Consumed, page 1
CONSUMED
Darkness Falls Series Book 1
BARRY NAPIER
MIKE KRAUS
CONSUMED
Darkness Falls Series
Book 1
By
Barry Napier
Mike Kraus
© 2023 Muonic Press Inc
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Table of Contents
CONTENTS
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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
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Darkness Falls Book 2
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Special thanks to my awesome beta team, without whom this book wouldn’t be nearly as great.
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CHAPTER ONE
Deep Branch, Virginia
Mitch Nichol woke suddenly, sensing that something was wrong. He sat up and looked around the early-morning gloom of his bedroom, his wife, Grace, sleeping peacefully beside him. Everything looked as it should and he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. It appeared to be like any other morning he’d come awake in his farmhouse bedroom over the past forty-two years of his life.
Only, that wasn’t true. Something was off, something was…
And then he realized just how quiet it truly was. He could actually hear the ticking of the grandfather clock all the way from the living room. Sitting in that eerie silence, Mitch understood what was wrong.
The chickens weren’t clucking. The cows weren’t mooing.
Curious, he slid to the edge of the bed and looked out of his bedroom window to the early morning colors and shapes of his farm. Warm mornings in southern Virginia had a strange way of looking like dusk. The cooler temperatures of night would put little deposits of dew on the ground and when the sun rose its blazing head, the dew became a thin, wavering fog that masked and muted dawn’s light. It crept over streams and fields, over farms and tracts of timber.
Mitch quietly got out of bed and made his way into the kitchen as the overwhelming silence continued to unnerve him. Trying to convince himself the chickens were maybe just having an off morning, Mitch entered the kitchen and walked to the back door.
For the better part of thirty-five years, the same morning sounds had stirred him awake: the clucking of his chickens and the mooing of his cows usually came like clockwork, a half hour before Mitch headed out to feed them. These noises had become so normal that it was nothing more than background noise—like the running of a refrigerator or the hum of a central heating and air unit.
But today, the world outside of his house was deadly quiet. He found himself quite nervous as he cracked open the back door and looked out. The mist was starting to burn off but remained thick enough to block most of the view that usually showed him his sizeable cow pasture. He slipped on his boots and grabbed his old, well-worn John Deere cap from the little hook by the back door.
Stepping down into the yard he made his way through the mist. It was so quiet that he could hear his breath and the velvet-like sound of his boots on the damp grass. The quiet chicken coop was to his right, just on the other side of the house and further out where the large stretch of forest that surrounded the small town of Deep Branch took over.
The front fence of the cow pasture was roughly sixty yards from his back door and as he drew closer, he saw that something seemed to be lurking further out in the pasture—nothing that seemed to be alive, perhaps a fallen tree or strewn underbrush. But that made no sense because it had not been there the night before.
When he reached the pasture gate, he got a better look of the odd shape he thought might be a fallen tree. It wasn’t a tree at all, but a strange vine, twisting and intermingled through vegetation bound up tightly together. When he finally saw it for what it was, his eyes registered the fact that it was not just one clump, but the front of an entire wall of it, a churning green mass of leaves and snakelike vines. As his eyes adjusted, he could almost see the serpentine mass shifting and slithering, climbing and crawling over itself, like trapped snakes.
A massive, uninterrupted wall of green tendrils and leaves were covering the majority of the pasture. It was so thick that he could only assume there were individual vines beneath; the leaves were so abundant that it was impossible to know for sure. The expansive growth was about two feet high and spread out in every direction with no clear end in sight.
“What in the…? This wasn’t here last night.”
His voice sounded too thick in the silence of the morning. He opened the gate, an old steel frame with cross-bars along the center and popped the simple bolt lock. The vine was about fifteen feet away from where he stood but he was close enough to see more of it and, more to the point, to recognize it.
That’s kudzu.
He stood in place for a moment, looking to the dark green leaves, trying to make sense of it. It had overtaken at least nine acres last night. Probably more than that because as far as he knew, there wasn’t any kudzu on his property, and his property went back an additional ten acres beyond the backside of the pasture.
