Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (124 page)

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everyone fell under the curse. Everyone, it seemed, but the three of us. And that was, in a way, a sort of curse.”

“Why didn’t you just leave the orphanage?” the man asked. “Abandon it altogether? If there were hundreds of bodies there, you must have known the risk of disease. There’s no way you could’ve known about… the full effects… of the plague. But you should have left the orphanage, gone out to the countryside.” He rapped his knuckles on the wood of the table. “Come to a place like this.”

The girl shook her head. “We
knew
the orphanage. It was familiar. It felt
safe
. It wasn’t. We knew that. But it was like a sanctuary to us. It’s where we grew up. The great halls, the sweeping rooms, the bell-tower, the courtyards, the towers. It was
home
to us. And we were determined to stay there.” She shook her head, wrung her hands, scowled. She looked up at the man, her eyes piercing. “But you’re right. We should have left. We couldn’t get all the bodies burned before… Before the first night…

Before the first night they… The first night they came back.”

“We weren’t in the bell-tower yet. We wouldn’t—couldn’t—sleep in the rooms where it had all happened, so we were sleeping in one of the classrooms. There wasn’t a bathroom there, so we had to go down the hall to use the restroom. We all had nightmares then. We still do, just not as much. You grow accustomed to things, even this, and it becomes normalcy, just another day, like any other. It’s terrible, but that’s the way it is. You grow used to the world you live in, and over time it doesn’t begin to faze you. It’s like what they would always tell us at the orphanage: we are growing up, but we have to remain children, we have to see the eyes with fresh eyes, or we will grow cold and calloused towards it, and it won’t affect us anymore. They were right. We’ve grown cold and calloused—even though the nightmares remain.

She took a long, drawn-out breath, prepared herself, continued: “But the night it happened, when they came back… My sister had to use the bathroom… And she went, and she came back, and she looked white as a ghost. She woke both of us up, and she told us Sister Clancy was in the nursery. We didn’t believe her. We’d found Sister Clancy dead in her quarters just like everyone else. But she was adamant, and she wanted to show us. She said Sister Clancy must have been deaf, because she called out to her and she didn’t respond, but if she saw all of us… So we joined her, and she took us to the nursery, just down the hall. We looked through the large windows on the wall and we saw Sister Clancy standing in front of one of the cribs. There was something wrong with her, something not right… A clumsy… animal… gait to her. Like they used to have, before they… became more accustomed to themselves. And she was standing over the crib, and my sister raised her hand to knock, but something inside me told me that it would be a horrible idea, so I grabbed her hand in mine and put a finger to my lips, told her not to, shook my head. And then I saw my sister’s face go white, and her mouth opened to scream, and I instinctively covered her mouth and followed her eyes into the nursery. Sister Clancy had reached into the crib and grabbed one of the babies. The babies were dead, we just hadn’t gotten to burning them yet, maybe because it would have felt sacrilegious, I don’t know, but this baby was
alive
, and it was squirming in her arms. It didn’t make any sense, it still doesn’t. But I remember what she did. I remember how she raised the baby up, holding it up as if to examine it in the light, and then she snapped her head forward and bit into the baby’s neck. There was so much blood, and it covered everything, I didn’t know so much blood could… could be in a baby. And Sister Clancy just let the blood flow into her mouth, down her chin, down her neck. My other sister screamed, and Sister Clancy dropped the baby and turned her head and just
stared
at us. And her eyes were like the eyes of all the others—devoid of any resemblance to who they were before the plague. Sister Clancy was the nicest, most compassionate, most religious and devout and caring Anthony Barnhart

