Dark City

by Hodge, Brian

  She slowed to stare at the back end of a tractor trailer truck sticking out of the entrance to a giant box store. On the far side of the store and its huge lot, a crowd was gathering, arriving on foot from all directions.

  The crowd, the accident and absence of emergency responders made Isabella wonder if she’d dropped into a fragment of her husband’s dream.

  In the school parking lot, the Principal’s spot was empty, along with many others. The National Guard trucks were missing, replaced by a single Humvee. There were few small school buses, but more cars than yesterday as parents had decided to bring their kids to school and stay. They stood, huddled by the doors, holding on to each other, to their children. Yesterday, a mother had told her she’d heard stories about kids being sent to shelters because parents went missing. She wasn’t there this morning, but the others looked just like her, apprehensive, hanging on to hope.

  New substitute teachers mingled with the regular staff, the school nurse at the center of their circle. Two of the teachers had a few of the young ones by their side, but no one seemed concerned they’d elected to keep the kids rather than turn them over to shelters.

  Three soldiers stood behind her, one of them talking into a headset. They were younger than the new teacher, just graduated, standing next to his car staring at the school building. Not moving, like other people on television, on the roadside, like yesterday, the day before.

  Isabella joined the group. The soldier with the radio and the nurse spoke about the plan for the day, which was like yesterday’s plan—keep the school operating, stay in contact with the county command center, bring in the ill for triage. Parents drifted down, the children organized themselves in small class clusters around their teachers. Older middle school brothers and sisters, a few from high school, stood with them. No one told them they had to go.

  The nurse led everybody inside. Classrooms filled, though by not as much as yesterday. Today, kids and adults combined classes and crowded together like a school of fish corralled by predators. Lesson plans metamorphosed into storytelling and knowledge games and anything that sparked discussion, excitement, even laughter. Quietly, the children who withdrew, the ones who stood alone and wouldn’t cry or shiver in terror of their new reality, were taken away to the emergency center in the staff lounge.

  Parents prepared and served lunch. A soldier drove off in the Humvee filled with those who’d been removed. A couple of parents followed, calls were made to the rest. Isabella tried all the numbers for her assigned child, picked up another case, was relieved when she found at least an uncle and a grandmother to follow-up.

  She took a few minutes afterwards to check for phone messages, emails, texts on old threads, but nothing new had been left since the weekend. She ran down her own family’s numbers again. An aunt she’d reached on Saturday was no longer available. A distant cousin answered, a Christmas card contact she hadn’t seen in years. Before she could ask if he’d heard about her mother, he told her he was looking out from an apartment window at a riot in the street.

  “So what?” Isabella asked, irritation flaring. She didn’t care about the riot.

  “People are eating each other.”

  Isabella dropped the phone. The nurse came to her, examined her eyes, held her shaking hands. After a minute, Isabella said she was fine and picked up the phone.

  “You have to stay strong,” the nurse told Isabella. “For the kids. For everybody else.”

  “What’s going on?” Isabella asked.

  “We’ll get through it,” the nurse said. She patted Isabella’s cheek and pushed her in the direction of a staff corner of the lunchroom.

  Two aides made room for her between them, gave her tea and a sandwich. A preschooler ran up to offer a lollipop, her father close behind. Isabella remembered him, his son was in her class. He’d left on a Guard truck Monday. The father picked up the girl, nodded to the staff, took her out the back exit, gently patting her head. The little girl turned as she walked and waved at Isabella.

  The door slowly closed. Through it, Isabella watched the young, newly-graduated teacher walk the school’s rear delivery road in a straight line and start climbing the fence instead of going through the rear gate. She wanted to ask him what he thought he was seeing, what was driving him like a stupid machine to go over obstacles rather than around or through them.

  The door shut on a bright day.

  The staff corner had quieted. The background noise of the children accented the remaining voice still speaking.

