Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller Read Online Free PDF Page B

around.
         Sam retched again, and then pulled himself shakily to his feet. He was doing his family and friend no good sitting here having a hysterical breakdown. He would check the radio, check the phones and cover Dennis with one of the blankets they kept on the truck. Then, he would find a way to his family. His home was less than a ten minute drive from here.
         The radio issued a hiss of static and no one gave Sam a response when he called out for one on all channels. His cell phone-where he’d left it on the truck-wasn’t working at all, and neither was Dennis’s, which had been sitting right beside it. Sam took a blanket as he’d intended to and took it outside to cover Dennis.
         Though it hadn’t been working, there was always a chance cell service would come back, so Sam pocketed his phone and Dennis’s. They had different providers. Maybe that would mean something.
         “Sorry, old buddy,” Sam told Dennis in a miserable voice as he gently covered his partner with the blanket.
         Dennis had been one hell of a good man. For him to end like this just wasn’t right.
         After the task of covering his friend had been completed, Sam observed his immediate surroundings. The girl and the body of her father were both gone. This struck a nerve of extreme disquiet deep inside Sam, but he pressed on with his observations through it. The dead man couldn’t have hurt him, and the freak of a girl had apparently done all the damage she’d wanted to do here.
         There were no people. No one drove down the empty road, no residents were walking out to get their mail or put their trash to the curb in robes and slippers. The world was eerily silent and as far as Sam could tell, he was utterly alone.
         With his observations of the area around him finished, Sam turned his attention inward. He could sense something wrong. He didn’t waste time trying to convince himself otherwise, because he knew it as plainly as a cancer patient can see a tumor on the x-ray screen that he was infected with something. The darkness wasn’t something as simple as a malign mass. Sam felt that whatever had claimed him was far more nefarious, and would be far more deadly than something connected with bodily illness. This was an infection of the soul.
         “Get moving, Walker,” Sam told himself aloud. “Standing here being scared of it isn’t going to help anyone, is it?”
         Because a ten minute drive was a much longer walk and he wanted as soon as possible to get back to his family, Sam looked around for something he could drive. He didn’t want to take the fire truck-it was a bitch to maneuver and in the event that nothing too extraordinary was wrong, he didn’t want to be accused of stealing company property. It almost amused him that he could still think that way, and then he happened to glance down toward Dennis’s unmoving, shrouded form.
         Any amusement that could have been born within him was immediately and viciously aborted.
         The houses to either side of the one they’d been called to had burned down to smoldering ruins in the time that Sam was unconscious. He assumed any vehicles belonging to the owners were either with their drivers or had burned in the garages. He would walk a few homes down, he decided, and knock on some doors while he tried to figure out a more solid course of action. He couldn’t be completely alone in the world, he tried to assure himself. Someone would help him.
         Moving in the direction of his own home, Sam didn’t look into the hollowed-out shells of what used to be people’s houses. A runaway fire that got to realize the full extent of its destructive potential was a personal failure to Sam, and it meant loss on so many more levels that one would at first realize.
         How many items of memory and sentimentality had perished in the flames? How many investments, hopes, fruitions of hard work and