Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (101 page)

The man leans the rifle against the side of the train and kneels down. He can see a small latch. The baggage compartment. “Sarah,” he says. “Your gun.” She hands him the M16. He steps back, pulls the trigger. The gun-blast roars. His ears ring.

The intermittent shot brings about an unearthly silence, and then the shouts of the dark-walkers become louder.

Katie turns and stares out into the corn from atop the bridge, and she can see great swathes being torn through the stalks. “They’re coming…” Tears speckle in her eyes.

The man tosses the assault rifle to the ground and grabs the broken lock. He wrenches the hatchway down, and he steps back as dusty duffel bags and suitcases fall at his feet. He reaches inside, grabs more luggage, yanking them out. He carves a tunnel through the baggage, and he crawls inside, moving upwards in the darkness. His fingers grope around in the blackness. He can hear the muffled talking of the others outside. He finds what he is looking for, a latch, and he twists it. It unlocks, and he scurries forward a few more inches, pushes upwards with his hand. The hatchway opens, revealing the inside of the driver’s quarters. He shouts back to the others, crawls out into the room. There are bare white walls, several posters and calendars, their decrees lost in the darkness. The air is stagnant and thick. He turns and helps Katie up, and she moves to the side. Mark and Sarah come up the chute.

When everyone has gathered, bringing with them their own weapons and the man’s WINCHESTER, the man closes the hatch.

There is the sound of shattering glass, and the man’s heart leaps in his throat. He settles down when Sarah appears, carrying a fire-safety hatchet that is nearly four feet long. She pushes the man out of the way and wedges the axe’s head against the door, and the end of the handle is pressed up against the opposite wall.

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The corridor is tight, and the man is thankful.

Katie’s face is wet with cold sweat. “Now what?”

They abandon the driver’s engine. The individual carriages are connected by enshrouded walkways. They enter one of the passenger carriages. There are oak tables with booths along one wall, and along the other are half-circle couches facing the walkway; within the crescent space created by the swooping couches are glass tables. The floor is littered with broken dishes, wine-glasses, and rotted food. The PLEXIGLAS windows along the walls bring in shafts of moonlight from the east, and to the west, the last dying rays of the sun are disappearing behind the endless miles of corn.

“Where are the vampires?” Katie asks.

“It isn’t night yet,” Sarah says. “They’re staying in the corn until the sun’s gone.”

“Oh,” Katie says, looking out towards the sun. “That won’t be long.”

“No,” the man says. “It won’t… Come on.” He moves forward.

“Where now?” Sarah asks.

“Away from these windows,” the man says. “They’ll be able to see us.”

“They’re plate glass,” she says. “They can’t get in.”

“Trust me. They’ll find a way. They’ll have all night.”

“Where’s Mark?” Katie asks.

They have moved three cars down, more carriages with windows and dining. The man turns around, looks over his shoulder, sees only the women. “Shit.”

Sarah turns to backtrack; the man grabs her by the shoulder. “No.”

She turns, glares at him. “We have to get him. We can’t leave him.”

“We’re not,” the man says. “You guys keep going. I rode an Amtrak once, in San Diego. They have dining cars, and then they have sleeping quarters. Amtraks go cross-country, even from the Pacific to the Atlantic, or from Mexico to Canada. If we find the sleeping quarters, we’ll be safer. You two go and find them, stay there. I’ll get Mark.”

Sarah takes a deep breath. “All right.” To Katie: “Let’s go.”

The man watches them depart, grips the WINCHESTER, and heads back the other way.

