Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (79 page)

Dwellers of the Night

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the windshield. Blood splattered in great goblets, skewing their vision. Kyle flicked the wipers—

“You’ll need these.”—and they began to wash away the blood in sweeping strokes. The man stared at the windshield as he continued to drive, saw several small teeth embedded in the glass.

III

Kyle and Mark return to the house. The Explorer is still missing. They enter through the front door, find that the house is empty. Anthony sniffles and heads to one of the bedrooms. His shirt is still stained with blood from the night before. Kyle watches him go, calls out into the house. A moment later he hears movement, and Mark appears from the kitchen. He tells Kyle that there is a basement, that it can easily be fortified. Kyle is uneasy with the idea, doesn’t like the concept of holing up in a place with only one exit. But he is tired, and he doesn’t complain. He tells Mark that he’ll be down in a second, to keep working. Mark says, “Okay,” and returns back through the kitchen and through the door leading into the unfinished basement. Kyle goes to the back room, where Anthony stands shirtless, holding up a polo shirt with rough cotton weave.

“All he has are golfing clothes,” Kyle says.

He wants to comfort Anthony, to tell him something meaningful.

But what is there to say?

Anthony doesn’t respond for a moment, then, “Okay.”

Kyle turns to leave, pauses. He looks back at his friend. “Anthony?”

The boy looks over at him. “What?”

“You would have been a good father.”

He smiles weakly, tears beginning to brim in his eyes once more. “Thank you.”

Kyle nods, then leaves the room.

Mark is taking a break. His hands are sore. He stands outside on the front lawn, lights a cigarette. He takes a large drag, lets the smoke fill his lungs. He exhales, watches the smoke climb aimlessly into the sky. He hears footsteps behind him, turns and sees Sarah. She stands beside him, asks for a cigarette.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Mark says, handing her a cigarette.

She puts it up to her mouth. “I used to,” she says. “Can I have a light?”

Mark lights the cigarette.

She takes several deep drags. “I started smoking when I was twenty-four. I had gone out and foolishly driven drunk. Got a D.U.I. I was kicked out of school. It was a private school, and they frowned upon drunkenness. I didn’t even dare go back to school, because I had the ‘Party Plates’—

those yellow plates they give you if you get caught driving drunk. Anyways, I couldn’t drive, had to walk to work every day. I spent most of my time in this bar a few blocks from my house. I got drunk one night and ended up fooling around with this
huge
jackass. His name was Keith. He drove me crazy, but yet part of me wanted to be with him. We dated on and off. He cheated on me. I still dated him.” She shakes her head. “I know. It’s stupid. Anyways, eventually something happened—I don’t want to get into the details—but I was evicted from my apartment. Keith said I could move in with him. Biggest mistake of my life.” She is quiet for several moments, takes more hits off the cigarette.

“He cheated on me constantly. Verbally abused me, threatened to physically abuse me. So I started smoking, and it helped… not a lot, but it helped.”

“This Keith character sounds like a deuschbag,” Mark says.

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“
Quite
the understatement,” Sarah replies with a chuckle. “I felt trapped: I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have any money to get a new place, I was locked into the lease. Did you ever see the movie

‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’?”

Mark shakes his head,
No
.

“In the movie, there’s this organization that will wipe out your memories for a hefty fee. It was for people who had lost loved ones, due either to divorce, breakups, even death. And all I could think about was how
sweet
it would be to just remove all those experiences from my mind. Even after I finally got out of that situation—I moved in with my aunt up north, in Wilmington—I was
still
depressed because of what had happened. I just wanted to wipe an entire two
years
out of my memory. It wasn’t until I met this cute boy named Patrick that I could finally get a handle on myself.”

They smoke together in silence for a while.

The front door behind them opens.

Katie asks, standing in the doorway, “Where did he go with the car?”

“He said he was getting gas,” Sarah answers, not even looking at her.

“He’s been gone a while.”

Mark tosses his cigarette to the ground, snuffs it out in the grass. Katie looks over at him. “He’s
your
friend. Where do you think he is?”

Mark shrugs, turning to go back inside. “God only knows.”

“Do you think he’s getting gas?”

He walks past her, entering the cool of the house. “Like I said, ‘God only knows.’”

∑Ω∑

The man turned right at the railroad tracks, and the narrow service road passed between countless rows of box-cars with closed doors and fading graffiti stenciled over their titanium sides. He kept looking at the teeth embedded in the glass, imagined what the little girl would have looked like before the plague: a girl who excelled at spelling bees, enjoyed coloring books, and watched Disney movies over and over. He could not tear his eyes from the teeth.
The Tooth Fairy’s Heyday.

