Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (112 page)

II

The drive is in silence. No one talks. Everyone thinks. The man thinks about Kira. Sarah thinks about Patrick. Mark thinks about Cara. Everyone thinks about Katie. It has been said, “Three’s Company.”

They wonder how many of them will be left when they finally reach Aspen, that holy grail, Anthony Barnhart

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seemingly untouchable, a mysterious fortress, the substance of their hope, the sustenance in their sorrows.

The sun is setting by the time they reach Durrance, Kansas. They had driven through many towns—

McFarland, Solomon, Salina, Strasburg—and even through small cities—Lawrence, Topeka, Junction City. Durrance is tiny, composed of a few roads lined with houses, some hole-in-the-wall shops, a supermarket/restaurant. A single 711 gas station. The man takes the MERCEDES through town and down an adjacent road lined with trees on either side, fields of corn and beans stretching in every direction, overgrown and dead. They find a small house nearly out-of-view, hidden amongst a somewhat large accumulation of woodlands. The man pulls up the gravel drive and parks in front of the house. He and Mark get out. They need to sweep the house, but they don’t have any weapons. The man pops the trunk and pulls out a bolt-loosening bar for the tires. He grips it in his hands and leads the way. The house is a one-story building, with a small kitchen, a living room, a family room, a single bathroom, and three bedrooms. It is decorated with fading black-and-white pictures, antique furniture. Sparse décor. It is free of any dark-walkers. Sarah joins them, and they proceed to barricade the windows and doors. By the time the sun sets and darkness returns, they are crowded in the living area, next to the fireplace, sitting in silence. They receive no visitors.

They leave at the break of dawn the next morning, driving through town and returning to the interstate. Ten miles down the road, Sarah begs the man to stop the car. The man obliges, and when the wheels halt to a stop, she throws open her door and stumbles outside, pukes into the grass. The man throws on the parking brake and gets out, walks around the side of the car, kneels down next to her.

“You all right?” he asks.

She looks away from the green vomit lying on the pavement. “I just feel a little sick.”

“What kind of sickness?” he asks, trying to hide the alarm in his voice. She glares at him. “Not
that
kind of sickness.”

“Then what kind?”

“I don’t know.” She wipes bile from the corners of her mouth. “Maybe the flu.”

“Does it feel like malaria?”

“How the hell would I know what malaria feels like?”

“Are you okay to drive?”

She nods, takes several deep breaths. “Yeah. I should be fine.”

“Okay.”

She isn’t okay to drive. They don’t drive five miles before she asks him to pull the car to the side again. This time she throws up for nearly fifteen minutes. The man sits on the hood of the MERCEDES, smoking a CAMEL FULL FLAVOR. Mark stands on the other side of the car, leaning against the window, looking out at the stretching fields barren of life. A few crows cry out, taking up into the sky.

“You know what a flock of crows is called?” Mark asks the man.

“I don’t know.”

“They’re called ‘murders’.”

The man moves over to Sarah, puts his hand on her head. “You’re burning up.”

“Probably because I have a fever,” she says.

The man looks west. He can’t even see the mountains yet.

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“Come get in the car,” he says.

“Let me finish, all right?”

“We’re not going anywhere else. You need sleep.”

“I can sleep in the car.”

“No,” he says. “You can’t. We’ve seen what happens.”

“I know what happens when you’re bitten.”

“I didn’t say you were bitten.”

“You’re thinking it.”

The man is quiet.

“I would know if I’ve been bitten.”

“Not if it was small.”

“I didn’t run into any of them.”

“Okay.”