He moves to the next carriage. Mark isn’t there. Several wine-glasses crunch underneath his feet. On into the next car he goes, and he spies Mark slouched in one of the semi-circle sofas. The man rushes over to him. Mark’s eyes are closed, his breathing labored. Fresh vomit lies on the floor, dribbles off the edge of the sofa. The man sets the rifle down next to him, grabs the boy’s shoulder, violently shakes him, shouting his name. Mark’s eyes open, glazed and numb. The man doesn’t ask Mark what he’s doing, knows full well: his injuries haven’t wholly healed, and the pain he is feeling is causing his body to react in quite deplorable ways. The man abandons the WINCHESTER and picks Mark up off the sofa, hefting him into his arms. “God, you’re heavy…” he mutters. Mark breathes on him, that awful, sickly, sweet smell of nausea. The man makes his way back towards the next carriage, says,

“What did I tell you, Mark? You shouldn’t have drank that fucking—’’

Something slams against the window, jarring his concentration; the man falls against one of the dining tables, the corner digging into his back. He lets out a shout, releases Mark, and they tumble to the floor together. The man picks himself up, looks out the window. A single dark-walker stands there, grinning at him with a demonic Cheshire smile.

“Aw, shit,” the man says under his breath.

The dark-walker places its hands on the window, the pale palms twin full moons. Anthony Barnhart

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The man looks back down to Mark, who is crawling along the floor. He vomits again.

“Mark,” the man says. “Mark, we need to move
now
.”

The boy looks up, past the man, asks, weakly, “Why are they… waiting?”

The man follows his line of sight.

Outside the window, thirty or forty dark-walkers are positioned in a line along the lip of the bridge, facing west. The sun has completely gone now, and they have emerged from the cornfields. None of them move forward, except for the single man standing in front of the PLEXIGLAS window, watching them with that god-forsaken grin. “I don’t know…” the man says. He looks right into the eyes of the single dark-walker, and he feels nothing but coldness and pleasure looking straight back at him. It is something different. He has looked them in the eyes before, has experienced nothing but that bitter and lifeless stare. But he looks into this dark-walker’s eyes, and he feels something extraordinarily…
human
. Maybe not human, perhaps semi-human, or sub-human. But it is a step up from the animalistic nature of the creatures. This monster, this fiend, this dweller of the night, he is something different, something inexplicable, something the man cannot quite put into words. It is something that makes shivers trace up the man’s spine.

The man turns away from the figure behind the glass.

Mark is getting to his feet.

The man stands, takes Mark’s hand, and they move towards the next carriage. The man glances behind them, and the dark-walker hasn’t followed them, except with his eyes: those bottomless, quasi-human eyes trace their journey, and the grin never leaves his narrow and emaciated face.

The next carriage is a dining car as well, and the floor is littered with bones, tattered pieces of clothing not eaten by the mice and moths. They hardly acknowledge them, a sight all too common in this new and frightening world. The man understands:
they were caught in the train, unable to escape,
and when the power finally went out, the train rolled to a stop with its cargo. When they awoke, they could not
get out, were forced to dine on one another, to reenact ‘The Donner Party’, and the last remaining dark-walkers
had to fight for survival, and then the winners became the losers as they suffered the worst fate of all: starvation
and death
. The tips of the man’s shoes kick skulls haphazardly across the floor. There is a tiny skull, perhaps belonging to an infant, and it is crushed underneath the man’s shoe, the bones splintering and folding atop of one another. Through the windows, illuminated in the pale moonlight, are the dark-walkers, naked and emaciated, shivering, but not moving. Staring forward, into the train, watching their prey, but not advancing. The man pushes into the next carriage, Mark right behind him.

They’ve reached the first of the sleeping quarters. The man shouts out Sarah’s name, and a door down the corridor slides open. She waves at him. The man reaches her, and she takes Mark, pulls him into the room. The man ducks inside. It is a small room, with two beds: one is up against the window, and the other is atop of it on a loft. There is a single window, with the blinds pulled over it. There is a dusty laptop sitting on a chair in the corner, and a small fridge filled with warm bottles of water. Katie sits on the floor, knees tucked to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs. Sarah helps Mark over to the bed, and he lies down. She grabs a bottle of AVON water, screws off the cap, hands it to him. He drinks it in small sips, his body shaking.

The man asks what’s happening to him.

She looks over, replies, “He’s in shock. We need to get him warm.”

“I thought shock had to do with blood. He’s just in pain.”

Anthony Barnhart

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“He’s in psychological shock. It’s something different.”

Katie stands, begins ripping blankets from the top bunk. “Will these work?” she asks.

“Good thinking,” Sarah says.

She turns around to say something to the man, but he has gone, sliding the door shut.

