Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (132 page)

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

616

VI

The gentle snowfall becomes a blizzard, and soon the truck is stuck in several feet of snow. The man can see nothing out the windshield except a sheet of white, and the snow continues to build around the truck. He smokes his cigarettes and stares out the windshield and curses his luck. He knows he cannot stay in the truck, knows he must continue on. He guesses there is a town near, but the snow is at least three feet thick, and the road is climbing uphill. He finishes his cigarette and grabs the bag with the scarce remnants of granola and a few more packs of cigarettes, and he takes the sawed-off shotgun and tries to open the door. It wedges against the snow. He is able to get his foot out and kicks at the snow, and he cracks the door open wide enough to slip through. He clutches the shotgun to his chest, and his fingers wrap around the plastic handle of the bag, and he moves forward in the snow, keeping his head down, staring at his face, feeling the stinging pinpricks of snowflakes blasting into his forehead and fingers. He continues on, into the white blindness all around him, the towering mountains lost in the snow’s fog.

He walks, and he thinks. Did he truly love Kira? Love is selfishness. Did he truly love her, or did he find himself bonded to her because of what she fulfilled in him? Did he love her, or did he use her because she fulfilled his needs? And what is love, anyway, but biochemical reactions in the brain? He is cold, he is dizzy, and the tears freeze against his cheeks. He is sure of it: he didn’t love Kira, and he never did. He used her to satisfy his own desires, he used her to try to ease the ache of loneliness. But she did not erase the loneliness, and when loneliness burned deep inside him, he turned to Jessie and thus revealed that any love he had for Kira was nothing but a damned lie.

The road dips downwards and bends around the side of the mountain. The snow does not lessen: instead it builds. Soon it is up to his shoulders, and he is pushing through the snow with his balled hands, and his fingers are red and cracking and bleeding. He tries to forget the pain, and he gets lost inside his thoughts once more.

Did he truly love Kira? If he did not, then why does he miss her so? He is sure of this: he misses not her but what she gave him. Her face is fading in his memory but what she gave him is intensified; and thus he misses not her but the way she fulfilled his selfish desires. He misses what they had, what she gave him, and he knows that it is not Kira he misses but what she symbolized: an end to the loneliness. He misses what they had, and he tried to find it once more with Sarah. But, indeed, he never truly filled with Kira the aching hole of loneliness; what possessed him to think he could fill it with Sarah?

The road bottoms out in a valley, and here the snow is thicker. He cuts his way between several trees with their boles wrapped in snow. He leans against one and fondles the bag with numb fingers. He sets the sawed-off shotgun beside him and with his teeth tears the wrapping off one of the granola bars. He eats it quickly, the granola cold and tasteless. He smokes a cigarette, the smoke in his lungs giving him energy, and then he continues on, pressing forth through the valley, the towering mountains around him masked with the heavy snow draping the earth like a carpet of diamonds.

Did he truly love Kira? Why does he ponder this? If he didn’t love her, maybe he can make the pain go away; if he didn’t love her, maybe he can stop from missing her. He had burnt his journals in his attempt to forget her, but he knows now this was foolishness and nothing less: he cannot, will not, Anthony Barnhart

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will
never
forget her. And yet he is plagued with that question, that haunting and decapitating question:
did he truly love her?
He wonders if there is a type of love that
is
selfless, a type of love that is self-sacrificing and self-giving and self-annihilating, a type of love that is characterized by bowing and submission? If there is such a love, he failed to have it with Kira, for he gave himself over to Jessie. If there was such a type of love, he is sure, he and Kira never had it.

The snow is lessening, and the sky above him opens up. He can see the sun breaking through the clouds in vibrant rays that splash down onto the snow-drenched mountaintops. He can see the snow falling around him, the snowflakes moving in the wind like flocks of birds numbering into the millions. The man is hungry again, is losing strength, but he is out of granola bars, has only cigarettes. He has left the bottles of water back at the truck; no doubt they are frozen. His fingers and toes burn and tingle, and he knows he is at risk of frostbite. He digs his hands into the pockets of his jeans, but snow comes in the top of the boots and pools between his toes. He knows he must find shelter, and he keeps moving, searching for anything—a shack, a vehicle, a house, a cave, a hollow—

where he can curl into a ball and warm himself. He is finding nothing.

