The Dark Vanishings Box Set by Dan Padavona

Author:Dan Padavona [Padavona, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-13T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Little Church in the Country

Graceful in sunrise, the old church stood a quarter-mile from the interstate, nestled beneath a complex network of maple branches that let the sun shine through in disparate beams, warm light plating the windows in gold. Keeshana awoke to a single beam brushing at her face. She stretched, yawned, and rolled over to shake Amy by the shoulder.

Keeshana Laurens and Amy Jenner had fled from Atlanta to the Georgia countryside, where they stayed a short time with a kind, aging man named Grady Sanders. Since leaving the Sanders farmhouse, they had been running for their lives. Amy harbored an unwavering belief that her father was one of the remaining survivors, but when they traveled to Chardray, South Carolina, to locate him, they were nearly murdered by a lunatic kid in a red Camaro. The kid had burned Chardray to cinders, and somehow he seemed to know Amy, though Amy had no idea who he was or why he wanted them dead.

“Wake up, sunshine. It’s morning.”

They lay nestled between pew rows, the rich scent of recently polished oak heavy in the air. Amy blinked and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, and then she twitched, her gaze following down the center of the church to where they had chain-locked the front doors.

“Easy, South Carolina. We’re safe.”

Amy pulled herself up and sat next to Keeshana on a long pew. Her eyes kept moving from window to window, searching for danger, but she found only the welcoming rays of morning.

“I must have had a bad dream,” Amy said, running her hands through her long, blonde hair.

“I’ll say. You were whining and running your legs across the floor like you were Bo.” Keeshana’s grin melted the ice off Amy’s bones, but her smile turned to a grimace when her quadriceps spasmed.

They had run all day Sunday, avoiding highways and popular routes, choosing instead to stick to residential back roads where they could quickly duck inside a house or carport if they heard a motor coming. But no motor was heard, and there seemed to be no sign at all of the crazed driver who had burned Chardray to the ground and chased the girls into the forest.

They found the little Baptist church a few miles north of the Georgia border as the sun dipped behind distant hills, the sky golden and welcoming. The back door was permanently bolted, the bolt having rusted in place long ago, leaving only the front doors to be defended. They procured a chain and lock from the ma-and-pa hardware store across the street, and after laying down blankets found in the church’s basement, they fell asleep between the pews, a snug feeling of safety pervading the dimly lit interior. Here, Keeshana sensed, no demon would dare show its face. No bat-wielding murderer or Camaro-driving maniac would seek them within these safe confines.

“I don’t want to run anymore, Kee.” Amy met her eyes, and Keeshana saw an exhausted resolve that surely she mirrored.

“Remember what we talked about in Atlanta? We can live anywhere we choose, Amy.

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