The Outside

by Laura Bickle

  I pulled my bandaged arm into my lap, wincing. It was sore, but the swelling seemed to have gone down. I saw Ginger and Pastor Gene sitting a few yards away, talking in low tones. Horace grazed in the grass beyond.

  Beside me, I saw my Himmelsbrief, weighted down with a small stone. Alex must have taken it out of my pocket and carefully plucked open the folds to dry it. The ink looked a bit blurry, but it was still legible. I hoped that would be enough.

  “I’m going to be all right,” I said. I couldn’t stand the worried look on his face. I reached up with my uninjured hand and pressed my palm to his cheek.

  “I was worried.” He turned his head and kissed my fingertips.

  I cast my eyes down and blushed. I felt the hand of God in this, but I didn’t know how to say this to Alex. I didn’t think that he would really believe it, not the way that I did. There was a vast chasm of something between us. Faith. He was still a good man, upright and much kinder than many people of my own sect. But I didn’t understand how he could do the right thing without thinking that God was watching. I knew that he had his own moral compass that led him, and sometimes it seemed stronger than my own.

  Pastor Gene had stood up and was approaching us.

  “How are you feeling, Katie?”

  “Weak,” I said, honestly. “But much better than before.”

  He crouched beside me. “It’ll take some time before you’re feeling normal again. Bites can take a long while to heal entirely. But I think you had some help.” He winked.

  I felt Alex glowering above me, but I smiled back at the pastor. “Thank you, Pastor Gene.”

  My smile faded as my gaze tracked back to the burned-out husk of his church. Two walls were standing, with the wet roof caved in over it. The structure was no longer habitable, and the vampires could reach in and pluck us out like sweetbreads if we tried to stay.

  His eyes followed mine. “It’s just a building,” he said. “All the people who were in it are gone.”

  “Come with us,” I said. “We are going north. To Canada.”

  He shook his head. “It’s time for me to come out of hiding, to see what remains of my family and the rest of the world.”

  My brow knit. “Where will you go?”

  His gaze drifted off to the horizon. “I have nieces and nephews out west. And following the sun doesn’t seem to be bad advice these days.”

  He patted my cheek, pressed his hand to Alex’s shoulder. I saw the green tail of a garter snake in his beard. He rose up, took one last look at the church, and walked across the field with his hands in his pockets.

  I gripped Alex’s sleeve. “Will he be all right . . . alone?”

  “Yeah. I think so. And I don’t think he’ll be alone.”

  In his wake, the grass rippled, and I saw the shadows of snakes following him.

  ***

  We turned away from the smoldering fire. I carefully climbed up on Horace’s back. I cradled my wounded arm in my lap, but the jostle of the horse’s stride made it ache enough to set my teeth on edge. But walking was just as bad, and Ginger had ordered me to conserve my strength.

  We headed north, as we always did. I did not turn back to the burned church. I saw Ginger looking at it sadly as we moved across the meadow. I imagine that Lot’s wife had much the same expression on her face.

  “Don’t look back,” I said. “It’s Gelassenheit. God’s will.”

  She shook her head. “It would have been good to stay someplace for a few days. To rest. But not with the snakes.”

  I lifted my chin. “And not with the fire. Fire is something that all Plain people fear.”

  “Because of no fire department?”

  “Ja. By the time that someone can run to find a phone, it’s usually too late. And it is a particular fear in the winter.”

  “Why winter?”

  “Because our chores stretch beyond the daylight hours. And we carry lanterns around many flammable things in the barn. One overturned lantern can engulf a barn in minutes. It can kill animals, people . . .”

  “I guess I never feared fire much before,” Ginger said. “But now that those modern conveniences are gone . . . perhaps I will again.”

  “It feels strange to be afraid of something so essential to survival,” Alex said. “I wonder if Prometheus knew how much we would fear it.”

  “Who is Prometheus?” I asked.

