Into the Light: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Thriller (Into the Dark Book 10)

  Into the Light

  Ryan Casey

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

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  Chapter One

  Forty-Seven Hours to Go…

  Kelsie watched the bullet fly out of Mike’s rifle, finger squeezing on the trigger, and she knew right away what was happening—and what it meant.

  She saw the sequence of events playing out in front of her in heightened focus. The bullet edging towards the canisters. The group of people racing towards Mike—the armed people, The Outsiders.

  And the knowledge that Mike was too close to those canisters not to fall under their flames in the process.

  She saw the bullet hit the canisters, right on time, and then she saw what followed.

  The blast. The surge of heat. The flames engulfing everyone in their immediate vicinity; every thing in their immediate vicinity.

  She saw the chaos, and she wanted to throw herself in there. She wanted to see. She wanted to know, for sure, what was going down.

  She wanted to know so much. But as she dragged against the arms of Tate, of the rest of these people who she barely even knew, she couldn’t help feeling a suffocating sense of loss surrounding her, engulfing her completely.

  First Siobhan.

  Now Mike.

  The people she’d cared about most. The people she’d held most dear, for so many years.

  Gone, just like that.

  Gone.

  She blinked, the light from the explosion blinding her. She could hear voices, still. Voices behind her telling her that it wasn’t safe. That they needed to go. And she knew they were right. She knew that logically, she needed to be careful. They all did. Because in spite of what Mike had done—what he’d done to ensure that armed group didn’t get any closer—there could still be people around in there. Dangerous people.

  Mike had made his stand. A stand that had ensured Kelsie and the rest of the survivors got away without concern.

  But it was only a temporary stand.

  Especially with the knowledge that a clock was ticking away. Fast.

  Two days.

  Two days to get away from Britain.

  Two days to escape this place before it burned completely.

  She saw the light fade. And when she saw what followed, she felt a void forming within. A deep void. Something she couldn’t counter. Something she couldn’t fight.

  Because she could see the bodies.

  The burning bodies.

  One of them right where Mike had stood just moments earlier. Moments that felt like an eternity ago, now.

  She saw them, and she felt it sink in deep and heavy.

  Mike was gone.

  The man she’d grown to see as her father was gone.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder, then. A barrage of sensations, all puzzling, all confusing. Tate telling her they had to leave. Something about Blackpool. Not safe here. Time running out.

  But something else, too.

  Something stronger and more prominent than anything.

  The sound of her baby. Holly.

  Crying.

  She heard that noise, and she felt shivers climb up her skin. Like insects crawling up her body. Because she felt love. But at the same time, she felt fear. Total fear. Because that noise wasn’t just her baby. That sound wasn’t just her child.

  That sound was Siobhan, and everything she’d lost.

  She felt herself being pulled away. Pulled towards a promise of another try. With Tate. With the three people Gina had been locked up with, their names she didn’t even know. With Arya Jr. And with Holly, her baby.

  She felt herself being dragged, and she knew she should follow the wave. She knew she should let them drag her along. Let them take her away.

  And then she stopped.

  She stopped because she had to go in there.

  She had to find Mike.

  She just had to see.

  “Kelsie?” Tate said. His face was smeared with oil and sweat. His longish brown hair was plastered to the side of his head. He was walking well considering what he’d so recently been through—the helicopter crash that tore their world apart and brought this whole sorry sequence of falling dominoes tumbling on them once and for all.

  “I can’t go,” Kelsie said.

  “It’s not safe back in there. The flames. And—and the chance there could be more Outsiders—”

  “I have to go in there,” Kelsie said.

  “For who?” Tate said. And Kelsie could tell right away from the look on his face that he wasn’t totally comfortable confronting her like this, but had to anyway. “For you? Or for your baby girl? Who is this for?”

  Kelsie heard those words, and she felt a whole mixture of emotions. She could barely pin one single emotion down; she was that caught up in them, that lost in them.

  But in the end she could only look at her baby, all tears and wailing and desperation for some kind of close bond, and she could only smile. “I need to go back in there. Not just for me. But we’re going… we’re going to need formula. We have some stocked in there. Some we developed. All the nutrients my girl needs—or as close as I can get anyway. If I can just go back in there… I have a chance. We all do.”

