by Ronald Malfi
He frowned and said, “Hon—”
“You were pulling on my arm and it hurt. But I didn’t want you to stop. I didn’t want you to let go. Because then the monsters would get me.”
He kissed her forehead a second time, then said, “There’s no such thing as monsters, Ellie. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know. Come on.” She smiled, and he thought—strangely—that it was solely for his sake.
“Yeah,” he said. “Come on.”
When he stood, she said, “Good night, Dad.”
“Good night, Little Spoon. I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
For the next hour or so, he sat on the couch watching an old movie, though he really wasn’t paying much attention to it. He couldn’t relax. A few times, his gaze drifted away from the TV, settling instead on some dark corner of the room. He saw the blood in Deke’s toilet, watched those tiny bits of blackened fibers in Deke’s sink take on life and begin twisting and jerking furtively in the thick pool of blood. After a while, he found he was sweating profusely.
He got up, shut off the TV, and locked the front door. The gauzy curtains over the bay windows were drawn, but a strange, dancing light beyond them was enough to attract his attention. He went to the windows and swept aside the curtains.
Deke Carmody’s house was on fire. Pillars of flame belched from the windows, and there were black columns of smoke rising up in front of the moon. A number of neighbors stood outside on their lawns, watching. As David stared, two fire trucks turned onto Columbus, sirens wailing.
David was out of the house and running down the street a moment later, the cool night air speckled with rain freezing against his skin. But the soft rain did little to staunch the flames blooming from Deke’s house. A wall of heat struck David halfway down the block, causing his eyes to water as he approached.
“Where is he?” he asked the neighbors who had gathered on the lawns across the street. “Where’s Deke?”
“No one’s seen him,” said Lucy Cartwright, holding her silk robe closed with two hands. She couldn’t peel her eyes off the burning house across the street.
There were police officers here, too, and they waved away the more curious onlookers. David rushed over to one of them and shouted, “The owner of that house—has he been—”
“Step back,” directed the officer.
“There’s a man inside that house!”
“Sir,” said the officer, placing a hand against David’s chest. “I said to step back. Everyone’s doing their job.”
“You don’t—” David began, but was silenced as something exploded inside Deke’s house. It was a deep-bellied whump, followed by a rolling wave of thick, hot air. One whole side of Deke’s house blew out, spraying debris across the lawn and against the Bannisters’ house next door. A ball of flame roiled out, casting the faces of the nearest onlookers in a pale yellow light. Cops and firemen quickly motioned for people to get back, get back.
After a time, it began to rain harder, but it did little to douse the flames. When the roof caved in, a second fireball belched up into the night sky. A few people cried out, and many more sobbed. By morning, Deke Carmody’s house was nothing but a charred frame of struts and smoldering black boards, and it took firefighters much of the afternoon to locate Deke’s remains.
10
The stranger staring back at him in the mirror had his eyes. Beyond that, there were no other similarities. His hair was freshly cropped and dyed black, his complexion sallow and seamed with hairline creases around the eyes, mouth, and nose. It was like staring at himself wearing the mask of another.
He cleaned up the dye and the shorn bits of hair, collecting them in the plastic shopping bag where he’d previously stowed Ellie’s hair clippings. He cleaned the dye from the sink, a task that proved more monumental than he would have thought. He kept dumping wet globs of dye-blackened tissues down the toilet. He had gotten some dye on one of the bath towels, so he tucked that into the shopping bag, as well. After he finished, his fingertips looked as if he’d been printed at a police station.
When he stepped back into the room, he said, “So, what do you think of the new ’do?” He was grinning like a fool, trying to mitigate the seriousness of it all, but he stopped when he saw Ellie peeking through a part in the drapes. The smile fell from his face. “What are you doing?”
“There’s people fighting outside, I think,” she said, quickly pulling her face away from the drapes. “A lady’s out there crying.”
“Get away from there.”
He went to the window himself and peeled back a section of drapery. At first he could see nothing but the shiny chrome of the Oldsmobile’s front grille, and he realized that he had parked it right out front out of habit instead of behind the Dumpsters as he had done the night before. He could see no one outside, and he was just about to turn away from the window when he heard the strong baritone of a man’s voice barking some indecipherable order, followed by the pained mewl of a woman David could not see. The man’s voice had sounded very close—possibly even in the room next door—but the woman had sounded even closer, and less muffled. David pressed his forehead against the glass and craned his neck. A shadow moved along the walkway outside his door. He heard scuffling along the tiny bits of sand and gravel that had collected in the cracks between the stamped pavers. David felt his bowels clench. For a moment, he couldn’t remember where he’d hidden the handgun.
Then he saw the woman. She came ambling into his line of sight, moving in a defeated stagger behind the Oldsmobile and across the parking lot. She wore a plain white T-shirt that fell to midthigh and nothing else, as far as David could determine. Her hair was short, spiky, the color of pennies. She was sobbing. The lower half of her face was a slick and blotchy mess, and something dark had dribbled down the front of her T-shirt. It looked like blood.
