Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (18 page)

The boy sets his glass of wine on the floor and stands, refusing the toast. “I need to get some sleep.”

The man is frozen, holding his glass in the air, and then he lowers it. “I don’t have another bed.”

The boy just stares at him.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” the man says. “You can have my bed. I can sleep downstairs.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor, if that’s okay.”

“All right. Let me get you some blankets.”

There are only two rooms on the upper level: the den and the bedroom, and the bedroom the man has blocked off. The room where he and Kira had held one another in romantic embrace has become sacred to him; sacred, and fearful. He cannot bear to enter, for he knows that in that room he spent his last night with Kira, and in that room he took her life. Now the door is barricaded from the front with a small coffee table covered with worn books of classical history, books he studied and adored during High School. As the man drags blankets and pillows into the hallway where the boy will sleep, the boy stares at the barricaded door.

“What’s in there?” Mark asks.

“Nothing,” the man says quickly. “Here’s your bed.”

Mark turns. “Thank you.”

“It won’t be too comfortable. In the morning we can look for a mattress for you.”

“This will do fine,” Mark says.

“Okay.”

As the man is returning to the den, Mark speaks up: “Wait.”

The man pauses, turns. “What?”

“I appreciate what you’ve done. I’m sorry if I’ve been cold to you.”

“It’s okay,” the man says. “It will be better in the morning.”

“No, it won’t.”

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The man bites his lip. “We’re going to be okay. This place, my house, it’s secure, and—”

“I watched as they tore her limb-from-limb,” Mark says.

The man stops speaking. He just stares the boy.

The boy looks down at his feet, lips moving. “Mom and Dad died in a car accident a few years ago. My sister, she is eleven years younger than me, she was just nine years old at the time. I was going to school at U.C. Dad didn’t have any life insurance, so we were left with nothing. None of our relatives would take us in. So I rented out an apartment and worked at FedEx. She stayed with me. I took her to school every morning. I helped her with her homework. I took her to counseling so she could deal with our parents’ death. I couldn’t afford to go. I had to be the Big Brother. I had to refuse to let my own sorrow get in the way. I had to be strong, resolute. It’s been over four years since our parents died. My little sister’s birthday was just last week. She turned thirteen. We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the Montgomery Inn downtown. We dressed up really nice, and we lit candles, and we celebrated that she was a teenager. I got her a stuffed animal for her birthday. She absolutely loved it, even though she knew it didn’t cost me anything. I just stole it from Target.”

The man’s mind flashes to the blood on the boy’s hands.

The man finds himself unable to speak. He is flustered at the boy’s candidness. The boy continues, hands beginning to quiver, lips trembling with each syllable: “Early this evening, just as the sun set, they got into the apartment. I forgot to lock the door. I don’t know how. But I was putting her to bed, and that’s when I heard the door slam open. I ran out of the bedroom and down the hall, grabbing an iron baseball bat on the way. I didn’t see anything. And then I heard…” He takes several deep breaths, then speaks, every word sluggish and forbearing, as if each utterance is an eternal struggle. “And then I heard her screaming. And crying. And I ran into the room. There were two of them. They had her by either arm, and they pulled at the same time. Her right arm, it just… It just ripped off. Like something you see in the movies. They twisted her arm, and they pulled, and I could hear her tendons snapping, I could hear her arm shearing off, I could hear it even over her screams. Blood went everywhere. More blood than I’ve seen in my entire life. I don’t remember much of what happened after that. My mind just goes to being in the car, driving, with her in the seat beside me, screaming and crying, blood going everywhere. Me knowing she would die. And I was covered with blood. Absolutely
covered
in blood. I imagine I clubbed those sick people to death, and then we left the apartment. Maybe more we’re coming in. I don’t know. But all I know is that she died in the seat next to me, and I kept telling her to hang on, but I knew she would die. And when she died, everything that had kept me going, everything that had defined my life, disappeared. I looked over and saw her lying there, blood still soaking the seat, her face pallid and her eyes empty… And I couldn’t tear my eyes from her, and that’s when I crashed the car. I got out of the car and stripped off my clothes, because they were covered in her blood, and I changed. Right there, in the middle of the street, I changed my clothes. I knew they were coming, but I didn’t care. I moved slowly, in shock, and then one of them came out of the woods beside the road, and grabbed me, and threw me into the side of the car.” He points to his bruised eye. “And then I grabbed him by the neck, throttled him, and slammed his face into the glass window of the driver’s door until the glass shattered, and his face was covered with blood. Something snapped within me; I suddenly felt vulnerable, and I… I forgot my sister… I forgot about what happened to her… And I just cared about
me
.” He looks up at the man, tears in his eyes. “She was dead. I couldn’t do anything else for her. I couldn’t stay with her. I couldn’t take her with me. There was nothing I could do. Nothing I could do. Nothing I could do…”

The man chokes over his own voice: “I know.”

