Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (11 page)

She stared at him. “Why what?”

“Why… this?”

She fidgeted, unsure of her answer. “I’m seeing someone else?”

“You’re fucking with me,” he stated matter-of-factly, refusing to believe.

“No…”

“Who is it?”

Her lips shuddered with an oncoming slew of tears. “Mark…”

His shout silenced the diner: “Fuck!”

∑Ω∑

He awakes. He is still at the bedside. He pulls himself up and looks into Kira’s eyes. “I’m so sorry…

I’m so sorry…” It’s all he can say. He can’t deny the fact that he is done this. Those visions were not visions, but memories. Repressed memories surging to the surface. He takes her hand in his once more. “How could I do this… How could I do this… to
you
?” She gives him no answers. He can only hear her pleas. Her pleas as she begged him to stop. He will bury her again.
I buried her, and she wasn’t
even dead. And when she came back to me, my dreams thrust into my face, alive more than ever, I took her life. I
have become insane, an animal, who shoots and kills as I am locked in this prison of my own making
.

He downs the Captain Morgan Rum. It is late afternoon. He remembers the days before he met Kira. Those dark and tumultuous days, those days he imagined would never end, those days when he believed all his hopes and dreams had floundered. His girlfriend had broken up with him, and he’d Anthony Barnhart

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been heartbroken. She had left him for his best friend Kyle. And he had been on the verge of taking his life. He had no idea that she—
Kira
—was just around the corner. The memories…

∑Ω∑

He stood upon the balcony, cigarette smoldering between his fingers, eyes lost and wandering as he gazed upon the walkways, the city’s lights reflecting on the dark Ohio River. He closed his eyes, felt the sharp and cold and biting wind, rustling up from the river and stabbing into him like a thousand frozen needles. The joints in his fingers cried out in the cold, and he flicked the cigarette off the balcony, watching the cherry dwindle in the darkness as it came to rest on the marble stone pathway below.

“What’re you doing here?”

He turned to see her standing beside him. Surprise danced over his face. “She told you, didn’t she?”

“Yeah,” she said. “She’s still here, too.”

“Oh.”

“She
does
care about you.”

He was silent. All he could do was stare at her, and even that took effort.

“Please,” the girl said. “What are you doing here? You told her that you wanted her to just drop you off her so you could ‘have some time alone and think.’ You know that’s not a good idea.”

He turned away and looked out again, watching the people on the streets below. The laughter and shouts of evening play consumed him.

She placed a hand on his shoulder. “Please.”

He didn’t flinch. “I want to be like them so badly.” He pointed to the joy written on the faces of the people gathering below. “I envy them so much. I just want to be happy. I don’t want to wake up sad and go to bed sad anymore. My smiles are fake. My laughter? A lie. But I want them to be real.”

He turned and faced her, tears in his eyes. “I don’t want this anymore.”

“You don’t want what anymore?”

“This… disease. This life I live. The person I am. I don’t want any of it anymore.”

“You’ve got to hang in there. It’ll get better in time.”

“But I’m losing faith that it will change. I’m losing hope that life will start looking up for me. You know why the breakup hurt me so much? For years and years I’ve prayed for a girl like her, refusing to lose hope. Finally she came, and she was more amazing than I could ever remember any other girl being. And the very moment I thanked God for answering my prayer, He took her from me.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You can’t—”

He interrupted her: “In that moment, something… snapped… within me. Hope died. When she broke up with me, hope divorced itself from me. Hope was dashed upon the rocks, smashed into pieces and washed out to sea. And I find myself lying broken and bleeding on the rocks, unable to escape, slowly being pecked apart by pelicans. I can’t believe that change will come. I have no reason to think it will come.” His eyes bore into hers. “You want to know why I came here today, why my eyes are fixated upon that bridge spanning the river?”

She swallowed, unnerved. “Yes. Of course I do. I care about you.”

