Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (28 page)

“I used to see them in movies. Daddy liked to watch them.”

The man asks, “You mean zombie movies?”

She eyes him, a whimsical look on her face. “Zombies? What are zombies?”

Mark taps her on the shoulder. “What are
you
talking about?”

“Vampires, of course,” she says. “Everyone knows they’re vampires.”

A chill runs up the man’s spine. “No,” he says, defiant. “They’re not vampires.”

“Mommy always said they were vampires. So did the others.”

“They’re not vampires.”

“Then what are they?”

“They’re sick people,” the man says. “That’s all. Just sick people.”

“Nope,” the girl chimes. “They’re obviously vampires.”

The man opens his mouth to speak; Mark cuts him off. “Why are you so sure they’re vampires, Lindsey? I mean, why can’t they just be sick people?”

“Because they only come out at night. And they drink blood.”

“Have you ever seen them drink blood?”

“They kill people to get their blood. It makes them powerful.”

“Vampires aren’t real,” the man says. “They’re just a legend. A myth.”

“Nope,” she coos, unyielding. “They’re vampires. I don’t know why you won’t admit it.”

The man’s temples flare.

Mark interrupts, “Why don’t we talk about something else, okay?”

The girl’s eyes light up. “Can we play Paddy-cake?”

“I don’t know how,” Mark says. “But you can teach me.”

The man stands and leaves the room.

Mark watches him go.

The girl grabs his hand. “Look! I’m trying to teach you!”

He turns back to her. “Okay. Sorry. I’m watching.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

131

“Okay. This is how you play…”

Mark awakes the next morning to find Lindsey sitting on the sofa, neck craned to the side, eyes wide, foam at the mouth. Alarm ripples through him. He screams for the man and runs over to the girl. He takes her by the hand. Her fingers are shaking. He places his forefinger behind her ear, feels her pulse. The heart rate has accelerated. The man comes down from the upper level and joins him. They lie her down on the sofa. Her neck is stiff, and they can see her eyes darting back and forth, terrified. She makes guttural utterances, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. Mark dabs away some of the foam from her swollen lips.

“Rabies?” the man asks.

“Why the hell would she have rabies?”

“People with rabies foam at the mouth.”

“Dogs foam at the mouth when they’re hungry. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I don’t think she’s just hungry.”

Words fumble through her mouth: “Can’t… breathe…”

“She’s suffocating,” the man says.

Mark grabs her shirt and tries to pull it off, but her stiff arms at her side refuse to budge. The man glares at him. “What the hell are you doing?”

“She can’t breathe. Maybe her shirt’s constricting her. Look at how tight it is.”

The man walks into the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” Mark demands. “Shit.”

The man returns with a knife. Mark steps aside. The man bends over the girl, gently running the serrated blade against the shirt. It rips and tears, fibers curling. The two halves of the shirt peel away, revealing her washboard ribs and sunken tummy. Their hearts are caught in their throat.

“What the
fuck
?” the man gasps, stumbling back.

Mark just stares. “What the hell
is
that?”

The man looks over at him, eyed deadened. “She was bitten.”

A small set of teeth marks is set in her abdomen, right below the ribs. They had pierced the skin but are now covered with dark scabs. The area around the bite wound is a red concentric circle, with alternating ovals of black and blue. Olive speckles are tracing out from the wound, looking like mold spreading over yeast, branching out, taking over. The girl’s chest moves in and out easier now, but the man and the boy have forgotten as they stare at the wound.

Mark chants under his breath, “Ring around the rosie… Pockets full of posies…”

The man looks at him. “What?”

“A funeral rhyme. From the Middle Ages. Children used to sing it.”

“That’s morose.”

“It was about the bubonic plague,” Mark says, almost in a whisper. The man bends down and runs a finger over the wound. The girl squirms. “It’s like jelly.”

“What?”

“Her stomach. By the wound. It feels like jelly.”

“Shit,” the boy says. “Maybe this is why she’s sick.”

The man has a thought, spoken as if its mention gives it power: “What if she turns into one of them?”

“That only happens with zombies. And they’re not zombies, remember?”

