Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (128 page)

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

597

The man looked back down at the blood forming around his feet. “I don’t know.”

“What are they doing?”

He shrugged. “They’re eating.”

“We should be quiet.”

“They know we’re here. They don’t care.”

“Why not?”

“Because they already have a meal,” the man said.

She was quiet for a moment. “Do you feel bad for the bandits?”

“No,” he said. “Do you?”

She shook her head. No remorse, no guilt, no shame:

“No.”

They sat along the back wall of the bathroom, wedged between the long sink with its dust-covered mirror to their left and the stalls with the rusted-hinged doors to their right. They sat quietly, listening to the dark-walkers outside, listening to the feast. The man tried to think of a plan of escape, but he couldn’t fathom anything. His thoughts were broken by Samantha’s words, and he didn’t know how much time had passed:

“You never answered my question,” she asked.

He turned to her. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and he could make out her golden hair.

“What?”

She spoke matter-of-factly: “What it is that hurts you.”

“There’s nothing to answer.”

“You said everyone hurts. That includes you.”

“I never said that.”

“I know,” she said.

“Then why did you say I said that?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me what hurts you.”

“Nothing hurts me.”

“Sister Clancy always told me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.”

“It’s too dark for you to see my eyes.”

“I saw them earlier. Your eyes are filled with hurt.”

The man had nothing to say.

The man wished he had a watch. It would have been something smart to have.

“I hurt someone,” he said.

“Who did you hurt?” Samantha asked.

“I hurt lots of people.”

“Everyone hurts people. We hurt people all the time.”

“I know.”

“I know you know that. But you feel bad about hurting someone.”

“I just said that.”

“Who did you hurt? Was it the woman you left at the house?”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

598

The man winced. She couldn’t see it. “No.”

“You didn’t hurt her?”

“She hurt herself.”

“Why did she do it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because she was ashamed.”

“Why would she be ashamed? What did she do?”

“She… She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“What did she
think
she did wrong?”

“She thought she cheated on her husband.”

“Did she?”

“No.”

“She kissed you.”

“Something like that.”

“And her husband, he died with the sickness.”

“Yes.”

“And she thinks that because she kissed you, then she cheated on him.”

“She
thought
that. Past tense. She’s gone now.”

“Did you take advantage of her?”

His neck muscles tightened, and he glared at her: “No.”

“Then why do you feel bad about it?”

He calmed down. “I could have prevented it.”

“You can’t always control what happens.”

“I know.”

“It’s not like you put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”

“I know.”

“It’s not like you killed her. You didn’t kill her, right?”

“She hurt herself. I didn’t touch her.”

“Then it’s not your fault.”

“I know.”

“And you couldn’t have prevented it.”

“I said I know.”

“But that’s not what hurts you.”

The man said nothing.

“You hurt someone else. And that’s what hurts you.”

“We should be quiet,” he said.

Samantha didn’t say anything else for a while.

Some time had passed.

The man spoke: “I cheated on the woman I loved.”

“Your friend back at the house?” Samantha asked.

“No,” he said. “Before the sickness… My fiancé.” A pause. “
Ex
fiancé.”

“She died with the plague?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you cheat on her?”

“I ask myself that every day.”

“You don’t know why?”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

599

“No. I don’t.”

“Did you ever tell your fiancé about it?”

“I told her the first time.”

“Oh.” She was quiet, then, “How many times did you cheat on her?”

“Twice. Only twice. And then… And then I never saw her again.”

“Do you think you would have cheated on her more than twice?”

“I want to say, ‘No,’” he said. “But I cheated on her twice. What does that tell you?”

“It tells me you cheated on her twice. Not three times.”

“If I had told her about the second time… I would have lost her.”

“Why did you cheat on her?” she asked again.

“Maybe I didn’t… Maybe I didn’t really love her.”

“Why didn’t you tell her?”

“Because I didn’t want to lose her.”

“Why didn’t you want to lose her?”

“Because I loved her.”

“Okay.”

After some time, Samantha said, “Nothing will change what happened.”

