Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (105 page)

Katie’s eyes are wide at his words, and she begins to tremble in excitement, the excitement of holding another girl close,

of feeling that companionship and love.

“The first of us came from the suburbs of Houston, Texas,” Keith says. “We were wanderers at first. There were about seventeen of us, give or take. I can’t remember the exact number. Before the infection, I did heating and air, even some construction work here and there. When we got to Kansas City, we found that, for some reason, there weren’t many infected. We think they may have migrated south for some reason, or that there had been some sort of non-related disease that wiped out a lot of them. We came up with this crazy idea, and we got to work. Within a month, we had cleared out all the downtown buildings. We lost a good woman, Annie, during that time. She let her guard down, something she knew better than to do. We burned the outlying buildings facing downtown, and we built the first barricade. We’ve constructed more since then. We started broadcasting over the radio that we had a place available, and people began flocking from every direction. We have around three thousand members at the current moment-in-time, from all over the region. The refugees have been trickling, and you’re the first that have arrived since the beginning of the month. I suspect you heard of us from the radio broadcasts?”

“No,” the man replies. “We’re on our way to Aspen.”

“Aspen? Colorado?”

“Yes.”

Keith laughs. “Can I give you a bit of advice?”

The man doesn’t say anything.

The Boss leans forward in his chair. “
Forget
Aspen
.”

The Boss leads them out of the room and to the elevator. “Yes, we have working elevators. We’ve been able to reestablish electricity through a series of battery-operated generators. Ninety-three of them, to be fact, monitored around-the-clock.” He presses the button on the wall, and the elevator doors open. They cram inside. “Please forgive the absence of elevator music,” Keith says as he Anthony Barnhart

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presses FR17 on the panel. The elevator descends, then opens up to a hallway. They exit. The corridor is abandoned. Keith leads them to one of the rooms and unlocks the door with a skeleton key. “Your key is sitting on the dresser in one of the bedrooms. Please get comfortable. We have hot running water and a full bar.” He turns to go, pauses, turns back around. “Before I forget, there is a party tonight down in the courtyard. I encourage you guys to check it out. And Sarah?” He looks up at her, having known her name from idle chat in the elevator. “How would you feel about having dinner with me tonight?”

Sampson’s words catch the man by surprise, and his blood runs cold. Sarah looks over at the man, and he doesn’t look over at her.

She turns back to The Boss. “Sure. I’d love that.”

Keith grins. “Excellent. Meet me at my place at 7:30.”

The man enters one of the rooms and shuts the door.

III

The man awakes, woken by a dream of Kira that fades as his eyes slowly open. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, remembers only lying down. He pulls himself out of the bed. In the Twin against the opposite wall, separated by a white bedside table, sleeps Mark. The man opens the bedroom door and exits into the living area, the kitchen to the left with a large window with the blinds pulled over the glass. The living area is empty. The door to the other bedroom is shut, and he imagines Katie and Sarah are sleeping. No one got much rest back at the mansion. The man goes into the kitchen and finds the mini-bar, opens it. Several beers, a few different bottles of whiskey and rum. He closes it, rubs his eyes. He fixes coffee instead.

The door to the other bedroom opens.

Sarah comes out, wearing a blue dress, LA FEMME.

The same design Kira wore on the last night they were together. The man pretends to ignore her as he pours coffee into a mug.

She comes up next to him, holds up two different necklaces. “Which one?”

He gives a casual glance, turns away. “I don’t know.”

“Choose one.”

“I said I don’t know.”

“I can never decide.”

The man stirs his coffee. It’s black. Nothing to stir.

“Wear both,” he says. “It’ll increase your chances of getting lucky.”

“It’s just a dinner,” Sarah interjects. “He’s just being nice.

“Why are you going?” He still refuses to look at her.

“He invited me.”

The man stops stirring, stares at the countertop. “Bullshit.”

“You were there when he invited me.”

The man eyes her. “Why’d you look at me when he asked?”

She doesn’t answer.

“You’re a woman,” the man says. “Saying ‘Yes’ usually means something else.”

She shakes her head. “You’re reading into things.”

“Why so defensive?” the man asks. “Did I strike a nerve? Perhaps play the wrong chord?”

