Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (126 page)

He told Jessica to wait up and ran after her, toting his rifle in hand and the cleaned bayonet in his belt.

Jessica went through one of the many doors leading inside from the courtyard, and they stepped into blackness. Terror ran through the man, but Jessica looked back in the shadows and said, “It’s okay. It’s safe here.” He didn’t feel too comfortable trusting her, and he gripped the GARAND tighter in his hand as he followed her. The narrow corridor went past several rooms with faded lettering on paled glass windows. Classrooms. She took a flight of steps up into a wide corridor with boarded-up stained glass windows. There were tables and chairs everywhere. A dining hall. She took him down an adjacent hallway that was narrow with a towering ceiling, chandeliers pointing downwards with their shattered bulbs. Glass crunched under his feet. They passed a great room that he recognized from going to Mass as a child, his mother demanding it, his father always complaining. His father beating them during the week and then taking communion on Sunday. She turned and waved at the man, who had stopped in his steps, gotten lost in his gaze into the sanctuary. “Come on, this way, hurry up!” He found it ironic that he was being told to hurry now. He followed her up a spiraling staircase. Built upon the staircase were several doors, which she unlocked with different keys. Seven in all. The stairs climbed up and up, and the man gasped for breath, tar-soaked lungs demanding compensation. Eventually the stairwell ended, and they stood in the wide bell-tower. It was twenty feet by twenty feet, with a giant bell right in the middle. Sunlight came in through the large windows on all four walls, illuminating the creases and grooves and dents in the archaic gong. Along the floor were several chairs, some suitcases, three beds with tossed blankets and greasy pillows.

Jessica ran to one of the beds, ruffled through the covers, found her stuffed sea turtle, clutched it to her tightly, grinned: “I found my turtle.”

“Good for you,” the man said. He dug through his pockets, found a cigarette, lit it. Jessica walked over as he smoked, reached up, grabbed the cigarette from his fingers.

“What the hell?!” he shouted as she stomped it underfoot.

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“It’s not healthy,” she said. “It’ll give you cancer and kill you.”

“In these days, cancer isn’t the worst thing to worry about. Or don’t you know that?”

“Have you lost your breath?” Samantha asked.

The man turned, cursed. “Can’t you follow the simplest directions?”

“This is our home,” she said. “We would like to see it one last time.”

“Snap a picture, then. Let’s go. We don’t have time for this.”

Deshay walked past him, to her bed, kneeled down, pulled out a box, began rifling through it.

“Does
everyone
have a keepsake?” the man asked.

Deshay stood, holding a black-and-white photograph.

“What is that?” the man asked.

Samantha leaned close to him, looked up, whispered: “Our mom.”

“You didn’t have a color photograph?”

“It’s a scanned copy of her driver’s license. It’s all we have.”

Samantha walked over to her sister, whispered something, took the picture. She returned to the man and stood with him, showed him the photograph. “It’s a picture of our mom,” she repeated. “We love her, and we’ve never even seen her.”

The man handed the picture back to her. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Samantha handed the photograph back to Deshay, and the two of them left. Jessica walked towards the man, who glared at her for snuffing out his cigarette, and she stopped next to him, said, “I don’t love her. I hate her. She abandoned us once. And then she did it again.”

Samantha overheard, standing in the doorway leading to the stairs. She didn’t say anything.

Jessica went forward and joined Deshay in the stairwell.

Samantha fell back with the man. “She doesn’t understand,” she said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He had to duck under the makeshift doors.

“She doesn’t understand that our mother left us out of love.”

“You don’t know that.”

“In my heart… I know that.”

“Okay.”

“It isn’t the action that matters. It’s the motive behind the action.”

The man wondered what his motive was for sleeping with Sarah.

It

was

escapism.

It was to escape his pain, his heartache, his sorrows.

It was to escape the nightmare of his existence.

It was to escape the nightmare of
their
existence.

And it was selfishness.

It was to gratify his own lustful desires.

It was to take what he wanted and give nothing back.

It was to do what he wanted without any regard for her.

“You know what I mean?” Samantha asked.

