Suspended In Dusk (38 page)

I held up my one shard of glass to the light, and felt the weight of its pull on my heart.

Mac’s gasping face met my own.

“Let me die,” his dream whispered. “Please just let me go.”

Just days ago, I had captured this shade as he gasped and trembled in a troubled sleep.

Now I hold his dream to rue and remember forever.

It is the first weight in what will become my own collection of imprisoned dreams.

And I think that it will always be the heaviest.

For Jerry

The Way of All Flesh

Angela Slatter

Since everything went to hell, Sweet Bobby Tate had found some—indeed, all—of his preferred activities curtailed. This vexed him no end. He was fond of travel—although he could take or leave the big cities; not that there were too many of them anymore—but what he really liked, where his heart truly resided was small towns. The smaller the better as far as Bobby was concerned; easier to meet people, get to know folk. Faster to get around and finish the conduct of business.

In small towns, Bobby would tell anyone who stuck around long enough to listen, people did you the courtesy of conversing. Taking the time to listen. People there were trusting, and Bobby liked that too. He liked how small towns had a layout that was easy to figure, and how they almost always had pleasant and interesting graveyards. Small towns had little old churches of wood, with peeling paint, flower beds awash with colour, prayer books lined up neat and tidy, all manner of altar cloths handmade by the local ladies. There were stone walls around such bone yards, not so high that climbing over them caused a pulled muscle or torn seams in tight jeans, but high enough to give a little privacy.

Cities had less space and so leaned towards crematoria, with niches and so forth, less cadavers, more urns of ashes. While Bobby was not averse to a barbeque on occasion, he preferred things
fresh
.

Bobby’s Momma had often told him,
Fresh is best
and her words were a sermon he took to heart. She didn’t get out much in her later years and she hated travelling as much as her boy loved it. She looked forward to his visits, though, hearing him tell of his adventures as he crisscrossed the great nation like some latter day Johnny Appleseed, sowing darkness wherever he went. The last time he dropped in on her—before the world had started to fall apart—he’d found her still and cold in her easy chair. No more cosy chats and homey wisdoms, no more games of cheating chess, and that loss hit Bobby hard. He was grateful it was winter and she’d not paid her heating bill.

He made himself a feast she’d have been proud of, ate every last morsel. She would have wanted it that way, he thought; hadn’t she fed his infant mouth with slivers of her own flesh and quenched his thirst with her own redness? Every time he’d seen those scars on her arms, in the places where the flesh was softest, he choked up, knowing he was so loved. Whenever he came into a new town and saw a woman who reminded him of his mother, he made sure she was his very first acquaintance.

So when Sweet Bobby Tate stepped across the boundary into Wolf’s Briar, West Virginia (Population: 332), footsore and hungry, the primary thing he cast around for was a bakery. On any day not Sunday, that was where you found ample women with grey hair, heavy breasts and loose cotton shifts, smelling of lilac toilet water or lily of the valley. Later on he’d try the church.

* * *

Annabel Adams—sixteen and pretty with only a slight overbite that barely anyone ever commented on anymore—sat on the porch swing and gently kept it rocking with the occasional tensing of her leg muscles. The breeze was agreeable and cool as it rustled through the branches of the old lemon tree. It hadn’t brought any awful sort of smell for weeks now, so Annabel figured that whatever had been rotting in large quantities some distance from Wolf’s Briar had finished its decaying. The weather was nice, almost on the turn from summer to autumn, and she thought it was her favourite time of year. Behind her the big white house was quiet; no voices, no music radio, no hum of a refrigerator or air conditioner coz no one had heard that for almost a year. Just as quiet as the church and god-acre next door; just as quiet as dust falling.

Annabel did a quick calculation and figured it was more than a year—closer on eighteen months. The power gave out the day before her brother Tim went the way of all flesh. Annabel didn’t like to say ‘died’. She hadn’t thought about it too much before what her Grandma Eileen called ‘the Great Retribution’ came, but when it got to the point that so many folks she’d known all her life just weren’t there anymore, she decided a new term was needed. Slowly but surely, just about everyone went the way of all flesh. She was happy her family had stayed with her though, after everything that had happened, even if they didn’t say much anymore.

Sighing, she stood and the swing banged back against the wall, taking out another chip of paint. Annabel stretched, long black hair trickling down her back. Her gaze flitted over the dusty length of the street, the lonely-looking houses, and overgrown lawns, and saw what she saw every day: precisely nothing new.

“Back to the books,” she said, so her mother might hear and know she wasn’t slacking. It was important, Melba Adams said, to stay up-to-date with all the subjects she’d need for her SATs, because surely one day things would get better and she’d want to go to a good school.

That was Melba’s mantra:
things would get better
. Her mother had been certain, so absolutely convinced that one day all the bad stuff would be done with. That one day the power would magically come back on, that they’d get something more from the landline than petulant silence, that their mobiles would once again start pinging signals from towers, and hallelujah, the tiny gas station at the end of Abel’s Road would be pumping petrol into all the SUVs currently standing idle in people’s drives. None of that happened, though Melba said they should just be grateful none of those walkers mentioned on the radio—back when the batteries still had juice and some places had generators that let them broadcast—ever came near Wolf’s Briar. Annabel didn’t share her mother’s faith in the Restoration of Everything, but she kept up her studies for Melba’s sake.

“Back to the books,” she said again, and stepped into the cool interior of the house.

* * *

Much to his chagrin, Sweet Bobby found no trace of either portly matrons or working bakery. Indeed, there was no trace of anyone anywhere. The shelves in the supermarket had been picked clean for the most part except for a few unloved tins of peas, ravioli, beets, and thirty-two packs of Junior Mints.

