Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (41 page)

Dwellers of the Night

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the chair. She pushes the chair out of the way and curls up into a fetal position. The man falls asleep while hearing her quiet sobs.

III

The boy wakes the next morning. He lies in bed for quite some time, can hear muffled conversations outside the door, though they sound distant. He can hear several little children singing. He hears
Amazing Grace
and
He Paid It All
before the door opens and the nurse enters. She is delighted to see him sitting upright in bed, and she approaches as he asks, “They’re singing hymns?”

She looks back to the open door. “Yes. It’s Sunday, after all.”

“Oh,” Mark says. He finds it ironic that people are praising God amidst the hell. She sits down in the chair. “How are you feeling?”

“Much better.”

“Healthy enough to walk around?”

“My limbs are still a little weak.”

“No worries, Dear. Your strength will return in time. You lost a lot of blood.”

“How much?”

“Maybe a few pints,” she tells him. “You were shivering and passed out in that furnace when our men found you.”

“How’d they know I was there?” Mark asks.

“They were coming back from Kentucky, and they saw the truck parked there, with the doors opened, and they explored the factory to see what had happened. Brave souls, they are. They’re lucky none of them were crouching in the shadows waiting to pounce. But, no worries, they did all right. And from what I hear,” she says with a twinkle in her eye, “so did you. They found three bodies in that same room. It looked as if you knifed them. Quite heroic.”

“It didn’t feel so heroic at the time,” Mark says. “I was just trying to survive.”

“Aren’t we all? No one lives anymore. We just survive.”

She returns in the afternoon with some hot soup. The boy anxiously devours it. For desert is a strawberry. The boy looks it over with amazement before slowly eating it, letting the tart juices crawl down the corners of his lips. The woman quietly watches him eat. The boy smiles at him. Her face falls for a moment, and her eyes flap shut. A trigger of alarm runs through the boy. She opens her eyes again, and he can see that they have swollen with the first onslaught of trepid tears. “You look like my son,” she says.

He doesn’t say anything. What
can
he say?

“He was about your age. Andrew Webster. A wonderful boy. He was quite the scholar at English, let me tell you! Everyone joked about it, because of his last name, you know. He would read Dictionaries and Thesauruses for fun. He even wrote his own textbook on grammar! No one would publish it, though: they said it was good, but he didn’t have the credentials needed to successfully market it. Thus his greatest success became his greatest failure. But isn’t that how life goes sometimes? He was bummed out about it for a while. He became cheery, though, let me tell you, when Harvard accepted him. He made the cut by a hair, that’s for sure, but he knew that he could make his dreams come true. Most boys dream of being rock stars or nation-renowned athletes or something like that. My boy, Andrew, he dreamt of writing grammar textbooks!” She shakes her head, biting her lip in a half-smile. “Such a sweet boy.” Her face falls. “That’s the Andrew I have to Anthony Barnhart

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remember. I don’t know why the plague didn’t get me, but it got him. I remember it. My husband was away on vacation. Golfing in Florida. I am sure he’s gone—I held onto hope for some time, but I know the statistics. Only a handful of people for every several thousand survive. My son wasn’t one of them. Unlike me, he was affected. I didn’t know anything was wrong that morning. I woke up and poured myself a glass of milk. I didn’t know the electricity was out, until I drank it. It was sour, you know. Curdled. Like drinking rotten cottage cheese. That’s when I noticed the silence. We lived near a highway, and you could always hear the semis. And in the morning, you’d hear them honking in the rush hour traffic. But there was nothing. I went outside. Looked around. I couldn’t find anyone. There were some cars wrecked, but the streets were mostly deserted. Most people were sleeping here when the plague hit. I can’t imagine the devastation in Europe and Asia… The plague hit them midday. But I couldn’t find anyone. I thought I was living in a dream-world. I found a wrecked van and went up to it. The driver, an older man, was lying behind the wheel. His face was contorted into a mask of… I don’t know. Terror. Pain. Something. Blood had dried around his eyes, nose, mouth, ears… The disease did something to people, made them bleed from their face. I ran back to my house and went up to Andrew’s room. I found him lying…” Her tears swell up, and she puts a shaking hand against her eyes, trying—perhaps—to block out the memory. The boy feels suddenly uncomfortable and keeps looking to the window. She continues speaking, voice quivering: “He was lying there in his bed, with his boxers… Just lying there… And he had a tube of modeling cement in his hand… And he had squeezed the contents into his throat… He had committed suicide. I felt his throat, felt for a pulse… And it just felt solid. The cement had hardened inside. But before… Before he did that, he had opened his Dictionary… and with a bright felt tip marker he had circled a word near the back…” She breaks down. Her head falls into her hands, and her chest heaves with each sob. Mark doesn’t know what to do. He just sits there, watching her, eyes fixated, engulfing. After a moment, cooling herself off by fanning her dainty fingertips: “I’m sorry…”

“It’s okay,” Mark says. “It’s fine.”

