Sparrow Rock

by Nate Kenyon

  She looked up at me, the whites of her eyes filling with bright red blood, tendons standing out in her neck, her body trembling more violently. “Like Jimmie, and…Jay. We’re all alone now. I don’t want to die. Help me.”

  I lowered the gun and stepped back, sickened by myself, the anger that had consumed me draining away all at once and leaving me feeling hollowed out and cold.

  Sue managed to get to her feet. She pulled the zipper down on her suit and shrugged her arms free, and peeled the T-shirt over her head, naked from the waist up.

  Her entire torso was covered with hives the size of quarters, their centers pulsing slowly in and out.

  A line of insects appeared like a fat snake under her skin, writhing upward, then sank again out of sight.

  “Oh, Sue,” I said.

  “It itches, so bad, please, cut them out of me, please.” Her hands were squeezed into fists and she clenched her jaw tightly together, making an nnnn, nnnn sound as blood-tinged tears ran down her face.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I won’t do that. I can’t.”

  “Then kill me…kill…me…”

  Her body went rigid, mouth stretching open wide, her eyes losing focus, and finally, she was gone.

  When the alien scream began, I raised the gun, tears blurring my sight.

  I’m sorry, Sue. I’m so sorry.

  I pulled the trigger.

  The shotgun kicked back hard into my shoulder as the pellets ripped through her chest at close range, shoving her backward against the wall. She did not fall, and when she came back lurching at me I shot her again, this time in the stomach, and the high, keening noise I kept hearing in my head was coming from me as I watched her body hit the ground and the black insects started boiling out of her ravaged torso and I remembered the sound I’d made as the bombs approached so many weeks ago, that high, terrible screaming into the teeth of insanity.

  Behind me I heard a sound like something large shuffling across the room and as I whirled around the gun was knocked from my hands and I was staring into the bloated, slimy face of my mother, or what had been my mother, and her cheeks were sliding down her skull and the bone was showing through as the insects writhed and squirmed and I fell back across Sue’s quivering legs, screaming, screaming.

  I shoved myself backward on my hands until I hit the wall in a panic and scrambled to my feet, the flashlight spinning away and the basement flashing light, then dark, then light again, and somewhere to my right was a shovel leaning within reach, but my mother was coming at me with her ruined hands outstretched, and I closed my eyes and waited but nothing came, and when I opened them again my mother had fallen to her knees and the shovel was buried deep in her throat, and Tessa was there, holding her up with the other end until her body fell sideways, headless and still.

  I sat there wheezing in the sudden emptiness, listening to the buzzing and ticking of insect feet across the concrete as they cleaned the bones like good little soldiers, and I knew it was wrong, it was all wrong, and I was terrified that I was still far too weak at heart to face the truth of who I was, and what I had become.

  “I told you to leave me alone!” I shouted at Tessa, tears streaming down my cheeks, snot running from my nose. “I don’t need you. You were never here, you understand me?”

  I blinked and looked down at myself as the world snapped back into place. I was holding the shovel with my mother’s head in my own gloved hands.

  My Tessa was gone, this time for good.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  I climbed the stairs out of that basement, and I felt like I was rising up out of the depths of my own private hell. Maybe I was doing exactly that, and strangely enough, I felt lighter and calmer than I had felt in years.

  If there had been any infected in that house, they would have had me without a fight, and I would have gone willingly.

  But I was finally, truly alone.

  I guess you know by now that Tessa wasn’t the girl next door, at least, not in the traditional sense. I didn’t meet her in her backyard. Hell, we didn’t even have neighbors within half a mile of our house. The thing was, somewhere deep down I knew that all along. I just needed to believe otherwise, and for several years her presence was the only thing that pushed away the terror and the red-tinged cloud and kept me from a return trip to the psychiatric facility where I’d spent the first few weeks after my father’s death.

  So there’s the irony. After murdering my own father in what some would say was self-defense, to remain sane I had to invent a sister who had died many years ago to be my best friend and companion. And she had served as the better part of me ever since.

  A week or so after my father’s death, my mother came to see me in the institution where I’d been committed for observation. The doctors had decided that the best thing for me was to have her keep her distance for a while, since every time I caught a glimpse of her puffy, swollen face, I started screaming.

  But after a week she’d had enough, and she showed up at the front gate and insisted on seeing me. The building was an old stone behemoth, Gothic and cold and intimidating, but she stood her ground. I didn’t know any of this until she told me about it later, but apparently she made quite a scene, and the director of the place had to come out and personally escort her inside.

  They had me sedated enough that I didn’t recognize her at first. We sat in a private meeting area, white walls and furniture bolted to the floor. There was a television mounted to the wall, and it flickered soundlessly at me. I remember that much. That television was always on, and the sound was always muted, and I remember thinking that the people on-screen had an important message for me, if only I could hear what they were saying. But they never spoke out loud.

  From what she told me later, I imagine it this way: my mother sitting uncomfortably in a chair opposite me, her back aching, cradling her broken arm. The swelling in her face had gone down by then, with only the ghost of a bruise around her right eye to mar her normally perfect skin, but she looked hollowed out and defeated.

