Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (61 page)

Her face illuminated in the light, and she screamed, clawing at her eyes, blinded; she was halfway up the steps, and the boy shouted, swung the flashlight around, smashing it into the side of her face. Her body slumped against his, and he fell back onto the stairs, the flashlight sliding from his grip. He closed his eyes, waiting for that lethal bite in his jugular…

But it never came.

He slowly opened his eyes, could feel her breathing heavily upon him, breath rancid. Her eyes fluttered behind the lids.

∑Ω∑

“I had knocked her unconscious,” the boy says. “I didn’t mean to… I don’t feel bad for it… She just scared me so badly, coming out of the shadows… I’m not ashamed to admit that I screamed. Something possessed me, something I can’t quite put to words, and I refused to leave the house…

Anthony Barnhart

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And I refused to kill her. I don’t know what it was that possessed me. Maybe the hope that she would be normal again. I think that’s what it was. I’d already lost my parents, and even though Karen was one of them… I just couldn’t stand the thought of her facing the same agonizing death my parents had endured. And I couldn’t just leave her… Love is a wickedly poisonous thing. It’s a venom that floods the veins and causes dementia. I’m sure of it, because no one in their right mind would have done what I did.”

The man eyes the boy, almost afraid to ask. “What did you do?”

Anthony takes a deep breath. “I chained her up. I kept her alive.”

∑Ω∑

Her appearance was not what he had expected. His mind had been emblazoned with the portrait of her in the days before the plague, but the woman—the creature!—he discovered in the basement of that old house looked nothing like her. Her skin clung to her bones, and her breasts hung swollen in the cold. Fire lit in the bowels of her eyes, a fire that could not be quenched, and she would glare at him, hungering and thirsting, and he would watch, detached, his eyes downtrodden, as she struggled against her chains, the metal scraping the epidermis from her skin, revealing bloodied tissue. When the darkness wrapped tighter, and the cold grew more intense, he would sit in the chair in her bedroom, covered with blankets, and she would be lying on that bed, the same bed they had laid in months ago, contemplating the future and enjoying sweet pillow-talk. She would be chained down, wrapped in blankets, and she would breathe deep and snarl as his broken voice filled the air with its bitter lullabies:

♫Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,

go to sleep, little baby.

When you wake you shall have

all the pretty little horses.

Blacks and bays, dapple grays,

coach and six white horses.

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,

go to sleep, little baby. ♫

He would talk to her as if she were human, as if Karen resided deep within the creature, as if she was a coma patient who could hear but not respond. When morning sunlight came through the window, he would sit beside her on the bed, and her head would be fastened down with leather belt straps. He would use an old brush and comb her hair, removing the tangles, and he would tell her how much he loved her, how he would always be with her. He fed her bread and canned goods, which she devoured hungrily; he would shoot squirrels with her shotgun, and he would feed them to her, and he would find some perverted pleasure in watching her feast. “I promised you I would always take care of you, didn’t I, Karen? Yes. I promised you that I would always take care of you.”

∑Ω∑

Tears dance behind Anthony’s eyes. The coldness of early March wraps tighter around him, and everything seems more distant and remote. He hangs his head and breathes slowly, his breath crystallizing before his eyes. The man watches him, doesn’t know what to say. His first impulse is to Anthony Barnhart

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condemn the boy for being so… twisted. But yet he wonders if he would not have done the same with Kira. He easily killed Mark’s girlfriend, but he wonders if Mark would not have followed in Anthony’s footsteps if the gunshot hadn’t taken her wretched life. The boy draws a deep breath, trying to clear his mind. “Love does things to you. Helen Keller once said that ‘the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched,’ that

‘they must be felt with the heart.’ But I wonder if she understood what she was really saying. Common sense, which is based upon what can be seen and felt, dictated that I end Karen’s life the moment she appeared on those steps. But love, something deep within me, something in my
heart,
caused me to do things that don’t make any sense whatsoever. I sit back now, and wonder, months later, how in the hell love could have possessed me to the point of chaining her up like an animal, yet singing lullabies and combing her hair? The Karen I loved, she died with the plague. And it took me a while to figure that out. I eventually took her life. It was when I heard news of this place, knew that there were other survivors. I couldn’t just leave Karen chained up, and I couldn’t release her for fear of losing my own life. So I went to the store and grabbed a bottle of Valium, and I slipped it into some of her food. She fell asleep in that bed, and she lies there even now.”

