Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (96 page)

The raider is quiet, bites his lip. “You’re no different than me.”

“Bullshit,” the man growls. Cigarette ashes fall onto his jeans.

“Oh, you think you’re different. But the moment you pull that trigger, you become like me.”

“This isn’t pleasure,” the man says. “It’s vengeance. It’s justice. Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth. Limb for a limb. Life for a life.”

“You say it’s justice,” the raider says. “But you’ll enjoy it. Won’t you?”

The door to the room opens. Sarah is carrying a candle. She steps inside. There is blood all over her clothes, her hands. Her eyes are heavy, speckled with tears. The raider stares at her, and his heart Anthony Barnhart

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begins to beat quicker behind his ribs. She looks at the raider, and her eyes are filled with an unholy hatred. She looks back to the man, says, “He didn’t make it. He was shot through the lungs. There was nothing… Nothing we could do… But to make him comfortable. We gave him lots and lots of morphine. He didn’t seem to be in pain. He kept talking about his girlfriend Sarah, and about some girl named Jessica. He died about five minutes ago.”

The man nods, snubs out the cigarette. He looks up at the raider. Sarah eyes him. “You’re going to kill him.”

The man nods. “Yes.”

She looks at the raider. “Okay.” She closes the door.

Sarah stands in the corridor holding the candle. There is silence. She doesn’t even flinch when the roar of the gunshot comes. Footsteps nearing the door. It opens. The man comes out, the shotgun in his hands. He quietly shuts the door. The stench of burnt gunpowder carries with him. Sarah looks up at him. The candle falls from her hands, hitting the tiled floor. The murky wax extinguishes the flame. She wraps her arms around the man. He shifts the shotgun to one hand and wraps the other arm around her. She cries into his shoulder. The night is quiet except for her sobs.

II

They left Kyle’s body in the clinical room and shut the door. They’d deal with him in the morning. Sarah tended to Mark, bandaging his wounds, stitching him up in places she didn’t even know he had. The raiders had done quite the work on him. She gave him some morphine and pressed two cushioned chairs together, the backs facing outwards, and he lied down, curled into a ball upon the cushions. Katie stood in the front lobby, next to the locked door, and peered out the window. Now the man enters the lobby and sees her standing there. He moves forward, sets the shotgun on the receptionist’s counter. He then stands behind her, and together they stare out into the night. Darkwalkers are moving about in the street, bending over, hefting up their fallen comrades. The man feels an eerie shiver crawl up his spine. They have never done this before. One-by-one they saunter into the cornfields, disappearing as the moon’s rays break forth through the scattered storm-clouds. Scanty drifts of rain speckle the window. Distant flashes of lightning, brief flashes, their fingertips dipping into the rain-soaked cornfields.

“You should sleep,” the man says.

Katie turns around. “So should you.”

“We can push some of these chairs together.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” Katie says. “There are blankets in the back.”

The man faces her. She’s covered with dried blood, just like Sarah.

“You helped,” the man says matter-of-factly.

“I don’t see how much I helped,” Katie says.

“You did good,” the man says, squeezing her shoulder. “Now get some sleep.”

She doesn’t know how to handle his new compassion. “You shot the raider.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Did he fight back?”

“No. He just sat there.”

“Okay.”

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Katie lies down on the floor in the back room, alongside Mark. Sarah and the man are in the kitchen. He sits in one of the chairs, one hand gripping the armrest and the other pressed upon several dusty magazines sitting on a small side-table. Sarah sits down on the floor, beside his legs, stitches up his wounds, and he asks for morphine.

“We’re out,” she says. “I gave the last to Mark.”

“It fucking hurts.”

“I know,” she says. “You’re the one who made the stitches fall out.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

She doesn’t look at him. “You damn well had a choice.”

“Then why didn’t you stop me?”

She doesn’t say anything.

He grimaces, pain shooting up and down his calf.

She says, “Now we’re down to just four.”

“I know.”

“Did you think it’d be like this?”

“I knew it might be like this.”

“We’re not even out of Indiana yet. We’ve only crossed one state line.”