The man bites his lip. “I don’t know anymore.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

132

Mark keeps watch over the girl. Snow is falling again. The man takes the truck up to the library on Glenway, and he returns with a set of books in his hands. He sets them down on the table as he sheds off his leather jacket laden with melting snowflakes. The snow is falling harder now, and the winds are making the house walls creak and groan. He sits down at the kitchen table as Mark attends to the girl. He is trying to clean the wound with antiseptic. The girl protests, but she’s too weak to fend him off. “It’s okay,” Mark says; “It’s okay. I’m just trying to help you.” The man flips through the pages filled with medical terminology he doesn’t understand. He gets nowhere quickly; taking a pad of paper and a pen, he writes down the symptoms they’ve seen, and he goes down each disease until he finds one that matches. It takes nearly three hours. The girl’s condition hasn’t gotten any better, but at least now she is sleeping.

Mark sits down across from him. “Any luck?”

“I don’t know. This book is so fucking vague.”

“What is it?”

“An encyclopedia of diseases. I’ve found one that might fit.”

“How bad is it?”

“Pretty fucking bad. The worst part is, there’s no cure. It’s only preventable before it hits.”

“Shit.” Mark runs a hand through greasy hair. “Okay. What disease is it, then?”

“I could be wrong… But it explains her shivering, vomiting, fever… Her red urine… It explains why it fluctuates every couple days. And it explains the abnormal posturing—her head being twisted to the side, her arms stiff.”

“Foaming at the mouth?”

“No. Nothing in there about that. But that doesn’t mean it’s not connected somehow.”

“What disease is it?”

The man takes a breath. “Malaria.”

Mark lets it sink in. “You mean that African disease? Transmitted by mosquitoes?”

“Yeah. It says here… Let me find it… It says that malaria is caused by protozoan parasites, whatever the hell that means. Of the genus
Plasmodium
. Only four types of
Plasmodium
can infect humans:
Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium ovale,
and
Plasmodium malariae
. And the parasites are transmitted by female mosquitoes of the… I don’t know how to pronounce this… of the
Anopheles
genus. The parasites latch onto red blood cells and thus spread throughout the body, slowly… killing the victim.”

Mark shakes his head. “No.”

“It fits her symptoms.”

“It’s fucking December. There aren’t any mosquitoes around here.”

“Then how do you explain it?”

“I don’t think we’re dealing with malaria. I think we’re dealing with something else.”

“Then what? If it’s not malaria, what is it? Cause I’ve spent the last three hours looking through this fucking book.”

“I don’t think you’ll find it in that book. Or in any of the others.”

“Because…”

“Because it’s a new disease. The same disease that killed everyone but us and a few others, except now it’s transmitted through bites. And it causes that sickness. The sickness that the girl has.”

“Maybe it’s a weird strain of malaria that travels not through mosquitoes but through the air, and then through the bites of the infected.”

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“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just something different. Maybe a common cold mutated and gone awry. Viruses or germs mutate, and when one of these viruses or germs mutates, it becomes lethal, and it causes this.” He opens his arms wide, figuratively engulfing the entire planet. “It causes the devastation of mankind. Only mankind is affected, so the virus or germ is adapted to people. And the virus or germ, when inside the victim, mutates, and then it is transmitted to others through bites. And since it’s mutated, it has different affects. Like with this girl.”

The man curses, looks over at the girl. “So what do we do?”

“What
can
we do?” Mark asks. “If it’s a germ, her white blood cells may be able to fight it off. And she’ll get better.”

“And if it’s a virus?”

“Then it’s attacking her cells directly. And it’ll probably kill her. Or worse.”

“You mean…”

“What if you’re right? What if this sickness that she has is just the first stage? What if she’ll turn into one of them?”

