Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (70 page)

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Everything is drenched in blood. He closes his eyes but for a moment, and he can see them all, the limbs torn from their bodies, their blood splashed against the walls, their screams and their cries and the shattering of their—
our—
indulgent complacency. The visions scar him, and he opens his eyes, pushing away the memories. He leans against the Explorer and takes several deep breaths. Kyle comes around and tells him that there is no real damage, just some dents and scrapes. Even the axles are undamaged.

Katie has to leave the kitchen. She enters the living room and sits down on the sofa, a cloud of dust rising with her presence. The picture-frames along the walls are coated with a film of dust, the images behind the glass hidden. A Christmas tree sits in the corner with several boxes of ornaments lying beside it. She can hear the woman’s moans in the other room, can see Mark standing in the kitchen, watching. She thanks God that the wall hides the grisly scene. Mark looks over at her, sees her shaking, walks over and sits down beside her. He doesn’t touch her, but his presence is comforting. She leans against his shoulder and stares numbly at the wall, and although she cannot see what is going on in the kitchen, the sounds are enough to paint a vibrant portrait. She sees a stream of blood moving into view over the tiles of the kitchen, creeping around the corner, moving along the cracks in the flooring. Mark bites his lip, looks over at her, then looks towards the kitchen.

Sarah presses the wash-cloths against the woman’s head, but the blood keeps coming. Several towels have been soaked, and they lie on the floor, the gathered blood emptying. The woman’s face is hidden behind a sea of red. Her shaking and moaning grows fainter. Sarah looks up at the man, who suddenly reels backwards, lets out a shout of rage, and slams his fists against the wall, leaving two cracked chasms in the drywall. The woman lies breathless on the table, and the fountain of blood that had been spouting from the gash over her forehead has dwindled down to a mere trickle, and then it stops. Sarah can feel the warm blood on her hands, the blood of a woman who no longer lives, the blood of a woman who has escaped this wretched world. The man fumes next to the refrigerator. He yanks it open, finds a bottle of warm water, twists off the cap, and, standing over the sink, pours the lukewarm water over his hands. The blood rushes down his fingers and into the sink. Sarah walks over and hands him a towel. He doesn’t say anything as he wipes his hands, but it only smears the blood. He drops the towel in the sink and leaves the kitchen.

Mark watches the man exit the house, and then he stands and walks into the kitchen. He stares at the lifeless corpse lying on the table. Sarah is at the sink, trying to wipe her hands clean of blood. Mark asks her name. Sarah doesn’t look over at him as she answers, “Cameron.” Mark doesn’t reply as he kneels down, scoops up several towels in his hands, and leaves the kitchen. Katie watches him go, then curls up into a ball on the sofa, rocking back and forth on the dusty comforters, staring at the wall with the dusty picture frames.

The man exits the house, sees Kyle and Anthony sitting on the curb. He moves around the S.U.V., opens the door, reaches inside, grabs a shirt. He walks back around the side of the S.U.V. and throws it to Anthony. Anthony just holds the shirt, then folds it, and sets it down in the olive grass beside him. The man climbs into the driver’s seat of the Explorer and stares forward through the webbed windshield. Anthony can see him lean over the wheel and start to cry, his chest quaking. Anthony looks over at Kyle, only to find that he is gone: he has gotten up and is walking down the street, arms dangling at his side, wandering aimlessly towards the west.

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Anthony Barnhart

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Book Three

May to October

2012

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Anthony Barnhart

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Chapter Twenty-Two

Carla’s Sonnet

“That which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.”

- Epicurus (341-270 B.C.)

Mark emerges from inside the house. He stops for a moment on the front stoop, looks up into the brilliant morning sky. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, and for a second he has escaped the trauma: but his closed eyes betray him, and he sees again the carnage and feels once more the warm blood splashing across his face. He opens his eyes, returns to reality, feels the towels held tight in his hands. He steps down from the stoop and moves to the S.U.V. Anthony stands and greets him. He asks where Kyle has gone, and Anthony mumbles something, points down the street. He can see Kyle standing underneath a distant tree, hands pressed against the bark. Mark shrugs and grabs the handle to the side door, rips it open. He crawls inside. He looks over to the man, who is trying to bottle his tears. Mark bites his lip, says nothing, and begins scrubbing the blood off the leather seat. He can hear Anthony behind him:

“How could this have happened? How could this have happened?”