“It’s just… Somehow, he knew. Somehow, he knew what would happen.”

Mark wants to ask, tells himself not to, does it anyway: “How did he know?”

“The word he circled… It was—”

The door swings open. The man stands there, doesn’t even acknowledge the boy. “Nancy.”

She looks up at him, wiping her eyes. “What?”

“Almira needs you.” He looks at the boy and leaves.

The woman stands from her chair. “I’m sorry… I have to go…”

“It’s okay,” Mark says. He watches her leave the room.

IV

When the man awakes, it is early morning. Sunlight is beginning to move at a snail's pace from the east, and the light is hemorrhaging in rivulets into the stone-walled room. The boy is sitting in the chair, staring into space. The girl is gone. With a groan, the man brings himself forward. His body aches and throbs, the bones cracking and the muscles burning. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and runs one hand through his greasy hair, the other feeling the stubble growing along his jowl. He would shave every other morning back at the house. The boy watches him. The man rubs tired, bloodshot eyes. He looks at the boy. “Hi,” he groans. The boy asks, “How’s your stomach?”

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The man feels down to his gut. “It hurts. Like hell. But it’s okay. They stitched it up again.”

“Yeah. They want you to be healthy.”

“For what?”

The boy doesn’t answer.

The man looks about the room. “Where’s the girl?”

He doesn’t answer for a moment. “These people… They’re monsters. When civilization breaks down, when rules and regulations cease to exist… There is nothing to curb the animal nature within us. Society trained us and raised us and made us docile. It taught us what it was like to be human—

and completely tried to eradicate the animal nature within us. Sometimes it seemed as if society had succeeded. But the moment society vanished… Then we realized that deep within, we are nothing but animals. These men… They’re animals. Brute creatures devoid of any sense of morality or conscience, living only to appease the animals within themselves.”

A few hours pass. The boy and the man are quiet, not talking much. The man doesn’t feel like talking. Never has. He’s always been the kind to coil up into his own little world and ignore anyone or anything that encroaches. He had let Kira in, and she had been one of the first. His barriers had fallen down. But Kira is gone, and he is alone. For some time he ponders Mark. He knows that since Mark is not with him, he must have fallen to the dark-walkers. He envies him. These thoughts are trickling through his mind when the door unlocks. He hears a scuffle on the other side; both he and the boy look up as the door opens.

The girl is shoved inside, completely stripped of her clothes. She is about seventeen or eighteen. Her breasts are small, and her skin is flat against her washboard ribs. Her shoulder-blades are knobbed and bony. She stumbles inside and falls onto her hands and knees, long and knotted hair dangling in clumps before her eyes. Tears stream down her face, and she hunches there on the floor like a mangled dog, weeping. The men shout at her—”Filthy bitch!”—and slam the door. The man and the boy stare at broken girl. Blood trickles from her vagina. Her sobs shake the room. The man wants to look away, but he cannot. He sees this girl, wrecked and bloodied, ravaged and scourged; and he sees, despite her closed eyes, a person within: a girl who had hopes and dreams, hurts and desires. A girl who desired to love and be loved.

∑Ω∑

They had been flirting for a few months. He was twenty-three, the manager of the restaurant, a tycoon in her innocent eyes. He drove a nice car and wore nice clothes and had wit and charm. She had fallen for him quickly, and they had begun seeing each other outside the office. She was eighteen, legal, and so he tried to get her to sleep with him. She refused. They would be curled up on the couch at his condo, and he would begin caressing the shirt over her breast, or he would rub the jeans along the inside of her thigh. She would giggle and tell him to stop, and though he played it off with an childlike chuckle, it frustrated him. That evening he had gone into the back office after the restaurant closed and began filling out some paperwork and hammering out numbers from credit card receipts. She entered the room and said, “We need to talk about something.”

