Steps (4 page)

Chapter 7

Faces in the Dark   
(Edwin)

E
dwin stood on the porch with Perry on one side, both of them with their shotguns unslung, while Amalie and Shelly Lynn waited behind them. Dale’s gunshot lingered in the mountain silence like an afterthought. For a while, Edwin let the silence ring with his thoughts, and then he said, “You saw a man by your truck?”

The boy nodded his head. “Yes, sir. A bigfoot or something. He was huge and hairy.”

Dale, his wife, and two boys stood in the driveway. One of the boys shifted his eyes from the cabin to the trees to the truck. The other son, the one speaking, stood between his mother and father in a stance much like Dale’s. Dale held his rifle in a hunter’s grip, while his wife, Precious, fingered a silver revolver She cradled it between her breasts with one hand around the barrel as if she might nurse it. To Edwin, the pistol seemed heavy and uncomfortable in her small hands.

Dale spit, sniffed. “Found tracks, too, Ed. Big ’uns. I could about near put both feet in ’em. Jake here says he was checking out the truck, huge sumbitch. Tracks went off down yonder, into the woods. I didn’t follow ’em, hell no, but I could see where he broke through the under-bush.”

“Tracks about this big?” Edwin held his hands apart.

“You seen him?”

“No, just the tracks.”

“Ed, what are you talking about?” Amalie said.

Edwin faced her. “I didn’t want to scare you and the kids.”

“We’re scared enough as it is. If there’s something out here, we need to—”

“What was I supposed to say? I found footprints? There’s someone else out here? What the hell am I supposed to say, Amalie?”

His voice had risen, and Amalie stared at him. “I’m sorry,” Edwin said. “I don’t mean to snap. I’m sorry. I should have told you. I’ll keep you in the loop, okay? All right?”

She still didn’t speak, and so Edwin turned back to Dale.

“We need to come in the cabin,” Dale said. “Don’t feel safe out here. We ain’t sick, man. Ain’t none of us running a fever or nothing, and we ain’t been around nobody for going on four, five days. You want to check our eyes?” Dale pulled his eyelid down and leaned forward in the driveway. “Look, we’re friends, ain’t we, Ed?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we need to stay friends, don’t we? Ain’t nobody else gonna be your friend, and you can take them words as Biblical, praise Jesus, and slap your momma all the way to the bank. What we seen on the road, all them cars and shit . . . Ed, this ain’t no game. You all been up here by yourselves. You ain’t seen it. I’ll take you down the hill and show you the bridal suite.” Dale winced. “Naw that burial site is what I mean, all them soldiers on tractors piling up bodies two stories high. I’ll take you into town, show you the shops been busted up. You ain’t seen the cattle trailers full of people. Folks is heading to the hills, Ed, and you’ll need friends like me and Precious and my boys here. More like us is coming. I’ll take you—”

Shelly Lynn cried, and Edwin heard his wife say, “Shh, Baby, everything will be fine.” Then she added, “Ed, I’m taking her inside. Perry, come on, let’s go inside.”

“He’s twelve, Amalie. He’s not a boy anymore.” Edwin spoke to Perry. “You’re not a boy anymore, are you?”

Perry shook his head. “No, sir.”

“Good. Why don’t you let Perry stay out here with me. It’s all right Shelly Lynn, go with your momma. Grab a candle, head into the living room and color something for us. What’s your favorite color, Dale?”

“Yeller and orange,” Dale said. “Like the sun.”

“Why don’t you color us something yellow and orange, Baby Bird, can you do that?”

Shelly Lynn nodded, and when the cabin door closed behind her, Dale said, “We can take the up-downs, the upstairs is what I mean. Stay there a day or two, have us a bathroom and ever’ thing. We brought our own food, and me and the boys can hunt us up some grub if we run low. Boy, pay attention.” Dale nudged the one son’s shoulder, the one who seemed distracted. The boy shuffled his feet. Edwin thought he might fall, but Precious steadied him. Jake, the other son, moved between them and wrapped his arm around his brother. They were identical twins, but the steady one was heavier than the other, with longer hair and a dirtier face.

