Anita watched the woman’s body grow smaller and smaller in the side mirror. She wondered if someone somewhere was waiting for her, hoping and praying she’d come through the door at any second.
In this madness, combined with the horrors she’d already witnessed, to consider everyone and everything she cared about or loved was simply too overwhelming. Instead, she closed her eyes and listened to the lies in her head.
And there, if only for a little while, she found something close to solace.
37
Chris pulled into the driveway and parked. The house looked quiet and empty but none the worse for wear. No broken windows or apparent damage whatsoever. In town things were much the same as they were elsewhere—debris, downed trees and abandoned cars everywhere, occasional bodies strewn about but very few traces of the living, most either running or concealed, peeking out from hiding spaces or now and then from otherwise dark windows. And it was quiet…unnaturally quiet…but Nancy’s car was there.
He remained in the Audi a while, apprehensive about what might be waiting for him in the house. Several minutes before, he’d said goodbye to Anita. Once they made it to the small house she’d shared with her husband until their recent separation, he parked out front and held her hand for a very long time. She was shaking but so was he, so it was hard to tell where she ended and he began. “I better come in with you,” he told her.
“I have to do this alone.”
He knew there was no point in objecting, so he grabbed the .38 from the console between them and held it out for her. “Take it.”
“I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”
“Take it,” he said again. “You may need it.”
“What about you?”
He stared at her. She reached out and took the gun.
“I can’t just leave you here, Nita. I can’t.”
“Go home to your wife, Chris.”
“What if there is no home? What if there is no wife?”
“Then die or not,” she said, “will it even matter?”
He gave a slow nod then leaned over and kissed her forehead.
His last memories of her were watching as she’d walked up the short driveway, looking around nervously. She retrieved a key from above the stoop, opened the front door and with a final wary look back over her shoulder, slipped inside.
Chris watched the house for several minutes. Anita never came back out.
The house kept its secrets, offering nothing.
Though he’d hoped for some sort of signal that she was all right, it never came. Once satisfied he’d given her ample time to go through the house, he waited a few minutes more then forced himself to head for home.
Now that he’d arrived, he couldn’t seem to get out of the car and venture inside. If anything had happened to Nancy in his absence, he’d never forgive himself.
He closed his eyes, saw his father’s head explode, his blood and brains spraying the wall.
“Why’d you really come here, boy?”
Chris killed the ignition and stepped from the car, immediately feeling a rush of humid air as he left the Audi’s air-conditioned interior. He looked back at the street and scanned as much of the neighborhood as he could. Nothing.
With a deep breath, he approached the front door.
Locked.
Quietly as possible, he slid the key in and opened the door, letting it swing fully open. Craning his neck, he tried to see as much of the house as he could from his position, but it was shrouded in heavy shadows. “Hello!” he called out. “Nancy, it’s me, are you here?”
When no answer came he stepped inside, leaving the door open behind him in case he had to make a quick escape. He’d never felt so afraid in his own home. The staircase stood before him, the landing at the top dark. He could smell vague traces of what had probably been a microwavable TV dinner or something similar. Whatever it was it couldn’t be terribly old, perhaps from the night before at the most. He moved through the downstairs, into the kitchen. Nancy was nowhere to be found. Everything was more or less as he’d left it. Nothing seemed disturbed. If the downstairs was any indication, and he hoped it was, whatever had taken place here during the night hadn’t been violent.
He made the full circle and again found himself at the base of the stairs. He gazed up at the second floor. “Nancy?”
His voice drifted up the stairs, dissipating in the hallway beyond.
Chris slowly climbed the stairs.
When he’d reached the top he glanced at the first room, a guest room they rarely used. Empty. The bed still made. Everything in place. Nothing disturbed or out of the ordinary.
As he closed on the master bedroom he called out to his wife again, but still received no answer. The door was ajar, so he gave it a gentle push. It swung open with a creak to reveal their bedroom just as he’d left it.
Except that Nancy was lying in bed, atop the blankets, on her back. She was still wearing the outfit she’d had on the day he left, but she’d removed her shoes. “Nance,” he said breathlessly, a warm wave of relief washing over him. “Honey, are you all right?” He rushed to her side and sat on the edge of the bed. Asleep, for the first time in recent memory she looked wholly at peace.
