Bird Box

by Josh Malerman

  He is close to emaciated. Tom imagines he’s been feeding on the dead parents.

  Jules removes some meat from his duffel bag, rips off a piece, and tosses it down to the dog. At first, the dog slowly comes out. Then he devours it.

  ‘Is he friendly?’ Tom says quietly.

  ‘I’ve discovered,’ Jules says, ‘that a dog will become fast friends with the people who feed him.’

  Jules carefully tosses more meat down the stairs. He speaks encouragingly.

  But the dog takes work. And time.

  The two men spend the rest of the day in the house. With the meat, Jules is forging a bond. As he does, Tom searches the same places Jules already has. There is very little that they don’t have at the house already. He finds no phone book. No food.

  Jules, knowing dogs much better than Tom, tells him that they aren’t ready to leave. That the dog is too erratic, doesn’t trust him yet.

  Tom thinks of the twelve hours he gave the housemates for their return. A clock, it seems, is ticking.

  Finally, Jules tells Tom he thinks the dog is ready to leave the house.

  ‘Then let’s get going,’ Tom says. ‘We’ll have to keep working with him as we go. We can’t sleep here, with this smell of death.’

  Jules agrees. But it takes a few attempts to leash the dog. More time passes. When Jules finally does it, Tom has decided that twelve hours be damned; one afternoon has delivered them a dog, who knows what tomorrow morning might bring.

  Still, the clock is ticking.

  In the home’s foyer, they fasten their blindfolds and put their helmets back on. Then Tom unlocks the front door and they exit the house. Now Tom uses his broomstick, but Jules uses the dog. The husky pants.

  Crossing the lawn again, going farther yet from Malorie, Don, Cheryl, Felix, and Olympia, they come to another house.

  This one, Tom hopes, is where they’ll spend the night. If the windows are protected, if a search brings them confidence, and if they aren’t greeted with the smell of death.

  The pain in Malorie’s shoulder is so exact, so detailed, that she can see its outline in her mind. She can see it move as her shoulder moves. It’s not a bright pain like it was when it happened. Now it’s deep and dull and throbbing. Muted colours of decay rather than the explosive hues of impact. She imagines what the floor of the rowboat must look like right now. Piss. Water. Blood. The children asked her if she was okay. She told them she was. But they know when they’re lied to. Malorie has trained them beyond words.

  She is not crying right now, but she was. Silent tears behind her blindfold. Silent to her. But the children can pluck sounds from the silence.

  Okay, guys, she used to say, sitting around the kitchen table. Close your eyes.

  They did.

  What am I doing?

  You are smiling.

  That’s right, Girl. How did you know?

  You breathe different when you smile, Mommy.

  And the next day they would do it again.

  You’re crying, Mommy!

  That’s right. And why would I cry?

  You’re sad.

  That’s not the only reason.

  You’re scared!

  That’s right. Let’s try another one.

  Now the water is getting colder. Malorie feels its spray with each gruelling row.

  ‘Mommy,’ the Boy says.

  ‘What?’

  She is immediately alert at the sound of his voice.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘You already asked me that.’

  ‘But you don’t sound okay.’

  ‘I said I am. That means I am. Don’t question me.’

  ‘But,’ the Girl says, ‘you’re breathing differently!’

  She is. She knows she is. Labouring, she thinks.

  ‘It’s only because of the rowing,’ she lies.

  How many times did she question her duty as a mother as she trained the children into becoming listening machines? For Malorie, watching them develop was sometimes horrific. Like she was left to care for two mutant children. Small monsters. Creatures in their own right capable of learning how to hear a smile. Able to tell her if she was scared before she knew it herself.

  The shoulder wound is bad. And for years now Malorie has feared sustaining an injury of this magnitude. There were other instances. Close calls. Falling down the cellar stairs when the children were two. Tripping while carrying a bucket back from the well, banging her head on a rock. She thought she broke her wrist once. A chipped tooth. It’s difficult to remember what her legs once looked like without bruises. And now the flesh of her shoulder feels peeled from her body. She wants to stop the boat. She wants to find a hospital. Run through the streets, screaming, I need a doctor, I need a doctor, I NEED A DOCTOR OR I’M GOING TO DIE AND THE CHILDREN WILL DIE WITHOUT ME!!

