Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (87 page)

YIRGACHEFFE. He searches for a grinder, but it’s electricity-powered. He leaves the beans on the counter and exits the café, moves down along the aisles of the library, breathing in stagnant, freefloating dust. He hears the echo of a cry in the darkness, somewhat distant, followed by rushing feet. He draws his KA-BAR, and holding his breath, runs between the aisles, nearly tripping over his own feet. Another shriek comes behind him, closer. He wheels around and sprints towards the exit, the shattered glass reflecting in the pouring sunlight. He leaps out through the broken window and stumbles onto the stone steps and falls, tumbling down the steps. He lands on the sidewalk, curses, feels blood coursing down his hand. He looks over his shoulder, towards the entrance. He hears another cry, but there is nothing. He grabs the KA-BAR lying next to him. The blood streams from a deep cut on the back of his hand; it sears in pain. He bites his lip, stands, sheathes the knife. Gripping his hand, putting pressure on the cut, he walks back across The Valley, cursing under his breath, the sun simply smiling.

Anthony manages to contain his tears. Acceptance isn’t as easy when reality sinks its fanged teeth into the rhythms of a beating heart. The muscles in his bent legs ache, so he grabs one of the bean-bag chairs and pulls it underneath him. He leans on the bed, looking at Amanda’s empty eye sockets, says, “If this had never happened… If this wouldn’t have taken place… You’d be an aunt right now. Karen was pregnant. You know that? Of course you don’t. But maybe you’re in Heaven, and you already know. Maybe you knew before I did. But it doesn’t matter. You always wanted to be an aunt. You always talked about how my kids would be the most beautiful kids in the world, and how they’d be weird and quirky just like me. You were going to be an aunt, and I was going to be a daddy.” He is quiet for a moment. The tears are returning. “But that’s not how it’s going to be. Maybe it was never meant to be that way. Maybe this is what fate had in store for us. Fate’s an elegant, coldhearted bitch. I know that now. But we can’t fight against fate. We just have to accept it. It doesn’t matter what our dreams, our hopes, our desires are… Fate has the final say. And you can’t fight fate and win—you’ll only be bloodied and left alone to mend your own wounds with the salt of your own tears.”

Kyle is sitting on a park bench along one of the winding paths that encircles The Valley. He watches the man walking away from the library, disappearing behind a building, on his way to the Explorer. Anthony Barnhart

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He wonders what the man was doing inside a dark building, doesn’t care. It looks as if the man is holding his hand, maybe it’s hurt.
Maybe he was bitten
. He pushes the thought away. The man is the type of creature who would gladly shoot itself to keep from becoming one of the dark-walkers. If he were infected, he’d have killed himself already. Kyle pushes the man out of his thoughts, stares at The Valley. The grass is overgrown, the crisscrossing sidewalks nearly hidden. It is mid-April. This time last year, there would have been students in The Valley: groups huddled together, laughing and chatting; boys and girls walking hand-in-hand; college kids feeding the squirrels that watched from the trees—he notices there are no squirrels; they were probably eaten by the dark-walkers, or are hiding in the trees, out-of-sight, acknowledging bipedal creatures as a dangerous threat to be avoided at all costs. He can almost see kids biking down the paths, or throwing Frisbees on the oncemanicured lawn. His eyes are drawn to the oaks, the leaves a brilliant green.
Spring is the season of
rebirth. Summer dies with fall, and fall takes its final plunge with winter; but when winter seems as if it shall
never pass, spring comes, bringing new life and rebirth
. He looks at the trees, wondering if this is a new life dawning, a rebirth for their little group. His father once told him, “Time doesn’t heal all wounds.
Action
heals all wounds. If you sit on your ass and do nothing, then nothing will change. But if you get off your ass and work towards something, then things
will
change—they will have no choice but to change.” They lived lives of resignation within the church, back at the city that now seems so many hundreds of miles away. Now they have a mission, a goal, something to accomplish:
Alaska
. The thought brings a smile to the boy’s face.

Sarah and Katie are alone at the Explorer. Katie says, “This was a Christian campus, you know?