  She saw the way Tate shook his head. Saw the way the rest of Gina’s people looked at her, uncertain.

  She saw all these faces, and she knew she was never going to get approval for this.

  She was never going to get the approval she needed.

  But she knew she was doing it partly for the right reasons.

  Partly for her child.

  She had to cling to that. Despite every opposing force to the contrary.

  “You can’t go alone,” a voice said.

  When Kelsie looked back, she saw one of Gina’s people step forward. Tall guy. Bald. Hair lip. Half-smile etched on his face.

  He held out a hand. “Name’s Manuel. I’ve heard o
f you. Heard of your people. Plenty of reason to believe you’re a threat I should worry about. But I’ve seen differently now. I’ve seen you’re just survivors, just like me and my people.”

  Kelsie nodded.

  “But I’m going to need one thing explaining,” he said. “Gina. My leader. My people. What’s happened to them? Really?”

  Kelsie thought of Gina. Of all the chaos that had unfolded with her, too. Her home falling at the hands of this same group. Then Gina going insane, shooting her own people, then Siobhan, then the showdown with Kelsie that almost cost Kelsie her life.

  She thought about all of these things, and all she could do was look at Manuel and shake her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Your people… your home…”

  And then she looked back at her own home, and she knew that to Manuel, this was the answer. This was enough.

  She saw the flicker of emotion on Manuel’s face. Saw the confusion. The sadness. The pain.

  “And Gina?” he asked.

  She thought about what to tell him. About whether to be honest. Truthful. Or whether to hide the full reality from him.

  And then she took a deep breath. Maybe it was the situation. Maybe it was because of everything else that had gone down.

  But Kelsie found herself doing something she hadn’t expected.

  “Gina’s gone,” she said. “She killed someone I loved. I chased her down. Got into a fight with her. And… and then I stabbed her and left her for dead.”

  She saw Manuel’s face turn. Saw the frowns on the faces of the rest of Gina’s remaining people, too.

  “When we got back to your home, we found it in ruin. Gina… she found Emilia. Found Romesh. And it sent her crazy. She killed people. Your own people. My people. I chased her down, and I made her apologise for what she did. But she’s still out there, somewhere. That’s it. That’s the truth. I’ve no reason to hide anything from you. It’s just how it is.”

  She saw his face turn. Like he was weighing this up. Trying to wrap his head around it all.

  And then she saw the way he looked at her again, taking a deep breath. “Then I’m with you now.”

  He stepped forward to Kelsie’s side. Stood alongside her. The pair of them looked back at Tate, at Gina’s two other people, at Arya Jr and at baby Holly.

  They looked back at them, and then Kelsie took a deep breath and tightened her grip on the Becker BK-2 knife.

  Mike’s Becker BK-2.

  “We’ll come back here,” Kelsie said. “I promise.”

  Tate could only nod. “You better,” he said. “Because we’ve got less than two days to get to somewhere in Blackpool. Less than two days to get off this island. You know the stakes if we don’t. You know the consequences.”

  And as Kelsie turned around and faced her burning, fallen home, she could only think something awful. Something selfish.

  The thought that she wasn’t sure what the stakes were at all anymore.

  The thought that she’d already lost so, so much.

  The thought that there was barely anything else left to lose.

  She took a deep breath and stepped towards the flames.

  Towards the chaos.

  Into the Dark.

  Chapter Two

  Forty-Six and a Half Hours to Go…

  Kelsie stepped back inside her home and felt the dread of familiarity growing right away.

  She was with Manuel, but she felt alone. Like she was totally stranded from every element of the outside world. Even seeing the Wright Green Hospital in this devastated state felt like she was on a rollercoaster, whatever that used to feel like. Like she was being taken through a house of horrors that she had no possible control over.

  The clouds were thick above, and rain was beginning to sprinkle down. She could taste nothing but sick in her mouth. The smell of death all around her, metallic, tangy.

  And she didn’t want to keep walking. She didn’t want to keep going through this pathway of terror.

  But she was stuck on this road, now. Trapped on this journey. Confined to the rails of this impossible death walk.

  She couldn’t change direction.

  She walked in the direction where Mike had fired the bullet. Where he’d fallen. She could see the mound where his body lay. And she was drawn to it, magnetic. She found herself drifting closer, closer.