  ‘Mommy,’ the Girl says.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We’re facing the wrong way.’

  ‘What?’

  As she’s grown more exhausted, she’s over used her stronger arm. Now she rows against the current and didn’t even know it.

  Suddenly, the Boy’s hand is upon hers. Malorie recoils at first, then understands. His fingers over hers, he moves, with her, as if turning the crank of the well.

  In all this cold, painful world, the Boy, hearing her struggle, is helping her row.

  The husky is licking Tom’s hand. Jules snores to his left on the carpeted floor of the home’s family room. Behind him, a giant silent television rests on an oak stand. Boxes of records are set against the wall. Lamps. A plaid couch. A stone fireplace. A big painting of a beach fills the space above the mantel. Tom thinks it’s of northern Michigan. Above him, a dusty ceiling fan rests.

  The dog is licking his hand because he and Jules feasted the night before on stale potato chips.

  This house proved to be a little more fruitful than the last. The men packed a few canned goods, paper, two pairs of children’s boots, two small jackets, and a sturdy plastic bucket before falling asleep. Still, no phone book. In the modern age, with cell phones in everybody’s pocket, the phone book, it seems, has passed on.

  There is evidence of the original homeowners deliberately leaving town. Directions to a small city in Texas at the Mexican border. A crisis survivor manual marked up in pen. Long lists of supplies that include gasoline and car parts. Receipts told Tom they’d purchased ten flashlights, three fishing poles, six knives, boxed water, propane, canned nuts, three sleeping bags, a generator, a crossbow, cooking oil, gasoline, and firewood. As the dog licks his hand, Tom thinks of Texas.

  ‘Bad dreams,’ Jules says.

  Tom looks over to see his friend is awake.

  ‘Dreamed we never found our way back to the house,’ Jules continues. ‘I never saw Victor again.’

  ‘Remember the stake we stuck in the lawn,’ Tom says.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten it,’ Jules says. ‘Dreamed somebody took it.’

  Jules gets up and the men eat a breakfast of nuts. The husky gets a can of tuna.

  ‘Let’s cross the street,’ Tom says.

  Jules agrees. The men pack up. Soon, they leave.

  Outside, the grass gives way to concrete. They are in the street again. The sun is hot. The fresh air feels good. Tom is about to say as much, but Jules suddenly calls out.

  ‘What is this?’

  Tom, blind, turns.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a post, Tom. Like … I think this is a tent.’

  ‘In the middle of the street?’

  ‘Yes. In the middle of our street.’

  Tom approaches Jules. The bristles of his broomstick connect with something that sounds like it’s made of metal. Cautiously, he reaches into the darkness and touches what Jules found.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Tom says.

  Setting the broomstick down, Tom uses both hands to feel above his head, along the base of the canvas tarp. It reminds him of a street fair he once took his daughter to.
The roads were blocked off by orange cones. Hundreds of artists sold paintings, sculptures, drawings. They were set up side by side, too many to count. Each of them sold their goods under a floppy canvas tent.

  Tom steps under it. He uses his broom to sweep a wide arc in the air above him. There is nothing here but the four poles that support the tarp.

  Military, Tom thinks. The image is a far cry from a street fair.

  As a boy, Tom’s mother used to brag to her friends that her son ‘refused to let a problem sit’. He tries to figure it out, she’d say. There isn’t a thing in this house that doesn’t interest him. Tom remembers watching the faces of his mother’s friends, how they smiled when she said these things. Toys? his mother would say. Tom doesn’t need toys. A tree branch is a toy. The wires behind the VCR are toys. The way the windows work. His whole life he’d been described this way. The kind of guy who wants to know how something works. Ask Tom. If he doesn’t know, he’ll learn it. He fixes things. Everything. But to Tom, this behaviour wasn’t remarkable. Until he had Robin. Then a child’s fascination with the machinations of things overcame him. Now, standing beneath this tent, Tom can’t tell if he’s like the child who wants to figure the tent out or like the father who advises him to walk away from this one.

