by Nate Kenyon
As my hands roamed Sue’s back and up near her shoulder blades, I felt something under her skin, something I didn’t want to acknowledge.
I opened my eyes and looked over her shoulder, and thought I saw a smaller, lonely figure watching us from the deeper shadows across the room.
And then I closed my eyes again, and release washed over me, drowning out the sound of Sue’s breathing and burying everything else.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I was driving past a broken and burned-out husk of a Volvo station wagon, nearly upended in the scorched brush, watching for movement behind shattered tree trunks and the drunken, leaning remains of a neighbor’s fence. The world sat silent and still like the leftovers from some gigantic end-of-days celebration, the remains of trees and houses strewn like party favors across the ground, and I was the last guest to leave.
The sky was the color of bruised fruit, and the air smelled like a wood fire after the embers had died. I was alone in the car, and as I approached our quarter-mile-long dirt driveway I felt my anxiety increase, a rush of emotions making my head thud dully and my skin grow clammy. I felt like I’d been here already, but I didn’t know how it ended. Strangely, the woods that lined our drive were untouched and bright green with foliage. I took the potholes and washboards as fast as I dared, and before long I was turning up the final slope, and my childhood house was in view, sitting on the edge of our small field, woods hulking behind. It was whole too, unmarked, windows intact, the shingles looking fresh and new.
By the time I left the car, the sky had descended over my head and turned black. As I ran to the screened porch, the rain began. I could hear it pounding on the roof; it sounded like a thousand tiny fists knocking on a door.
I didn’t have my gun with me, but had picked up a short piece of split firewood from somewhere on the ground, and I gripped it like a club as I swung open the heavy front door and entered the house.
It was dark inside, and smelled of home, a slight mustiness that had always seeped up from the basement and persisted no matter how much or how thoroughly my mother cleaned. It felt familiar, but there was danger here, I felt that too, prickling my scalp and making me tighten my grip on the wood until my fingers ached.
I heard the sound of someone weeping.
I crept through the dark. I knew what I was searching for was at the bottom of those basement steps.
As I walked through the front hall and past the small, neat kitchen, shadows reached out and tried to pull me in. I was aware of a strange sense of doubling, that déjà vu I’d felt in the car, as if I were seeing the same scene twice, from slightly different perspectives. I did not want to know what was down there, and yet I did; and I felt a trembling knot loosen somewhere deep inside my chest, one loop at a time and with each step, but it was a painful uncoiling.
At the door to the basement I stopped, studying the old, paneled wood, the scars and marks of a lifetime of carrying furniture and boxes and equipment up and down, into storage and out again. I saw the scratch marks made by our short-lived kitten back when I was ten, before he’d run off and disappeared; there was the deep dent from the time my father had hit the lower left panel with the edge of a miter saw he was lugging downstairs for a project; the groove I’d made with a pocketknife near the hinges for some reason I’d since forgotten, and for which I’d received a terrible beating.
I heard the sound of someone weeping again, a woman. I stared at those reminders of a past life I had tried so hard to forget, and I felt smaller, reduced in some fundamental way. I did not want to open that door.
But I did, reaching out and twisting the handle, watching from some point outside myself as the door swung open and revealed a narrow wooden staircase with a rough, handmade railing. The smell was stronger here, and as I stepped forward to peer down into the darkness, I felt like I were stepping to the edge of a cliff with the urge to jump. With that came the rush of panic, my heart accelerating in my chest, my palms growing clammy, my chest tightening until I was nearly hyperventilating.
Down at the bottom of those steps, barely visible in the gloom, was a body.
I flipped on the light switch. He was crumpled on the concrete floor, one leg and arm bent underneath him at unnatural angles, his head twisted to the left. His sightless eyes looked back at me. I saw the inch-deep depression in his temple where his skull had shattered and driven shards of bone into his brain.
My father, the monster. Dead and gone, or so I thought.
The weeping was coming from the living room. I peered into the darkness and saw my mother huddled there, holding her broken arm, faceless in the dark, rocking. The familiar rage welled up in me with the force and power of a tsunami.
When I glanced down at myself, I was no longer wearing the hazmat suit. My hands were gloveless, and the piece of firewood they held was marred by the blood and hair that clung to its end.
I woke up gasping for breath, momentarily disoriented. The room seemed slightly lighter now, and I knew it was daytime, although without windows I was not sure how I knew. My fingers still ached from gripping the ghostly piece of wood, and my heart beat like a runaway train in my chest. I had been crying in the way people did when they wanted to get something huge and swollen out of themselves, and I felt weak and drained and helpless.
I remembered the sound of the rain from my dream, like fists knocking.
There was someone sitting over me in the dark. For a moment I thought it was Sue, and what had happened the night before came rushing back to me, along with a mixture of guilt and a flood of emotion I couldn’t begin to understand.
But as my vision focused in the dimness I realized it was Tessa. She just sat on her knees and looked down at me, not moving. I couldn’t make out her eyes.
