The Dark and Shining Future Read online

  The Dark and Shining Future

  By: P.F. White

  Part One:

  The Day of the Incident

  Chapter One:

  The car wouldn't make it back home, that much was for certain. It probably wouldn't even make it more than a few miles. The windshield was smashed to pieces, vision through it was almost impossible between the spiderweb cracks. The sunroof wasn't much better: almost all the glass was gone and a large ragged tear along the metal of the roof kept flapping and groaning as the car moved. One tire was wobbling pretty badly, even as slow as they were going. The other tire on the same side was flat and they drove upon the rim. Adriana Fletcher didn't want to think about any of that. She didn't want to imagine what being trapped here might mean for her family. Adriana just wanted to survive somehow.

  The mist was everywhere now. Drifting in so slow and so steadily, it covered almost the entire landscape and was even starting to block out the ever-bright Florida sun. When they had started out from Ocala, near the center of the state, they hadn't even seen the mist. It had been a bright sunny day near the end of summer, one of the last really good ones for packing up and spending at the beach. The radio had played nothing but greatest hits, not a commercial or DJ to be found. They had all laughed at that, saying it was a good sign. The beach trip was long since forgotten. The radio was dead now too, it had been smashed by something no one wanted to think about. They highways were deserted and mist covered. At some points it even looked like the mist had sought out these artificial arteries of human existence: choking them off quickly to ensure the tiny mortals couldn't get away. They hadn't seen another human being in more than an hour.

  The family was somewhere south of Jacksonville Beach now. They were beyond the homes of the wealthy, far from the thriving metropolitan center of town, and out where real estate was low on value and habitation was sparse. A place where faceless corporations could quietly set up shop and no one would bother them. A place where people usually stayed away from on the weekends.

  The family had pulled off the freeway when- well, it was best not to think about that. Even imagining the sound- the smell might cause Adriana to lose it again, if just for a little while. They were now far from that event. They were lost amidst the endless rows of tastefully faceless corporate towers, and the occasional sectioned off mini community that would inevitably be advertised as being “quiet” or “out of the way”. It was a part of town odd in many respects. Just now they passed a small walled in area that might, someday, house new homes. Right now all the shrubbery had already been carefully selected, sculpted, and maintained...but not a single house stood in the vacant streets.

  In some ways this part of town seemed undeveloped, but it was not really. Large stretches of seemingly empty wilderness served as buffers between private corporate fiefdoms where petty office dictators could pretend they ruled the land. There were crowded lots nearby the towers where small businesses could supposedly flourish but never did. What few somehow remained in operation appeared abandoned in well sculpted concrete mini-malls, lost amid the rows of empty store fronts and beautifully manicured lawns. The only stores managing to stay afloat were those small restaurants or cigarette shops that catered to employees of the corporate towers. The towers dotted the landscape every kilometer or so, each standing out now like a stark giant lost amid the ever growing mist. None of these towers had personality. Each was only a faceless block of concrete, varying only in size or the logo hastily emblazoned upon one of it's sides. Their intended purpose or the products they represented were impossible to discern.

  Somehow the fog hadn't yet covered inland this far, though neither Adriana nor Hank knew why exactly. It could be the concrete barriers which were supposed to keep the sound from the highway from sensitive corporate investors. It could be that there simply weren't enough people for the fog to bother with. That thought made Adriana uneasy: she didn't want to start believing there was some malevolence in the cold mist itself. It was too easy to fall into a trap like that. She had seen her parents do it hundreds of times, mistaking every coincidence as an act of some vengeful or appreciative deity.

  Adriana didn't believe in any god, or in any sort of god-like being either. She had trained herself not to. Her gods were the sciences of man. Her prophets were men like Nietzsche, Newton, or Socrates. Real men who had changed the world not through any act of subservience to a higher power. Real men who had allowed her species to conquer the earth. She didn't believe in ghosts or monsters...well, whatever she had seen clearly. It had to be something else, it simply had to.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” asked Adriana's husband Hank. She only smiled at him, but kept her thoughts to herself.

  “Probably thinking about Socrates again aren't you?” teased Hank. He tried to use humor sometimes to alleviate tension. Hank himself never seemed tense, not really. He could be scary, focused, thoughtful, or even furious...but never tense. He also knew how to read her very well. Hank knew how to read everyone.

  “What if I'm just driving?” said Adriana. The car made some sort of horrible noise and she slowed down even further to ease the stress. They were leaking a lot of fluids now and she didn't know how much longer they could continue.

  “You aren't,” said Hank, “You can't just do any one thing. It's not in your nature. You are probably reminding yourself what is real, counting philosophers or scientists in your head, or maybe just making a mental inventory of what we have in the car.”

  Adriana smiled.

  “Naw,” she said, “I would leave that to you. You probably have a dozen things you want to get out of here that I don't even know about.”

