by Hodge, Brian
The night and its silence pressed down on her head and shoulders, made her feel heavy. Weary. Silence thickened around her, leaving her alone with the sounds of her heart beating, her breath, in, out.
A faint boom made the night shudder. A flickering glow limned the nearby rooftops.
From the direction, she calculated that something had happened at the closest mall. Maybe propane tanks blowing up.
A beam of light stabbed the sky, then another. Columns of smoke danced in the lights. Someone had turned on the mall searchlights, normally reserved for special sales and events. Perhaps the Guard, calling people to come to an emergency shelter.
No. There would have been signs, at least a few intersections manned to direct traffic. Warning sirens from schools, police and fire stations. Instructions on the emergency channels.
It could have been the Guard breaking up a riot like the one in the town square.
No. That was only hope. A dream from the second bottle of wine. Kids, more likely, the same type she’d seen playing music and watching the frenzy she’d come across, the ones drawn to danger, to risk. Bored. Frightened. Alone. And men, the kind who changed with the pressures of time. Drawn to destruction, to feeding annihilation, adding to the stench of burning meat and shit and fat and blood that had been lingering in the air, teasing her with a terrible truth.
Not all the fires had been accidental.
She stopped at the car door, looked up and down the street. Under the stars and a quarter moon descending to the horizon, a neighbor’s pile of dusty boxes, furniture, left-over building materials, paint and household goods loomed like an altar to an unknown entity.
Fear moved through her like a shark in bloody seas. The skin at the back of her neck tingled as if teased by a feather. She felt herself being watching. Darkness waited for her at the end of the street. She looked up at the sky again, at the space between stars, expecting a voice to boom the message that something was going to happen in the morning.
The wine. She shouldn’t drive.
She’d shop tomorrow morning, early, before work. In daylight. With clear roads and no crowds in the store. No riots. She’d get to the school in plenty of time.
Her eyes burned. She shivered as tears traced the contours of her cheeks like dead fingers.
Isabella took the flashlight from the glove box. Went to the garage, opened the door. The flashlight beam found Hugh in a corner to the right, at the back, knees to chest facing the call.
“Hugh,” she said. Her voice was quieter than she’d expected, as if smothered by the quiet. She went to him, put a hand on his shoulder. “Come to bed. Please.”
He turned his head.
She put the flashlight beam on his face. He stared back, through the light, through her, into a night she could not see as if searching for a star to guide him, a moon to give him comfort.
Isabella tried to burn bright in his invisible night. She came closer, remembering her own night, the fires she’d seen, the sun in its blazing indifference, the moon and stars, the world in its transformation. She brought the light to his eyes, spilled desires and dreams they’d shared, her feelings for him, memories of their life together, and watched them turn to shadows and echoes before falling into bottomless chasms.
“I’m here,” she said, trying hard not to be the voice of his infinite night sky. “Things’ve changed, already. But I’m not gone. We’re both still here. You. And me. Please, believe me, Hugh.”
She waited for an answer. Into his ear, into the darkness, she whispered, “I believe you.”
Hugh said nothing. He remained transfixed by the flashlight beam until she shut it off. He turned, bowed his head, becoming a part of the wall.
Isabella waited until she was sure he was anchored to the world so that he wouldn’t drift off, and nothing might drag him away, and he would stay with her no matter what might happen.
Exhaustion swept through her. She left Hugh in the garage, pulled down the door, went back inside the house. In the bathroom, she threw up wine and bitter acid, and when she was finally done she went to bed.
She set the alarm earlier than usual, determined to find rest before going shopping and then to school. She’d help whoever was left, and this time, if there any lost children, she’d take them home.
Because like men, and women, dreams changed, but if they remained true to the dreamer, they were worth keeping and nurturing through all the nights that might fall, short, dark and full of stars.
Or long and invisible.
— | — | —
Afterword:
Burning Bright in the Invisible Night
I’m not a huge zombie guy. I watch The Walking Dead, just like everyone else. I grew up with Night of the Living Dead and enjoyed 28 Days Later a bunch of times. Did the Keene, some zombie anthos, but I never thought of myself as drawn to the theme. Slow or fast, they just didn’t populate much space in my imagination.
Of course, I was surprised when somebody put me on a zombie panel years ago at a con. Yeah, okay, I’d kinda written some zombie stories—one in the future with aliens ruling over vast herds of humans through something like Buck Rogers’ Killer Kane Amnesia Helmets; another told from the point of view of a hoodoo/conjure zombie in love. And, of course, there’s that trade Caravan of the Dead is involved in, in a couple of my books.
Still, those stories were not about zombies. The living dead were props, part of the background. The hoodoo piece, that one was about power of love—She’d Make A Dead Man Crawl. Nothing zombie about that.
Obviously, I had a blind spot. I was using zombies without thinking about them. Using them, and throwing them away. What a cad.
But when I thought about zombies, the dead shambling around hunting down the living, there was nothing there. No reason to care, no ideas, no inspiration. Guess I’d always backed into zombies, coming up with other ideas first and letting the dead creep in because they were necessary, they served a story’s purpose.
