Our War with Molly Nayfack

by Chris Capps

  Soon the monsters would run out of quarry. How many people were dead, he didn't know. But he had already seen some of the smarter ones leaving town. When he saw the Forbins that night, hand in hand strolling into the woods wearing backpacks he had wanted so much to call out to them, to go with them into that nothing of trees and fog. But that wasn't where he was going. He was going to head up the tracks, up to find the girl and his brother.

  Molly had become such a word in his mind, that he found it difficult to even think of her walking with Felix. The thought brought a cold sweat to his hands. Wouldn't it be crazy if this was all just a long con to get him and Felix out there? What if she suddenly snapped and turned on them both? Would they be able to stop her? It went without saying, but killing was completely foreign territory to them both. Felix didn't even like shooting crows. And while Mike could swallow the moment and pull the trigger, he knew it would follow him. Probably forever.

  He looked up at the crows staring down at him from a dying tree.

  "Go to Hell!" he shouted, picking up a rock and throwing it. It whizzed past them, far enough away that they didn't even flap their wings. They just kept watching. And though Mike knew they had no sense, no capacity for language, he could still imagine what they were thinking.

  Good. He'll die now.

  Footsteps approached from behind Mike, and he whirled around gripping the sack with both hands tightly. It was a stumbling gait, something unnaturally tired. It shot feet forward, kicking rocks and dust as it emerged from the fog.

  "Cooper?" Mike said.

  "Yeah," Chance said as he fell to one knee catching his breath in wet husky gasps, "You're one of the McCarthy boys."

  "Yeah," Mike said.

  "I've been running," Chance said, his wide palms making a thin trail in the dirt. He didn't look good. He gasped and swallowed his breath, looking up, "All around. Don't know where's safe."

  "Me neither," Mike said as the crows started screaming in unison, drawing his gaze.

  "You leaving?" Chance said.

  "Yeah."

  "Take me with you?"

  "Yeah."

  Chance didn't smile very big. He had his mouth trapped shut in a half smile, but he nodded a few times and held out a hand to tap Mike on the shoulder,

  "You want me to carry that bag for you?"

  "I'm fine."

  That was the last thing Mike McCarthy said in town before he stepped onto the rails in search of his brother and the girl. Chance Cooper stopped, though. He turned and looked into the pale smoky morning into what he remembered of Cairo. And nodding once, before turning and following Mike he said,

  "So long."

  The crows watched from their perch in the tree, cawing madly for a moment and watching the shapes descend the tracks into the deep woods beyond the world of men. They stared with the same marble black eyes as the scarecrows that had been crafted to keep them off the corn. The crows could tell the difference between a man and a scarecrow every time. It was natural, instinct driven.

  A shape walked nimbly from the fog into the crows' line of sight. They didn't make a sound, but cocked their heads to the side and stared down. And they froze. The shape knelt down to the dust and ran a long sticky hand through it, oozing dirty water from its sleeve as it traced a circle around Mike McCarthy's footprint with its finger.

  If you had asked old Ned Daffy, or Mayor Sugarhill, or Grandma MacReady who the shape was, in an instant they would have said Mark Newmann. Sure, he married Andrea Newmann and lost his daughter Delia last year to some wasting disease. Sad story. They would likely have said those exact words. But the crows in the tree, the ones that had known by instinct the difference between man and scarecrow were staring at him crouched down and smiling to himself as he traced circles in the dust.

  The crows considered him with wide black eyes. For once in the collected history of Cairo they looked and they didn't know if this man that knelt beneath them was a man or a scarecrow. Something was missing. Something vital. They hopped on nervous feet, clinging to the branch and making frightened muted chirps as they saw desperate reflections in each other's eyes. There was something not there, something their obsidian gazes searched for. But all they could see, all they could smell, was a hole standing where a person should be.

  This scarecrow walks. This scarecrow can see us.

  It looked up at them smiling and whistling once before casting its dark eyes down the train tracks and asking,

  "Where do you suppose we're going now?"

