Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (92 page)

“What are you doing?” Katie asks. “You shouldn’t do that.”

The man has knelt down. He grabs the arm of the traveler and flips him onto his front. Blood gurgles onto the cold, hard earth. He pulls back the traveler’s jacket, revealing his ragged jeans. He reaches inside, grabs his wallet.

“You’re robbing him?” Sarah asks, whimsical.

“No,” the man says, opening the wallet. “I’m finding out who he is.”

Mark overshadows him. “What’s his name?”

The man examines his driver’s license. “Ralph Frankton.”

“That name sounds familiar,” Mark says.

The man goes through the wallet some more. Credit cards. Some pictures of an older woman. Probably his wife. “Look at this.” He holds it up. An identification card. GEO OIL is stamped in the upper right-hand corner, and underneath the wizened old man’s photograph—a much younger version, though with the same wrinkles and same lively eyes—it reads: C.E.O. “Look at this,” he says again, handing it to Mark.

Mark eyes it in the sunlight. “I’ll be damned.”

Katie asks, “Who is he?”

The man replies, “A dead man lying cold and alone in a cornfield.”

“Who was he
before
?” she clarifies, aggravated at the man’s inconsiderateness. Mark answers her: “He owned a company.”

“Not just
any
company,” the man says, dropping the wallet and standing. “A Fortune 500

company. Ever hear of GEO OIL?” Katie shakes her head. “Of course not. You don’t strike me as the type who would watch the news very much. He started an oil company, one rivaling most of the big off-shore oil businesses. He got all his oil from the United States, or from Canada. He negotiated an oil drilling operation in the Yukon, just east of Alaska. A lot of rioters—you know, those vegan ‘savethe-whales’ and shit like that types—opposed him. Said he was siphoning the oil from Alaska. No one could prove anything. He became well-known in the public arena. He gave half of his income to charities. Promoted social reform and clean water and urged a cure for AIDS. Shit like that. Not that he was dirt-poor. He still had millions.”

Katie stares at the corpse on the ground. “And this is what he looks like now.”

“Yeah,” the man says. “Pathetic, really. He should have died happy.”

Sarah says, “He seems to have died happy. He’s smiling.”

“Then he’s got something on all of us,” the man says.

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They make their way back to the vehicle. No one says much of anything. As they reach the road, Sarah mutters something under her breath: “Let the brother of low degree rejoice in that he is exalted: But the rich, in that he is made low: because as the flower of the grass he shall pass away. For the sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat, but it withereth the grass, and the flower thereof falleth and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth: so also shall the rich man fade in all his ways.”

The man asks, “What’s that you just said?”

“It’s from the Bible.”

“What’s it mean?”

“It means that nothing lasts forever,” she says, looking back into the cornfield, the stalks shuddering in a stillborn breeze. “Especially wealth.”

“And sanity,” the man muses. “He was a fucking lunatic.”

Kyle shrugs. “He died with a smile on his face. Maybe
we’re
the lunatics, trying to overcome what we know to be true: that running, hiding, fearing, surviving… That it can’t be escaped. Maybe he realized it.”

“He was delusional.”

Kyle ponders, “Maybe
we’re
the ones grasping at delusions.”

The man doesn’t say anything.

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Chapter Thirty

The Children of the Corn

“The sun also shines on the wicked.”

- Seneca (1st Century A.D.)

I

They make it through Indianapolis by early evening. The highways were clogged with wrecked cars, but they were able to weave their way through. They stopped the RAV4 at the highway exchange in Warren Park, right outside the city. The man examined the NORTH AMERICA map and charted their course towards Alaska. Interstate 65 North would be their route. He folded up the map and started the engine. They followed the exchanges and drove north of the city, the highway spanning railroad tracks and passing two parks filled with benches and gazebos and overgrown grass and gnarled trees. The road bent south, and downtown Indianapolis rose up through the windshield: several skyscrapers, many of the windows blown out; the streets filled with cars but empty of movement; Monument Square with its neoclassical, oolitic limestone statue: the Indiana Soldiers’ & Sailors’

Monument. The White River flowed west of the city. The man followed the signs to Interstate 65, driving north of the city. The road followed the White River north for a few miles, and then they knew nothing except suburbia: shopping malls, neighborhoods, average-Joe restaurants. Indianapolis was soon lost behind them, and suburbia followed suit. The highway stretched north, and now they are driving once more between endless fields of corn and ground-hovering beans. They are nearing a small town. Munroe, Indiana. They pass over a set of railroad tracks. A small lake to the left of the highway. Several buildings come into view. Old-fashioned, squat and brick-walled. They pass a sign that reads: MONROE, POPULATION 356. The 356 has been scratched out and painted over: POPULATION

0.