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and pious woman you would have ever met, but she became an absolute
monster
. She stared at us through the glass, and then she charged at us. We were moored to the ground, frozen in place, and she was knocking over cribs in her beeline right towards us. Common sense grabbed hold of me, and I grabbed my sisters and we ran down the hallway, just as Sister Clancy threw herself into the glass window. It shattered underneath her impact, and she tumbled through, fell to the ground, rolled in the glass, came sprawled up against the wall with her legs in the air. We turned down the corridor, and we could hear screams coming from the rooms in the building that we hadn’t cleared. Thank God we were far enough from those wings of the building that they couldn’t get to us. We just had Sister Clancy to worry about, and she was right behind us. We reached the room and leapt inside. There were candlesticks mounted along the walls, because they would light them at night to provide a monastic atmosphere, because we would have nuns who would sometimes come and teach and live. I yelled at my sisters to get inside, and I grabbed the iron candlestick and turned just as Sister Clancy was upon me. I drove the candlestick into her eye, and she immediately went down. I had her blood on my hands. I stood staring at her body lying at my feet, the end of the candlestick protruding from the back of her skull. Her bones had broken in such a way that they created a flap that moved up and down with the gurgle of blood. My sisters were yelling at me, so I ran inside the room. We shoved desks against the door, every desk in the room. They tried to get in that night, but they weren’t able to. They weren’t as smart then as they are now.”

“There are three things that can explain how we were able to survive that night,” she said. “The first is luck. The other is fate. And the third is divine providence.”

“Which do you believe?”

“I don’t believe in luck.”

“Do you believe in fate?”

“I believe in God.”

“You’re a walking miracle, then. No one believes in God anymore.”

“People choose not to believe.”

“God chose to let this happen. People simply follow in His footsteps.”

One of the girls continued eating her peaches.

The man was agitated. He just wanted to leave.

The girl continued her story. “All of the wings of the orphanage have large stained glass windows, windows that let in light. Except one wing. That’s where they all went. We barricaded it off, went outside, poured gasoline on the foundation, and lit it afire. We could hear them screaming inside.” A tear dotted underneath her left eye. “It was an awful thing to hear, to hear them screaming. To hear them in pain. They were people we remembered. People we’d eaten with, played with, studied with, worshipped with. It was easier, just carrying out their bodies… Because then they were dead, and there was nothing you could do, and you knew that, even withstanding the failure to understand why God would allow this to happen, that they were with God, in paradise. But hearing them
screaming
. And
smelling
them. And seeing their bones the next morning, arising out of the dust and ash of the rubble... To look at their skulls and see those empty eye sockets scorched black by the flames… That was awful. Absolutely awful.”

She wiped tears from her eye. “We boarded up the windows. Put padlocks on the doors. We put all of our stuff in the bell-tower and built alternating doors leading up to it, which we could lock and barricade from the inside. They couldn’t get up to the bell-tower, it rises one hundred feet from the ground with no ladders. And we would spend every night there, and we could hear them, and when Anthony Barnhart

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there were no clouds, and when the moon was full, we could see them. Moving about in the courtyard. Trying to get inside. Just standing down on the green, watching us. Always watching us. Always hoping. I used to think hope was something limited to mankind. But I have seen hope in their eyes. A wretched hope. And I don’t like to think of them as people.”

“Neither do I,” the man said.

“They look a lot like people.”

“It’s a stretch,” the man said.

He

believed

her.

“We wondered why we survived, why everyone else didn’t. Why it was the three of us. Triplets. And we wondered, and we wondered, and when we understood, we felt like idiots. Something connects every survivor, something within them. And it’s what connected the three of us.”

“Genetics,” the man said.

“Yes. Genetics. Something within our D.N.A..”

“I didn’t know Catholic girls knew about science.”

She ignored him. “Where did our genetics come from? From our parents. So one of our parents, if they were alive the night it happened, would have survived… Probably. There’s always the chance that whatever genetic normality—or
ab
normality—that makes us immune could be recessive, and that our parents were dominant and we received the recessive genes.”

“You’ve thought this through.”

“We decided to look for our parents. We didn’t know our father. And we didn’t know our mother. But the orphanage knew our mom, not our dad. When we were infants, they ran genetic tests on us. A name came up in the database, a woman who had been charged with assault several years ago, had her D.N.A. on file. Her name was Tabitha Staten. Like the island. In New York?”

“I know Staten Island.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“Okay.”