  “In Greek mythology, he was a Titan, one of the old gods that were a generation before Zeus and the rest of the Olympians. Zeus asked Prometheus to create man, but in doing so, Prometheus felt some sympathy for his creation. Prometheus watched man struggle to find enough to eat, to build places to live, and felt pretty darn sorry for our incompetence.

  “So he brought us a gift. He stole one of Zeus’s lightning bolts and gave it to man. It was the gift of fire. It kept man from freezing to death, helped him cook food. It saved man from a short life of cold savagery.”

  I shook my head. Alex’s stories were exactly that—good stories. But I did not believe in the underlying morality of those old, cruel gods.

  Ginger kept walking backwards, looking for the fire. And I resolutely looked forward, remembering how Lot’s wife looked backwards, full of salt and tears. No good could come of that.

  Within hours, my fear proved to be a prediction.

  We smelled the fire before we saw it.

  It wasn’t the benign, warm smell of wood smoke. This was acrid, chemical. It was the stench of man-made things burning: plastic, gasoline, rubber.

  We’d walked through the morning, having found a two-lane road. Horace trotted along the soft shoulder to save the wear and tear of pavement on his hooves. The clop of his hooves on the earth created a mechanical marching rhythm and an ache in my bones. We didn’t speak, shuffling along at Ginger’s pace. She struggled and wheezed a bit, but we went steadily. There was no traffic. No cars. Just buzzards circling in the distance. And a dark haze on the horizon.

  The road fell away at a crossroads, and we plodded over a hill that seemed to go on forever. When we reached the crest, we stopped.

  A city lay below us in the valley, burning.

  I sucked in my breath. I had never seen a city before. I had imagined that it would be as I had seen in books and newspapers: skyscrapers laced with gray ribbons of road and overhung with the glitter of electric light shining against mirrored glass. It would be towering and vast and glamorous, full of life and movement. This was where I had intended to go on Rumspringa, a lifetime ago.

  I was here, but this was not what I had pictured. There were tall buildings surrounded by a black cloak of smoke. Orange flames reflected on broken glass. Stilled cars blocked congested streets.

  I stared ahead. “Should we go down there?”

  Ginger’s fingers knit in her coat sleeves. “There might be people down there. Radios. Survivors.”

  My stomach growled.

  “And food,” she added. “Supplies.”

  Alex frowned. “It could be infested. Probably is. Dangerous.”

  “It’s daylight,” Ginger said. I could hear the yearning in her voice for news. For hope.

  “They can be awake during the daytime,” I reminded her. “All they need is shadow, indoors, away from the sun.” I had encountered a nest of them before in daylight hours, on an excursion from my old home to the nearby town. They had nearly killed me.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Alex said.

  “What if . . . what if we stayed in the open? Stayed on the street . . . found something to eat, and left right away?”

  “There aren’t only vamps to worry about. Survivors could be just as violent,” Alex pointed out. “Especially if they’re hungry or desperate. Violence is the first rule after any disaster. We’re better off on the road.”

  I pressed my fingertips to my lips. I didn’t want to believe that humans could be terrible to each other. But I’d seen what a disaster could do to even a small community, like mine. We had turned on ourselves, begun threatening eac
h other with expulsion and dogma.

  “We have to try,” I said. “There’s not going to be much more forage. Frost’s coming.”

  Alex sighed and kicked at a rock. “Maybe we can find a car or something that runs.”

  I leaned protectively against the horse’s neck. “We can’t leave Horace behind. All of us or none of us.”

  He reached out and tenderly touched my cheek. “Horace will be fine. We can’t—”

  He saw the ferociousness in my face. My grip tightened on the reins. “All of us or none of us,” I repeated.

  His hand dropped and he stuffed it in his pocket. “It’ll . . . it’ll work out.”

