by Laeser, Nico
“We can use the rat traps too,” Randall said. “We’re going to have to tear the siding off of the barn to reinforce the windows. There’s probably not going to be much left of it when we’re through. I’m sorry, Emily.”
“I’d rather lose the barn than anyone else,” I replied, almost in whisper.
Randall pulled an unopened pail of drywall mud from beside my father’s workbench and set it down beside me. “Sit down and take the weight off your good leg. You can supervise,” he said with a smile. “I’ll find you something to do soon enough, but for now, just try to stay off that ankle and be there for Haley. She needs you as much as you need her right now. Let me and Gary take care of the grunt work, and you take care of the family.”
Something in his tone, and in his emphasis on the word family reminded me of my father on the day Sam told us he was signing up for the Army so he could send money home.
Dad begged him to stay, Let me worry about money; you just be here for your family, your sister, but Sam was determined to leave, to share the financial burden of keeping our little family afloat. He left to become a man, to send money back that would eventually pay for my apprenticeship as an electrician, allowing what remained of our little family to stay together. Even after I became an electrician, people referred to me as the electrician’s daughter or Jack Tanner’s girl. In the world we now live in, I no longer have a father, and there is no power but what we make for ourselves.
Randall gave Haley a stick and a pair of work gloves, showed her how to trigger the rat traps, and had her collect them up in a pile, while he kicked and sledge-hammered his way through the barn’s siding. The sunlight beamed through the new gaps in the side of the barn, and the hovering dust particles glowed and followed each new air current caused by the falling boards. What started as a trapezoidal shelf of dust and light soon transformed into channels of shadow, cast from the remaining stud wall—the exposed rib cage of my father’s workshop; its heart had already been removed before the fires ravaged our town.
A collection of moving shadows stretched across the barn, sharpening to the silhouette now standing in the open door way.
“The wire’s run all the way around. There’s tons more—we could go around the house another ten times and still have some left,” Gary said, the glowing dust swirling away from the silhouette of his mouth as he spoke.
“Keep going. Use it all. If it doesn't stop them, hopefully it will slow them down enough for us to get shots on target,” Randall said.
“You have no problem with shooting them?” I asked Randall.
“I don’t agree with the killing of God’s creatures, but from what you’ve described, they’re not God’s creatures.” Randall’s tone was a flat, low rasp, perhaps as a result of the airborne dust, or perhaps the soft shell of the preacher had finally been scratched away, revealing the soldier underneath. “If those things were sent by God, then we’re already on his bad side. We might as well make a stand, and we can discuss it with God soon after.”
40 | Revelation 19:11
I thumbed the magazine release of the 1911, letting the spent magazine fall to the bed and then brought the gun up to my waiting left hand, poking out from the cotton sling and holding an empty magazine. Using my finger to find the magazine well, I fed the magazine into the gun and pressed it against my chest until it clicked in place. I gritted my teeth, took the slide in my left hand, and pushed against it with the gun in my right. Sharp electrical pains shot up and down from my elbow, ending with a burning crescendo, and I let go of the slide.
Gary said that in a “real” situation, the slide would stay open after the last shot was fired, so the gun would only have to be racked once, but I should practice anyway, just in case the gun misfired and I had to eject the jammed cartridge.
I placed the readied firearm down on the bed, brought the ejected magazine up to my left hand, picked up the gun, and began the process again. Eject, feed, rack, repeat. If I planned to be of any use in the fight, I would have to learn to work around my injuries and to work through the pain.
As my body cycled through the painful actions of loading and reloading the 1911, my mind cycled through the same few questions—how long would it be until the creatures arrived at our doorstep? Would there be only a few stragglers at first, or would they emerge as a ravenous horde, having depleted their resources at the camps? I thought about Sean and Sarah—perhaps, their deaths had been a mercy, having been taken before having to face those things. Perhaps, they were all together—Sean, Sarah, Powell, and my mother and father. A smile crept over my face at the thought of my dad giving Powell the talk—So you’re the man that earned my daughter’s heart?
My smile faded. A warm sting in my eyes and a lump in my throat, forced the images away. There had been little time to properly mourn for my father, and Powell’s death remained locked behind a door in my mind. I refused to believe he was gone; it was all so surreal. Perhaps we would all be together again soon in some shared afterlife, or perhaps, each of us would walk alone in limbo, trapped inside of our own dream, destined to wake up in the future without recollection of that dream—a new wave in a new world.
41 | Oversight
Outside, the sunlight glistened off the taut wire—long lines of bright white light with sparkling barb or razor accents, a horizontal spiderweb of steel, with the house at its center like a trapped fly waiting to be consumed.
Rat traps were nailed to wooden stakes and trees around the perimeter, with glow sticks and cans taped and strung up to the traps. A single fishing line, tied to the trigger of each trap, fed down through several eyelets, the last, a foot above the ground. The line stretched across to a nail hammered into the next post or tree. If anyone or anything tripped the wire, the trap would snap, rattling the cans and breaking the chambers in the glow stick—allowing the chemicals to mix, and if it happened at night, allowing us to see our enemy.