  Chapter 17

  In the dead of night with smoke trailing into the sky, Old Lady MacReady sat at her typewriter. With old fingers she tapped out the headline to the latest daily issue of The Finger. The chances of anyone going out to pick up a copy were low, she reasoned, but there was always a chance. And it was a habit she had timed her life by for years now, typing up the little tabloid. With the chugging clank of her typewriter sliding to the next line, she paused as she thought about where to begin.

  "Warehouse is gone. That's a problem," she said to herself, leaning back in the worn creaking red leather chair, "Things are going to have to change because of that. And at this moment I don't know how many people are..."

  A terrible thought. She reached over to her heavily modified CB and switched it on, scanning to the Police frequency and listening in. A younger officer was talking.

  "Four-one-nine-Mary."

  Dead body found. Mary was just the department's phonetic alphabet code for M. That was easy enough to decipher. A four-one-nine-Mary most likely meant that a dead Molly had been found. But where? Linda MacReady leaned close to the radio waiting for a response.

  None came.

  She rolled back to the civilian band her radio had originally been designed for, listening carefully. No one seemed to be broadcasting at the moment. The static swirled and spiraled out into her room as she listened, hissing and crackling as her dial explored the whole spectrum. Nothing.

  Outside she could hear a gunshot. Then three more. Driven by instinct, her hand reached for the lamp to turn it off - but then it drifted down to the thin silver chain around her neck. She pulled out a key and unlocked the lower right hand drawer. Inside, cached in a thin film of dust was her old ivory handled heirloom six-shooter. And inside that, there were four bullets and two empty shells.

  Through the yellow glare of the window she could see shapes wandering past, brazenly walking around and looking in the window at her. One of them was pointing directly at her. The others turned.

  Linda MacReady's heart froze.

  She reached for the lamp and pulled the chain, dousing it. The Mollys had gathered in. They were standing in a wide circle around the window. Four of them. One was holding an axe, heavy for her to be sure, but carrying it nonetheless. The others appeared to be unarmed, for what it was worth.

  That dress she wore, the skirts had a pocket running down the side. Perfect for concealing a knife or whatever else they needed to do their work. Most of the town was silent now, so either by incredible numbers or else by deadly efficiency these Mollys were moving from house to house. What were they doing? Killing everyone? The leader of that pack of six, the one that had pointed into the window stopped. She walked up to the glass and wrapped her hands around the sides of her mouth, calling into the house,

  "Give us your radio. We don't need to hurt you tonight."

  "That's Lin MacReady's house."

  "She's got four kids in there."

  In the dark of the room, Linda pulled the pistol from her office drawer and stood gripping it at her side. The front door was locked. Of that she had no doubt.

  One of the Mollys reached down and picked up one of the partitioning rocks designed to separate her garden from the rest of the yard. Holding it aloft in both hands she walked right up to the window and pushed outward.

  "Grandma?" Linda heard from the hallway door as the rock soared through the window into her studio office. In the cascading blizzard of glass, the rock banged onto the
desk heavily. Bobby, her youngest grandson screamed from the hall and ran upstairs.

  A hand reached through over to her desk under the window, clinging for the radio. Linda looked around the room. The last time she had fired a pistol had been six years prior before her arthritis had begun eating away at her hands. Rind, who had been helping her grip the pistol, had told her again and again not to let the nose climb so much. He had suggested she craft a brace to hold the pistol in her wrist. Of course the Daily Sentinel had been there. The picture of Rind helping an old lady learn how to shoot had even made the front page.

  Grandma Shoots Breeze with Sherriff. Hilarious. And unfair. She had hit the target three times that day, each time nicking it around the edge. She remembered holding up the target as a joke for the Sentinel photographers and posing for a photo which they never ran.

  An arthritis flare up soon followed, so she stopped going to the range. She needed her hands. It would be suspicious if the Daily Finger stopped coming out suddenly in the wake of her arthritis.