It wasn’t until he touched her hand that he realized something was horribly wrong. She was cold as ice. She’d been dead for hours. On the nightstand, he saw the remains of a glass of water and an empty overturned prescription bottle.
There is such a thing as the pressure of darkness…
“No,” he said softly. “Oh baby, no—you—why didn’t you—I—I’m back, I came back for you, I was wrong, I’m so sorry. I was wrong.”
The darkness…
“I came back for you.”
It becomes our master…
Her corpse blurred through his tears. “Why didn’t you wait for me?”
From the doorway behind him came a deep and hollow but strangely familiar voice. “I did.”
Outside, a waif of a girl in a dirty and bloodstained nightgown stood in the backyard staring up at the house with eyes long dead. She smiled. Very soon now she and her brother would be together again. She could almost feel him there next to her, his strong hands clutching her tender throat.
Hidden in the trees behind her, the monster from her little girl dreams waited, watching with fire-red eyes and folded wings, kin to neither the living nor the dead, but rather a servant to the empire of shadows between the two.
38
First, he buried their bodies.
No one came looking for them. No one came looking for anyone.
Nobody seemed to know a goddamn thing about what had happened or why. Was there still a government out there? Was there any semblance of civilization? Was there anything at all? Did an out there even exist anymore?
Wasn’t it just like life to end this way? No grand explanations, just a thief robbing you blind and slipping away without ever telling you why. The planet was alive, a living organism, so maybe it was fighting back, scrambling for survival the same as other living things. But what of the dead? Were they its servants?
Or was it the other way around?
It was all such a terrible waste. There should’ve at least been some point to it, and if there was, it continued to elude him. He suspected it always would.
Duck had stockpiled as much bottled water and nonperishable food as his pantry would hold, and all the ammunition he could find from the gun store downtown. The fact that he’d had to kill four people to get it still bothered him, but as time skulked on, such things held less and less of an impact.
Next he’d fortified the cottage, making it more secure and easier to defend by encircling the property with razor wire he’d gotten from the hardware store, and boarding the windows with hinged makeshift shutters. Using skills he’d acquired in the military years before, he also booby-trapped sections of adjacent forest.
If it hadn’t been for the cats he probably wouldn’t have bothered. There seemed little else
worth living for, much less defending. So he spent his days watching and waiting, same as the dead, guarding the property and the little kitty house in the backyard. There weren’t many folks left in town. A lot had fled to God knows where, and those that remained behind tended to stay hidden. They knew better than to cross his path, so he was relatively safe from the locals. It was the small bands of marauders that had popped up in the first few weeks of this new world he had to worry about. They were few and far between, but dangerous in their ignorance. At the end of the day it just meant he’d have more bodies to bury, and Duck had already buried more than enough.
The rain stopped and hadn’t returned, but the sky continued to threaten it, remaining a dull gray color day after day, the sun blurred by thick haze and casting everything in unbearable humidity. It looked as if the sky itself was filthy, covered in a gauze-like film, and Duck thought maybe like the rest of the world, it was sick and slowly dying. The question was would any of it—any of them—survive in the end, and for what purpose? Would those still here rebuild at some point? And if so, rebuild what, exactly?
The nights were different. The nights were still for dreams.
Can’t fool the night, can’t put it off. It knows too much, holds too many secrets. Has too much power. He’d learned that from Dempsey.
And the night stories, he’d learned about them, too. That thing in Rae’s cottage had descended from the ceiling that night, clutched him with its hideous claws and pressed its mouth to his ear, its breath fetid and hot as it exhaled the truths of darkness and light, the living and the dead, branding it into whatever remained of his soul.
He hadn’t seen it again, and hoped he never would, because what he knew for sure was that having the night stories passed to him carried with it not only responsibility, but the horrible pressures of knowing things The Living were never meant to understand.
Like Dempsey before him, he had no idea how he knew many things, he just knew he did. So instead of birdsongs or the drone of crickets, he listened to the night stories unfold in his head, aware that they were more than random thoughts coursing through a decimated mind. They were prophecies delivered by a deaf, dumb and blind mystic staggering through seamless currents of night, a madman lost in the dark with truths to tell no one should ever have to hear.