  Hank shrugged.

  “I like to be prepared. Life doesn't always give you warnings.”

  Adriana smiled at him. She looked tired, but she was holding it together. Hank didn't know for how long she could manage, but he hoped it would be enough. It would have to be. They had the family to think about. In the back the baby gurgled to itself while Claire leaned out the window to help them navigate. They were good, thought Hank, good smart and worthy people. He would kill to protect them if he had to. He would do whatever it took. He had to. They were going to survive...he just knew it.

  The family hadn't even gotten in this part of town by choice of course. Driving with a busted out windshield isn't easy and the car wouldn't make it very far with all the other damage. They had made the turns they were able to make safely, always looking for signs of life amid empty streets and never finding it. Their cell phones didn't have a signal, not even Claire's which was a modern gadget that neither her father or step-mother could make heads nor tails of. Even the traffic lights had gone out. Power was gone to wherever the people all went. All that was left were chillingly empty streets, a vague sense of unease, and that constant creeping mist. It was almost boring really, how empty it all seemed. Outside of the car it was almost perfectly quiet, but that would be usual for this part of town. Here: deafening silence was normal.

  It wasn't all normal though.

  For one: seagulls stood about in large packs nearly everywhere. You could see entire flocks standing in parking lots and huddled on roofs. These noisy little pests seemed particularly agitated today, though they also didn't seem to have any idea what to do about it and so just stood around in confusion while they squawked at each other occasionally. The mist seemed to dampen the noise and after a few hundred feet you couldn't hear even the biggest flocks.

  There were a few homes they saw that had been set on fire. Nothing else was seemingly out of place: they were just quietly burning beside their perfectly fine looking neighbors to either side. About a block away from one of these bizarre fires was an empty car crashed into a pow
er-line, and it's door was torn off beside it. There were deep scratch marks down the side of the door.

  “Claws,” said Claire as she saw them, “Probably from another of those things.”

  “Don't talk like that,” said Adriana as she gripped the steering wheel tightly, “You will upset the baby.”

  Claire scoffed and said her half-brother wouldn't mind. She was probably right too, thought Hank: the baby was a weird kid who had squealed in delight when the “big monkey” had landed on the car and tried to break through the sun-roof. Even with those claws waving in front of his face: he had only giggled and swiped at them with his tiny chubby little hands.

  God, thought Adriana, did that really happen? Did she really...no. This was no time for thoughts like that. Just keep driving, she thought. Hank can handle it. You aren't in shock. You are fine. Someone will sort it all out. Somehow Claire was handling it all better than she and the thought irked her a little. Teenagers, even brilliant ones like Claire, weren't supposed to be able to do that.

  “I think there might be a building around here we can take shelter in,” said Hank as he leaned out the car, “I don't know why, but it just seems-”

  “Up ahead,” said Claire, she was leaning out the side and acting as a lookout for the adults. Her adolescent eyes were easily the best in the group. “I can see lights. I think it's an office building just past the tree-line...and it has power!”

  “I can't see it,” said Adriana as she drove while leaning her head out the window. Hank shouted from the other side: “I can see it! It's not far either. Look for an entrance in the hedges. Even the upper floors have lights on! It's practically a goddamn light house.”

  “Seriously?” said Adriana with a nervous laugh, “Are we all just all swearing now? Is that how it is? All this family's well thought out plans, the meetings, and now a bit of stress and-”

  “Turn here!” called out Claire. Adriana slammed on the brakes before she missed what was either an entrance or an exit for the office complex. The tires made terrible noises and something sounded like it broke in the engine, but miraculously the car kept running. It was just as well, she thought, her voice had risen to that shrill tone it took on sometime when she was really freaked out. She hated that tone. It was all she could do to keep calm. Ahead there was a break in the hedges and the tall concrete barrier that surrounded this particular office complex, just as her husband and step-daughter had said. It was a small driveway, but it definitely led past the barriers. You could just make out the building beyond it too. The fog was still closing in fast behind them. There was no time to hesitate.

  “I think it's perfectly natural to curse at a time like this,” said Hank with that same pedantic tone he loved so much, “It's a time of high stress and social niceties are often-”

  “Darling?” said Adriana as she painstakingly made the turn into the complex. Having a busted window made everything harder than it should be. She could barely see anything.

  “Yes my love?”

  “Just shut the fuck up please,” said Adriana as sweetly as she could. Her mother wouldn't approve of that. They hadn't approved of much in her life though, and cursing was hardly the worst of her sins.

  “Of course dear,” said Hank with a smile, “You are doing great you know. Hang in there just a bit longer.”

  “Don't patronize me either,” growled Adriana, “I'm aware of the situation- I was there. I've also got just as many degrees as you do, sweetie, so don't try to analyze me. I can take care of myself and you know it. Is the magnum loaded?”