Katie’s shout nearly freezes the man’s blood: “Stop!”

The man hits the brakes. They are right next to the on and off ramps for Monroe. Katie is pressing against the glass, her nose flattened.

“Roll down the window,” the man mutters, “and it will be easier.”

She obeys.

“Why did we stop?” Mark asks, craning his neck from the front passenger’s seat.

“Good question,” the man mumbles under his breath.

Katie says, “I’m sorry, I thought I saw something…”

The man is suddenly attentive. He looks back at her. “What did you see?”

Sarah looks at him, mouths,
Raiders
. The man just shakes his head. Katie says, “I don’t know. Movement.”

“Probably just a dog,” Kyle says.

“Yeah. Probably.”

The man taps his fingers on the steering wheel. Half of him wants to forward, leave whatever she saw behind. But the other part of him wants to check it out. If she happened to see raiders, then Anthony Barnhart

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the raiders would probably continue on their route, and suddenly
they
would be the ones snuck up upon. The man doesn’t relish that thought. If it
is
raiders, and logic tells him that it probably isn’t, then they probably won’t be expecting anyone too soon. Or at all. And the man has the M16 wrapped underneath his seat. “Which way was whatever you saw?” he asks.

She points to the east. “Down that street. See those buildings?”

“Yeah.”

“I saw something move between one of the buildings.”

“All right,” the man says.

He pulls the RAV4 up the off ramp and turns it around so that it faces back towards the highway. He opens his door and gets out. Mark asks if he wants him to come along with him. The man says, “Yes,”

tells the others to stay with the car. If anything happens, they need to leave and not come back. The man takes the BERETTA, hands one to Mark. Mark checks the chamber, makes sure it’s clear, loads a 9mm magazine. The man offers a whimsical smile to Sarah, and they trot down the road, moving slowly. The road dips down into a recession and is lined by old brick buildings on either side, buildings with flat faces and gaping windows, loose tiles on the shingled roofs, dead vines crawling up the sides. There are several trucks parked along the road. The man approaches them, puts his hand upon the front hood of the first.
Cold
. If they’d been used, the engines would be warm. Relief floods through him. “Let’s check these alleys one-by-one,” the man says. “I’ll take the right side of the road. You take the left.” He looks back at the RAV4, a quarter mile away. He can see their heads sitting still. He flicks off the safety on the BERETTA and moves forward.

The man is standing in the alley staring at the skeleton of a dog next to an overturned trash can when he hears Mark shouting for him. He runs back across the street and finds Mark standing in front of a house, pistol held down at his side.

“What?” the man asks.

“They’re in there,” Mark says, pointing at the house.

“All right. Who?”

“Two little boys. Maybe four and six. They saw me and ran inside.”

“You’re carrying a gun. You probably scared the shit out of them.”

“I guess. What do we do?”

“How long has it been since August?”

“What is it now? The middle of April? Last week of May?”

“I don’t know. Something like that.” He repeats his question: “How long?”

He does the math in his head. “Almost nine months. Maybe nine months altogether.”

“Okay,” the man says. “They’ve survived nine months. I think they’re okay.”

Mark watches as the man turns and heads up the street, towards the RAV4, pistol lowered. The boy looks at the building, steps forward, grabs the door. He tries to open it. It’s locked. He knocks a few times, looks back at the man. The man doesn’t look back at him. Mark steps back and throws his foot into the feeble wooden door. It swings open. He steps into the darkness. The man is now watching, and he curses, trotting over to join him.

