by Timothy Boyd
When I didn’t wake up from my nightmare, I sighed and resigned myself to the fact that it was time to leave. Not that I really had any idea where to go. I didn’t even know what it was I was trying to escape from. I placed my ear against the door that led out into the office, listening for signs of movement. Soft creaks echoed from the floor upstairs, and if I closed my eyes and listened hard enough, I could faintly hear the bugs crawling in the walls and ceiling.
It’s crazy the things you hear when you stop and listen.
I decided this would be the best time to make a break for it, get to my truck, and drive off into the unknown, hoping I would have enough gas to take me there. I reached my hand down to the door handle.
“Oh,” came a voice from behind me. “Hello, Nick Barren.”
Startled, I turned and had my gun aimed at the target in less than a second. When I saw who it was, I began shaking, my eyes growing wide: Billy. He stood and walked to his bars, grasping them with both hands and pressing his face in between them. “Please don’t leave, Nick. We have so much to discuss.” His voice had lost its southern laziness, and it carried in such an unnatural way that reminded me of the man and woman from before – cold, eerie, and emotionless.
I didn’t know how to respond. I wasn’t really accustomed to seeing people rise from the grave. I suppose, perhaps, he hadn’t actually been dead before, but something about him now was different, and I knew deep down that I was talking with a deceased man. “Um… I’m sorry, Billy.”
Billy’s face showed no expression, no sign of emotional response. “Don’t be sorry. Just stay and talk with me.”
I slowly reached down behind me and turned the knob, pulling the door open and backing through the threshold. “Sorry, I can’t. I… I gotta go.”
Billy spoke plainly as if to me, but his words were: “I have Nick Barren. He is here. He is here. I have Nick Barren.” He continued speaking these words over and over, and I dreaded the obvious. He had just sounded an alarm, and somehow, the other people heard his quiet speaking.
A stampede of footfalls pounded across the upstairs floor and began trampling down the flights of steps to the office where I now stood. I thought briefly about shooting Billy in the face but realized I may need the extra bullets.
I ran.
Through the office, around the desks, leaping over chairs. And as I pushed through the door into the lobby, I saw a group of people barrel down the stairs and through the office, following me. I blasted through the entrance vestibule, my footsteps echoing off the high ceiling, and I charged out the glass doors into the night, my heart racing. I sprinted for my truck, still parked crookedly at the curb. Fumbling in my pocket for the keys, I managed to unlock the door and leap inside, slamming and locking it just as the group from inside the station plowed into the truck, like they had never intended on stopping in the first place.
There were five of them, all dressed normally, looking like everyday citizens of Angelwood. I even recognized one of them from the supermarket. They were all pounding on the window, muttering “Nick Barren. Nick Barren. Listen to us, Nick Barren.” There was no anger on their faces. Only placidness.
I jammed the keys in the ignition, but the truck just turned over repeatedly, the engine unable to start. “Come on!” I yelled, continuing to turn the key. “Come on!” And finally, the engine revved to life.
“Stop!” yelled one of the men at my window.
The five of them stepped back and grew silent, and I was compelled to face them. We all stared at one another, the thick air ripe with anticipation. Their pupils seemed darker than normal, and I swore I saw a fleeting image of something flash past the whites of their eyes. Then I yelled through the closed window, “What do you want from me?!”
A man in a business suit spoke calmly. “We don’t need any trouble. And you’re a man that tends to cause trouble, Nick Barren.”
I was baffled by their assumptions of my character. “You don’t even know me!”
“I see you at the bank every other Friday.”
Then the woman spoke up. “I see you leave Gravediggers every morning on my way to work.”
The man I recognized from the market: “Every Saturday evening, I see you at the grocery store.”
“I see you roam the halls of the hotel where you work.”
“I see you at the McDonald’s drive-thru.”
“At Wal-Mart.”
“At the gas station.”
“The liquor store.”
“I saw you at your daughter’s funeral.”
All of their voices speaking in tandem had thrown my head into a nauseating spin. These were not the people of my town, and I needed to remember that, but keeping anything straight in my head right now seemed impossible. As they continued to rattle off locations where they’d seen me, I felt I was losing my grip on reality, the cacophony of voices growing louder with every passing second.
Trembling and near hysterics, I hollered, “You don’t know me!”
The group of them fell silent from my outburst, considering me through the closed glass of my window.
“What are you people?!” I pleaded for answers.
The woman remained passive and answered plainly, “We are the future.”
This non-answer merely infuriated me. “Whose future?!”
Instead of the woman replying, the lead man spoke. “We don’t need any trouble, Nick Barren. Join us of your own free will.”
For the first time, I noticed a small bit of dried blood on the corners of his mouth, like he had taken a bite of a messy chicken wing at dinner and forgot to use his napkin. With what I assume was fervent disgust, I spat at him. “Go to hell.”
The man’s fist punched through the window, shattering it to pieces as he grasped my throat, squeezing the life from me. Billy had been right: my flak jacket would be worthless in this crisis, not to mention uncomfortable. My hands grappled at the man’s taught fingers around my neck, not an iota of anger in his face. I needed to defend myself, or I would be dead in thirty seconds.