Once upon a time, a Tooth Fairy lived up in the sky. She lived in her mansion, and her mansion looked like a castle. She lived way up in the sky, amongst the clouds. Whenever a little boy or girl would lose a tooth, the Tooth Fairy would descend from her throne and return to the land of children. There she would enter the homes of the children, and she would sneak under their pillows and find their teeth. She turned the teeth into money with her wand. Some people have asked,

“What does the Tooth Fairy to look like?” The Tooth Fairy looks like a princess, with a pink skirt and a bow on her head. She has wings on her back, and she uses them to fly.

The windshield wipers only streaked the blood on the window, and the man cursed, unable to see. Lightning danced in the sky above them, and suddenly the world became ever darker. Torrential rain fell downwards, hammering on the roof of the Explorer. Rivulets of rain tore across the windshield, mingling with the blood.

“Thank God,” the man muttered, finally able to see the road ahead of him. Kyle leaned back in his seat, took a deep breath.

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Mark spoke up in the back: “Can I have a cigarette?”

“No,” Kyle said. “Don’t you dare roll that window down.”

“I was just kidding,” Mark said. “It’s raining. My cigarette would get wet.”

One day the Tooth Fairy knew of a girl who had lost several teeth. She went down to her house, which was in a big city. She entered the

house underneath the door, and she flew up the steps and went under the door and into the girl’s bedroom. The girl was curled up under the covers. The Tooth Fairy moved quietly, as is her preferred style, and she snuck under the pillow to gather the teeth. But this time the little girl awoke. She grabbed the Tooth Fairy in her hands, and the Tooth Fairy’s tiny screams could not be heard as the girl ripped off the Tooth Fairy’s arms. Pixie dust scattered over the pillow. The Tooth Fairy could feel her wings being torn off, and she could only watch as the little girl with gaps in her teeth feasted on the veiny membranes. The little girl grinned with devilish malice, and the screams of the Tooth Fairy vanished as its head disappeared into her mouth.

The Explorer crossed a pair of railroad tracks, the axles and shocks grinding. The teeth wobbled and fell, disappearing.

Kyle looked over at the man. “Those teeth were driving me fucking crazy.”

“Yeah,” the man said. “Tell me about it.”

Someone in the back—Cameron—spoke up: “It’ll be dawn soon.”

∑Ω∑

Anthony is in the basement. He hears footsteps coming down the stairs, and he turns to see the others returning. He sets down a piece of wood, doesn’t say anything. They enter the darkness, which is broken only by meager light from assorted candles lit about the room. Mark enters the closet and rummages around, returns with several sleeping bags. He tosses them onto the floor, says, “I’m going to go get some pillows,” and returns upstairs. Katie sits down on the couch, stares at the blank television screen. Sarah sits down beside her. Anthony listens as they talk, picking the wood up again and begins to hammer it over one of the small windows near the ceiling: he stands on a chair so that he can reach.

“Do you think he’s coming back?” Katie asks.

“Of course he’s coming back,” Sarah says. “He’s not just going to abandon us.”

“He didn’t want to bring us in the first place.”

“He’s not a bad man.”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t like me very much.”

Sarah smiles. “He doesn’t like anyone very much.”

“You just say that because you like him.”

“I don’t like him,” Sarah responds. “I just… understand.”

“What is there to understand? He’s a jackass.”

“He lost his fiancé with the plague. I can understand that. I lost Patrick.”

“But you’re not treating everyone like shit to cover up your pain.”

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IV

Mark is outside, a cigarette burning between anxious fingers. He looks out to the west, sees the sun sinking lower and lower.
Where the fuck is he?
The cigarette is smoldering, the ember nearly to the point of burning his skin. It is at that moment that he hears the sound of the engine, and he looks down the street to see the Explorer coming into view. Mark smirks and tosses the cigarette down into the grass, stomps it out with the heel of his shoe. The man parks the Explorer in the driveway. As he is getting out of the car, Mark walks over to him, arms outstretched: “Where the hell have you been?”

“I had to take care of some things,” the man replies.

“What in the hell did you need to take care of?”

“I thought I didn’t need a babysitter?”

“You just up and left! Half of us thought you abandoned us!”

The man glares at him. “Did you?” he asks.

Mark sighs. “No.”

The man walks towards the back of the Explorer. “I got some stuff.”

“Like what?” Mark asks, following him.

The man opens the back, revealing a cardboard box filled with pistols and ammunition.

“Holy shit,” Mark breathes. “Where’d you get all this?”

“We passed a small arms factory in the city.”

“I didn’t know we had a small arms factory in Cincinnati.”

“Neither did I. But I’m not complaining. Help me carry them inside.”