  “—they’re closing down lines of communication,” one of the older teachers said, “to minimize the panic. The damage. So the survivors can pick up where the rest of us left off. I bet when things get down to a critical level, when the last live feeds go dark and the craziness goes out of control until everything becomes quiet, automatic messages will kick in. Signals, instructions for survivors, telling them to get to rally points where there’ll be plans, procedures, policies, all the equipment and supplies to get things organized and started again—”

  “You watch too many sci-fi movies,” a younger teacher said.

  “Nuclear launch codes?” a teenager said, the son of one of the aides, then laughed nervously as attention turned to him. He turned back to his phone, pretended to text someone.

  “You never know,” the old teacher said.

  “Hope there’s somebody left knows something about nuclear reactors,” the son’s mother said. She put her hand over the phone.

  Isabella ate a few crackers while finishing the tea, excused herself from the growing crowd and the blossoming conversations about the ending of things.

  She went back to the first child’s file, finally handed it back to the nurse, shaking her head.

  “We’ll take care of him,” the nurse said, as she always did.

  She tried again to reach Hugh at the office, left more messages which no one in the company seemed capable of returning. Julio called to let her know their mother was fine, but withdrawn. Her temperature was a little low and she had no appetite. Their father was locked up in the bedroom.

  Isabella felt tears aching to be released, but kept herself from crying, as much over the news as from hearing a familiar voice again so soon.

  “Drama,” Julio said. “He says she smells funny, like she wore a special perfume to be with another man. He’s probably scared of losing Mom. Who else could take his cranky ass?”

  Hugh’s father never called back, and didn’t pick up calls.

  A few parents took their kids home early. The volunteer bus drivers checked to make sure someone would be home to welcome their precious cargo. At the end of the day, Isabella and other staff stayed with the children whose parents hadn’t come, or who were no longer answering their phones, again going through emergency numbers until staff adopted the last few lonely, crying stragglers to take them to shelters. Or, home to their own diminished families.

  The nurse stayed with a half-dozen mothers who’d come to pick up their kids only to discover they’d been sent away during the day. Like the nurse, like Isabella, crisis had pinned them to their jobs. Pain wavered behind the shock in their expressions, as if they were still working, still keeping up the front that enabled them to handle madness.

  The hurt in their hearts ached in Isabella. She lingered by the school door, looking out at the quiet neighborhood, drawn to the silent, empty space behind her. She turned, found herself compelled to listen, to watch the doorways and hall junctions, for any sign of life, anyone left behind. Or, something new, lurking.

  On the ride home, she stopped to let a large pack of dogs trot across the road. Already, they seemed feral, a few of the dogs circling the car, sniffing, one jumping on the hood to stare down at her through the front window before scurrying off to rejoin the pack.

  A faint odor of burnt plastic lingered in the air. Behind her, a thick, roiling column of smoke climbed into the sky, closer than she was used to seeing. A gas station, she thought, or a small factory. She drove
on.

  Sirens were silent, other drivers scarce. Smaller stores and offices had closed or were empty, but most of the big malls seemed open, active. Shoppers pushed carts back to their vehicles or to the stores. Church parking lots were Sunday full, as was the Temple. Fast food restaurants were the most common places open, drawing customers.

  She stopped at a gas station to fill up. The attendant was gone. The glass door to the cashier’s office had been smashed open. A car had stopped half way into the station. The driver sat behind the wheel, looking ahead as if waiting on line for a pump to open up. Across the street, a group of five men and women had gathered near a park entrance, facing the empty center of their circle. They swayed in gusts that left the trees untouched.

  Isabella stepped over glass to punch buttons on a panel as she’d seen the attendant do, filled up the tank, left forty dollars on the register. Her attention was divided between the other car and the group across the street.

  “You don’t want to go down the main road much more.”

  Her entire body jumped, like a startled cat’s. She whirled, already recognizing the voice as a child’s. A boy stood at the far end of the station, behind the air pump, back to a strip mall. Eleven or twelve, dressed in pajamas and sneakers, he carried a backpack slung over his left shoulder and a soda bottle in his right hand.