“I know,” the man said.

“You can’t dwell on what happened in the past,” Samantha said, putting her hand upon his knee. “You have to look ahead to the future.”

“Do you believe in Heaven?” the man asked.

“You know I do,” she said. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I always told one of my friends… His name was Mark… I always told him I didn’t believe in Heaven because this plague proved that God did not exist. If God existed, and if He was deserving of worship, and if He was the kind of God who would make a Heaven for people… Then He would not have let any of this happen. But I think…” Tears swelled up in his eyes. “I think that I don’t believe in Heaven… Because I’m afraid Kira is there… And I’m afraid that she knows what I did to her.” He looked at the girl, but he could barely see her in the darkness, and the tears grew stronger, and his chest began to throb as he wept. “And if she… If she knew what I had done… Then it would… It would be Hell to her. If she saw what I did with Sarah… while loving her… then it would be Hell for her. I already lost Kira once… And I don’t want to lose her again.”

He wept in the coldness of the basement.

The little girl wrapped her arm around him. She laid her head on his shoulder. And she cried with him.

IX

“Please…” she weeps. He is holding her with his free hand, and the other hand holds the rifle, the end of the barrel pressed against her clammy forehead. She reaches forward with her free hand and grabs the hem of his shirt. “Please… Please…” He cannot see her tears through the mask of his own, and he turns his head, he closes his eyes. He can hear them coming through. There is a netherAnthony Barnhart Dwellers of the Night

600

worldly shrieking, a shrieking whose source is in the bellies of Hades, and the man turns his head to avoid the splatter of blood, and seeing shapes dancing in the wan moonlight filtering down from the rafters, hearing the scuffling of feet and the shattering of wood, hearing the girl’s cries abruptly evolve into screams of terror… The man pulls the trigger.

∑Ω∑

“How long has it been?”

Her words brought him forth from sleep.

He blinked his eyes in the darkness of the bathroom. “I don’t know.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to wake you.”

“It’s okay,” the man said.

He got up and moved forward. His legs ached. He ran into one of the open doors leading into a stall. He shut the door quietly and made his way to the entrance of the bathroom. His feet splashed in the pool of blood on the green-tiled floor. He checked to make sure the door was still bolted shut, and then he pressed his ear against it. He could hear shallow breathing outside, moaning, the occasional snapping of a bone. The sounds of marrow being sucked out of femurs. He backed away from the door and returned to Samantha.

“Are they outside?” the little girl asked.

He sat down beside her, leaned against the wall. “Yeah.”

“What are we going to do?”

The man rubbed tired eyes. “I don’t know.”

“We shouldn’t have come in here. We would’ve been safer outside.”

“Maybe. We’ll never know.”

“How are your sisters?” the man asked after a while.

“They’re sleeping,” she said.

The man was quiet for a moment. “You’re different than they are.”

“How so?” she asked.

“You just seem… So much more… mature… than them.”

“I know,” she said. “They’re autistic.”

That caught the man by surprise. “Autistic?” he asked.

“Do you not know what it is?”

“No, I know what it is. They just… They don’t seem… like that.”

“You can say the word. It’s not a bad word.”

“I know.”

“Their autism is mild. They can still function. They’re just really quiet.”

“Okay.”

“It’s because of Mom. Her drug abuse. It affected them.”

“And it didn’t affect you?”

“No.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I think that God chose to keep me from that so that I could keep us all together.”

“I bet it’s nice to believe that.”

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“I’m the only reason we’re all still alive. What else do you want me to believe?”

“That the god who got you into the mess in this bathroom can get you out of it.”

Her face was stern: “God didn’t get us into this mess.
You
did.”

“You don’t have a watch, do you?” the man asked after a bit.

“No,” Samantha said.

“Do your sisters?”

“No.”

“Damn.”

“Don’t talk like that,” she scolded. “Why do you want a watch?”

“So I can know what time it is. If we get out of here, I don’t want to run out of this building right into the night-time. You know?”

“Yeah,” she said.