“What?” he said. He was standing on the step, broken from his thoughts. She was standing a few steps beneath him. “It’s motive, not action, that matters.”

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“I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Jessica and Deshay were far ahead of them.

Samantha and the man left the stairwell, entering the giant hall with the stained-glass windows, the glass hidden underneath a complicated web of nailed-together wooden boards. The man looked over at Samantha. “Why do you trust me?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Why do you trust that I’m not just as bad as these bandits?”

“It was your eyes.”

“My eyes?”

“I’ve seen the eyes of the bandits. I’ve seen their evil. I’ve seen what lies in their hearts. But I see something different in your eyes. I see that you’re broken. I see that you’re hurting.” Without hesitation: “What is it that hurts you?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“You can tell me.”

“Forget I asked,” he said.

“You can—’’

Her words were cut short:

Jessica’s screams carried down from deep inside the orphanage.

V

Samantha was lost behind the man as he rushed down the great hall. He reached the doorway leading to the narrow corridor with the chandeliers, and upon entering he saw, standing at the far end, in the wan unfiltered light from two windows, two raiders with hunting rifles, holding the girls at their sides. The man reacted instinctively, not breaking his speed: he wrenched the bayonet from his belt, flipped it around in his hand, and with the precision honed in by practice, he hurled the bayonet through the air. It flipped end-on-end, and the closest raider could not react before the tip of the bayonet dug into the flesh of his throat, piercing his esophagus and lodging in his spine. He released the girl and stumbled backwards, blood pooling in his eyes, blood falling down atop of Jessica’ beautiful blond hair. The raider collapsed into his companion, and his companion released Deshay in his fall, and the two of them fell to the floor.

The man yelled for Jessica and Deshay to get out of the way.

The lively raider threw his dead friend off his chest, and he reached for the rifle lying on the ground. The man reached him, kicked the rifle away, and, with his other foot, slammed the heel of his boot down into the raider’s face, sending the bridge of his nose into his brain. The raider’s body went into convulsions, and the man stepped back, the heel of his boot covered with blood and bits of bone. The raider’s face was impaled.

Jessica and Deshay stood off to the side, their faces ashen, and then Jessica began to scream, grabbing at her bloody hair.

The man hollered at Samantha, “Shut her up!” and went to the window. He wiped away dirt and grime from the glass and peered through. He could make out several 4x4 trucks on Sunset Avenue below, and standing amidst the trucks and in the opposite front yards of the houses at least twenty men armed with an assortment of hunting rifles. At the same time came the sound of Anthony Barnhart

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footsteps coming from the courtyard: they’d found the MERCEDES. The man looked over to Samantha:

“Please tell me you have another exit out of this place.”

“The utility tunnel,” she said, regaining her composure.

She kept looking at the two corpses.

The one with the impaled face continued to convulse.

The man knelt down, wrenched the bayonet from the fallen man’s throat. “Forget about him,”

he said. He looked over to her: “Get your sisters out of here.”

“What about you?” she asked.

“I’ll hold them off.” He wiped some of the blood from the bayonet off and onto his jeans. “If you want to pray for me… Now would be the time.”

“I want you to come with us.”

“Stop talking and start moving.”

“We’re not leaving until you come with us.”

“No. I’ll get you fucking killed. I told you this was a bad idea.”

“You’re the only reason Jessica and Deshay aren’t being raped right now.”

Those words cut through him.

The raiders are coming towards them from the courtyard. Closer.

The man kneels down, grabs one of the rifles. A REMINGTON.

“We need you,” Samantha said. “And
you
need
us
.”