Mark doesn’t answer. He only scrubs harder.

“How could this have happened?” Anthony asks.

He tosses a bloodied towel to the side.

Anthony leans against the side of the Explorer, stares at the house.

“How could this have happened?”

Mark pulls himself out from inside the vehicle. He turns and faces Anthony, and with a fierce fire in his eye, he says, “It happened because we became numb. It happened because we became complacent. It happened because we forgot what the world is really like. And now we remember.”

∑Ω∑

Harker lied awake in bed. He pulled the sheets tight around him, fighting off the early spring cold. He stared at the ceiling with the muddled wax, and he closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep. But all he could see was his little angel, his beautiful daughter. He saw her running through the meadows, laughing and giggling as the kite danced in a rhythmic ballet upon the wings of the sky. He saw her clinging to his side, begging him to make EGO waffles before she caught the bus to Elementary School. He saw her lying in her own bed, with the purple polka-dot comforter and the Disney princess pillows, and he remembered sitting beside her on the bed, holding open a copy of The Little Engine That Could, telling her the story of courage and heroism in the face of great odds, hinting that she could continue to be proud in class even amidst the pestering of bloated-chest bullies. These memories of his baby girl, the jewel and gem of his life, refused to give him rest, tormenting him with their sweet reminisces.

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Anthony sat upon the makeshift toilet in the lowest part of the church. His stomach curled. Sweat popped over his brow. He cursed his weak stomach. The light from the oil-lamp flickered through the small room, and he held the book before him, reading with fascination, passing the time, trying to ignore the howls of the zombies outside the church walls. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson: a tale of a mosquito-born plague that turned the entire human race into bloodsucking vampires. He began to read the ending, and it chilled him to the bone: the vampires became sophisticated, formed their own societies, and they eliminated the last surviving
Homo sapien
.

Katie’s eyes were closed, and she slept soundly, a smile upon her face. In the dream, she stood on the beach with Elizabeth by her side. They held hands and watched the surf break over the jagged Maine rocks. The breeze whirling from the ocean chilled them to the bone, and they moved closer and closer to one another, feeding off one another’s warmth. Their foreheads pressed together, their noses cuddled, and they giggled as they kissed. The waves grew stronger, and the spray became more fierce, slicing into them like a million tiny spears. They laughed aloud and, still holding tightly to one another’s hand, sprinted up the beach, skipping among the waving beach-comb grasses, the crescent moon smiling lazily upon them.

Mark sat on the edge of his cot, a BASIC 100 curled between his fingers. He couldn’t sleep, accosted by dreams of Cara. He hadn’t had such dreams in quite a while, but now they kissed him in his sleep. He remembered learning something in psychology, the professor speaking: “There are, within the brain, channels of neurons, what we call
neural pathways
. Memories, information, experiences, facts, anything that we learn creates a neural pathway. Repetition makes these neural pathways deeper, and thus more easily accessible. In counseling, one will often find that a person will dream of events that took place much earlier in life; this may involve abuse from a loved one, the death of a special person—even a pet—or some other traumatic event. Though the person may have ‘moved on’ and