  I was restrained, and I’m sure that cut her like a knife. But she didn’t reach out to touch me, or try to loosen the straps. I had been violent, and had tried to hurt myself, and the staff was still being overly cautious. An orderly was watching through an observation window, and any contact would have surely brought him running and ended the session before she could express what she had come to say.

  “Your father,” she said. And then she stopped for a bit, because this was difficult for her. I wasn’t in any shape to protest, and that probably made it easier, because when she began again, she didn’t stop until the entire thing was out.

  “You asked me once why he hated us so much,” she said. “Our family wasn’t always in such a terrible place. When you were just a baby, things were different. Your father still had his moods, but there was kindness inside him too, and a lot of that was reserved for your older sister, Tessa. She had him wrapped around her finger from birth. She liked the smell of wood shavings and would sit with him for hours in his workshop, watching him put together his projects, and he made things for her like dollhouses and carved wooden birds they would paint in bright colors and use to attract other birds to the feeder in the yard.

  “And then hell came to White Falls. You understand me? I can’t explain it any better than that. Whatever evil thing rose up was never clear to any of us, but it left dozens dead, the dam shattered and the town flooded and in pieces in the aftermath of that terrible storm. And in the middle of that darkness, your sister Tessa lost her life.

  “The official cause of death was drowning in the creek that had overrun its banks in our backyard. She was only five years old and I…I was with her at the time. But I couldn’t save her. It was dark and she was screaming and something just reached up out of that water and it took her down. Maybe it was just a dead tree branch, but it looked like it was moving, like it grabbed hold of her. And I couldn’t find her again until it was too late.

  “After that, yo
ur father retreated from us. The town was rebuilt and our lives went on, but he never came back. Maybe he blamed me for Tessa’s death, or maybe he blamed himself. He started drinking more heavily, and the occasional shouting match turned into slaps, and that progressed to worse things. There was something in both of our faces that set him off: maybe we looked too much like her. But when he got to drinking and we were in his way, we suffered for it.”

  Telling me all this must have been difficult for my mother to do. They never spoke of Tessa in our home; all photos of her had been removed. I never knew I had a sister at all. For years she’d kept this secret from me, and the entire town was complicit in it, because I’d never heard mention of her name from anyone.

  But she was unburdening herself because she thought it might help me to understand my father better, and to know that it was possible to go on, even with such a devastating wound as the death of a child.

  Grief is sort of like a scar; the wound heals, but the damage remains, and when the timing’s right it can ache like a ghostly memory of something sharper and more immediate.

  Yes, something like that.

  “I want you to understand that it’s not your fault,” she said. “That you’re not to blame for any of it, and that your father wasn’t the monster he seemed to be, at least, not at first. But that kind of pain damages a person permanently, Petey, and now we’ve all tasted it. We’re all damaged in that sense. I only hope you can find a way to live your life without letting it bring you down the way it did your father. If you have to blame anyone, blame me.”

  I don’t remember much of that conversation, but that’s the way I imagine it. And something must have gotten through to me, because that night, after my mother left the hospital, I saw Tessa for the first time.

  It was much like I’ve already described it, except, of course, it wasn’t in her own backyard or anywhere near my home. I was unusually calm and lucid and the orderlies had left me free in a common room to stare out at the rain. I stood at the reinforced glass door and I saw my Tessa dancing out there in the mud, her hands outstretched and her face up and open to the raindrops.

  She was as real to me as anyone else I’d ever seen. You have to understand this, if you’re going to understand why I’ve told this story the way I have; somewhere in my own mind, I guess I knew she wasn’t really there. But to keep my own sanity, I had to find a way out, and she gave it to me. I pushed what had happened to my father way down deep, along with what my mother had told me. And before long, Tessa was as familiar to me as my own skin, and there didn’t seem to be any way back.

  I tried the door that night and found it unlocked, and I went out there with her in the rain.

  From that moment on, she was always with me, and I was never alone.

  They called it a miraculous recovery. The director of the facility, when he sat me down to do his own version of an exit interview a couple of weeks later, said that he’d never seen anything like it.

  “I’m still a bit skeptical,” he said, leaning back behind his large polished desk and crossing his arms behind his head. “I was worried about you, young as you are, coming in here the way you did. You required serious corrective medication. Neuroleptics are nasty things. They make you sleepy, put your mind in a fog, make you hallucinate. Weight gain, agranulocytosis, tardive dyskinesia, tardive akathisia, tardive psychoses. These things can begin slowly, but are not easy to reverse. To be honest, I suspected you would be a lifelong resident. That does not give me any pleasure to say, you understand, it’s simply the truth. But this…”

  He leaned forward so suddenly as if to pitch straight out of his chair. Maybe he was trying to get a reaction. But I did not flinch. I got the feeling that I’d flustered him, and that I was peeking through his carefully polished exterior to what really lived underneath.

  “You’re not fooling with us, are you?” he said, looking me in the eye. “Because we’re experts here. We’ll see through it. You’re a bright young man, and you’ve passed all our tests with flying colors. I just find it all…hard to swallow.”

