Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (78 page)

Like everything else, the tears are short-lived. In this brand new world, nothing is certain, there are no guarantees, and anything resembling normalcy or “a better life” is swept away in the darkness of Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

360

the night. His tears have stopped, and he takes several cavernous breaths, feels his cheeks sore and tight against his bones, his eyes aching from the tears. He wipes tears from underneath his eyes, sniffles at the congestion in his nose. He looks toward the high window, the sunlight pouring within. The shaft falls upon the journal in his hands, and he begins to read her writing, unable to look away, unable to forsake the memories of romance that bring him so much agonizing pain.

My breasts are swelling and sore, I have a heightened sense of smell and strange food cravings, I become nauseous at the strangest and most unpredictable times… And I have missed my period since last week. I am terrified. How could we have been so stupid to mess around? I knew the risks and the consequences. I want to get a pregnancy test, but I’m scared—what if it’s positive? I know Anthony loves me. I know that he cares about me. I know he wouldn’t duck out on me. But even common sense doesn’t make sense anymore. How well do I really know Anthony? Would he really stick beside me through this? Would he really help raise the child? I am so scared. I have been pushing him away, and I’m sure he knows something is wrong. Maybe he thinks that I don’t love him anymore. God, I hope not. I love him so
fucking
much. I can’t talk to anyone about this. I know I should, but I’m just too scared. I even told Anthony that I had my period, so that he wouldn’t ask questions. He thinks I’m in this mood because I’m menstruating. He doesn’t know what’s really going on. I should take that pregnancy test. I’ll take it tomorrow—hold me to it.

He stares at her words, a tightness beginning in his chest and spreading throughout his arms and legs, tracing up his spine and spreading like a spider’s-web through the neurons in his brain. It feels like a droplet of ice has been stabbed into his heart, and his veins have frozen, the ice branching out throughout his entire body. He can almost feel the icicles dangling from his ribs. His hands begin to shake, and he reads her words over and over again. He stares at the date: AUGUST 11, 2011. The night the plague struck.
She never took the pregnancy test
. It all makes sense now—the way she had become closed-off, almost untouchable. He would try to hug her, but she would just reel away. “I’m sorry,”

she said; “I’m on my period.” He hadn’t believed her, had thought she had found someone else, had been cheating on him since he left for Minnesota. He closes his eyes and remembers the night they had sex. He had gotten back from Minnesota. They had gotten a hotel room near the River. He had taken her to Shawnee Lookout, and they had eaten at a fancy restaurant—he forgets the name—and then proceeded to the hotel, where kissing led to touching, and touching led to sex. It had been the most marvelous experience of his life, though the guilt and shame had weighed upon him heavily.
She never took the pregnancy test
. He hadn’t known such guilt and shame to be possible. He’d always preached abstinence until marriage, and had lived by that Golden Rule. But seeing her after so long, having thought about her every night for several months straight, everything he held onto, everything he believed, had fallen apart. He had succumbed, and they had slept together in that bed, wrapped naked in the sheets, feeding off one another’s warmth.
She never took the pregnancy test
. He had fallen asleep imagining that they were living in their yellow cottage in the mountains, that they were sleeping underneath a quilt, and he buried his face into the pillow beside hers, had gazed deep into her eyes, had rubbed his fingers up and down the breadth of her spine. She had smiled so beautifully.
She never took the pregnancy test
. When morning came, she was throwing up—he blamed it on food poisoning from the restaurant. She had agreed—at least verbally.
She never took the pregnancy
test
.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

361

Now he stands beside the bed, staring down at the sheets. He reaches forward, fingers quaking. He grips the edge of the sheet, begins to unwrap.
Like unwrapping a mummy from the dungeons of a pyramid
. He knows nothing but his own stagnant breath and the beating of his own heart. Adrenaline surges through his veins. He continues unwrapping the blankets. Sunlight crawls over his shadow, reaches its tendrils down onto the bed. The refracted sunlight dapples against her skull, the pale bone of her forehead. Shivers trace up and down his spine like lightning in the African Serengeti. He forces himself to continue moving, and his eyes behold the undercarriage of what had once held the smoothest skin; he sees the bones over which muscles had clung, muscles that moved on that fateful night to maneuver himself into her. He sees her collar-bone, her sternum, the ribs. He continues unfolding the blankets—and then everything stops. The world goes to silence, and his lungs stop inhaling, his heart ceases to beat. The silence grows louder and louder until it becomes a pulsating scream in his ears: he stares down at her abdomen, underneath tattered clothing, and he can see the small eye sockets staring up at him, the tiny finger-bones wrapped around her spine, the mouth open in a crooked grin, and he can almost hear its speech: “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”

