Out of the Darkness and into the Light

Out of the Darkness and into the Light

By Andy Hayes

The mirror in front of me shakes with my neighbor’s screams. For an instant my worn expression wobbles and vibrates, and I think that I look better out of complete focus. Someone must have fallen asleep when the Dread was so close to our parameter. My room is brightly lit. The high florescent lights shine straight down on me, and create a small pool of a shadow just under my feet. Even this little leak of darkness makes my hair stand on end like needles in a pincushion. I take my company-issued safety razor and run it over my stubbly scalp. It leaves clean lines of freshly shaven flesh in its wake. My hands move through the motions without thought, rehearsed and practiced. My bald head catches the rays of the ever present lights overhead. I put on my company-issued sunglasses to make the world a little more bearable, and step into my company-issued jumpsuit that lays crumpled before me. My uniform is still white, and all of its zippers are unjammed and pull the white fabric tight against my bare skin.

I look outside my 1x1 foot window to see the sun fight its way through the darkness, through the Dread. It used to be able to hold back the Dread, but these days it seems to find it impossible to do alone. I can see other rays of lights streaking out and fading into the darkness prematurely from other windows like mine. The other side of the workers’ barracks faces the yard, and whatever beams their little windows emit are lost in an ocean of light.

I check my appearance in my now very stable mirror. My jumpsuit is white and still very well-kept, and my sunglasses still have the heavy mirroring that usually fade within the first year of usage. I open the door and walk out into the well-lit hallway. Several other workers on this side of the barracks are in the hallway as well, and we exchange knowing nods. We walk together through the yard-facing side of the barracks listening for whimpers and moans from the rookies. We could at least get a sense of light and dark on our side, these poor guys are constantly in the light. We knock our callused knuckles against their doors; not to wake them, because they’re awake, but to get them to move from whatever corner of their room they’ve inevitably buried their face in. We wait and they eventually emerge.

Their uniforms are a brighter white than even mine, and their sunglasses still boast a standard issue sticker explaining the Standard Operation Procedures for usage of their 100% UV Protection, Mirrored, ShineBrite MirrorForce sunglasses. One reflexively probes the area next to his door for a light switch, and then remembering where he is, stops. We wait for the last rookie, probably the one screaming earlier, to come out. He doesn’t, we make him.

The mess hall is silent, the buzz of the lights and the sound of dulled forks scraping against metal bowls are the only sounds that fill the large cafeteria. Murmurs about the outside world are few and far between, and the poor soul we dragged out this morning is rocking in his seat talking to himself. His jumpsuit is still creased from the shipping box it came in, and his sunglasses are in its breast pocket. Those that are sitting next to him have already scavenged his morning food ration and continue to eat in silence. The bell rings, we all file out.

I’m handed ShineBrite Lightbringer #6642 and I grab an extra bulb and battery pack. The glorified flashlight is light in my hands, and I press the trigger to lock the bulb on, and again to shut it off. Everything shines, everything is in order. Everyone around me tries their torch in a similar fashion, and when satisfied move out of the armory.

The yard’s lights seem to be even brighter than the barrack’s, and we all raise our gloved hands to shield our sunglasses protected eyes. We make our way to the long walls that surround our little camp, and file into units. I’m in the patrol unit, and the rookies are on the wall. I steal an apple out of a rookie’s lunch ration and meet up with my patrol.

“We have signals from the beacons in the southwest and west proper, the Dread is inching closer when the bulbs flicker, and we can’t push it back. Shift 1 patrol is trying to find a more continuous circuit to run the lights on. They’re pulling a double, so be sure to fuck with them as little as possible,” my commander says.

