Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (119 page)

“It frightens me,” the man says, suddenly breaking the quiet.

“What frightens you?” Sarah asks.

“What we’ve become,” he says. “Mark and I used to sit and drink coffee every morning. Just like we’re doing now. It was our ritual. Those rituals… Back before the plague, when someone died…

Those rituals took on new meaning. They became
saturated
with memories, with meaning. But here we sit, drinking coffee… And I feel nothing.” He is quiet for some time. “What have we become? You slept peacefully last night. You slept peacefully in the arms of a man who strangled his best friend.”

She begins to protest, but he won’t let her: “It terrifies me, Sarah. Cameron. Anthony. Kyle. Katie. Mark. I’ve barely mourned for any of them. Death has become commonplace, and our emotions are seared.” He releases his coffee mug and rubs his temples, and his eyes are filled with rage pointed upon himself. “My mind has become cold, bitter, calloused. A graveyard with freshly-dug graves ready to swallow and bury and forget the next fate-stricken soul.”

II

Sarah is loading up the car. The man goes down into the basement one last time. He peels the bricks away from the windows, and great shafts of light burst into the damp room, pushing away at the darkness. The man stands in the light, shading his eyes, and turns, and he sees the bed with bloodsoiled sheets tossed to and fro from the struggle which ended the poor boy’s life. The man walks over to the bed and looks down at the bloody stains, illuminated in their red-brown hues under the brilliant sunlight. The man feels something burning within him, and he understands this feeling, the Anthony Barnhart

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same feeling he felt after Kira’s corpse was mutilated, the same feeling when he beheld the horrors of the Cult of Dagon, the same feeling he felt when Mark was carried away by the ruthless savages. This feeling that spawns acts of lunacy. The man grits his teeth, and he turns, moves to one of the shelves lined with bottles of alcohol. He grabs one and heads upstairs. He hears Sarah coming in through the front door of the farmhouse. He reaches the kitchen and goes through the drawers, finds what he is looking for: a table cloth.

Sarah comes up behind him, asks what he is doing.

“Nothing,” the man replies, stashing the cloth in his jeans pocket and clutching the bottle of wine.

She takes the wine from him, turns it over. “My God.”

“What?”

“This is ROMANEE CONTI.”

“Okay.”

“It’s one of the most expensive wines in France.”

“We’re not going to drink it,” he says.

Her eyes spell confusion. “Then why do you have it?”

“We need to make a stop in town.”

The MERCEDES reaches Victoria in fifteen minutes. The man slows down the car and gets off the exit, passing the PHILLIPS OIL. It has been three weeks since he’s come into town, three weeks spent waiting hour-by-hour in that decrepit farmhouse, three weeks beholding the drama of Mark’s decay, three weeks that ended when the man’s hands strangled the breath and life out of the boy. The man’s blood boils, and he accelerates, the force of the propulsion pushing both he and Sarah into the backs of their seats. The I.G.A. comes into view, and the man swerves the car into the parking lot. He pulls it to a stop, throws it into PARK, gets out. He glares at Sarah. “Wait here.” She watches him with confusion as he pops the gas tank lid and gets out. She cranes her neck around in her seat and watches as the man unscrews the tank’s cap and stuffs the towel inside. She shakes her head as he withdraws the cloth and sets it on the trunk’s hood. He sets the bottle of wine beside it and pulls out the bayonet. He carves out the cork, and then he stuffs the towel deep inside the wine bottle.
He’s
making a bomb
, Sarah realizes. The man walks away from the car, not even looking at her, and he enters the grocery store. Sarah sits back in her seat and stares through the windshield, the sun reaching its zenith in the sky. She leans forward and cranks up the air conditioning. It’s hot in the car.

The man moves between the aisles, searching. He finds the aisle with canned goods, and he grabs several, stuffs them under his arm. He moves towards the stairwell leading up into the employee’s area. He sees the doorway shut, the doorway he had passed through, where he had heard the weeping of the damned. The stairs had moved upwards into a room with filing cabinets, and that room had windows that overlooked the innards of the store. The man looks up at the tinted windows, knows who—
No, what
—lies beyond. He sets down the wine and cloth and cans. He bends down and picks up one of the cans, stands, fits it into the palm of his hand. He reels back his arm and prepares to throw.