Dale spoke. “Ed, I ain’t really asking, you understand that, right? I’m telling you what’s about to happen. I built this here cabin. I got a right to use it. We don’t have the bug.”

There was a long silence, and then Dale continued. “We’re friends, ain’t we, Ed?”

“Please, Ed,” Dale’s wife said. Precious rubbed the pistol and glanced at her sons as she spoke. “We aren’t sick. Really, we aren’t. We’ve already lost so much.”

Precious cried and handed the pistol to Jake, the steady son who had spoken. The twin boys were about Perry’s age, but seemed much older, harder, with worn edges around their eyes and hands. When his brother released him, the unsteady one took a few steps away from his family, deeper into the dark, while Jake moved forward next to his father. Edwin noticed he thumbed back the hammer on the pistol.

“I have a right to use this cabin,” Dale said. “I built the damned thing. What did you do? I ain’t sleeping in the truck another night. We ain’t got the bug.”

Edwin flicked the safety off his shotgun and said, “Two more nights, Dale. Just two more nights and we’ll know you’re clean.”

“
We ain’t got the bug!
” Dale screamed. His rifle rose, spoke, and jerked. Dale’s son leveled the pistol and fired.

Edwin answered with an explosion that struck Dale’s gun and face, spun him backward and blew the rifle into the dirt. The man tried to keep his feet, but fell over his heels.

Edwin didn’t want to shoot the boy, but the pistol steadied at them cocked again. As Edwin shucked another round into the chamber, Perry’s shotgun opened the boy’s head and folded him onto the ground.

The other son ran down the driveway, and then there was only the screaming of Precious, something inhuman as she fell over her son and screeched unintelligible words that sounded like an ancient language from the time when man and beast were not so different.

Precious cradled her son’s ruined head in her lap as Dale kicked along the ground backward. Dale rolled to his hands and knees and screamed mangled words from a mangled mouth. He tried to pick up the rifle, but dropped it and fell on top of it, breathing hard and mumbling to the dirt.

Behind him, Edwin heard Amalie screaming, and in a higher pitch, Shelly Lynn.

Precious yelled, leaned over her son, and picked up the pistol. Her hands shook when she lifted the weapon. She steadied herself, caught her breath, and said to Edwin, “Dale’s eyes were going red. We all were.” She put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.

Chapter 8

Coy Runs   
(Coy)

A
s he watched from the woods, crouched on his heels, his mother raised the pistol, put it to her head, and fired. A red spew erupted above her left ear. Her head snapped sideways, and she fell limp on top of Jake.

Coy Lincoln felt nothing. He should feel something, a pain perhaps, or a longing. The cloud of an emotion formed in his mind’s eye, but dissolved when he reached for it. He should cry out or run at the man with the gun, or fall on his mother and weep.

Instead, a complete nothingness consumed him, as if his mind had been numbed. Coy shifted his weight from one heel to the other. His feet itched inside his boots. He touched the back of his hand to his head and felt a flame of fevered flesh. His hands shook, his eyes burned, and his lips trembled. He stared forward, mouth gaping, void of emotion, unable to look away.

The man and his son stood on the porch with their shotguns aimed into the driveway. The man’s wife screamed at him from inside the cabin, “What did you do!” She threw open the door and yanked their boy so hard he nearly dropped his shotgun, the one he used to shoot Jake in the head. The boy appeared terrified, as if pulling the trigger transformed his flesh to wood. He stumbled into the cabin.

The man stood on the porch and searched the darkness. There wasn’t much light, just the moon, but his eyes would be adjusted to the dark by now. Coy bet if he moved, the man would see him, and the man would kill him like he had the others. For some reason, the thought of killing excited Coy, and he fought an urge to run at the man for no other reason than to feel the rip of the shot through his own head. Maybe it would tear out the numbness.