Anthony falls back onto the floor, his strength completely evaporated. He tumbles backwards into a bookcase, which collapses under his weight, the wooden frame splintering, books on psychology and dreams and astrology scattering, a glass Buddha doll shattering into a dozen fragments upon the floor. Kyle rushes into the room, bearing a knife. He sees Anthony on the ground, curling up into a fetal position. Kyle curses under his breath, slides the knife into the belt on his jeans. He feels awkward, but he kneels down beside his friend. Anthony reaches up, wraps his arms around Kyle’s leg, buries his face into his blue-jeans. The tears have come once again, a fresh onslaught. Kyle looks up at the window, can hear birds singing outside. Anthony moans, “I was going to be a daddy… I was going to be a daddy…” but his words are choked away with the lung-searing sobs.

∑Ω∑

The Explorer sped into the night, loaded fresh with its passengers. The Man. Kyle. Sarah. Mark. Cameron. Katie. Anthony. The wheels rolled through stagnant puddles of rainwater, splashing the zombies behind them with in a miry shower. The man wiped sweat from his brow, felt the tears stinging his eyes.
Pay attention to the road. Pay attention to the road
. He hated the fact that there were so many in the car, and he hated even more the fact that he had let compassion overtake him.
Compassion is what will get everyone killed. The Survivor is not The Compassionate. The Survivor is the
Ruthless, the Brutal, the Realist.
But when he looked into the rearview mirror, and when he could see the faces of the others—mere
children
to him, only around twenty years old a head—he felt something like
Responsibility
. He had seen that youthful look in Adrian’s eyes, and it had drawn him to the boy.
But now Adrian is dead. And you will be, too, if you don’t pay attention
.

II

The man stops the Explorer in the middle of the street, but he leaves the engine idling. He leans back in the leather seat and stares out the window. The entire fence has been torn down, the barbed wire merging with the muddy grass. The grass itself, once a beautiful canvas of green, has become a mudslide from the countless dark-walker hoards that had surged upwards into the church. The man takes a deep breath, twists the key, turns off the engine. He opens the door, the sound of the creaking Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

362

metal deafeningly loud. He stares at the section of the downed fence where he, Sarah, and Kyle had madly shot into the road only about twelve hours before. Then it had been dark, and dark-walkers had crowded around them. Now sunlight illuminates the road, and the man is surprised that there are no dark-walker remains to be seen in any direction.
It makes sense. They’re starving, and they’ll eat
their own kind if it suits their own selfish needs
. He wonders if that is such an awful thing, and he remembers back when those soccer players crashed in the Himalayas:
Hadn’t they resorted to eating
their own dead?
The man pushes these thoughts out of his mind and steps out of the car, feels his feet touch the pavement, and it becomes so real to him once more.

Mud clings to the bottom of his shoes. He has climbed the slope of the hill, and he walks along the side of the church. The windows that had once been boarded-up are now no more than gaping holes, through which sunlight cuts into the sanctuary, scattering amongst the manhandled pews. He moves to the front of the church, finds the front doors still bolted shut. He shakes the doors, tries to open them, resigns to moving back around the church and crawling inside through one of the broken windows. Glass crunches under his feet, and he moves between the pews. Several are knocked over, the bibles scattered over the floor. He stops and kneels down, picks up one of the bibles. It is bloated from moisture, and dried blood crusts over the edges of the pages. He sets it back down on the floor and moves forward. There are streaks and puddles of blood everywhere, but no remains of the carnage that had commenced only hours before. He figures that as dawn began to surmise its appearance, they dragged the remains into the confines of the shadows, where they continued their feast. He does spot, however, several pale bones, stripped entirely of flesh and gnawed by blunt teeth. It is then that the smell reaches his nose, and he slaps a cupped hand over his nostrils and mouth, trying to ward off the stench of dead flesh.

He takes the stairwell that leads down into the basement. Darkness cloaks the stairwell, and he grips the shotgun tightly in his hands (he had nabbed it from Mark before leaving the house on Maranatha Street). He walks carefully. He feels something squishy underneath his feet. He pulls out his cigarette lighter, kneels down, strikes a flame. He sees that he is standing in a pool of blood upon the step. The blood has become like jello, and his feet leave imprints in the gelatin fluid. He uses the lighter as a meager light as he moves farther down the steps. He reaches the basement and navigates between the tables. He finally reaches the door and pushes it open. He is greeted by a scream.