∑Ω∑

The two of them stood in the baseball field outside their hometown. Late June. The worn leather glove felt so large wrapped around his hand. He picked up the ball and just eyed it, the dirty Anthony Barnhart

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whiteness and the stitches. His father stood twenty feet away, told him to throw it. He had never thrown a ball before. He looked up, a boy of only six years old, and his father told him, “Just arch your arm back and throw it!” The boy did so, and the ball lifted off, then pitched into the ground after ten feet, rolling through the dirt. His father moved forward to pick up the ball, tossed it back to his son. The boy tried to grab it with his free hand. “Use your glove,” his father said. After a while the boy was throwing the ball, and though he was not the best—his father generally had to stumble to the right and left and then kneel down to pick up the ball—his father was proud of him. As they left the baseball field, the sun sinking behind them, his dad said, “You’re going to be a star baseball player when you grow up, you know that?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said, clutching his glove.

His father looked down at him. “What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I want to be a pilot.”

“Everyone wants to be something,” his father said.

“Yeah, and I want to be a pilot.” He looked at his dad, grinned wildly, spun around in a circle, arms outstretched, still holding onto the glove, laughing. “I want to fly!”

His dad chuckled, rubbed his son’s sandy-blond hair. “That’s nice, but you’re going to be a baseball player. We’re going to come out here every evening and practice, okay? And then we’re going to put you in a baseball league. You’re going to blow all of those kids out of the water.”

“I like throwing the ball with you, Daddy.”

“I like it, too.”

“I like baseball. It’s fun. But I want to be a pilot.”

“That’s nonsense,” his father had said. “You’ll never be a pilot.”

∑Ω∑

The man winds back, and with a shout of pure and un-adultered rage, he releases. The can shoots through the air like a rocket and slams into the glass; the impact sends the can
through
the glass, and the glass webs and shatters, falling down like rain onto the tiled floor below. He can hear shuffling and screaming within, the sunlight making its way into the room. A crimson smile crawls over his lips, and he bends down, picks up the wine with its gasoline-soaked cloth. He pulls out his lighter and ignites the flame, presses it to the cloth. The end of the cloth ignites, the flames beginning to creep downwards towards the wine in the bottle. The man winds back to throw again.

∑Ω∑

They sat around the dinner table that night. The boy ate quietly as his mom and dad “talked.”

His mother said, “Let him be what he wants to be, Michael.”

“Pilots don’t make a damn penny. His life will be worth nothing.”

“And baseball is a guarantee of happiness?”

“It’s not about happiness. It’s about success.”

“Just because
you
didn’t succeed at your dreams doesn’t mean you get to thrust them onto your son and make them
his
burden.”

His father reached across the table, grabbed his mother by the neck, throttled her. “You’re just a fucking cunt bitch, you know that?! Fuck.” He released her, settled down, looked over at his son, who hung his head in shame. “Eat your fucking vegetables. I’m getting you out of school tomorrow, so you’d better eat those damn vegetables.”

Anthony Barnhart

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His mother rubbed her sore neck, tears in her eyes.

The boy ate his vegetables, pretended nothing happened, tried to hold back the tears. He just wanted to be a pilot.

He just wanted his mommy to be safe.

He

just

wanted

his

daddy

to

die.

