Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (63 page)

“Is Jason in trouble?” she asked, heart hammering. “What did he do?”

“He didn’t do anything,” one of the officers told her.

Immediately she knew, and she felt her knees beginning to lose strength.

“It wasn’t his fault,” the officer said. “A bus driver… He fell asleep at the wheel…”

She leaned against the doorframe, felt the rain reaching in, kissing her cheeks. The other officer looked away, uncomfortable.

The officer said, “We need you to come to the hospital.”

“Why?” she croaked, though she already knew the answer.

Compassion drenched his façade, and he spoke:

“We need you to identify his body.”

∑Ω∑

“My husband never got to see our child,” Carla says. “He died several months before he was born. I didn’t even know I was pregnant at the time. When the child came, I named him Jason. After his Anthony Barnhart

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father. He was only three months old when the plague struck. He died in his sleep. He didn’t even cry.” Tears were beginning to sparkle behind her eyes, and she wiped them away with a single finger. “I thank God… I thank God that he didn’t feel any pain. I thank God… that he didn’t suffer like the rest.”

∑Ω∑

She awoke with the sunshine coming through the blinds, and she immediately wondered why her alarm clock hadn’t gone off. She rolled onto her side, blinked away the snuff in the corners of her eyes. The LCD display on the alarm clock was dark. She stumbled out of bed, in bra and panties, and threw on some pajama pants and a baggy t-shirt. She walked over to the wall and flicked the light switch. Nothing. She moved into the bathroom, turned on the water.
At least the plumbing’s still intact
. She stripped down, got into the shower, and quickly bathed. The water had been hot at first, but it quickly became icy cold, and she stopped showering before she had shampooed her hair. As she dressed, preparing to go to work and wondering what time it was, she remembered little Jason, how he hadn’t woken her up crying. She was thankful for the break. She went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The power was out in there, too, so she quickly shut the fridge door, not wanting any of the coldness to escape. She made her way into Jason’s room, saw the crib beside the window, morning sunlight pouring into the room. She began cooing Jason’s name, and she approached the crib. She peered down inside, saw him lying under the think blanket. He was face-down on the pillow, and her heart leapt into her chest. She quickly grabbed him, pulled him up… and she dropped him upon seeing the blood covering his face, blood that had soaked into the fibers of the pillow. She staggered backwards into a dresser covered with stuffed animals, and several fell onto the floor. Her hands rushed to the sides of her face, and the room shook with her horrendous scream. No one was there to hear, no one was there to help.

∑Ω∑

“It didn’t take me long,” Carla says, “to discover that I was, apparently, the only one left. I tried calling the emergency services, but I only received a dial tone. I wandered the streets for a couple hours, searching for survivors. There were a few car wrecks, but everyone was dead. I went by a bar, and there had been a concert going on that night. The band had collapsed atop their instruments, and tables were overturned and bodies littered everywhere. It was a nightmare. I considered taking my life. I am ashamed to say it, but I was a coward. But I buried Jason, and I am thankful I did. I can’t imagine finding him in the crib, one of the… zombies.” She shudders, hating the very sound and thought of this incalculably cold word. “But you ask me how I dealt with losing Jason? I may be crazy, but I believe this is the End of the World. That God chose a few elite to remain and eliminated the rest. As children have no knowledge of right and wrong, they cannot be judged. And so God spares them from this hell by killing them. Do I think little Jason would have become a zombie? The thought mortifies me. But, no, I don’t think so. He was only three months old. He was innocent and pure. I find comfort in the fact that my little Jason is at home in Heaven, with God and the angels…

and that little Jason has met his father, and they are watching over me, waiting for the day when I shall join them in paradise.”