  We descended the hill and walked down a highway off ramp together. Horace’s hooves rang loudly against the pavement, piercing the silence. My heart clunked unevenly in my chest as we approached a truck stop that spread out by this, the first exit to the city. The blacktop lot was mostly empty, but my spirits lifted when I saw a few tractor trailers parked there and imagined that Horace could fit in the back of one of them. A convenience store, gas station, and deli were housed in the same building. A sign listing prices for diesel and unleaded fuel stood above advertisements for sodas, cigarettes, and sandwiches.

  I could tell that the place had been abandoned. My heart sank. A chain was run through the handles of the front door and fixed with a padlock. Ginger grabbed the pay phone receiver and shook her head. “No dial tone.”

  The locks on the building had done little good. The glass in the window was shattered, and I could see a toppled display of fruit pies inside. I slid down from the horse and found my stake in his gear. I tucked the weapon into the crook of my right elbow, pressing myself forward against the dizziness creeping into my skull. I reached with my left hand through the ruined window, conscious of the hollowness in my belly.

  I snatched a lemon fruit pie from the display, clutched it to my apron. I peered into the half shadow inside.

  Sunlight streamed inside the store about four feet. The only things that moved were the dust motes. I could make out toppled racks of candy and bottles of car fluids. I smelled stale beer spilled on the floor and wrinkled my nose.

  “I think we can get in there,” I said, gesturing to the broad safety of the stripe of sunshine.

  Alex looked inside. “I’ll go first, see if it’s clear. If it is, you can come in after.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it. For all of Alex’s foreign manner, he did try to be chivalrous, to protect me.

  I nodded, gripping my stake with my good hand.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Alex stepped through the shattered window frame. I held my breath, watching as the sunlight washed through his blond hair and poured over his shoulders. I glimpsed the reflection of sun on his knife. As he moved away from me, into the darkness, the daylight drained away. I could hear his footsteps crunching in the glass, but soon even that soft pulverizing sound fell silent.

  I balanced my wounded palm carefully on a shard of glass in the window frame and strained to see beyond the silhouettes of ruined displays. I smelled curdled milk, tobacco, and sour coffee. Lottery tickets had been dragged from behind the checkout counter like streamers. The cash register was broken open on the floor, surrounded by glistening change.

  “Alex?” My hand tightened on the shard, summoning a trickle of blood. I snatched my hand away, pressed the heel of my palm to my mouth to stanch the flow. I tasted blood—warm and coppery. It turned my stomach. How the vampires found sustenance in such thin liquid baffled me.

  I heard steps crunching back in the glass and candy. Alex’s lanky silhouette came into view.

  “It’s clear,” he said, and I could hear the relief in his voice. “And there’s food.”

  Ginger and I clambered though the window. I felt a tiny pang of guilt as I scavenged down the aisles, filling my apron pockets with packages of food. I tore open a candy bar, stuffed it into my mouth without really tasting it to quell the rumbling in my belly.

  Alex had ripped open a door in the refrigerated section and was pawing through the sticky cans.

  “No beer,” he mumbled. “I would really like a beer.”

  Ginger gave him a dark look. “You’d have to fight me for it.” She lifted a bottle of clear liquid. “The vodka’s all mine.”

  Alex swore. “Damn it. Looks like looters already got the rest of the good stuff.”

  Funny how we didn’t consider ourselves to be looters. Just survivors.

  I paused before a glass door. Behind it was a display of red and white Coca-Cola bottles. I had developed a sweet tooth for Coca-Cola on my excursions to the local English-run general store back at home. I reached in and grabbed a bottle. It was warm. I twisted off the cap and took a slug. It tasted hot and unsatisfying.

  I turned toward the counter, stepping through ribbons of lottery tickets. I spied the aspirin, Band-Aids, and medicines behind the counter and figured we would need those.

  And as I came around the edge of the counter, it was clear that the occupants of the store no longer needed them.

  A rust-colored stain covered the gray speckled tile. It was large, as if someone had bled a great deal, but faint, as if it had happened a long time ago.