“I’m losing hope. The more I squeeze onto hope, the more it hurts. Hope is like barbed-wire: the tighter I hold on, the more it hurts. So I’m beginning to let go. The pain is becoming unbearable, so I Anthony Barnhart

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begin letting go. And so I’m embracing a life of resignation, becoming a stoic in the face of my existence. ‘This is who I am. This is my life. It will not change.’ And I’m beginning to accept that.”

Her face reflected grave concern. “You can’t do that, though. I know it’s hard right now. I don’t understand, but I see it on your face when you’re hurting.” As she spoke, he lit another cigarette.

“Listen to me, okay? I never thought I’d grow so close to someone in only a few weeks. I care about you so much, and it hurts me to see you like this. I know your chemicals are messed up, that you have a disease in your brain that makes you depressed a lot, and I know that everything that’s going on—the fact that she broke up with you and started dating one of your best friends—, I know it’s killing you. But you’re allowing it to blind you. Life will get better. It sucks right now, but this won’t last forever. I promise.”

He took a drag off the fresh cigarette. “But I can’t—”

Now she interrupted him: “You’re not letting yourself believe it. You’re an amazing, compassionate, genuine guy. You make people laugh no matter what they’re going through. You bring joy into other peoples’ lives. You care about people more than you care for yourself, and even in your pain you wouldn’t wish harm upon those who have hurt you. You’re a great guy with a great future, and it hurts me to see you—”

He cut her off after taking another hit. “I asked her to bring me here…” He spoke slowly…

“because I was going to take a walk on the bridge.”

She took a deep breath, began to say something.

He wouldn’t let her: “I’ve embraced resignation. This is my life. It won’t change. So I need to accept that. And you know what? If this is the definition of my life, well… I don’t want it anymore. Why should I continue? What do I have to look forward to? I’ll tell you what I have to look forward to: nothing.”

∑Ω∑

He has set the rum aside. Now he holds the gun in his hands. He presses the cold steel of the barrel into his mouth. His heart races.
Soon my heart shall be silenced
. Kira came into his life, the beauty that he had been waiting for, and in a moment of morbid insanity he had stabbed her to death. How does one live with such a thing? He wraps his finger around the trigger, begins to squeeze—

No.

Why can’t he do it? Why must he be a failure at everything?

He pulls the handgun out of his mouth, stares at it.

It will all be over. All I have to do is squeeze the trigger
. He sets the gun down on the sofa.

You coward. You fucking coward.

The sun is beginning to set. He sits on the rooftop. The rain has stopped falling, and the skies are clearing. He has no desire to sleep or be inside the house. So he sits on the roof, surrounded by bottles of alcohol. He is finishing the Captain Morgan’s Rum. He doesn’t mix it with anything, just drinks it straight. He hates the taste, but he can begin to feel the euphoria building. The drunken stupor…

That is what he searches for. An escape from the world in which he has found himself. The moon appears overhead. The sun sets to the west, behind him, and the city begins to enshroud itself in darkness.

A lone dog howls in the distance, and more join with him.

The fires burn low at U.C.

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Everything—
everyone
— is dead.

IV

The dogs howl. Their wails surround him, floating over the dead city, crawling up the hillsides, reaching into the stars. The sun throbs on its dying legs, and the howls grow in intensity. The man’s head hurts at the sounds, and then he hears a dog bark somewhere down the street. A furious, wild, maniacal barking. And the howls continue. There is something in the howls of those animals, something that strikes him as odd. He has never heard a dog howl like those around the city. And how many dogs is he hearing? The cries seem to rise up like a majestic concerto, so magnificent in their intensity that the symphonies of the Sydney opera-house dwindles in comparison. He wonders if it has something to do with all the people being gone.
And the dogs rise and become the new dominant
creatures on planet earth
. A twisted smile. Like some subtitle for a B-rated movie. But those howls…

Something just isn’t right.

And then the dog’s barks dwindle, replaced with a whining shriek.

And then silence.

It is at that moment that the man understands.

He isn’t hearing dogs at all.

He is hearing something else.

But what? He doesn’t know.

He walks across the flat roof and looks down into the street. All of State Avenue is wrapped in shadows. The sun has set beyond the hills, and the stars sparkle in the moonlit sky. He can see figures down the street, walking. Walking on two legs. Coming towards him. He tries to count them. Six?