“I know.”

“This is a suicide mission.”

“Then how come you’re coming along?”

“Because there aren’t any other viable options.”

“You could stay here.”

“Do you want that?” She tightens the thread, making him gasp.

“No,” he says, blinking the pain out of his eyes. “I don’t want that.”

“I didn’t think so.”

The man leans back, takes several deep breaths. “Are you almost done?”

Sarah stops for a moment, looks up at him. “Why’d you shoot him?”

“He deserved it.”

“You wanted to make things right.”

“Did it?”

“Kyle’s still dead.”

“But at least he’s avenged.”

“He’s still dead.”

“Would you prefer I not have killed him?”

Sarah returns to stitching, doesn’t answer.

The man smirks. “I didn’t think so.”

III

Morning comes. Mark and the man sleep. Sarah takes the shotgun and leaves the building. The storm-clouds are gone, and the sky is perfectly clear. Several birds fly overhead. She walks past the RAV4 and heads down the street. There are splotches of blood where the dark-walkers had fallen only to be removed into the cornfields. The buildings are quiet and stoic. The truck wrapped around the telephone pole at the foot of the bridge has been broken into, and splotches of blood covers the Anthony Barnhart

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webbed windshield. She moves over the bridge and descends down to the other side of Monroe. There are human remains—tattered clothing, flaked bones—where dark-walkers had feasted on fallen raiders. She sees smoke rising from one of the buildings; she grips the weapon tighter and moves towards it. She moves through the overgrown grass slick with rain. The house has fallen down upon another truck. She is about to head into the corn when she hears a groan. She moves towards the rubble, and she can see an arm poking out from behind a fallen concrete slab. The fingers twitch. More moaning. She climbs over the debris and bends down, lifts the fragmented slab away. It is heavy, and she grunts. A face stares at her from inside the compacted cab. A man with spectacles. His forehead is covered with dried blood. He reaches out for her. “Water… Water…” She grabs the shotgun, lifts it up, presses the barrel against his forehead, looks away. The gun-blast thunders in her ears. She can feel droplets of warm blood alighting onto her face: blow-back. She steps away and doesn’t look back as she pushes into the cornfield.

She follows the trampled corn from where the two trucks had torn through the field. She climbs up the ditch beside the flipped truck, and the soles of her feet splash in a puddle of jellied blood. She makes it to the clearing and stands in front of the house. There are great splotches of blood all over the porch, and many of the windows are shattered. Assault rifles lying haphazardly in the tall grass. She enters the building, wrinkles her nose at the stench. She tiptoes through the hallway, which is filled with human remains. A lonely eye squishes underneath her shoes and a pair of glasses crunches underneath her weight. She stands in the kitchen, stares at the broken guitar, the bullets all over the walls. There is an adjacent room off to the left, and she can see two legs sticking out the door from inside the room. Small tennis shoes. Frayed limbs.
One of the boys
. Her throat knots, and she follows the man’s directions, turning the opposite way. She finds the cellar door. It is closed, covered with scratches, bits of bloody fingernails.
They tried to get inside
. She kneels down, grabs the cellar, knocks. No movement. She calls out to the survivors below. No response. She then yells that she’s going to blow the hatch, that they need to back away. She steps back and blows several holes into the hatch with the shotgun. She sets the shotgun beside her on the floor and leans down, reaches into the splintered holes, finds the latch on the inside. She flips the latch and opens the hatch. She takes the flashlight from her belt and flips it on, shines it down into the hole.

“Oh, God.”

She shuts it off, looks away.

The smell is revolting; she wrenches to the side and vomits all over the floor. Bile crawls down her lips.

Sarah returns to the doctor’s office before noon. The man is awake, standing outside, leaning against the paneled siding of the building, keeping weight off his bad leg. He smokes a MARLBORO RED. As Sarah approaches, the shotgun dangling in her hands, he asks where the other survivors are. She reaches him, stands beside him, shakes her head.

“Dark-walkers got them?” he asks.

“No. Somehow they had an assault rifle. They killed themselves.”

