Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (102 page)

The dark-walkers are throwing themselves against it.

The man aims the M16 at the door, yells at Katie: “You fucking gave us away!”

Katie shakes her head, face pale as freshly-fallen snow. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

“Fucking bitch,” the man says, moving up next to Sarah.

Sarah mutters under her breath, “This wouldn’t be an issue if you hadn’t left.”

The dark-walkers continue hurling themselves against the sliding wooden door.

“They’re going to get in,” Sarah says.

“I know,” the man says.

“We don’t have anywhere to go,” Sarah says.

The door begins to splinter.

The man curses. “I know.”

Katie wails: “I’m so sorry! I’m so fucking sorry!”

The man’s eyes are glazed over.

Sarah looks at him. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

“What the fuck
isn’t
wrong?” he replies.

“You don’t look so good.”

The man turns away from her. “Katie.”

“I’m sorry!” she weeps, tears streaming down her face.

“Katie. Give me your gun.”

She pulls the BERETTA pistol out of her belt, hands it over.

The man flicks checks the magazine. Full. He flicks back the safety.

“I’d prefer you use the M16,” Sarah says, confused.

The man looks at the door, splinters emerging in various places.

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“We can’t go out like this,” the man says. “We can’t… We’ve seen what they do.”

Sarah understands, but she doesn’t want to. “No…”

Part of the door splinters, a hole, and a pale arm emerges, groping with knobby fingers and overgrown fingernails.

The man takes a deep breath. “There’s too many of them.”

“We can shoot them as they come through…”

“There’s at least forty. Maybe fifty of them. We can’t get all of them.”

“You can’t do this.”

The man ignores her, turns around, faces Katie crying in the corner. Katie looks up at him, and she sees it: he is pointing the gun at her. Her tears stop, and her eyes go wide, her body tensing. She tries to understand, tries to make it all make sense, but all she can hear is the man calling her a bitch, and now all she can see, with that refrain playing over and over in her mind, is the pistol pointed right at her. Sarah stands in the man’s shadow, and she lowers the M16, begins to cry. The pounding against the door grows louder, more intense. Sarah looks at the ground. Katie looks at the man, can see the coldness in his eyes, the placid resolution. “No…” Katie moans. “No…”

The man chokes on his words. “I’m sorry…”

Katie falls to her knees, begins crawling across the floor. “Please… Please…”

The man follows her with the gun. His trigger finger shakes.

She wraps herself around his legs, squeezing him tightly, begging, pleading. He can feel her breath against his knees.

He can feel her heartbeat through his pants.

The breath he will put an end to.

The

heart

he

will

extinguish.

“Please…” she moans, squeezing his legs tightly. “Please…”

Her tears return, soaking his jeans.

“I’m so sorry,” the man says. He places the cold barrel against the top of her skull.

“Don’t do this…” Katie looks up at him, shoving the gun away. “Please… Don’t…”

He now places the barrel on her forehead, bites his lip, looks away.

“Please…” Her cries bounce around inside his head, a morbid symphony.

“I’m sorry,” the man repeats, knowing nothing but her wrapped around his legs and the gun placed against her clammy skin. “I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, but… But you won’t feel a thing this way.”

The gunshot screams.

And Katie continues screaming.

Sarah throws herself against the man, hurling him into the wall. His shoulder throbs with the impact, and he spins around. She is upon him, her M16 lying on the floor, and she begins delivering punches into his face, attacking him physically as well as verbally with a slur of insults as giant tears gush down her face. He grabs her by the arms, turns her around, pushes her into the wall. He steps back, shouts, “I didn’t shoot her! I didn’t shoot her!”

He points at Katie, who is on the ground, screaming, grasping her head in her hands.
Her unscathed head
.

Sarah stares at her.

She heard the gunshot,

she saw the gun against Katie’s head,

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Mark didn’t have a gun, and she didn’t fire a single shot.

Sarah looks over at the man, who is now beside the window. He draws back the blinds and steps back. In the middle of the PLEXIGLAS window is lodged an arrow bolt, and the bolt has passed through the back of the strange dark-walker’s skull, exploding out the other side and lodging into the glass. Now the dark-walker’s eyes are lifeless, but yet his grin remains. Bright light washes over the man’s eyes, and he shields them with a hand. He gets closer to the window and looks out. He can see a large vehicle parked in the street, and there are spotlights washing over the train, and he can make out shadowy figures, men with guns, firing at dark-walkers running back and forth along the bridge. The man ducks down from the window.

