Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (115 page)

She is so lost in the ecstasy of the moment that she does not realize he is holding a weapon, the bayonet-fixed GARAND. He had grabbed it from its leaning position against the wall beside the chair. Her eyes freeze in their sockets, the pupils going into spasms, as the bayonet is thrust through her throat, the tip bursting out from the back of her neck in a radiating spray of blood. With a grunt, Mark shoves her off of himself, but he refuses to let go of the gun. She stumbles backwards, groping at the rifle’s barrel. Mark is pulled forward, the bayonet caught between the strong tendons in the throat. She looks at him with fear in her eyes as he wrenches his finger down on the trigger. The gunblast shrieks through the house, the framed pictures on the walls chiming. The blast of the bullet racing through her throat and shattering her vertebrae sends her head flying into the air. Her body thumps onto the ground, her legs shivering, blood coursing over the hardwood flooring, pouring as if from a spicket from the bloody stump where her neck had been. The head rolls and comes to a stop against the foot of a bookshelf, the teeth chattering and eyes swimming in their sockets like tadpoles in a PETRI dish.

Mark is standing alone, staring at the decapitated body on the floor when the man rushes into the room, Sarah on his heels. The boy looks over at him, swallows hard, says, “She got in… Through the window…” He points to the open window. The man leaps over the corpse and runs to the window. The boards have been knocked out of place, and the pane has been lifted. He sticks his head out and stares down at the ground. The overgrown grass is void of any type of life. He looks over at the trees, and in the pale moonlight, broken by towering clouds floating lazily above, he can see the illuminated eyes of dozens of upon dozens of dark-walkers standing in the small grove of trees that wrap around the barn. “Shit.” He looks to his left and sees several dark-walkers crouched down upon the porch overhang. Somehow they had crawled on top, and one of them must have managed to wisely maneuver to the window and open it. They blink at him, faces nothing but blank stares. The man pulls his head back into the room and slides the window frame back down. He throws the latch, locking it tightly. He turns around. Mark is still staring at the body, and Sarah is staring at the man. The man says, “This isn’t good.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

537

“They’re on the roof,” the man says. “And they’re in the woods.”

“How many?” Sarah asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe twenty. Even thirty.”

“I thought you said they were all in the city.”

“I was wrong.”

“Apparently.”

Mark looks over at Sarah, points to the body. “I thought it was you.”

“What?”

“When she came into the room, I thought she was you.”

Sarah shakes her head. “She looks nothing like me.”

The man says, “Yeah, you still have your head attached. But if we don’t think of something quickly, there’s no guarantee it’ll stay that way.” He looks back towards the window. “They were smart enough to open the window and knock out the boards without waking you up, Mark. And somehow they got onto the roof. They could be surrounding other parts of the house for all we know.”

He finishes speaking, and then they hear the sound of breaking wood downstairs, followed by the overturning of the kitchen table, the shattering of the coffee maker on the tiled floor. Sarah’s face goes white as snow. “They’re in the house.”

The man grabs the GARAND from Mark’s hands, wrenches the bayonet off from its mount. He slides the bayonet into his belt and checks the magazine on the rifle.

Sarah says, “What about us?”

“What about you?”

“You have all the weapons.”

The man nods, draws out the knife, tosses it to her.

She grimaces, wiping the blood from the blade on the chair’s arm. They can hear the kitchen cupboards being rifled-through downstairs, cans and silverware thrown around.

The man says, “They’re going to be pouring into the house any minute.” He looks over at Mark.

“Remember that cellar you found?” Mark nods. The man continues, “We’ll aim for that. Shut the door. Cellars usually have locks on the inside, especially in old houses like this. We should be able to lock it and barricade ourselves in for the night.” He looks over at Sarah. “How’s that sound?”

“We’re wasting time,” she says.

