Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (130 page)

He is on the East 470 toll road, north of Denver, when he stops the truck. Something catches his attention, something bringing him forth from the nightmarish memories of Mark and Sarah and the three little girls, memories that creep forth from the darkest sectors of his mind to tiptoe before his eyes. He stops the truck and looks out the window. He is looking at a golf course that loops around the ADAMS COUNTY FAIRGROUNDS. There are several geese in the scattered ponds, without young, and the trees are swaying listlessly in the stale breeze. Down in the fairgrounds are several tents, some carnival rides, a carousel, a listing Ferris wheel. Birds are perched upon the cars of the rusted Ferris wheel, clustered together in small groups. There are several trailers along the side of what had at one time been a lively carnival. The lights are now extinguished, the garbage having blown away, and the carnival-goers having fallen and gotten back up. All that remains are the skeletal insignia of what had at one time been a festive occasion. Now the festive occasion is a graveyard. The man puts the truck in gear and continues driving.

He stops for lunch at the ROCK CREEK FARM PARK, northwest of Denver, off the parkway. He has parked the truck in an abandoned parking lot, and he has taken his bag and walked through the long grass and sat down on some rocks facing Stearns Lake. He eats half a granola bar but throws the rest of it into the lake. The wrapping paper flutters upwards with the wind and vanishes in the glare of the sun. He has no appetite. He sits and smokes on the side of the lake, looking at his reflection in the waters lapping against the cool rocks. He meets his own eyes, and he doesn’t break the stare, cannot break the stare, just looks into his eyes and tries to see deep into his soul: but there is nothing there except for a shallow bed of sands and pebbles and flitting minnows. He finishes his cigarette and tosses it into the water. It fizzles out upon impact and becomes clogged with water, then sinks halfway and bobs with the lapping current. He stands and grabs the bag and returns to the truck. He hopes to be at the foot of the mountains by nightfall. He hopes he doesn’t get lost: the only map is the one in his head. He wonders if he should stop at a gas station and calculate the directions. He decides not to do so.

He decides to avoid Denver and its sprawl and instead heads northwest towards Boulder. He passes through the city with its many blocks and abandoned buildings and cryptic quarters. He passes through the University of Colorado, the elegant architectural buildings standing with their stone walls and pillared porticoes like the monuments of ancient Rome. He leaves the city and follows Route 119 through BOULDER MOUNTAIN PARK and further west.

Soon there is nothing on either side of him except thick woodlands with pines and spruces and waterfalls carved into the rock. Patches of the road are thick with weeds growing through the cracks, and the weeds entangle in the truck’s tires. The steep slopes of the Rocky Mountain foothills rise on either side of him, the tops covered with solid stone speckled with outcroppings of bushes and solitary pines. Soon the hills rise up so high around him that they seem like miniature mountains, and he pulls over at a place called Sunnyside. There is a small 50’s-looking diner along the road. He Anthony Barnhart

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stops the truck and goes inside the diner and searches behind the counters for a map. He doesn’t find one. He goes back out to the truck and smokes a cigarette while gazing upon the towering hills all around him. He cannot imagine what it will be like in the Rockies. He has seen photographs, but nothing compares to even the foothills. He just wishes the girls were with him, that they could enjoy this beauty.
Beauty
. He looks upon the hills and is confident that it has been eons since he has seen beauty. Beauty unscathed, beauty unscarred, beauty pristine and radiant and unspoiled. He smokes several cigarettes, and his body feels numb, his muscles ache and throb, and laziness cuts through him. The moon can be seen in the sky high above despite it being only early evening. The man decides to drive down the road a little while longer. He doesn’t fear dark-walkers here: they have probably gone to the city.

He reaches Barker Reservoir, a long and narrow lake wedged between two large foothills. He stops the truck and walks onto the top of the eastern dam, and he watches the sun setting over the Rocky Mountains in the distance. He leans over the edge of the dam with the cigarette between his fingers and looks at the water lazily rocking below. The wind tugs at his clothes. Across the lake he can see a town with several blocks, and he decides that he would rather stay away from the town when night falls. He rolls up the truck’s windows and locks the doors and finds a doorway leading into the dam. It is dark and cold, and he moves forward with the sawed-off shotgun, illuminating his path with the lighter. There are large pumps along the walls, no longer moving, silenced alongside the silencing of man. There are cracks in the cement and a thin sheet of water at his feet. He finds a storage room and goes inside and shuts the door, and he climbs on top of several boxes and curls up. The thick concrete walls prevents him from hearing the dark-walkers this night, and he sleeps soundly, listening to the steady dripping of water through the cracks in the walls. He pretends that he and Kira are sleeping in one another’s arms beside a lazy brook, and in his sleep tears trace lines down his cheeks.

