Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (125 page)

“Really?” the man asked. “I found this place. Why won’t they? You’re better off in the orphanage, if you ask me.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

583

“You’re not a bandit.”

“How do you know?”

“You would have already done awful things to us.”

“I may still be planning on it.”

She leaned back in her seat, eyed him. “You’re strange.”

“I’ve been called a lot of things. But never ‘strange.’”

“You act like an ass. But you’re not.”

“You haven’t known me long enough.”

“You fed us when you didn’t have to.”

“It’s your food.”

“And you stayed here with us when you didn’t have to.”

“I’m just trying to decide how to cook each one of you.”

The girl smiled. “And you’re funny.”

The man said nothing, looked away.

“What’s wrong?” the girl asked.

“Nothing,” he said. He pushed the chair, back stood. “I have to go now.”

III

“Where are you going?” the girl asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, grabbing the GARAND from against the counter.

“You’re just going to leave?”

“Yes.”

“At least tell me where you’re going.”

He looked at her. “Why?”

“So I can pray for you.”

“I don’t need you to pray for me.”

“Maybe you do.”

“I don’t
want
you to pray for me.”

“I’ll pray for you anyways.”

“Thanks,” he said, turning to go.

“Please, Mister. Just tell me where you’re going.”

He sighed, turned. “Why?”

“I’m curious. That’s all.”

“Fine. I’m going to Aspen.”

“That’s in the mountains.”

“Yes it is,” he said. “I want to be there in a few days.”

“Why are you going to Aspen? It’s populated. Just like Denver.”

“It’s not as big as Denver.”

“But it’s secluded. All the vampires would have stayed there.”

“Maybe they froze to death.”

“Tell me why you’re going to Aspen.”

Anthony Barnhart

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He looked down the hallway, towards the door, back to the girl. “There’s a small community there. Or at least there was, a few months ago. They’ve fortified the entire town. It’s like a microcosm of civilization.”

The third girl, quiet until now, spoke up: “Sa-Rah.”

The bold girl looked over at her. “What?”

She asked, “Do you think they have other kids there?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She looked at the man. “What do you think?”

The man shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe. Sure. Probably.”

The girl leapt up from her chair, knocking over the empty can of peaches.

“Jessica!” the bold girl scolded. “Sit down.”

She refused to sit down, just stared at the man, eyes hopeful. “Can we come?”

“No,” the man said.

“Why?” she asked.

The bold girl stood, reached across the table, grabbed her sister’s arm. “Sit down!”

“I want to go!” she wailed.

The man repeated, stern, “No.”

“Why not?” she demanded once more.

“Because you’ll just slow me down.”

And he left, exiting through the front door.

Sa-Rah leapt up from her seat, told her sisters to stay put, and followed after him.

The man was down the front porch’s steps and nearly to the MERCEDES when he heard the front door opening behind him. He gripped the GARAND tighter and turned. The bold girl—her name was SaRah—stood watching him.

“What?” he asked.

She answered him with a question, her voice tender, pleading: “Why not?”

He didn’t answer for a second, then, “You heard me.”

“We won’t slow you down.”

“I’ve heard it before,” he said. “It won’t end well.”

“We won’t be a burden.”

“You’ll be a burden to me,” he said. “You’re safe here.”

“You just said we weren’t.”

“What the hell do I know?”

She seemed irritated by his language. “Please. Let us come with you.”

“I said, ‘No,’” he said.

“Give me a real reason.”

He walked around the side of the sports-car, opened the front door. Looking at her from over the hood, he said, “You want a real reason? Here’s one: you’re right. I’m an ass. And I don’t give a damn about you or your sisters.”

Sa-Rah glared at him, her eyes wound into a frightening scowl.

“Oh,” the man said. “Remember: don’t go into the bedroom.”

