by J. L. Murray
Dez frowned and looked at Mike, then back at Lila.
“Oh goddammit,” Dez said. “You called them?”
Lila shrugged. “I had to. You know how it is.”
“How?” said Dez. “You don’t even have a phone.”
“Wore you out, and early this morning I went over to Henry Gotcher’s place. He’s got a phone.”
“What?” said Mike, confused. “You turned us in?”
Lila shrugged. “Girl’s got to get by. Nothing personal.”
Dez shrugged. “Guess I’d do the same.”
Mike stood up quickly, knocking the chair over. “What the hell is wrong with you people?” he said, his voice rising to a panic.
Dez looked at him mildly, then drained his cup. He stretched and stood up.
“It’s been fun, Lila,” he said, kissing her on the cheek.
“Dez, what the hell is going on?” said Mike.
“We’re going, that’s what’s going on, Mikey,” Dez said. “Lady needs the money. I know, I know, you’re outraged. But be outraged on the bike, okay?”
“There’s a spare coat in the mudroom,” Lila said.
Mike spun around to look at her. “I will take the coat, but under extreme protest,” he said.
Lila shrugged again. “Whatever you want, mister.”
Dez pulled him out by the arm, grabbing the puffy green coat on his way out. Mike shrugged into it as they went around the house for the bike.
“Can you believe this, can you goddamn believe this?” Mike said, his voice rising. “Basic human decency is gone, Dez.”
“Simmer down, Mikey,” said Dez. “She’s pregnant. Terrified they’re going to find out and take the baby. She needs the money to hide.”
Mike was panting, his breath a cloud.
“Get on, man,” Dez said. “There’s not much time.”
The motorcycle shook Mike down to his bones. Though he was far warmer this time round in the stolen coat, for which he was grateful, though he was torn about how he had acquired it. Dez pulled into an abandoned barn that looked on the verge of caving in.
“What are we doing?” said Mike.
“Waiting for the Movers to pass by,” said Dez, peering out through some missing boards in the side. The place smelled of rotting hay and animal feces turned to dirt again.
“How long did you know she was pregnant?” said Mike. He remembered Kyra, his wife, so happy when she knew she was expecting. Then the grief on her face when she started bleeding, the red soaking through her pretty white dress three months later. Mike pushed the memories away quickly. They hurt like a blow to the stomach. He couldn’t think of her now. He would lose his sanity if he thought of Kyra.
Dez shrugged, not looking at Mike.
“She told me last time I saw her,” he said, watching the road.
“You see her often?” said Mike.
“Often enough.”
“Is it yours? The baby?”
Dez looked at him then. “I didn’t think to ask.”
“You didn’t think to ask?” said Mike incredulously.
“Look, mate, I got bigger problems right now. We’re running from Revs right now. How the hell am I supposed to take care of a kid?”
“Did you ever stop to think,” said Mike slowly, “that Lila turned us in because you didn’t think to ask?”
Dez looked truly surprised. “No,” he said. “I guess that might make sense.”
“You selfish prick,” Mike said angrily.
“Mikey, calm down.”
“Have you ever stopped to think of anything but your own skin? That woman could be carrying your child and you just left her to fend for herself. In a world where children disappear in a fog of blood and terror. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Jesus Christ, man, keep your voice down.”
“You’re a coward, Dez,” said Mike, with finality. “Just a coward.”
Dez raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never denied that. Besides, don’t blame me for all this. Blame your shifty creep of a friend, Flynn. It would be easy for him to help us out here, but where is the bastard? Nowhere. Spooky asshole. We’re not going to make it, Mikey. We need money to survive here, not newspapers.”
They heard a rumbling and a moment later a line of black vans came into view, driving in a line like a funeral procession.
“I might have some money,” said Mike quietly. He was still angry with Dez, but the man had helped him escape. If not for Dez he would have been picked up back at the newspaper house. Or splattered all over the floor.