Mark moves inside the house. A thick layer of dust assaults his lungs, and he coughs. He calls out, telling the boys that it’s okay, that they’re not here to harm them, they just want to make sure they’re okay. He doesn’t get a response. The man enters the house as Mark walks to the steps leading to the second story. The man grabs Mark’s arm, but Mark rips away, begins ascending the stairwell. The Anthony Barnhart

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man looks back at the open door, the sunlight, sits down on the step. He hears Mark moving around upstairs. Opening doors. Then there comes the sound of shouting, the squeal of little boys. He gets up off the step and Mark comes tumbling down the stairs. The man smiles, asks if they scared him away. Mark ignores him, runs right past, knocking the man into the railing. Mark disappears out the front door and turns left, running around the side of the house. The man follows. As he rounds the side of the brick building, he can see one child running into the corn. The other is sliding down the rainspout. The boy looks reaches the ground, turns, looks at them, eyes wide, face ashen, and he takes off into the corn. Mark runs after them, telling them to stop. The man runs after Mark, telling him to stop. The three figures disappear into the cornfield, leaving the man behind. The man curses and enters the cornfield, running between the rows of weathered stalks. He can hear Mark shouting, one of the boys screaming. The man stops, takes a breath, leans forward, hands on his knees. He looks up, shouts, “You’re scaring the shit out of them, Mark! Leave them the fuck alone!” The shouts are dwindling. He considers going back to the RAV4, telling the others to drive the S.U.V. into the cornfield to find Mark. The field has to be fucking huge. But the man doesn’t want to risk losing his friend, so he pushes forward.

He has half-run, half-trotted nearly a mile. His lungs are searing. His vision is foggy. His muscles are shrieking. He stumbles forward, falls, the BERETTA skittering across the hard ground. He grabs it and continues forward. The corn thins, and he can see Mark ahead of him, legs flashing back and forth, shoulder hidden by crisscrossing rows of corn. The man pushes through. The corn thins, opening up into a clearing. The man stops behind the corn, kneels down, sees an old farmhouse, a silo off to the right, a large oak tree with its knotted branches obscuring the far side of the two-story building. The farmhouse is dilapidated, falling-apart. He estimates that it was built maybe in the late 1800s or early 1900s. He sees the two boys run inside the house. Mark is following after them. The man sees movement in the upper windows, and suddenly he realizes what has happened. “Shit.” He leaps up, runs forward, shouting after Mark. Mark is at the front door; the door bursts open, slamming him in the face; the boy drops the gun and collapses against the building, sliding to the wooden front porch, blood seeping from his nose. Two figures emerge from the doorway, men carrying automatic weapons. The upper-story windows shatter, and men push guns out through the gaps. The world is suddenly filled with the crackling of gunfire; the man turns, slips, falls to the ground. Bullets whip past, screaming; the ground bursts with bullet strikes, dirt and grass spraying into the air. The man stumbles forward, reenters the field. Bullets tear at the corn-stalks, and the severed limbs fall among him. He keeps his head low, running diagonally. Searing pain rips through his leg, and he falls. He rolls onto his back, grabs his leg, can feel blood pushing through a rip in the jeans. “Shit.” The shooting has stopped, and now there is shouting from the men, and he doesn’t even look back as he pushes away from the farmhouse, half-crawling and half-walking, limping the entire way. A trail of blood weaves between the rows of corn, etching out his path.

II

Mark’s world slows, and he feels himself grabbed by his arms and dragged across the porch. The sound of gunfire dies, and he blinks his eyes, dazed. His ears ring and his nose screams. He can taste blood in his mouth. His head rolls about on his shoulders, and he can see the silhouettes of two men on either side of him, gripping his arms in a vice-like embrace. He is brought into the farmhouse, and Anthony Barnhart

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the wooden walls on either side swirl past. The hallway opens up into a kitchen, and he feels his strength evaporate as he is slammed down into a chair at the dining room table. He reaches up and feels his nose, the warm blood. A man comes in from the porch, sets Mark’s BERETTA on the kitchen counter; it had fallen into the weeds beside the porch when he took the hit to the face. Everything is coming back to him, the fog lifting. He can see two figures standing by the refrigerator: the two little boys. They stare at him and smile. Mark leans down, coughs; bile dribbles from his mouth. The two boys are hidden behind the shadow of a larger man, who kneels down and looks at the boy. The boy looks up at him, doesn’t say anything. The man smiles, stands, turns and faces the children. He says something, but his words are lost in Mark’s haze. The man goes over to the counter, opens a drawer, draws out a hand-towel. He tosses it to Mark; it lands in his lap, slides down his pant-leg, onto the tiled floor.