They backtracked to the large great hall. Samantha led the way, holding the hands of her two sisters. The man noticed how she was always in charge, how she seemed so much more mature. Something was different about her, something that differentiated her from her twin sisters. The man made a mental note to ask about it later. They went through a door and down a flight of steps. Mold and grime clung to the walls, and the air was heavy and damp. It reminded him of the wine-cellar, where he had strangled Mark.
How long ago had that been? A single night? Two nights?
It seemed like ages ago. The stairwell ended and they reached a narrow corridor with an arched stone wall. Mice scurried and squeaked along the floor as they moved past. The girls didn’t mind: the man cursed and kicked at them. Movement above. The man told them to stop, to be quiet. Footsteps. He looked up, into the stone ceiling, heard muffled voices. Raiders asking where the girls had gone. And then shouting. They’d found the bodies. Lots of rage and anger. And then something else: the mentioning of a blood trail. The man turned and looked down at his feet. It was too dark to see, but he cursed himself for his idiocy. There was blood on his boot. It would lead them straight into the cellar. “Move,” he said under his breath. “Now.
Now
.”

There came the sound of gurgling water, and then they were splashing ankle-deep through an old sewer now filled mostly with rainwater and residue from melted snow. The man told them to go on, and he set the REMINGTON against the stone wall and scraped the heel of his boot against the floor underneath the water. He could hear shouting coming from down the corridor, and he grabbed the REMINGTON and caught up with the girls. They were climbing up a ladder, which led to a heavy metal grate.

“We can’t open it,” Samantha said.

He handed her the rifle—she had two now—and climbed the ladder. He wrestled with the gate, feared it was locked from the other side—
we’re fucking pinned
—but he was able to get it open with a grunt. Sunlight filtered down amongst them. He dropped down and took the REMINGTON and told the girls to climb. They did so.

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The shouting from the raiders was growing nearer.

The girls were up.

The man climbed onto the ladder and raised the rifle upwards; “Careful,” he said as she took the other end and hefted it up with her. He looked back down the corridor, heard the raiders talking, and then there was excited shouting, and then the ring of a bullet. The stone beside him chipped away, the debris burning and scalding as it smacked into his cheek. He quickly climbed. More gunshots, the bullets bursting into the stone wall around the ladder.

He climbed up into what was a storage room with several boxes and bags of pebbles and racks filled with dusty glass aquariums. He kicked the grate down and grabbed several bags of pebbles, stacked them on top of the grate.

“Now what?” he asked.

They left the storage room and stepped into a vast display room. There were signs on the walls—LIVE

CORAL! LIVE ROCK!—and a cash register at the front. Massive tanks lined the walls, now void of water. The glass insides were covered with dried algae, wearing away with time; and inside the tanks were skeletons of all sorts of exotic fish. Angelfish, boxfish, butterfly fish, scorpion fish, jaw-fishes. There were even the skeletons of long-dried stingrays and seahorses. The man went to one of the windows and rubbed away at the dirt and grime, looked through the glass. He saw the outside of the fence encircling the orphanage, and he could see part of the road with a few trucks parked and abandoned. He could see movement in the windows of the orphanage. Most of the raiders had entered the building, on the scent of blood, lost in the hunt. The man ducked away from the window and checked the REMINGTON, checked the number of bullets. Seventeen. Fair enough. “Come on,” he said, motioning them towards the front door.

“We’re going outside?” Samantha asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“There are bandits out there.”

“And soon there will be bandits in
here
. Trust me.”

“They’ll see us.”

“Hopefully not before we hijack their truck. Stay close and stay quiet.”

VI

He changed his mind, told them to wait in the store; he didn’t want them out on the street in case he was spotted. He slowly pushed open the front door, and an old rusted bell chimed. He gritted his teeth, stuck his head out, looked to the left, saw the truck. The driver and the passenger stood facing the orphanage, their backs towards him. The man reached up and grabbed the tiny bell, and he held it as he shut the door. He wiggled his arm out and with the REMINGTON in hand slowly began making his way down the street, towards the 4x4 truck. They didn’t turn around or notice him. Fifteen feet away, he slowly knelt down and laid the Remington on the asphalt. He pulled the bayonet forth, and he moved forward, holding his breath, his world screaming: they both had rifles. He was upon them, and he wrapped his arm around the first and wrenched him down, dragging the bayonet across his throat. A waterfall of warm and steaming blood ran over his hands, and he tossed the man to the side as the other watched, stunned. His friend opened his mouth to shout for help, but the man attacked him, slashing the knife across his throat. Blood sprayed him in the face, and the Anthony Barnhart