Coy’s protective instinct dominated the urge, and he remained unmoving in his hiding place. The man’s eyes searched the woods, passed over Coy, and focused on his family inside the cabin. Maybe the man would fall on his family and launch a spray into each of them. He would call Coy to join him, and they would warm their hands inside the exploded chests.

A white light grew from the man’s back, surrounded him, and expanded until it swallowed the cabin and the treetops. It blanketed the stars and the ground like a burning sun, and Coy held up his hand to ward it off. The heat cut through his palm and eyelids. Even when he closed his eyes the light scorched his retinas in a blinding rage, and for a moment he stumbled through the trees in a vain attempt to escape its sudden wrath. His arms lashed out and met the solid trunk of a tree, followed by air, another tree, and limbs with briars on them. His feet sucked into the mud. He fell, rose, lunged forward, and ran on.

He slapped the light until his lungs burned. As he ran, he struck the heel of his palm against his forehead harder and harder until the light subsided, and the darkness of the real-world coalesced in front of him. The trees wavered and shook with a breeze he could not sense. He slammed his palm into his head again and felt so much nothingness that he wondered if he had made contact, or missed altogether. Only the blurring of his sight suggested he hit his target.

Exhausted, Coy fell to the forest floor and caught his breath. After a while his heart settled. He rolled to a seated position, picked up a handful of mulched leaves and let it sift through his fingers. He put some in his mouth, chewed away the grit, swallowed the water, spit it into his palm and streaked the remains along his cheeks.

He stood and tried to find the cabin and the man, but he must have run too far down the hill. Something had happened. He tried to remember the event, but all he recalled was the image of a man on a porch with a woman screaming on the other side of a bay window.

The trees thinned as he stumbled, and he recognized something in the darkness ahead. Coy angled toward it and found a mud-caked truck with the windows wiped clean by a man’s palm. He walked to the truck, pressed his hand into the window, and ran his fingers along the streaked mud. Inside he saw his blanket. He thumped his forehead into the glass to make the glass go away.

The window remained even when he struck it with his fist. He put one foot on the rear tire and launched himself into the bed. Here were other supplies, which had not been distributed to the campsite a few feet away. Coy knelt and rifled through an old backpack, found shirts and women’s undergarments. He tossed it over the bed, into the woods. Behind it he discovered a box of canned food. He lifted a can of baked beans, put it to his nose, licked it, and threw it toward the backpack.

Next to the box rested a pair of women’s boots with embroidered wings on them. The wings would be pink and blue if they weren’t blackened by the shadows. He touched the boots and envisioned a woman wearing them. She leaned over a dead boy with Coy’s face, but not his name, next to a dying man. She lifted a gun to her head and shot herself.

Coy stood, squinted up the driveway toward where the cabin would be, opened his mouth and forced air through his throat. He heard a scream echo out of the trees. He wondered if that was him, or some creature just beyond where he could see. The scream intensified until the bright light scorched his face. He batted the light and fell through it, groping until his head and chest were met by the rain-softened mud of the driveway.

He lay on the ground while the light subsided. Stars appeared dancing through the treetops. When the night sky calmed, Coy rolled to his feet, kicked over a gas burner, picked up a lawn chair and threw it against the truck, ripped the ground tarp out of the mud and flapped it skyward.

As the tarp drifted to the ground, a pine tree appeared behind it. A white plastic bag of trash dangled from the side of the tree. At the top of the bag, a black-bladed knife tacked it to the pine. Coy walked to it, touched the bag, smelled the empty cans inside, wrenched the knife free, and let the trash clank to the ground. He rolled the knife over in his hands. He recognized it, but could not remember why. It bore a name, because someone had named it. The boy with his face, but not his name, christened the knife. He could not remember, but whatever the case, the knife felt familiar. He swiped at the darkness and followed it through the trees, racing away from the cabin and down the mountainside.

Chapter 9

What Edwin Did   
(Edwin)

E
dwin’s hands shook and his scalp tingled. He felt drunk to the point where his nerves boiled and his eyes defocused. Three bodies divided and became six in the driveway. He gripped his shotgun with bear-claw force.