The boy draws a deep breath, steadies his nerves. “I started running. And then you found me.”

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The man doesn’t say anything for a moment. “Your sister survived the plague.”

“Yes.”

They just stare at one another.

The man breaks the silence: “Maybe you should get some sleep.”

“Can I ask a favor?”

“Yeah. Sure. Anything.”

“Tomorrow… Can we bury her? Can we bury my sister?”

He sounds like a little child asking for a piece of candy.

His voice: so innocent and heartfelt.

It

is

something

otherworldly.

The man nods. “Yes. We’ll bury her.”

The man knows, in his heart, that she will not be there when dawn arrives.

II

The flashing lights from the twin police cruisers dance over his features as he stands at the side of the road. He stands in the snow, feet freezing in the tattered sneakers. The rough leather jacket fails to keep out the icy cold, and his face feels entirely numb from the arctic winds. His fingers hang limp, gnarled and twisted, the knuckles pale white and his fingernails a tinged blue. His heart thuds lazily within his chest, and snowflakes burn his eyes as they fall from the sky. But he doesn’t take his eyes off that which rests before him: the overturned six-passenger van. He moves forward slowly, and his eyes look into the open side door. Boxes that had been crammed into the back are now overturned, contents spilled out. Snow has drifted inside, covering everything. His eyes fall upon a stuffed animal lying on the arm of an overturned seat: a spotted Labrador puppy with a pink ribbon tied around its neck, half-buried in drifted snow. He kneels down and reaches inside, taking the stuffed animal by the foot, and he pulls it from inside the van. He brushes snow from the stuffed animal’s belly. The lifeless marble eyes stare at him.
Molly
. He grips the stuffed animal tighter, and he sees his sister’s face in his mind’s eye: the cute little dimples, the strawberry blond hair, the innocence of her jokes, how she would write him letters telling him that he was a “stupid neerd” or a “jrk”. She never did spell right. No one knows where she is. When the van overturned, she had been with it; but now she is gone. Some have speculated that, so overcome by terror, she fled into the woods: by now, her tracks would have been covered with the freshly-falling snow. The boy can’t imagine why she would run. With the stuffed animal dangling from a clenched hand, he moves to the front of the van. The glass windshield is webbed but not broken, and he is thankful: he doesn’t want to see his parents still strapped into their seats, heads hung low and blood dripping from their injuries. He just stares at the windshield and feels no emotion. He feels rotten for it. But he feels no emotion. No one knows why the van wrecked. No one knows what caused it to spin out of control and flip several times before coming to a rest on the side of the road. The snow has been falling, but the roads are clear; there is no ice. The boy doesn’t have answers. He just keeps thinking about his little sister. And that’s when he hears it. Something scratching. It isn’t an overbearing noise; it can barely be heard over the howl of the wind through the trees. He stares at the webbed windshield, ears attuning, catching the scratching. And then he notices that the windshield begins to shake and quiver. He steps back, eyes wide, and with the sound of a thousand shards of glass shattering, the windshield falls apart, landing on the street, amidst slushy snow; the shards of glass glint like diamonds in the flashing lights from the police cruiser. The boy sees his mother, arms sweeping around. She is groaning. Hope fills within Anthony Barnhart

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him. He rushes forward, shouting for the paramedics, shouting that his mom is alive. He falls to the ground, on his knees, glass shards cutting through his jeans. He doesn’t care. He reaches inside, calling out for his mom. He grabs her hand. It feels clammy and cold. As if there is no blood pulsing through her veins. He calls out to her—”Mom, can you hear me? Mom? Mom.”—but she doesn’t reply. He holds her hand in his and reaches for her seatbelt. Her head begins to move, and she slowly raises her chin. The flashing red-and-blue lights illuminate the dark cuts across her face, the smear of blood running down the contours of her nose. And her eyes… Something inside her eyes… A lifelessness, a vacancy, an emptiness. A void. The boy stares at those eyes. “Mom?” Her mouth opens, revealing a mouth filled with blood-laced drool. A single shriek emanates, and the boy’s body shudders as she grips his arm with her hand, as she squeezes so tight that her fingernails pierce his skin.