II

He leaves the dam in the morning. He cracks open the door leading outside and sunlight filters inside. He opens the door wider and leaves, and he returns to the truck. He drives around the reservoir to Nederland, Colorado, set upon the reservoir’s western bank. The man drives up the main road and through the circle, and he stops next to a gas station in the center of town. He doesn’t know what time it is, only that the sun has risen high into the sky, and it is nearly above him, so he guesses it is close to noon. He slept so well last night that he lost track of time, but he cannot remember his dreams. He goes into the gas station, breaking one of the windows, and he finds a map and spreads it out on the counter and finds Aspen, Colorado. He draws a deep breath, surprised at the greatness of the distance. He calculates the miles in his head: it is almost 200 miles on mountain roads that pass between the mountains in sinking valleys. He remembers what Keith from New Harmony had said: the roads are swamped with snow. He curls up the map and walks outside, and he walks around the gas station and gazes over the rooftops of the surrounding buildings, and he looks at the mountains, so close they can nearly be touched, rising up out of the earth in their jagged rock formations with pine-covered slopes, and the tops are crested with snow. It is mid to late July, and the man doesn’t think there will be much snow in the mountain passes. But he has never been to Colorado before, and he doesn’t know what to expect. So he drives to a mechanic’s shop down the street and goes inside and finds several chains, and he goes back out to the truck and wraps the chains around the tires and Anthony Barnhart

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secures them tightly. He smokes a cigarette and finishes one of the packs of MARLBORO and drops the pack to the ground. He turns and flattens the map on the hood of the truck, and amidst the sounds of several birds flocking overhead, he plots his journey with his thumb. He will head southwest to Idaho Springs via interconnected roads weaving between the Rocky foothills, a distance of about sixty miles. From Idaho Springs he will take Interstate 70 West through the worst of the Rockies, and after about 200 miles will reach State Route 116. He will take State Route 116 East until he reaches Route 82, and that will take him straight into Aspen. Nearly 200 miles. He knows he is wasting time standing in the center of Nederland so he gets into the truck and starts the engine and heads south, once again lost in the foothills with rolling slopes on either side peppered with pines and spruces and clefts of bare polished rock.

He is halfway to Idaho Springs. The road ducks and twists and plunges and rises amidst the sprawl of the hills, and the Rocky Mountains rise like sentinels off to his right, their peaks reaching high into the sky, caressing the bottoms of cirrus clouds coming in from the west. The man presses down on the pedals and takes the turns wickedly. It feels like a roller coaster. The bag of cigarettes and granola bars spill into the bottom of the seat amidst the butt of the sawed-off shotgun. The man finds a smile creasing his lips, because he finally feels free. It is a strange feeling. Everyone had been a burden, even Mark, even Sarah, even the little girls. Now he does not have to suffer the burden, does not have to suffer the guilt of slowing down for their petty excuses. He doesn’t have to worry about moving at someone else’s timetable. Freedom: he tastes it sweetly in his mouth. Aspen is so close,
so close
. And he won’t be held back anymore.