∑Ω∑

Her chest with its washboard ribs had stopped moving. He quietly moved about the room, gathering his things. He took one last look at her face, the skin clinging to the bones, the eyes sunken in the withered sockets. He tried to remember what she looked like before she had become one of them, but his memories had been shattered. He broke down in the bedroom, and he crawled into the corner and wept. He looked up at her vanity, saw pictures of him and her smiling together, taken from Cox Arboretum in Dayton, Ohio. It had been early spring then, the flowers just beginning to poke forth in vibrant blooms. They had walked along the paths, through the pine thickets, had seen several deer grazing in the wildflower fields. They had walked down a long sidewalk lined with cherry trees, and had sat down in a covered gazebo, the latticework covered with dead ivy. They had taken several pictures together, and Karen had several printed from WAL-MART and put in generic frames. He scooted up to the vanity, reached up, pulled down one of the picture frames. His tears dropped onto the plastic covering, the pictures beneath magnified. He set the picture down and moved back to the bed, and he kneeled beside the covered corpse, found his lips moving in an ancestral Celtic prayer his great uncle had taught him many years before:

“May you be as free as the wind,

As soft as sheep’s wool,

As straight as an arrow,

That you may journey into the heart of God.”

∑Ω∑

“She had become… closed-off… towards the end of our relationship,” Anthony says. “She became more and more distant in the days before the plague. I don’t know why. I think… I was never the best boyfriend I should have been. I was not as loyal as she deserved. I didn’t kiss any girls, and I didn’t cheat on her… But sometimes I would look at other girls’ bodies, and I would secretly wish that Karen had their body.” He looks over at the man. “I regret never being the boyfriend I should have been. I regret never appreciating what I had. But at least… At least I killed her humanely. She Anthony Barnhart

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died in her sleep. And I have this comfort: that one day this will end, and I’ll go and get her remains, and I’ll give her the proper burial she deserves. Maybe, by doing that, I can make up for how pitiable of a boyfriend I was to her. Maybe, by doing that, I can cling to a little so-called decency.”

VI

They are silent for a time. The hatchway opens, and Kyle climbs out. He takes places with Anthony, who crawls back inside the church. Kyle takes Anthony’s rifle and feels its weight in his hands. No words are exchanged. They gaze out into the darkness, hearing the howls of the dark-walkers in the unknown distance. Kyle pokes the man in the shoulder, points. Across the road, along the trees bordering the river, a deer has cautiously made its way out of the woods. The man takes a breath and raises the rifle. He aims the sight along the deer’s neck. He had been hunting only once before, with his father before the accident. He traces the sights over the deer’s hide, and he squeezes the trigger. The shot rings out, deafeningly loud, clapping across the rolling hills. The deer moves forward, stumbles over its front legs, and collapses into the grass. A smile dances over the man’s façade.

“Oh, shit,” Kyle mutters.

The man glances over at him; the boy points.

Several dark-walkers have emerged from the trees on the other side of the road, where the old parsonage lies in shadows. There are maybe twelve or thirteen of them. They are naked, mottled blue in the cold, and he can hear their teeth chattering. Several of them look up at them atop the church, and they stand quietly, innocently watching. The man swings the rifle around, points the hairs over the closest dark-walker’s skull. The dark-walker opens its maw, lets out a shriek. The man yanks down on the trigger.

The gunshot screams in his ears, and he can see the face of the dark-walker implode, blood spraying out in an arc.

It stumbles backwards and collapses into the grass.

“What the fuck!” Kyle shouts. “Now they know where we are!”

“They already did,” the man grunts. “Use that gun, will you?”