His uniform is off-white, almost gray, and his sunglasses are worn to the point where I can’t see myself in them. His Lightbringer is decorated with markings and stickers that surround its issue number - #31. We jump into our ShineBrite Photon all-terrain vehicles and move out to the beacons in the southwest. I see a familiar face in Shift 1; we shared our flight into camp. He told a story of the stolen car that he’d accidentally driven into a off-duty cop picnic, and his brilliant attempt to pretend he was a male stripper acting as a criminal. He was a funny fellow, quick with wit and sharp with his tongue. He’s hauling a wire as thick as his torso, and his white jumpsuit is made nearly transparent with sweat. He falters and falls, stands again only to fall again.

My right hand grabs the back of his suit and my left grabs a loop on the wire. I sit him up and hand him the apple I stole from the rookie earlier. I urge him to take a bite, eating will keep him awake. He’s passing out sitting there, and I take his Lightbringer and pop out its stand to set it up right in front of him. The flashlight beams directly onto his face. It tries in vain to keep him awake, keep him in the light.

His head nods forward and he looks peaceful if only for a second. I almost envy him, the serenity in his face. His sunglasses droop on his gaunt face and his eyes are closed, the pupils rapidly moving beneath his eyelids. His body slumps under the weight of it all. I slap him, I hit the emergency taser built into the jumpsuit, he’s unresponsive. It’s coming.

His scream pierces the darkness, and I swear the echo can be heard on the distant hills. His eyes open wide and the Dread shoots through the light like a dagger in the hands of an assassin. It grabs his body by his chest before I can get a beam on it, and drags him deep into the abyssal shadows. Shouts and orders are barked around me while I bend over to pick up the fallen apple. Lightbringers spring to life, shooting thin beams into the looming darkness. He won’t be found, no one is ever found after they enter the Dread’s forest, and I just hope I won’t be moved to Shift 1.

The beacons in the southwest and west proper are repaired, their circuitry improved and bulbs increased in power. The dirt surrounding the beacons is brighter than ever; brighter than I care to see it. The beacons are circled by dead earth, too much light for plant growth. We head back to the mess hall. The food is surprisingly good here. I guess they want us to have something to look forward to so that we don’t all run into the Dread’s forest without looking back.

A large map flickers on the wall of the cafeteria. We see the two beacons we repaired shining brightly keeping the black at bay. A large rolling banner declaring “Today we saved over a million lives by keeping the Dread at bay! The war is being won by soldiers like you!”

I’m no soldier, I leave for my room. My mail slot opens and I hear my paystub being slid through it. I check the deposit, it reads Sam Marshall, a name that’s not my own, everything is right. I ball it up and toss it into my trashcan next to my desk. My eyes start to lose focus, I bang my shin against my desk leg and the shooting pain keeps me awake. Blood pools beneath my foot from a reopened wound. The red stands in stark contrast to the whiteness of my room. It’s like a pen that accidentally bursts in a white dress shirt. I soak all of the red up in a white towel and throw it in the bin with the paystub. I watch as the piece of paper soaks up my blood and creates a harrowing peak of red.

I reach into the bottle on my desk and pop a few of the innocent, company-issued, purple pills it contains. I unzip my jumpsuit and sit on the lone chair in my room in just my white underwear and my sunglasses. Colors swirl and converge, I smell the iron in the blood that is seeped into the towel, the light vibrates and flickers. I feel the tendrils of the narcotics easing themselves into the cracks of my brain. I look down at my hands and watch as they dip slowly in and out of the light. My hands are covered in blood, and at my feet is the body of a man. His ID reads Timothy Marshall, a name I was not assigned to know, and my body goes numb as I feel the red and blue lights scream towards me; reaching out to grab me and pull me into the light. He was no one, he was innocent.

A knock on my door snaps me alert, and I look at the timer on my wall. We don’t get clocks because of the association of time with sleep. The timer just ticks down the minutes until we get thrust out into the light. The timer reads 00:05:36, and I pull up my jumpsuit. No time to shave my head and no time for breakfast. My jumpsuit’s leg is soaked in blood, and I’ll undoubtedly get pulled aside by my commander. I get to the wall and meet up with my unit; my commander corners me and makes sure that I understand just how important keeping a neat uniform is in the war against the Dread. I’m just happy it wasn’t about being moved to Shift 1.

