Bleed

by Lori Michelle

  Why did you let us through? Why didn’t you finish us?

  She growled back. “You still can’t come in.”

  She reached up and swung the door. Jon’s feet blocked it, so she pushed them aside to finish slamming the door. Jon groaned. She didn’t look through glass to see if the shadows still waited.

  Anna lay down on her side next to Jon looking into his sweaty face. She wiped his forehead with her sleeve.

  “Do you want me to help you upstairs to bed, honey?”

  Jon’s eyes fluttered and he sucked in air. “Just let me lay here for a little while, Anna.”

  She folded her arms over her chest with one elbow against the hard tile. “We made it, baby. We’re safe.”

  “We haven’t even started.”

  Anna frowned. “We’re safe for now and we’re together.”

  Jon nodded rocking his head and neck against the floor. “Lock the door, please.”

  Anna rose up on her arms. “The shadows can’t come in the house unless invited, Jon.”

  “I know that, Anna,” he muttered, “but the wraiths are not the only ones that threaten us. Lock the doors and shutter the glass. Use all the locks, please.”

  Anna got up from the floor to fulfill his wishes. He was snoring before she returned to his side.

  ***

  Anna opened the door and led Doctor Gawith inside the house. He pulled off the mesh hood as she closed the door.

  He asked, “Does Jon know you are outside without armor, Mrs. Sasser?”

  Anna looked up the stairs and back at the doctor. “Jon was wearing armor. It sure didn’t . . . He doesn’t know I was out. Can we keep that quiet, Doctor Gawith?”

  Keith Gawith shed his vest and pack in the foyer. “Your husband would be my patient. I don’t think the privilege extends, Anna.”

  “I’m not worried about courts, Doctor Gawith. I just don’t want Jon upset.”

  “No, the courts burned down with the cities. Is he going to think I magically appeared or that you rang me on your cell phone?”

  Anna sighed. “I don’t know, Doctor.”

  Dr. Gawith looked up the stairs. “Anna, I really want you to still call me Keith. We have known each other since before the shadows destroyed the world. I don’t have that many old friends left.”

  “How many of these cases have you handled recently, Doctor . . . Keith?”

  Dr. Gawith shook his head. “Lately, not many. Most people don’t make it back to their house. The shadows have less distractions than they used to, so once they hunt one of us down, well, I’m not sure I want to know how you got him back alive, Anna.”

  “Two crosses and little luck.”

  Keith smiled. “Take me up to him, dear, and if you both made it back alive, I think it might have been something more divine than luck.”

  Anna preceded him up the stairs. “Can you help him?”

  “You want me to diagnosis him before I see him?”

  Anna led him down the upstairs hall. “Are you teasing me, Keith? Maybe this is why you don’t keep any friends.”

  “I wish that were the truth.”

  Anna opened the bedroom door and Doctor Gawith walked in with his backpack. He opened the curtains, letting light into the room. Jon groaned on the bed and covered his face with his hand.

  Keith called. “Light. Always lots of light with shadow sicknesses.”

  Jon sat up and held his head at the sound of the voice. “What’s going on?”

  Anna sat down at the foot of the bed. “Everything is fine. Doctor Gawith is here to see you, Jon.”

  Jon dropped back to the pillow. “Keith? From church?”

  “Yes, Jon. First stupid question: How are you feeling?”

  Jon’s eyes slid closed. “Aren’t you a cardiologist?”

  Keith pulled up a locked trunk from the center of the room and sat on it beside the bed. “Yeah, was the monster chewing on your foot and you prefer a podiatrist?”

  Jon coughed. “You have a point. I feel bad, Keith. Very bad.”

  Dr. Gawith pulled down the blankets. Anna’s eyes watered and she pressed the back of her hand under her nose.

  “Are you cold, Mr. Sasser?”

  Jon’s teeth chattered. “Sometimes. Other times it’s the opposite. I feel like I’m cooking alive. Is that typical, Keith?”

  “Nothing in the world is typical anymore, Jon.”

