Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (7 page)

He grabs a rock next to the sidewalk and smashes it through the window. He kicks away glass stubble and enters the classroom through the broken window. Sunlight illuminates the empty desks. Anthony Barnhart

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He walks past the watercolor paintings, eyeing them, then goes into the hallway. He walks up and down the corridors, searching. He finds the gymnasium, basketballs sitting in a mobile net-case in the corner, the retractable bleachers folded up. The locker rooms stink of body odor, residue from young kids. He finds the cafeteria and walks into the kitchen. He opens the cabinets, trying to find food, but all he finds are industrial-sized cans of canned goods. Finally he comes across a stack of singleserving chips. He tears one open—Baked Lays—and munches on them as he continues his search. Finally he finds it. The Nurse’s Office. He tosses the empty bag of chips on the floor and enters. He fumbles through the cabinets, finds some gauze. He places it on the counter. He continues searching.
Tweezers?
Got it.
Soap?
He doesn’t find any soap, but he finds brown and gray bottles of hydrogen peroxide and providone-iodine.
Even better
. He sits on the patient’s chair and pulls a mobile standing mirror up against his knees. He works by the sunlight coming through the skylight. Using the tweezers, he pulls the glass shards from his face. He counts maybe fifteen or twenty fragments embedded in his skin. Each yank burns. The blood starts flowing again, and he dabs the tiny yet deep cuts with cotton balls he found in a drawer. Finally, once he has all the glass out and sitting in bloody clumps on the floor, he soaks one of the cotton balls in hydrogen peroxide and dabs it over his face. He lets out a grunt with the searing pain. He dabs his entire face, treating all the wounds—they are everywhere, over his forehead, his eyebrows, along his nose, cheeks, chin, and one nearly sliced his right eye and another spliced his swollen lip. The burning is worse by his eye and lip. He tosses the rag away and kicks the chemical solution on the floor. It chugs onto the tile. He leans back in the chair and takes several deep breaths.

Aspirin.

In a minute. I need a few moments.

Fuck, that stuff hurts. I should have just used soap.

He pops an aspirin as he walks away from the school. He can see the highway from the school entrance. He takes West 19th Street to Highland Avenue, which curves up the same hill that the GARDEN OF HOPE adorns. As he passes baseball fields to his left, he bandages his cut hands. He had already soaked them in hydrogen peroxide and had even dabbed them with Neosporin.
My face is
going to be scarred forever
. That thought doesn’t carry as much weight as he thought it would. He walks into the parking lot of a retirement home and returns to the highway, crossing the knee-high grass. He easily spots the overturned Prizm, and after grabbing the flowers and his bag of tobacco (the cartons had scattered), he sits on the overturned rear of the car and smokes another CAMEL

LIGHT, staring out at the lifeless city.
I’m coming, Kira. I’m coming
.

III

The I-75 bridge spanning the Ohio River has turned into a nightmare. The Brent Spence Bridge is of cantilever truss design, with a main span of 830 ½ feet; approach spans measure 453 feet. It opened in November 1963, with its two decks—the uppermost deck going south, the lower deck heading north—striped for three lanes each. Emergency shoulders were eliminated in 1986 and replaced with an extra striped lane. Traffic overwhelmed the bridge for decades, and now the man sits in the idling S.U.V. staring at the congested mess. The entire entrance to the lower-most decks is congested, filled with overturned and crashed vehicles. The gentle slope of the highway down to the bridge had become overrun with unmanned cars, and they had all come to a stop right at the entrance to the Anthony Barnhart

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bridge. Skid marks went off the road, vehicles crashing below, erupting in explosions of fire: now they rest smoldering in the cold dawn.