III

The man exits the sleeping quarters carriage and returns to the dining cars. Outside the windows, illuminated under the pale moonlight, the dark-walkers stand silent and staring forward, into the cars. He avoids their eyes. He pushes through the final accordion walkway between the carriages and sees his gun lying on the floor in the next car. The ominous figure still stands where he had been standing before, and the scowl across his features returns to a strange grin. The man doesn’t pay him attention, grabs the WINCHESTER off the floor.

He turns to return to the others, but an undeniable curiosity accosts him. He slowly spins upon his heels, and he faces the figure in the window. There is something about that creature… No,
creature
doesn’t seem quite right. There is something
more
in those eyes. When you look into the eyes of the others, you feel nothing but deadness. But there is a certain electricity that travels from the eyes of this odd dark-walker, passing through the PLEXIGLAS window and meeting the man in his rooted position amidst the sofas and booths. The man feels an ethereal uneasiness at the monster’s livelihood, and he finds himself moving forward.

His face is now inches from the window, and his heartbeat accelerates at the close proximity. They face one another, their eyes connecting, and the man is overcome with a hypnotic blend of terror, dread… and awe. He is in a trance, and his own eyes go wide as the creature suddenly moves, wrenching its head back, throwing its eyes to the full pale moon. Its throat warbles with its cry, a shrill, deep-throated, and rasping shriek that lodges the man’s own sterile heart in his own mirrored throat.

The cry is answered by the others, and their rank-and-file assemblage along the bridge’s railing is broken.

They blitzkrieg the carriage in a maddening rush.

The dark-walkers throw themselves into the side of the carriage, lifting the heavy wheels off the steel track. The man loses his balance and falls backwards, the gun sliding from his hand. The carriage is tilted at a steep angle, and the man rolls across the floor and slams into the legs of one of the tables. The leg snaps and the lip of the table falls down next to him, splinters emerging from the shattered wood. The carriage groans and falls back into place; several dark-walkers are caught under the wheels, limbs severed, bodies crushed, but the others return to the bridge’s railing, take a deep breath, and rush after the carriage again, oblivious to their fallen comrades: a new development. The man leaps to his feet, grabs the edge of a sofa to steady himself as the carriage lifts up once more. It rocks back down into its original position, and the impact against the ground sends cracks through several of the glass windows. The man bends down, grabs the WINCHESTER, and he looks up as one of the windows shatters. A dark-walker struggles to get inside. “Fuck me sideways,” the man growls. He begins moving backwards towards the other cars, and he raises the gun and fingers the trigger. The gunshot is deafening, and the bullet carves through the creature’s forehead; the fiend topples to Anthony Barnhart

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the floor, bleeding out amidst the skeletons. The man turns and runs as more pile into the carriage. He hears another window shatter as he reaches the next dining car.

Sarah is standing in the hallway, gripping the M16 in white-knuckled fingers. She sees the man appear. He swings around, facing the opposite direction, fires another shot. She yells at him. He turns, sees her, runs over. She asks what happened. He tells her there’s no time to explain. They duck inside the cramped quarters. Katie is standing next to the bed where Mark is lying. Sarah and the man shut the door, and the man grabs Mark, yanks him out of the bed. Mark stumbles against the wall, dazed. He collapses to the floor, weak.

Sarah and the man wedge the end of the bunk-bed against the door. They step back. Katie kneels down next to Mark, trying to comfort him. He turns to the side and vomits. A cold sweat pours down his face.

Katie stands, moves to the window covered by the blinds.

The man sets the WINCHESTER at Mark’s feet and takes the other M16. He and Sarah stare at the door, can hear dark-walkers inside the corridor. The man looks at her, puts a finger to his mouth:
Shhh
.

Katie turns, fingers the blinds, pulls them away.

Her scream makes Sarah and the man turn around, and the man can see the figure with the otherworldly eyes standing with its face in the window, grinning at them, mocking them in their demise. The man rushes forward, elbows Katie out of the way, draws the blinds back over the window. He glares at Katie, who is up against the wall, next to Mark. Sarah shouts, points to the door.