She continued, “We looked in the paperwork in Sister Clancy’s office. And we found our files. We had a last known address for our mom. It was on the outskirts of Denver. Along this old road with rundown houses. A drug lane. You know what that is? A place where nearly every inhabitant was a habitual drug user or drug distributor. The cops generally left it alone. We went in late October. It was already getting cold. We hoped we would find our mom. We did, but it wasn’t what we expected.”

“I told my sisters to wait outside. I tried the door. It was locked. The windows were boarded up. Most windows on the street were boarded up. It’s the kind of neighborhood, you know? I’m sure they had drive-by shootings. But maybe that’s just in the movies. I was able to climb on top of an old truck parked alongside the house, and I was able to pull myself up onto a shingled overhang. The shingles were loose, I nearly fell, and I was afraid of breaking my neck. I was able to get in through one of the second-story windows. The room was empty, covered in dust. Just boxes of papers stacked everywhere. I went down the hall and into another room. There were vats of chemicals everywhere, and there was a laboratory table and vials and mixers. It was a methamphetamine lab. I hated the idea that Mom partook of such things, but we knew what to expect of her character. But that doesn’t make her a bad person, you know? People make bad choices and get enslaved by those choices. It Anthony Barnhart

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happened to her, it could happen to anyone. I went downstairs and searched around for a while. I found her on the sofa. She was just a skeleton then, a skeleton without clothes. She’d killed herself naked. Lying next to her skull was a jagged rod of cement. And clutched in her bony fingers was an emptied tube of modeling cement. It became clear what had happened: she killed herself. She poured modeling cement down her throat, and it hardened, and she suffocated. When she was down to just a skeleton, the cement that had molded in her throat was left in its original form.”

“We never knew if she went crazy with the plague, or if she killed herself afterwards, unable to handle what had happened.”

“Who knows,” the man said.

“Either way… She was gone. And I guess it didn’t bother us too much. Because she’d always been gone, you know?” She shrugged. “I don’t know what we hoped for. Maybe we hoped that when she saw us, she would become a loving mom and protect us from the hell of this world.”

“That’s ridiculous,” the man said. “You went for her. She didn’t go for you. And she knew where you were.”

The girl stared at him, her green eyes afire. “Don’t judge, lest ye be judged.”

“That’s not the first time I’ve heard the Bible quoted,” the man growled. “And last time it didn’t end so well.”

“What happened? Did it shake your perceptions?”

“No,” he said, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms. “A lot of people died.”

She felt uncomfortable, tried to swallow it away. “Oh.”

The man looked over at the third sister. “Are you almost done eating?”

Her face flushed red; she enjoyed hiding in her sister’s shadow.

The man glared at her. “Hurry up.”

The talkative girl continued with their story. “When winter came, things got easier. It was colder. And we couldn’t have a fire in the bell-tower, it would attract the bandits. We would always shake in our sleep, and Deshay nearly lost her toes.” She nodded to the quiet girl still eating peaches. “But it was easier, because the vampires, they began to dwindle, and then they disappeared. Most of them went straight into Denver, into the big buildings, where it was warmer. Even into the sewers. We got a lot of snow. None of the factories were working, there was no energy being produced. It got a lot colder, and it snowed a lot more. We had fifteen feet of snow at one point, and we had to carve paths to the gas stations and supermarkets to get supplies and food. When the snow melted, there were bodies everywhere. The vampires, they’re not like the ones in the legends. They’re not supernatural, they’re just as fragile as we are. And a lot of them froze or starved to death. Every now and then we still find another skeleton in raggedy clothing, the flesh rotted away. Not that there aren’t anymore vampires. There’s lots of them. Denver had a population of around 600,000 people. Most of them—

the vast majority—became vampires. And there’s still a lot of them around. But we’re knowledgeable about them. We know their weaknesses. Sunlight, for example. And they’re not the brightest, though recently they’ve been showing… promise. But our main worry now is bandits. Some of them found us last night. They tried to get inside, but they couldn’t find us. They always come at night. They get some sort of perverse thrill out of it. And that’s why we made this place.” She swept her arms outwards. “This is our safe haven. The bandits don’t know about it. We’ve stocked it fully and prefortified it. They won’t find us here.”