So I tried backing into them again, thinking about zombies as an apocalypse, a consequence of or a passing of judgment on humanity. But no, nada, zip—all that came to me were the same things I’d seen and read. I just couldn’t connect with the critters. They didn’t scare me. Blocked again. Still struggling, I began to resent the trope. And, my own resistance. Why couldn’t I focus on zombies the way I might when thinking about ghosts, monsters, demons?
Well, if I couldn’t come up with a zombie story, what about an anti-zombie story? A violation of some central, sacred code of zombiness. A transgression, a corruption of the idea of the living dead and all they’ve come to mean. Suddenly, the juices were flowing. An apocalypse took shape, with all its terrible consequences. A character, sad, scared, facing loneliness, took shape.
So I finally wrote a story about zombies, though I’m afraid it might disappoint true fans of the brand. But I did get to explore abandoned landscapes, because that’s always fund, and how survivors might adapt to them. And, I had a chance to look at a person abandoned, and what someone might do in order not to feel alone in the world. Less fun, that, but satisfying in its own particular darkness.
I’m happy, in a horrified kind of way. I hope readers also find something in the tale that will please, in a disturbing kind of way.
— | — | —
The Fear Puppet
«« — »»
Gerard Houarner
Marican woke to the sound of distant booming, his arms and legs shaking.
He’d been dreaming about talking to the new girl at the Ministry. They were walking together in a restored gallery with electric lights, glass windows and polished oak floor. A crowd had gathered around the wine and cheese at the other end of the hall. The walls were covered with paintings he couldn’t name but knew were by Bosch, Rousseau, Picasso. He asked if she’d found the exhibition’s guide brochure. Her voice started off like Naja’s, a subtle song soothing life’s wounds. He couldn’t understand what she was saying. She started yelling. The walls
shook. Canvases flew from their frames, fluttered through a yawning hole in the ceiling. Then he fell back into the waking world, trembling.
Usually, he was awakened only twice from his sleep.
The antenna, a setaceous arc of chitin that nightly slipped through the window shutter slats to probe the empty space at the center of his bedroom, had already made its visit. The scrapping of its hardened tip against the wood floor had roused him, as usual. He’d also answered the two hard knocks on his door from the building’s other tenant with, “I’m fine. Thanks.” He’d gone back to sleep, and dream, each time.
It had been a while since his last seizure. The sky had been quiet.
The booming rolled through night, dragged him from clinging dream and memory into the room’s darkness. The bedside candle had gone out, as had the stove’s last embers, but in the faint sputter of bonfire light dribbling through the windows, he saw that he was alone. No ghosts, demons or desires waited for him to fall back asleep.
Dream guilt swarmed him, making muscles dance. His body was right to tremble. He hadn’t even spoken to the new girl, yet. Had no idea what her voice was really like. She’d never replace his dead wife. She was an Orphan.
He lay in bed waiting for the fit to pass. When it wouldn’t, he willed himself to be still, pushed the dream and the noise from his mind.
The last traces of dream girl and gallery evaporated, but the sound rolled closer, almost like a storm’s thunder, sharpened by the report of something like gun fire. Of course, there were no more guns. These days, survival was all that passed for resistance.
The bed frame creaked, the floor groaned, as his fit grew more violent. A cup rattled briefly on its saucer on the table against the window wall when another rumble crashed through the building. The walls moaned, as if bearing a new burden of weight.
Drenched in sweat, Marican sat up on the edge of the bed. The threadbare sheet stuck to his naked chest and arms like a second skin, cold, refusing to slough off. He whimpered at the suggestion of an embrace by something he couldn’t understand. The rumbling seeped into his body, rattling rib cage and spine, spreading tremors through chest and guts.
Enough. No more.
But his body never listened when that sound seized him in its overwhelming grip.
The booming snagged the strings of his nerves. His hands flew up and down like tethered birds seeking the sky’s safety. Thigh muscles twitched. Toes cramped. He wanted to raise the shutter slats and peek through the gaps to look out across the crumbling city. Blink at the light from the bonfires around the Orphanages. Watch his terror approach through a veil of burning tears. His body wouldn’t let him.
“Naja,” he whispered, desperate for the warmth and comfort of her soft hands. Her bones couldn’t answer from their grave under the ruins.
To see what was coming, he would have had to look up, pierce the cloud cover. Maybe, if the winds were right and the moon was high, those clouds would part to let him catch a glimpse of stars, and of something passing, uncoiling, shifting in the heavens, moonlight warped and stained on its oily surface. Only a dream, of course. A nightmare spilling into the waking world.
The giggling fit bubbled from his gut, an icy froth that filled his lungs and froze his heart.
As if to remind him that he was alive and awake, his twitching hands hurled themselves against his chest. Flesh throbbed from the beating, the stings of snapping fingers and slicing nails. Yes. He was still alive.
A stink of rotting meat and excrement wafted through the window. Local khli vendors were warming fermented meat for the morning meals. Dawn was coming. He’d have to go to work, soon. Even if he’d rather vomit his guts out the window.