Several strings of job lights were hung in series between long two-by-fours staked every twenty feet just outside the trap line. The caged bulbs hung from the thick, sagging yellow cord, one string plugged into the next, and the last ending at the generator, which had been moved to the front of the house. At the first rattle of cans, or first sight of a fluorescent beacon, one of us would flick the switch, lighting up the horde, and the battle would begin.
We pored over scenarios, now under Randall’s command. He outlined primary and secondary plans, instructed us in close-quarters-combat strategies for both defensive and offensive positions. In under two weeks, the coming battle was reduced to a series of if—and—or set pieces, and we would soon be tested on what we had learned.
While the men stood, leaning over drawn maps, spread out over the breakfast bar, I sat with Haley, wondering where she fit into our plans. During drills, I was placated with simple tasks and exercises catered to my physical limitations, but Haley was treated like no more than a prop, or like the king piece in a game of chess. Randall had been adamant that Haley was not to hold or even touch a gun, stating that if we were all to die, then at least she would maintain her innocence and grace with God. He said if the only thing we were able to accomplish was to deliver Haley into God’s hands unsullied, then our efforts would have been for something, but in the stories I remembered from the N.L.D., God had been as elusive in the afterlife as he’d been here in this life.
Haley was sin-free but not unsullied. Nothing could scrub clean the catalog of horrors she had seen. She had regressed to the frightened child we had coaxed out from under the piano, leaving the temporary hiding place offered by her book only so often to seek comfort under my one good arm. It was in the crook of my arm that she wept silently in the night before sleep took her away and nightmares brought her back struggling and kicking, waking and relieving me from my own night terrors.
Time rolled by slowly—the days were long, and the nights were even longer. Food all but lost its taste, becoming nothing more than necessity, routine, a scheduled break from war planning
or from peering through the window slits for any sign of the creatures.
Gary and Randall stole sleep in shifts—while one slept, the other stood guard at the window, watching and waiting. It is said that a watched pot never boils, but there is no logic to it, whether watched or not, the water will boil if the pot is hot enough. It is said too, that dying is easy, it’s the waiting that’s hard, but if my nightmares were any indicator, our deaths would not be easy. I tried to convince myself I had made peace with the fact we were all going to die, but that too was a lie. There was no peace in that fact, more the sheer dread of being eaten alive, of watching the others die, of watching Haley die. I often dreamed of turning the gun on her to save her from a death far worse, the death I imagined and dreamed for myself, a death from which I would scream awake each night.
***
After two weeks of waiting and hoping they would not find us, I was awoken by a short blast of the air horn, alerting all but one to a possible sighting.
Gary had seen something rush past the kitchen window slit, too fast to allow for any better description than a shape or shadow. They had found us. I wondered if it was perhaps a straggler, unaware of the feeding grounds at the camp, or if the creatures at the camp were nearing the end of their bloody feast and had sent a scout to find their next meal. I thought of how futile the soldiers’ efforts must have been against the creatures in the camp, not able to imagine any scenario in which the soldiers, or the people trapped within the camp’s fences, could have survived. The thought darkened my hopes for our survival. If the Army could not hold them back, not even in my imagination, how could the four of us? Two of our group were a nine year-old girl and me—a one-legged, one-armed, frightened pessimist, who had already accepted defeat before the battle had even begun.
We expected the rest to follow, but for days after, there were no more sightings. What did follow, was a cutback in sleep and an increase in paranoia over any and all noises made by the house. Gary had been the only one to see the shadow, and even he was beginning to doubt it had been anything but a trick of the light—as are all shadows. He said it could have been an animal or a bird, but we all knew that the birds were gone and no animal could have made it past the tripwires or avoided capture in the razor-lined spider web.
If Gary had seen something, then it had come close enough without interacting with the traps or wire. Perhaps whatever he had seen was not yet physically capable of setting them off. A deep and deadly hole had formed in our plan, and its edges frayed further the more I thought about it. Our traps would not do us a damned bit of good if the creatures found us before they manifested. They could bypass all of our security measures, walk right through our wire, through our walls, and sit inches from their prey, waiting for our two worlds to converge.
I was afraid to voice any doubt in the plan, in part because I didn’t want to believe such a now obvious oversight could have been made and also because what I was about to explain could strip us all of any remaining hope.
“Randall? We need to talk. I think we may have a problem,” I said.
I explained my fears to Randall and Gary, and my fears were realized in their expressions as they listened. I was not wrong. It had been an oversight, an expectation of a physical enemy. No allowance had been made for the stealthy ingress of a demonic scout beyond the reaches of physicality. With a house full of those things waiting on the verge of our world, we wouldn’t stand a chance—all of our preparation would have been for nothing.
“That’s why the soldiers were keeping them in the camps, holding the people in there as bait, so that when they manifested, they would have had somewhat of a chance against them,” I said, remembering Powell’s words.
Gary looked over at Randall. “So what now?”
Randall was staring down at the breakfast bar, at the latest play drawn in permanent marker over several sheets of paper. He shook his head.