He closed his eyes, steadied himself, and when he opened them, the dual driveways merged into one, and the blurry bodies shimmered and blended.

He glanced to the cabin. A single candle lit the master bedroom with just enough light to outline undetailed shapes. He could not see Shelly Lynn, but she had to be in there somewhere because he heard her scream. After a brief search, he identified the form beneath the covers on the bed, curled up tight as a pillow and just as still.

Next to the bed, Amalie crouched with Perry, who leaned on the shotgun like a sinner on the cross, knees on the floor with his head bowed, chest pulsing with heavy gulps of air. Amalie rubbed Perry’s back and glared at Edwin.

In the candlelight his wife coalesced into a bloodless, expressionless work of morbidity, a head of white clay which stared at him with parted lips and unblinking eyes. Only the flickering of the candle suggested life. Her pupils dilated until they took up all of the iris, so huge and black that he could stick his finger into them like a man would a pigeonhole.

Amalie shook her head. It was almost imperceptible, but it crushed Edwin in the sudden-stop way that terminates a long, long fall. It knocked him breathless because something ripped with her shake, something deep and irreparable. She put her nose into the top of Perry’s head, closed her eyes, and rubbed his back the way she had when he was tiny, bald, and suckling.

Edwin watched not because he expected her to look up, but because he could not turn away. She touched Perry’s shotgun, parted it from his hands, and lowered it to the floor. She rose, helped Perry to his feet, and dug Shelly Lynn from beneath the blanket. Amalie grasped them by the hands, led them through the bedroom door, and closed it behind her with the soft, resolute manner of absolute finality.

Nothing else moved inside the room, and it was then that Edwin noticed the hole in the windowpane from one of the shots fired at him and Perry. Somehow the bullet had not shattered the glass, but had created a small, neat punch-out the exact diameter of the round, or about the size of a child’s pinky finger. The bullet penetrated at Edwin’s shoulder, or Perry’s head, on the side of the porch where his son had been standing.

He touched the glass and searched for the other bullet hole. He found it in the wood siding of the cabin at the same height as the other, but aimed toward his side of the porch. The hole was larger than the one in the window, and it seemed to him that this must be from the pistol, from the boy, a large, slow-velocity round which flattens and expands on impact. He stared at Dale Lincoln. The man had been aiming at Perry.

Edwin’s feet could not be trusted, but he pitted them against the porch steps anyway. He moved into the driveway, kept a safe distance away from Dale, Precious, and Jake. Edwin listened as Dale panted. It should have been a torturous sound to hear a man die, but it felt no less disturbing than the hissing of air from a bleeding tire. Dale’s bullet hole in the window, aimed at Perry’s head, changed everything. Edwin waited until the panting stopped, and then he stepped a wide berth around the dead ones.

His eyes panned through the trees for the boy who ran. Edwin wasn’t sure what he would do if he found the boy, or if he had a choice in the matter. It was like deciding to breathe or hold his breath at the bottom of the ocean. It didn’t matter what decision he made, because the end result remained the same.

As he stalked down the driveway, a yell pierced the darkness, followed by the absolute silence of an Arkansas mountaintop. Edwin thought it might be Dale’s other son, but no human throat could have withstood such strain.

He raised the shotgun as Dale’s truck emerged from the darkness. The camp looked as if a windstorm had swept through, tossed out the goods from the back of the truck, and slung aside the lawn chairs and cooking supplies. Edwin swept the shotgun around him wishing he would see nothing. He received his wish. He lowered the gun and walked to where the driveway met the mountain road.

A quiet darkness crouched over the road, all of it abandoned and still as the dirt at his feet. He found himself on a different planet than had existed two months ago. He turned, marched back up the hill to the cabin, kept a safe distance from the dead ones, and mounted the porch.

Edwin tapped on the door. He tapped again, tried the handle, locked, and then moved to the side of the cabin, checked the back door, locked. They must have gone upstairs.