Anthony Barnhart

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IV

The large display windows are shattered, the tables that had once been covered with books now mostly overturned, the books scattered over the floor, bloated from water due to the melting snow. The man stands in the middle of the Newport on the Levee courtyard, the beginning of March breathing soft whispers of warmth. He sheds his jacket and throws it onto a bench that encircles a dead and wilted tree, turns and looks at the vacant buildings, the ice cream parlor, the abandoned kiosk, the clothing store with its front-porch manikins overturned and gnawed. He finds it ridiculous and rather anticlimactic: a starving dark-walker, seeing something that looks like a person, and gnawing on the tough plastic until finally receiving the hint that there is no blood to drink within. The large multi-story, glass-walled Newport Mall rises at the end of the courtyard, and the sun reflects off the windows, some shattered and others webbed. The innards of the Mall are dark and cloaked in shadows, and the man can almost feel eyes boring into him from its dark recesses. No worries, though: it is nearly noon, and sunlight is reaching its zenith. He doesn’t worry about the time as he steps over shards of broken glass and ducks into the building. Most of the aisles of books stand just as they did on the night of August 11 of last year. He can imagine the workers locking up the building and closing down the cash registers, setting off and dreading another day of work that would never come. Some of the bookshelves are knocked over, the books scattered, and the titles of the books are all covered with a thick layer of immaculate dust. The building is enshrined with windows, and sunlight drenches everything; a shadow cannot be detected. The broken windows mean that, perhaps at night, creatures dwell in this building, the inhabitants of some foreign sanctuary. Or they may mean that someone had been infected inside the building and escaped, as an abandoned mop—the tendrils now dried and cracking—with its mop bucket—now empty—seem to imply.

He moves past the store’s information desk. One of the computers lies on the floor. He spies twin escalators, no longer in service. The escalators have become stairs, and this bookstore has become the festival of moths and mice. He moves up one of the escalators, remembering when he and Kira had ridden the escalator early in their relationship, before they had explored one another’s bodies in a sensual and erotic embrace.

∑Ω∑

“Did you just touch my ass?” she demanded, spinning around.

They were halfway up the escalator.

He looked at her in shock. “What? No!”

“Oh. I thought you touched my ass.”

“No, I didn’t. I swear.”

“You don’t need to apologize. It didn’t bother me. It just… surprised me.”

∑Ω∑

He steps onto the upper level, this section holding the fiction, some nonfiction, and the religious and occult sections. Before him is a small café, enclosed with a decorated railing. The railing is lined by tables on either side. At the opposite side of the café are giant windows that overlook the Ohio River and the beautiful Cincinnati skyline. He had come here many times, during his schooling for aviation, pouring over complicated textbooks, sipping caramel macchiatos, gazing in wonder at the Anthony Barnhart

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plethora of city lights that seemed to reach into the highest pinnacle of Heaven. He admits now that he had flirted often with the female barista, a punkish girl with raggedy red hair and freckles, with wild eyes that spoke volumes of wicked desire. This thought flushes his face even now, a secret that Kira had never known.
Secrets are what make relationships work
, a friend had once told him;
Secrets are
what keep a relationship together. The moment you know everything about a person, there is no mystery…

Only boredom.
He smiles, finding it ironic that the one who had told him this had endured three divorces following those cryptic words.
At least I never did anything with the girl
, the man thinks;
Isn’t
it okay to look but not touch?

He walks into the café, past a table with several cubbies filled with sugar and crème packets. At the front of the STARBUCKS café, he peers into the display case. What had once held danishes, brownies, cookies, and a wide assortment of treats is now stained with mold and an eerie mist, and flies crawl along the inside of the glass, probing with their mouths. He wrinkles his nose at the smell and steps away. Sitting next to the cash register is a jar filled with wrapped sticks of biscotti; he takes one—vanilla almond—and unwraps it, chewing hungrily. It tastes much more fantastic than the usual canned goods and occasional candy bar. No one had discovered biscotti in the stories around the church. He munches quietly in the café, sunlight filtering through the windows, and as he eats he imagines the place crawling with science fiction nerds, religious nuts, flirting teenagers with their cups of coffee, a couple arguing in the corner, a blind and awkward date at a small table in the middle of the café. It is a flash from the past, and he quickly shakes it from his mind, returning to the empty store with its volumes of books that, in time, will be reduced to nothing, eaten by moths and disintegrated into oblivion.