  The hand pushed the broken glass across her desk, fingertips reaching for the cable on her CB radio. These days the radio was one of her primary windows to the outside world. Without it, she wouldn't be able to research the scuttlebutt around town in the middle of the night. The hand snagged the cable and yanked it out, with the microphone sliding past the windowsill and clattering to the ground below. She just stood and watched it.

  The Molly holding an axe motioned for the others to back away and slammed the rusted wedge into the machine twice before the crowd moved in and started stomping the machine's remains. The box, well out of Linda's sight cracked and spilled into her garden. Plastic bread boards and imploding vacuum tubes spilled between the thick leaves of her myrtle patch, into the realm beneath where the beetles lived.

  Molly pulled the axe heavily up over her shoulder and huffed, turning to the others,

  "Next house."

  "I don't understand what happened," Linda MacReady said leaning over her desk, poking her head into the night with the pistol hanging slack in her hand, "You were such a nice girl. No one hated you."

  They looked up at her, each cocking their heads to the side in silent curiosity as she stared from her windowsill.

  Down the street thunder sounded. No. An explosion.

  The girls each had the same smile, slowly creeping up their faces and the same furrowed brows.

  "I remember ten years ago," MacReady said, "You weren't an outcast. You weren't hated. Who did this to you?"

  The Molly holding an axe stepped forward, reaching her hand up into the windowsill, reaching around Old Lady MacReady's fingers and clasping it gently, squeezing it. Her fingertips explored the texture of the old lady's slack and stretched skin. A benevolent smile was on her face. She shook her head and moved her hand to her lips,

  "Shh. You'll wake the children."

  "Four of them," another said, words as cold as they were polite, "Sleeping upstairs. Two to a room. At the end of the hallway, your room."

  "We're not here to hurt you," the Molly holding an axe said, "You're too old to have had a hand in Willard's death. Too old to be a problem for us now. Yours will be quiet and peaceful. And Bobby, and Charlie, Anne, and Leslie. They'll just go to sleep. We'll have time when the rest of this is over."

  "Why?" Linda asked, "Why are you doing this?"

  "We're making things right."

  "You plan to kill everyone," Linda said, a terrible shudder trembling her hands.

  "Not everyone. Just the ones that die. We're killing death."

  We're killing death.

  Linda was shaking now, very hard. Her mind went to the faces in town she had grown to know over the years, the smiles, the meaningless festivals. She thought about the plays scheduled to come up, and the election that would follow Sugarhill. She envisioned a thrilling carnival where there was only one face, one mind. The thought clung to her heart, and squeezed. She was getting tired and frightened all at once. The gun in her hand was shaking, and it slipped from her fingertips into the broken glass and the myrtle below.

  "Everyone," MacReady said as the gun disappeared into the leaves of her garden, "Except you."

  The Molly holding the axe hefted the tool off her shoulder and leaned down, picking up the ivory handled pistol. She examined it, staring into the complexity of the yellow surface of the gun. It was loose in her hand, and it seemed for a moment like the girl was in a trance. After a moment she looked up, holding the pistol and held it by the barrel up toward the window.

  "Here you go," the Molly said, "This will make you feel safe. Sleep with it under your pillow if you want. But the radio you can't have."

  ***

  "Jessica," Mayor Sugarhill said as they huffed down the police station steps to her patrol car. She looked back, and he pointed up into the distance, "Warehouse is still burning."

  "I heard," she said, "We got an update nearly an hour ago. I don't know how long it's going to burn. I usually ask the fire marshal questions like that."

  "It's going to be burning a while," Sugarhill said as he rounded the old Crown Vic and opened its passenger side door, "Where are we going?"

  "We're going to go visit Dr. Sam Rosario. He did an autopsy on Molly when all this started. I'm going to need all the help I can get if we're going to fight this thing. We need to know what they are more than who they are. What are their weaknesses? What stops them?"

  They could hear footsteps and a curious chattering beyond the fog in the dark. Sugarhill quickly got into the patrol car and slammed the door shut behind him. He braced his suit coat around him, pulling the lapels up and bracing them around his throat.