Some nights Striper would leave her babies a while and curl up in his lap. He’d put his guns aside, pet her, focus on the relaxing rhythm of her purr and drink himself into oblivion. Eventually, asleep in his chair, he’d dream of the dead. He’d see them watching from the forest or standing on the beach like they often did, staring out at the ocean as if mesmerized and waiting for some sort of celestial sign.
And some nights he’d dream of Rae. Together, they’d lay in bed, nude and entangled, bodies slick with perspiration. He’d remember her eyes and how beautiful they could be even in low light. She’d whisper wonderful lies to him, and as her children played outside, she’d bury her bejeweled dagger deep inside him, twisting and turning it until he was free.
Then came Lana and Lennox and Perry; standing over the bed and smiling down at him like proud siblings.
“I buried you,” he’d gasp. “I—I buried you.”
When daylight broke, it would damn him, reminding that perhaps they hadn’t been dreams after all.
This time, as night approached, Duck pulled his chair into the doorway of the cottage like he did most evenings, and sat down. Shotgun in his lap, he opened his last beer and took a pull. Wasn’t cold but it was better than nothing.
He looked out at the sky. Something different about it tonight, he thought. Dark clouds had gathered on the horizon, black as coal and rolling in a slow creep toward what had once been Tall Tree Junction.
The cats stirred, and Striper emerged from the house with her babies. The kittens, oblivious, hopped and played and wrestled with each other as their mother sauntered over to the stoop and jumped up in Duck’s lap.
He ran a hand down along her back and she began to purr.
Though still quite a distance away, the clouds were gathering momentum, getting larger and rolling closer. Somewhere nearby, maybe just off in the trees beyond the razor wire fence, something moved, rustling the branches and conjuring shadows reserved for the nightmares of children and the waking horrors coiled in the minds of tired old men.
He thought about how the sky used to look, how the air used to feel. Perhaps the world had already come to an end.
In the distance, the hollow whistle of a lethargic wind drifted through the trees, a promise in a world of lies. In time the gentle pitter-patter of fresh rain on leaves came to him as well. He watched the forest a while longer. This new rain had something of a phosphorous look to it, subtle and quiet, almost peaceful and casting enough of a glow to barely illuminate an intricate spider web suspended between two branches of a nearby tree. Flawlessly round, the web was outfitted with two thick cross-section strands upon which a strange looking cocoon had been positioned.
The spider was nowhere to be seen.
Striper snuggled closer, purring loudly. She sensed no danger. She was content, there with Duck and her babies in a razor-wire cocoon of their own. Duck continued petting her as the kittens slowly climbed up his pant legs toward their mother and his lap, their tiny claws and little arms and legs hoisting them along as they went.
Duck finished his beer, tossed the bottle into the yard then pulled the shotgun from his lap and put it aside, focusing instead on the kittens as they crawled over him with abandon.
“Something’s coming, little ones,” he sighed. “Something more.”
Good or bad, he couldn’t be sure.
Sure seemed like a good time for the former, though. There’d been more than enough of the latter.
Time would tell.
He could still hear the others moving through the trees, still feel their eyes upon him, but it no longer seemed to matter. Instead he found comfort in the playing kittens and their loving mother. Hope.
Besides, in the end, somebody had to be there to tell the night stories anyway. Didn’t they?
Maybe somebody had to be there to stop them.
Could be it was all in the remembering, the telling, because the only thing less reliable than the dreams of the dead were the nightmares of the living.
And sure as night would fall, there was no escaping either one.
About the Author
Called “One of the best writers of his generation” by both the Roswell Literary Review and author Brian Keene, Greg F. Gifune is the author of numerous short stories, several novels and two short story collections (Heretics and Down To Sleep). His work has been published all over the world, consistently praised by readers and critics alike, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and The Midwest Book Review (among others) and has recently garnered interest from Hollywood. His novels include Children Of Chaos, Dominion, The Bleeding Season, Deep Night, Blood In Electric Blue, Saying Uncle, A View From The Lake, Night Work, Drago Descending, Catching Hell, and Judas Goat. In addition to working as a full-time author, he also serves as Senior Editor at DarkFuse. Greg resides in Massachusetts with his wife Carol and a bevy of cats. Greg can be reached online at: [email protected] or through his official web site at: www.gregfgifune.com.
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Table of Contents
PART ONE: Night Stories
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
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15
PART TWO: Bringing Up The Dead
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
About the Author
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The Living and the Dead Page 22