The man with the baritone voice barked again, though his words remained indecipherable. This time, David caught a glimpse of him along the walkway, too—a robust fellow with a meaty forearm braided with wiry black hair. A bluish tattoo near his shoulder. Indeed, the man was standing in the doorway of the room right next door. His thick voice reverberated behind the wall of their room.
The woman paused beside the Oldsmobile’s rear bumper and seemed to sway momentarily on her feet. As David watched, she brought up a hand and touched her mouth. When she looked at her fingers, she whined like some injured animal.
David jerked away from the window, letting the drapes swing back in place.
Ellie was standing on the far side of the room, as if determined to get as far away from the commotion outside as humanly possible. Her eyes were wide, staring, terrified. Somehow inquisitive, too. “Is that lady okay?” she asked. Despite the fear in her eyes, her voice was remarkably calm.
“It’s not our business,” David said. “Let’s just get our stuff and get out of here.”
“Right now?”
“Yes. Before the police show up.”
“But I haven’t showered.”
“You’ll have to go without.”
“But I didn’t shower last night, either.”
“We don’t have time for this, Ellie.”
In the bathroom, David took the Glock from the duffel bag and jammed it down the back of his pants. He shouldered the bag, then glanced at himself in the mirror. His hair was still wet, the dye job looking too dark and suspiciously artificial. Yet he wouldn’t risk hanging around here, in the event someone called the cops on the sobbing woman in the parking lot.
He hurried back into the room. Ellie was standing by the front door clutching the suitcase handle in one hand, cradling the shoe box of bird eggs to her chest with the other.
“We go straight to the car,” David said, gripping the doorknob. He already had the car keys in his other hand at the ready. “Go to the driver’s side and then slide over. You understand? I don’t want you separated from me and going around to the other side of the car. Not for a seco
nd.”
Ellie nodded, her expressive eyes mostly shaded by the brim of her ball cap.
“Okay,” he said, licking his lips. “Okay. Okay.”
He swung the door wide and charged out into the daylight. Somewhere off to his right, the sobbing woman made a hitching sound, then went instantly silent. David didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t help himself—he stole a quick glance over his shoulder just as the woman was turning to look at him. The back of her T-shirt had ridden up, exposing a single pale buttock. There was an ugly bruise there, mean and purple with a greenish border. Glancing up at her face, David could see the blood spilling from her nose and mouth, black as motor oil. Her eyes possessed the distant gaze of the legally blind.
David yanked the car door open. “Go,” he said to Ellie, shoving her forward with one hand. “Get in.”
Ellie quickly got into the car, the suitcase banging against the door frame, careful not to crush her shoe box.
“Hey,” the woman said, her voice so unexpectedly calm, almost childlike, that it caused David to look in her direction again.
She stood facing him, her head cocked curiously at an angle now. Despite the blood that trickled from both nostrils and spilled down over her chin, hers was an expression of utmost serenity. Yet there was the foggy detachment in her eyes that immediately chilled David to the core, reminding him of Deke Carmody’s similarly detached stare. It was as if she was looking right through him and at something visible only to her on the horizon.
“Hey,” she said again . . . and took a step in his direction. A bare foot scrudded over blacktop gravel. In the motel room behind her, the drapes over the window twitched.
“Daddy,” Ellie said from inside the car.
“Please,” the woman said. “Wait a minute. Please . . .” There was agony in her voice now.
David shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I need help.” She took another step toward him. “I’m hurt. I need help. He won’t . . . he won’t . . .” She glanced briefly over one shoulder, at the window where the drapes continued to twitch and move. For a second, a man’s wide, ghost-white face peered out before receding back into the darkness a moment later. David had time to glimpse a brutish, Cro-Magnon forehead and dark rodent eyes.
David switched his gaze back to the woman. He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Daddy,” Ellie said again. She was leaning halfway out of the open door, watching the woman.
“Please,” the woman said, the word whining out of her as she proceeded to sob again.
David quickly got into the car and immediately slammed the door.
“Daddy, what’s—”
The woman was at his window before he got the key in the ignition. Ellie cried out, startled.
“Please!” the woman shouted on the other side of the glass. When she slammed one palm against the window, David jumped and Ellie let out a strangled whimper. “I need help! Why won’t you help me?”
“Daddy—”
“Please!”
David threw the car in Reverse and stomped on the accelerator. The Olds lurched backward, jerking David’s head on his neck. Sharp, hot pain blossomed at the base of his head. David spun the wheel until the tires squealed and the whole car seemed to groan in protest. Then he dropped it into Drive. The car shuddered before its tires found purchase on the asphalt. David sped straight across the parking lot, daring to glance up at the rearview mirror only once. The woman had collapsed to the pavement and was rapidly shrinking as he put distance between them.
11
They had driven several miles before David realized he had the duffel bag in his lap, wedged between himself and the steering wheel, making it difficult to steer.
“Help me with this,” he said, shoving the duffel bag over his shoulder and into the backseat. Ellie reached over and lent some assistance without uttering a sound. Once his heartbeat slowed, David eased up on the accelerator and glanced over at his daughter.