“I—I killed him,” I gasped out, another huge sob wracking my chest with a sharp intake of breath. “I found her that way, bloody and beaten and almost dead, and I was so angry. I took that piece of wood and I—”
“I know,” Tessa said. “Shhh, Petey. Easy.” She reached out with her delicate fingers and stroked the hair from my forehead, just the way my mom used to do it when I was a boy. She looked something like my mom, I thought, the way I would have imagined her as a girl.
And then I wondered what she must think of me, because it had surely been her in the shadows last night, watching me and Sue. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. I didn’t know what else to say.
But Tessa just smiled and leaned down and kissed my forehead. “You know I love you,” she said. “I always will. You’re my brother. You’re family. Nothing you do can change that.”
For most of a person’s short stretch on this earth, it’s impossible to mark the exact moment when something life changing happens. Frost wrote about standing at the crossroads of two paths in a wood, stepping down the rougher one and saying it made all the difference, but it’s not often like that, at least not at the time. We make lots of little decisions every day, some right, some wrong, and some turn out to be more important than others. But how can you judge them at the moment they happen? I mean, even Frost was looking back. It’s only after the fact, usually long after, that the truth becomes obvious.
Tragedy changes us too, shapes us with its little cuts into the person we’ll become, but we’re too numb at that moment to see this either; it’s all about getting through, and our thoughts are consumed with the most mundane details and basic tasks. Breathe in, breathe out. Life is reduced to function, nothing more. It’s not until the welts have faded when you really start to realize what it’s done to you.
Before my father was rushed to the hospital, already brain-dead, there was no hesitation, no question of what to do. My mother helped me burn the piece of wood I’d been holding in the fire pit out back, and she made sure it would look like he’d hit his head on the stairs on the way down. Then she set about making calls. Even in that moment, having done such a thing, I did not feel the weight of Frost’s crossroads bearing down on me; there was no time. Before I
knew it the ambulance was there, EMTs were carrying my father strapped to a board up the basement steps and treating me for shock, and the event had its own momentum that carried me along with it.
Everyone assumed the breakdown that followed was because of what I’d witnessed, rather than what I’d done. It wasn’t long before I began believing that it was an accident myself. He had been drinking, and he’d taken a nasty tumble. I’d had the misfortune of finding him. And that was all. The decision to take him off life support was an easy one, in the end.
But at this moment, right here in the study with Dan and Sue still sleeping on the rug and me sitting up with my back against the wooden paneling, tears not even dried on my cheeks and Tessa stroking my head, I realized something fundamental had changed, or was about to—something about myself and my life that I could not get back.
It probably sounds silly to say that now, considering the devastation that we’d already gone through. After all, we had spent the past few weeks buried in a hole, having to deal with the impossible, our loved ones surely dead, our lives one heartbeat away from ending too, and we had gone on living, suffering those nicks and cuts, breathe in, breathe out, life reduced to function, for the most part. We knew on some level what was happening, but we didn’t really understand it, not at that deep-brain spot where something becomes a part of who you are.
A good chunk of that, I think, was the fact that we had each other. Jay leaving cut us deep, and Jimmie too, but the rest of us were still there, still together.
Now Dan was infected, and I was pretty sure Sue was too. It was only a matter of time before they were gone. That left me and Tessa, and I wasn’t feeling too good about what was about to happen to us when we left this place. I’d confronted a memory I’d refused to acknowledge for years now, and it had dislodged something else in me. Maybe it was the coils of that knot coming undone, but I recognized what Tessa had meant to me all this time, and what a crutch she’d been in my life. There were things I had to face alone, things she could not help me with as much as I might want her to, and that thought was terrifying to me.
It seemed like my whole life I’d been playing a game, and only now had realized it was the wrong one. Choosing to move on, to shove the things that cut me into a small box and hide it away had felt like the smart thing to do. I was strong enough to survive, and making light of everything sharp in my life made it seem less important. If you were laughing, how bad could it be?
Only now did I realize how I’d been damaging myself. I was on the edge of adulthood, the years where most people would consider a boy becomes a man, and I still did not know whether I was capable of change.
Movement in the room roused me from my thoughts. Dan had gotten up from the rug and turned up the lantern, bathing the room with light. His hair was crusty with blood, his face too flushed with heat, tiny capillaries tracing red lines across the whites of his eyes. He looked pretty sick, and for a moment I wondered if he would start to tremble and go rigid like the others, his mouth opening wide to disgorge the foul contents that were surely gathering in his lungs.
I fumbled for my mask and my gun. But then he scratched his face and sighed, and I knew it was still Dan, at least for now.
I glanced at Sue. She’d put her suit back on in the night, but her own mask was still off, and she lay on her back, blinking up at the ceiling. She did not look at me, and I had no idea what she might be feeling. I searched for signs of sickness in her as well, but couldn’t see any. I wondered how that puncture wound of hers looked now, but her neck was covered by the suit collar.
That’s why they hid in the bed and fed on her the way they did. They were opening up a wound for the others to get in.
I shivered. It made enough sense for me to want to push it away from me like someone had handed me a piece of fruit with a fat hairy spider on it. It was an ugly thought, because it meant something similar to what had unnerved me about the idea of these things sending a message in the way they’d destroyed Jay in front of us: it was the idea of intent in their actions, which was dangerously close to intelligence.