Did he truly love Kira? If not, then why does he dream of her? He knows that no love is perfect. He knows that even the truest and most beautiful and most radiant of romances is imperfect; but imperfection does not render that love a farce. He knows that he misses Kira—not Sarah, not Jessie, no one except Kira. Even Mark is fading into the back of his mind, with the omnipresent shadow of Kira looming ever so intensely and painfully in his thoughts. He is succumbing to the cold, his vision is becoming blurred, and strength is leaving him, and he knows: he loved Kira, he still loves her—

and that just makes the pain worse.

VII

The storm has stopped, and in its wake it has left five feet of snow that wraps around the trees and blows in titanic drifts and obscures the road and coats the creeks. The man has no idea where he is, and his mind is beginning to fog. He is slowly losing feeling in the tips of his fingers, and his feet have gone all but entirely numb. He knows he must find warmth, or frostbite will begin to overcome him. He knows he must find food, for he is finding it hard to continue, finding his legs refusing to make each laborious step. Up ahead he sees something in the dying evening light, sunlight reflected off the roof of a building half-submerged in snow. He pushes his way through a towering snow-bank and reaches a fence. He manages to climb overtop and falls down into the snow. He picks himself up and approaches the building. At one time it had been some sort of maintenance building: a perfect square, hewn concrete, no windows, a single metal door. He pushes snow away from the entrance and tries the doorknob. It is unlocked. He pushes it open with his shoulder, and he stands facing the innards of the building, his shadow tall against the backdrop of evening light filtering into the shadows. He draws a deep breath and enters.

He stands in the doorway and sets down the bag and the sawed-off shotgun, and he digs into his jean pockets, searching for the lighter. His fingers are so numb he can barely flick it once he digs it out, and the miniscule heat from the flame makes his fingertips throb. The light crawls its way down a corridor and then vanishes when the hallway intersects with a single room. The walls are dark and Anthony Barnhart

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gray, and the man’s footsteps echo loudly as he walks. He is sure he has found the shelter he has been looking for, and if he were any sort of praying man, he would have thanked God for such providence. He steps into the large room and swings the lighter to the side, the flame bowing with the movement, and as the flame’s light extends through the room as if it were a magnificent torch spreading light to the darkest corners of the world, the man sees something that will remain with him forever, a prophetic sight that gives birth to all his deepest and darkest fears: squatting in the corner of the room is a single dark-walker, hunched over brambles and nettles, and underneath her naked and bloated form are several babies, groping at one another with tiny fingers, their eyes dancing in the flame’s light, huddled together in the makeshift nest. The man’s mouth drops, and he forgets the cold and his frostbitten fingers, and he sees the female dark-walker staring at him, her eyes filled with rage at his intrusion. She opens her mouth and lets out a terrifying shriek, and the man drops the lighter and lunges for the corridor, and he runs into the brilliant sunlight, trips and falls into the snow, picks himself up, and runs into the trees.

He collapses against a single pine and draws in deep breaths of frigid air. The oxygen scourges his lungs, and he bends over and vomits into the snow. Blood traces along the bile as it splatters in a web at his feet. He grips the tree and presses his forehead against the ice-kissed bark, and he tries to force the image out of his head. He remembers when he had first contemplated the thought, first explored the possibility, when he and Mark had been stranded at Mount Aries. He remembers thinking of the basic impulses of the human creature, that which is innate in all mankind:

The need for shelter.

The need for food.

And the need for sexual gratification.

