The Outside

by Laura Bickle

  “It’s effective.”

  “Very. As long as you don’t run out of ammo.”

  “Where are we going?” I whispered to Judy.

  “We’re going someplace safe,” she said.

  And I believed her.

  We walked down a paved street, past a retirement village and a dock, to a gate. The gate was a simple one, just a steel arm. It reminded me of the ones that we used to rotate cattle in and out of fields back home. A sign with a large cross on it read WELCOME TO WATER’S EDGE.

  We climbed over the low gate without opening it.

  “The vampires . . .” I said.

  “They can’t get in here,” Judy said. “This little town, all fifteen square blocks of it, was founded as a Methodist colony in the nineteenth century.”

  “It’s holy ground?”

  “Yes. Still. The tourists that came here for the religious conferences and the contemplation are still here.”

  “But the vampires can be invited in . . .” I began, remembering the shrine and the nuns.

  Judy shook her head. “Everyone at Water’s Edge has been altered. The glamour doesn’t work on us.”

  I cocked my head. “‘Altered’?”

  “Matt will tell you all about it. He can explain the science much better than I can.”

  Science. I bit my lip and traded sidelong glances with Alex.

  As soon as we passed through the gate, the luminous members of the group visibly relaxed. Their knot around us loosened, and we moved down tiny narrow streets bounded by small, pretty cottages. Frozen flower beds and hanging arrangements surrounded concrete yard ornaments. There was no grass to speak of, as the houses were built right up to the sidewalk, as if land was at a premium. You could literally reach from the upstairs window of one house to another. The shadows of cats flitted in the tiny alleyways. I wound my fingers in Fenrir’s ruff to keep him from chasing them.

  Most of the houses were shuttered. But many of them held light. I was amazed to see it. It wasn’t the cold light of electricity but the yellow, uneven glow of oil lamps like the ones used by the Amish that I recognized.

  We walked down the main street, past a shuttered ice cream parlor and a pizza restaurant, to a paved path that dipped along the lake. A dock with a flagpole reached into the lake behind us, the U.S. flag tearing in the wind. The bluster drove waves up over the rocks, soaking the paths. Many of the houses facing the lake were covered with storm shutters, but there was one that was open: a large grand house facing the black water with nearly every window lit with warm yellow light.

  “Here,” Judy said. “This is Matt’s house.”

  We walked up a brick path to the back porch. I wasn’t sure what to do with Horace. One of the men rubbed his nose. “He’s a nice horse. Where’d you get him?”

  I took a deep breath. “He came to my village without his rider.” I omitted the part about finding a human foot in the stirrup.

  “He looks like he’s a Sabino white.”

  “You know horses?”

  “A little. I used to work for a veterinarian. I can take him to the park to graze. There’s still a bit of grass there. I’ll take off his saddle, rub him down, and get him a blanket.” He moved to take the reins from me. “I’ll bring your gear back.”

  Horace seemed placid around the glowing people. I clutched the reins. I was more worried about Horace than the gear. “Will he be safe?”

  “It’s on the property. He’ll be as safe as any of us.”

  I nodded and handed the reins over. “His name is Horace.”

  The man clucked to the horse. “Tell the others that he went with Keene. They’ll know where to find me.”

  I watched Keene and Horace strike off through a gap between the houses, up the main street.

  The man with the flare gun led us past patio furniture covered in tarps. The back door was unlocked. In fact, there was no lock on it at all. It reminded me a bit of Amish houses in that way. He opened the back storm door to a parlor that smelled of lemon soap. We clustered awkwardly in the light of an oil lamp perched on a table. Books were strewn on the table and on the formal, overstuffed chairs.

  I noticed that the glow of our “‘angels” had dimmed once we entered the presence of artificial light. Judy, standing closest to the lantern, had stopped incandescing entirely. She looked like a normal woman: blond hair, blue eyes, freckled skin. Unangelic.

  “Matt!” the man shouted. “Hey, we need a doctor.”

  My gaze slid to the two young women. Their hands were knotted together. They were probably only a year or two older than I was. They looked like sisters, with the same long black hair and pale gold skin. But there was blood splashed on their faces. One of them held a hand over her eye. What I thought was snow on their clothes didn’t melt—it was glass glittering.

  “If you’re looking for a doctor, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  A man entered the parlor, wiping his hands with a dishtowel. I guessed him to be in his middle forties. Gray was beginning to streak his brown hair on the left temple, and his hazel eyes were lined with humor. He was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. I liked him immediately.

  He looked at us, and then at the girls. “What happened?”

  The man with the flare gun nodded at us. I saw that his name was Peter—It was embroidered on his coveralls. “We saw the fireworks, went to look.”

  “It could have been a vamp trick.”

  “It wasn’t. These two”—he pointed at me and Alex—“were trying to distract the vamps from taking the girls out of their car.”

  “We weren’t trying to distract them, actually,” Alex said. “We were trying to kill them by hitting them with the fireworks. But we weren’t very effective.”

  Peter grinned. “Good idea. Need better aim.”