He looked up at her from his position in the chair. “Sure.”

She shut the door, and a wicked smile crossed her lips.

He eyed her. “What are you doing?”

She moved towards him, leaned forward, grabbed his face between her hands, lifted his chin, and began kissing him passionately. Their tongues danced back and forth within their mouths. He Anthony Barnhart

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found this much more enjoyable than paperwork, and he ran his hand underneath the sleeve of her work-shirt, feeling her warm shoulder. She took one hand from his face and tiptoed it down his shirt; she reached the zipper to his work pants, and she fondled with it ever-so-gently, unzipping. She reached inside and felt his warmth. She explored his boxers and found the crease in the fabric, and she slid her fingers within. His heart fluttered as her fingernails tickled him. He kissed her harder and harder, and she squeezed him. His eyes goggled. He stood, still kissing her, and he picked her up and put her on the desk. She was a small girl, lightweight.

She leaned up against the computer and grinned at him. He had grown hard and was sticking through his pants. She fingered the tip of his penis, and he lifted her skirt. He found much to his surprise and liking that she had already removed her panty-house. He stared right into her vagina. She bit her bottom lip and leaned forward, wrapping her bare legs around his waist. She whispered into his ear, “Fuck me. Fuck me right here, on this desk.”

A nervous sweat trickled down his face. He looked back to the door. She grabbed his chin, turned his head towards her. “Don’t worry about them. Look at me.”

He didn’t look back to the door, but he could hear the clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen.

“Are you going to fuck me?” she asked, her voice so beautiful.

He looked at the BEN’S DINER logo on her breast pocket, imagining the taste of her nipple.

“Well?” she asked, squeezing her clandestine legs tight around him.

“This is your first time,” he told her.

“I know,” she said.

“It might hurt a little bit.”

“I know.”

He didn’t say anything more. He moved closer, and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and their chests rubbed against one another as he entered inside of her. She made a strange sound, her lip quirked to the side. He asked if she was okay, she said to keep going. He went slow, then faster and faster. Her face contorted in pain a few times, but she began breathing heavily, and she began thrusting with him, squeezing him tight, burying her face with its beautiful black hair into the shirt on his chest. She let out a slow moan and fell backwards, her eyes fluttering. He withdrew and spilled all over the floor.

They looked at one another, and she sucked in breath after breath.

“Did it hurt?” he asked her in a whisper. The clambering in the kitchen had ceased. She shook her head, the world spinning. “That… was… so…
awesome
.”

He helped her off the desk. He zipped up his pants as a knock came at the door:

“Marv! Do you have the invoices from last night?”

She sat in her bed, sobbing, the world dark and unfamiliar. The stuffed animals in the hanging basket in the corner of her room glared condemnation. She felt smaller than an ant at a carnival as buried herself deeper and deeper underneath the blankets. She clutched the phone and heard it ring on the other line. Her friend answered: “Hello?”

“Liz?” Her voice cracked.

“Jasmine? Are you all right?”

She shook her head. “No…”

“What’s wrong? Want me to come over?”

“No…”

“Jasmine, you sound like something’s wrong.”

“I had sex with him,” she blurted, spilling her guts. Sobbing, “I had
sex
with him…”

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“With who? The guy from the diner?”

Her voice was low, defeated, as she fought off more tears: “Yes.”

Liz didn’t say anything for a few minutes. “I’m going to come over.”

“I just want to love and be loved,” she whimpered. “Why is that so fucking hard?”

∑Ω∑

Now the man stares at that same girl. Naked and exposed. Bleeding from the most precious part of a woman. Treated like shit, despised by mankind, violated. Raped. Her dreams are shattered. Her friends are absent. She is alone, nothing but a play-toy by which the monsters of men worship the god of lust. Her sobs drift away, and she curls up among the floor, folding together, arms wrapped around her knees, completely oblivious to her own nakedness. The man moves away from the bed, takes the sheet, and drapes it over her. She grabs the edges of the sheet and pulls the blanket tight around her shivering form. The man takes a seat upon the bare mattress with its coiled and snapped springs. The boy in the chair looks over at him, then looks away. The man lies with his back to the room and stares at the bare stone wall. The sunlight enters and the cold wind whips back and forth outside.