Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (116 page)

The dark-walkers let out a final shriek and departed, and they could hear them exiting the house. They didn’t leave the basement until sunlight could be seen coming through the small windows. Mark took the bayonet and walked up the stairs, unlocked the door, took a breath, and opened it. Sunlight came through the broken kitchen window and blinded his eyes. He blinked, let his eyes adjust. The kitchen floor was strewn with scattered bones, the flesh completely gnawed off. Blood formed a gelatinous mass upon the floor, and flies crawled over the walls in their carrion-glee. He quickly scanned the house, which was totally ransacked. He called down to Sarah, and she came up the steps. They went into the bedroom against the kitchen and laid the man down upon the mattress. Sarah left Mark with the man and went upstairs, into the bedroom with the skeletal couple. Their bones were thrown about, and a femur had been smashed into the vanity mirror, left lodged amidst the spider-web cracks in the glass. She searched the closet and found what she was looking for: a FIRST AID kit. She knew an old couple with farming experience would have one. She returned downstairs and pulled the shirt off of the man’s wound. He didn’t move an ounce. Totally unconscious. Mark stood like a statue and watched as she stitched the wound, then laid the man down upon the pillow. She looked up at the boy, said, “Now all we can do is wait.” He nodded, thanked her, and then left: “I need to lie down, I feel sick to my stomach,” he had said. And she remained in the bedroom, sitting upon the bed, hearing the birds returning to life, singing their songs, watching the man sleep.

∑Ω∑

The man rubs his stitches again, lightly, with little pressure. “Where’s Mark?”

Sarah replies, “He’s on the couch. Feeling sick.”

The man pauses at those words, begins to stand.

She reaches out, grabs his hand: “You need to rest. You’ve lost a lot of blood…”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

541

He withdraws his hand from hers. He stumbles out of the bed, feels his weak knees wobbling, staggers against the wall next to the broken window. He places one hand against the wall to steady himself, and he moves past the window. He dodges the broken and rotted wooden boards lying on the floor, and he winces in pain as he steps on glass. Sarah curses and moves around to help him, saying, “You’re barefoot, you’re barefoot…” He just shakes his head. He moves around her as she tries to placate him into lying back down. He reaches the bedroom door and pushes it open, and leaving bits of blood on the floor as he walks, he enters the kitchen, turns left, and heads down the hallway towards the living room. Sarah is behind him, quiet now: she knows no words will stop him. Under her breath: “Stop being so fucking stubborn.”

The man reaches the living room, looks over to the sofa. Mark is lying there. The boy is curled up upon the sofa’s cushions, one hand draped over the edge, fingertips grazing the floor. His eyes are clenched shut, and his body quivers and quakes. His eyes flutter for a moment, and then he leans onto his side, vomits into a trashcan. The stench is overwhelming. The man turns and goes back towards the bedroom, leaving Sarah alone. He returns with the blanket from the bed and places it over Mark. He glares at Sarah: “He was shivering, and you didn’t do a damned thing?”

She just shakes her head. “He wasn’t shivering earlier…”

“He’s shivering now.”

“I know. But you got a blanket. He’ll be fine.”

The man stands, overshadowing the boy. “I don’t know.”

“He probably just caught what I had. I was still kind of sick, and it was cold in the cellar.” She is resolute: “I’m sure he just got whatever I had.”

“No,” the man says, his voice cold and resolute. “He didn’t.”

She looks over at him. “How do you know?”

“This is different,” he says, stepping forward, kneeling down beside the boy. “I’ve seen this before.” He pulls the blanket back. Mark doesn’t react. The man gently takes the boy’s arm and pulls his body to the side, revealing his shoulder. The man turns away, suddenly feeling dizzy, and he nearly loses all strength, nearly falls backwards onto the floor, his body threatening to reel in shock. Sarah moves forward, and her breath is taken.

Her heart stops.

Three words escape her icing lips: “Oh my God…”

She is staring at a bite wound.

