Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (129 page)

The light from the flame extended outwards, and it pooled in the eyes of dozens of dark-walkers surrounding them in a circle. They were completely naked, their clothing long lost. Many were covered with scrapes and bruises. A few were missing limbs. They watched the pitiful refugees with a strange glint in their eyes. Their mouths hung open, slack, and their chests moved in and out with each rapid breath. Their skin clung to their bones, and they were merely skeletons. Some had dried blood clinging to their jaws. One drooled. Another held a fibula in its clutches and let it fall to the ground as it stared at the new prey. The man’s heart dropped into his stomach, and he reached for the GARAND which he had strapped to himself. There were only three bullets, but the bayonet Anthony Barnhart

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remained at his side. None of it would help: there were too many of them. He closed his eyes, accepting his fate, wondering why he ever believed it would work out differently than this. He could hear Jessica and Deshay whimpering. Samantha closed her eyes and prayed.
It won’t do any good
, the man thought;
God has forsaken us. He forsook us the night this all began
.

The dark-walkers began to move in rhythm… and they didn’t attack. The man opened his eyes, wondering what was happening, and he half-expected to see one of the dark-walkers, the alpha male, grinning that awful grin, letting the prey drown in the knowledge of what was about to transpire. But his eyes beheld something different, something he couldn’t quite comprehend. The dark-walkers moved to either side of the room, revealing a path leading into the shadows. One-by-one they knelt down, bowing, and they fell to their hands and knees, their faces hovering inches above the tiled floor. Jessica and Deshay stopped crying, and Samantha took their hands. She took the man’s hand, and she led the way.
And a child shall lead them
. They walked past the dark-walkers on either side, and the line of bowed creatures continued unabated for nearly forty feet. Then the line ended, revealing a single doorway with PASSENGER CHECKPOINT painted above in white lettering. Samantha grabbed the door and opened it, and a burst of light hit them in the eyes. The man blinked the light away, and he was pulled into the next room. Samantha abandoned his hand and shut the door. They stood alone.

XI

The man felt strange standing in the passenger waiting area. He had been here so many times, though never at FRONT RANGE. He remembered the evening before it happened, standing in such a place, conversing with the German gate attendant. He stood in a place quite like it, though nearly halfway across the world, and at a time when nothing was as it had been. The seats facing the large bay windows were abandoned, and there was an overturned trashcan filled with the bones of rats. Cobwebs covered everything. The air stank of mildew. Through the large bay window was a CESSNA CITATION, sitting with a ladder reaching up into the open door. There were skeletons strapped into the cockpit. Past the CESSNA the sun was setting behind a line of trees, several old homes and barns on the opposite side. The sky was painted a ruby red, with charcoal streaks off to the west. The man didn’t want to see if the strange activities of the dark-walkers would continue after the sun set, and he told the girls to follow him. They maneuvered around the seats and reached the gate. They pushed through the accordion, and they went through a door that led to a fifteen-foot drop. The man cursed, knew they would have to jump or find another way. They didn’t have time, and he wanted to get inside that CESSNA and close the door and wait for sunrise to continue on their journey. He crawled towards the edge of the ramp, swung around, gripped the edge of the ramp, and swung his legs outwards. He dangled eleven feet above the ground, and gritting his teeth, he released. He hit the ground quickly and rolled to mellow-out the impact. He stood and called to the girls to jump. They wouldn’t. He began cursing. Samantha talked to them quietly, and sniffling, they managed to jump. He caught them and set them down beside him. Samantha came last, and he caught her, set her down. “Come on,” he said.

He led the way to the CESSNA. The sun continued to sink, and the howls of dark-walkers arose from the plains leading up to the feet of the mountains twenty miles west. He stepped upon the ladder and was nearly inside when a hand shot out, grabbed him by the shirt, and tried to yank him inside. He Anthony Barnhart

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shouted, writhed away, but the hand didn’t release. The dark-walker tumbled out with him, and they fell onto the pavement together. The dark-walker shrieked and screamed in the meager sunlight, ripping away from the man. The three girls watched, terrified, as the dark-walker clawed at its own naked flesh, its long fingernails tearing ragged and bleeding lines into its skin. The dark-walker groped at the ladder and crawled back into the airplane. The man got to his feet, stunned, his heart pounding, and he heard the creature whining inside, nursing its sun-licked wounds. He looked over to the girls. “Let’s try somewhere else, shall we?”