They watched the last black van rise up over the hill and disappear. Without speaking, Mike joined Dez on the bike.
“So where’s this money, old man?” Dez said, tapping on the gas gauge.
Mike had the sudden urge not to tell him. To leave on foot and let Dez angrily pass him, flinging dirty snow from his wheels. But it was a long way to Philly, and Mike needed Dez just as badly as Dez needed his cash.
“Back home, Dez,” said Mike with a sigh.
“Your old place?” said Dez. “You just left it there?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” said Mike. “Revs were all over it. It’s hidden though. There’s a good chance it’s still there, under the floorboards.”
“A good chance?” Dez shook his head. “Barely enough gas to get us there. I hope there’s more than a good chance.”
“I guess we’ll just have to take a gamble,” said Mike.
“Mikey,” Dez said. “Sorry about the girl, man. I didn’t know she was going to rat us out.”
“I guess you can’t go back there now, even if you wanted to,” said Mike. “You think it’s yours?”
“What?”
“The baby, Dez. Jesus.”
“Oh, right. Hard to say. Probably not.”
“Why do you say that?”
He shrugged. “Never happened before, with any of the others.”
“That you know of.”
“Can’t do anything about it now, like you said,” said Dez, irritated. “What do you want from me, Mike? You want me to be an honest man? Settle down? Smoke a goddamn pipe and read the paper? I’m sorry if I disappoint you, mate, but I’m interested in getting out of this alive.”
“You think we’re getting out?” said Mike. He really wanted to know.
“Don’t you?” he said, hopeful. “This has to end, right? Nightmares always end. Monsters always die. Isn’t that the way it goes?”
“Maybe,” said Mike. “But there’s always another monster, another nightmare.”
“That’s dark, Mikey.”
And as Dez started the bike and they buzzed out into the night, a thought occurred to Mike: the monsters didn’t always look like Revs. Mike thought of the girl, Lila, with her muddy snow boots and soiled nightgown, terrified to bring a child into a world that was nothing but pain. Mike suddenly didn’t want to touch Dez, even to hold on for his life.
Sometimes the monsters looked startlingly human.
Fifteen
The night Hunter disappeared was blacker than any night Viv had ever seen, before or since. She remembered peeking out of her window at the street. All the streetlights had been off for days. The power was out, the radio was silent, the newspapers stopped printing. The stores remained locked and dark, and not a single person appeared on the street. Everyone disappeared just like the light. Even during the day a dim, dusky fog covered the sun. Perpetual twilight, that’s what they had, for four days. Viv kept expecting military trucks to roll through the streets, Red Cross, anything to help them through this terror of not knowing. But no one came.
People later called this time the Dark Days. The Revs spoke of it as if it was ancient history, from the long-ago edge of memory. But it wasn’t long ago for Viv. She relived it in her nightmares every night. She tried every single day not to think about it. When the Revs took over the world, they called it the Annex, as if it were a minor political maneuver and not the end of all days. The Annex. As though they were
a simple addition to the human world.
In Viv's neighborhood, the screams began on the second day. She stopped going out and checking to see if any neighbors had information. She stopped trying the locked doors of the grocery store. She stopped checking in at the hospital because people stopped coming to the hospital. She could often see dark, shining trickles traveling through the gutters in the dim daylight. She often hugged Hunter close to her, shivering on the couch with all the shades drawn, the house as silent as a tomb. She had never appreciated the noisy humming and buzzing of all the comforts of a modern home. A refrigerator dropping ice occasionally, the fan of the computer, the thrumming of central heat kicking on. She huddled under a mountain of blankets with Hunter in the silence and tried not to hear the muffled screams outside that ended alarmingly abruptly.
