Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (23 page)

Mark’s breath is ragged. “Did you get the bat?”

“The bat? What? No. No. I’ll go–”

“Not now,” the boy says.

The man turns and sees the dark-walkers in the room. He grabs Mark and they sprint across the porch overhang. They climb onto the roof. It is slick with the earlier rains. They climb up the heavily slanted roof and crawl down the other side. The overhang over the back porch is right before them. They crawl on top of it and draw several deep breaths.

“Now what?” the boy asks.

“I don’t have a fucking clue.”

“What time is it?”

The man looks at his digital watch. “Two in the morning.”

“Shit. Daylight’s not for a couple more hours.”

“They’ll find us before then.”

“I know.”

The snarls of the dark-walkers fill the night.

The air is a bitter cold, but they do not notice: adrenaline pumps through their veins. Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

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“The car,” Mark says.

“No,” the man replies. “My keys are inside.”

“The truck, then.”

“What truck?”

“Jeremy’s truck. Her brother’s truck. It’s right outside.”

“There’s no keys.”

“They’re in the ignition. I saw them when we went inside.”

“But the door was open. The open door light would drain the battery.”

“It’s an old truck. It didn’t have any lights like that.”

“There’s no way it would start.”

“It was turned off when the plague hit.”

“There’s no way you can know that.”

“He parks there when he is working on the truck. He was probably working on it when the plague struck. Probably working with the lighting under the dash. The lights, they would always go out. Blown fuses.”

“It was around midnight when it struck here. He’d be in bed.”

“He was a night owl. And twenty-three. He would have been awake.”

“We can’t risk it.”

“So you want to just stay up here? Try to wait it out?”

“Shit. I don’t know.
Fuck
.” He grabs at his greasy hair. “Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Let’s go for the truck.”

“Are you serious?”

“What the hell? You were all about it ten seconds ago.”

“I didn’t actually think you’d agree.”

“Well now I agree.”

“I was hoping you’d think of something else that’s less risky.”

“I’m drawing a blank.”

“All right,” Mark says. “I’ll run and get the truck. You wait here.”

“No, I’ll go.”

“I’m faster. I’ve seen you run. You’ve killed your lungs with cigarettes.”

He knows the boy is right. “The ground is wet. The tires will sink. The truck will get stuck.”

“It’s a 4x4. We’ll be all right.”

Mark walks over to the edge and looks down. It is clear. Most of the dark-walkers are at the front of the house. He wonders how many dark-walkers lurk among what had once been a haven for laughter and romance. He’d only seen seven or eight. But he knows there have to be more. They travel in groups. Flock like birds. He peers over the edge once more, waiting. Still nothing. A tenfoot-drop. He sprained his ankle once doing something like this, trying to fly with a blanket as a kid. The doctor said he was lucky: he should have broken a lot more. Now Mark imagines himself hopping along towards the truck with a compound fracture. And there are no doctors. He won’t be able to heal his ankle. And his compound fracture will become infected. Gangrene. Self-amputation using alcohol, a gag, and a skillet of embers to cauterize the wound. “Fuck.”

“Are you going?” the man asks, behind him, keeping his voice low.

“Don’t try to talk me out of it.”

“It looks like you’re
thinking
yourself out of it.”

“No,” the boy says.

Anthony Barnhart

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And he jumps.

