What Andrew wants is to have Wen back and to have Eric be his Eric and not this brain-bashed proto-zombie. And if he can’t have that, then he wants to sit down and cry and never move again. He wants to cover himself with the blanket, the one that used to belong to us, used to be ours. He wants to tie Sabrina to the deck railing and leave her behind forever. He wants to know what exactly is going on in Eric’s concussed head. He wants to yell and lash out at Eric for defending anything Sabrina says. He wants to take Wen away from Eric; rip her out of his hands.
Andrew says to Sabrina, “All right. Back in the cabin. Be quick.”
Eric asks, “Aren’t we going? Is she coming with us? I think we need—”
“We’re all going!” Andrew yells.
That barking roar spikes through Eric’s head, and he winces and closes his eyes. When he opens them, he looks past Andrew and to the lake, and a thought scurries: Eric could walk into the water with Wen in his arms, and he could walk until the water is over his head. He could walk until his feet sink into the muck and then weave binding chains from the weeds so he would never surface, never be exposed to the light. Then everything would be over; he would’ve made the required sacrifice and the world would be saved. Aren’t those the rules? The rules some growing, metastasizing part of himself believes to be true? There is still doubt, but it has become easier to believe than not. Has it always been easier to believe? Either way, the lake solution doesn’t feel right, and it wouldn’t be fair of him to take Wen with him, take her away from Andrew. Eric drifts over to the couch and sits down. He spreads his legs wide, balances Wen’s body on his thighs, and pulls his arms out from under her to give them a break. He needs the rest if he is going to carry her for the duration of the walk, however long or short it might be. Flies land on his arms and not Wen’s body this time. He doesn’t shoo them away.
Sabrina steps over Adriane and back into the cabin. Andrew follows. He sidesteps into the kitchen and grabs an eight-inch chef’s knife from the cutting block. He tosses the sledgehammer weapon out the slider doors and it lands on O’Bannon. Andrew says, “Good.” With that nightmare stick back with its dead progenitor, the cherry on the top of that refuse pile, Andrew is invigorated and more able to concentrate on what needs to be done to survive the next minute and hopefully more minutes after that.
Andrew stalks back to the center of the cabin’s common area but slows down when there’s a hiccupping click in his right knee, a warning from his shifting bones to slow down. He navigates more carefully over the blood-slicked floor. Sabrina stands with her back against the front wall, and Eric is on the couch with Wen’s body across his lap. It’s as though the trip to the deck didn’t happen and no one has moved and nothing has changed. And just like that Andrew’s energy dissipates and a near-incapacitating sadness and despair swells at the realization that even after we walk out the front door, part of us will be trapped in the cabin and in these positions forever.
Andrew says to Sabrina with his best impersonation of his own stern, professorial voice, “Turn around, drop to your knees, and put your hands behind your back.”
Sabrina does as is instructed. Facing the wall, she says, “You don’t have to hurt me. I’m going to help you as much as I can.”
Eric asks, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to tie her hands together and then we’ll all walk to the keys.”
Andrew saws lengths of rope away from Leonard’s bound legs. The size of the chef’s knife makes it unwieldy for the job. He accidentally pokes and jabs Leonard’s body twice. Red beads leak sluggishly from the puncture wounds like sap from a tree. He manages to cut four arm-length pieces of rope loose. He carries them over to Sabrina, who is still on her knees, waiting. He considers threatening her with consequences if she doesn’t comply but instead simply tells her not to move. He squats behind her. His swollen right knee is a bowling ball. Sabrina’s fingers and hands are pink with memories of blood. The back of her shirt is as white as a single puffy cloud in summer.
Andrew doesn’t say anything to her and she doesn’t say anything to him. He does a quick and rough job of tying her hands and wrists together with the first rope length. It will keep her bound long enough for him to take more care with the reinforcement lengths. If any of this process is uncomfortable or painful, Sabrina doesn’t react to it. When he finishes, her hands and wrists are all but swallowed up by a thick dual spindle. He tries to pull her forearms apart and there’s no movement, no give in the rope.
Eric is off the couch and standing behind Andrew. He looks at the door and is as afraid of what’s outside as he is afraid of what’s inside. He says, “We’re doing the right thing.”
Andrew does a double take because he thinks he hears We’re going to do the right thing. He says to Sabrina, “Okay, you can stand up. Do you need help?”
“No, I don’t.” She lifts her right knee until her foot is flush against the floor and she stands smoothly and without much effort. She turns and flashes a friendly, I’m-on-your-side smile that slides into pity, an ugly transformation familiar to us both.
She says, “I’m ready.”
Andrew walks to the front door and swings it open on creaking hinges.
Eric holds his breath and prays, asking for the light and whatever entity might be housed within to not be outside waiting for us. That there hasn’t been another sighting of the shimmery figure only convinces him it will return. The cabin interior brightens by a few shades, enough to wash out color and add more shadow. This light is from a nowhere time, neither before nor after the golden hours of dawn and dusk. Nothing in the cabin moves; even Eric’s flies are stilled.
Andrew stands in the open doorway and glances back inside the cabin. With bent metal pieces of the television frame and wires hanging limply from a splintered, jagged hole in the far wall and the blood on the floor congealing into colossal scabs. The room was thrashed and scored from within by parasites so greedy as to have killed the host.
Andrew waves his knife and says, “Come on.” Sabrina is the first to walk outside, and she does so silently. Eric and Wen are next with Eric walking dutifully and with his head down. Andrew thinks about reaching out to touch his husband’s shoulder as he passes, but he fails to lift his free hand in time. Eric is already down the stairs and to the grass. Andrew is the last to leave and he closes the door behind him, keeping whatever is left inside the cabin from following.
It’s darker outside now than it was only minutes ago, and windier. The cloud cover is charcoal tinted. The cabin and surrounding trees block any attempt at distance viewing. At least from the deck, we could see across the lake to the forest and mountains and more easily imagine the wider world beyond us, beyond what we saw on the television. Without the elevated perspective, the front yard is the bottom of a grasshopper jar.
We walk across the lawn and to the gravel driveway. Our footsteps are loud and grinding. We don’t feel safe. We’re exposed and vulnerable, and we suppress the urge to run back inside the cabin and hide from this world.
Andrew says, “Hold up,” and stops at our SUV. The passenger-side rear door is open, shark-tooth-shaped chunks of glass clinging stubbornly to the frame. The slashed tires have melted into pools of rubber. The vehicle is lopsided, a sunken derelict ship. “We can’t drive it. It’s not going anywhere,” he says as though having to explain or excuse leaving behind anything that belongs to us. He opens the rear hatch, which hisses as it lifts over his head.
The hissing is a shriek in Eric’s ears and it echoes through the woods, stirring up a susurrus similar to but not the same as the mocking chorus of flies in the cabin; it’s a deeper sound, the humming of power lines. Maybe it’s a mistake to be outside, attempting to leave, acting like we can simply go on.
Eric asks, “What are you doing?”
“This will be quick.” Bullets, those shiny brass threats, are seeds spilled and spread over the black-as-potting-soil trunk interior. Andrew ghosts over the evidence of his earlier struggle
with Sabrina and those leavings now read like tea leaves, a forecasting of the events in the cabin that followed.
Andrew pulls the handgun from his back pocket. He studies the snub-nosed barrel from which exploded a bullet that looked no different from the ones lying dormant in the trunk, a bullet that passed through his daughter’s—
“Stop it,” Andrew whispers. He’s going to reload this gun and bring it with him just in case Sabrina or anyone else has another surprise for us. Andrew says into the vehicle’s interior but loud enough for Eric to hear, “When this is over and when we are safe, I am going to throw this gun into the woods or the lake or preferably a bottomless pit.”
“I’ll help you find one and we’ll throw it in there together,” Eric says. It comes out too eager and sentimental, so it feels like such a damned and obvious lie. Andrew reloading that gun, the gun, and then Eric’s awkward attempt at commiseration is yet another microevent within the greater, grander days of horror and evil that will mark us whether we live another sixty seconds or sixty years, together or apart.
Andrew gathers the loose bullets quickly, before he can change his mind. They are small chilled things in his fingers and he loads the five chambers of the handgun. He returns the gun to his back pocket. He places the knife in the trunk next to the gun safe, leaving an offering for a bloodthirsty, violent god, were there any other kind.
Andrew faces Eric and is desperate to say something, anything besides the gun is loaded so we can go.
Eric adjusts Wen’s body in his arms and walks down the driveway, toward Sabrina, who is as still as a photographic image.
Andrew leaves the SUV trunk open, hurrying to catch up to Eric. His right knee audibly grinds and clicks, and he catches himself as the knee buckles and gives out, leg quivering like a loose spring. “Shit!”
From the mouth of the driveway and standing next to Sabrina, Eric asks, “What’s wrong?”
She sneaks glances at Eric as though she wants to tell him something that’s meant only for him. Maybe she wants to tell Eric this is his last opportunity to save the world: leave Andrew behind while he and Sabrina continue down the road and along the way Eric can make the sacrifice, a self-sacrifice, without Andrew having to suffer through witnessing his suicide, without Andrew being there to stop him, and once it’s done then Andrew will live. It will be hard but Andrew will live. And everyone else will live.
Eric says, “Maybe you should—” He pauses long enough, and purposefully, to let Andrew interrupt and to keep Eric from finishing his statement. Maybe you should stay here.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m, um, rebooting the leg.” Andrew regrets not taking one of the weapons with him as he could’ve used one as a cane. He walks more cautiously and with a pronounced, sputtering limp, only putting as much weight on his right leg as is absolutely necessary before skipping back onto his left. He scans the woods along the edge of the driveway for a walking stick and finds one that’s long enough but might be too skinny to hold his full weight. It’s a gnarled, arthritic finger and the bark is black, knotty, and dotted with green and white blossoms of lichen. It’ll have to do. He says, “All set,” and hobbles forward.
Sabrina calls out to Andrew in an overly cheery, high-pitched voice. “It’s not that far. You can do it.” And did he see a flash of a smartass smirk, the we’re-on-to-you kind his better students give him when he’s playfully obtuse in a group discussion? Sabrina holds Andrew with a look that pins him, and he now reads it as I can sprint away at any time and you can’t catch me and you won’t shoot me. Andrew quickens his pace, putting all his weight on his inadequate and warbly stick, desperate to prove he can achieve a brisk, healthy-legged walking speed. He should’ve gathered more rope and tethered a line between himself and Sabrina. What was he thinking? But it’s too late now. There’s no going back inside the cabin for more rope. There’s no going back for anything.
We make a right turn at the end of the driveway. It’s darker on the dirt road, which is narrower than we remember, only wide enough for one lane, and it might be our imaginations, but the road appears to be thinning, winnowing as we progress. The trees crowd our procession, wanting to be closer, to hold us, to stop us. They are our jurors and their whispered deliberations occur above in the canopy. The treetops sway and peer down for a better look, or a final one before they hold their thumbs down. Above the conspiratorial trees, the clouds have lost their individuality, pressed tightly into thick layers of ash. It’s darker ahead, the road leading to a point beyond where we can see, to a point we may never reach.
After a few hundred paces of silent walking, the little red cabin is no longer visible. Sabrina is a few steps ahead of us. She walks evenly and with a confidence neither of us feels. We stagger behind, side by side, glancing nervously at each other.
Eric looks down at Wen and another panicked thought slithers in: later (however long or brief his later might be), when he remembers what it felt like to hold Wen in his arms, will he only and forever remember this death march? It doesn’t feel like it’s her that he’s carrying. This isn’t what he wants to remember, and her body is suddenly as heavy as a wooden cross. Eric recalls his Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Amstutz, a middle-aged woman who always wore blue print dresses, black patent shoes with silver buckles, and tan pantyhose that made her legs look wooden. She didn’t smile and a tight-lipped pucker of disapproval was permanently etched onto her ruddy face. Eric’s mother didn’t like her very much. Mom never said so outright, but he could tell by how she referred to Mrs. Amstutz as “your teacher” and never by name. Mrs. Amstutz once spent an entire class harping on how heavy the cross was that Jesus was made to carry. She wasn’t speaking metaphorically, either. She asked each of the children in the class to give a weight comparison. The other children enthusiastically compared its weight to cars, boulders, elephants, an offensive lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Jabba the Hutt, and someone’s overweight uncle; the kids did not take the question anywhere near as seriously as she intended. When it was Eric’s turn, he was near tears and his heartbeat was a drumroll. In a regular classroom setting, Eric was composed, confident, and according to all his teachers, mature beyond his years. Sunday school was different. It wasn’t the teacher that had him rattled and afraid. This was God’s class. God was watching, listening, keeping track of what Eric said and did, and what he thought. Mrs. Amstutz asked Eric three times how much he thought the cross weighed. He thinks of the question every time he goes to church and sees the cross hanging over the altar, and every time, he remembers his answer: the ten-year-old Eric squeaked out that he couldn’t imagine anything being that heavy.
Andrew says, “Talk to me. How are you doing, Eric? Need me to carry her for a bit?”
Eric shakes his head not as an answer but at the uncanny timing of Andrew’s inquiries. He needs to tell Andrew what he believes might need to be done. The might is still there within him, like a crumb of conscience in an unrepentantly guilty person, but it is shrinking. He says, “I know I’m injured. Concussed. Not thinking straight. But—”
“But what?”
We continue to walk together. Our feet grind into the road at different rhythms, leaving two separate paths of footprints in the dirt.
Eric says, “This might be real. I think it’s happening.”
“It. Tell me what it is that’s happening.” Andrew wants Eric to quit obliquely referring to the others’ proposal of choice and apocalyptic consequence. If Eric can be made to spell it out in detail and stop with the midwestern, polite vagueness—like how people discuss but not-discuss a serious illness in the family—then Eric might understand how irrational it all is. Andrew, too, would benefit from having the illogic of what the others are proffering reinforced. In these dimming, implausible hours, he is not immune to doubt.
Eric feels like he’s being made to answer his Sunday school teacher’s how heavy question all over again. He cannot explain how heavy this is. Andrew should know; he’s supposed to know.
Eric
has too much he wants to say at once and is unable to organize it all. What’s happening to us is this big unwieldy thing in his head, changing form and shape with each passing second. There’s no beginning at the beginning, so he says, “Those planes all crashing and crashing when they did, at the same time. Leonard said they would fall from the sky.”
“No. He didn’t say that.”
“Yes, he did.”
“He never said anything about planes. Did he ever say the word planes?”
“No, but—”
“Leonard said the sky would fall into pieces. He didn’t say planes. Like a scam psychic, he made a general statement, one culturally associated with end-of-the-world stories, essentially saying the sky is falling, and he let you fill in the details. What if we’d turned on the news and saw a skyscraper collapsing? That means the sky is falling into pieces, right? Or how about a monsoon or a nasty hailstorm; one could argue either of those would be closer to a literal interpretation of the sky is falling. Or it could’ve been a mass die-off of birds, or chunks of falling satellite or, I don’t know, space stations, goddamn Skylab 2.0 plummeting to Earth . . . whatever. Metaphorically, you can retrofit almost anything to—”
“Come on, Andrew, it’s not much of a metaphorical leap from sky to planes. The planes literally fell out of the sky and in pieces. He said ‘pieces.’”
“Frankly, so what?” Andrew pauses and flashes on the images of the wrecked planes, and he remembers the fear coursing through his nerves like a rabies virus, and then his giving in to the impulse to destroy the television so he wouldn’t see them anymore. With as much of the voice of reason as he can muster, he adds, “Planes crash all the time.”
“All the time? Yes, they just drop like leaves in the fall. We’re always having to look up and take cover and—”
“All right, an exaggeration, but only a slight one. Crashes do happen frequently. It’s a numbers game: there are thousands and thousands of planes all over the world in the air at any given time. The day before we drove up here that little pond hopper crashed into a house in Duxbury.”
The Cabin at the End of the World_A Novel Page 23