The highway continues for miles, unending fields on either side, broken only by occasional patches of woods. Sarah feels woozy again, and the man doesn’t know how much longer until they reach the next city. They pass by a sign that reads VICTORIA: 15 MILES. He looks over at Sarah, who sits in the front passenger’s seat, leaning against the window, and he says, “We’ll be there soon, all right?” As they drive, Mark leans forward from the backseat, taps the man on the shoulder, points off the highway. Down a small embankment is another road, and shooting off from that road is a paved driveway leading to a small farmhouse and barn encircled by woods bordering the fields. The man slows the car and turns left, and the MERCEDES lurches in the tall weeds. They reach the road, old Route 40, drive west, and turn down the drive. The man slows the car down, the oaks and hickories on either side casting them in shadows. Songbirds cover the limbs of the trees. He pulls in the front drive, the two-story farmhouse to the right and the decrepit barn before them. Outside the barn is a skeleton of a horse, the bones bleached from the sun. The man turns off the engine and gets out. “Try to get some fresh air,” he tells Sarah. He leans back in, pops the latch for the trunk, and takes the tirebar out from the back. He moves up the wooden steps on the house’s portico. The boards creak underneath his weight.

Hanging wind-chimes tinker as he stands before the front door. There are windows on either side of the door, and he tries peering through both, but they are covered with dust from the inside. The door hasn’t been opened, the windows haven’t been shattered. He has no reason to believe that the place is inhabited; besides, haven’t most migrated towards the cities in search for sustenance and warmth?

He kicks the door open and steps inside. A heavy cloak of dust invades his lungs, and he turns his head, coughs. There are two living areas on either side, and he moves down the hallway. To the left is the kitchen, and to the right is a room with a closed door. He cautiously opens the door and steps inside. Paltry sunlight lights up the room, and the air is drafty; the bottom right pane of the only window, facing the backyard, is broken. The bed is made, and there is sparse furniture. A guest bedroom. He climbs the chairs accessed from the kitchen and reaches the second floor. He moves down the hallway. There are picture frames mounted on the wooden walls, but the glass is smeared with grime, and sunlight barely penetrates the fogged windows on either side of the hallway. There are three doorways. The first is a reading room, the second a bathroom. He opens the door to the third and steps inside.

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It is another bedroom, except with more furniture: two dressers, a vanity, two bedside tables. There is a King-sized bed in the middle of the room, and lying on the bed are twin skeletons. The man moves closer, lowering the iron bar. He has nothing to fear. The figures are dressed in pajamas, and he guesses that one was male and the other female. They are holding one another, enraptured in an eternal, skeletal embrace. On the bedside table is an empty glass of wine and a spilled bottle of pills. The man understands: they survived the plague, but they knew that life would never be the same. They died together, falling asleep in one another’s arms, never waking up. “Maybe you were the smart ones,” he says under his breath.

“One can only wonder.”

The man turns at Mark’s voice. “Where’s Sarah?”

“She’s outside.”

“You should have stayed with her.”

“They don’t go out in the daylight. You know she’s fine.”

The man looks back to the bed.

The boy moves forward. “It’s almost romantic, isn’t it?”

The man doesn’t answer.

“A classic Romeo-&-Juliet love story.”

“We can put Sarah in here,” the man says. “We’ll move the bodies.”

“No,” Mark says. “Let’s leave them here.”

He eyes the boy. “They could have diseases.”

“They’ve been dead for months,” he says. “They’re all right.”

The man almost persists, but he stops.

He understands why Mark wants the room untouched.

It is what Mark always wanted, what he could never have:

to grow old with the one he loved, to die in her arms.

They say dreams never come true. But maybe, sometimes, they do.

Mark goes down to help Sarah inside, and the man is behind him. He stops before the stairs, and he turns, faces one of the picture frames. He takes the sleeve of his shirt and wipes the dust from the glass. He squints, and he can see the photograph. An older couple, with deep-set eyes and slashing wrinkles. The woman is in a dress, and the man is in a flannel shirt and a JOHN DEERE cap. The picture was taken outside, and the barn can be seen off in the corner, the field spreading in the background, a tractor sitting underneath the burning sun. It is a faded black-and-white, perhaps taken a decade ago. The man returns downstairs.

III

Mark is helping Sarah into the house as the man reaches the bottom of the steps. He leads them to the guest bedroom, and he takes the sheets off the bed, flaps them around. A cloud of dust rises. He inspects the bed, checking for roaches, bed bugs, lice, anything. He is content, and he guides Sarah to the bed. He turns to Mark, who is standing by the window. “Leave us for a minute,” he says. Mark doesn’t understand, but he leaves anyway, saying, “I’ll go see if I can’t find some wood in the barn to board up the windows.” He shuts the door behind him.