She sang to Hunter when he clutched at her, and she tried not to cry, the frenzied desperation welling up in her, expanding in her chest and making her want to scream. But she smiled and sang and laughed with her son. Griff was oblivious. She went into the bedroom to check on him several times a day. He would mumble answers at her, the prescription bottle in his hand. She didn’t know where he got the Slack, but in the past month it was suddenly available everywhere. At one time before the Blackout the punishment for being caught with Slack was immediate arrest. She even knew patients given lifetime prison sentences for selling their prescriptions. The turnaround was so sudden and shocking: All physicians, including Viv, were instructed to dole out the miracle drug like candy. It seemed to be a cure for everything: flu, AIDS, cancer, the common cold. It eradicated them all. The drug behind the Slack was very secret, too. The company that produced it wasn’t even disclosed. It was basically free to the patients, and made Viv think — even before they cut everyone off — that it was too good to be true. People seemed to get addicted to it quite easily, and for a time it seemed as though even her colleagues wandered around glassy-eyed and stoned.
But Griff, with his brilliant mind and gentle heart. She had never in her darkest dreams imagined that he would end up just another addict. The boils all over his neck and face made him look like something diseased. And he had an odd smell on the drug, like soil and dust. He’d never been violent to her, barely even a raised voice in all their happy years of marriage. But the night she tried to take his bottle of Slack away, he had struck her across the face and given her a bloody nose and a bruised cheek. Ever since, she had stayed away from him. At first, she wanted to call the authorities, an ambulance, even rehabilitation facilities. But the the cell phones were useless, and the landline just came back with a busy signal.
And then Hunter was gone. There one minute, gone the next.
Viv had a vague memory that she had to strain to hang onto. Like it was a dream that fell through her fingers like sand the more she tried to remember. All she could keep in her head was a feeling of panic, a set of eyes, the sound of Hunter calling for her, screaming. That was it. Viv sometimes stayed up until dawn broke over her shabby apartment trying to remember what happened. But every time, she came away frustrated and crying and hollow.
As she searched for Hunter the next morning, looking in cupboards where he sometimes played, checking the yard, under beds, Griff padded out of the bedroom and looked at her, eyes red-rimmed and puffy. He stood in their drafty Victorian home in their upper middle class neighborhood, his dirty feet sinking into their plush carpet. He swayed where he stood, trying to keep his eyes trained on her, and she felt her belly fill with hatred. She clenched her fists at her sides, cutting into her palms with her fingernails. It was better to be angry, she found. Better than the alternative.
“They’ve taken Hunter,” she said, her voice quiet.
“I’ve run out of pills,” he said, his voice like a grunt.
Viv narrowed her eyes. “Did you hear what I said? Our son is gone. Whatever these things are, they have our son.”
Griff blinked at her. “Do you have any pills?”
She didn’t remember walking over to him, but then she was standing over her husband, sprawled on the ground and her knuckles were throbbing and she was hitting and hitting and hitting him.
She wandered the streets then, calling Hunter’s name until her voice was gone and the blisters on her feet were filling her shoes with blood. She went home and slept, cradling the stuffed rabbit that Hunter once carried with him everywhere. She dreamed of Hunter smiling and laughing, his one dimple showing as the most wonderful sound in the world came out of his mouth.
Viv would wake up and knock on doors. Rarely someone answered. But their red rimmed eyes would turn inward and they would whisper for her to go away, her son wasn’t here. On the third day, a man who looked recently aged beyond his years seemed to catch his breath.
“Don’t you know?” he said, his voice accusatory. “They’ve taken all the children.”
“Who has?” said Viv.
“Them. The monsters. Your son is theirs now.”
The man’s tone was so cruel that Viv was sure that he had lost a child, too.
“There must be something we can do,” she said, the tears spilling out. She sounded desperate, pathetic. “Please. If we find others like us, we can find them.”
“You think they’re alive?” he said. Then just shook his head and started to close the door. Viv stuck her foot out and stopped him.
“Wait. Please, you can’t just give up.”
“I’m not giving up,” said the man, rage in his eyes. He was directing his anger towards her, the outsider. “I’m just goddamn surviving. And you should too. Go home. Wait for them to tell us what to do.”