  I crouched down. There were small swipes and rills in the stain. Sweat prickled the back of my neck. I had seen that pattern before, when I’d spilled milk on the floor and the dogs had licked it up.

  “They’ve been here,” I said.

  “There are more in the city than in the countryside. Simple math. Which is why we shouldn’t linger,” Alex said, reaching past me for a bottle of aspirin.

  I nodded and retreated. I left my Coke on the counter, having lost my appetite. I stared at a stack of very thin newspapers. They were from six weeks ago, and the headline was “SUSPECTED VIRUS INFECTS EASTERN US—RESIDENTS URGED TO STAY INDOORS.” Only one page was printed. I scanned the article:

  (AP) In a press conference from a bunker in Greenbriar, West Virginia, the president urged residents to remain calm. A highly contagious blood-borne pathogen with symptoms similar to rabies has infected major metropolitan areas in the eastern U.S., while similar reports of outbreaks are developing worldwide.

  “We are working on a way to control the epidemic,” the president said. “But it is critically important to stay calm. The world’s top researchers at the Centers for Disease Control are working on a way to identify and isolate the pathogen. In the meantime, stay indoors and do not open your doors for anyone after dark.”

  When asked if there was any truth to the rumor that the pathogen arose from germ warfare, specifically Tuesday morning’s detonation of a dirty bomb in Washington, D.C., the president said that he could “neither confirm nor deny” such reports. He issued a similar response to rumors that the pathogen developed in Chernobyl, Fukushima, or nuclear testing sites in the Middle East.

  The National Guard will be enforcing quarantine orders in the following affected areas: New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. . . .

  I tucked away the paper to read later. It was old news, but perhaps we could glean something useful from it. I had been calling the creatures we were fighting vampires. The Hexenmeister had simply called them Darkness. It was useful shorthand for what we saw. But there was still doubt among Alex and Ginger about what they really were, of what fusion of myth and technology blighted our world.

  Alex reached under the counter, began fiddling with a black machine with knobs, a radio the size of a large breadbox.

  Ginger was beside him instantly. “Is the radio working?”

  “I think the battery’s about gone.”

  The two of them began poking and prodding the machine. I heard a low hiss, varying in volume as they changed the numbers on the dial.

  Ginger grabbed a handheld device wired to the radio box and spoke int
o it: “Mayday, is there anybody out there? Over.”

  Alex continued to fiddle with the dials. Perhaps they could summon a voice out of it, some hope that we were not alone.

  “Mayday, mayday, is anyone out there? Over.”

  I heard only the dull, rushing hiss. They continued to try to work the machine. Once, it seemed like there was a garbled human voice at the other end.

  I held my breath.

  “Repeat that? What’s your twenty?” Ginger’s fingers tightened on the microphone.

  The voice sharpened and then faded.

  “There are people out there,” she said, her knuckles white on the black plastic. “Probably in the city.”

  “That’s a great way to get killed. We can’t fight a city of vampires, even in the daylight,” Alex said.

  “But we have to find out what happened,” she protested.

  “We may never know what happened,” Alex charged. “The only thing we can do is survive.”

  Ginger threw the corded plastic microphone down on the countertop so hard that it bounced and struck a reel of lottery tickets. She stormed away to the back of the store.

  Alex moved to follow her, but I caught his sleeve. “Give her some time,” I said, as soothingly as I could.

  He grunted and went back to rummaging through the medicines.

  I gravitated toward a strange contraption in the corner. It stood on four legs, and had a glass tabletop with colored bits of enamel and springs inside.

  “It’s a pinball machine,” Alex said.

  I blinked. “It makes . . . pinballs?”

  “No. It’s a game. You put in a quarter.” He pointed to the slot. “A ball gets loaded here.” He gestured to a rod with a spring wrapped around it and pulled. It made a startlingly loud noise in the silence.