Black Sun by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 52

That night was like any other. The pleasure of a good roll in the hay could not only be fun and bonding, but a release for stress, and Ryan and Abby released a great deal of stress – several times. Now, bathing was no longer an issue, yet their water had to be used sparingly as neither of them knew when they would be able to find more. But for now, they would enjoy each other in more ways than just sex. At some point, they realized that they didn't know each other very well at all. This was an opportunity to remedy that. With their sweating bodies shimmering in the moonlight, each told the other their story. Abby was raised in the town of Ticonderoga, a quiet place nestled east of the Adirondack high peaks. While the town was well populated, Abby wanted something more than a life in a tourist trap. While summers were tolerable, winters came on with deadly force, sometimes freezing the town's ducks into the ice of the creek near the business district. She often hiked to the top of Mount Defiance and sat at the one picnic table thinking about where her life might take her. Sometimes she left the road, away from the summit, and journeyed down to the revolutionary era fort that lay at the edge of town. Knowing she wasn't supposed to be there after tours were given, she took the chance of getting caught anyway. The cannons felt cold to the touch as she walked among the ruins currently being restored by the state. But the fort was the only thing in need of restoration. Abby's life was at a standstill. She was only nineteen and suffered from a lack of direction, seeing no future beyond the loneliness of a place that was nothing more than an insignificant dot somewhere on a map.

There was a small two-year college there, and Abby attended a few classes, hoping to find something that might trigger her need for personal fulfillment—a life beyond the town line. It wasn’t until she took an art class that the passion to create sank its teeth into her soul. She took enough classes to receive a two-year degree, but she wanted more—to explore and surpass the boundaries of her budding creativity. And she now realized that there was to the world than Ticonderoga.

Taking her passion with her, Abby moved to Albany, where she attended the State University of New York. She had never such a place, with sixteen thousand students living on campus. She craned her neck to admire the student housing towers perched at the four corners of the main campus, and she wandered through it, found herself in awe of its architectural beauty. But she quickly found that there were too many people and decided to seek housing off campus, somewhere quiet where she could work uninterrupted and smoke the occasional joint. She began this new hobby at a party and instantly came to believe that she couldn’t be without it. It both relaxed and inspired her, and her work took on a dimension that reflected this altered state of consciousness. Her professors noticed the change as well and found themselves impressed. All was well until the curtains of colored lights appeared in the sky. It was during the afternoon when she stopped at an art supply store in downtown Troy that Abby looked up and saw the Aurora Borealis waving across the spring sky. At first, she suspected that it might be the effects of smoking too much weed, if there was such a thing. But when she saw people dropping to the street, she approached the person closest person and found them dead, the victim of something she did not understand. Panicked, she ran to the back of the nearest ally and hid behind a dumpster.

Eventually, the screams of panic that so briefly exploded from downtown Troy began to fade. But as she looked around the corner of the dumpster, Abby saw a shadowy figure spying around the corner of the ally. She didn’t know anyone in Troy and saw it as an exhaust filled war zone. All she knew was that people seemed to be dropping dead, and the sight quickly overwhelmed her. With the need to return to the quiet safety of her apartment, Abby decided that she needed to trust someone who did not appear to be threatening. Walking out from behind the dumpster, she approached the stranger and silently took his hand. In a short time, they would come to trust each other with their lives, traveling on foot to anyplace that seemed to offer the invisibility they needed. She had met Ryan.