Carla is chained to the wall, but she is no longer Carla. The man finds the oil-lantern in the corner and lights it with the cigarette lighter. He raises the lantern up to his face, and the issuing light illuminates Carla. She is chained to the wall, and dried blood covers her neck. At her feet lies the body of what had at one time been a dark-walker: the throat is ripped out, and its head with lifeless eyes lies in a puddle of its own gelatinized blood. The man stares at the girl he once knew, and she pulls against the chains, yearning to be free; her jaws snap open and close, and her eyes speak venom. The man feels no compassion. He pulls the shotgun up, points it at her face. She lunges forward once more, but her shriek is drowned in the gun-blast, which shakes the corridors as it echoes through the stone-walled church. The man lowers the weapon: Carla’s body, with the stub of her neck, relaxes in the chains. Her head has become a splatter of blood and brains against the wall, dripping amorphously to the stone floor. Blood rises like a fountain from her neck, but it slowly subsides to a gurgle, and then there is nothing.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

363

Adrian’s body is covered with a swarm of flies. The man tries to brush them away, but they dodge the swipes of his hand only to return to their feast. He decides to ignore them, and he tries to lift Adrian off the ground. The boy’s body buckles and snaps, and suddenly the man is holding only the boy’s arm, the edges gnawed and frayed. He curses and drops it to the ground, feels guilty for treating his friend’s body with such disdain. He leaves the room, returning a few minutes later with a trash-bag. He gathers Adrian’s body and stuffs it into the bag. Not much is left. He ties the bag shut, and a cloud of flies follows him out of the church and to the Explorer. He loads the trash-bag into the backseat, shuts the door. He gives one last glance to the church, standing still and alone, void of life, and then gets into the driver’s seat. The rumble of the engine is the only sound in the air as the vehicle does a U-turn in the middle of the street and heads towards the heart of Mount Adams.

The Spring Grove Cemetery. The man parks the Explorer on the turn-around, and he pulls the bag out of the back and trudges through the grass. He spies the cross beside Rachel’s gravesite. He sets the bag down and leaves, returning twenty minutes later with a shovel taken from the caretaker’s shed on the other side of the hedgerows. He begins digging, and even in the coolness of the late March afternoon, sweat pops over his brow. His palms burn, the skin blistering, before he can set the shovel aside and lower the bag, the bottom of which is slick with blood, into the hole. He takes a break, standing in the gazebo, smoking a cigarette. He returns to the grave and fills in the dirt. He lays the shovel beside the freshly-dug grave and returns to the Explorer. Before he gets into the car, he spots something in the grill. He kneels down, sticks his finger in the grill, pulls at clumps of hair, which have welded to the metal via dried blood. He wipes his fingers on his pants and gets back into the Explorer. He leaves the cemetery, not even looking back, and heads east towards Maranatha Street.

∑Ω∑

The Explorer’s headlights flashed over a concrete wall; the man hit the brakes, swerved, fishtailed. The back end of the vehicle smashed against the concrete, shattering one of the translucent tail-lights. The man grimaced and pressed his foot harder upon the accelerator. They continued driving down the twisting and turning road, which sloped down a great hill and dove-tailed into a part of the city filled with factories and warehouses. The headlights reflected off the thousands of rustic glass windows lining the buildings. Dark-walkers poured out of the structures, emerging from their catacombs to give chase. The man gripped the steering wheel tighter, knuckles going white. His heart pounded in his brain, threatening to burst out of his ears. They passed underneath a series of bridges, over which crossed the train-tracks back when the day trains ran out of Cincinnati and to Pennsylvania. The man peered up through the windshield, and the splayed arches of the headlights illuminated dark-walkers upon the bridges, dressed in tattered clothing, their eyes glowing blue in the headlights. The man turned his eyes back to the road, and he saw a girl standing fifty feet in front of them, her head cocked to the side, eyes doused in wonderment. Hesitancy pervaded his muscles, and he began to slow down. Kyle turned and shouted at him: dark-walkers along the sides of the road continued to squeeze in upon them. The man kept slowing down, the Explorer losing precious speed, and suddenly the vehicle was attacked on either side, hands smearing against the glass, faces grinning in a blood-hungered pleasure. Kyle cursed and swung his leg over the gear-shifter, and he slammed his foot down upon the man’s foot, shoving it down onto the gas pedal. The Explorer lurched and raced forward. The man released the wheel, covered his eyes. The grill of the vehicle slammed into the girl’s legs, and her tiny body somersaulted through the air, her head smashing into Anthony Barnhart