Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (100 page)

She looks up at him. “What?”

He tosses her the keys. “There’s a K-MART down the road. Take Sarah with you and get her some new clothes.”

Katie eyes him. “Why don’t you take her?”

“Because I smoked my last pack of cigarettes,” he says, “and K-MART didn’t sell them. I’m going to the gas station.
You
take Sarah to the store. All right?”

She nods. “Okay.” She looks over at Sarah. “So tell me what happened.”

Sarah turns to get back inside the vehicle. “I’ll tell you on the way there.”

The man looks over at her.

She looks away.

The man curses and starts heading towards the gas station across the street.

It is evening by the time they get back. Mark is awake, albeit groggy and still suffering a splitting headache. He and the man are in one of the rooms, and on the table the man is stirring several Anthony Barnhart

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different kinds of vegetables—string beans, brussell sprouts, and corn—in a saucepan atop the Bunsen burner. Sarah and Katie enter. Both are wearing new jeans and shirts, and they are both carrying shopping bags filled with clothes. Sarah is wearing a new pair of sneakers. Mark nods weakly at them, rubs his temples. The man tells them that dinner has been prepared, and he grabs a pack of paper plates and tears it open. “We don’t have any silverware. You’ll have to eat with your hands.” They don’t complain. No one talks as they gather around the table and begin to eat.

The man decides to sleep in his own room. Once dark comes, he draws the blinds over the windows and begins pulling the dusty sheets from the bed. Some of the sheets are riddled with holes from moths or mice. He doesn’t know which. A knock comes from the door. He walks over, throws back the lock, and pulls it open. Sarah is standing there in her new clothes.

“Hi,” the man says.

“Hi,” she replies.

An awkward pause. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk,” she blurts.

“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“Can I come in?”

“No. I don’t think… I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Okay.” She steps back, away from the door. “Good night.”

“I thought you wanted to talk.”

“I already know what I need to know,” she says. “Sleep good.”

“Okay,” the man says. He shuts the door.

The man sits on the edge of his bed. His mind is overtaken by thoughts, and he finds himself pondering what Sarah wanted to talk about, and what she discovered through his words. He keeps looking at the digital clock, as if to read the time, to count the minutes passing by slowly as sand in a sieve, but there is no electricity, and all he sees is a blank stare returned. Finally he curses and gets up, opens the door, goes out into the hallway. He approaches Sarah’s doorway. He can hear movement inside. He raises his hand to knock, but he slowly lowers it. Something prevents him from fulfilling his desires. He shakes his head and abandons the door, returning to his room. He lies in bed for a while before falling into a fitful sleep.

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Chapter Thirty-Four

Under the Pale Full Moon

“What whispers so strange at the hour of midnight,

From the aspen leaves trembling so wildly?

Why in the lone wood sings it sad,

When the bright full moon beams upon it so mildly?”

- Bernard S. Ingemann (A.D. 1789-1862)

I

They leave the MOTEL 8 at the crack of dawn. Sarah tries to talk to the man about what happened the day earlier, but the man keeps pushing her aside. The four of them load into the RAV4 and continue west along the highway, navigating small towns and overgrown cornfields. Mark apologizes several times for holding them back, and eventually the man just tells him to shut up. At a UDF gas station in Booneville—a small town bordered by a snaking river—the man has Mark fill up the tank while he plasters the map over the hood of the S.U.V. He flips through the pages, follows the highlighted course through Aspen, tries to calculate the distance. He has done this many times before, dealing with air travel, but with airplanes, the course was generally either straight or, with pan-global flights, they were circumvented. He finds it somewhat difficult to trace various roads, and he tries to estimate crowded highways near the major cities. The next city is Kansas City, and they are about 100

miles from there. He looks up at the sky, the noon sun, can feel its warmth radiating upon his face, tickling the growth of beard.
100 miles
. It is such a short distance, and yet it feels so long. He thinks they can probably get through Kansas City and on into the suburbs before finding a place. He tells this observation to the others, and they just nod their heads.

Katie says, “The plan sounds okay to me. How far, then, to Aspen?”

“I don’t know,” the man says. “About 600, maybe 700 miles.”