  “There’s hundreds of them,” the boy said. “Maybe thousands. In the town square. They’re getting ready.”

  The man in the car got out. Isabella grunted as if she’d been struck from behind. She pressed herself against the car, holding on tight to its cold, metal solidity. He headed off, up the road in the direction she’d been traveling, at a steady, determined pace. The five across the street broke their circle and followed.

  “They’re not dangerous. Not deliberately, anyway. When they herd, they go after each other. But if you get in the way, they don’t stop.” He took a swig from the bottle.

  “Do—” Isabella began, then coughed, choking on the dryness of her throat. She swallowed spit, coughed again, said, “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to come home with me?”

  The boy looked at her for a few moments. “No,” he said, at last. “I’m good.”

  The pump stopped. The tank was full. She put up the nozzle and replaced the tank cap. Took a deep breath. Walked toward the boy.

  “It’s not like in the movies,” he said, backing up.

  Isabella raised a hand. He turned the corner to the strip mall. She followed, running, and stumbled to a stop at the brink of a long street. Past the shuttered strip mall stores and barren lots, houses on fenced lots stood guard over the silence. Like in her own neighborhood, some doors had been left open. Household goods had been tossed out. In the distance, a dog trotted out onto a driveway and pissed on a mailbox post.

  Isabella shivered, feeling loneliness like ice in her belly. Her flesh prickled, as if stroked by a phantom’s gaze. Not the boy’s. A faint rattle and metallic squeaking confirmed he was bicycling away. The sound broke the spell, and she ran back to the car and took off. But she turned off the main road, heading for high ground around the way ahead.

  Abandoned vehicles made the going through the narrower back streets difficult, and she had to back out of dead ends and go slowly over lawns and lots. Twice she came across cars going the other way. Single drivers, a man, a woman, ten minutes apart. The exchanged quick glances, but no one stopped. The divide between them was deeper than the phone’s silence, wider than the minutes, hours, years, and more between the remaining moments of ordinary life.

  Music blaring slowed her, human voices made her pull over, find a backyard overlook.

  The town square lay below and a little behind her. Hundreds of men, women and children crowded its center, entangled in a single teeming, writhing mass.

  At the far end of the crowd, a few teens sat atop an SUV that had crashed into a tree. Thin smoke blew out from its exhaust. She recognized ’80s Motörhead from Hugh’s playlist. Across the town, a man stood on the crowd’s edge, dancing close, swinging an axe, darting back. Parts of the crowd fell away. Other figures watched, from the streets feeding the square, from windows and rooftops.

  A few houses away, a man and woman sat on a porch drinking beers and laughing. It was the sound of their voices that had stopped her.

  The boy from the gas station, still on his bike leaning against a wall, watched from a vantage point between her and the square. She yelled, but he was too far. Or, he ignored her, as did the nearby couple.

  Isabella was drawn back to square, to the blur of faces, the familiar costumes of suits, dresses, jeans. She felt a twinge of relief in the hope that something wonderful had happened to bring together so many people, young and old, from all classes and races, to celebrate in a mad street festival.

  But there was no joy in the expressions of the celebrants. No expressions on their faces, at all. Eyes opened wide, heads lolling and turning, their entranced stares slid over neighbors as if they’d all been blinded by a shared vision.

  They were silent beneath the music, when their joined voices might have drowned the song playing on the car’s speakers. And they moved like bursts of static, in sharp, spasmodic bursts, out of synch with the driving rhythm pulsing through the air.

  Isabella searched for meaning in their dance. Perhaps the stresses of the times had inspired a new fad the news had failed to report, or their actions were symptoms of the fever gripping the world, or its antidote.

  She took breath, froze. Details from the living tapestry sharpened under her gaze.

  Isabella flinched.