  Matt wasn’t listening to us. He went to the girls. He was talking softly to them, persuading the one with the wounded eye to take her hand away. I couldn’t see what he saw, but I thought it was bad because Peter looked away.

  The girls nodded, but spoke back in another language that I didn’t understand. I wished I could know what they thought, but there was an invisible wall between us. I wondered if the English felt that way when we spoke Deitsch around them.

  “Anybody get bitten?” Matt asked.

  “No,” Judy said. “We asked before we brought them in.”

  I wondered what they would have done if one of us had been bitten . . . would they have done as we did for—or to—Ginger? I hoped so. But I still shuddered to think of it, and a pang of grief twitched in my stomach.

  “Let’s get them to the kitchen. I think we need some towels. And tweezers. See if someone can find Cora. She’ll be able to tell better than I can.”

  Peter unhooked a walkie-talkie from his belt, pressed down the button. “This is Waterfront House. Looking for Cora. Over.”

  The radio crackled back. “This is Summer House. Cora’s here. Over.”

  “Send her to Waterfront, with supplies. We’ve got two girls we found on the road, cut up pretty bad. Over.”

  “We’ll wake her and send her right over. Over.”

  “Roger Dodger. Copy. Waterfront out.”

  I gaped in amazement at the walkie-talkies. I had not heard an artificial human voice in months.

  Peter clipped it back on his belt. “Each occupied house has one. I’m the maintenance guy, so it seemed like a good idea, as long as the batteries hold out.”


  “Aren’t you a doctor?” Alex asked Matt.

  Matt gave a short bark of laughter, shook his head. “Not a medical doctor. I’m a biologist. But I’m hell with a pair of tweezers. Cora’s coming, though. She used to be a nurse.”

  Judy ushered the girls to the back of the house. “I’ll see if there are any wounds we missed.” She traded an inscrutable glance with Matt and disappeared.

  Matt glanced down at Fenrir. I didn’t know if animals were allowed in the house. I should have asked.

  “He’s beautiful,” Matt said. “Looks like mostly timber wolf. With a bit of shepherd mixed in.”

  Alex knelt beside him, scrubbed his ears. “Fenrir’s harmless. Don’t worry.”

  Matt extended a hand to him, at nose level. Fenrir sniffed at him. He shied away when Matt tried to touch him, slipping back behind my skirt.

  “So . . . you’re not aliens. Not that I would believe that now,” Alex said. “What the hell are you, other than biologists, nurses, and maintenance men?”

  Matt spread his hands out. The sides facing the lamp looked normal. Human. The palms turned toward us, in shadow, glowed softly. “We’re human. Don’t worry. We’ve just found a way to adapt to the vampires.”

  Steps clomped on the back step.

  “That’s Cora.” Peter let a woman in her sixties inside. She had tightly permed gray hair that was flat on one side, and was dressed in a pink sweatsuit. I was envious of the imprint of a pillow seam on her cheek. A raincoat was thrown over the sweatsuit, and she clutched a first-aid kit.

  “What did you find?” Her eyes were wide and bright.

  “Two girls . . . They’re speaking Vietnamese. I think. Judy has them in the back. Cut up with glass. One of them has a pretty bad-looking eye.”

  “I’ll take a look.” She bustled to the back.

  “You guys will have to excuse me,” Matt said. “I think I might be needed to hold a tray while Cora picks glass out of those wounds. But I will come up to talk with you later. I promise.” He nodded to Peter. “Set them up in one of the guest rooms.”

  Peter glanced at my bonnet. “Not to be too prying, but . . . would you like a separate room, miss?”

  I swallowed and shook my head. I edged closer to Alex. He put his arm around me. “Thank you. Ja, that is very thoughtful of you. But after all that has happened . . . where he goes, I go.”

  “All right, then. Follow me.”

  Peter led us up the back staircase. He didn’t light a candle or bring a flashlight. Perhaps he’d had much time getting used to glowing in the dark.

  Alex started whistling. It was a song that I didn’t recognize.

  “What’s the song?” I asked.

  “‘Stairway to Heaven.’”

  I stifled a shiver.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I couldn’t sleep in the House of Angels.

  I had learned to sleep in the open, on the cold ground, in darkness, in daylight. But I couldn’t sleep in this warm, soft bed with Alex beside me. Not after I’d been fed ham and cheese sandwiches with milk. Not with only a useless scrap of my precious Himmelsbrief remaining, knowing I was spiritually defenseless. And not with the knowledge that there were glowing beings in the house. I still wasn’t certain that they were quite human.

  And I couldn’t sleep with the screams.

  From the floor below, I could hear the dull murmur of voices, trying to be soothing. I guessed that the sobbing girl’s injuries were more serious than we thought. I didn’t know if they were pulling glass from her eye . . . or taking the eye itself.

  I cuddled close to Alex. “It sounds like they’re hurting her.”

  “I think that all we’ve got left is primitive medicine,” he said. “And I’m betting that there’s no alcohol allowed on the premises of a Methodist colony.”

  Alex slipped out of bed. He went for the door, rattled the doorknob.

  Locked.

  “They may not be sure about us yet. Not that I blame them,” he said. “We could be incubating vampirism from some hidden bite. We could be thieves.”