As he studied it, Mitch could see a slight shifting within it, causing the occasional vine within its mass of growth to move. In the barely-lit mist of the dawn, it seemed to almost breathe. More than that, they looked shockingly aware, almost like it was a living, breathing thing. While Mitch’s eyes tried to make sense of that slow shifting movement within it, he spotted something else.
It was a cow. Or, rather, part of a cow.
He could just barely make out the gleaming white curve of a ribcage in the meandering vine. He could see portions of three ribs along the curve, with the faintest bits of tissue and fat sticking to them. The grisly sight broke his hesitation as curiosity and a sick sort of wonder took over.
Mitch walked forward, approaching the wall of kudzu. He’d seen the plant all of his life, having been born and raised in the expanse of the American south between Mississippi and Virginia. He’d even seen entire fields and old, neglected houses covered in it. Mitch also knew that in the right conditions, it could grow up to a foot a day. But the absurdity of what he was witnessing was beyond his comprehension. He looked out over the field and though dawn was still about fifteen minutes from shedding any real light on Deep Branch, Mitch was quite sure the vines did indeed extend all the way out into the forest.
Closing in on it, he saw more signs of his cows under the vines. He saw a leg and its hooved end, stripped entirely down to the bone. There was also what he thought was a hip, and then the top of a skull, all peeking through the vine.
While he stood before the odd cluster of kudzu, something out in the woods bellowed out. It was the sound of an animal in pain, a deep and desperate cry that brought goosebumps across Mitch’s arms.
Despite the sound of that poor, pained animal in the distance, Mitch took another step toward the vine. He could hear Grace in his head and for a moment, her imagined voice was as real as anything else in the unnaturally quiet morning. You get that behind of yours inside, Mitch. There’s not a single thing about this that makes sense. Don’t you go thinking you can figure this out on your own.
The animal out in the woods cried out again as if in agreement. It was weaker, on the cusp of giving up, and Mitch thought it was likely a deer. But even as he heard the cry and Grace’s voice in his head, Mitch was reaching out to the bit of vine closest to him. He pinched one of the simple, green leaves between his thumb and forefinger in an almost habitual way. He rubbed at it and made the slight muscle movement to tear the leaf away from the vine, like a child picking weeds or flowers.
His fingers started to burn almost instantly. It was just an irritating tingle at first but quickly escalated to what felt like a bad sun
He heard Grace in his head again and he knew she was right. Even still asleep and only existing in his head, she was right. She usually was. Whatever this was—whatever was taking place in his cow pasture and the woods behind it—was not natural. He needed to head inside and call the cops or maybe even the county agriculture department. As he started to back away, he looked quickly to his right. It was the first time he’d realized that the creeping vine was less than forty feet from his front door.
Mitch turned to run and when he did, he realized that while he’d been trying to figure out what had happened, the vines had crept along the ground and reached his boots. More than that, it had grown slightly past his leg, the vines encircling his feet.
That’s not possible, he thought. That means the stuff somehow grew about six inches in less than two minutes…likely more than that.
He tore his right foot free. When he did, he could see a strange residue along the leaves and vines. It was almost clear in color, though the myriad of green around it gave it an ominous tint. It clung to the vines and underside of leaves almost like paste, making Mitch think it was some sort of sap. Mitch knew that kudzu didn’t contain any actual sap, but then again, nothing about this certain growth of kudzu was natural, now was it?
Mitch cried out again, this time not in pain but in fear. He attempted to run again but realized his left foot was also tangled in the stuff. He went tumbling to the ground with the force of his own momentum. As he tried scrambling back to his feet, he saw it moving towards him. And though he knew it was not actually moving, it was all his brain saw. Besides, was it really any crazier to think that the plant was suddenly sentient and moving of its own accord than to believe that it was growing at such a rate that it simply appeared to be moving?