He seems to hover in the air, frozen in the cold, and then time rushes to meet him with the ground. He finds himself rolling over the wet grass, the breath knocked out of him, his ankles searing with pain. He comes to a rest on his back, staring up at the sky, the moon half-covered by whispering clouds, head resonating with a dull thudding vibration and the world spinning as if he were on an out-of-control carousel. He hears his name being shouted, and he raises his neck, which throbs in pain, and he sees the man standing on the back porch overhang, face ashen. The boy gives a thumbsup and rolls onto his hands and knees. He stumbles up and moves along the side of the adjacent garage. He can hear the dark-walkers. They are quieter now. He moves to the far edge of the garage, conscious of his footsteps crackling in the gravel. He moves behind the yellow sport’s car—Cara’s sister’s pride and joy—and feels a presence behind him. He spins around to see a bunny rabbit staring at him. Then it turns and hops away. He almost laughs, but he stifles it down. He hunches down and looks through the car windows, and he can see the S-10 Chevy. He looks up and sees the man following his progress with his eyes and a frightened look on his face. Mark gives another thumbs-up and continues to venture out. He keeps his eyes on the truck and moves forward carefully. The windshield is cracked, the driver’s door window smeared with blood. The passenger’s door is open. He creeps across the gravel and grabs the driver’s door handle, praying that it’s unlocked. It is. He pulls the door open. It creaks. He steps inside and sits on the seat covered with dried and flaking blood. He pulls the door shut ever-so-quietly. The keys are in the ignition. He twists the keys. The engine whines, then starts. The gas gauge goes to ¾ full. He puts the car in drive. He presses the gas.

A shriek fills his ears. His body goes rigid, and he twists around. A dark-walker is climbing in through the open passenger’s door. Mark’s scream is caught in his throat. Its feeble hands grab his legs, the mouth opens wide. And then the creature shrieks and begins to spasm. It falls face-down on the seat. The man stands behind him, and a hunting knife has carved a deep chasm into the back of the creature’s skull. The man tries to pull the knife out, but it’s jammed in the bone. He pulls the body out and tosses it aside. He climbs inside and shuts the door.

“That’s three times you’ve saved my life,” Mark says.

The man wipes blood on his jeans. “That one doesn’t count.”

The dark-walkers are attracted to the noise of the engine. But by the time they have congregated themselves once more and rushed out of the house, Mark has already turned the truck around. He stamps on the gas. The tires spit gravel. The truck lurches forward, careening down the driveway. The dark-walkers fall in behind, screaming and shouting. The boy twists the truck onto the main road and goes right, back towards the highway.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t have a fucking—Shit!” He swerves around a trashed minivan.

“We can’t make it back to my house,” the man says. “Not in the dark. Too many accidents.”

“I know.”

“There’s more.”

They have reached the intersection. Dark-walkers pour out from a Walgreens Pharmacy and a Day-Care center. Some of them are but children, foaming at the mouth, emaciated. Mark runs one over with the car. “I just hit a kid,” he says. It doesn’t even faze him. They near the highway. Darkwalkers block the exits. He drives over the bridge. A dark-walker leaps out of the shadows; Mark Anthony Barnhart

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doesn’t swerve; the body is thrust over the car, kneecaps sheared open; the creature screams as it hits the bridge railing and topples over, falling down onto the pavement. Dark-walkers descend upon it. The road twists and turns.

“You missed the highway,” the man says.

“They were blocking it.”

“I don’t think they knew what they were doing.”

“I know, but they were still blocking it.”

Dark-walkers pour in behind them. They pass a road sign: MOUNT AIRY FOREST. More darkwalkers appear in front of them. Mark curses and yanks the car up a narrow drive surrounded by trees shrouded in shadow. The road ascends up a hill. Dark-walkers rush at them through the trees. A Park Ranger car sits in the middle of the road; the headlights of the truck wash over the shattered driver’s side window, and Mark jerks the wheel; the truck goes onto two wheels; both the man and the boy are absolutely silent, paralyzed with shock; the truck falls back onto two wheels. The road bends into a clearing populated with scarce trees. A single deer stares at them from straight ahead. Mark swerves around it, and it darts into the clearing. The dark-walkers behind them turn their attention upon the deer, and, as a group, flock after it. The deer is much quicker, however, and disappears into the brush, but only after the truck disappears around another curve cloaked with forest.

And by then, the dark-walkers have forgotten.

IV

The road twists and turns, thick trees resplendent with the last dying leaves of autumn lining either side. There are no parked cars, as the plague struck after dark, when the park had been closed to the public. Empty picnic tables are acknowledged by the truck’s headlights, then forgotten just as quickly and given over once more to the impermeable darkness. This is the reign of the dark-walkers, and nothing but flesh and blood is remembered: skyscrapers, fountains, parks, vehicles, statues and gardens and computers and televisions, all of this means nothing. Fossils that will decay and break down, and millions of years later, the next sentient beings will study the Old Age, when
Homo sapien
ruled, and they will study their lives and books will be published on the topic, and there will be a scholarly work entitled The Decline and Fall of
Homo sapien
: the Rise of the Dark-Walkers. Volumes will be written on the Age of Mankind, and a single chapter shall be dedicated—mayhaps even a footnote—to the carnage that struck the planet on August 11, 2011.