The man paced back and forth between the sinks and the stalls. “It’s hopeless,” he muttered. Samantha stood beside the sinks, watching him pass. “It’s not hopeless.”

“Yes, it is,” the man said. “We’re fucking
fucked
.”

“Don’t talk like that…”

“I know, I know.” The man stopped, rubbed his temples. “God.”

“Why do you think it’s hopeless?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to have this conversation.”

“Hope is a good thing.”

“No,” he said, turning and facing her. If she wanted to talk about it, then, damn, why not?

“Hope is just escapism. Hope is trying to escape the reality of the moment by burying your head into the metaphorical sands of the future. Sands that hold no promise.”

“Maybe,” she confessed. “But it keeps us alive.”

“Alive?” the man countered. “It kills us. It drains us. A friend of mine said that hope is like barbed wire: the tighter you hold on, the more it hurts us. The more it makes us bleed.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But we still hold onto it.”

“Some of us do,” he said. “I don’t.”

“Yes you do. Even if you deny it.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“You’re still alive. Without hope, you would have killed yourself. Suicide is the logical conclusion to hopelessness.” After a moment she asked, “What do you hope for?”

The man was quiet.

He wasn’t even sure if he knew the answer.

“Sometimes,” Samantha said, “when it’s the darkest, we can’t keep looking down into ourselves. We can’t keep looking at how bad things are. We need to look up, because when we look up, that’s when we find hope… That’s when we find something to hope for.”

The man started moving quickly, exploring the bathroom.

Samantha backed into the wall as he rushed past. “What are you doing?”

“You’re brilliant,” he said, his voice excited.

“Why am I brilliant?” she asked.

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Dwellers of the Night

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“Because,” he said. He emerged out of the shadows, grabbed her by the shoulder, squeezed. Even in the darkness, she could see him smile. “Because you just told me how we’re going to get out of here.”

X

He opened one of the stalls and climbed on top of the toilet. He flicked the lighter and let the flame’s light pour forth, illuminating the wall above the toilet. Upon the wall was a three-foot by three-foot iron grill. He turned off the lighter and grit it in his teeth and wrestled with the grill until he was able to wedge it out of its place upon the wall. He set it down beside the toilet and grabbed the lighter and flicked the flame upwards, and the flame’s light poured inside the shaft and reflected in the sleek and thin aluminum insides of the shaft. The man tried to hold back his excitement as he told Samantha to wake her sisters.

Everyone piled into the stall, and he explained to them what they were going to do. One-by-one he pushed them up into the ventilation shaft, and after strapping the GARAND to his side—he decided to leave the REMINGTON behind—he pulled himself up and in. “Move slowly,” he said. He didn’t know how much weight the shaft could hold, but he was willing to risk it, because it was better than sitting like poor stoics within the bathroom. The squeeze was tight and compressed, and the man’s shoulders ached, the heavy cloth of his shirt brazing against his bare skin. They moved for what felt like hours, and they passed over another grill facing downwards. The man flicked his light to see what was below, and he let the flame hover close to the parallel-running bars. The light bled through the bars and danced reflected in tiny pools of eyes. The eyes looked up at them, and he heard them growl. “Keep moving,” he said, and they continued their trek. They pushed onwards.

Samantha stopped, told the man that the shaft reached a decline, and she couldn’t see where it went. He told her that it was okay, just to go anyways. He heard the sound of her body thumping around, a few
oomphs
, and then she told him, her voice echoing in the shaft, that she had reached the bottom, where the shaft continued unhindered into the darkness. Deshay and Jessica followed suit, and the man crawled after them. He lost his balance and pitched headfirst, and his clothes moved freely against the aluminum siding. He gained speed, and with a shout he slammed into Jessica, and the aluminum bottom creaked, groaned, snapped; and he felt air all around him, found himself somersaulting head-over-heels, and then he landed hard on his back. He heard the girls shouting, and they fell around him. The man pushed them off of himself and stood. His arms shook as he flicked the lighter. The flame’s light danced outwards, and he found they were not alone.