  My fingers chewed the blanket. “Or we could be prisoners.”

  He came back to bed. I buried my head in his shoulder. Fenrir crawled into bed, burrowed under the covers, and whimpered.

  ***

  We were dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed when the door opened the next morning. It was Judy, and she had brought a silver breakfast tray of bread and fruit. She didn’t glow in sunlight.

  “I’m sorry for that,” she said, placing her hand on the knob. Dark circles had spread under her eyes. “Matt wants the two of you to either submit to a thorough search or agree to quarantine for three days.”

  Alex and I exchanged glances.

  “That’s a reasonable request,” he said. “As long as we get answers.”

  “What happened to the girls?” I asked.

  Judy stared down at the tray. “Linh lost an eye. It wasn’t good. Yen . . . we’re not sure about Yen.”

  Alex’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “We missed what could have been a bite. She was pretty bloody last night. We’re going to watch her closely for the next few hours. If she shows evidence of vampirism . . .” Judy’s hand tightened on the doorknob. “We’ll have to send her outside. Before she turns. Otherwise, the holiness of the ground will be compromised. Vamps will have the run of the place.” I could see the deep worry mark on her forehead, the fear of losing their sanctuary.

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up. That sounded a lot like what had happened to us, when we were cast out of my community. And there was a certain resoluteness to her actions that seemed familiar—reminiscent of both the actions of the Elders that I’d despised, and my own when I had killed Ginger.

  One of the things that I was beginning to learn was that kindness is often brutal. And that there was blood on all the survivors’ hands.

  Alex said, “I don’t mind being searched. But Bonnet’s got a different religious sensibility than I do.”

  I lifted my chin. “I could be searched by a woman. No men.”

  Judy let out a breath. It was clear that she’d been expecting resistance. “That can be arranged. We’re just . . .” She rubbed her forehead. “We haven’t found any survivors before. And we should have been more thorough.”

  “It’s okay,” Alex said. “We weren’t doing so hot out there on the freeway.”

  “We are grateful that you saved us,” I said.

  “It was the human thing to do.” Judy smiled at me. “Come on . . . I’ll give you the once-over in the bathroom, and I’ll send one of the guys up to check out Alex. And then you can talk with Matt over breakfast, downstairs.”

  I followed Judy down a short hallway to the bathroom. She awkwardly turned her back while I untied my bonnet.

  “So you’re Mennonite?” she said, making conversation. “Amish?”

  “Ja, I’m Amish,” I said as I undressed. “From south of here. Near Torch.”

  “I know vaguely where that is. I think my parents went there to buy furniture once.”

  “Ja, we have exceptional carpenters.” I folded my dress, placed it on the back of the toilet, and began to strip out of my leggings and underclothes.

  “Why did you leave?”

  “We were forced to leave,” I said. “Vampires had gotten inside. Some of us wanted to fight it, but . . . the Elders were not listening.”

  “And you were a dissenter?”

  “Ja. I was placed under the Bann—shunned—for harboring Alex. We were sent out along with an English friend who was staying with us.”

  “That’s harsh.” I could hear the disapproval in Judy’s voice. But she didn’t ask what happened to Ginger. For that I was glad.
r />   “The Ordnung is not to be argued with,” I said. I stood on the cold tile in the nude, my toes curling. “I am ready.”

  “I’ll try to make this fast,” Judy said.

  She did try, but she was very thorough. She examined my scalp, as if checking for lice, peered at every mole on my back, asked me to lift my arms. I blushed furiously as she examined every inch of flesh, even between my toes.

  She paused when she saw my hand. Her fingers were cool on the scabbed flesh. “What’s that?”

  “It was a snakebite.”

  “You were lucky to survive that.”

  “It was something of . . . a miracle.”

  She turned my hand right and left. “It looks like it’s healing. Not like a vampire bite. Those have black and red runners, and they are always open. They never scab up.”

  “I know,” I said quietly.

  “The English friend you were traveling with?” she guessed.

  “Ja.”

  She didn’t push further. “I’ll let you get dressed. You can meet us downstairs, in the kitchen. And Matt will tell you about us.”

  I gathered my dress to my chest to cover myself, and she left the bathroom. I dressed quickly and crept slowly down the staircase, like a child eavesdropping on her parents.

  Alex was already there. He was holding a cup of coffee, sitting in a ladder-back chair in a sunny breakfast nook with chintz curtains. Matt was sitting beside him, and Judy had brought the fruit tray down. There was no sign of the Vietnamese girls.

  “Good morning,” Matt said. Like Judy, he seemed tired. “Please join us.”

  “Good morning,” I answered. I slipped behind the table into an open chair. There was a window behind us that showed the shore. The sky was brilliant blue, and the lake shimmered beyond it. I saw the dark outline of what must be an island. I longed to walk down and touch the water, to see if it felt as cold as it looked. I could feel the pull of it through the glass.

  But now was not the time for such things.

  Alex stared over the rim of his mug at Matt. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but . . . what the hell are you guys?”

  “We’re human. Sort of. Like the vamps, we started out that way. I guess it’s a long story, but I’ll start at the beginning.