He uses his finger to wipe dust from the spines of the books. He is in the Science & Nature section, and he grabs a book called Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. He reads the back cover: an exploration of how the culture of mankind has evolved into the civilization of the 21st Century. Another book he peruses is The Selfish Gene, and he notes that Richard Dawkins is the author. He remembers watching a video of Richard Dawkins in one of his science classes in high school. He considers taking some books on evolution but decides against it.
This is not why you’re here.
You don’t have to understand the dark-walkers. You just have to survive them
. He leaves the section behind.

He had heard about the book on Discovery Channel before the plague, but he has forgotten the title. He knows he’ll recognize it when his eyes lay upon it, and he is right. He hungrily grabs the book and flips through the pages, thanking God that moths had not devoured the sacred text. The SAS

Survival Handbook: How to Survive in the Wild, in Any Climate, on Land or at Sea. He moves to one of the tables in the café and begins exploring the book, his heart pounding in his chest.
You can look at
it later. You still have work to do
. He can imagine Mark poking his way through the church, trying to find out where the man has run off to; it brings a smile to his face. He sets the book down on the table and makes his way back to the aisles of literature, testaments to a world of intellect, knowledge, and fictional fascination that died seven months ago.

The store only had two books on what he had wanted, but these will have to do. He takes a seat in the café and flips through them. The Milepost and Lonely Planet Alaska. He dares not whisper his heretical plans to anyone save Mark, and he knows that Mark will even be skeptical. It is of no importance. The man has seen the evolution of the dark-walkers, has seen how they are growing smarter, clever, working together, creating diversions and traps.
Even sacrificing their own for the good
of the group
. Such altruism has been said to be present only in the human species, and then only in Anthony Barnhart

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rare cases. Yet he has seen more altruism in the dark-walkers than he has seen in any
Homo sapien
his entire life, and it begs to be wondered: “Are the dark-walkers, in truth, more human than we are?”

He glances out the large windows, suddenly forgetting the books. Storm clouds are gathering in the distance, and raindrops are beginning to peck on the glass. Dark will come sooner with the rain, the sun obscured by thick clouds, and they will pull themselves from their catacombs early. He gathers his books in his hands and leaves BARNES & NOBLE, hurrying quickly as the rain grows stronger.

V

She stands stark nude in the wintry snow, the ice crystals scarring her bare feet. She tries to open her eyes, but ice cakes them closed. She swipes the ice away with a finger and sees Adrian before her, except now he is transformed: a rotting skeleton, crawling with maggots, twin eyes hanging by strands from his cavernous eye sockets. His mouth is open in a scream, and a snake peers at her from between his misshapen teeth. Beyond him all the leaves on the trees are gone, the limbs stripped bare and covered in snow and draped with icicles. The flowers and grasses of the meadow are replaced with rocky stubble strewn with bloody snow. She twirls around and a scream exits her throat; nooses are tied to the limbs, and infants and small children swing from the nooses, hung upon every skeletal oak and elm. Their eyes are vacant of life. Thousands upon thousands of nooses, dozens tied to every branch. She falls to her knees in terror and wrenches her head to the sky: the sun boils and millions of men, women and children are hovering in the abyss above her, screaming and howling as unseen forces rip their limbs from their bodies. The blue sky turns red as a rose. She cries out and turns her head to the earth, avoiding the horrible sight: but then she sees the infant in the snow, and she knows:
It’s mine
. The child’s skin is pale and mottled, stricken with blue veins; its eyes glisten evil and its mouth reveals hundreds of tiny fangs. It shrieks and leapt upon her; she falls back into the snow, trying to fight off the creature. As the infant sinks its fangs into the soft of her neck, she realizes that it is not snow that blankets the meadow, but the ashes of the leagues who have been burned alive.

Rachel awakes in a cold sweat. She leans up on her elbows, staring into the darkness of the room. Adrian notices, pulls himself from sleep. He reaches out, grabs her wrist; she writhes away, falling against the wall. She can almost see the zombie lying in bed beside her, and the walls seem to melt away as the night terror fades. She sees Adrian staring at her, fear in his eyes.