“Amalie!” he hollered.

She didn’t answer, of course she didn’t answer, and so Edwin made his way to the front porch and sat on the steps. While he thought, he plucked a round off the stock sleeve and shoved it into the shotgun. Seven rounds were not many, and he had to make them count, if the big man or bigfoot heard the racket and came to investigate.

“Red eyes,” Edwin said, because that’s what Precious said. If the bug was airborne and contagious as they claimed, Edwin might be infected. His whole family might be infected. He could only do one thing, something inconceivable a few hours earlier, and it wouldn’t wait until morning.

He stepped into the woods and found a large branch the width of his thigh and twice his height. He dragged it to the driveway and used it as a lever to push the bodies together. He parted the guns from their owners, shoved the weapons a safe distance, dropped the branch on top of the bodies, and searched the woods for smaller branches and limbs.

Dawn came before he grew satisfied with his fire-stack, and the sun rose to noon before the fire raged so hot he could stand no nearer than ten feet. He used half a gallon of diesel to start it burning. He sat in the rocking chair and watched it burn, and must have fallen asleep, because the generator kicked on and woke him.

Amalie appeared through the glass in the hallway, her hand on the generator switch, gazing away from him as if he were too bright to stare into. He stood, stepped to the door, and tugged on it. He knocked for her to unlock it, but she ignored him. She flicked on the television to its blue screen, and stalked into the den.

Edwin fell into the rocking chair with the shotgun across his lap. The sun rested low over the trees, maybe an hour of daylight left, and the shadows grew long and gray as he napped. He closed his eyes, but the smell and crackle of the fire chased away sleep anytime it approached. Relenting to the uselessness of sleep, he opened his eyes and let them burn with the smoke as it wafted over the cabin.

The bodies smoldered beneath the fire. They became charred, hideous things, rank and vile as their flesh cooked to black and peeled from the bone. Whatever humanity they possessed burned away until they became
things
. Edwin forced himself to watch the transformation as his penance for not knowing the right thing to do, if such a choice existed.

He hung his head, slunk into the forest and dragged more limbs to the fire. He stacked them haphazardly, allowing the fire to form a wide ring of sterilized ash in the driveway’s gravel. Maybe he would burn the underbrush between here and Dale’s truck. Maybe he would burn Dale’s truck.

He crept to the window and watched his family as they huddled around the television. Amalie flipped through the channels, displaying the same blue-screen message and presidential seal they had been seeing for days. She flicked off the television and tossed the remote onto the coffee table. She made a point of ignoring Edwin as she padded through the hallway toward him and the generator switch. “Amalie,” he said.

She swiped the generator switch and put her back to him. The generator and Edwin both fell silent. Since he had no food, he walked to the hose behind the cabin and drank from it. The well water tasted earthy with a chewy grit to it. He paced the cabin perimeter searching for footprints, and found a few which were either new or missed. He squatted and touched the print.

As dusk fell and his bonfire grew hotter, he scanned the driveway, past Dale’s truck and down to the mountain road. Dale’s tracks were drying into hard-edged ruts. Edwin followed the tracks with his eyes down the mountainside, into the trees, around a bend until they disappeared.

He knelt and touched the ruts. Where Dale’s truck tracks angled into his driveway, a fresh set pressed them flat and kept rolling up the hill. Edwin listened, heard nothing higher up. He hiked a hundred yards following the new tracks, checking for another driveway, but the tread-marks wound ever upward. Someone had made it this far and kept going, probably to another cabin. His own cabin was not visible from the road, but the driveway formed a scar leading right to them.

Edwin returned to his driveway and wiped away Dale’s tracks. He threw brush and limbs across the entrance and spread leaves and pine needles along the roadside. If he had done this sooner, maybe Dale would have missed the cabin. They would have kept driving up, camped on the road and let become whatever would become of them. Maybe that was the right thing, and he screwed it up.

Darkness overcame him as he labored, but at the end he stood in the middle of the road and inspected his work. He would need to do more tomorrow.