  The men examine the thing, blindly, for many minutes.

  ‘Maybe we could use this,’ Tom says to Jules, but Jules is already calling him from a distance.

  Tom crosses the street. He follows Jules’s voice until they meet up on another lawn.

  The very first house they go to is unlocked. They agree they will not open their eyes in this house. They enter.

  Inside is draughty. The men know that the windows are open before they check them. Tom’s broomstick tells him the first room they enter is full of boxes. These people, he thinks, were getting ready to leave.

  ‘Jules,’ Tom says, ‘check these. I’m going to search farther into the house.’

  It’s already been twenty-four hours since they left their own house.

  Now, with carpeting beneath him, he walks slowly through a stranger’s home. He comes to a couch. A chair. A television. Jules and the husky are barely audible now. Wind blows through the open windows. Tom comes to a table. He feels along its surface until his fingers stop at something.

  A bowl, he thinks.

  Lifting it, he hears something fall to the tabletop. He feels for it, finds it, and discovers it’s a utensil he didn’t expect.

  It’s like an ice-cream scooper, but smaller.

  Tom runs a finger into the scooper. There’s a thick substance in there.

  He shivers. It’s not ice cream. And once, Tom touched something just like it.

  On the bathtub’s edge. By her little wrist. The blood there was like this. Thick. Dead. Robin’s blood.

  Shaking, he brings the bowl closer to his chest as he sets down the scooper. He slides his fingers slowly down the smooth ceramic curve of the bowl until he touches something resting in the basin. He gasps and drops the bowl onto the carpeted floor.

  ‘Tom?’

  Tom doesn’t answer at first. The thing he just touched, he once touched something like that, too.

  Robin had brought it home from school. From science class. She kept it in an open coffee can full of pennies. Tom found it when Robin was at school. When he was searching the house for that smell.

  He knew he’d found it when, just inside the rim of the can, atop the pile of coins, he saw a small discoloured ball. Instinctively, he reached for it. It squished between his fingers.

  It was a pig’s eye. Dissected. Robin had mentioned doing that in class.

  ‘Tom? What happened in there?’

  Jules is calling you. Answer him.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘I’m all right, Jules! I just dropped something.’

  Backing up, wanting to leave this room, his hand nudges something.

  He knows this feeling, too.

  That was a shoulder, he thinks. There’s a body sitting in a chair at this table.

  Tom imagines it. Seated. Eyeless.

  At first he cannot move. He’s facing where the body must be.

  He hurries out of the room.

  ‘Jules,’ he says, ‘let’s get out of here.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Tom tells him. Within minutes they are out of the house. They’ve decided to work their way back home. A dog is enough. Between the tent and what Tom found in the bowl, neither of them want to be out here anymore.

  They cross one lawn. Then a driveway. Then two. The dog is pulling Jules. Tom struggles to keep up. He feels like he’s getting lost out here in the darkness of his blindfold. He calls to Jules.

  ‘I’m over here!’ Jules calls.

  Tom follows his voice. He catches up to him.

  ‘Tom,’ Jules says. ‘The dog is making a big deal about this garage.’

  Still trembling from his discovery in the house, and still frightened, deeper, by the senselessness of the tent in the street, Tom says they should continue home. But Jules wants to know what the dog is so interested in.

  ‘It’s a freestanding garage,’ Jules says. ‘He’s acting like something’s alive in there.’

  A side door is locked. Finding only one window, Jules breaks it. He tells Tom that it’s protected. Cardboard. It’s a small fit, but one of them should go inside. Jules says he’ll do it. Tom says he’ll do it, too. They tie the dog to a gutter and both men crawl in through the window.