  Dr. Gawith pulled up Jon’s shirt. A thin wisp of steam vaporized off his chest. It was brief, but they all saw it.

  Jon coughed on a laugh. “And for my next trick . . . ”

  “How much weight have you lost?”

  Anna spoke truth over Jon’s denial.

  Jon whispered. “Not so much.”

  As Anna said, “A lot.”

  Keith nodded as he felt around Jon’s sides. “I can’t tell much from my medieval methods. I’m ninety percent sure the beast stung you through the chest and I would say deep. You probably knew that. It is a miracle you made it back alive.”

  Jon nodded looking up from the pillow. “Anna made me.”

  Keith smiled and winked at Anna. “She kidnapped me from a day of fishing too.”

  “Not golf?”

  “The courses are too open for my tastes and you can’t eat the score card. How is your breathing?”

  Jon looked at Anna “Bad.”

  Anna rubbed at her neck. “Is there some way we can get x-rays or an MRI?”

  Keith reached into his pack and handed Anna a bottle. “No, but they don’t help anyway. Back when this first started, we discovered the venom or the stinger or whatever is phased out of normal reality or normal time. We can’t see it on film. The MRI actually moves it and sometimes ripped open the patients’ chests. We can detect the cells in the bloodstream, but we can’t view them under a microscope.”

  Jon whispered. “Vampires.”

  Keith pointed at the bottle. “Anna, are you okay using needles?”

  She nodded. He handed her a baggie full of syringes.

  “You can read my handwriting?”

  Anna nodded again.

  Jon wheezed. “How bad are the side effects?”

  Keith looked back at Jon. “Bad . . . The good news is that I have lots of doses to spare because the median survival time for this is about ten seconds. The bad news is that the extended survival time is unsure.”

  Anna asked. “What about the nausea?”

  Keith shook his head. “There is nothing left for it. I miss Big Pharma . . . and Big Oil too, I guess. The foods I’d normally recommend aren’t available either. You have to try to eat no matter what though, Jon. Push through it.”

  Jon nodded, but made a face and pulled the covers back up. Keith stopped him and stuck Jon’s arm with a syringe. Jon winced, but waited for Dr. Gawith to finish. Keith withdrew the needle after the injection and Jon brought the covers up to his neck.

  “No warning . . . Your bedside manner sucks, Keith.”

  “Well, you’re not paying me, so you are getting your money’s worth.”

  Jon sighed and began to breathe slowly as Keith and Anna watched. Dr. Gawith pointed at the door and they exited the bedroom. Anna glanced back in before she closed the door. The light in the bedroom split with a swatch of darkness as something passed by the second floor window with a whisper. As the darkness washed over Jon in the bed, Anna heard his teeth chatter. Anna thought she heard a word too. She shivered Dr. Gawith closed the door the rest of the way before she could step back into the bedroom.

  “How are you on food, Anna?”

  “We are canning and have grow boxes in every window. I holed up for almost a week waiting for the creatures to thin back out. We have a little, if we need to wait them out again.”

  “I can bring more. Not a lot, but more to help out.”

  “We’ll take anything, Keith.”

  They walked back down the hall toward the stairs.

  “Are Charlotte and Susan still . . . around, Anna?”

  Ann
a followed behind as they walked down the stairs. “Charlotte and her family are still out west. Susan was on the move a few months back. We have not heard from her since.”

  “Have you thought about going out west? Jon could stay with me and—”

  “No, Keith, no, I’m not thinking like that.”

  “You should send a courier.”

  As they stood at the bottom of the steps, Anna stared at the tile of the foyer between her feet. “They will try to come back with the kids and everyone. I can’t risk them.”

  Keith set down his pack to strap back on his vest. “They would want to know. You could tell them not to come. Tell them you will come to them once . . . if . . . ”

  “I’m not thinking like that, Keith.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  She helped him tighten the strap on the back of his vest. She spoke at the back of his head.

  “Do you think I should tell them anyway?”