  Hank patted the handgun. It was fully loaded again and still a little hot from when he had fired it point blank into-

  Don't think about it, thought Adriana again. We can handle it. We can handle everything. As a team. We've been in tough spots before...just, you know, not with...well...things coming at us is all.

  “Careful,” said Claire, “I think this is the exit and they have tire spikes.”

  Adriana was crawling the car through as it was, but she couldn't see up ahead. The mist had already drifted in low to the ground. The air smelled like fish and it was far colder than it should be.

  “I can't see,” she said.

  “There are spikes,” confirmed Hank, “Lots of them actually. But they are all pulled down. It looks like whoever owns this complex can turn them on and pretty much block off the entrance completely. Wow. Look at the blades on those things! I wouldn't even want to try and walk over-”

  “Honey you aren't helping,” said Adriana sweetly.

  “Sorry. Just keep going up ahead. Even if they were up it's not like a few popped tires are going to matter anymore.”

  “You can say that again,” muttered Adriana. She glanced over at Hank, his mouth was open to repeat what he had just said as a little joke. No words came out though. He just shut his mouth and smiled at her. Hank was a good man.

  The parking lot was vast and, as they approached the building, it appeared to be mostly empty. There were about half a dozen cars present, but they seemed random and scattered. As they approached: they began to notice that the building itself was also vast. In fact is just seemed to get bigger the closer they got to it. What had once seemed a fairly normal tower, just one of the multitude that dotted the skyline, now appeared far bigger.

  “What is that, an optical illusion or something?” asked Claire as they approached.

  “I'm not sure,” responded Hank as he pushed his glasses up on his nose, “I think it's a forced perspective from the road. We saw what we expected to see based on local objects and had no reliable measurement for scale. Here though: we can actually see that the building is...well...”

  “Huge?” offered Adriana sweetly.

  “Sure that works,” said Hank with a little chuckle, “I was going to say 'bigger than expected' but...yeah, huge is more accurate. What is that like thirty stories tall?”

  “No,” said Claire as she bit her lip and tapped her cheek with one hand. Hank smiled at her because he knew the mannerism well. Claire was one of the most gifted thinkers he had ever met, though admittedly some of that was most likely a parental bias. She could do math problems in her head that most people couldn't do with a calculator. More than that though: she often did them using systems she improved from first principles. More than one teacher had become frustrated with the little prodigy for that, Hank remembered, but usually when that happened: it just took a visit from Daddy and a stern talking down for them to change their tune.

  Between his intellect, appearance, and reputation: Hank Fletcher hadn't met many people in life he couldn't intimidate. Part of it was his looks: he was six foot five and two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle and scar tissue. Despite his academic background: his face was rugged and taut from years of hard living. He had been homeless before, he had served in the Navy, he had been to prison. Hanks ears were cauliflowered from hard fights as an amateur boxer and his face still bore a single diagonal scar from eyebrow to jaw. This was from when a prisoner had come at him with a box cutter.

  Hank told people that he had taken the box cutter away and broken the man's hands so bad that the man couldn't wield a weapon again. He said that, but it was just a convenient story. In reality he had simply killed that man, and three others during his time incarcerated. He wasn't proud of it, but he knew he would do it again if he had to. Hank Fletcher was not exactly your traditional philosophy professor, but there you go: Hank liked to subvert norms, and philosophy had never been his first career choice anyway. It amazed him even now that, of all the things he was good at, somehow teaching Philosophy and Ethics to bored teenagers was what society had decided he should do with his time.

  The second part of why he was so intimidating had to do with his manner. Hank had been diagnosed as a clinical psychotic when he was a child and had, during a particularly troubled youth, been investigated by the police more times than he could remember. His parents had sealed the records early, or had tried to, yet still after all this time those same r
ecords came back to haunt him. Hank didn't believe he was a clinical psychotic...he was just a little different from other people. He understood them for one thing, both the good and the bad in them.

  Hank had cold blue eyes. Some people said he had inhuman eyes, but that was rubbish. They were cold and deep blue and they saw a lot of things. Hank didn't blink much, and he kept his voice even when talking about even the most depraved of subjects. He was also almost supernaturally calm under pressure and took the time to think things through even when others were making rash decisions. Naturally this had gotten him pegged as a then-unknown mass-murderer, and so for six years he had lived inside of a correctional facility while doing correspondence school to keep busy.

  Eventually it was all cleared up, though the lawyers he bought to clear him on the crimes he had committed while institutionalized had taken most of the money the state owed him for wrongful incarceration. It was just one of those things, he would say. Life gives us all lots of ups and lots of downs, all we can do is to survive at all costs. Hank Fletcher had a natural talent for many things really, but survival was chief among them. He even got the university to let him teach an elective class on the ethics of survival.