He wondered if the dead walkers had been through, but there were none of the usual signs left when those locusts on two legs paid a visit: no empty bullet casings scattered like metallic fruit, no bodies in various stages of decay littering the streets, no houses hastily fortified and then broken open like Easter eggs. Everything was just quiet and empty and filled with different degrees of dust.

Perhaps the inhabitants of Wolf’s Briar had decided to head to one of the safe zones early on—but surely they’d have taken their vehicles, as long as the gas held out? Without much hope, he decided to give the rest of the town a once-over. Who knew? He might get lucky at the cemetery, find someone buried not
too
long ago and not too deep.

He wandered up the deserted main street, past empty-eyed shops until the shops became cottages, then cottages grew into larger houses as they got closer to land that might be farmed. Soon enough he spotted it: a stone wall, not too high, not too low, the tips of grave-markers peaking over the top, and the pale yellow-painted planks of a tiny church. Bobby put some pace into his step, a smile pulled up one corner of his mouth like a fishhook.

He vaulted the wall, his boots kicking up an awful lot of dust and dead grass. With a keen eye he looked over the simple headstones and the mounds in front of them, saw that most of them were sunk with age instead of reaching upwards. Some had metal grilles over them, slowly rusting. In disgust, he kicked a largish rock and heard it strike against the timber of the church. Sweet Bobby stalked along one side of the graveyard, then turned a right angle and paced the distance to the opposite wall. As he got to the next corner, he stopped.

A large white house, three stories high, with a broad veranda. Colourful curtains fluttered in and out of windows. A place that did not look empty or deserted; and then, flitting from one set of open French doors to the next, was a girl. Thin, knobbly knees, a white and black polka dot skirt, and tiny breasts under a washed-out t-shirt. She was singing to herself, off-key, some song he didn’t recognise. Her voice cracked partway through the last word and it made him laugh.

He hitched the satchel firmly on his shoulder, and made a beeline for the tall house.

* * *

“Now, Daddy, don’t look at me like that. I’ll make him welcome.”

Her father’s expression was the one she thought of as his ‘sermon face’, just like he used when in the pulpit, talking about the lack of a moral compass in their community. He’d given her the heads-up, turning his mostly-bald head towards the front door just moments before the stranger’s lean shape darkened the rectangle of light. Annabel stretched away from the kitchen bench so she could see all the way down the hall and take in the visitor. She kept her breathing calm, although her heart skipped, just a little.

“Hi there,” he called. “Mind if I come in out of this heat?”

“Of course,” she said like a polite young lady, not contradicting him about the weather coz it really was quite pleasant outside. “Would you like some lemonade? It’s from our very own lemons.”

“I did notice that tree hanging over the cemetery wall,” he called while he paused and removed his boots before crossing the threshold. Annabel took the opportunity to gather all the condiments she needed for his beverage. By the time Bobby had sock-footed it into the bright kitchen, Annabel was pouring a tall glass of lemonade from an old crystal pitcher.

“I’m Bobby Tate,” he told her—he didn’t tell anyone that he was
Sweet
Bobby until the very last minute.

The girl held out the glass; rough-torn leaves of mint contrasted with the pale yellow liquid. Her hand didn’t shake as their fingers brushed, and he was kind of disconcerted by that. Then again, he thought, folks had become strange since the changes; some got friendlier, some got braver, some more easily spooked.

“I’m Annabel Adams and I’m sorry the lemonade’s not so cold,” she said, sweeping her hair back from her face, carefully knotting the strands into a fat bun at the back of her head, then took up one of the pencils that lay on an open exercise book and jammed it through the thickly wound ball.

The girl smiled. “How do you come this way, Mr Tate? Wolf’s Briar’s so far from anywhere.”

“Oh, I’m just a roaming soul. Besides, there’s not much left out there,” he said and gestured in the general direction of ‘out there’. Bobby took a swig of the lemonade, then another—it was good, sweet. The girl busied herself tidying, lining the exercise book up with the edge of the counter, then closing the text book next to it.

He took Annabel Adams in like a butcher assessing a calf. She hadn’t been eating particularly well, but she
had
been eating. He thought about the long-bladed knife in his satchel, but decided that could wait; he liked to get up close and personal with his food first of all. This girl was slender; she wouldn’t prove too much of a challenge. Bobby knew from past experience that he would prevail—it was one of the things he liked best about himself.

He put his now-empty glass gently down on the slick surface of the bench. Or he thought he did; there was a moment when it seemed settled, then it was falling, falling, and next it was in pieces on the cool floor of grey tiles. Sweet Bobby stared at the remains as they caught the last of the light from the wide window above the sink. He could have sworn he’d placed that damned cup firmly, solidly, down on the flat expanse.

The girl was unperturbed by the loss of her glassware. She smiled at him and behind her, figures started to appear. Bobby blinked hard, once, twice, trying to focus, to make those pale pasty white things
sharpen
. But they remained quite stubbornly insubstantial—almost swirly. A big-boned man, a thin woman, two young boys—maybe twins—a girl not much older than Miss Annabel here, and finally an old woman with what looked like a shawl of cobwebs thrown jauntily around her shoulders. They looked light as gossamer, pale as angels.

“Don’t worry about that, and don’t worry about them—although don’t you think Daddy would look best with wings? Did you like the lemonade?” asked Annabel. “Not too much sugar?”

Bobby shook his head like a dullard, tried to say ‘Just right’, but his tongue felt thick and slow, didn’t want to form words. He grunted, which the girl was too polite to comment upon.

“Coz,” she continued, “you need the sugar to cover the taste of the powder.” She saw his expression and laughed. “Oh, hell, it’s not poison, if that’s what you’re thinking, Mr Tate—that would ruin the meat.” She addressed the hefty vaporous man, “Sorry, Daddy, I didn’t mean to curse, I just got carried away.”