I put my gun to his face and pulled the trigger.
In that moment of shock when his fingers released their grip on me, and he fell backward onto the concrete, the other four in the group stared at me, showing no signs of anger or fear. Just looking at their faces creeped me the hell out, so I yanked my gearshift into drive and peeled out down the road, leaving the madness behind.
* * *
I sped more quickly than I should have down the empty forest road, tall trees reaching up into the black sky on either side, my headlights haphazardly illuminating the winding path before me. My mind couldn’t get a grasp on the events of the past few hours since I had awakened and showered away last night’s hangover. This was all something out of a bad horror flick; zombies, vampires, mind control, whatever the hell was going on.
There was no reason to stay in Angelwood any longer. I hoped that maybe somewhere far away from my small town was still normal. I had turned on the radio in my truck, letting it automatically scan through stations. Static had filled them all. I had stopped at a gas station payphone and tried calling my ex-wife Sarah, but I’d received a default message about high call volume and to try again later.
Now, nothing felt right anymore. Even the trees looked odd, like there was a slight sheen glistening over them that was gone the second the truck’s headlights passed them. As I drove, I realized another oddity about the evening: there were no animals to be found. Not anywhere. I remembered back to when I left my house to go to the store and found it odd that the sounds of bird chirps weren’t echoing through the trees. In my gut, I knew that they weren’t all dead. They had surely left, knowing what was about to take place. An animal’s intuition placed them higher than people on survival skill, but these emotionless human husks that were born from today’s chaos were underestimating me.
I entered the familiar suburban neighborhood where I used to live with Sarah – back when things were wonderful and Annie giggled everyday.
Unpleasant emotions rose to the surface as I pulled my truck up to the front of my old house. Shortly after Annie was killed, Sarah had kicked me out, which was all for the best, because I couldn’t stand the place without my daughter’s laughter.
But before I left town tonight, I needed to make sure that Sarah was safe. I had few personal attachments to Angelwood, and I wanted to make damn well sure that they were all either preserved or destroyed, so as not to leave any loose ends that would always leave me wondering with regret.
I exited my truck and removed the flak jacket from under my hoodie, replacing my red ball cap on my head. I glanced both ways down the street lined with cookie-cutter houses, all of the one-story Ranch-style homes identical except for their exterior paint colors.
The night was too quiet. Even more silent than my house of solitude in the woods. The midnight breeze worsened matters, as if something filthy floated through the air on those wind currents, and it left me on-edge. I patted my holster to reassure myself that my gun was at my side, and I started walking up the driveway.
It was only when I stepped up onto the porch that I noticed the front door was wide open.
Barren
IV
I hesitated for only a moment before I released my gun from its holster and took cover against the brick wall to the left of the open door. I took a deep breath, repressing the fear that had begun bubbling to the surface. "She's your ex-wife. Just be done with it!" acquaintances at Gravediggers would say. But what they don’t understand is that she’s not just Sarah Bolton, my ex-wife; she’s the mother of my little girl, and that's a bond that will never be broken, as far as I'm concerned.
I was in a pinch. Normally, I would have a partner that would be able to cover me while I swept through the entrance foyer, but without a second gunman, it seemed a little too reckless. I noticed that there were no signs of forced entry at the hinges or the lock bolt, which meant that the intruder was someone she trusted and for whom she opened the door willingly. Or maybe she flung the door open in a panic and ran out, away from something.
Hell, I didn't have nearly enough information to have any idea why the front door had been left open, and I knew I was wasting time trying to think it through. I would quickly sweep around the back of the house for a safer way in. I stayed low to the ground and stepped down off the porch, headed to the right, using waist-high bushes for cover. I stopped under the first tall window, nearly stretching from floor to ceiling, slowly peeking inside. The lights were off. No signs of movement.
I turned the corner of the house, keeping as close to the brick as possible, noting that in my heightened state of awareness, the grass felt sticky under my shoes. I focused on the chain-link fence ahead, taking care to purposely ignore the high window coming up on my right; it was Annie’s old room. The house’s foundation was raised due to the basement we had decided to add to the plans before the house was built, and as a result, her window was high off the ground, which made it easier for me to ignore and continue toward the fence into the backyard. But something alerted the edge of my vision, and I looked up.
The light in Annie’s room was on.
My breath caught into a lump in my throat. I had to force myself to swallow and keep breathing. I looked around at the surrounding houses and listened. This was no longer my home, to a much larger degree than only one day ago. I felt like I was standing in an alien world where up was down and blue was green.
Moving quickly to the fence, I quietly released the latch and pushed it open just far enough for me to squeeze through. I didn’t bother shutting it behind me. Crouching, I scampered across the lawn, staying close to the house, careful not to activate the motion sensor spotlight I had installed a few years back. No other lights were on in other windows, as far as I could tell.
I hopped up the two concrete steps leading to the double French doors and took cover to the side, slowly peeking through the divided windowpanes. The family room beyond was shrouded in blackness. I softly turned the faux-brass doorknob, but it was locked (as I had hoped it would be). I silently rejoiced when I discovered Sarah still kept a spare key under the potted plant to the left of the steps.