  But then she felt the hand on her arm, and she stopped.

  She saw Manuel looking at her. Concern on his face. Sadness in his eyes. “You don’t want to see that. Do yourself a favour, kid. Keep walking. Keep focused on what you came here to do.”

  She wanted to resist, but in the end, she ended up nodding. Turning towards the old storehouses where the formula milk was kept. She thought about how Siobhan always insisted she wanted to do things the natural way. How she wanted to give her son or her daughter breast milk.

  But even the best plans could quickly go out of the window.

  She didn’t have much of a choice anymore.

  If she didn’t find any luck here, she’d be stuck with cold water. Which might be something, but it wasn’t nearly enough for her girl to grow up as strong as she could.

  She started her walk towards the storehouses.

  And then she stopped.

  She stopped because she chanced a glance. A look at the bodies. Bodies of people she’d knew who had fallen before the explosion. Shot down by the Outsiders.

  But also those who had fallen in the blast.

  And not just her own people, either.

  She saw the Outsiders. Saw them in their black gear. Saw them lying there, most of them still, most of them missing limbs.

  Some of their masks had been torn away.

  They weren’t all dead, though. Some of them were twitching. Screaming out with what little strength they had left.

  She saw one of them—a blonde woman whose mask had blown away—trying to drag her limbless body along.

  Sadness in her eyes.

  And as much as Kelsie couldn’t help hating these people for what they had done to her, what they had taken from her… she couldn’t help feeling that unmistakable, inescapable pull of human sympathy, either.

  She looked away and carried on her walk towards the storerooms.

  She tried not to let her memories keep on flashing in her mind as she made her way towards this storeroom. As she passed buildings she used to go into all the time. The bar. The flats. All of them, reminding her of better days, of happy days.

  Of what was.

  She passed them; tears welling up, emotional storm threatening to hijack her rationality at any given second, and she reached the storerooms.

  But when she got there, she saw that Manuel was already standing by the door, totally still. Forlorn look on his face.

  She frowned. “What’s—”

  “Kelsie, you don’t want to go in there.”

  “But I…”

  It was already too late.

  She’d seen it.

  Seen what was inside.

  The people who used to work in the storerooms were all lying dead. They’d been massacred, that much was clear to see. And it was enough to wipe out any sympathy Kelsie might’ve had for the fallen Outsiders moments earlier. Enough to make her feel enraged, feel like it wasn’t revenge enough. Because she recognised these people. They were good people. Innocent people.

  And the stores had been ransacked, too.

  The food had been torched. The fridges had been toppled.

  And the formula milk they’d taken so much time researching and creating and storing had been spilled all over the floors, a cloud of dust hanging in the air.

  She saw this mess, and she felt that longing for what was building up, all over again.

  “Come on,” Manuel said. “We need… we need to get out of here. There’s nothing here for us. Nothing at all.”

  And Kelsie was tempted to nod. She was tempted to agree.

  But then she saw the flats, and she felt that pull once again.

/>   “Wait.”

  “Kelsie,” Manuel said. “We can’t mess around anymore.”

  “Then you go,” she said. “There’s somewhere I need to go. Something I need to see.”

  Manuel stood there. He looked like he was going to stand up to her. Protest.

  And then he just shook his head and sighed. “Be safe.”

  She turned around, then. Rushed towards the flats. Because there was something she had to go to in there. Something she had to find.

  And now she was racing towards it… there was no turning back.

  Even if she knew that danger was waiting around every corner.

  Chapter Three

  Forty-Six Hours to Go…

  Kelsie made her way towards the flats where she and Siobhan used to live, and she felt a sense of dread right away.

  The clouds were thickening. The rain was growing heavier. And all of this, Kelsie felt like she was getting used to it. Like she was adapting to it. Like the ménage of emotions were settling, allowing her to see better, more clearly—even if she hadn’t even had an opportunity to grieve as of yet.

  But she had one goal. One focus.

  That was getting to hers and Siobhan’s home.

  Or rather, their old home.

  Because there was something she needed to get from there.

  She picked up the pace as she passed by more bodies. Because she could feel them surrounding her even more now. Feel them suffocating her. Feel them threatening to send her emotions into overdrive once again.