I nod, and then flick him the bird as he walks away. Today’s patrol is the usual. We attempt to push back the Dread with our Lightbringers in order to install a new beacon, one farther out. We succeed, and there are thoughts of getting an hour of sleep in before we awake in a horror. This is all so that those behind us can enjoy their little slice of whatever paradise they’ve constructed. The Dread gets us so they can sleep at night with the lights off.

The shift ends and I eat with my patrol. Some talk about the outside world filters in and out of consciousness. I just need to finally get some sleep. As Shift 2 returns to the barracks we find that we’ve been reissued our beds, and the light was made a fraction less intense. I collapse and find sleep like the embrace of a long gone lover. Screams are heard; created by phantom Dread. The light outside is too intense, our parameter too thick to penetrate, but the Dread within cripples. The yard-facing wall is a chorus of moans and screams of bodies who so want to find sanctuary in the unconscious, but are only greeted with terror and dread.  

I get up out of bed exactly thirty minutes before my shift starts. I eat breakfast. I go to the armory. I meet up at the wall. I’m assigned Shift 1.

Extra work, extra patrol time, all the extra got shuffled onto Shift 1. People crack under Shift 1 in a matter of days. If a beacon goes down they call in Shift 1 and watch as we try ineffectively to hold off the darkness with only our Lightbringers while one of us repairs the downed beacon. If a light burns out on the wall we must repair it before the darkness finds the hole; an impossible task. We must preserve the boundary between light and dark, equally impossible.

I hear uncharacteristic shouts and directions that break the incessant buzz of the lamps overhead. The guy that had been melting down for the past few days had finally hit critical mass. He’s also been assigned Shift 1 to replace a suicide. He’s waving his flashlight around like a club and screaming at people to just let him go back to prison. If he goes too nuts he could knock someone out or knock down a light. People are scared to approach him, scared to be forcefully pulled into unconsciousness so close to the Dread, but he must be stopped, contained. We can’t have everything we’ve worked for, all we’ve sacrificed, be brought down by some kid who can’t go a few days without sleep.

A deep, warm breath fills my lungs. Dust hangs and dances in long swirls, almost animate in the way it moves. It’s too small to make shadows, too small to make any difference. I wish I was dust. I drop my Lightbringer and roll up my sleeves to my graying uniform and begin to walk toward the wild eyed man. His sunglasses had fallen off of his skinny face in the turmoil revealing two bloodshot eyes. His pupils are pinpricks it seems his eyes were mostly bright blue iris adding to his horrifying visage. As I approach he brings his Lightbringer around to hold out in front of him attempting to keep some distance between the two of us. He waves it at me as I stand out of his reach.

“This isn’t standard operating procedure for your issued ShineBrite Lightbringer,” I tell him.  