The booming faded, but the fit held on, made him stand on restless legs and dance around the bed, knees raised high, arms flailing, body writhing to the spasms of his dread. He might have been running from falling stars, or leaping from a chasm opening under his feet. He bumped into the table and broke the cup, overturned the chair, soiled his trousers.
The building’s other tenant screamed in long, high-pitched peals. Insects, larger and meatier in the years after the Turning, skittered through the walls, thumping into each other and clicking. Nearby, a pure and mournful woman’s voice delivered a bare but defiant rendition of the Vissi D’Arte aria from La Traviatta into the booming’s silent wake. The lonely proclamation echoed in the spaces of his terror. “In the hour of grief,” he croaked, in English, before and after she sang the original line.
Down the street, something heavy crashed through a rotting balcony or old store canopy sign to the street below. Everyone dealt with fear in their own way.
The seizure wore itself out. He fell back into bed, exhausted. His body ached as it had after crawling from the wreckage of his home, with the sky erupting and screaming, the earth convulsing. Muscles burned, tendons shrieked, as they had when he’d tried lifting beams and bricks until his fingers broke and the strength bled from his arms and legs through gashes and cuts that laid bone bare. The booming was only a faint echo from that time, but it was still too much for him.
He slipped back into dreams, where he searched through empty, torch-lit halls in vain for someone to hold him.
Morning wails dragged him into daylight. The talking drums, slow, tentative, like doors banging in the breeze, were broadcasting their last threads of empty news: someone missing, basement collapsed, the sky shook. He got up, moving gingerly, his old bones feeling like brittle egg shells. A rough, cracking man’s voice carried the first stanza of “We Will Understand It By and By” through the window, barely audible, before fading mid-way through the second as if unable to carry the burden of hope.
Marican washed from the water pan in the remains of the apartment’s kitchen. Put on his second set of work clothes. Picked up the broken cup. Passing through the living room, he glanced at the old, cracked television screen that would never again receive signals of any kind, the shelves of dusty books and belongings salvaged from his past, all the reminders of who he was supposed to be. He let his gaze pass quickly over the gaunt, bearded face staring back at him from a tall, framed mirror. He kissed his family’s faded picture in its tarnished frame on the bedroom dresser before leaving.
Downstairs, he left his water bucket out. Dumped the waste bucket in the wheel barrow for the gardener. Exchanged a single pellet from his pocket with a local vendor, a wrinkled, dark-skinned stick man who never looked anyone in the eye, for the week’s morning khli, along with yesterday’s plastic container. He put the full container in his patchwork quilt cloth bag, put up the collar to his wool jacket, moved on quickly to escape the stench of the night’s cooking that hung thicker than fog around the old man.
The morning was cool, with a frosty bite. His muscles ached, as if he’d spent a week with the sackcloth orphan gangs excavating ruins like ants carving up a corpse. He walked to work, slower than usual, aching and sore. Occasional morning prayers sung or shouted by other survivors of another night were his only company. On mornings like these, he was tempted to return to old habits. But he remained weary of waiting for prayers to be heard, and fearful of the answers that might be delivered.
The new girl was holding court in the Ministry square, by the shattered fountain, surrounded by a band of orphans. Every few days since her arrival, they’d gathered, like old friends sharing memories of living through something together. He’d never seen a gang flaunt its immunity to the rule of three so close to the Ministry. Government workers drifting in from all directions like a lost autumn’s last brittle leaves gave the gathering furtive, hostile glances. Security remained on post, overlooking the transgression.
She held the youngest of the band in her arms while she seemed to listen to the rest, though the sackcloth hoods kept speakers secret. The boy mussed her short black hair, grabbed at the worn and faded leather jacket that fell to her hips, kicked at her skirts, as if trying to get at who she really was.
Cari, their youngest, had been curious like
that.
The young boy didn’t yet need the hood to protect a degenerating face. May he’d be one of the lucky ones. Like her.
The boy laughed, though the woman’s expression remained serious, almost sullen. Marican couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard children laugh, or even done so himself. The sound was like the crackle of lightning in the square. Workers glanced at the clouds.
The sound, as primal as the night’s rumble of thunder, shot through him, left him shaking with excitement. The woman and the bare-faced, laughing boy made the small knot of faceless forms gathered around them seem human. Almost normal. He remembered the feel of small fingers in his hair, ears, tugging at his lips; the warmth of sleeping children against his chest; the startling brightness of innocent eyes looking to him like gates opened to a new and endless country.
He remembered a young woman meeting his gaze and softening her hard expression. Laughter. The sun, and a clear sky. Naja.
Marican shut his eyes, bowed his head. This woman, he had to talk to her. Just to get her out of his mind, and dreams. Today. Yes, today, he promised himself. Again.
But not right now. Not in the company she kept.
She probably squeaked, like a rat caught in the jaws of its death. Nothing like Naja.
He passed the group, picking up his pace like everyone else. A small stone flew past his head. Small, muffled voices giggled. He didn’t turn around. He’d been closest. He should have expected the harassment.
Ministry staff yielded to his seniority and let him pass as he rushed forward. The two young guards at the building’s gate held their ground and forced him to squeeze past between them, as if answering the challenge of the orphans’ presence.