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She chooses a necklace, moves away.

The man takes a sip of his coffee, sets it back down on the counter. “Sarah.” He turns and looks at her. She is standing beside the door leading into the hallway. She stops, looks over at him. The man confesses, “I don’t have a good feeling about this guy.”

“Thanks for the warning,” she muses.

“He plays a good game, and he may be charming, but…” The man tries to choose his words, fails. “There’s something in his eyes.”

She’s incredulous. “You’re basing this off his eyes?”

“Sarah…”

“Why does it bother you so much that I’m eating dinner with him?”

“Sarah…”

“Why so defensive?” she coos. “Did I strike a nerve? Perhaps the wrong chord?”

He is quiet.

She says, “I can make my own decisions, all right? I’m not Kira. You don’t have any say in what I do.” She says nothing more, turns, opens the door, and slips into the hallway. She shuts the door behind her.

The man sips his coffee, gazes out the window.

The sun is setting behind the blinds.

The man has wakened Katie and Mark, and together they dress and descend the stairwell towards the courtyard. They pass through the skyscraper’s lobby and walk out onto the marble steps leading to the street from the skyscraper’s lobby. People are everywhere and loud music is playing. The man is amazed at the number of souls walking the street in the night. There are several booths filled with assortments of vodka and liqueur and whiskey and assorted beers. There is rave music playing down the street, and Katie breaks from the others and begins walking in that direction, remembering the times when she and Elizabeth would go to raves and pop pills and just get lost in the reverie. The man feels uncomfortable. Several girls come up, from teenagers to thirty-year-olds, flirting with Mark. Mark just nods and looks away, and the girls leave, giggling. He can see Cara’s face in their eyes, and it pains him.

Mark and the man walk down the street, throngs of people crowding the sides, couples holding hands walking past. The music from the rave is getting louder, and the flashes from several whirling lights can be seen reflecting in the buildings’ dark windows. The man is reminded of a small carnival in Kira’s hometown that they would go to every year or so. ‘Christmas in Springboro.’ Caramel popcorn, Chinese food, grilled pork-chops; booths filled with carolers, church yards sporting nativity scenes, giant covered tents filled with hole-in-the-wall arts and crafts. The streets would always be packed, and you had to move out of the way to avoid getting run over by the horse-drawn carriages. The man’s thoughts turn to Sarah, and he wonders how her little dinner is going. Mark sees an odd look etched over the man’s face, and he asks, “So… You and Sarah?”

“What?” the man asks.

“You and Sarah,” Mark repeats.

“What about her?”

“You like her,” Mark says.

“No,” the man says. “No, I don’t.”

“Okay,” Mark says.

They walk in quiet.

The man eyes the boy. “Why do you ask? Do you think I like her?”

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“When I was in high school, one of my friends had this thing going with another one of my friends. He liked her, she liked him. But they never really admitted it. It became a sort of cruel game. He would go on dates to piss her off, she would date boys to piss him off. And the circle went round and round. It was pathetic, really: none of them would succumb to being the one asking the other out.”

“It’s not like that,” the man says.

“They argued a lot, too. Always trying to undermine the other.”

“It sounds like they were in love,” the man sarcastically coos.

“They were,” Mark says. “They were more in love than anyone I’ve ever met. It was a pure Shakespearian tragedy. Two lovers, unable to be united, because of their own stubbornness.” The boy shakes his head. “Love is something we’ll never understand. It’s unpredictable, it’s undeniable, it’s untamable.”

The man is quiet for some time. “Most of all,” he says, “it’s a lie.”

“A lie?”

“Love’s supposed to last forever. It never does.”

“Maybe our preconceptions of love are flawed.”

“If love doesn’t last forever, then it’s a brutal, cut-throat whore.”

Mark breaks away, heads towards a booth. The man follows him. The woman behind the booth pours Mark four shots of ABSOLUT vodka. Mark throws them down, leans over to the side, takes several sharp breaths. He asks for some water, and as the woman reaches underneath the booth’s counter, the man asks, “Drinking again?” Mark takes the water, takes several drinks, washes back the aftertaste. He says he might as well, there’s nothing else to do, and they’re not going anywhere. The man says, “We’re not staying here. We’re still going to Aspen.”