  The drive to Rosario's house was quiet. Jessica rolled down her window and tried to shine the patrol car's spotlight in on the darkened houses along the main street. Lots of curious things on the road at night. Lots of uncertain bad signs.

  When she reached Rosario's house, she noticed that the light was on. Michigan, Rosario's old cataract plagued dog leapt from the hammock where he ordinarily slept and started barking as they pulled up.

  "Michigan!" Rosario said uneasily as he walked to the screened in front door to greet them, "Just shut up!"

  As Jessica emerged from the patrol car and started walking up to Rosario's front door something caught her eye at the edge of the fog. It was a bloodied hand holding a gun. The arm it was attached to terminated in a red stump where flies had started to gather. A sheriff would have reported something like that. They would have stopped everything, walked over to it, gathered evidence, and called for backup. But as she stood staring at the hand in the yard she heard Rosario greet them from his screened in door,

  "Everything alright, deputy?"

  She looked from the arm up to Rosario, standing silhouetted in his golden porch light, with the dog sniffing the air and licking its jowly chops.

  Sugarhill glanced over at her too, waiting for her to speak. A sheriff would have figured out who the arm belonged to, and called an ambulance in case that man had survived. But she couldn't be a sheriff anymore. The job she had inherited from Paul Rind wasn't a simple keeper of the peace. It was the organizer of a militia, the general of a small war between two completely different types of human. In that moment she came to a realization. She wouldn't tell Rosario about the arm and the gun in his yard at the edge of the fog. She wouldn't even tell Sugarhill. They had work to do, and they didn't have time for the dead.

  "Rosario," Sugarhill said at last, "Jessica and I are here to talk to you about... You know what we're here to talk about."

  "You'd better come in," Rosario said opening the screen door. Michigan, standing at Rosario's feet turned its white sickly eyes toward the smell of blood in the yard and started drooling. He looked back at Jessica. He wasn't going to tell anyone either.

  "We need everything," Sugarhill said, "Anything we could use."

  Once inside, Jessica and Sugarhill looked into the haphazardly decorated room. Rosario sat at his desk next to the
couch, slapping his knees heavily as he sat down. There was an antiseptic smell in the air, like iodine. This was certainly a doctor's house. He still had medical tools and instruments spilling out of his bag on the desk. Rosario nodded as he looked down at the tools,

  "Ordinarily this would present a conundrum for me. I stay out of the business of killing at all costs. My goal is to keep as many people alive as possible. I'm not fond of death, as you well know. But I've told you everything I can. Tell Rind he's-"

  "Rind isn't in charge anymore," Jessica said, "I am."

  "You are?" Rosario said raising an eyebrow and leaning back. His eye darted to something on his desk. Both Sugarhill and Jessica noticed it. Two bottles were sitting there, uncorked. One had a rubber tube leading from it still hanging off the edge.

  "S'that?" Sugarhill asked, pointing. A long silence followed where Rosario looked at the bottle, then he folded his arms and leaned back heavily.

  "That's a bottle," the doctor said.

  "Transfusion bottle," Jessica said, "Who needed blood?"

  "A girl," Rosario said, "One that was dying."

  There was a moment of silence after that as Sugarhill and Jessica realized what Rosario was hinting at. What girl would have come here rather than the hospital?

  "I don't believe it," Sugarhill said, "Tell me you weren't treating those things."

  "One, yes," Rosario said, "I thought maybe the process that makes them, and the process that makes them bad were one in the same. I heard Rind at Chance Cooper's interrogation. He seemed different. But Chance Cooper was the same guy I had always known."

  "Where did she go?" Jessica asked, taking her pistol from her hip and looking into the kitchen, "Is she still here?" Rosario rose his voice and continued,

  "Rind was going bad. You know it, and I know it. He was losing his mind over something. And I thought about it, about a thought that had been in my head my whole life. Think about your own death. Where's your point of view? Inside your head? Or is it on the outside looking in? Think about it."