‘dealt with’ the incident, the trauma itself carved a deep-seeded neural pathway in the brain. The result is that, often in sleep, when one’s guard is down, the neural pathway may be accessed again, and a person may dream of the trauma that they experienced so long ago.” Mark took a deep hit of the cigarette, flicked ash onto the stone floor. He watched the ember burn in the twilight. He remembered going to the park with Cara. He remembered how they would sometimes smoke cigarettes together, and they would see who could blow the most smoke-rings. “Fuck,” he muttered, and he dropped the cigarette to the floor. He crunched it with the heel of his bare foot, and he felt nothing.
There is nothing to feel
, he thought to himself.
I have become numb to everything and everyone
. Adrian, Kyle, and the man stood on the rooftop in the calm March night. They huddled together, and Kyle gripped a hunting rifle tightly in his hands. They spoke in hushed whispers, occasionally glancing down at the fence-line along the edge of the hill that led up to the church. The dark-walkers crowded the fence, half-naked and emaciated, their flesh purple and blue, fingers falling off from frostbite. Many more had gathered since the snow had melted, and more seemed to appear every minute from the buildings surrounding the church. The creatures formed groups and pressed against the fence, creating a line of washboard ribs and swollen fingers gripping the chinks in the fastened iron. They avoided the bright beams of the ultraviolet lights, which Rachel had installed long ago. The ultraviolet light hurt them, made their skin burst into boils… Kyle had seen it once. A darkwalker had been caught outside with the origin of dawn. The sunlight tore through its skin, and it tried to make it inside a building, into the haven of darkness, but the pain became too intense, and it had fallen in the street, immobilized with cries of agonizing pain. Its ghastly moans and penetrating shrieks had lasted nearly an hour before it succumbed. Kyle had poked it with a stick to make sure, Anthony Barnhart

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then flipped it over… The skull, bathed in blood, could be seen, the flesh having totally burned off as if dipped in some type of flesh-eating acid.

Up on the roof, Kyle watched the dark-walkers with an uneasy feeling in his stomach. Men. Women. Children. The younger dark-walkers stood amidst the legs of the older ones, and they clung to the fence, watching the church with personality-absent eyes.
They can smell us
, Kyle thought to himself, nearly able to see the nostrils flaring like those of hunting dogs hot on the trail.
They can smell
the living blood running through our veins
. The thought sent chills through his spine. He forced the thought away and returned his focus back to the conversation.

“We’re leaving in three days,” the man was saying.

Adrian asked, “Who all is coming?”

“Me, Mark, you two. Maybe Katie.”

“What about Sarah? Or Carla?” Kyle asked. “Others might want to…”

“The less people we have, the sooner we can actually finish the trip.”

“If you’re convinced that this church is a dead zone, it would be responsible…”

“The responsible thing would be for others to step up to the plate and make decisions.” The man was adamant, refused to back down. “The most I’m willing to carry with me is five. Sarah. Carla. Anthony. Harker. If they want to get out, then they can get out. No one is stopping them. But our caravan is full.”

Kyle’s voice rippled through the air: “What the fuck?”

“I said…” the man said, turning to face him.

He

went

quiet.

Kyle was staring out at the fence.

And the man immediately realized what had happened.

“Oh, shit,” he muttered, glancing over at Adrian.

Adrian’s hands began to shake.

Kyle swung the gun around, facing it down towards the fence-line. The man ran towards the door, shouting for Adrian to follow.

They rushed down the stairwell, taking the steps two-at-a-time. The image continued to run through the man’s mind: the floodlights had extinguished, and the dark-walkers had begun going crazy, snarling amongst one another, clambering at the twelve-foot chain-link barricade. The ultraviolet lights had been centered on the fence’s weakest points, and now the dark-walkers had begun finding those weak points. He had felt the blood rush from his face as the fence began to wobble and shake, creaking in the quiet of the night. He and Adrian emerged in the sanctuary and rushed past the podium and stage; Sarah sat in a pew, reading a book by lamplight, and she watched them with a nervous interest. Adrian and the man took the stairwell on the opposite side of the sanctuary, and they reached the basement and stumbled through the darkness. The usual sound of the chugging generator had vanished. They saw the door to the generator room, closed in the corner of the basement. The man grabbed the door and ripped it open. Light flooded over them. Carla stood beside the generator, holding an oil-lamp up to her face. A strange mix of emotions reflected behind her crazed eyes. Adrian rushed forward to work on the generator, but Carla intercepted him, shoving him back into the wall with violent and un-foreseen force. The man glared at Carla, and she began shouting: “It’s the will of God! It’s the will of God!”