At first Sarah didn’t realize what she was seeing. She had never seen and recognized one of the bite wounds herself, and though she had beheld it earlier while setting Mark upon the sofa, she had thought nothing of it. Now she can see so clearly, as if a veil has been lifted, the blindness extinguished, the dark and concentric circles around each of the three teeth marks, each scabbedover. Around the entire wound are alternating ovals of black and blue, and radiating around the hued ovals are olive speckles, stretching out in currents across the skin. In time the moldy patches will crawl down to his fingers, and in time the disease shall ravage his brain, and in time he will become one of the dwellers of the night.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

542

V

The man’s pulse is sprinting, and he is overcome with dizziness. He falls away from the couch and sits upon the floor, staring at the bite wound hewn into Mark’s shoulder. He cannot pull his eyes from the gash, and he feels a cold sweat beginning to pepper his brow. Sarah moves forward and takes him by the arm, helps him up, and he begins gasping for breath, his lungs searing. She pulls him away from the sofa and into the kitchen. She has removed the remains of the fallen dark-walkers, but the peeling floor tiles are still stained red with their blood. She leaves the man at the counter, and he leans against the cupboards, rests his forehead against them. She grabs a jug of distilled water and pours him a glass, dumps some salt inside, and she hands it to him. He begins to set it down on the counter, but she says, “You’re showing the signs of rapid blood loss. Sweating. Dizziness. Air hunger. Drink it. It will help.” The man takes several drinks, nearly vomits, but is able to keep it down. He feels better. Sarah looks towards the hallway leading into the family room, where Mark sleeps, and she says, “I’ll make us some coffee.”

She was able to get the coffee maker working again, and she overturned the table and slid the chairs underneath. There are bits of flesh cloven to one of the table legs from where the dark-walker was impaled. They sit at the table, and the man drinks coffee, feels his head pounding with a resonating migraine.

Sarah looks to the window, the sun shining forth in its brilliance, says, “We need to figure out what to do before nightfall.”

“I know,” the man says, clutching the cup of coffee in his hands.

“They’ll be back tonight. And there’s no way we can fortify this place again.”

“I know.”

“We’ll have to find someplace else.”

“I know.”

“But you’re weak. And Mark…” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

The man had been exhausted, returned to the bedroom, curled up on the bed without blankets. Sarah had gone out to the car, had contemplated going into town and seeking a new hideout. That was when it struck her, and she felt foolish for not thinking of it before. She returned into the house and spent the majority of the day in the cellar: she was able to slide bricks into the small windowsills peering into the cellar, and she pushed the wine-shelves against the far wall to allow for the bed and sofa to be brought down. She went outside as the sun began to lower from its zenith in the sky, and she filled the trap-door leading to the cellar full of dirt and rocks, then shut the trap-door and nailed boards from the barn overtop. They had not been able to get in last night, and she prayed they would not find a new way in once darkness fell. She returned inside, and she waked the man, told him what she had done. He approved. He was weak, but he helped her pull apart the bed and carry it into the basement, where they reassembled it against the far wall. Sarah went upstairs, hefted Mark into her hands, and carried him down, laid him on the bed, and she grabbed the blanket from the couch and pulled it over him. He shivered, white and clammy, cold and opaque. She then brought down the couch, and the man found several candles in one of the rooms upstairs, brought them down. As the sun began to set, Sarah barricaded them inside. She and the man sat down on the couch, holding the candles, and they said nothing as the howls and cries of the dark-walkers once again began to awake over the Kansas plains.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

543

The dark-walkers surround the farmhouse, and they can hear them moving about upstairs. They are not so frenzied this time, more calculated and cool. They don’t find a way in. The man lights a cigarette, and Sarah takes it from him, snubs it out on the sofa’s arm. He glares at her, and she tells him, “It will accelerate your heart-rate. That’s not a good thing for you, not right now, until your body is able to replenish its blood.” The man shakes his head and says nothing. He tries to listen to the dark-walkers, pinpointing their movements, but the next thing he knows is bits of sunshine weaving between the cracks in the bricks against the tall windows, and Sarah is curled up on the sofa beside him, her head on the sofa’s arm. He looks over to the bed and sees Mark sleeping, cocooned in the blankets, and he closes his eyes again, and he falls back asleep.

