Strangers in the Night (22 page)

A hat stand thick with splinters.

A rotten hole in the floorboards.

Downstairs, there was the entrance hall, a kitchen, a toilet, a sitting room.

And a study.

It was the latter which interested him tonight.

Mitts trod into the study. He felt a tingle pass down his spine. A slight, swirling nausea entered his blood. Something within told him that he was doing something
Wrong
.

That he was
invading
Luca’s privacy.

Although Luca would always say that her home was
his
home, Mitts could read the subtext.

He knew that this room—
the study
—was off limits to him.

And yet it was the most interesting room in the house.

Because here—he believed—he would find answers.

Moonlight floated in through the window.

The air smelled of furniture polish.

A large, oak desk sat in the middle of the room; a piece of furniture clearly designed with a much bigger space in mind.

Mitts turned to the bookcase.

What he had come for.

What he
always
came for.

Well-thumbed books occupied the lower shelves—novels and manuals, mostly.

He turned his attention upward.

To the higher shelves.

Mitts ran his fingers along the spines of the folders.

He got about a third of the way along the shelf.

And then stopped.

He pinched the folder.

Slid it out.

He took care to do so silently.

He glanced back over his shoulder.

For some reason he caught the feeling he was being watched.

He wasn’t.

Mitts paced over to the oak desk. He laid the latest folder down flat.

He raised his head, listening for any stirring within the house.

Hearing nothing, he zipped the folder open.

His hands were shaking.

He could feel his heart pounding a little harder.

Palms sweating.

Because he knew it could be here.

That, what Mitts had just seen in his own mind—in his
dreams
—might be drawn out here, in visual form.

Among Luca’s dream logs.

* * *

Mitts peeled back the pages. He took a few seconds to consider each drawing before turning to the next. Each time he turned the page, he felt a sudden, inexplicable excitement.

Some hope that the next drawing would be the
one
.

About a year ago, Luca had stopped sharing her dreams with him.

Every year, a day-long party was held in the Village.

A party dubbed the Mid-Summer Blowout.

A chance for everyone to let down their hair. To drink their moonshine liquor.

To get intoxicated.

As a matter of principal, Mitts hadn’t ever got involved.

But last year had been different.

On the night of the festivities, Mitts and Luca had had an argument.

Over what Mitts didn’t remember.

All he could recall was that he had stormed out of the house.

Determined to have a good time.

He had made a beeline for the Station.

He had met up with the others.

All the others involved in the Patrol.

They were surprised to see him, of course, but that didn’t mean they weren’t
delighted
.

Over the years, Mitts had built up something of a reputation for being a sharpshooter. For being one of the most valuable members of the Patrol. He was the one who, more often than not, managed to spot the Strangers out there, in the mist.

He would guide the group’s shooting.

Although not one to brag, it was impossible
not
to hear the rumours about town.

They said
he
was the reason for nobody having been killed in the Patrol in recent times.

Mitts didn’t think this down to any sort of skill.

At least it was nothing he was
consciously
responsible for.

On top of his well-publicised ‘heroics’ five years ago, this made Mitts one of the most popular people in the Village.

His mates in the Patrol would implore him to join in with the Mid-Summer Blowout. Each and every time Mitts would volunteer to take watch. He had never had a thirst for liquor.

That night, though, he had changed his mind.

Before he knew it, his fellow Patrol members had tipped what felt like gallons of liquor down his gullet.

Mitts could still, to this day, recall how the whole world had swilled and swirled beyond his eyes.

How Yuvna had had to prop him up so he wouldn’t topple over.

Later that evening, Mitts had puked his guts out in one of the Station toilets.

Even now, a year later, he could still recall the sting of bile at the back of his throat.

How it’d felt like a never-ending stream pouring right out of him.

He had come to sometime around dawn.

Still in the Station toilets.

Someone had been standing in the doorway. As he had peered through his blearily focused eyes, he had squinted hard, trying to make the silhouette out.

Somewhere, in his bleary brain, he had decided it was Samantha.

And so he had spoken her name.

It was only when Luca trod forward, closer to him—her features becoming obvious—that Mitts realised it wasn’t Samantha after all.

Luca had taken him to bed.

In their bedroom, with the next day dawning, she had turned her back to him.

Drifted off to sleep, without a word.

The next day, at breakfast, she had brought a damp, warm towel for him to lay over his forehead. Over a strong cup of coffee, he had tried to explain. He had attempted to jabber some explanation about Samantha always being there to protect everyone.

That she was
always
cropping up like that.

But it hadn’t helped.

Ever since then, although there were flashes of their relationship—of the former romance—Mitts knew, in reality, it was over.

Trust had been breached.

There was no turning back.

And it mattered not at all that Samantha was dead.

* * *

The sun shone in through the study window.

Mitts felt its warmth.

Dawn.

He flipped the next page over.

It felt as if someone had punched him right in the forehead.

He glared at the page. Unable to understand.

What was he
seeing
?

He squinted.

It wasn’t one of Luca’s meticulous pencil sketches.

It was full colour.

He took in the details.

The man dressed in a royal-blue top hat.

White stars speckling it.

A white, cotton shirt underneath.

Bright-red suspenders.

His dream.

This
was his dream.

The one which he had had years ago now.

He stared hard at the page.

And then he turned it over.

A comic strip.

A page that’d been torn out of a comic.