Sarah is pulling the sheets over her, and she asks for a trash can. Anthony Barnhart

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The man finds one in the corner of the room and moves it over to the side of the bed. She turns onto her stomach and dry heaves. Strings of bile drip into the trashcan. The man sits beside her, looks out the window, at the oaks with their spreading green leaves and the withering field beyond.

Sarah finishes and rolls onto her back, stares at the ceiling. She closes her eyes. The entire room seems to move, shuddering with her each breath, a monotonous vortex. The man looks over at her. “Sarah.”

“What?” she asks.

“I know you’re sick…”

“I just want to sleep.”

“I know. But we have to make sure first.”

“I told you I wasn’t bitten.”

“Sarah. I’d demand you do the same for me.”

She is quiet for a moment. “Fine.”

The man stands, moves to the side of the room.

She crawls out of the bed, stands. “Lock the door.”

“Okay.” He moves to the door and throws the lock.

Sarah is already undressing when he turns around.

She removes her shirt, stands only in pants and a bra.

She glares at him. “Are you just going to stare?”

“Sorry,” he says, turning around.

He hears her unlatch the bra, unzip her pants, strip down.

“Tell me when you’re ready,” he says, facing the closed door.

A few moments pass. “Okay.”

He turns. He finds himself rooted in place, staring at her naked body: the slender legs, the flat stomach, the perky breasts, the bare arms, her hair falling onto her broad shoulders. He bites his lip, feels his face flush red. “This isn’t going to be… like that,” he says, and he moves towards her. He looks over her neck, over her arms, over her back. He bends down and inspects her buttocks, her thighs, her legs. Her skin is smooth, freshly shaven. His fingers quiver. He hasn’t seen a naked woman in so long, hasn’t felt the bareness of skin in months. He tells her to turn around, and he bypasses her privates, moves up her stomach. His eyes dance momentarily over her breasts. He looks her in the eyes.

“Are you satisfied?” she asks.

“Yes,” he stammers. He moves to the door. “Get some rest.”

She doesn’t say anything more, crawls into bed, pulls the sheets tight around her. She is soon asleep.

The man shuts the door behind him.

The front door to the house opens, and Mark enters.

“Did you find any wood?” the man asks.

“Yeah. There’s a ton. But it’s rotted.”

“If it’s all we have, it’s all we have.”

“I found something else, though,” Mark says. “Check this out.”

They leave the house and walk to the barn. Mark leads the way. They maneuver around the horse’s skeleton and enter the barn. The back end is entirely falling apart, crushed under the weight of Anthony Barnhart

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neglect that has been taking place for years. A tractor lies underneath the rubble, the tires deflated; it is the same tractor from the cryptic photograph. There are stalls for horses along the far left wall, but the doors are open, the stalls abandoned. The man imagines their skeletons lying in the fields, in the woods, anywhere. But he knows horses are fast. Maybe they’ve adapted, too, just like the survivors; whereas the survivors hole up during the night, the horses may sleep during the day and be alert at night. They could certainly outrun the dark-walkers. Shafts of light come from between the rotted boards, and the sunlight dapples upon the old hay at their feet. Mark takes him to a small door along the right side of the barn, and he pushes it open. It is a tool shed, but what draws the man’s attention are several mounted rifles. M1 GARANDS. American rifles from World War II. The man moves past Mark and takes one off the holster. Mark flips open a footlocker on the floor, revealing collected magazines and bayonets.

“It’s a gold mine,” Mark says, grinning.

“Do these work?” the man asks.

“Let’s find out.”

They leave the barn and stand out in the cornfield along the house. The man loads a magazine and raises the rifle. He aims down the notched sight and pulls the trigger. The gun bucks, and the bullet tears apart several free-standing corn stalks. The crackling of the gunshot disappears with the endless horizon. Mark takes a rifle for himself and fits it with a bayonet. He takes a spare bayonet and gives it to the man. The man slides it underneath his belt.

“You’re supposed to put it on the gun,” Mark says.

“What happens when you lose the gun?” the man asks.