  I held his gaze. “No, sir,” I said. “I’m not fooling you. I do believe I’m better now, thank you.”

  Although he did not know it, Tessa sat next to me, holding my hand the entire time, and I felt safe enough to smile and nod and thank him again for his help.

  A day after that, my mother came to check me out.

  I wrote earlier about being at crossroads in life, and how hard it is to see them at the time. For a while I’d thought the crossroad in my own life was the day Tessa appeared to me, and I made the choice to take her in. Then I ended up trapped in the bomb shelter with those I considered my best friends. And after witnessing things that would defy belief, if I had not seen them with my own eyes, I had to shoot three of them, to stop them from killing me.

  If that’s not a crossroad, I don’t know what is.

  I also wrote that being friends means you might know something embarrassing about each other, or whom you have crushes on. But you don’t know their most private thoughts, the things they don’t share with anyone else, the things that make them bleed.

  My best friends thought they knew me, but they were wrong. Hell, I didn’t even know myself. That game I’d been playing, the one where I laughed at all the jokes and kept on going as if the entire world were a punch line, it was rigged. There were house rules, and I was just a guest with a line of credit that had run out.

  But like my father said, life was about survival. The world didn’t care if you lived or died; fate was strictly a human invention. Like it or not, I was the last man standing, and now I had a second chance to make things right.

  As I left my house and climbed back into the Jeep, I thought about just lying down in the dirt and giving up. And then I thought about change, and second chances. I thought about crossroads. It was a hell of a long way to Alaska, but if I played my cards right, if I finally faced down my own demons and owned up to who I was and what I’d done, maybe I just might make it. And if I didn’t, at least I’d go down knowing I gave it my best shot, on my own terms.

  Dan’s voice drifted back to me from the night before:

  I want you to promise me that you’ll do everything you can to survive. I don’t want it to all end for nothing.

  And so I climbed into that Jeep and I kept going, and I fought to the end for the sake of my friends.

  They would have wanted it that way.

  EPILOGUE

  Saw the last nest outside of North Conway. These were smarter than the rest, moved more quickly. I think they were still alive, although their eyes were dead. Came at me through a used-car parking lot as I stopped to look for gas. There were four of them, and the hives were everywhere, across their faces and legs and arms, every bit of skin I could see.

  They hit me using a pattern similar to the one the rats had used in the tunnel—one drew my attention while another flanked me as I bent over with the plastic tube in my mouth, sucking gasoline-flavored vapors from one of the car’s tanks. As the gas came up and started pouring onto the cracked concrete and I coughed and spit, the first one, a girl of about fourteen in a skirt and Old Navy top, stepped out from between the cars parked right in front of me. I reached for my gun as she put her hands up and then I heard a noise from behind and turned and the second bastard had come wriggling underneath the car’s chassis like a snake.

  I shot him in the face, and when I turned back the girl had been joined by two others, a man and a woman, maybe her parents, I don’t know.

  It didn’t matter. I managed to get all three of them before they spilled their black guts, but it was close.

  After that I left North Conway, and I didn’t see any more. There’s a good foot of gray snow on the ground, but the Geiger counter says the fallout is safe enough for me to continue. I stole an oversize ski parka from a department store and managed to fit it over my suit. It’s gotten a lot colder during the day, downright frigid at night, and I think I was right about the cold. I
think it’s keeping them dormant, like wasps at the end of fall as the frost moves in.

  I’ve been picking up bits and pieces of voices from the radio for a few days now, but after I crossed the border into Canada, they got stronger. It’s coming from the Doomsday Vault, and there are survivors, although I don’t know how many. They say they have plenty of space, and heat, and food. They’re asking anyone left alive to come. So we were right.

  Thank God, we were right.

  Passed Edmonton and holed up in the basement of a convenience store to rest for a bit. Almost out of gas. Have to siphon again and pray the Jeep will keep going. There’s a lot more snow, and the roads are tough to navigate. Nearly got stuck twice. I may have to look for a different vehicle soon, maybe a plow or even a snowmobile, if it comes to that.

  It’s damn cold out here, and my fingers are cramped and aching, but I don’t dare light a fire. I can’t risk the smoke and the chance that I’m wrong about the infected going dormant.

  I feel like the loneliest man in the world. The wind whips and howls outside like a living thing. There’s nothing else alive out there, nothing that could be called human. The voices on the radio are all that’s keeping me from ending things right now. There are a dozen ways to do it, and I’ve thought of them all. The easiest might be to just start walking until I feel like lying down and closing my eyes. The snow will take care of the rest.

  But when I think of these things the memory of my friends comes in, and I see Sue and Dan and Jay and Jimmie cheering me on. I can’t do it. I owe them too much.

  Left the convenience store earlier this morning, into the teeth of another snowstorm. I can’t seem to keep warm. It’s not much farther now, according to the map, maybe a day or so of solid driving if I don’t run into trouble. But the going’s even worse, and I’m scared to death I won’t be able to make it through the next couple of drifts.