He got into the car and set the GARAND in the seat next to him and put the keys in the ignition and twisted the keys. The engine rumbled to life, a gentle throbbing. The gas gauge went to ¾ full. He looked out the window, and he could see Sa-Rah standing on the front porch, her sisters flanking her. Jessica and Deshay, if he remembered correctly. He listened to the engine idling, and he just stared at Anthony Barnhart

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them, and they stared back. Jessica began to cry, and Deshay moved around Sa-Rah and wrapped her arms around her sister, comforted her. The man watched them, but his vision blurred, transformed, and he was in the living room again, and they were cuddling on the couch, commercials playing between back-to-back television shows, and they were warm and it rained outside.

∑Ω∑

“We should try for children.”

Her words caught him off guard. He had no response.

“I’m taking your silence as affirmation,” she said, nervousness in her voice.

“Children would be nice,” he said after a moment. “Or maybe a child.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A child is just one.”

“You only want one?”

“I don’t… I don’t want more than one at once.”

She snuggled up closer to him. “We should talk about this.”

“We
are
talking about it,” he said.

“No. I mean, like, seriously.”

“I know,” he said dejectedly.

She rubbed her cheek against his. “Do you think we should try for kids?”

“You mean, like, right now?”

A wicked grin. “If it’s okay with you, can we finish FULL HOUSE first?”

“Oh, I see,” he said, poking her cheek with his finger.

“What do you see?”

“It’s those Olsen twins, isn’t it? They’re inspiring you.”

“You don’t think they’re cute?”

“There’s one too many of them for me.”

“You don’t want twins?”

“It’d be… a lot of responsibilities. You know?”

“What if we had triplets?”

He chose his words carefully. “We’re thinking ahead of ourselves.”

“When, though?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We should wait until we’re married.”

“You’re definitely not abstinent,” she said, grabbing the inside of his leg. He squirmed under her advances.

“Am I making you uncomfortable?” she asked, trailing her hand up his leg.

“This
conversation
is making me uncomfortable,” he replied.

“You’ve always wanted to have kids.”

“And I do. I want to have kids. And I want to have them with you. But not now.”

“When, then?”

“Once we’re married.”

“You’ve been pushing marriage off for years now.”

“One day we’re going to get married.”

“We should get married soon. Half my family has disowned me because of my… premarital…

relations.”

“Don’t blame
me
,” he said wryly. “
You’re
the one doing the fucking.”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

586

She slapped him. “So that’s what you want? Just someone to play with?”

“Sure. But not right now.” He pointed to the television. “FULL HOUSE is back on.”

And their conversation ended.

∑Ω∑

The girls stood on the porch, waiting for him to go, knowing he would go. The man leaned back in the seat and drew several deep breaths. “Fuck,” he muttered to himself. He couldn’t save Kira.

He couldn’t save the others.

And he couldn’t save Sarah.

But maybe he could save these three little girls.

Maybe he could honor Kira’s dream.

Maybe he could do something
right
for once.

He hit a button on the inside of the door. The passenger’s window rolled down. He shouted,

“Get in the fucking car!”

The girls looked at one another, confused.

Jessica wiped away her tears.

Sa-Rah took a tentative step forward.

The man slammed his fist on the horn. “Come on!” he shouted.

The girls scrambled down the steps and came to the car.

He unlocked the doors.

Deshay and Jessica got into the backseat.

Sa-Rah took the front seat.

The man said nothing. They shut their doors. He pressed down on the gas. Mud spit up from the tires as they hit the driveway and left the house behind. He knew they would find Sarah’s body at nightfall.

But at least she wouldn’t suffer as they tore her limb-from-limb.

IV

The little girl’s body goes limp, her mouth caught in the slack of her dismembered shriek, and she falls backwards, landing hard beside the tractor, a cloud of dust wrapping around her face, her features twisted and contorted, eyes wide open—and between them a single bullet hole. Blood pulls beneath her head, bubbling amidst the broken dirt and scattered manure of months past. The man turns to the other girls.

They stare at him in absolute terror.

The doors are about to burst.