He screams and lunges at me. I catch a lucky break as he slips on the barren dirt beneath his squeaky new boots. He comes crashing down and his improvised weapon skitters out of his reach. The flashlight hardly had time to roll to a stop before the rogue worker was grabbed by a dozen different hands. His hands are bound at his back, and a few of the guys press his jumpsuit’s emergency taser to fuck with him. The commander of Shift 1 yells at them, but makes no real effort to further punish them. After all this guy kept him from his duties as well.
His face is pressed up against the hard, cold metal of the newly installed beacon and he’s being told what is going to happen to him. His rations of purple pills would be halved and his stay on Shift 1 would remain unchanged. He turns to me and smile through bloodied teeth. The corners of his mouth reaching farther than they should, creasing his face into a wicked mask of perverse confidence. His sky blue eyes grow wide and he swings his head full force into the base of the beacon.
It comes. A tentacle of darkness swings from beyond the light’s reach and grabs the unconscious man by the leg. I reach for the flashlight loop on my suit to find that it’s still on the ground where I left it. The other Shift 1 guy that was holding the man swings his Lightbringer around fast; its beam carves fleeting paths into the void beyond the light. I see the bright light in my eyes and then stars, I see stars for the first time since I got out here.
I come to and open my eyes. Are my eyes open? I see nothing, darkness. It’s colder here, but not by much. My eyelids droop and close, so yeah, my eyes were definitely open. It smells like rain, like the mountain trails in places away from the wall and the Dread. I reach again for my absent Lightbringer, and shuffle around to gain my ups and downs. I hear panting, and breathing from my right? I think? I use my hands to probe the ground, cold dew forms around blades that are not of the safety or shaving type. I find something rough, something like...bark? I think it’s bark, from a tree? Trees cause shadows and shadows lead to Dread I think in my trained procedural mind.
The breathing stops, it’s funny that how the absence of a sound can alert you to the sound’s existence. No buzz of the lights, no hum of constant bulbs shining constant beams down on our constant lives. I go too far with my nose leading before my hands. I bang my head against the trunk of a tree and hear scurrying. My body is on alert, I have nothing to defend myself and no ability to judge what I have to defend myself from. My hands ball into pathetic little fists. I plan to punch the darkness into submission.
It’s gone. I relax and work to consciously unclench every muscle in my body. Probably just a squirrel. A squirrel, something I haven’t thought of in years. I push my face against the bark again, but this time in a much more gentle manner. I breath deep the wood, I breath deep the grass and the dew and the squirrels. Without the lights blinding all of my other senses I find that everything is deeper in sensation. I take off my company-issued boots and my company-issued jumpsuit and roll in the grass in nothing but my white underwear and sunglasses. The grass tickles my bare skin and I hear the rustling of fallen leafs beneath me. I drift to sleep again. I hear no screams in the darkness, and I dream of nothing but black.
Familiar beams shoot into my dark sanctuary and I wake up. There’s no timer to remind me when I have to run into the light again. I hear the unwelcome sounds of human voices probing through my serenity, prying their stupid white fingers into my inner peace. The darkness runs and hides from the destructive light, I’m blinded and frozen in my shock. An arm grabs me, enveloping my entire forearm in one massive hand. I’m blind again, but not by black now, but by white. My commander continues to drag me with his entirely normal looking hands. The buzz of the lights consumes me and I struggle to block them out. I smell nothing but dirt and human sweat.
I’m put in a room, not my room, a room that faces the yard. I’m not a rookie. I’m handed a new bright white uniform and a pair of ShineBrite MirrorForce sunglasses with the tags still on. The buzzing of the lights around me is rising to a roar. I run my hands over my scalp to comfort myself. The hair is course and thick. It itches like a thousand mites crawling over my skin trying to find a pore they can burrow in. The light is raining furiously blows down on me and I can’t lift my head up. I’m stuck staring at the ground, staring at nothing but my pathetic little puddle of a shadow. My shadow is my sanity and it’s far too small. I want to tuck myself into ball and fall into the hole that my shadow has created in the middle of my white room.
The lights from the yard seem to be even brighter than those in my room and seem to be shining directly on me no matter where I am in my room. The buzzing is louder and louder and I want it to stop. The smells of this human-created hell overwhelm me. Everything smells sanitized and white. The timer peers down on me, dictating what I do, controlling my life. The mirror in this room is on the opposite wall as the window. I look into it, all I see is the outline of my head surrounded by a bright white light. My fingers sink deep into my eye sockets. They give way with relative ease. Pain is nothing compared to the constant suffering I endure in the light. I’m holding two small gelatinous orbs in my hand, and they drop to the floor. They make a satisfying squishing sound as my bare feet grind them into the white floors. I can still feel the light, I can still feel the binds of this place, I still smell nothing but blank.

My pathetic balled fist strikes the mirror hard, and I feel as it shatters to the floor. I find a suitable piece, one that fits my hand. I run it over my scalp, trying to get rid of the horrible itching. Blood runs down my face chasing the trails of bloody tears. I can hear screams in a different room. Someone must have tried to sleep with the Dread so near. There’s a knock on my door.