  Keith spoke without turning around. “I would want to know.”

  “Would it make you cross the deadly countryside to see him one more time with our granddaughters in tow?”

  Anna let go of the strap. Dr. Gawith knelt down to retrieve and pull the mesh hood back over his hair and face.

  “I waited until the end of the world to start making house calls. What do you think?”

  Anna smiled as tears stung at her eyes. She turned away from the doctor and blinked up at the stairs.

  “Dr. Gawith, is there anything else we can do? Are there other treatments? Anything you’ve heard . . . anything at all? I’m willing to try anything if there’s the slightest chance.”

  He sighed. She turned back around to face him. Keith picked up his pack and chewed on his lip as he shouldered the load.

  “There is something. Tell me, Keith.”

  He shook his head. “There is a . . . chemical swill that has started spreading around the country. It’s supposed to disrupt the evaporation, but I can’t imagine that would be any good for the other processes in the body. There is no FDA anymore, so it is probably a blend of poison and moonshine. I don’t have any and I don’t think I can get any from the people who are afraid I’ll test the snake oil, Anna.”

  She stepped forward and grabbed the hard armor over his shoulder. He outweighed her, but he allowed her to turn his body to face her. She stared into his eyes through the opening in the hood.

  “Who has it, Keith? I’ll try anything.”

  Keith took a few silent breaths before answering. “The Garrets. Don’t go down this road, Anna. It’s not worth it. The problem with trying anything is that most things don’t work and some can be deadly.”

  Anna dropped her hand from his shoulder and gritted her teeth. “If sure death is imminent, then I’m willing to risk something experimental.”

  Keith adjusted his pack on his shoulder and scanned through the glass in the front door. “Experimental implies some scientific method leading to reliable data. This is a bunch of violent hillbillies, who used to cook meth, now pretending to make medicine for desperate people.”

  “They still make meth,” Anna said, “They trade it for food and weapons.”

  Keith pulled the rugged, metal cross out of his shirt and dropped the piece to hang on its chain over his vest. “They probably don’t wash the equipment between cooking methamphetamine and the medicine. It is called Shalobicortazine, but I think the Garrets call it House Juice or Silver Lightning.”

  “Okay, thank you.”

  Keith undid the locks along the door and turned back toward Anna. “I’ll be back in a few days to check on Jon. I’m sending Chris to take your letter to Charlotte. He owes me and I’ll call in my chits for the postage for you to send one page along couriers out west. Don’t trade your soul for the juice, Anna.”

  Anna stared without nodding. Keith smiled and turned back to the door.

  “Close this behind me, then. I guess you listen to requests about as well as your daughters do. Write my love to Cherry and her family, Anna.”

  “I will.”

  Keith opened the door and slunk out onto the porch. Anna pressed the door closed quietly behind him. She refastened the locks and turned away, so as not to see the doctor step off the bottom stair.

  It’s bad luck to watch them go. The shadows will know.

  Anna stepped back into the kitchen. She placed her palms on the handle of the hand pump where the sink faucet used to be. The light from the sun flashed out and then back from the window. Anna looked up slowly, but just saw their wrecked, abandoned car in the driveway. The darkness passed over the window to her left. When she looked, the light was blazing through the blinds onto the sprouts in the grow box.

  She looked back to the sink and screamed. She backed into the pantry door across the kitchen and clutched her chest. She heard a thump in the floor above her upstairs.

  Jon’s voice traveled weakly down the stairs behind her in the foyer. “Anna, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Jon. Don’t try to come downstairs. I’m coming up in a minute once I water the plants.”

  She looked back at the figure in the window. It darkened the grow box above the kitchen sink and rigged pump. The open hole eyes slanted out into sharp points at both sides of the shadow. A waft of smoky darkness billowed up to the glass. She heard it pop on the frame. A spark lit the darkness for a moment and the shadow melted back from the window. It hovered in the air a bit farther back from the house staring at Anna. A slanted mouth cut sharp lips across the shadow below the eyes. Something acidic burned in the back of her throat.

