After Darkness Fell by David Berardelli

over by a gang of punks. Just hours later, after we’d driven to Cocoa, he found himself standing in someone’s living room, his arm covered in blood and brain matter from one of the thugs I’d killed. He was looking at me as if I was some monster that had crawled out of a nightmare.
    I’d tried to tell him that my military training had come into play, that survival was second nature to me. Reed said he understood, but I could tell he didn’t. Only those who had been through something similar could grasp the cold reality of killing someone in self-defense.
    In the few short months since Reed’s death, things had gotten much worse. Survival had turned into constant terror—a chilling, merciless horror that followed us everywhere we went. And despite Fields’ contention that it didn’t bother me, I couldn’t shake the nagging fear that we couldn’t go on like this. There were only two of us now, and since Reed was gone, the strange voice he’d often heard, that same voice that had saved our lives more than once, was gone as well. And although my instincts remained basically sharp, there was no way I could make any of this more tolerable—no matter how much I wanted to.
    “I can’t help what’s happened,” I told her. “I can only try as hard as I can to make things a little ... well, not as bad.”
    “I appreciate it, I really do.”
    “I’m sorry if I seem, well, optimistic. It’s just that I’m trying to make you feel...”
    “It won’t work, Moss. Can’t you see that? It’s too late for anything to be fine or okay. This is something that will never ever happen again.”
    “You know that already. You’ve known it for some time. You knew it when we were trying to get out of that the underground facility.”
    “Of course I knew it. My head wasn’t in a fog. They even had me assisting in their horrid experiments. I’d have to be comatose to not realize what’s going on, what we’ve been through.”
    “Then what’s different now? You and I are a team. Together, we can survive this. We proved it this morning, didn’t we?”
    “Yes. This morning, we both killed someone. I stepped out of my shower, toweled myself dry, looked out the front window and saw someone with a gun sneaking around in the front yard. I grabbed a rifle and shot him. Then we had breakfast. Two normal, healthy people sitting at the kitchen table with our eggs and bacon and toast and coffee, while the two bodies lay dead outside.”
    “We had no choice.”
    “No. We didn’t.”
    “Then what’s all this really about?”
    “I used to be a nurse, Moss. I used to help people; I assisted daily in saving their lives. I wish I could tell you the number of times I saved the lives of patients when their doctors couldn’t be right there when they were needed. Now? I’m killing people, for God’s sake. Killing them!”
    “I know you’re killing them. Believe me, I know. Look at me. I used to be a soldier. It happened twenty years ago. I was just a kid then. Twenty years old and full of myself. In my three-year stint, I killed people, lots of them, but it did something to me, and I promised myself that once I got out, I’d never have to kill anyone again. Now here I am, twenty years later, killing again. But that’s what life has become, and we’ve got to accept it.”
    “I know that.”
    “We’ve been living like this for several months now. What’s changed?”
    “Nothing.”
    “I know it’s bad.”
    “It’s worse than bad.”
    “I know it is. But we’ve been surviving very well under the circumstances. We’ve got a roof over our heads, food...”
    “I understand that. I appreciate it, too.”
    “Then what’s the problem?”
    “It’s getting to me. It really is.”
    “It was the biker, wasn’t it?”
    “Among other things, yes. It was the biker. It was also Don, lying dead in his father’s house with a dead cat in his arms. But mostly it was the biker. He had both barrels aimed at my face, Moss. My face