They move quickly. The man leads the way. They exit the room and run down the hallway, and the man takes the steps two-at-a-time. A dark-walker meets them halfway up the stairwell, and the man blasts it in the face with the rifle. The dark-walker’s face is carved with a precise hole, and the bullet bursts out of the back of its skull, lodging in the wooden wall. Its body slumps to the ground and rolls down several steps, its legs getting caught in the banister. They leap over the body. The kitchen is directly below. Several dark-walkers stand there amidst the overturned table and the cupboard’s contents littered on the floor. The GARAND pops off several shots, and they drop where they stand. The man reaches the kitchen floor with such speed that he cannot control himself; he stumbles forward, trips over the body of one of the fallen dark-walkers, and he pitches forward, the gun sliding from his fingers. He sees the corner of the kitchen counter rushing up at him, and then he knows nothing.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

538

IV

He hears birds chirping outside. He opens his eyes, and he immediately shuts them: the light is blinding, reaching back behind his eyes and scalding his brain. He lifts his heavy hand and touches his face. His nose is sore to the touch. He draws his fingers upwards, the fingertips tiptoeing across the bridge of his nose, and—He winces, extraordinary throbbing rippling through his forehead. He sucks in a deep gasp of air, settles down, touches the stitches with great tenderness. He groans and rolls onto his side, away from the window, and he opens his eyes. Sarah is sitting on the edge of the bed, and she is watching him. A smile creases over her lips, and she reaches out, takes the man’s hand in hers, squeezes.

She says, “I was afraid you weren’t going to wake up.”

The man’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. “Your shirt…”

She looks down, dried blood clinging to her clothes.

“It’s mine,” the man says.

She looks back to him, nods. “The important thing is, you’re alive.”

The man closes his eyes, moans, pounding cymbals resonating behind his temples. Sarah begins to stand, says, “I’ll get you some water…”

“Wait,” the man says.

She sits back down. “Okay.”

He opens his eyes again, looks at her. “What happened?”

She looks towards the door, takes a deep breath, and she tells him.

∑Ω∑

The man had tripped, hit his head on the counter, and fallen backwards onto the floor, sprawled like a manikin amongst the freshly-dead dark-walkers. They could hear others swarming into the house, the sound of splintering wood and shattering glass, creatures barging unwelcome and yet unhindered into their falsely-sound fortress. Mark had rushed forward and grabbed the man; and Sarah, though weak, had knelt down and taken up the GARAND. Only a few more rounds were in the gun, and she didn’t have another magazine. She swung around to face the hallway as two darkwalkers burst into the kitchen, their long hair falling about their shoulders like wild manes. She raised the GARAND and fired two shots into the first creature, sending it backwards into the wall. The other rushed her, and she squeezed the trigger: the bullet grazed its neck, tearing out a chunk of flesh and giving birth to a geyser of blood that sprayed against the pasty-white ceiling. The dark-walker continued coming after her despite its wound, and the weapon was out of ammunition. She swung the gun around and bashed it in the face with the butt, splitting its nose, and it staggered backwards. She dropped the gun and drew the bayonet from her belt. The dark-walker’s eyes swam in a daze, but it reoriented itself and faced her. She stood ready, glancing between it and Mark, who was hefting the man into his arms. The dark-walker looked over at Mark and the man, and Sarah leapt forward, slashing the knife through the air. It tore across the dark-walker’s throat, and the creature staggered backwards into the overturned kitchen table; it stumbled and fell, and one of the kitchen legs pierced through its back and protruded from its chest. The dark-walker groped at its throat, eyes wide in terror as blood spilt down its bare and hairy chest, a crimson waterfall that trailed along its sides and splattered in great goblet upon the underside of the table.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

539

Mark then had the man, and he was moving towards the cellar door. Sarah turned, rushed and opened it; she stepped back as he descended the stairs. More dark-walkers came into the kitchen, looking at the bodies thrown about, the blood filling the tiled floor. They looked over to Sarah, but she was already inside the cellar door, pulling it shut. She threw the inner bolt as they hurled themselves against the door, and she stood on the wooden steps, hearing their growling and snarling. And then there was silence, followed by the muffled sound of moaning, ripping flesh, snapping bones and stretching tendons.
They’re eating the fallen
, she thought, and she turned and took the steps down into the subterranean cavern.