They begin taking shots. The dark-walkers scatter, moving towards them with a quickening pace. Several fall backwards, the momentum of the bullets throwing their bodies like rag-dolls. They are getting closer to the church, and they disappear out of sight, along the church walls. They can hear them running back and forth along the wall, scraping their hands against the concrete structure. The man looks over at Kyle. “Now what?”

“They shouldn’t be able to get—Shit.”

The man swings his eyes over to the deer.

Its legs are disappearing as several dark-walkers drag it into the brush.

“It was a diversion,” the man says as the deer disappears.

“I don’t know,” Kyle says.

“Yes, it was a diversion. They played us for a bunch of fools.”

“If it was a diversion,” Kyle says, “then how come the ones below haven’t left?”

Before Kyle can answer, they hear screaming and gunshots coming from inside the church.

On the rooftop, their souls are drained with the blended concoction of shouts, screams, and gunfire coming from the bowels of the church. Kyle grips his gun and runs forward to the hatch. The man Anthony Barnhart

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curses and runs after him. As Kyle grips the hatch to swing it open, the man grabs him by the shoulder and tears him away, hurling him down onto the ground. Kyle rolls, dropping his rifle, and stumbles to his feet, eyes ablaze.

The man shakes his head: “No.”

More gunfire. Shouting. Kyle snarls, “Those are our friends down there!”

“We don’t know how many of them got in,” the man says. “We can’t risk it.”

Kyle searches for an excuse. “We have guns…”

“Guns won’t do shit if there’s more than a few.”

The screams and shouts die down. No more gunfire.

The man’s face goes ashen. “Still want to go down there?”

Kyle doesn’t answer, looks out into the trees… “Look!”

The man follows his gaze.

Several dark-walkers are moving towards the tree-line, one limping. He counts maybe five or six, and they’re dragging…

“Malkovich.”

“They got him,” Kyle murmurs under his breath. “They fucking got him.”

Malkovich is struggling, shouting, fighting. But their grip on him grows tighter. The man raises his rifle, aims.

“You can’t kill them all!” Kyle wails.

“I know,” the man mutters. He takes a deep breath, tries to calm his nerves.

“They’re almost into the trees!”

“Be quiet, all right? I can’t concentrate with you screaming in my ear.”

Kyle moves towards the edge of the roof, strains his eyes in the darkness. He hears the gun-blast from the man’s rifle.

He sees Malkovich go limp moments before disappearing into the trees. The boy looks over at the man, who tosses him the rifle.

The man walks past, growls, “Not so fucking funny anymore, is it?”

Rachel stands in the closet in the back of the church, the only light coming from a small wicker candle with wax crawling down the sides. She takes several deep breaths, sets the box on the floor, and pulls down her pants. She situates herself quietly upon the makeshift toilet, not wanting to arouse any suspicion, paranoia swarming over her. She leans back against the wall, feels the seat cold against her cheeks. She licks her lips and squeezes. Nothing comes. She tries again. This time there is a trickle. She leans to the side, fumbles with the box, manages to open it; in the darkness, she can search only with the tips of her fingers, and she finds the stick. She pulls it up into the dim light, can’t see a thing, and puts it underneath her. Taking another breath, she squeezes again, and urine dribbles over the stick and into the toilet. She pulls it out and sets it on the floor. She leans back against the wall, closes her eyes, begins to count silently in her head.

One. Two. Three
.

Each second is agonizingly slow.

Four. Five. Six
.

Upon reaching two minutes, she grabs the stick. Her hands shake as she holds the stick in one hand and the candle in the other. The light dances over the small display on the stick, and in a moment a line appears across the display. Her stomach flips inside-out, and she drops the test, leans forward, head in her hands, feels dizzy and nauseas. One word cycles through her mind, growing louder and more intense with each numbing repetition:
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…

Anthony Barnhart

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Anthony Barnhart

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Chapter Nineteen

As the Rain Falls

(or “Carla’s Story”)

“Religion is a wizard, a sibyl… She faces the wreck of worlds, and prophesies restoration. She faces a sky blood-red with sunset colours that deepen into darkness, and prophesies dawn. She faces death, and prophecies life.”