She asks, “Can we cover that in a day?”

“On a good day,” the man answers, “maybe.”

Mark muses to himself, “And we know how many of
those
we’ve had.”

They reach Marshall Junction by 1:30. It is a weaving assortment of bridges and ramps that connects I-70 East and West with I-65 North and South. The man must drive down onto I-65, head south, and then ramp back up onto the highway: a tractor-trailer had lodged itself in the railing and flipped, its remains scattered about the road, decaying and rusting in the sun, the skeleton of the mammoth vehicle blocking their way. They continue on I-70, heading west.

They stop in Concordia for gas, and everyone is starving. It is near 3:00, and no one has eaten yet. Mark spies a beer tavern, DEBBIE LYNN’S COUNTRY CORNER, along Main Street. After filling up gas, the troop enters the restaurant. It stinks of oxidized wine. There are several tables with overthrown chairs, and one of the glass windows is shattered. Splotches of blood are on the floor. A 24-hour pub, filled with farmers and 21-year-olds when the plague struck.

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Mark goes behind the counter and opens the massive refrigerator. It stinks of mold. He grabs several bottles of beer and sets them on the counter.

The man reaches for a dark ale, but Mark stops his hand: “If you’re going to be driving the rest of today, you can’t drink.” The man begins protesting once more, telling him that there are no cops and that there’s no traffic, but Mark reiterates that if the man didn’t want Mark coming along with them with a hangover, how hypocritical is it to let himself drive buzzed, if not drunk?

The man doesn’t want anyone else to drive, wants the wheel to himself, and so he heads back over to a table where Sarah is opening cans of fruits and plopping them down onto paper plates.

“I forgot the plastic silverware,” she says.

“It doesn’t matter,” the man says, plucking a pear half into his mouth. Katie opens up a bottle of beer, begins to drink.

Mark stands at the counter, eyeing the selection. He makes his choice, sits down with them, screws off the top. The sweet smell radiates outwards. The man watches him drink, is irritated. He finishes his peaches and sits back. Mark sips his beer. The man watches him for a minute, and then he angrily shakes his head: “We’re just wasting time here.”

Mark shrugs. “You wouldn’t be saying that if you were the one drinking the beer.”

“We’re really wasting our time,” the man repeats.

“Don’t worry,” the boy says. “The beer’s pretty flat. But, hell, it’s still beer.”

The man reads the label on the bottle. “Only pussies drink that stuff.”

“It’s a Royal Raspberry. It’s delicious.”

“You’re a pussy,” the man growls.

Mark edges him on: “But at least I’m a pussy with a beer in his hand.”

Sarah says, “Mark… Stop it.”

The man looks at her. “Can we go now?”

“Are you sincerely asking me, or are you just being a jackass?”

“I’m just being a jackass.”

“I thought so.” She turns back to Mark. “Finish your beer. Take your time.”

The man crosses his arms, mutters something under his breath.

Sarah glares at him. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” he says, standing. “I’ll be waiting at the car.”

“All right,” Sarah says. “You do that.”

The man stands outside the bar and lights a cigarette. He looks up and down the vacated street, sees a few parked cars. He walks down the road and stops next to an old station wagon. He looks inside and sees a folded-up baby stroller and an empty baby carriage. He continues smoking the cigarette. Something tickles his ears, almost to the point that he doesn’t notice. It is almost inaudible, and for a moment he thinks it is a helicopter. He tries to identify the sound, but he hears the door to the bar opening. He turns and sees Mark waving at him: “We’re leaving,” the boy says. The man looks up into the empty sky and drops the cigarette. It burns down to the filter by the time they’re in the RAV4

and heading down the interstate.

They reach Odessa by 5:15. It is a somewhat large city, now abandoned. A ghost town. Mark asks if they should stop here for the night. The man tries to hold back his tongue, fails: “If we wouldn’t have spent an hour at the bar, then we may be on the other side of Kansas City right now.”

“An hour wouldn’t get us that far,” Sarah says.

“Whatever,” the man retorts. “We’ll go to the next town. What town is it?”