He says, “Things either got a lot better, or they just got a lot worse.”

IV

There is the sound of gunfire within the train. The dark-walkers at the door abandon their clawing frenzy, and the sounds of their feet rushing back towards the dining cars causes the man to move forward. The man grabs the bunk-bed and pulls it away from the door. Sarah wipes tears away from her eyes, kneels down next to Katie. Mark has curled into a fetal position on the floor, knows nothing except coldness and sweating. The man slides the splintered door to the side, and holding the BERETTA tightly, maneuvers into the abandoned corridor. Mud stains the carpet from the darkwalkers’ bare feet. He looks towards the dining cars, through the accordion, sees nothing but shadows. He hears movement behind him, swings around, raises the pistol. There is a figure standing in the accordion to the next car, and he raises a handheld crossbow in one hand, and with the other waves back at the man in desperation: “Don’t shoot! Don’t soot!”

The man doesn’t lower the pistol. “Who are you?” he demands.

The reply: “Your only hope.”

The man licks his lips, feels sweat on his brow. “That’s not enough.”

“Then let me leave in peace,” the newcomer says. “Once they regroup and form a new strategy, they’ll return. You may be content staying here, but I’m not. So just let me turn and walk away.”

The man says nothing.

The newcomer asks, “What will it be, then?”

Sarah and Katie take Mark in their arms, and they follow the man. The man follows the newcomer through the back of the train, an open door busted open with some sort of weak dynamite. The hinges of the door lie amidst the train tracks, still smoldering, the smoke rising wistfully into the night air. The four of them follow he newcomer around the side of the bridge. There are more armed men carrying automatic weapons. They descend down the steep embankment, and the man slips in the mud. He picks himself up, tosses a casual glance to Sarah, and they nervously reach the highway that passes underneath the Amtrak bridge. The large vehicle is a renovated school bus. Along the side it reads, visible in the backwash of the gigantic spotlights hooked onto the edges of the hood, PARK HILL SCHOOL DISTRICT. The yellow paint is mottled. Atop the bus, the roof is ringed with a makeshift railing, and men with sniper rifles and night-vision scopes laugh amongst themselves, firing into the corn. The dark-walkers are gathering a quarter mile away, ducking low to avoid being shot. More men are guarding the entrance to the bus. They nod and smile at the four strangers as the man with the hand-bow leads them up the steps. The man remembers his youth, climbing into the Anthony Barnhart

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school-bus, anxious about his first days at the Junior High. The man sees that the bus windows are reframed with solid plate glass, and the insides
and
outsides of the windows are barred. The seats have been removed, with boxes of food and supplies crowding the back, and weapon-racks near the front. A ladder leads up to the roof, an open hole being the exit and entrance. A barred steel frame separates the cab from the back of the bus. The man with the hand-bow leads them towards the back, and he helps them position Mark against several boxes. There are a handful of men off to the corner, smoking cigars and playing “Rummy” by flashlight. A whistle sounds, and the guards outside and up near the train assemble into the bus. The doors close. The man leans against a box. The engine revs, and the bus begins to move. The boxes jostle. The men on the roof continue making pot-shots into the corn. The bus does a U-turn and proceeds west, the floodlights splashing over the empty road. The man turns, peers over the boxes, can see out the top of the back window. The bridge disappears into the shadows, but he can barely make out dark-walkers returning to the bridge, grabbing at their fallen companions, dragging them into the corn.

One of the men playing “Rummy” stands and approaches them. He pulls the stubby cigar from his mouth, exhales a puff of smoke. “Give us your weapons,” he growls. The man grips the pistol in his hand, suddenly wary.

The man with the hand-bow steps forward. “It’s all right.”

The man shakes his head. “We’ll hold onto them.”

Hand-Bow Man says, “It’s just for the ride. We’ll give them back.”

Sarah quietly shakes her head,
No
.