He isn’t surprised at the trauma before him.
You should have expected this
, he tells himself. I-75

was among the world’s most important roadways and the second busiest interstate highway. I-71

was routed across the bridge in 1970, adding to the traffic.
But it could be worse
. He doesn’t want to imagine how it would look were the plague—if that’s what it was—had struck midday. Most of the traffic over the bridge was due to bursting suburban sprawl, shopping centers, apartment complexes, office parks, and light industry. The bridge had a tendency—
had
being the key word here, for now there is no one left to use it—to be the bottleneck of Cincinnati. He turns off the engine and gets out of the S.U.V., grabbing his bag of tobacco (into which he had placed the antibacterial ointments and extra gauze), and he grabs his lily bouquet for Kira as well. He lights another cigarette and stares at the carnage. In the dawning light, he can see bodies inside the cars. A single arm, pale white and clammy, lies in a pool of splattered blood near one of the smashed vehicles. Most of the bodies are smashed and crunched from the impacts. He doesn’t want to look. Smoking his cigarette, he walks along the catwalk on the side of the bridge, avoiding the crashed cars. It’s only a two-mile walk home from the bridge. He can easily walk it, despite the pain in each step. His ankle is swelling.

He climbs over a wrecked van and descends down the other side. He looks into the tinted side window and sees an infant in the back, its car-seat facing the rear of the vehicle. Its mouth is open in a tiny scream as rivulets of dried blood course down its rosy cheeks. It looks just like a porcelain doll in some HOUSE OF HORRORS freak-show. The mother is thrust into the back of her seat, the airbag pressing against her, partly deflated. The Radisson Hotel of Covington rises to his right, off the highway. The circular hotel rises 18 floors from the street, including a revolving diner—The Riverview Restaurant—at the top with wide bay windows affording beautiful views of downtown Cincinnati, the wooded hills of northern Kentucky, and the sweeping currents of the Ohio River. Now, he imagines, it has ceased rotating, and men and women in suits and dresses are pitched forward with their heads in bowls of fettuccini alfredo and Italian spaghetti. He ate there with Kira once. They had been able to see their house from atop the rotating restaurant. He can’t wait to see her again.

As he crosses the bridge, he looks at the city. It rests quietly. Whispers of smoke rise from one of the windows of a skyscraper, though he can see no fire. Most of the streets of downtown—at least, those he can see—are abandoned of cars. Downtown nightlife is nothing to be appreciated in Cincinnati. He has driven through it many times at night and seen barely any cars. This helps confirm that the plague struck at night. Most people were at home. And those in the city were mainly in their offices, perhaps curled at their desks in grotesque postures of pain and agony. Minutes pass. He tosses the cigarette, considers grabbing another, shakes his head.
No
.
Not now
. As he nears the end of the bridge, he looks down at the boat ramps along the Ohio shore of the river. Bodies are washing up with the current, perhaps thrown from the bridge when their cars crashed. He doesn’t feel anything.
It’s just
the shock. I’ve been in shock this whole time, and the car accident didn’t help
. Now he’ll have another cigarette as he reaches Ohio and takes the OH-50 West ramp.

He hijacks a car that had drifted into the shoulder. The entire right side of the car is scraped clean of paint, and the side mirror is completely lost. He pulls the young man’s body from the seat and sets him by the concrete shoulder wall. He throws his bag and flowers into the passenger’s seat and tries Anthony Barnhart

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to start the engine. It won’t work. He curses, tries a few more times. It sputters to life. A faint smile crosses his lips—the first in what seems like an eternity, though he knows it has only been around twelve hours since the nightmare began over the Atlantic. He shuts his door and puts the car in Drive. The engine makes sputtering sounds as he takes the exit to West 8th Street and turns right, then left. Through the back mirrors, the skyline can be seen as he meanders around a car accident in the intersection and takes Glenway Avenue up Price Hill—he can’t go right on State Avenue; it’s blocked by an overturned Cincinnati Police patrol car.

His house is not far. Forest hangs over the sidewalk on his left and rigid buildings stand straight and quiet to his right. He passes a college campus—Cincinnati Bible College—and then takes a right on Grand Avenue. He takes it up a hill, passing several houses, and goes left onto Lehman Avenue. He knows this street well: he crashed his first Jeep into the telephone pole at the base of the hill. He passes the Christian college on his right, with its freshly-mowed soccer field on his left. The hill curves around several apartment complexes. He reaches the bottom of the hill. The metal plate on the telephone pole is still bent by his impact four years ago.
A long time ago
, he thinks;
back when I was
dating Julie
. He turns right on State Avenue and pulls into the driveway. He sits in his car, unmoving. His girlfriend’s car sits in the driveway, cool and quiet. Bird droppings stain the side window. He bites his lip, suddenly overcome with panic. His heart drums like a gong in his chest.
I’m here, Kira,
he thinks to himself.
I’m here
.