Seven? No, even more. A dozen?
Two dozen
? People. Humans.
Real, live humans
. He realizes he isn’t alone!

The howling stops.

The world is silent.

All he can hear is the wind rustling through the trees.

The figures down the street have stopped moving. They stand rigid. Frozen. The breeze picks up, and the clothes they’re wearing tug back and forth, but still they don’t move. The man sets the alcohol aside, moves to the edge of the roof. “Hello?”

No movement.

He raises his voice: “Hello!”

The figures start. Their heads snap around. They stare right at him. A nervous, anxious chill spreads through him, crawling up his spine.
Something isn’t right…
But the warning of his subconscious is lost at the exhilaration of finding more survivors. He rushes over to the side of the house and swings his legs over. He grabs the lip of the roof and hangs for a moment, then releases. Six feet he falls, and then he is hunched over in the grass. It is still moist from the day’s earlier rains. He gets to his feet and moves around the side of the house, past the Escort in the driveway, and into the street. He faces the figures standing some 300

meters away, next to a wrecked pickup truck.

“Hello!” he shouts again.

They just stare at him.

They’re just frightened. Hell, I’d be frightened, too, if I were them
. Anthony Barnhart

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So he begins moving closer.

His feet carry him forward. The darkness peels away. The figures come into sharper focus. There are some men and women. A young child. Their chests move in and out with each breath, almost in rhythm. Their arms hang limp at their sides. They cock their heads and stare at him as if they are birds. He waves his arms, trying to get them to snap out of the trance.
Their trance
. He thinks,
It’s
almost as if they’ve never seen another person before
. He is about 50 meters away when he notices the young boy: blood is covering his arm. Dried blood. He doesn’t think much about it, especially when the boy steps forward, and approaches him.

The man stops.
Let him come to you. Don’t frighten him
.

He guesses the boy is around five or six years old. A scrawny tyke with vanilla-white hair. The boy comes towards him slowly. Cautiously? As he comes nearer, the man notices the face: it, like the arm, is covered in dried blood. The blood has seeped from the eyes, nose, and ears. He remembers when the plague began in the plane. Everyone going crazy. The blood streaming down their faces. He quickly looks at the boy’s arm. There is a deep gash, and within the gash he can see a glinted blade protruding from the flesh. A knife of some sort.
Shit
.

He asks, tentatively, “Are you all right?”

The boy stops at the sound of the man’s voice.

“Are you okay?” he asks again, unsure of what to do.

The boy just stares at him, head cocked to the side.

The others, 40 meters behind the boy, just watch. On-edge.

The man steps forward as he says, “Let me help—”

He goes quiet. The boy recoils, stepping back.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I won’t hurt you.”

The boy doesn’t respond, shoulders hunched in agitation.

He bites his lip. “What’s your name?”

The boy shows no emotion. Only a cautious curiosity.

“You have a name, don’t you?”

The boy attacks, so quickly that the man doesn’t have time to think. One moment the boy is rigid, and the next moment he is atop of the man, swinging and shrieking. Frightened, the man raises his knee to brace against the oncoming charge. His knee drives into the young boy’s chest, and the man grabs the boy by the arm and swings him around. The boy tumbles to the ground and rolls.

“I’m so sorry…” the man says. “I’m so sorry…”

The boy stares at him as he lies on the ground.

Eyes full of hate and madness.

Drool trailing from his mouth.

Muscles twitching in anticipation.

The others let out a merciless shout and begin running.

The man stares at them. “Oh my God…”

His feet pound on the pavement. They are behind him, chasing and shrieking. Those god-awful shrieks pierce through him like a knife through wet tissue paper. His heart melts. His legs threaten to give way. The horror is unbelievable. He runs straight past his house, unthinking, and curses.
I can’t
get back there now
, he thinks to himself. The shrieks of his pursuers are taken up all around him. Cries come from the rising tree-studded slopes to his right, and then he can hear the crashing of Anthony Barnhart