“Slow down,” the man says.

“What?”

“Look. In the trees.”

Mark toys with the brake. The truck slows, but does not stop. The trees on either side of the narrow road pass by. Mark tries to wipe the blood from the window but fails. He grabs the manual crank and lowers the window to watch. The man simply stares out his own. They stand in the trees, solid as stone, the only movement that of their rapid breathing.
Rapid breathing
, the man thinks to himself, and he remembers the hummingbird.
Lampornis clemenciae
, the blue-throated hummingbird, could reach up to 1,260 heartbeats a minute, and its rapid breathing assisted this. The man’s mind whirs and clicks: flock together, call to one another, rapid breathing… They are just like birds. A single phrase stretches through his mind and then vanishes:
avian flu.
Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

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“There must be hundreds of them,” the boy says, driving the truck. The dark-walkers pay them no attention. They just stare at one another, not speaking. The boy grimaces. “They’re stupid bastards.”

The man isn’t so sure. Their stoic features, piercing eyes, icy precision…

It sends chills up his spine.

The road bends around a curve. The headlights splash over a circle in the road. In the middle of the circle, dozens upon dozens of dark-walkers stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, backs to the truck. They wheel around when the headlights dance over them, and their eyes are frozen in a mask of fear, faces contorted into quiet shouts. For a moment they do not move, like deer stuck in headlights, and then they scatter in every direction to avoid the truck. The boy’s heart races, hoping that none come towards the truck, but none do. They drive around half the circle and pull onto a road with a sign reading OAK RIDGE LODGE.

The man cranes back in his seat, gazing behind them through the truck’s back windows. The man says, “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“I thought I saw something.”

The lodge is abandoned. Two white vans sit next to it, unused. It is a two-story wooden structure. There is a walk-around portico. All the windows are bolted shut, and a heavy, iron padlock is placed over the door. A sign along the road reads: ADMITTANCE BY RESERVATION ONLY. No dark-walkers are to be seen in any direction. The boy looks over at the man and stops the car beside the portico. He turns off the engine. The silence is engulfing.

In the distance, they can hear howls filling the night.

The sound to the day reminds the man of coyotes.

Everything about the dark-walkers reminds him of some kind of animal.

Because that’s all they are. Animals.

Animals driven by the primeval engine of the Mother Nature:

The struggle to survive.

He thinks of the basic impulses of the human creature, that which is innate in all mankind:

The need for shelter.

The need for food.

And the need for sexual gratification.

The man looks at his watch.

“What time is it?” the boy asks.

“It’s almost 2:30.”

“What should we do?”

“I don’t know,” the man says.

Mark sits in silence, then opens his door and crawls out.

“Wait…” the man calls after, but already Mark is heading for the lodge. The man squints out the window, eyeing the trees. No movement of any kind.

“Fuck it,” he says, and he gets out of the car.

A cool rain begins to fall, the tiny droplets glinting in the shattered moonlight.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

113

The man is walking after the boy, but the boy turns and approaches the man.

“All the doors are locked,” he said. “And there are wooden plates over the windows.”

“Why?” the man asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe to prevent people from breaking in.”

“Shit.” He turns around, looks back to the truck. “It’ll be safe in the truck. We can leave if anything comes, and—” He turns when he hears the boy moving away. “Now what?” he calls after as the boy reaches one of the vans.

The boy breaks open the small corner of glass in the driver’s side window and reaches inside. He is fumbling around for the lock when the man reaches him. He finds the lock and unlocks the door. His arm slides out, and he opens the door. The cab of the van smells of must. Mark cranes his neck inside. There is a solid steel wall between the cab of the van and the back. He ducks down and searches under the seat for the latch. He flicks a small latch.