IV

The front door is locked. He takes his keys off his belt and puts them into the lock. He twists, realizing his hands are shaking. He is terrified of what he may find. The doorknob clicks as it unlatches, and he pushes it open. The aromatic scent of her perfume washes over him as he stands in the doorway, gazing into the parlor. He fights off a swell of emotions and steps inside. He slowly turns and shuts the door, quietly, so as not to frighten her. He stands rigid and unmoving in the parlor. He looks into the kitchen beyond the parlor. The back door to the porch is shut, and through the slits in the blinds over the door he can see downtown Cincinnati beyond. He walks into the kitchen. An empty tea kettle sits on the stove burner. Packets of teabags sit on the counter beside it, next to her purse. He walks over, places one hand on the purse, feels its leather side. It is heavy. She always keeps too much in the purse. He eyes the tea bag; it reads: PURPLE JASMINE. He turns his head slightly. His neck still hurts. “Kira?”

The sound of his voice frightens him. Why, he doesn’t know.

“Kira?” he repeats again. Nothing.

He leaves the kitchen.

He trudges upstairs. The wooden stairs creak with each step. He moves slowly, hand on the wooden railing to the right. To his left, along the walls, are framed pictures of the two of them: standing outside their home when they first bought it, their first Christmas dinner together, her sitting inside his old truck when they first started dating. The caption under it read, in his handwriting: I FOUND

THIS CUTE GIRL AT THE GAS STATION AND STOLE HER. In the picture, she was leaning out the driver’s window and smiling widely.

He reaches the top landing. He turns and, drawing a breath, opens the door to the bedroom and steps inside.

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Sunlight comes in through the twin windows. The bed is made, the comforter stretched smoothly and without wrinkles, the pillows fluffed and sitting ready at the end of the bed. There are two dressers in the room and a high-backed chair in the corner. Kira’s dresser is adorned with framed pictures of him and her family back home in Illinois. His has a framed picture of his first plane—an Airbus for Air France—and a picture he took when they went out to a fine restaurant with some friends. He walks over to the bed and sits down. The mattress sighs under his weight.
She is here. Her car is here.

What if she left the house?

Why would she leave the house? She wouldn’t leave the house.

She’s looking for other survivors.

No. She wouldn’t leave. She knows I am coming back.

He looks over to the bathroom door. It’s shut.

She never shuts the door.

His hand touches the knob of the bathroom door. With momentous effort, he twists and opens it. It swings open, creaking on its hinges. The mirror is directly in front of him. He sees his own haggard reflection, the cuts from the glass swollen across his face. The edge of one of his eyes is puffing up. He gently touches it; painful to the touch. He steps onto the linoleum tile and turns. The drape around the bathtub/shower is drawn. He can hear the dripping of water. He approaches and sees the linoleum around the tub glistening with pools of stagnant water. He grabs the drape between aching fingers and pulls it aside slowly.

His breath escapes him. Strength evaporates.

He collapses to his knees.

He twists around, back against the wall, and vomits all over his pants.

She lies in the tub, the soapy water covering everything but the tips of her hands, her knees, and her forehead. The water is a ruby-red color from her blood. Her fingers grip white-knuckled to the edges of the tub, and her knees stick out of the overflowing water like twin islands. Her breasts crest the top of the water, dull and lifeless. He cringes in the corner of the bathroom, staring, unable to breathe, unable to think. He is terrified of moving closer, of looking inside, of pulling her out. No. He can’t believe it. He can’t believe she’s dead. All of this, all of his efforts just to get here to be with her, the driving force of his entire flight of survival. Everything… Gone. Drowned with her.

He stands in the kitchen. His pants reek of vomit. He has no desire to clean them. He holds the bottle in his hand—Bacardi 151, the killer of beers. Nicknamed the Superman—”When you drink it, you think you can fly like Superman; and when you wake up the next morning, you discover you’re paralyzed like Christopher Reeves.” One of his ancient history professors had told them, “Egyptian beer of antiquity was some of the most potent beer imaginable. Think of 200-proof beer. Even Bacardi 151 doesn’t compare.” He twists off the cap and raises it to his lips.
No. Not this. Not now
.