By the time Mitch was able to get to his knees in order to then get to his feet, the vine was on him again. He swatted at it and tore at it as it pressed against his knees and legs but all that did was result in more burns across his bare arms. He felt it in several places all at once and as he drew his arms to his body and fell over again, his screams tore through the quiet morning, blanketed by the morning mists.
Thirty-two miles away, morning traffic started to fill the streets of the much larger (but still relatively small) town of Farmville, Virginia. Though it was a college town, the students were not due back for the fall semester for another three weeks so the locals were enjoying their relatively quiet mornings and thin traffic while they still could. It was the closest town of any real size to Deep Branch but the thirty miles between them kept anyone from hearing the screams of Mitch Nichols.
As a matter of fact, despite the eerie calm over in Deep Branch, no one heard his screams. A few animals in the forests were spooked by it, though, but by then they were having their own terrifying problems.
Just two acres from Mitch’s cow pen, a small doe cowered among a heap of tree roots that had long ago cracked the earth’s surface. Helpless, it watched its family succumb to a force that neither nature nor nurture had prepared it for. When the vine finally made its way into her hiding place, the doe fought for a moment but, realizing there was no escape, submitted to it. She was dead less than three minutes after the first bits of vine had fallen over her front legs.
Above her, the treetops rippled as squirrels and birds fled from the encroaching green, their senses triggered by the unknown, sinister threat. As the vines continued to spread through the undergrowth, each new source of food and energy spurred it onward at a faster pace. Tendrils stretched out, reaching for the next source of fuel, grasping and trapping all in their wake.
Something very bad had come to the woods of Deep Branch, Virginia. And though the creatures of the forest did their best to escape it, to retreat and find new shelter, there was something on the morning breeze that told them this was folly. Whatever had come to Deep Branch was already spreading onward toward an unknowing population.
CHAPTER TWO
Peruvian Amazonia, Amazon Rainforest
Omagua region
There are more than sixteen thousand different species of trees in the Amazon rainforest, and on the really humid mornings, Benjamin Munroe thought most of them looked the same. The walls of palm fronds, cat’s claw, mahogany, rubber trees and countless others of the Omagua region of the rainforest greeted him every morning like a blanket. From his vantage point along the ground level of the Peruvian lowlands, the trunks of those trees blocked the sight of nearly everything forward and overhead. They were all pressed together, some towering as much as two hundred feet or more over his head. Sometimes it was almost suffocating to think that expansive green canopy made up his little corner of the world.
It had been almost overwhelmingly beautiful when Benjamin had first come to the Amazon, but now it made him feel trapped. He imagined a sea captain must feel the same way after seeing nothing but an endless ocean horizon ahead of him for weeks on end. Benjamin had seen this world of green from all angles, and he preferred it in the highlands to the east. From there, it looked like a wide-arching green ceiling where just about anything was possible in the hidden world beneath. There could be hidden treasures, hidden species, even hidden adventures waiting down below.
Being part of that hidden world, Benjamin knew what waited there: stifling heat, more green, and insects that seemed to always be upset that they could not travel beyond that beautiful, green canopy and took their aggressions out on the stupid Brit that thought it would be a good idea to spend six months in an ecological center in the Peruvian Amazon.
Stepping out onto the center’s front porch, Benjamin looked up to that massive wall of green. Little specks of blue sky peeked through here and there. It made him anxious for the visit he’d be making to Chimbote next week. He’d be able to see the sky, the ocean, cars, and the finely tanned women. He’d be able to feel an actual by God breeze.
“Only two months left,” he told himself. “You can do this.”
He knew he could. It’s why he’d decided to take the opportunity to work at the ecology center for a six month block. The OVI Ecology Center was a joint effort between the American and British government, with some partners from Asia beginning to venture in as well. It was a relatively new project, setting up several such centers around the world. There were three here in the Amazon, two in the mountainous regions of Nepal, and another in Africa out in the Guinean forests. The intent of the project was to study certain plants in their natural environments, comparing them to new methods of growth and cultivation in the hopes of discovering a faster and more accurate system of getting medicines to the more impoverished parts of the world.