“We need to go,” Dan said. “Right now.” He walked across the room to the gun cabinet and rattled the locked doors.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
He looked around, grabbed a heavy book off the shelf, smashed the glass with it and reached in to unlock the cabinet. Then he reached in and pulled out a shotgun, two more handguns and some boxes of ammunition from a smaller drawer set into the bottom.
“They’re coming,” he said. He tossed me the shotgun and two boxes of shells. “I can hear them. Can you handle this?”
I nodded. “Pump, aim, pull the trigger. It’s not hard.” I’d never fired a shotgun before, but I knew the basic premise. Twelve gauge, pump action, devastating at close range, spreads out quickly. Moral of the story: don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.
“What do you mean?” Sue said. She sat up. “Who’s coming?”
“That noise Karin made, there were others who heard it too. It took them a while, but they’re close now. They know where we are, how many of us are here, what we’re doing. I…I think I’m helping with that somehow.” Dan glanced at me, but his face gave nothing away about how he was feeling, only a determination that set his mouth into a hard, thin line. “They move during the day, mostly, and they stay in their hosts for the warmth. You’re right about that part, Pete. And it’s daylight now.”
I glanced at the wall clock. Almost noon. We’d slept far longer than I’d thought. The fear that had been hibernating quietly inside me woke up and started to gnaw again. “Maybe we should stay put, at least until night falls,” I said. “Hole up in here and wait it out.”
Dan shook his head. “I’m telling you, it won’t be safe in another few minutes. The bridge to the mainland, we have to get across it. Now.”
Oh, Jesus. I was torn with indecision. Even the choice of trusting Dan was no longer so black-and-white. I thought he was still on our side, but how did I know for sure?
I slid shells into the shotgun chamber, seven rounds before I would have to reload, while Dan loaded the two handguns. He handed one to Sue, and then we all got into our full gear, masks on, hoods up and zipped.
We pushed the heavy furniture away from the door and opened it, guns up and ready, me in the lead, Dan at my back. Everything was muffled inside the hood and I felt strangely detached from what was happening as I peered out through the face mask. Hiss, pop.
It was brighter out here with the windows in the family room letting in some weak gray light. The kitchen was empty, piles of white bones and bloodstains the only sign that any of last night had ever happened.
I saw something glint in the light where Sue’s grandfather had fallen.
The keys…where are they?
He’d have them on him…
In between the bones, right about where his pants pocket would have been, if there had been one left, was a metal zipper. Next to that was a set of keys. I scooped them up in my gloved hand, held them for the others to see. Finally, something was going our way.
“Let’s blow this popsicle joint,” I said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Our sacks were still sitting on the floor of the mudroom. Sue had picked up the Geiger counter from the kitchen and flicked it on, and the tick, tick, tick of the reader started up again as we opened the door to the garage, weapons up.
It was darker inside. My heart rate kicked up a notch. Sue handed me the lantern, and I held it out with one hand, shotgun in the other. The Jeep was still sitting there, silent and still. I swept the gun from side to side, took a few steps into the garage, listening. I crouched to look under the chassis and stood up again. There was nowhere else for them to hide.
“It’s clear,” I said. “Let’s load up.”
Five minutes later, we had everything crammed into the Jeep: our sacks, plus more cans and packages of food from the mudroom, jugs of water and other supplies. Tessa found a plasti
c funnel and some tubing in a drawer in the work-bench and I stuck that under the front seat. We had a full tank of gas, and more in a five-gallon plastic container we found next to the lawn mower, but that wouldn’t get us anywhere near far enough. We’d have to depend on siphoning out the tanks of other cars.
I took a few deep breaths, trying to steady myself. My head was throbbing dully from the drink, and I wished I had thought to take a couple of ibuprofen from the first-aid kit. Other than the glimpse I’d gotten when I went to close the hatch a few days back, this would be the first time any of us had seen the outside world since we’d been trapped down in the shelter. I didn’t know whether to feel hopeful or scared to death.
We all piled in except for Dan. Since the power was off, he would have to raise the garage door manually. I started the engine and waited for his signal. He nodded at me and I switched on the lights, pinning him with their glare. He waved a gloved hand, then turned, gripped the garage door handle with his good arm, and rolled it up.
The open door revealed a scene straight out of a surreal nightmare. A ribbon of black driveway wound through a landscape that was too dark and bleak and cold to be any part of the Sparrow Island I knew. Watery gray light bled from a purple sky that had lowered itself to kiss the tops of the withered, leafless trees. The earth looked previously scorched, the brush and grass around the house all brown and dead, and everything was coated with that gray ash, as if the entire world had been cremated and tossed to the wind.
I sensed, rather than saw, the hulking form of Sparrow Rock looming over it all somewhere on the other side of the house, casting a shadow that used to feel out of place among the greenery and sunlight that often kissed the backs of the island cliffs, but seemed to fit right into the place now; granite was rough and hard and barren of all life.