, it had saved her from a most probable death. The air was musky and damp, and clung to the back of the throat. It smelled awful, a mix of gaseous fumes and rotting wood. Helen began to get up. She brushed dust out of her short brown hair, her blue eyes adjusting to the darkness. She had a toughened but pretty face from hard work, and long lean muscular legs and arms.
She froze. The ground underneath her was soft... Too soft. And then a hiss. The ground underneath her shifted slightly, until it slithered, and writhed like a nest of snakes. But instead, it was a nest of.... the Infected.. Helen felt like throwing up. It was a literal floor of the Infected, all wrapped together, crawling, moaning, screeching.

When the plague struck, people dropped like flies. And that seemed what would happen to the diseased for a long time. There was no cure, nothing they could do to prevent them from dying. So people locked themselves up, never leaving their houses, stocking up on food and water. But it didn't stop there. The disease continued, but the ones that didn't die now turned into something much worse. Their skin would rot, blisters developed, eyes went bloodshot. They would shrivel up, avoiding the blistering rays of sunlight, penetrating the darkness like a dove within a flock of ravens. And they fed on anything living. The Infected in other words.
Her mind was fuzzy. Aeron and her had been jumping along the rooftops of London having been chased by the Infected. They had been separated from their original group when falling into the Thames. She saw in focus how they'd been cornered by the Infected, how invincible she had felt when flying through the air, how terror grasped her so quickly when the building collapsed and when Aeron died. And now she could feel the Infected, crawling and howling.

Helen supposed the Infected had been sleeping, and the commotion they had caused made the Infected wake. In a desperate attempt to make it out of the hellish building, Helen turned around and began sprinting for the exit. Big mistake. The coiling and rotating positions in the floor made it so that she sank into one of the momentary holes that appeared, and then the Infected tightened around her, ensnaring her like a fly in a spider's web.
Helen was breathing loud and desperately, struggling and writhing out of panic. But the burst of terror came when the Infected bit down on her legs. Except they didn't. None of them had any teeth, and were instead simply sucking at Helen's flesh, like an octopus's sucker. Helen shrieked and struggled madly, harder than ever, crying freely now, wanting to simply get out. She was becoming submerged faster and faster, and they were at her knees now, covered in suction.

Forcing herself to calm against the revolting stench the bunch of dried, skinless and broken Infected, she started elbowing, clawing, punching anything that came near her. Her head was throbbing, the touch of the Infected sending shivers up her spine. But quit she did not.
After her legs were finally free, she jumped with all her might and landed painfully. She started treading cautiously but quickly and advanced until she was almost out of the door. Suddenly an Infected reached out of the ground of blood, dirt and flesh, and grasped her arm. The nails of the Infected holding on to her, now looking more like the claws of tiger, had dug deep into her skin, having wrenched out flesh, muscle and veins. She felt the nails trying to clutch her plain bone and drag her back into the world of hell. The pain. Indescribable. It felt like someone had placed a ball of fire inside her arm, and that had transformed into lightning, and that lightning was now shooting through every vein, every fiber of her body. But she could not stop.
With a strangled roar, she pulled, and pushed, and tore the body that was holding on to her out of the mass of bodies in the building. She could not resist screaming in pain as black blood pumped out of her arm like a fountain, smearing the ground with scarlet liquid. The body was still attached.

Adrenaline coursed through her body, and with a heavy kick, she crushed the Infected's skull in with a satisfying crunch. And yet it did not give up. Still it crawled, still it lived, still it needed her blood. Screeching, it got up on its legs and advanced slowly, stumbling and disoriented. Unimaginable pain was seeping through every pore of Helen's body, and her eyesight was swiftly dimming. Swallowing painfully, she forced herself to focus. Her head pounded inside of her skull, and she felt like it was going to explode in a rain of gore and bits of brain.

Her hand automatically went to her belt, where a knife was strapped so precisely that she had forgotten it was there. She only had one purpose now. And she would fulfill it. The Infected was almost upon her now, and she knew it. Quickly, she leapt forward, slammed her elbow into the Infected stomach, chopped its neck down and brought her knife up.
"Goodbye, oh forsaken one." She whispered. The knife came down, disappeared for a second and then burst through the other side a moment later. She had plunged it through the neck, where she had discovered was the best place to end them. She had lost a substantial amount of blood, and she had a feeling that she hopefully wouldn't die. But a rest was much called for. Collapsing onto the floor, her entire world swam, and she was plunged into the almost unforgiving darkness.
Rats scurry away into the darkness. And the darkness laughs.

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