Affiliated with the Pentecostal Church of God tradition.” Sarah asks how she knows that. “Anthony was telling me. You know what? When people found out I was a lesbian, I was accosted by these Christians who ‘cared’ about my salvation. They cared so much that they took pleasure in condemning me to Hell. One time Elizabeth and I were at a baseball game in Orlando, and this little kid comes up to us. He asks if we are lesbians. We tell him we are. We weren’t ashamed of it. He then proceeds to give us a gospel tract, and he tells us that we are sinners damned for Hell, and that if we do not repent, then we will be raped by demons in the underworld.” She stares at Sarah with piercing, cold eyes. “How can people raise their children like that, to hate everything they don’t understand? It’s pathetic. If you’re an adulterer, you’re human. If you’re an idolater, you’re human. If you’re addicted to food or alcohol or drugs or cigarettes, you’re human. But if you’re gay… Then you’re the scum of the earth, stomped on by God, hated by everything Holy and Divine.” She laughs.

“You know what I keep thinking about? Whatever happened to that little boy? I know what happened. He became one of them. And he’s running around someplace down in Florida, roaming the palm trees and white sand beaches, foaming at the mouth. And you know what I wonder even more? Whatever happened to his so-called ‘god’? If I am condemned for who I am, then why didn’t I become infected?” She shakes her head. “This proves there is no God.” Sarah doesn’t have anything to say.

Mark nears one of the buildings, elegantly designed with ivy crawling up its sides. There is a cobblestone patio with several benches, ringed by bushes. He makes his way up to the patio, sees something erected in the middle of the laid cobblestone. He approaches, sees a plaque along the cylindrical, four-foot-tall column: THE ETERNAL FLAME. There is no flame. It is no longer burning.
Everything dies. Everything extinguishes
. He looks around at the buildings, the sky, the trees, feels the crisp spring air in his lungs.
One day, all of this will fade. The buildings will fall apart. The cobblestone will
shatter. The benches will disintegrate. This entire campus—this entire town—will succumb to nature, and it
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will be nothing but a vast wilderness with a few monuments of a forgotten age: slabs of concrete, rusted car
skeletons, shiny plaques weathered by the elements. Civilization with all its trappings will fade, and no one will
remember us.
The thought doesn’t affect him anymore.

Anthony takes several deep breaths. He closes his eyes, tries to calm down. His heart flutters rebelliously in his chest. “You were a wonderful girl,” he says, not opening his eyes. He then looks at her. “You always thought you were a horrible person, because of the things you’d done. But you weren’t a horrible person. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone does things they shouldn’t. Everyone has regrets. You screwed up a lot. So did I. But we were still compassionate. We were still caring. We still put others before ourselves. That’s what made us good. It isn’t what we did, it wasn’t our mistakes that defined who we were. It’s how we treated other people. And we treated people well. I mean, I didn’t. Not all the time. But I was always proud of you. Always proud.” He takes her bony hand into his. “You made me proud, Amanda. So fucking proud.”

Sarah sees the man walking towards them, along the road around RICE HALL. “He looks hurt.”

Katie looks up at her. “What?”

“He looks hurt,” she repeats, and she runs over to him. “You all right?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” he says, not breaking his pace.

“What happened?” Her voice quivers: “Were you bitten?”

“No,” the man says. “I cut myself on my knife.”

She walks with him back towards the S.U.V. “How’d you manage that?”

“I was being stupid.”

They reach the vehicle. Sarah opens the door and reaches inside. The man leans against the hood of the car. His hands are covered with his own blood.

She grabs a hand-towel. “Give me your hand.” She grabs his hand; he doesn’t refuse. “Let me see it.”

He says no.

“
Let me see it
,” she demands.

He lifts his hand. She wipes blood away from the slice.

He grimaces, the rough cloth tearing at his ruptured skin.

“It’s pretty deep,” she says. “We can suture it up. Nancy taught me how, back at the church. We’ll need to get needles and stuff.”

The man doesn’t say anything.

She presses the towel tight against his wound. She tells Katie to get another rag. Katie obeys, hands it to her. She gives it to the man: “Clean yourself up. You’ve still got blood on your face. Hopefully none of the blood from the dark-walker got into your system…” The man hasn’t even thought about that. She looks at him. “If you start feeling sick…”

“I know,” the man says.

Tears brim in Sarah’s eyes.

“I’ll be fine,” the man says.

Katie is staring at him.

He snaps, “What the fuck are you looking at?”

“Hopefully not a dead man,” she whispers under her breath.

He looks back at Sarah. “Stop crying.”

“I’m not crying.”

“I’ll be all right. It’s the bites that matter. I’ve gotten their blood in me before.”