Viv stared at the closed door for a long time, before she slowly turned and stumbled home. She went straight into the kitchen and found the bottle of bourbon she kept above the refrigerator. She uncapped it and drank deeply, stopping to cough as the liquor burned its way down. Then she tipped the bottle back and let it pour down her throat.
The power came on. Viv leaned against the refrigerator and slid down to sit on the floor and she felt the sobs rack her body as the fridge hummed behind her. She heard the radio come to life in the living room, first static and then a man’s voice.
“Humans. Do not be afraid. My name is Ambrose Conrad and I am your new president…”
Viv stared at the light fixture now bathing her high-efficiency kitchen in a bright glare and she started to laugh.
Viv sat in the Irish bar across from this man, too handsome and too easy to smile for her. Too eager. There was something off, she knew that right away. She herself had become damn good at bullshitting, and the man sitting across from her was definitely a bullshitter. Viv laughed at his jokes and drank the sickly sweet cocktails he brought her. She dearly wanted to leave and climb into a wine bottle by herself, but she sensed something wrong here. She had to be careful.
Viv stood up and her neighbor Tom stood too. She smiled.
“I’m just going to use the restroom,” she said.
“I’ll get us more drinks,” he said, too eager. Again. Viv walked across the smoky bar towards the bathroom. She slowed as she passed a shadowy recess, a single figure fingering a full glass in the large booth. Viv pretended to drop her purse and reached down to pick it up, glancing at the occupant as she stood again. Fedora, black coat, and the wet gleam of teeth in an ebony face that had long since turned ashen.
She closed the door to the bathroom and locked it, gasping in air that didn’t seem to make it to her lungs. She ran to the toilet and hunched over it as the drinks came back up, tasting basically the same as they had going in. Viv wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and splashed some water on her face. She looked in the mirror at the woman who had once been so strong. She pushed a curly tendril off her forehead and forced her heart to slow, her breathing to steady.
It was just one Rev, she told herself. It didn’t mean anything. Revs went to bars all the time, just watching. He wasn’t necessarily watching her, specifically. He could just be out enjoying himself.
If Revs enjoyed themselves. The fact that Tom seemed overly eager was probably just her imagination. She was being paranoid. Paranoid.
“Paranoid,” she said aloud to her reflection. “Everything’s fine. He just likes me, that’s all.”
But even her reflection didn’t seem convinced. She popped a breath mint from her purse and went back to her table, watching the Rev out of the corner of her eye as she passed. He (or she?) didn’t seem to notice. Just sat, tracing the rim of the glass in front of him.
Viv sat back down across from her date and smiled. He smiled back, a million watts brighter.
“You know, Tom,” she said, “I’m suddenly not feeling well. I think I’d better call it a night.”
“Are you all right?” he said. He reached out and put a hand on hers. “I hope I haven’t done anything to offend you.”
Viv smiled and took her hand back as gracefully as she could.
“No, it’s not that. I’m just not used to liquor,” she lied. “I just need to lie down, I think. Besides, I have to work tomorrow and it’s getting late.”
He nodded. “I’ll walk you. It’s on my way.” She laughed, trying to make it sound genuine. As they exited the bar, the cold, clean air blew over her, seeming to cleanse her. She breathed deeply, the taste of snow on her tongue. Tom reached down to take her hand and she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.
“Just stop this,” she said.
“What?”
“You don’t really like me,” she said. “Just stop all this.”
Tom frowned. “You’re a gorgeous black woman,” he said. “What’s not to like?”
“No, you do not say that,” she said, suddenly angry. “You do not get to say that to me. I’m not a gorgeous black woman, I’m a gorgeous woman. Do you understand that you’re not allowed to say that? You don’t get to categorize me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Tom, seeming sincere for the first time all evening. “I didn’t know.”
“Look,” Viv said. “I’m obviously not your type. So why are we here?”
He shook his head, his handsome face troubled.