He glanced up, to the title at the top of the page:

SAM AMERICA: A NATION AWAITS ITS HERO

Mitts leaned back from the desk.

The chair squeaked a little beneath his shifting weight.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

Mitts’s heart skipped a beat.

He jerked around to look.

Saw Luca standing there.

She wore her white nightie. Her sable hair tumbled down over her shoulders.

He read her expression.

No anger.

No disappointment.

Had she expected this?

Had she
known
what he had been up to?

Mitts swallowed hard, then said, “You saw him too—in your dreams?”

Luca held Mitts’s gaze.

Her cheeks had once held a pinkish glow, but now they had turned a richer red colour.

From working out in the sun.

That had been another innovation of the past year, or so. Luca had opted out of Patrol rotation. She had decided she preferred to work in the fields.

‘Womanly work’, as she put it herself.

To Mitts, though, there didn’t seem all that much
womanly
about field work.

Luca crossed her arms. She tilted her head to one side. Smiled faintly.

He could hardly remember the last time she had looked at him that way.

With tenderness.

He wondered if what he’d done, in reading her dream logs, hadn’t been some sort of validation for her. He had shown that he
did
still see value in her.

That they still shared their connection.

“Come on,” Luca said, still smiling. “I’ll make us some breakfast.”

Mitts remained where he was, at the table, the folder still open before him. That comic strip of Sam America spread out. “At the end,” Mitts said, “when you last saw him, in your dreams, was he walking through the Village—the
destroyed
Village?”

Luca’s smile faltered.

Her expression darkened a touch.

She broke off eye contact.

“Yes,” she replied, in a quiet voice.

“One more thing,” Mitts said.

She glanced up, briefly, her smile now completely gone.

The familiar darkness resting just beyond the surface of her eyes.

“The last time—the last time you
saw
him—was he digging someone out of the rubble?”

“Yes,” she repeated, her tone deadpan.

“And,” Mitts continued, “was the person he pulled out . . . were they . . . I mean, was it
me
?”

Even as Mitts said it, he felt like a total idiot.

Just who did he think he was?

But Luca shook her head.

“No,” she said, her voice not much more than a
croak
. “It was me.”

Mitts felt his chest tighten.

Before he could say anything else, Luca turned away.

Disappeared into the kitchen.

* * *

That evening, Mitts headed out with the Patrol.

Like always, he thanked Luca for dinner. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek as she tended to the washing-up. Sometimes Mitts tried to help out with the housework but, more often than not, Luca would reprimand him for doing so.

As if it wasn’t his ‘duty’.

Once outside the Village gates, with his troop of ten or so, he felt all his muscles seize tight.

He looked over his men.

He was responsible for all these people.

Responsible for getting them back home safely.

For some reason, before tonight, that fact had never
really
hit home.

He glanced up, to the rampart.

He looked to Dag—an eyepatch now covering his left eye—and gave him a salute.

Dag saluted back, stern-faced, and then, the crutch under his arm, limped away.

Out of sight, down below the wall.

Mitts headed his team, led them across the rolling hills, the squidgy earth.

It was hard to believe how things had changed.

How Mitts had gone from being a dangerous—possibly
deranged
—prisoner to heading up the entire Patrol once Dag had been incapacitated.

The same night Samantha had died.

As Mitts led his men across the terrain, directing them to take up positions with the motion of an arm, he found himself stumbling back in time.

Three years ago.

That was when it had happened.

It had been a Patrol just like any other.

Wasn’t that how traumatic things
always
occurred?

On a ‘normal’ day . . .

They had laughed—
joked
—as they’d prepared their weapons.

He and Samantha had ended up in a room together.

Alone.

They’d been forced to make polite conversation.

Forced to
pretend
there was nothing between them.

Sometimes Mitts wondered if Samantha herself noticed the spark.

Sometimes Mitts was convinced the spark was there for anybody to see.

For anybody who
wanted
to see.

Out in the mist, Mitts heard croaking.

He snapped his mind back to the present.

He tasted sulphur on the air.

The smell of
them
.

The Strangers.

The mist moved in over the water.

He felt a slight chill.

Another few
croaks
. . . it reminded him of frogs calling.

His men knew what to do.

They took up their positions. Gripping their rifles tightly.

Taking a knee in the sodden earth.

Staring down their rifle sights into the mist.

Mitts waited for the creatures to come. They always did.

As he felt the chilly, white clouds of mist wash over him, his mind ebbed back to that fateful evening once more.

It was so much like it was now.

The mist rolling in.

Croaks
filling the air.

A dim awareness that Luca was close by.

That she was grinning at him in profile.

Like all of them, with a false sense of confidence.

Like it was all just a game.

As if nobody could come to harm.

In retrospect, everything was primed for something careless to happen.

And that was just how it played out.

Mitts recalled the minute details.

His eyes had left Luca’s.

He had traced the shore.

All the way down.

All the way back up.

Samantha and Dag had been about a hundred metres off to the left.

On the lower ground.

Mitts recalled distant concern. Thinking to himself about how, whenever the two of them occupied the same space they seemed to forget who was in charge.

Either consciously, or by some unspoken agreement, Samantha
or
Dag came out on Patrol.

Never both.

But a stomach bug had struck down many of the Patrol.

Replacements were required.

Mitts had turned his attention back to the incoming mist.

Turned his attention to priming his weapon.

To being ready for the creatures to attack.

When the first few shots had rung out in the night air, he had thought nothing of it.