The man is quiet for a moment. “Oh.”

“I guess they thought the dark-walkers would break through the hatch.”

“They didn’t.”

“No,” she says. “They didn’t.”

“Well,” the man says after a moment. “That fucking blows.”

Sarah doesn’t reply, just goes inside.

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The man finishes smoking his cigarette and tosses it into the weeds. The moisture soaks into the paper and the cigarette snuffs itself out.

They stay in Monroe for a week, fortifying the building, gathering more blankets and mattresses from the houses along the street. The man hobbles out into the cornfield and gathers the WINCHESTER and three M16s with multiple magazines. He only has one BERETTA pistol now. Sarah and the man move the raider’s corpse outside and throw it in the street; at one time, the vultures would feast, but now the dark-walkers ruled the cadavers. They bury Kyle out back, the soft tilled earth, moist with rainwater, giving easily to the hammering of their shovels. There is no ceremony, no sweet reprise, nothing to signal that anything has changed: they simply cover his grave with dirt and return into the building. The man is able to move around and walk within two days, but Mark still needs to recuperate. His wounds are substantial, and at one point, Sarah didn’t know if he would make it. When she gave her concerns to the man, the man holed himself up in the cleaned-up office and just sat there in the silence, staring at the wall, not even hearing the howls of the dark-walkers when night fell. Mark did get better, and within a week, he is moving around, talking, thanking the man and thanking Kyle post-humously for their heroic actions.

“He died trying to save me,” Mark tells the man. “He deserves to be where I’m at. I deserve to be where he’s at.”

The man tells him, “It doesn’t matter what you deserve or don’t deserve. You get what you get. And it’s usually
not
what you deserve.”

Sarah quips, “The raiders got what they deserved.”

“Yeah,” the man says. “I guess they did.”

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Chapter Thirty-Two

The Girl in the Yellow Dress

“The hottest love has the coldest end.”

- Socrates (469 – 399 B.C.)

I

The man has decided they will leave the next morning and continue north on Interstate 65. The hope of Alaska burns brightly in his mind, a great torch that cannot be extinguished, a comforting guide in the times of greatest affliction. There are only a handful of them left: himself, Mark, Katie, and Sarah. Cameron fell to the disease. Anthony killed himself over remorse regarding his dead sister. And Kyle was shot through the lungs by wicked men who received what they rightly deserved. The man is not quite sure anymore if a God exists, but watching the smoke crawl upwards from the raider’s magnified head made him feel such a quench of justice that he wondered if God may exist after all:
Where does the craving for justice originate? Is it an animal instinct, or something much greater?
These thoughts have consumed his mind.

This morning Sarah and Katie made coffee from a battery-powered burner found in the local hole-in-the-wall supermarket. The man drank his coffee quietly, and he noticed that Mark—who can now walk around and has been healing quite well—had disappeared. He followed him from a distance, watching him walk over the bridge. The man crested the bridge over the interstate and saw Mark enter a SHELL gas station.

Now the man stands outside the large bay windows, nearly out-of-sight, and sees Mark standing in the corner, flipping through pages in a book. A yellow notepad is beside the book on the counter, and he is holding a fresh rolling-ball ink pen ripped out of its packaging. The man takes a breath and pushes open the door. A bell chimes.

Mark swings around, raises his BERETTA pistol, quickly thumbs the trigger. The man drops to the ground with a shout.

The bullet shatters the window, and glass rains down upon the hunched-over man.

“Shit!” Mark exclaims, setting the gun down. He races over to the man’s side, extends a hand.

“I’m
so
sorry.”

The man takes his hand, stands.

Glass falls from his clothes.

“I thought you were one of them,” Mark says.

“They only come out at night,” the man snaps, eyes afire.

“I meant the raiders.”

“We killed them all.”

“I’m sure some escaped. Anyways. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” the man says. “At least you didn’t fucking shoot me.”

“My aim’s a little rusty.”

“Good,” the man says. He nods to the corner. “What are you doing?”

Mark suddenly looks anxious. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” the man asks.