They ran across the pavement of one of the runways and reached the fence bordering against the tarmac. The man wanted to get inside one of the homes on the opposite side of the woods. He led the way over the fence, the barbed wire tearing at his bare hands.
Hope
. He dropped down on the other side, and he caught Jessica as she slipped and fell. Once Deshay and Samantha reached the bottom, they ran across a dirt road and into the woods. Brambles tore at them, and wet leaves slapped them in the face. The trees emerged at them from the darkness, and they dodged them. A bird cried somewhere in the trees. They splashed through a half-dried and muddy creek, and the man heard growling off to their left. He gripped the GARAND and swung around. The first rays of moonlight pierced the tops of the trees and sprinkled against the form of a malnourished, naked dark-walker hunched over a deer carcass. Its head had been buried into the deer’s bowels, and it looked up at them, its face stained red, and it growled, daring them to come forward. “Move
slowly
,” the man hissed, and they left the creature with its meal. The trees broke apart, revealing a clearing with long grass waving in a slight breeze, a few sparse trees, several nude and dead. A single barn, decrepit and falling apart, sat in the middle of the clearing.

They pushed through the waist-high grass, and then Samantha grabbed the man’s hand, told him to stop. He asked what it was. She pointed into the darkness wrapping around the bowels of the trees on the other side of the clearing. “They’re coming,” she whispered. She had seen it first, her eyes more clear and attuned, but then the man saw them. Shifting figures in the shadows, figures with legs and limbs and heads, figures moving towards them, entering the grasses. “Fuck.” His voice was surprisingly loud. He grabbed Jessica and Deshay’s hand and pulled them towards the barn; Samantha followed. The dark-walkers at the opposite end of the clearing let out a unified scream and took off into a run. The man and the three girls reached the barn, and he opened the heavy wooden door, told them to get in. He followed and shut the door, locked it tight. “We should be okay in here,” he said. But he didn’t believe it. He gripped the GARAND tightly.
How in the hell are we going to
last an entire night in this shithole?

XII

They had surrounded the barn, and they had gotten inside. Now Samantha’s body collapses to the ground, a hole chiseled into her forehead, blood spurting out like sewage from a broken cistern. The dark-walkers come at him from behind, and the man is suddenly lost in rage. He turns the GARAND

around and strikes with the butt of the rifle, slamming the first dark-walker in the bridge of its nose. It staggers backwards, and the man tosses the rifle into the hay, withdraws the bayonet, and he slashes the blade across the stunned dark-walker’s throat. A geyser of blood shoots out, spraying the man in the face. The blood feels electrifying. The man lets out a war-cry and charges the other darkAnthony Barnhart Dwellers of the Night

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walkers; they stop in their pursuit, watch him approaching, don’t know what to do. His screams terrify them, and with a shout they dart out of the barn, scrambling into the trees. One is caught in the makeshift exit, its leg jammed; the man grabs the leg with his free hand and yanks the darkwalker back inside the barn. The dark-walker tries to get away, but the man drives the tip of the bayonet into its spine, paralyzing the creature. The monster lies still, continues breathing, and the man drags it towards the three girls lying dead on the dusty floor of the barn. He pulls the darkwalker up and thrusts it against the tractor; he stares the creature in the eyes, and he can sense fear. The man doesn’t break the gaze, just stares at the creature, lettings its fate sink into the back of its mind. The man places the edge of the bloodied bayonet against its throat, and with a howl of vehement rage, yanks it across the exposed skin. The jugular is severed, and blood pours forth, flowing down the dark-walker’s chest. The man sticks his hand inside the wound, the warm blood running between his fingers, and he grabs the dark-walkers spine, and he yanks it into several pieces. The body falls to the ground, the blood bleeding down into the dirt between the flattened tractor’s tires.