  I’ve never seen that before.

  A thick, wet whisper gurgled and hissed weakly from the other side of the glass. “Hungry.”

  She ran forward and slammed the plastic blinds closed with the flat of her hand. “Stay away from my house and family. You are not invited inside.”

  She turned to do the same at the other windows. She looked at the plants.

  I have to let light in while it shines. I’ll water the plants later when the shadow goes away.

  More thumps traveled down the hall above the stairs. “Anna, I’m coming down.”

  She turned and walked into the foyer. Something crossed the windows and door by the porch. Anna did not look.

  “Don’t, Jon. Everything is fine. I’m coming up.”

  ***

  Anna didn’t like being touched. The man ran his hands up her legs and along her sides over her pockets. Anna closed her eyes. A second man stepped up beside her. The first man behind her touching her stepped back and nodded. They handed her bag back and allowed her through the gate.

  “If the smokies come, you are on your own. We don’t provide shelter to people who have not paid for it. You are not a premium customer. You understand, ma’am?”

  Anna cleared her throat. “I understand.”

  The fence encompassed five houses on two different streets and their yards. Sunlight filtered through thick netting that billowed up and over tall poles above the roofs of the cluster of houses. The entire compound lay cluttered with furniture, tables loaded with machine parts, lines of tires, stacks of scrap metal, and a dozen Garret cousins toting semi-automatic rifles. Others gathered around fire-pits cooking, smoking, drinking, or all three. Full size crosses surrounded the fence line at intervals. An American flag as big as the houses hung roped and stretched out between one of the net poles and a gnarled tree.

  Property runs from cheap to free these days.

  A few of the other customers eyed Anna as she passed, but most negotiated quietly or left with their heads down.

  She walked up to a group of men by an open garage. Their weapons sat propped dangerously against their chairs or knees. Flames licked up out of a rusted barrel between them. An older man with a beard looked at her, then went back to talking to the others about a boat he had gotten in a trade from a tweaker and how it had sunk the first time he tried it. Anna stood and waited.

  “We’re going to find what hole he crawled
into and we’re going to fill it with piss and gasoline before we . . . Can I help you darling? The men are talking here.”

  “I need to get something I’m told only you might have.”

  The other men looked from Anna back to the bearded storyteller. He smiled, but his lips folded into a sneer before he spoke again.

  “Boys, we’ll need to finish this later. I guess my rep has preceded me and I’m back on the clock again. What exactly do you need, sweetheart?”

  All the men stood and hoisted their weapons, except the bearded man and another younger fellow next to the burning barrel. The lawn chairs creaked as they were vacated. The rest of the group dispersed to the other fire pits.

  Anna said, “I need Shalobicortazine.”

  The bearded man sneered again. He looked at the younger man, then back at Anna and used his fingers to brush whiskers away from his open mouth.

  “Speak English, girl.”

  “I need Silver Lightning.”

  “You mean White Lightning maybe? That’s cheaper and less likely to strike you blind. Did you get yourself stung between the boobs?”

  Anna looked away toward the fire. “It was Jon, my husband.”

  The younger man spoke up. “Jon Sasser? Are you Mrs. Sasser?”

  Anna nodded. The older man snapped his fingers at the younger man.

  The bearded man said, “That stuff isn’t an easy mix. We hadn’t made it much lately. You have a warehouse full of weapons or a running factory you can turn the deed over for it?”

  The younger man snorted. “You look a little old to pay the way most of our lady customers do. Although, you are better kept.”

  “Cool it, Dusty. I’m handling this.”

  Dusty kept talking. “I went to school with your daughter, Cherry. I like the taste of cherries. She had a little sister, Suzie, too. I bet they are both full grown and filled out. What are the two of them willing to do to save their father?”

  The older man said, “Dusty, take a walk. I’m handling this deal. I’ll let you know if I need you.”

  He stood up and walked back into the garage. “Knock yourself out, old man. I suppose she is young and plump compared to you.”