He had forsaken such a thought, had refused to give it any sort of leeway into his mind, but now it comes back to him:
they’re reproducing
. Harker had believed that in time all the dark-walkers would die, driven to extinction by their own inability to survive. They would starve and die and decay and rot. The man had never spoken his fear, a quiet fear that had for all this time been running through his veins like a virulent virus just waiting to expose itself. Now it has exposed itself, and he knows that Harker’s hope was certainly an ill-founded hope. Not only had the dark-walkers organized themselves, not only had they developed their own primitive societies, but they were reproducing. They were creating more of themselves. The thought makes the man’s stomach churn, and once more he vomits into the crystallized snow at the base of the tree.

He knows he must find shelter soon: dark is approaching.

He knows he must find warmth soon: or the blood in his fingers will freeze. He knows he must eat soon: he does not have the strength to carry on. He curses this storm.

He curses leaving his cigarettes at the building.

He curses abandoning his shotgun.

He curses being alone, he curses his own existence, he curses everything, everyone. He knows what he must do.

He must find warmth.

He knows where to find it.

He must find food.

And he knows where to find it.

Anthony Barnhart

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He abandons the tree and follows his own footsteps until he reaches the building. He stares at that open door, knows what lies beyond. He knows what he must do. He enters the doorway and reaches down and grabs the sawed-off shotgun. He takes a deep breath and grits his teeth and moves forward. He makes his way down the corridor, stops before entering the room. He can hear her moaning, and he can hear the muffled cries of the infants. They almost sound like chirping baby birds. He wraps his finger around the trigger of the sawed-off shotgun and forces himself to move. He does not control his own actions, and he closes his eyes. He enters the room and swings around. The mother screeches, and the man raises the shotgun. She is up off her nest and charging him. He squeezes the trigger. The shells tear through her, exploding out her back in great swells of blood and hewn flesh. One of her arms is ripped from its socket, blood coating the wall. Her body collapses at his feet. He opens his eyes, and he lowers the shotgun, the barrel pointed at her distorted face. Her eyes are frantic, staring up at him, and he squeezes the trigger once more: her head becomes nothing more than a pallet of mush on the concrete floor. He moves over to the nest, and he raises his boot. He doesn’t look as he stomps upon the infants, crushing them underneath his feet. Soon the nest is nothing but broken bone and tattered flesh and a pooling ocean of blood.

He finds his lighter and moves back down the hallway and shuts the door. In the distance he can hear the dark-walkers’ cries echoing between the snow-laden mountainsides and carrying down into the valley. He shuts the door and bolts it from the inside. He returns to the single room and sits against the far wall. He curses and moves to the nest with the dead infants. He is able to pull from the nest dry brambles, and he creates a small heap of foliage on the floor at his feet. He lights it with his lighter and lets the heat warm him. He has no more granola left. He doesn’t want to do it, but he knows he has to. He knows he is immune, but that doesn’t bring him any comfort. He takes one of the infants, whose head is missing, and he puts it on the end of a stick from the nest and roasts it over the fire. The smell of the burnt flesh is nauseatingly delightful, and he tries to pretend he hates what he is eating, but truth be told, it is absolutely wonderful.

He leaves the shelter in the morning. He is still hungry, but he decides to eat nothing more. The night was spent cold and shivering, but he knows he would have died had he been truly exposed to the elements. The sky is clear and the snow is brilliantly white in the sun, so white that it burns his eyes. He keeps his eyes focused on the ground as he continues making his way down the snow-covered interstate. He passes a truck covered in snow. He breaks the window and searches for a map—he left his with the truck—and finds one in the glove compartment. He doesn’t quite know where he is, doesn’t know how much longer until the junction with… is it Route 82? He doesn’t know. He hopes he’ll remember it when he sees it. He abandons the truck and continues his march through the snow.

He soon reaches the intersection of Interstate 70 and State Route 82. It is a small town, Glenwood Springs, and he breaks into a small restaurant and finds several economically-sized cans of vegetables. He eats quietly, snow falling from the roof and drizzling out the large windows. He decides to stay the night in the town, hoping to get a better start with the morning. When the next day comes, he leaves once more, heading down Interstate 82. By the time evening is setting, he is in a tiny village named Basalt. He barricades himself in the bathroom of a gas station and waits for Anthony Barnhart