“Pack animals prey on the weak, right?” I asked.
Gary looked up with a frown, not liking where I was going.
“They won’t find an easier meal than me. If I can draw them outside—”
“They’ll kill you,” Gary snapped.
“They’re going to kill us all anyway. At least this way, some of us might make it through,” I said.
“What about Haley? If they go after the weakest of the group, it’ll be the injured and the young.” Gary glared at me, but it wasn’t anger in his eyes.
“I’ll take her out with me,” I said.
“What? What exactly are you—”
“Listen,” I said, cutting Gary off. “We move the generator out into the middle of the wire and cut a path through the wire from the generator to the front door. I’ll hook up the wire to the generator and wait out there until the creatures materialize, then turn it on, and fry any that are touching it. Then it’s up to you and Randall to kill the rest.”
I looked over at Randall. “You said that the more of them that we can stop at the fences, the better chance we’ll have against the rest.”
“You can get enough power through the wire to kill them?” Randall asked.
“Enough to kill a man. If I can wire up several of the large tank capacitors, and if we can keep the system charged, then I can release it all at once on a switch. It’s a one-shot deal though, and after that, we may not have power or lights.”
“We can set up oil lamps as a backup for when the lights go out,” Gary said. “I don’t want to face those things in the dark.”
“Once it’s set up, all I have to do is wait in the middle of the web and flick the switch.”
“A fly waiting in the middle of a web, trying to catch a spider,” Randall said.
“Not one spider,” I said, “tens, maybe hundreds.”
42 | Superimposition
Beyond the initial reprieve, the creature sightings multiplied exponentially over the following days. Some of the creatures appeared now as more than mere shadows: bull or ox-like, but with long claws that made them all the more grandiose and imposing, terrifying in a way that not even the wildest bull ever could be. They moved on all fours, loping to a stop after short bursts of speed, rising up on hind legs to sniff at the air, trying to find the scent of their prey. While we worked to prepare, they stalked and circled around us, our world remaining out of reach, but readying itself to offer its old inhabitants as a sacrificial gift to the new—a gift to the successor of the throne at the top of the food chain.
Day by day, they became clearer, sharpening into focus, phasing into our world as our remaining time ticked and faded away. Time sculpted new layers of detail over the translucent form of our enemy—thick rope-like veins that patterned the surface of their thick, muscular necks and shoulders, protruding muzzles with viper-fish-like teeth longer than a human hand, curved horns to impale, and hooked talons to clamp onto, or into, flesh. These creatures seemed to have been made to catch, kill, and eat. They were hunters, demons, monsters. On hind legs, the brutish figures stood seven or eight feet tall with their forelegs seemingly functional as arms with built-in weapons to disembowel.
The mental collage, created previously by piecing together myriad translucent profiles, was terrifying. The emerging and evolving reality of what was slowly manifesting was far worse. The creatures became increasingly restless, flinching as they passed through the wire and obstacles in our world. I remembered the burns and shocks received from making physical contact with the N.L.D., for us and for them, and how the sensation grew stronger in the few days before the N.L.D. were declared no-longer-dead. The creatures were at our gates and would soon be upon us. They would not be expecting us to clothe them as the N.L.D. had, but they would be expecting us to feed them.
***
The stage, on which we would make our stand, was set, and all preparations for the fight had been made. Our final preparation was not for the coming battle, but for what would possibly be our final meal together. There’s nothing gourmet about non-perishable food, but Gary somehow f
ashioned a version of tuna casserole, using up one of the small, waxed cheese wheels we had agreed to save for a special occasion, sliced and layered with packaged pasta and canned tuna, and cooked in foil on the propane grill. Following the casserole was an assortment of canned fruit: peaches, pineapple, and pears. It all tasted better than anything I could remember. Afterward, we thanked Gary for the meal and said goodbye to each other in as many ways as we could without saying the word goodbye.
I retired to my bed to dream for possibly the last time in this world. Haley climbed into bed and curled up next to me, wrapping herself in my good arm. I kissed her forehead and pulled the cover up over her shoulders before blowing out the candle and letting the darkness consume the looming shadows.
***
I awoke to Randall standing in the open doorway, extending an oil lamp into the room. “Good morning,” he said, instinctively speaking in a low whisper so as not to wake the sleeping girl, although fully aware she could not be roused by sound. I wasn’t sure if he could see my face by the dim light of burning oil, but I offered a smile.
I pulled my arm from under Haley, pulled on my boots, and followed Randall out into the living room.
“Morning, Emily,” Gary said in a somber tone.
“Morning,” I said and offered him the same thin smile as the one he wore below worried eyes.
“You don’t have to do this. We can take our chances together,” Gary said.
Randall looked over at Gary, almost certainly thinking the same thing as me, that together, we had no chance at all, but he said nothing.
“We could put a few cans of tuna out there instead,” I said, hoping to break the tension.
Gary frowned.
“We all know that this is how it has to be. It’s what we’ve been preparing for. We’re out of time. They’re almost here,” I said.
Gary nodded and, in a defeated tone, asked, “Do you want some breakfast before you go out there?”