IV

The man pushes the coffee table laden with books away from the door to his old bedroom. They open the door and step inside. The air is cold, and a broken window reveals snow having drifted inside the room. The covers are all strewn about, still stained with the brown remnants of Kira’s blood. The knife lies on the floor, the blade painted with rust. The man takes the sheets and puts them in the bathroom. It is a painstaking procedure; he looks over at the bathtub and sees rings of rust, the water from Kira’s bath so long ago having evaporated. He places the blankets into the bathtub. He is leaving when he looks into the mirror. His eyes lay dark and funneled in a hauntingly-worn face. His own bloodshot eyes stare back at him, each looking like a caged animal behind a hot-wire fence. He shuts and locks the bathroom door. Mark helps the man bring an extension cord into the room, and they plug it into a large heater. More blankets are brought in, and a pillow. Together they move the girl upstairs, fumbling with her up the ladder, and they lie her down. The boy brings her water and some cookies, but she won’t eat. He sets them beside the bed. The cries of the dark-walkers begin to carry in the early nightfall; the man barricades the windows with furniture and covers the furniture with some heavy blankets from the crawlspace. He exits the room, and after a moment, Mark follows. The girl cries out for them, but they shut the door and push the coffee table with its books back in front of the door. The man squeezes Mark’s shoulder and enters his own den, closes the door. Mark sits down amidst his strewn blankets, and he hangs his head in his hands, and he cries.

They awake to screaming. Mark shoves the coffee table filled with books out of the way, and he throws open the door and runs into the room. The man is behind him. His digital watch reads 4:17

AM. The girl is curled up in the sheets, face white as the snow falling outside, her screams piercing. She is staring at the far corner, her legs kicking under the covers. Mark runs over to her side; the man holds the BERETTA pistol in his hands. Mark kneels onto the bed; the girl throws herself upon him; the man swings the gun around, but lowers it when he sees that she is clinging to him, burying her head in his chest. Mark squeezes her tight and runs his fingers through her golden hair. Horrendous sobs soak his shirt with salty tears. Her fingers wrap around his shoulder and arm like in a vice grip, her fingernails poking through his shirt and scratching his skin, drawing blood. He doesn’t care. She continues to sob, and she lifts her head, and looks back into the corner, and screams again, gripping Anthony Barnhart

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the boy tighter. The boy looks over at the man, eyes shouting confusion. The man takes a deep breath.

“She’s hallucinating.”

In the morning she is better. Mark asks what happened last night, and she tells him that her mother had come, and she had been one of them, but she left a little while after Mark showed up. “She was scared of you. Because you protect me. She didn’t love me. Not anymore.” Mark tells her that she did love her, and it was dark, so she looked like a dark-walker. But really she wasn’t, and she just came to see if her daughter was doing okay, and she left when she realized she was safe. The girl smiles up at Mark and hugs him. “You remind me of my big brother,” she says.

Mark stays by her side. Snowfall accumulates, melts, snow falls again. The days go by painstakingly slow. Her symptoms fluctuate, but she isn’t getting better. The man recommends Mark distance himself from the girl, but Mark will have none of it—”She’s suffering, and she’s scared, and she shouldn’t be alone.” At night, he reads her children’s books. Christmas is coming, so he goes to the library and finds Christmas-themed picture books. He reads her the stories, and sometimes she reads along. She really likes the pictures: it serves as an escape. She loses herself in the stories, and Mark does, too. THE LITTLEST ANGEL, SHALL I KNIT YOU A HAT?, SANTA’S STUCK, and CHRISTMAS IN THE

BARN are some of her favorite, but she always wants him to read her AN ORANGE FOR FRANKIE every night.

“Christmas is next week,” Mark tells the man as they sip lukewarm clam chowder from coffee mugs.

“I know,” the man says.

“You don’t have to get me anything.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

Mark stares into the murky white soup, bits of pale gray clam swimming at the top. “I was thinking about getting something for Lindsey. Maybe a big stuffed animal. They have big ones at Wal-Mart. I could get her one, and it might help her sleep at night.”

“Okay,” the man says.

Mark is quiet for a moment. “You don’t think I should.”

The man looks up at him. “She
is
going to die.”

Mark leans back in his chair. “It’s Christmas. She deserves to be happy.”

“Her entire family has been taken from her. How can she be happy?”

“I can at least try.”

“Fine. Then get her a stuffed animal. But it won’t fix everything.”

“I know,” Mark says. “I just want her to be happy.”

“Are you sure you’re not just doing this for yourself?”