He is only twenty miles from Idaho Springs when he stops the truck along the side of the road. He stumbles out of the truck and staggers around the front, his hand sliding over the warm hood. He swaggers into a thicket of ferns and presses himself against the base of a towering pine. He wraps his hands around the rough bark and buries his head into the tree. It is sticky with sap and smells sicklysweet. Tears fall down his cheeks, and he falls to his knees amidst a puddle of pine needles, and he falls to his hands and bows to the ground. The tears run off the bridge of his nose and splatter in the needles. The pointed tips of the needles dig into the palm of his hand and into his clenched fingers, but he doesn’t care. He had seen them—he is
sure
of it—standing along the side of the road. Every one of them. Just watching him drive past. Their former beauty had been turned into a wilting frame, and they had been discolored and naked and the skin had clung to their bones, and their jaws had hung slack and their eyes had been sunken-in and lost amidst their skulls. They had watched him, those empty sockets pooled with venomous hatred. They were supposed to be with him. He wasn’t supposed to be alone. They had journeyed together, struggled together, despaired together, hoped together. But he is the only one remaining: the jackass, the jerk, the asshole. He is the one who should’ve fallen first, but he is the only one still standing. The wretchedness of his own person, and the knowledge that the unfairness of life is not an excuse for complacency, has forced him to his hands and knees, has forced upon him the realization that he is entirely alone, and he was always meant to be alone—but not like this. His curse was to be loneliness in death, but his curse has become loneliness in survival. A squirrel watches him from the branches of the pine above, clutching to a pinecone. The man raises himself up and lets out a hurtling scream, a scream that echoes through the valleys and resonates against the rocky outcroppings, a scream that is carried by waterfalls into gullets and ditches and into towns and villages. A scream that carries up into the mountains, a scream that no one hears.

Anthony Barnhart

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He reaches Idaho Springs by 2:00 in the afternoon. His cheeks are bloated red with broken capillaries, and his eyes are swollen from crying. He gets out of the truck and stands on the road that intersects with Interstate 70. The town is small and narrow, running between three large hills and parallel with Interstate 70 coming from Denver. Down Interstate 70, over the tops of the bluffs, the tips of the Denver skyscrapers can be seen. The man grabs the bag of granola bars and cigarettes, and he walks down the road, past several old buildings—a grocery store, a post office, a gas station—while eating one of the granola bars. His appetite is no better than it was yesterday, and he drops half the granola bar to the ground and crunches it to pieces underneath his boot. He sits on the curb next to a drain and smokes his cigarette and watches the miniature tornadoes of dust rising from the streets and splashing into the buildings and disintegrating into nothing. He finishes his cigarette and turns and faces the mountains. He can maybe be in Aspen by nightfall. He knows it is a reality, knows it will take place… But that thought brings him no comfort. He knows no one in Aspen, and he is sure there is no one in Aspen whom he
wants
to know. He doesn’t even know if the refugee community remains anymore: for all he knows, it could be a death-trap, having succumbed to the plague, crawling with the denizens of the dead. He doesn’t care. He will go anyways. He has nothing to lose: he has already lost everything.

III

Interstate 70 follows the passes between the mountains, weaving its way between the great pineladen slopes. The man drives carefully. At some points there are boulders in the road, having dislodged and fallen and having never been cleared. Parts of the interstate have crumbled due to erosion from rivers where the concrete barriers have ruptured. It is surprising what can happen in only eleven months when no one is around to take care of things. The road is bathed in the shadows of the mountains as the sun begins its long descent into the west. The man knows night will come earlier here, because of the mountains blocking out the sun before it sets, and he knows he will have to find somewhere to lodge. He has not gotten as far as he hoped, maybe only forty miles. He continues driving, and the shadows grow deeper in the gullets, and the moon behind him sparkles in the sagging currents of the creaks running beside the road. He begins to get anxious, can hear howls of the dark-walkers coming from somewhere in the mountains. He ponders if they dwell in stone caves, like cave-men before their rise to dominance. A thought runs through him, and he wonders if the dark-walkers will ever rise to dominance, if they will ever become more than animals. It is not a thought he wishes to dwell on.

The last dying rays of sunlight sparkle against something metallic ahead of him, and he slows down the truck. He rolls to a stop next to a semi whose cab is wrapped around a crooked pine tree devoid of needles, a spindly tree with naked branches. He stops the truck and grabs the sawed-off shotgun and gets out. He checks to make sure the safety is off and walks around to the cab. He grips the driver’s door handle and swings the door open. Inside is a skeleton in a tattered red-and-white striped shirt and moth-eaten khakis. The bones of the hand are still wrapped around the steering wheel. The man sees something in the worn and frayed shirt pocket, and he pulls it out. A GRENADIER cigar. Leaf wrapping from the Dominican Republic. He slides it into his pocket and shuts the door and returns to the truck. He grabs his bag of granola bars and cigarettes and shuts and locks the door. He has forgotten to turn off the lights so he goes back and unlocks the door, opens it, and Anthony Barnhart