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The map is unfolded in Mark’s lap. “Bates City. It’s not too far. Maybe twenty miles.”

“All right,” the man says. “We can make it there in time. We’ll just have to speed.”

They leave Odessa behind.

It is 5:20. Sunset is coming soon.

The highway is lined with cornfields on either side. The sun sinks lower and lower before them, and the shadow lingering behind the body of the RAV4 grows longer and longer. Darkness begins to weave between the broken and destitute corn-stalks. They pass a sign: BATES CITY, 5 MILES. The man is nervous, his heart fluttering in his chest.
We should have stayed at Odessa
. His eyes keep drawing themselves to the setting sun, sinking lower and lower, threatening to extinguish, to hang its head in defeat to the twilight. No one says much. Katie grips the arms of her seat, knuckles white. Sarah bites her lip. Mark stares into the cornfields. No one tells the man,
We told you so
. Blame-shifting isn’t what’s at stake here, not anymore. Everyone knows what happens when the sun’s rays are extinguished, when darkness comes. An S.U.V. won’t protect them against—

“Shit!” the man shouts, yanking the car to the side.

The RAV4 shakes, something rolling underneath the wheels, and then there comes a frightening sound: the gushing of a liquid underneath their feet. Katie swirls around in her seat, looks back, sees the skeleton of a buck deer pulverized and falling apart, the antlers broken and lying in pieces around the flattened skull. “We’re leaking something!” she shouts. “It’s something black, something—’’

“It’s gasoline,” the man growls. “How the hell didn’t I see that?”

“It was dark,” Mark says under its breath.

“The antlers must have torn the fuel line.
Shit
.”

The vehicle rolls to a stop, the engine light blinking.

The man sits back in the seat. “We’re out of gas,” he says, voice pitched. Mark stares out his window, into the darkening fields.

“We’re stranded,” he says.

Sarah says, “The next town is only, what, three or four miles?”

“There’s no way we can make that on foot,” Katie moans.

The man kicks open his door. “We have to try.”

II

They leave the RAV4 behind, and it vanishes in the distance, entombed in shadows. The placid cornrows on either side of the highway, separated from the highway by a shallow ditch with overgrown weeds, trot past them as their legs carry them forward. They have left their baggage behind: the man carries the WINCHESTER rifle, Sarah and Mark hold the two M16s, and Katie is equipped with the BERETTA pistol.

The man’s lungs are afire, as if Hell itself has swallowed them in its depths, and his side aches and burns, the stitches sliding free, blood trickling down his side, underneath his shirt, a warm current in the icy spring breeze.

Mark stumbles and falls, his injuries returning in full display, and his strength is evaporated. Sarah and Katie grab him by the arms and pull him forward. Anthony Barnhart

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The sun continues to set, the shadows growing longer. The sun is suddenly split down the middle, and the man realizes that there is a bridge ahead.
An exit
. The others see it as well, and they pick up their pace. The race is on: the muscles in their legs versus the steady descent of the maroonred sun. And behind them, the referee: the rising full moon, pale and smiling at the plight of earth’s inhabitants.

The shouts and cries of the dark-walkers emerge in the distance, but the distance cannot be measured. In the still silence, broken only by their ragged breathing and the sound of their shoes thudding against the pavement, the wails of the dwellers of the night could be five miles away—or a quarter-mile.

They near the bridge, and they see that atop the bridge is a train: slick and sleek, a mottled white, with tinted windows along the body of the carriages. At the head of the train is the engine, streamlined and white. A red painted stripe runs down along the length of the train, and there are several painted American flags. Along the side it reads AMTRAK. It is no exit into a town, but only a bridge for the Amtrak service. The four travelers turn off the road, push through the corn, and climb a steep rise slick with mud from previous rains. They file up onto the steel train-track, and they face the train. They exchange glances and move forward, saying nothing, hearts racing, lungs expanding and deflating with wicked speed. They move around the front of the train. The man finds the door, elevated off the ground, and he tries to open it. It’s locked. He looks over at the others. The cries of the dark-walkers are growing louder: they can smell their prey, the sweet scent of uninfected flesh. Katie moans, “We should have stayed in Odessa…”