Sarah and the man are upstairs. Mark is sleeping in the basement. He has been vomiting all morning, moaning and shivering, his skin cold and clammy. The house has been ransacked once more, but they had hid the coffee maker in the back of a cupboard, and it was untouched. Now they drink the coffee, their only sustenance, and they avert their eyes from one another, desiring only to crawl into the vacuum of their own thoughts.

Then Sarah speaks.

The man looks up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you.”

“What are we going to do?”

“About what?”

“About Mark.”

The man looks back down at the black coffee, says nothing.

Sarah looks towards the door leading down into the basement. “We shouldn’t be here… We shouldn’t be here when it happens.”

The man winces, the thought painful. His hands squeeze tightly around the mug. Sarah looks at him, but he doesn’t look at her. “We have to face what’s happening.”

“We don’t know what’s happening,” the man says.

“Bullshit. You know very well what’s happening.”

He looks up at her. “Why weren’t we infected last year? How come nearly everyone we knew died, but we were uninfected? For some reason, our bodies were not susceptible to the virus or germ.”

Sarah nods. “We know this.”

“But then, when we get bit, what happens? When something in the saliva, maybe a hothouse for the germ or virus, gets into our system, then we become one of them—but only after a debilitating sickness.”

“And we know this, too.”

“My point,” the man says, his grip on the coffee mug growing tighter, “is that the virus or germ or whatever the hell it is mutated to the point of being able to infect us after its widespread distribution. So what if it’s mutated again? What if it’s mutated in such a way that it causes sickness, but not death; it causes sickness, but not…” He searches for the right word, can’t discover it, just stops talking.

Sarah leans back in her chair. “You’re going to bank on that?”

“We can hope.”

She is quiet for a moment, then, “Can we?”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

544

VI

Several weeks have passed, and Mark’s situation has not improved. It has followed, step-by-step, the steady progression the man had witnessed months earlier with the death of Miss Lindsey Campbell. The fever, shivering, and cold sweats had continued, along with the prominence of bloody vomit and red urine. He began convulsing madly at times, and more than once the man and Sarah had to hold him down to prevent him from making too much of a racket during the night. He was unable to eat, and he became emaciated, his skin clinging to his bones. The coughing intensified, a deep and cacophonous coughing that kept everyone awake during the night. The bouts of sickness were interspersed with moments of clarity and longevity, and sometimes Mark would go on long walks during the daytime, contemplating his future. “Finding his peace with God,” Sarah would say. The man didn’t want to hear any of it. And although Mark’s progress had been downhill, a steady yet quickening pace towards the inevitable, the man has regained his strength, his forehead wound has healed, and the stitches are beginning to fall out.

Now sunset is approaching, in the first week of July, and the man stands in the kitchen. He hears Sarah shouting, and fearing the worst, he grabs the GARAND sitting on the table and dashes down the stairs. He finds Sarah holding Mark in her arms, sitting upon the bed. Mark’s back is arched in a crooked posture, his eyes are wild and rolling in their sockets, and foam spills from his mouth, tapering in great droplets onto the bed-sheets. The man lowers the rifle and looks with forlorn eyes at the sight behind him. Tears cascade down Sarah’s cheeks, and she weeps, “Make it stop… Make it stop…”

The man has no strength, simply shakes his head. “I can’t.”

“Please…” she sobs. “Please…”

The man turns and walks over to the sofa.

He sits down.

He runs his hands through his greasy hair and stares at the floor. He hears Sarah crying.

He wants to do it. He wants to be merciful.

But he had promised Mark he wouldn’t.

∑Ω∑

It was the third day after they found the bite wound, and it was the first time Mark woke conscious, the fever and shivering and cold sweats abated. The man had heard him walking upstairs, and pulling himself from sleep, he abandoned the sofa and followed up after him. Sunlight was already breaking across the farm, and the heat of the morning sweltered in through the broken windows. He heard the front door open and shut, and he made his way down the hall, pushed his way out onto the porch. Mark was standing beside the RAV4, just staring down the gravel drive leading towards Interstate 70, the thick lines of trees flowering with their green radiance casting shadows upon the drive. The man pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Mark turned and saw him, walked slowly to the porch. The man handed him the lit cigarette, grabbed one for himself. They stood smoking in the morning, saying nothing. An awkward pale of silence.