Free Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller by Ashlei Hawley

Others of us, well, maybe we anticipated it better or something. Maybe we were corrupt enough to begin with.”
         “Don’t say that,” Amy interjected, because by him saying that, Ray counted himself among the corruption.
         “I’m just hypothesizing here, Amy,” Ray explained calmly. “I don’t know why some people were taken by it and couldn’t stay conscious for it, or why some people can half control it and some lost all control immediately. I have my thoughts, but they aren’t quite there yet. I have to work it through, I have to figure it out, and if you want to hear what I think and what conclusions I’ve come to, you’re going to have to bear through some of my thought process with me. We only have until the night…”
         When he trailed off, Amy didn’t immediately add more contribution to the conversation. She knew Ray intended to leave her alone when the night came, and there was little she wanted less.
         “Anyway, there were two people with you when it happened,” Amy repeated in an invitation for Ray to continue.
         “Right,” Ray agreed with a nod. “Tony and Alex. When it hit, Tony went insane. Something happened that just…warped him, I guess. The first thing I thought was that he had become corrupted. Some cancerous darkness of the soul ate him up and destroyed who he was. What came up in his place was…violent. Evil. Alex seemed fine at first. He was hit by it, same as me, same as Tony, but he fought it like I did. Tony ran out of our dorm room and attacked the first person he saw. Just flung himself at the guy and mauled him like a rabid dog. Alex and I watched, and we saw other people doing the same thing. They were tearing at each other, at people who hadn’t been corrupted or were maybe fighting it, and there was blood everywhere. Alex and I shut the door and barricaded it.”
         Amy remembered doing the same thing to her own door, and why. She’d seen a lesser level of the violence Ray and Alex had experienced, and had known enough to get herself safe and unexposed.
         “Alex and I talked it out, tried getting down what we knew and our theories before something else happened. Alex was the first to point out the near-psychic level of awareness about what was happening around us. He said he felt like he knew everything about the situation, and then nothing at all. He second-guessed himself, got frustrated and when that happened, we experienced another part of the phenomenon.”
         Ray took a deep breath, remembering what had happened when Alex threw a punch at the wall with a shout of frustration.
         “There was something inside him,” Ray recalled. “When Alex moved in anger, the thing was able to make itself known. We could see it under Alex’s skin, like a shadow. Like something was wearing Alex like a very intricately designed suit and could occasionally force itself through. When Alex threw a punch, the thing flung out shadowy, black claws at the wall. When he beat his head against the refrigeration in frustration, that same black shape forced itself from under Alex’s face and snapped at the freaking magnets. What Alex and I were fighting, what Tony lost the fight to, they weren’t gone. They were inside.”
     Ray and Amy had reached the teacher parking lot on one side of the admissions office. These cars mostly seemed as though they hadn’t been tampered with. In the age of key fobs and auto-lock systems, Ray doubted they’d be lucky enough to find a vehicle with the keys inside.
         “If we want one of these cars, we’re going to have to steal keys from an office. We’re not going to find an unlocked car out here.”
         “You mean…go back inside?” Amy asked with a shudder. She eyed the building suspiciously, and her overactive imagination acted as though it wanted to grant her x-ray vision; showing her the shapes of creatures once human prowling the hallways of a building