“We’re not bandits,” Hand-Bow Man says. “No more than you are. If we were bandits, we would have left you to rot. Besides, you weren’t forced to come here. You were invited. And when you’re invited into someone else’s house, you take your shoes off at the door. You know?”

“But when you take off your shoes,” the man retorts, “your host doesn’t pick them up and beat you with them.”

“We’re not going to harm you,” he says. “I give you my word.”

The man with the cigar continues smoking, uninterested.

Hand-Bow Man says, “Give us your weapons, or you can step off the bus.”

Sarah stands, hands him her M16. “We left the rifle and the other M16 on the train.”

“Thank you,” Hand-Bow Man says. To the man: “And your pistol.”

The man curses, hands it over.

The man with the cigar says, “Your knife, too.”

The man curses again, draws the knife from the sheath on his belt, hands it over. Hand-Bow Man looks it over. “You were in the Marines?”

“No. But I know how to use it like one.”

“All right.”

“I want it back. When we get to where we’re going, I want it back.”

“All right. I’ll see what we can do.” He looks over at the boy lying beside the boxes, shivering.

“And we’ll get some blankets for your friend. Mind giving me a hand?”

There are several crates at the front. Hand-Bow Man sets his own weapons and the weapons from the others in one of the weapon racks, and he begins sifting through the crates. He pulls out several blankets, hands them to the man. They return to the back of the bus. Sarah and Katie take the blankets, wrap Mark tightly.

More gunshots can be heard overhead. The bus rocks for a moment.

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Hand-Bow Man grins. “It sounds like we’re going through Bates City right now. There’s always a lot of them out this way. Some time ago, some travelers holed up in this town. They were overrun. Most of the buildings are old, hard to fortify. You were safer in the train, anyways.” He sits down, leans against one of the boxes. He extends a hand. “Nathan Gambill.”

The man sits down next to him, shakes his hand. Gives him his name.

“Where you people coming from?”

“Cincinnati.”

“How long ago did you leave?”

“I don’t know. A while ago. It feels like that, anyways.”

“Cincinnati’s only… less than a one-day trip from here.”

“We ran into some problems along the way.”

“That’s the usual story.”

The man looks out the window, sees the looming moon. He turns his attention back to Nathan.

“You’re not a raider, are you, Nathan?” His words are more of a statement than a question.

“No. We’re not rogues, if that’s what you mean.”

“You’re just travelers.”

“No. We’re from New Harmony, actually.” He boasted with the identity.

“New Harmony?”

“Never heard of it? Trust me: your days of running are over. You’ll
love it
there.”

V

The school bus merges off the highway onto Route 4. The road gracefully curves south, the town of Grain Valley with its gas stations and supermarkets and business complexes and subdivisions sprawled out on either side of the road. The man looks out the window to the left and sees a small airport, The East Kansas City. There is a Learjet sitting outside one of the hangars against the road. His heart aches for flight, a small passion that had been extinguished in the clamor for survival. He turns his eyes away from the airstrip. The subdivisions to the right disappear, replaced with overgrown meadows and gatherings of trees bursting in their spring décor. The bus slows down and turns onto another street, Brizendine Road. Several dark-walkers in the street stand illuminated in the wash of the floodlights, and they quickly scatter to the sides of the road, throwing themselves into the ditches to the left or into the trees on the right. There is a golf course to the side of the road, and a hotel: ELK’S LODGE. Up the road, Brizendine intersects with Mize Road, and the bus turns left. The man can see flagpoles at the golf course, the tattered flags waving in the wind. An overturned golf cart. They pass through Adams Dairy Parkway, going straight. Business complexes on the right and a large subdivision on the left. The bus slows down, turns around. Hand-Bow Man says, “I was wondering where he was going. It’s easy to get lost. The signs on the roads are faded.” The bus returns to Adams Dairy Parkway and turns right, heading south. The road goes on for several miles, passing the opposite end of the golf course; “We had to go up and around, because there’s a big twoprop plane crashed on the road. Probably was taking off from the airport when the disease came, and the pilot died. The plane went down with him.” The road enters into the country, and they pass more cornfields and several silos rising serenely in the darkness. The paved road soon becomes a dirt road, and the bus lurches and groans, spitting up dust and gravel. The floodlights dance over a structure straight ahead: a mansion enshrined with a humongous stone wall.