Mark coughs. “Aspen? You hated the idea.”

“But when I get an idea in my head, I don’t give up. We’re close.”

“We have everything we need here.”

“This is just one big circus.” The man shakes his head: “This isn’t what we need.”

Mark points: “Katie seems to be satisfied.”

The man follows his finger, sees Katie sitting on a bench in the shadows, a girl on either side. The two girls are leaning over her breasts, passionately kissing one another, tongues entwined, and Katie’s hands have slid under the hem of their pants, exploring their buttocks. The man returns his attention to Mark: “She’ll feel ashamed of it in the morning. And then she’ll break and want to come with us.”

“Will Sarah want to leave?” Mark asks. “She seems to have met quite a nice guy.”

The man flinches.

Mark laughs.

“Stop playing games with me,” the man growls.

“You should drink,” Mark says. “It’ll take your mind off things.”

“I’m tired,” the man says. “I’ll leave the door to the room unlocked.”

The man begins heading back up the street. He ducks into a side alley to smoke a quick cigarette. The boy uses alcohol to take his mind off things, and the man uses cigarettes; there is a certain escapism experienced as the smoke fills the lungs. He takes several hits and leans against the brick wall behind him. He hears muffled noises coming from the shadows towards the back of the alley, and he steps away from the wall. He can see movement, figures moving on top of one another. His eyes slowly Anthony Barnhart

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adjust, and he sees several men and women, naked, crawling over one another, exploring one another.
A giant fucking orgy
. The man is repulsed and he turns away, nearly knocking over an older man with wild eyes: “Want some cocaine?” the wild man asks, “It’s free of charge.” The man says
No
, tries to move away, but he is pinned: “Come on, Dude, try it, it’s magical…” The man spits, “I said
No
,” and he grabs the wild man by the shoulder and thrusts him against the brick wall. He leaves the alley, and his cigarette lies on the ground, slowly smoldering.

IV

It is a candlelit dinner. Before she had even knocked on the door, Keith had opened it, beckoning her into his suite. He was there with another man, a jock-looking type with well-oiled black hair and clothes that fit too tightly. Keith, wearing an Armani suit with a rose poking out from the left breast pocket, told her: “That’s my assistant, the ‘Vice President’, if you give him a title. He handles the dayto-day affairs of New Harmony, leaving me to deal with the ‘Bigger Picture’ stuff.” Keith had then commented on her dress, and he had taken her by the arm and led her to the dining room table in an adjacent room. A butler had appeared, delivering two wineglasses and pouring them each bubbling champagne. He had asked her a series of questions, listening intently to her answers: questions about her former life, her fleeing and hiding with the plague, sympathizing with her every stumble and pitfall and broken heart. When the butler arrived with the food—an assortment of mashed potatoes, corn, rolls, and turkey (“We breed chickens and turkeys,” Keith had told her, “and we hope to one day raise cattle; just the very
idea
of sinking my teeth into a rib-eye makes me salivate!”)—the conversation quickly turned upon Keith, and he spoke highly of himself, highlighting his achievements, his successes, the way the plague had opened the door to a brilliant new life: “Before this, I worked sixty hours a week doing heating and cooling. I had no time for friends or family, and I exhausted nearly all my money just paying rent on a house I never should have bought. It was a miserable life. The plague was deliverance for me. It enabled me to become who I was meant to be: a charismatic leader that puts a viable hope into people’s hearts.” Now Sarah sits back in the chair, sweating underneath her dress, rubbing her fingers against the half-consumed glass of champagne. She feels nauseas, and she regrets agreeing to join him for dinner. Something within her
aches
, and she can easily identify it: sitting here, with this self-absorbed egomaniac, she can’t help but see Patrick in her mind’s eye, tears inching down his cheeks, his own heart rupturing at the betrayal.

“You’re beautiful.”

Sarah doesn’t hear him for a moment, and then she realizes what he has said. An electric shock runs through her, and her fingers twitch upon the glass, nearly knocking it over. She looks up at him, mouth suddenly dry. “Excuse me?”