The boy’s eyes open. For a moment he doesn’t know where he is.

“You were shaking,” the man says, standing over him. He holds a cigarette between his fingers.

“I’m sorry,” Mark says, chest moving up and down in ragged breaths.

“I made some coffee. And there’s canned peaches. It’s downstairs.”

He rubs his swollen eyes. “What time is it?”

“Almost noon,” the man says.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“You needed your sleep. Come and get some lunch.”

The meal is quiet. Two cups of hot coffee sit on the table, steam rising from the mugs. The man hands Mark some packets of Half-&-Half, but he doesn’t want any. He likes his coffee black. The man dishes out some peaches and slides the bowl across the table. At first Mark just picks at his food with his fork. The man gets up and goes over to the coffee maker that is plugged into the small batteryoperated generator. He unplugs it, and when he looks back, he sees Mark hungrily eating. The man returns to the table and sits down, lights another cigarette. He dashes the ashes into a porcelain ashtray from Cancun, Mexico. He had found it in someone’s house that morning while looking for a mattress for Mark (he hadn’t found one suitable). He watches Mark hungrily eat, and he asks, tentatively, “Did you still want to go bury your sister?”

The boy looks up. Peach juice slides down the sides of his chin. “Yes.”

The man nods. “Okay…” He extinguishes his cigarette, stands, walks to the back door, unbolts it. He slides it open and steps outside, into the cool September air. Several birds are flocking south, completely oblivious to the hell that drowns their world. The man steps back into the kitchen, shuts and locks the door, and sits down. “I went to the bottom of the hill,” he says, speaking slowly. “To your car.” Mark looks up, eyes wide. The man searches for the right words. “There’s not… They didn’t…” He knows there are no “right” words. “They didn’t leave much behind,” he concludes with a sigh. He looks back at Mark, his face an awful grimace. “I’m sorry…”

The boy drops his fork, forgets his peaches. “You went without me.”

“You don’t need to see that… You can’t remember your sister like that…”

The boy suddenly thrusts his chair back as he leaps to his feet, doing so with such force that the wooden chair flips over and lands with its back on the floor. He turns and sprints down the hallway. The man curses under his breath and leaps from his chair. “Mark!” he shouts. But Mark isn’t listening. The boy unlatches the front door as the man gives chase, but by the time the man reaches the front door, Mark is already running across the front lawn, dashing madly down State Avenue, towards the intersection with Lehman. The man leaves the door wide open as he runs after the panicked boy. But the man is short-of-breath, and he cannot keep running; his smoke-torn lungs rage Anthony Barnhart

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at him, and he leans against a parked car, taking savagely-painful gasps of air. He sees Mark’s form dwindling, then disappearing onto Lehman Avenue. The man draws several deep breaths and begins to run again.

He can already hear Mark’s screams.

The boy is sprawled against the totaled car’s back left tire. His knees are pulled up to his chest, and his face is buried into his knees. He rocks back and forth, face hidden. The man’s legs burn as he walks up the hill towards Mark. His breath feels like chalk in his lungs. He approaches slowly, says nothing, and then he hears Mark whimpering. The man doesn’t know what to do. He stands in front of the totaled car, watching. He turns his eyes and turns around, looking out at the city. Little children used to play in these streets, even when it rained. They would be dirty, covered with mud, but smiles would be plastered over their faces, and their eyes would shine like radiant stars. No children play anymore. The man looks out at the eastern hills of Cincinnati, at the rising buildings of the University of Cincinnati on the closest hill across the railroad tracks and highway. He can see the hospital sitting ghostly quiet, nestled between twin hills. And the dome of the Cincinnati Children’s Museum is cluttered with a black mass of ravens. He looks up at the sky. Dark clouds are gathering. The wind is picking up. He feels a raindrop. He turns back to Mark. The boy hasn’t moved. The man doesn’t say anything. The rain begins to fall harder, drumming on the crushed metal roof of the car. He curses under his breath and moves forward. He stands beside Mark, not knowing what to do.