She was staring at him, her face emotionless. Based on the whimpering sound she had made as they fled the parking lot, he assumed she’d been crying, but she wasn’t. She was stoic. Unmovable. He felt colder for looking at her.
“Are you okay?” he said.
Her eyebrows ticked together, a movement so subtle it was nearly undetectable. She glanced toward the windshield.
“Ellie?” he said.
“Why didn’t you help that woman?” She was sitting ramrod-straight in the passenger seat, which looked very unnatural to David. As if she might launch herself at the windshield at any moment.
“There was nothing I could do.”
“She was hurt. She was bleeding.”
“I saw, Ellie.”
They merged onto the highway. David felt about as conspicuous as someone driving around with a missile strapped to the roof of his car, even with so few vehicles on the road. When he looked to his left, he noticed the woman’s bloody handprint on his window, stark as an accusation. He quickly rolled the window down, flooding the car with a cool wind.
“She was crying,” Ellie said.
“It’s none of our business.”
“She was hurt.”
“No,” David corrected. “She was sick. It’s different.”
“How?”
He shook his head. It was all too much to explain. “Cut me some slack, will you, please?” he managed.
“We could have driven her to the hospital.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “The hospital won’t do her any good.” He glanced at her. Those deep, searchlight eyes. “That’s probably the first time you’ve seen it,” he said. “Up close like that, I mean.”
Ellie turned away from him, facing forward to watch the horizon. “No,” she said, quite matter-of-fact. She had the suitcase down at her feet, but was picking at the plastic handle with her thumbnail.
“No?” he said.
“The first one was a girl at school,” she said. “There were others, too. But the girl at school was the worst.” She added, “Up close like that,” as if to turn his own words back around on him.
As she said it, he recalled the incident with the girl at school. It had happened during recess, out on the playground. But other than that, he hadn’t been aware of any other occasions Ellie would have witnessed such horror.
“What others?” It seemed impossible. In fact, it seemed as if he had failed her in some way. He and Kathy had done their best to sequester her from it all, and until that moment, he had thought they’d done a commendable job.
Ellie shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Well, I want to talk about it with you.”
“I don’t.”
He continued to stare at her until someone blared a horn at him. He jerked the wheel, centering the car back in its lane. His whole body felt prickly with perspiration. When he glanced up at his reflection in the rearview mirror, he was dismayed to see streaks of black sweat spilling down his forehead from his hairline. Goddamn hair dye.
“Okay,” he said after a time. “That’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it right now if you don’t want to.”
“How ’bout the radio?” she said, still not looking at him.
“Have at it.”
She switched it on and scrolled through the dial. Most of the stations were nothing but static. She paused when she came upon an evangelist orating on the sins of mankind. “Many will tell you that the time for repentance is now, brothers and sisters,” he rallied amidst washes of static and crackling audio. “They’ll tell you to repent, repent! But what if we are faced with some greater truth? What if the magic has turned black? Perhaps repentance is no longer an option, children. Perhaps we are the marching doomed, a parade of devils, the hopeless dregs paying for the sins of a world that has gotten so out of control, so repulsively foul with sin—”
“Find something else,” David said.
She was staring at the radio dial, unmoving.
“Find s
omething else,” he repeated.
Ellie reached out and spun the dial, eventually stopping on a station playing old swing music. She finally settled back in the passenger seat, her posture seemingly more relaxed. Yet her eyes remained alert.
12
They drove for another two hours before David decided to stop for lunch. With no destination in mind, he had fled the main highway to the back roads that wound and twisted and looped through a gray September wilderness. He guessed they were somewhere in the southwest corridor of Virginia by now, though he couldn’t be sure. For all he knew, he’d spent most of last night driving in circles.
“I’m not hungry,” Ellie said as he pulled into the parking lot of a diner. There was a large handwritten sign over the entrance that said, simply, WE ARE OPEN.
“We should really eat something,” he said, pulling into a parking space. The parking lot was comprised of white gravel, the tiny stones popping beneath the Oldsmobile’s tires and raising a cloud of white powder. When he turned off the engine, the whole chassis seemed to shudder and die. He resisted the urge to crank the ignition again, just to make sure the engine hadn’t seized up on them for good.
Ellie did not move. She stared at the diner through the windshield, as if trying to divine some great secret hidden within the 1950s-style design of its chrome-and-glass construction. Her forehead glistened with sweat. She looked like a stranger sitting beside him, her long tresses shorn away, her face stoic and impassive.
“Put the hat back on,” he told her.
She only stared at it, turning it over in her hands.
“Ellie,” he said.
“Back at the motel,” she said. “Were you telling me the truth? About what’s going on back home? The quarantine, I mean.”
He felt the skin across his face grow tight. “Yes,” he said.
“If we’re not sick, then why would people be after us and wanting us to go back home? Why would they want to keep us locked up if we’re okay?”
“It’s just how they do things now, Ellie. They don’t know who’s okay and who’s not.”