Tears fall from his eyes, blurring his vision. He doesn’t know who he grabs next, only that she is struggling, futilely, against his iron grasp. He yanks her away from the tractor. The bullet will exit out of the back of her skull and possibly ricochet against the steel of the tractor if he shoots her where she stood. He cannot bear the thought of being shot by a ricocheted bullet, not before killing the third girl. He cannot bear the thought of lying immobile in the dirt, strewn amidst the two other bodies, his Anthony Barnhart

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lungs filling with his own blood, watching as the girl—
hearing
as the girl—is torn apart into several pieces, her blood painting a masterpiece against the rotted wooden boards of the barn. He is holding the second girl, and she is crying, doesn’t even plead for him to stop as he puts the end of the GARAND against her forehead and squeezes the trigger, discharging a single bullet from the magazine. The back of her head explodes against the stacked hay, and she tumbles down on top of her sister. Her splattered blood against the stacked hay drips like acrylic paint.

∑Ω∑

“Are you going straight through Denver?” Samantha asked.

They were driving down the highway, nearing Strasburg.

The mist had cleared, and the tops of Denver’s skyscrapers could be seen. And behind them: the Rocky Mountains.

“Yes,” the man said. “It’s the quickest route.”

“Maybe,” Samantha said. “That’s where the bandits are.”

“Bandits are everywhere.”

“There’s seventy or eighty of them downtown,” she said.

The man was quiet.

“You should go around.”

“Okay,” the man said. “How?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mapped it out to go straight through downtown.”

“Find a new map.”

They stopped at a gas station a few miles outside Strasburg. The man told the girls to wait in the car, and he took the GARAND and broke into the store and swept through the aisles. It was clear. He found a rack of Denver maps sitting next to a cigar case that had been shattered, the cigars dry and crisp. He fumbled through the map in the meager light coming from the tall dusty windows, and he was able to plot a course around Denver following different highways. There was no direct route around the city, so he had to improvise with city roads and state routes. He mouthed it as he read his notes back to himself: Interstate 70 West, then onto State Highway E-470 North, followed by a right onto Denver Boulder Turnpike. Go down that a ways, and then take a left on South Boulder Road, then go south on State Route 93, right onto Route 6, and then right onto Route 70 West—straight into the Rocky Mountains. He calculated the distance, knew they could be at the foothills of the mountains by evening. Away from the city. A smile creased over his lips. He knew they would make it.

“What are you doing?”

He turned around, startled. “Shit.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” Samantha said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, though he wasn’t. “I told you to wait in the car.”

“Jessica wants her stuffed turtle.”

“What?”

“She left her stuffed turtle at the orphanage. She wants it back.”

“We’re not stopping for a damned… for a turtle.”

“It means a lot to her. It’s on the way.”

“
Now
do you see how you’re a burden?”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

588

“It’ll take about five, maybe ten minutes. Please.”

The man broke under her pleas. They got off at the Strasburg exit, and she directed him down several blocks until they reached Sunset Avenue. He turned left, and against the side of the road was a large iron fence and a single gate, and behind that gate a towering stone building with arching stained glass windows and three towers, a bell-tower rising from the middle like a spire from a London church. The man saw the wing that had been burnt down, now nothing but mud and debris. He pulled in through the open gate, and Samantha directed him to drive around the orphanage. Along the massive, shut front doors was a sign reading in faded lettering: SAINT FRANCIS ORPHANAGE. The tires kicked up pockets of mud, and she guided him towards a low arched overhang leading into a courtyard. Even the MERCEDES with its low top barely fit.

There were trees blossoming with spring flowers along the sides of the courtyard, and in the middle was a gazebo with several benches. An old pond.

“They ate all the fishies,” Jessica said.

He stopped the MERCEDES next to the gazebo and leaned back, said, “Hurry up. Find your turtle and let’s go.”

Jessica bit her lip and got out of the car.

He cursed, apologized to Samantha, grabbed the GARAND, and fumbled out after her. Before he shut the door, he told the two other girls, “Wait here.” To Samantha: “Seriously.
Stay here
.”