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V

They decide to spend the night in RICE HALL. Mark and Kyle sweep it clean, finding no more darkwalkers. They use the R.A.’s key to open several more dorm rooms. They drag skeletons out and put them in the hallway, then flip the mattresses onto the opposite side to prevent the spread of disease. They find blankets and pillows in closets and put them over the mattresses. “Don’t use the ones the skeletons were on,” Sarah told them, “because they’re not going to be the most sanitary.” Mark and Kyle take a room, Anthony and the man take a room, and Sarah and Katie take a room. It is early evening, and everyone is quiet, walking around, thinking. Anthony has disappeared, and the man and Sarah are in the room. He sits on a sofa, and she sits next to him. He bites his lip; she holds his hand, running a needle and thread between the frayed flesh, sporadically splashing hydrogenperoxide into the wound. She found the suturing equipment in the R.A.’s room. The man doesn’t say anything, and she sews in silence, working by the dim light coming through the window.

“It doesn’t hurt too badly, does it?” she asks, voice drenched in compassion.

“It’s fine,” the man says. “I deserve it for being so fucking stupid.”

“What happened?”

“I went into the library. Looking for coffee. Anthony had mentioned that there was a café in there. Anyways, I found the coffee shop. They didn’t have any coffee I could make, ironically. I was on my way out when I was chased. There was one in the building, maybe more. I barely escaped, and I lost my footing. I was holding my knife, and as I fell, I cut myself.”

“Well,” Sarah says, “it’s better than them getting you.”

“I know,” the man says. “
Ouch
.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re okay.”

Anthony moves across The Valley. The leaves on the oaks are beautiful in the last moments of daylight. His heart had beaten quickly at first, but now it has calmed down. This is something he knew he should have done a while ago. He had been on the campus a few times before, knows his way around. He walks past WARNER AUDITORIUM, the concrete sidewalk clapping loudly under his feet in the still and silent dusk. He nears the KRANNERT FINE ARTS BUILDING; on the patio at the main entrance is a fountain, the water long since having stopped flowing. The fountain is composed of a pool with a helix statue rising up, an emblem of the human D.N.A. strand.
The Helios
, it was called. He sits down on the ledge around the pool. It is filled with murky rainwater. He takes a deep breath and sets his hands on his knees. He looks up and sees the sun lowering beyond one of the oaks, its rays splitting between the branches and sparkling on the leaves.

“Mark tells me that you were engaged when the plague hit.”

The man doesn’t say anything.

“Were you?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “I was going to propose to her the night after the plague hit.”

“Oh.”

“It’s okay.”

“I bet it was hard losing her.”

“Yeah,” he says. He remembers stabbing her in the bedroom. “It was.”

Sarah doesn’t say anything for a moment, continues the stitches. “I lost my husband.”

“I’m sorry.”

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“His name was Patrick. He was… fantastic.”

“I’ll bet he was.”

“He really was. He was my knight in shining armor.”

“Okay.”

“We were… We were trying to have children.”

“Did you?”

“No. Thank God. Losing Patrick was hard enough…”

“I understand.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever really be over losing him.”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you over losing your girlfriend?”

“Yes,” the man says.

After a moment, with the quaking of his heart, “No.”

The sun continues to set. Anthony remembers sitting with Amanda on their front porch. He had bought three zombie movies—“Dawn of the Dead: 2004,” “Land of the Dead,” and “Diary of the Dead.” She had made fun of him, saying, “You’re obsessed with zombies.” He told her that he was, that the concept of a zombie apocalypse was exciting. He had told her, “My life isn’t very exciting. I’ll bet a zombie apocalypse would make it exciting. Sure, I’d have loads of emotional and psychological baggage to deal with afterwards—in the event that I didn’t end up bitten and so join the Legions of the Undead—but it would make my life a little more… interesting.” She told him that he was crazy, asked why zombies fascinated him so much. He thought for a moment, said, “I don’t think it’s the zombies necessarily, but the collapse of everything we hold so dear. For nearly five thousand years, mankind has been erecting a civilization filled with monuments to their glory and achievements, to their accomplishments that reach into the stars. And a simple plague destroys all of that when it turns mankind into mindless creatures who only hunger and thirst and know nothing more. Order disintegrates into chaos. Hope becomes hopelessness. Our greatest dreams and ambitions die in the twinkling of an eye. The hunters become the hunted. Families are torn apart, friends become our worst enemies, and society crumbles.
This
is why a zombie apocalypse is so… fascinating… to me. I find myself contemplating the future, wondering what it would look like if this were to happen. How would our theologies change? How would our perceptions of the world be transformed? How would we live our daily lives? Would we seek to rebuild civilization? Would we even be
able
to rebuild civilization? Our environment would take a one-hundred-eighty degree turn, would be flipped upside-down, and we would have the ultimatum of either changing and adapting, or dying—and joining the Legions of the Undead.”