She had found Mark standing over the man next to one of the many shelves lined with aging wine. She pushed him out of the way and knelt down on the grime-stained concrete floor. The darkwalkers above them, in the kitchen and living area, trampled a great deal, in their frenzy for food, and waves of dust fell from the rafters above. Mark looked up, blinked his eyes free of dust, feared that the ceiling would cave in. Sarah ignored the commotion above, tended to the man. Even in the blackness her eyes adjusted, for there were small windows, barely a few centimeters long, around the rim of the walls, facing outside; and milky moonlight traced its way in with leisurely pace. “There’s so much blood…” she said under her breath. The man’s eyes had rolled into the back of his head, and his breathing was shallow and contorted. Blood spilt from the gash in his forehead, covering his face. She used her sleeve to wash some of the blood away, but despite soaking her sleeve, the blood continued to pour from the wound. She feared he had burst open some of the branching vessels of the carotid artery. She didn’t voice this fear to Mark, who stood over the man, fidgeting, his face pale as the moon itself. She looked up at him, said, “Mark. Your shirt.” He understood, quickly undressed. He stood half-naked and tossed his shirt to Sarah. He began shivering in the damp coldness. She wrapped the shirt around the man’s face, careful not to obscure his nostrils, and pressed down tightly on the wound. A makeshift tourniquet. Blood soaked through the cloth, pooling between her clenched fingers. Mark asked if he was going to make it.
I don’t think so
, she thought, saying, “I don’t know. He should.” Mark asked if she was being honest. She didn’t answer.

Twenty minutes passed. The blood began to let up, and the shirt stuck to the man’s forehead. Sarah kept checking his pulse along the carotid in his neck. Slow but steady. She propped him against one of the stone walls, to keep as little blood as possible flowing into his head. He moaned some in the darkness, uttering words she couldn’t comprehend. She noticed a name:
Kira
. And then another name, one less familiar:
Jessie
. She hadn’t heard that name before. She repositioned him, and she leaned against the wall, and she held him up against her, wrapping her arms around him, holding him tightly, keeping him warm. As Mark paced back and forth in the darkness, she kept whispering to the man: “You’re going to make it. Don’t give up. This isn’t your time. Keep it together. Don’t bail out on us. Stay strong.” The dark-walkers would become silent for a while, and then the commotion would begin again, a new frenzied search for food. Banging at the door above them. God-awful wails, pitiful cries spawned from the pit of hunger within their acidic stomachs.

Several hours into the night, the dark-walkers nearly got into the cellar. They had cleverly found another entrance, accessed from outside. A cellar door that had been covered with old mulch and dried leaves. They had ferociously dug away at the dirt, their fingernails bleeding, whining like dogs closing in on elusive prey. Mark had heard them and moved forward, feeling a draft of cold air. He had seen an old wood-burning stove propped against what looked like a grate, and pushing the rusted stove out of the way, he knelt down beside the grate and peered inside. He didn’t have time to Anthony Barnhart

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react as two hands shot through the grate and grabbed him by both arms, yanking him against the rusted bars. He let out a shout and ripped away, fell backwards. In the dim moonlight coming through the small windows—which were now covered with the eyes of dark-walkers peering inside, enraged that they were too large to fit through—Mark could see a figure of a naked, hunched woman, snarling at the gate, gripping the bars with white-knuckled fingers and bloodied, overgrown fingernails. Mark composed himself, heart racing, and he pushed the stove back against the grate. He walked over to Sarah and the man, on the other side of the room and separated by the shelves of wine, and she asked what had happened. “They found another way in, but it’s blocked,” Mark told her. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

Dawn was approaching. The dark-walkers were becoming even more agitated, knowing that they would lose their prey if they didn’t find a way in quickly. They covered the windows, tried to bust through the heavy door leading to the kitchen, and they flocked up against the grate, throwing themselves against it. The iron, though rusted, was too strong. The man’s pulse was growing weaker, and his murmurings had stopped. Sarah asked Mark to bring her some wine. He grabbed the closest bottle and gave it to her. She popped the cork with the edge of the bayonet, and she poured the wine down onto the cloth pressed against the man’s forehead. His body shuddered in pain, and she knew he was conscious. She whispered: “You can hear me. Stay with it, all right? Stay the course. The sun is almost up. Everything’s going to be okay.”