  Once inside, something growls at them.

  Tom turns back towards the window. Jules calls out.

  ‘It sounds like another dog!’

  Tom thinks it does, too. His heart is beating fast, too fast he thinks, and he stands with one hand on the window ledge, ready to pull himself back out.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ Jules says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s another husky.’

  ‘What? How do you know?’

  ‘Because I’m touching his face.’

  Tom eases from the window. He can hear the dog eating. Jules is feeding it.

  Then, by Tom’s elbow, there is another sound.

  At first, it sounds like children laughing. Then like a song.

  Then the unmistakable sound of chirping.

  Birds.

  Gently, Tom backs away. The chirping quiets. He steps forward again. It gets louder.

  Of course, Tom thinks, feeling the excitement he’d hoped for when they left the house the day before.

  As Jules talks quietly to the dog, Tom approaches the birds until their squawking is unbearable. He feels along a shelf.

  ‘Tom,’ Jules says in the darkness, ‘be careful—’

  ‘They’re in a box,’ Tom says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I grew up with a guy whose father was a hunter. His birds made the same sound. They get louder the closer you get to them.’

  Tom’s hands are on the box.

  He is thinking.

  ‘Jules,’ he says, ‘let’s go home.’

  ‘I’d like more time with the dog.’

  ‘You’ll have to do it at home. We can lock them in a room if there’s a problem. But we found what we set out to find. Let’s go home.’

  Jules leashes the second husky. This one is less difficult. As they exit the garage by the side door, Jules asks Tom, ‘You’re bringing the birds?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve got an idea.’

  Outside, they retrieve the first husky and head towards home. Jules walks with the second dog, Tom with the first. Slowly, they cross lawns, then driveways, until they reach the marker they set the day before.

  On the front porch, before knocking on the door, Tom hears the housemates arguing inside. Then he thinks he hears a sound coming from the street behind him.

  He turns.

  He waits.

  He wonders how close the tent is to where he stands.

  Then he knocks.

  Inside, the argument ceases. Felix calls out
to him. Tom responds.

  ‘Felix! It’s Tom!’

  You’re going to have to open your eyes …

  ‘You need to eat, Girl,’ Malorie manages to say. Her voice is weak.

  The Boy has eaten nuts from the pouch. The Girl refuses.

  ‘If you don’t eat,’ Malorie says between grimaces, ‘I’m going to stop this boat and leave you here.’

  Malorie feels the Girl’s hand upon her back. She stops rowing and shakes some nuts out of the pouch for her. Even this hurts her shoulder.

  But above the pain, a thought hovers. A truth that Malorie does not want to face.

  Yes, the world behind her blindfold is an ill grey. Yes, she is worried she might be losing consciousness. But a much darker reality weaves through her myriad fears and problems, serpentine, clever. It floats, then hovers, then lands at the front lines of her imagination.

  It’s a thing she’s been protecting, hiding, from the rest of herself all morning.

  But it’s been the focus of her decision making for years.

  You tell yourself you’ve waited four years because you were afraid to lose the house forever. You tell yourself you waited four years because you wanted to train the children first. But neither of these are true. You waited four years because here, on this trip, on this river, where madmen and wolves lurk, where creatures must be near, on THIS DAY you will have to do something you haven’t done outside in even longer than four years.

  Today you’re going to have to open your eyes.

  Outside.

  It’s true. She knows this. She’s known this forever, it seems. And what is she more frightened by – the possibility of a creature standing in her line of sight? Or the unfathomable palette of colours that will explode before her when she opens her eyes.

  What does the world look like now? Will you recognize it?

  Is it grey? Have the trees gone mad? The flowers, the reeds, the sky? Is the entire world insane? Does it battle itself? Does the Earth refute its own oceans? The wind has picked up. Has it seen something? Is it mad, too?

  Think, Tom would say. You’re doing it. You’re rowing. Just keep rowing. This all means that you’re going to make it. You’ll have to open your eyes. You can do it. Because you have to.

  Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom.