The Living and the Dead

by Greg F. Gifune

  Chris held his muddy hands out as if in evidence. “The wind’s taking trees down out there and…I’m afraid he was pinned beneath one. There was nothing I could do. I tried, but by the time I’d reached him…”

  Lennox closed her eyes as if to shut out the words. “He’s dead?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “If we stay here we’ll all die too,” Lana said suddenly.

  “That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it?” Lennox asked. “Staying alive.”

  “I’m sorry about Perry, sincerely I am, but right now we need to think about ourselves.”

  “Well that is your specialty.” Her eyes widened in challenge. “It’s a small cottage, voices carry.”

  Lana’s bottom lip curled inward. “Who the hell are you to judge me?”

  “Someone I cared about was just killed.” Lennox wiped a renegade tear from her eye. “I heard the last bit of life scream its way out of him, and I’ll hear that as long as I’m alive, whether that turns out to be another ten minutes or another sixty years. I’m doing my best to maintain because if I let go now I’ll never get back to anything close to sane, so maybe you could let me take a couple minutes to think about something other than my own ass, OK? Think you can manage that?”

  “I’m talking about staying alive, Lennox.”

  “So am I, bitch.”

  Anita looked at Chris with an expression that said: What the hell kind of hornet’s nest have we run into?

  Lana stepped closer to her. “Well then what are we arguing about, bitch?”

  “Do you really think we have any chance out there?”

  “I’m not sure we have a chance anywhere. But if we stay here it’s just a matter of time before we lose our minds or it takes us like it took Perry. At least if we run and try to get to other people we’ll have a chance.”

  “Not much of one.”

  “Isn’t that better than no chance at all?”

  “I don’t know. Is it?”

  The two women stared at each other, the tension between them rising.

  “I could go,” Duck offered. “You could all stay here with Dempsey, and I could go into town and try to—”

  “Enough macho bullshit,” Lennox snapped. “We all go or we all stay.”

  “Dempsey can’t make it, he’s barely conscious.”

  “Then he stays behind and we’ll send help back for him.”

  “She’s right,” Lana conceded. “There’s strength in numbers. We have to stick together, for better or worse. All I’m saying is we can’t just sit here praying for daylight anymore. We have to move and we have to move now.”

  “We’ve been through town not half an hour ago,” Anita said in a small voice. “There’s no one there. The streets were empty, no life anywhere. It was like everyone was just…gone.”

  Duck thought about what she’d said a moment ago. “Good chance most townies are holed up, hunkered down and looking to ride out the storm.”

  “Stay or go, we’ll have to fight our way out of this.” Lennox gazed morosely at the video camera on the table. “We can’t just wait around for the dead to take us, too.”

  Lana snatched up the recorder and wandered over to the counter to prevent Lennox from doing it first, perhaps to sate her own morbid curiosity, or perhaps an equal measure of both.

  “I need to talk to my father,” Chris said.

  Duck nodded. “We have to find out what he knows.”

  “He’s totally out of it,” Lennox explained. “He thought I was his daughter.”

  “We’re still a few hours from dawn.” A shadow crossed Duck’s face as he considered his watch. “You three fill your hands and keep a close eye on both doors. Give us a minute, me and Chris are gonna try to talk to the old man, see if we can reach him.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll make a decision as a group. We either ride it out here until morning or we get the hell out and take our chances.”

  Familiar voices suddenly filled the kitchen with playful banter.

  “How many are watching this time?”

  “At this exact moment, seventeen people. Isn’t that cool?”

  Lana quickly stabbed a button, shut the video camera off and looked away guiltily.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Lennox asked.

  “I’m sorry, I was trying to shut it off, I—I’m not familiar with these things.”

  Lennox held her hand out. “Do you mind?”

  Lana returned it to her.

  She tossed it onto the table with no regard for its welfare. “If you’ve got something to say to me then say it.”

  “It’s none of my business. And now’s certainly not the time to—”

  “Sure it is. Say it.” Lennox stepped closer. “Say it.”

  Lana straightened her posture, raised her head. “I don’t understand why you’d allow yourself to be demeaned like that, performing on demand on the Internet like some prostitute.”

  “Well aren’t we the pillar of moral superiority.”

  “I never claimed to be anything of the sort.”

  “It’s only demeaning if it’s done against my will.”

  “Just because you allow it doesn’t make it any less exploitive.”

  “What’s wrong, Lana, jealous?”

  “Hardly.”

  “I guess you just rewound it a little too far, huh? Maybe you’d find Perry’s death a little more entertaining and not quite so offensive.” As her voice cracked she drew a breath to steady herself. “Want to see if I can cue that up for you?”

  “Let’s just drop it, OK?”

  “You don’t even know me, lady. You know nothing about me.”

  “You’re not nearly as complex as you’d like to think,” Lana snapped. “No one from your generation is. You’re all shallow and ignorant. You stand for nothing; you believe in nothing; you care about nothing. Unless of course it revolves around shopping or texting or any of the other completely inane things you all concern yourselves with. You treat sex like it’s no big deal, you have no concept of privacy or even basic decency or respect—self-respect or otherwise, look at the way you refer to yourselves—bitches and whores and pimps—and you laugh, you think it’s funny. You all prance around like compliant little sluts, and the worst part is you’re happy to do it, you think it’s what you’re supposed to do, who you’re supposed to be. You set women back a hundred years and you coddle a generation of men who think we’re all nothing but a bunch of fuck toys for their amusement. You have children the way most people go to the store for a loaf of bread because you’re so desperate to do something, to achieve anything, to be loved and to love someone else; you view violence and death like they’re scenes out of some foolish video game or moronic movie, and anything of any depth as a joke. The things you worship and the people you look up to are pathetic and corrupt. You’re vulgar, disrespectful, classless, vacuous, xenophobic, and see the world through your own limited experience with short-sighted, insignificant, uneducated eyes and empty, soulless hearts. You consider history things that happened two years ago, and anything beyond that you couldn’t care less about. You know nothing, yet you parade around with a breathtaking sense of entitlement like the spoiled, bloated, pampered, self-absorbed little shits you are, smug, mean and self-centered beyond belief. In the end you’re all just a bunch of blind and mindless drones, shuffling along doing whatever the government and Madison Avenue tell you to do. You’re ridiculous—all of you—and the saddest part is that none of you have any idea.”

  “My generation,” Lennox said, laughing softly, bitterly. “I’ve got almost no interest in my generation. All I know is the past. For me it’s all I’ve got. You’d know that about me if you weren’t completely talking out of your ass. What are you, like, fifty?”

  “Thirty-six,” Lana answered through an icy stare.

  “And look at you. What have you ever done that’s so fucking wonderful? You’re a thief and a coward, you said so yourself. Y
ou’re as lost and fucked-up as the rest of us, and you’re not fooling anybody with your big superiority speeches and your fake moral outrage. You’re scared to death like the rest of us, and you’re pissing in your little khaki shorts hoping there’s a God and that He’s listening, on the off-chance he might save you and grant you one more chance to salvage the disaster you’ve made of your life. So check this selfish, vulgar bit of disrespect out, you stuffy, self-important cunt. Fuck you. ”

  Lana slowly narrowed the gap between them, standing so close to Lennox their faces nearly touched. “Fuck me, you little bitch?”

  Duck slowly slid between the two women. Until that point the others had stood paralyzed, perhaps stunned by the confrontation, or perhaps too focused on other things to muster the strength necessary to intervene.

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  Neither woman backed down.

  “We’ll decide when it’s enough,” Lennox told him, her eyes never leaving Lana’s. “Not you or anybody else.”

  “Fair enough, but if you two could put your cocks away and have this conversation some other time, we’d all appreciate it. We’re kind of in the middle of a fucking nightmare here in case you forgot.”

  The two women eventually separated, albeit reluctantly, each moving off in opposite directions.

  “Look,” Chris offered, “I’m a psychologist. I understand better than anyone how our minds are reacting to these pressures but—”

  “A shrink,” Lana cracked. “Great, just what we need.”

  “All I’m saying is that the last thing we should do right now is turn on one another. Not now, we…” He froze, looked to the other room. Pale and drenched in sweat, his father stood watching them from the doorway. Or at least what was left of him.

  Duck started toward him but pulled up short when he saw he was holding the .38 Perry had left on the couch. “Jesus, Dempsey, you all right?”

  The old man looked at him with exhausted, bloodshot eyes. “Of course not,” he said gravely. “And neither are any of you.”

  30

  It was breaking them down, the darkness, the storm and the evil within it. No one trusted anyone anymore, perhaps they never really had. They couldn’t be sure of each other or even themselves. The only constants were fear and paranoia, drifting up out of the fog, seeping through the walls and wrapping around them like hands squeezing tighter and tighter at their throats. They could only wonder what was happening out there beyond the walls and trees and hammering rains. Night without end folded around them, opened their veins and let the blood run free, spilling secrets and lies, desires, nightmares and forgotten truths, all of it raging through their exhausted bodies and minds in a tempest of hopelessness and despair. The humidity had finally eased somewhat, but the claustrophobic heat and stale air remained, making the cottage seem even smaller than it was, the ceilings lower, the walls closer, and that which separated inside from outside a mere veil through which one could soon easily pass.

  “You need to help us,” Duck said wearily. “You need to tell us what you know, Dempsey.”

  “They’re loose,” he said, still looking as if he might collapse at any time.

  “Is it the storm? Did the storm bring them?”

  “It brought the storm,” he said through a scowl, eyes going to his son and then away again and again. “I—I never meant for any of this to happen.”

  “You’re saying you’ve done this?” Lana asked, incredulous. “That you’re the cause of all this?”

  Before he could answer Lennox asked, “That thing that’s out there. What is it?”

  “Rae knows all about it,” he said through a sigh. “It’s been around long as people, maybe longer, no way to know for sure. Been seen all over the world, shows itself before bad things happen, tragedies and whatnot. Sometimes, it brings up the dead.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Some say it’s a devil, some say it’s a prophet. It talks to you in dreams and visions, has lots of names. The Indians called it a shape-shifter, a Thunderbird. They used to say its wings made the wind, caused thunder.”

  “That’s legend,” Duck reminded him. “This thing’s physical. It leaves tracks, it—”

  “Maybe it’s the monster under our beds,” Lennox said softly. “The evil inside all of us come to life.”

  The old man’s head swiveled toward her. “Not you. Me.”

  “We’re never getting out of this town, are we?”

  “Don’t you know where you are, girl?” His bottom lip quivered. “This ain’t no normal rain. It’s the rain of the dead.”

  Something brushed against the windows.

  “It’s been inside me so long, showing me the night stories, it’s—I didn’t want to lose her—after what happened with Lucille and with Chris leaving the way he done, sneaking off in the night, I didn’t want to lose my daughter, didn’t want her running off too. I loved her. I truly did, in my own way, I loved Lacy. She was my child, goddamn it, my child.”

  “Shut your mouth,” Chris said through gritted teeth. “You wouldn’t know love if you fell over it.”

  “It was an accident,” Dempsey said, tears rolling down his cheeks.

  A dawning slowly spread across Duck’s face. “Christ.”

  “It must’ve been, I…”

  Anita reached out, took Chris’s hand. He gently pulled free and moved closer to his father without saying a word.

  “I got drunk, I…” The old man made no attempt to wipe away the tears. “When I come out of it the next morning she…I know I done some horrible things…things I’m gonna burn for.”

  “In Hell,” Chris said softly.

  Anita felt a sudden chill. Chris had always claimed he didn’t believe in such things.

  “But I don’t know what happened that night, I swear it.”

  “Where is she, Dempsey?” Duck asked.

  Dempsey locked on Chris. “I swear, son, I don’t know what happened.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Duck said, “where is she?”

  “Rae knew,” he said as if he hadn’t heard the question. “She knew what I done. She was the only one that knew what was inside me…what was coming out of me. Fucking gypsy witch looked right through me her whole life, she knew—”

  “Dempsey, where is Lacy?”

  “Back in the woods.” The old man bowed his head. “I buried her back in the woods.”

  Duck snapped shut his eyes. “Lord.”

  “All them years ago, it’s—it’s been so many years,” he mumbled. “Those night stories going in my head all the while, telling me things and—I always thought real evil was out there somewhere, and that it’d come and find me and punish me for what I done. But it ain’t out there. It don’t got to come get you. That’s what I never knew ‘til now. It’s already with us, already inside, right there all the time. Evil ain’t fighting to get in. It’s fighting to get out.”

  Anita backed away, a reality dawning on her nearly as frightening as the rest of what was happening. “When you found Lacy she was already dead?”

  Dempsey squinted at the woman, trying to place her, and despite having no idea who she was, gave a slow nod.

  Chris shot her a look of disapproval but she ignored him. “How long after Chris left?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “How long after Chris left did you find Lacy’s body?”

  “Nita,” Chris snapped, “stay out of this, it’s be- tween—”

  “How long?”

  “Next morning,” Dempsey answered.

  “That’s not possible,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “Is it, Chris? It’s not possible because you’ve always claimed to have spoken to your sister a few weeks after you left home. That means one of you has to be lying.”

  Everyone turned to Chris, who stood pale and trembling before them.

  “You have no idea what sort of monster this man is,” he said just above a whisper. “What he put us all through. What he did to my mother, to my sister
, to me. Tell them, you sonofabitch. Tell them what you did to your little girl.”

  “I know I done wrong, I—”

  “Tell them.”

  “I think we all know what he did,” Anita answered for him. “The question is what did you do?”

  He glanced at her but couldn’t sustain eye contact.

  “Chris,” she said, voice shaking, “what did you do?”

  Do it, Lacy says from the darkest corners of his mind. Do it.

  “I saved her,” Chris said quietly. “And then I let this sadistic bastard rot in his own filth and guilt.”

  Anita brought her hands to her head, as if to prevent the thoughts from escaping. Who was this man she thought she’d known? “When he called you and said he’d seen Lacy, you had to come up here because you didn’t know for sure if he’d figured it out or not. You assumed it was some fantasy in his demented mind, who wouldn’t? But you still had to be sure because what if he had it right, even after all these years? You didn’t know then that it wasn’t all in his mind. What you did know, was that it was impossible for Lacy to have come home because she never left, did she? And while your father was a horrible man guilty of many terrible things, he didn’t kill your sister. You did. You killed her and let your father think he’d done it.”

  I’ll take you with me, I—

  You can’t. We both know you can’t. I’m underage. If I go, they’ll come after us and bring me back.

  Then I’ll wait. I won’t go until we’re both—

  He’ll kill you by then, maybe both of us. Do it, Chris. I want you to. Do it.

  “My sister was already dead the night I saved her,” Chris said flatly. “Our father had already killed us both.”

  I love you, he whispers, holding her down as she bucks and writhes. And then she’s gone, lying there with her bloody nightgown and bruised body, eyes open, gazing into eternity. He sits with her a while, holds her cold hand and weeps. After he places her body delicately on the kitchen floor, he slips away into what remains of the night, as dead inside as the little girl he leaves behind.

  Dempsey stared at his son as if not entirely certain of what he was seeing. “Why’d you really come here, boy?”