∑Ω∑

He chucks the wine with its cloth into the air, and he watches with a malicious grin as it soars into the room. There comes a moment of silence, the sound of the bottle breaking, the liquid spilling. And then there comes the great rush of fire, and flames burst out from the broken window, licking up at the ceiling. The fire is hot against the man’s face, tinting his skin maroon. He watches the flames, mesmerized at their beauty and functionality. He can hear the weeping of the damned once more, the miserable creatures pinned between a boiling death in sunlight and a burning death in the fire. There is no viable choice, and the man can only close his eyes and draw in the deep scent of burnt human flesh, a sickly-sweet incense. He hears the sound of a splintering door, and he opens his eyes and turns his head, sees two dark-walkers spinning out into the sunlight to escape the fire. Almost immediately their flesh begins to sputter and boil, and they tumble into an aisle filled with oriental sauces, knocking it to the ground with the chattering of glass and spilling of sauce. The man patiently walks over, the fire now at his back, scaling up the walls, and he looks down upon the creatures, their skin a fiery mess, their eyes wild with pain, their mouths contorted into eternal screams. He hears movement behind him, and he turns to see the little girl stumbling outward, scraping at her own face with hands turned into claws. She falls onto the ground, twists and moans, kicks her feet and flails her arms. Burns cover half her body, and the jaw bone on the right side of her face is exposed, a marshmallow white. The man bites his lip and walks over. He looks down at her, and then he lifts his boot and slams it down into her forehead, crushing the bone into the brain. Blood and puss seep onto the heel of his boot. He leaves her alone and exits the store as it raises itself up in flames.

III

They leave Victoria behind, the I.G.A. blooming in flames like the unfurling petals of a newborn lily. Hard rains come, hammering upon the roof of the car, and they drive slowly, blinded by the fog and rain. Lightning dances around them, reaching down like the fingers of God, splashing into quicklyforming puddles amidst the strewn cornfields and patches of woodlands. It gets so bad that the man cannot see in front of him, and he stops the car in the middle of the highway. They sit listening to the rain, a cacophonous drilling on the roof of the car, and the man smokes his cigarettes and ashes in the ashtray. Sarah complains that the car is becoming too smoky, and without a retort he cracks the window. Water drips inside. He continues to smoke.

The rain continues.

The man speaks. “Katie was a good girl.”

Sarah looks over at him. “What?”

He stares forward into the rain. The windshield is a smeared mess. “Katie. She was a good girl.”

“Oh,” Sarah says, turning back to her own window. “I know.”

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“I didn’t treat her right.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“I treated her like shit. I always accused her of slowing us down. I blamed her for what happened to Kyle. I told her that I didn’t give a shit about her. I told her that I would go back for Mark, but I would never go back for her.”

“And you’re remorseful over it?”

The man is quiet for a second. “No.”

Sarah is shocked, looks over at him.

His eyes are cold, his features stern. “I despised her. I don’t know why. I didn’t even care that much that she died. I cried a little bit. I cried over her more than I cried over Mark. I don’t understand it, that’s for sure.” He looks over at her, his voice crystal-clear despite the rain hammering on the roof of the car. “I don’t know why I hated her. I really don’t. But I genuinely
despised
her. I even wanted her to die, in some sadistic sense.” His eyes are filling with tears. “I’m not… I’m not crying for her…”

He looks away, blinking the tears from his eyes. His vision is smeared just like the windshield. “I’m crying because of what I have become. I’ve become a monster.”

Sarah bites her lip, undoes her seatbelt, leans over to comfort him. He reels away, pressing himself against the door of the car. “No. It’s not okay.”

She says his name, sweetly.

He will have none of it. “We’re just animals. That’s all we are.” His voice is clear of its shaking, now hard and resolute. “Society taught us differently. Religion taught us differently. But now reality has bitch-slapped us across the face, proclaiming, ‘Arise, Soul-Less Creature, and be deceived no longer.’ It’s not okay that I’m a monster. And it’s okay that I’m a monster. Because I’m not a monster. I’m just an animal. We’re all just a bunch of animals, a bunch of big, hairy beasts—some hairier than others—running around like ants. Before this plague, I thought I was a good guy. But now this has revealed who I really am.”

“But you
are
a good man,” Sarah says.

He shakes his head, the tears returning. “No. I’m a selfish, self-serving bastard.”

“No…”

“You told me as much. Don’t deny it now just because I cry.”

“I was wrong…”

“
That’s
convenient,” he says.

“Then how come you’re crying? If you’re a bad man?”

“Because I’m realizing who I really am.”

She is quiet now.

The man composes himself. “The only reason I loved Kira… is because I wanted to fuck her.”

The slap across his face burns, and his eyes are blurred with confusion. Sarah is leaning forward in her seat, facing him, her teeth gritted, eyes afire. He rubs his cheek, the burning sensation growing, the shock wearing off.