I stealthily entered the family room through the back door, sweeping the darkness with my weapon. Most of the room was just as I remembered it: the fireplace and brown recliner, the ugly plaid-patterned couch made up of shades of burnt orange, the faux-wood paneling on the lower half of the walls, the tattered rust-colored recliner near the TV. But the walls were different; she had painted them a deep burgundy that really suited the space. It felt more homely than before.
I crept toward the long kitchen, taking one step onto the linoleum before halting. I stared at the barstool near the counter to the right, the spot of flooring in front of the sink, the blue-carpeted hallway perpendicular to the kitchen at the other end…
My hands shook, my heart raced, and my eyes slammed shut as the images blasted my brain like it had happened yesterday.
I remembered being on the barstool, terribly drunk, with a lowball glass of whiskey and coke in front of me. Annie screamed. I jumped out of the seat but couldn’t stand. As I fell over onto the floor, I saw the man round the corner, Annie in one arm, a gun in his hand. She bit him, and he dropped her. Sarah emerged from our bedroom and threw her arms around the man’s neck. He elbowed her stomach, forcing her to double over before he spun around quickly and slammed the butt of his gun into her head, knocking her to the floor, unconscious.
I couldn’t do anything. I struggled to stand, but everything I saw was blurry and nauseating. In my whiskey stupor, I managed to raise myself to my knees and mumble something. I saw the intruder point his gun at me. I heard Annie scream “Daddy!” as she ran toward me. Then the gunshot. The man uttered an obscenity, tripped over Sarah’s body, charged down the hallway, and scrambled out the front door.
The urge to vomit had been so strong when things finally came into focus, and I saw my little girl lying on her stomach in a massive pool of her own blood, her face pointed in my direction, her green eyes staring into my soul. It was as if her dead body were able to ask, “Why daddy? Why didn’t you help us? Do you love whiskey more than you love me?!”
Now, as I stood in the kitchen at the location of the end of my daughter’s life, the end of my marriage, and the end of who I had been, something inside me finally shattered. I knew that things needed to change. My life wasn’t over yet, and I had spent the past two years acting as if it were. I figured this was as good a time as any to definitively quit drinking. And maybe, if the world still existed in a week, I could try to get my old job back.
I didn’t risk walking down the length of the kitchen, knowing that there were many creaky spots in the floor, and I wasn’t yet ready to announce my presence. Instead, I went left through the living room, circling around to the bedroom hallway. I saw Annie’s door, closed, with a beam of warm halogen light sneaking out from the base. I placed my ear against it and heard nothing. Slowly, I turned the knob and pushed open the door.
My chest clenched as I saw the yellow carpet and walls, the small twin bed, the stuffed bears, the hanging carousel lamp; all of Annie’s things remained untouched. I could almost hear the echoes of innocent laughter, imagining her sitting on the floor playing with her animals, giving each of them a character to play out in her dramas.
Sarah sat on a folding chair in the center of the room, her back to me.
I kept my gun raised toward the ceiling, ready to spring into action as I asked, “Sarah?”
She didn’t respond.
I saw her torso expanding with breath, so I knew she wasn’t dead. “Sarah, it’s B… it’s Nick.” I almost said “Bear,” but I quickly remembered that she hated that nickname and refused to call me by it. I took a few steps into the room, my gun lowering toward the floor.
Still, she didn’t respond.
As I neared her, I could see that she was trembling. I cautiously stepped around to face her, and she looked up at me, her long bro
wn hair falling into her face, fear and regret in her eyes, her skin pale and sweaty, a strip of cloth tied around her mouth.
I immediately removed the gag as she tried to push me away, tears streaming down her face. “Sarah,” I said. “Are you all right? What happened?!”
She continued shoving me back. “Please, you have to leave. Leave now!”
“What’s going on?!”
“Nick, they’re here!”
I stepped back in shock as her words sunk into my thick skull. Of course. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind before this moment. The open front door. The light in Annie’s room. Sarah sitting here by herself, bound and gagged.
It was a trap.
These people used to be acquaintances in town. They knew I wouldn’t be able to walk away from Angelwood without stopping here first. I thought back to the events at the police station when the newly turned Billy had begun quietly muttering that he had found me, and everyone else had come running as if they’d heard him. Did these things communicate telepathically in some way?
I imagined the woman in the group at the police station mutter as I drove away, “Nick Barren has fled the station. Nick Barren is gone. Nick Barren is probably going to his ex-wife’s house. Nick Barren will fall for our lame and simple trap, because he is a stupid drunk.”
If punching myself could be productive, I would have done it.
“Hello, Nick Barren.”
I looked up at the door and saw a cluster of people – maybe ten of them – staring at me with dead eyes and straight lips. I glanced down at Sarah, who looked up into my eyes, crying, an expression of sincere apology on her face. It was only now that I noticed the blood staining the side of her shirt.
She had been bitten, although I was still unsure what that meant exactly.