  In the arms and legs flailing, in the bodies jerking and convulsing, there was an intensity that made her release her breath in a faint and pitiful cry. There was blood in the relentless hammering and pulling, in the wrenching of their entwined limbs and bodies. People were biting into each other. Tearing off chunks of flesh. Ripping off clothes. Limbs.

  The crowd looked like an out-of-control machine churning up its own mechanism, the meat and bone of its parts. Annihilating itself.

  The mass moved as if its purpose was self-destruction, fueled not by fear or rage, by the passions of beliefs and faith, but by an endless emptiness, visible only by the blankness in the faces of its parts. The people weren’t celebrating or fighting. They weren’t expressing emotions, they hadn’t been possessed by germs or a virus, by recreational or curative drugs. They weren’t rioting, like the news reports claimed.

  Isabella felt her heart break, as if a bond she hadn’t known existed had suddenly shattered, leaving her broken and alone.

  She saw people, but understood what she saw was a lie. They were following instincts alien to her, laws that didn’t belong in the world. There was no shared mind or purpose in the crowd’s action, in the group or its individual parts. No soul or spirit. They were nothing, coming to rest in the greater nothingness encompassing all.

  Gasping for breath, she tried to look away.

  The crowd, what it had become, wouldn’t let her. She wanted to see. Understand. Negotiate with this new reality, as her mother said she’d have to, long ago. Back then, so far in the past, now, the bargains to be made had been with boys, and with men. For all her life, all she’d tried to do was to arrive at a shared agreement of what she and the boys and girls, men and women, were to be with and for each other. Because men changed, life changed them as it changed girls and women, and to get along, to make a safe path for themselves and their children, men and women needed to make the room and get the practice to come to terms with each other. And if men and women changed, and could negotiate, then surely there were ways to bargain with reality. Even a new reality.

  Locked into the scene, she searched out individuals, trying to catch the nature of the drive to become nothing, to find in its heart a need she could satisfy so she’d gain the leverage to demand something in return from what possessed them.

  But tears blurred her vision. The children—
she closed her eyes. Turned away.

  She tried to burn the image of what was with the remembered faces of children staring at through the world around them, or watching the end of the street for a familiar car after all the other children had been picked up. As terrible as the memories of those faces were, as lonely and empty as they made her feel, they held more hope than what called to her from below.

  But she couldn’t live with those images for long. She looked back at the roiling, shuddering mass and this time fell back on the broader vision, encompassing the town, the car and its teenagers, other people watching from the streets and the surrounding heights, somehow resistant to the beast before them. She kept searching for another way to unravel the living tapestry, like the children she couldn’t put out of her mind waiting, watching the end of the street for the return of what they knew.

  She shifted from side to side, made restless by the urge to run away. And, to descend into and join what was becoming.

  She crossed her arms and held herself as if to keep from tearing herself apart.

  In her own arms, she found another reality—a life, waiting for her return.

  She was safe, in this moment. What was below couldn’t touch her. The people, whatever they were, didn’t want anything from their surroundings. They didn’t even care about the man with the axe cutting them down from the sidelines.

  The world wasn’t ending. She was going home, to Hugh, to what they shared.

  She took a deep breath, like she did before walking into a new class at the start of the school year.

  The moment, the breath, held more: a scent, sweet, floral, with a trace of citrus, haunted by the sour residual fog of a summer camp dormitory. Her head recoiled, but the fragrance kept her from looking away. A longing bloomed, seductive, unreasoning, from seeds buried in what she’d just seen in the town square. It rooted in her desire for something more than to join, or to run away

  The bloom shined bright in her moment, illuminating the night of her need. The scent worked itself into her, feeding the crowd’s pull, the urge to join the inhuman entity assembled from so many incongruent parts. It nurtured another reality sharing the moment, a beast’s heart, impervious to pain and desire. It made her feel the purpose, the certainty and solidity of emptiness, as if that was her true home.