∑Ω∑

Cameron’s words brought with them hope:
Dawn is coming
. The night had nearly ended. And so far, they had survived. They were tired, aching, many of them injured and bleeding. But they were breathing—and they hadn’t been bitten. That’s all that mattered. The road passed underneath a walking bridge: they had been driving up I-71, and the highway had not been filled with darkwalkers. The Explorer weaved between vehicles, and more than once Kyle had told the man to slow down—“You’re going to get us fucking killed by running into a wrecked car.” As they passed underneath the bridge, something hard landed upon the roof of the car. Katie asked, “What was that?” just as two hands burst through the metal roof: the knuckles bled and the fingers were broken, the bones of the hand shattered; but the hands swept back and forth above Cameron’s hand, the fingertips tickling her hair. She let out a scream and leaned forward—right into the clutches of the zombie. The creature grabbed Cameron by the neck and began trying to pull her out of the vehicle: but it could only rip her upwards so that her head slammed into the roof of the car. Cameron kept screaming, and Katie and Sarah—sitting beside her—just stared in terror. The man shouted, “Are you going to help or just sit there and stare!” Sarah grabbed at Cameron, tried to pull her away from the zombie’s grasp; but the dark-walker was intent, and its hands refused to release her hair. Tears crawled down Cameron’s face, and suddenly she went quiet: the zombie yanked her upwards, and the impact of her head against the roof ruptured her forehead, and blood began to course down her face, covering her eyes, nose, cheeks and mouth in a mask of brilliant red. It was at that moment that sunlight suddenly pierced over the rolling hills to the east of the highway, and the sun’s snaking tendrils instantaneously swept across the road. The zombie let out a howling scream and released Cameron, tried to withdrawal; but its hands were stuck. Katie grabbed Cameron, pulled her to her—

blood gushed over Katie’s pants, and she pushed Cameron into Sarah’s lap, began shouting in Anthony Barnhart

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disgust at the blood. The shrieks of the dark-walker shook the Explorer, and then there was silence. The hands protruding from the roof went limp. Kyle leaned over his seat, grabbed the hands, pushed them upwards and out. The zombie rolled off the top of the Explorer and landed on the road behind them. Anthony and Mark stared out the back window, saw the creature lying in a heap upon the road, its skin bubbling and boiling.

Kyle leaned back in his seat, feeling the warmth of the sun. “Thank God. It’s over.”

“It’s not over yet,” Sarah shouted. “Cameron’s going to bleed out.”

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Chapter Twenty-Five

The House on Maranatha Street

“It isn’t enough for your heart to break, because everybody’s heart is broken now.”

- Allen Ginsberg (Born A.D. 1926)

I

Night has fallen. They had completed barricading themselves in the basement, sealing the windows and posting a guard beside the stairwell leading to the ground floor. Now Mark sits on a sofa, feet propped against a wooden coffee table. The cigarette ember is the only light, and it illuminates only the crests of his fingers. He watches it slowly burn, the coals igniting the paper wrap in jagged lines. He hears the others snoring, sleeping. Anthony cried before he finally fell into a fitful sleep, the exhaustion of spending nearly forty-eight hours awake, plus the sapping of strength by the adrenaline, overcoming him. Katie is nearest to Mark, and he can hear her moaning in his sleep. He never cared much for the girl, but her brokenness following the tragic night has left a deep impression upon him. He considers waking her from troubled sleep, but chooses against it: the waking will only be a slight reprieve, and she would succumb once more to the phantoms that haunt her dreams. Instead he sits quietly, the shotgun sitting across his lap. The cigarette is nearing its death. He takes one last hit and drops the filter with the slight snub of tobacco onto the concrete floor, stomps it out with the heel of his shoe. He lies back, engulfed in the comfort, feels sleep weighing heavily upon him. He leans forward, refusing to become too comfortable. He shifts his position and listens. It is awfully silent, and he cannot hear the sounds of the dark-walkers. The subdivision is slightly secluded, and he imagines most of them have migrated towards the city. His mind is drenched in thoughts, a smorgasbord from which there are too many choices to choose from. He tries to sift through the fragments and sentences dancing through his thoughts, but he cannot elect any to focus upon. The silence becomes heavier, the monotonous melody of snores aligning with the sounds of crickets back in the day when he would lie out in the hammock at his old house, before his parents died. He would stare at the stars and contemplate life on other planets, and then he would feel so insignificant: a tiny speck in an ocean of specks, all upon a single planet rotating around a lonely star in the midst of a galaxy filled with millions of stars. The insignificance would bring about freedom, redemption from the cares of the world. The universe would spin without him. His decisions lost their ultimate meaning.
The universe will spin once we are gone. Whether,
when all is said and done, we or the dark-walkers have the final say, the universe will continue spinning. The
moon will revolve around the planet. The planet will revolve around the sun. And the Milky Way will continue
its monotonous pulsations as if nothing ever happened.