The man falls to his knees, the bodies of the little girls scattered around him. Their lifeless eyes stare at him, their pupils frozen with the last image beheld: an image of the man standing like a romantic statue,

the gun placed against their foreheads,

the tears running down his cheeks.

He can hear their question:
Why did you do it?

He didn’t have to.

They would’ve made it.

He falls onto his hands, and he weeps, his tears falling like droplets of blood. He couldn’t save Mark or the others.

He couldn’t save Sarah.

He couldn’t save the three little girls.

And he wonders if he will be able to save himself.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter:

because

he

is

entirely

alone.

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Anthony Barnhart

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Chapter Forty

Ice Heavy Branches

“Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word but

the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”

- Joseph Conrad (A.D. 1857-1924)

I

The dark-walkers had abandoned the barn, and the man did, too. He crossed through the clearing and into the opposite trees, and he made his way through the woods hearing the dark-walkers in the distance; and the woods opened up to a street lined with houses, and he broke into one of the twostory houses and ascended the steps and found the entrance to the attic. He lowered the wooden stairs to the attic and climbed up and brought the steps back up. He moved into the back of the attic, staying low, moving over the wooden planks, pushing boxes out of the way. He sat by a window overlooking the airport, and everything—the street, the trees, the roof of the barn in the clearing, and the airport beyond—could be seen in the pale moonlight. The moon smiled upon him as if it were mocking him, and he lit up a cigarette and smoked and let the smoke fill his lungs and exhaled it. He sat looking out that window all night long, feeling nothing. His tears had dried and he thought of the girls, how beautiful they were, and he remembered Samantha asking him what he hoped for. The odd thing about hope is that in the present sometimes you do not know what you hope for, but when it passes from you, when it fails to come to fruition, the hope that has been lost becomes so clear. The man had hoped that he would be with the girls forever. He had hope that they would be his children and he would be their father. An odd and twisted hope, but what other kind of hope existed? The girls had made him laugh. He had cracked jokes. He had felt freer around them. But now they are gone. The man smoked his entire pack of cigarettes and tried to sleep but couldn’t get comfortable. He waited until sunrise and left the house. The streets were abandoned and a mist clung to everything, a mist that wrapped around his legs and wreathed the Denver skyline and inched its way up the mountainsides to ring the mountaintops in an ethereal fog.

Now the man stands inside a BP gas station. He fills a sack with NATURE VALLEY granola bars and packs of MARLBORO and CAMEL and BASIC and VIRGINIA SLIMS. He leaves the gas station and stands out on the road. He takes a deep breath and carries the bag with him. He leaves the gas station and walks back down the street past where he had stayed overnight. He crosses through the woods and reaches the clearing. He stands in the tall grass and stares at the barn. Flies swarm around the entrance, and he knows that maggots and worms are crawling over the bodies, chewing upon the dead and slowly-decaying flesh. He doesn’t go inside, doesn’t want to see what he has done. Instead he walks past the barn and through the woods, and he finds the deer carcass half-eaten, its consumer long vanished. He reaches the fence to the airport and throws the bag over the top. He climbs over and descends the other side. He picks up the bag and walks down the runway. He walks around the building and finds the truck with its front flat tires. The other trucks are all there, abandoned. Only one of them has a set of keys inside. There is a sawed-off shotgun in the back. He opens the door and Anthony Barnhart

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tosses the bag of food and cigarettes into the passenger’s seat, and he takes the sawed-off shotgun and puts it on the floor underneath the glove compartment. He gets inside and starts the engine, and he pulls back onto the road leading to Interstate 70. He needs to get gas. He makes his way to the BP

and fills up, and then he returns to Interstate 70. He sits in the truck, the engine idling, and he stares at the Denver skyline with the mist-cloaked mountains beyond. He takes a deep breath and puts his foot on the gas. Fumes billow out of the exhaust pipe and the truck heads west on the interstate.