Lockdown

by Nick Kolakowski

  Pete was dead by the time we got to him.

  From what we knew of the virus, it mutated as it jumped from person to person. Pete’s particular variation had manifested suddenly as a series of large nodules sprouting out of his skin, clustering tightly around his neck and mouth, which is why his strangled coughs and gasps for air had sounded so peculiar at the end. As he lay there, frozen in what must have been his final seizure, head back, eyes wide, mouth open even wider, I could see a large clump of fleshy red nodules blocking his airway, filling his mouth, forcing his jaws open. They must have grown rapidly and all at once, choking him as he lay there in a fevered, already-weakened state.

  “He was fine when I last checked on him,” Chris said in a faraway voice.

  Tom made a bored noise deep in his throat.

  We closed the door. None of us felt sad, or shocked, or anything really.

  We all just wanted to get back to the diamond.

  Adam still held the gem box. Clumped together outside Pete’s room, we watched him like a hawk in case he made a run for it.

  But something felt off.

  I did a swift headcount to double-check. Me, Adam, Chris, Tom…

  No Lou.

  With a sinking feeling, I realized that she had seen her opportunity. My instinct told me she was about to take it.

  Instinct was right.

  A tiny movement at the edge of my vision: my bedroom door, opening just a crack. An eye peered out, and then the door yanked open, and Lou ran at us, full speed on light, bare feet.

  While we’d been preoccupied with Pete, Lou had crept into the kitchen and armed herself with a long, sharp kitchen knife. Her face as she held the knife high above her head was like nothing I’d ever seen before: twisted, frenzied, wild, completely disconnected from anything human.

  With a crazed roar, she launched herself at Adam, who clutched the gem box close to his chest and only registered her presence at the very last moment. He had little time to defend himself with his free arm before she brought the knife down on his face. I heard a wet slice and smack, and a faint crunch: Adam’s nose breaking under the impact. He fell backwards, the knife deeply embedded below his right eye, and a part of me thought, distantly, that we should be helping him. I thought this—but did nothing. Neither did the others.

  Lou’s momentum sent Adam crashing over. The box flew from his hands, hit the wall, dropped, and broke open. The diamond shot out of the box, bounced, and rolled across the floor. I dove for it, terrified that it would disappear down a crack in the floorboards. So did Tom and Chris.

  I was aware, while this was happening, that Lou was stabbing Adam over and over again, grunting with effort as she did so. Blood sprayed into the air and decorated the corridor with artistic streaks of arterial bloom. She must not have realized that Adam no longer had the diamond.

  “Give it to me!” She shrieked with each thrust of the knife. “Give it to me!”

  Tom, the biggest and fastest of us, got to the diamond first. I felt true anguish flood my body as his hand closed around it. Then he was on his feet, pushing past us, jumping over the bloody mess that was Adam and kicking at Lou as he ran past her, headed for his own room. His door slammed. We heard furniture drag across the floor. He had barricaded himself in.

  Silence descended.

  With the diamond out of sight, I thought we might feel its pull a little less, but if anything, the desire to seize it grew stronger with the knowledge that it was now in Tom’s control. I realized suddenly that I was drenched in sweat—not from fear or adrenaline, but sheer longing.

  Lou got to her knees, coated from head to toe in Adam’s blood. There was no doubt that Adam was dead, and Old Mike, the version of me that had existed before the diamond, would have been out of his mind with distress. He might have been terrified at what Lou had done, he might have wondered blindly if she was about to attack him, next.

  New Mike simply looked at Chris and said, as if speaking through a mouth full of cotton-wool: “Should we call the police?”

  Chris stared down at the red ruin that was Adam, and shook his head. “No. They will find out about the diamond. They’ll try and take it from us.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “So what now?” Lou said, pointing at Tom’s bedroom door. “He’s blocked the entrance.”

  I shrugged, feeling my hate for Tom swell into a massive ball of resolve and determination. He had something that belonged to me, and for that, he would pay.

  We decided to work together, the common goal of reaching Tom uniting us briefly in murderous collusion. We returned to the living room and lifted the coffee table. It was solid oak, heavy and durable, and would make a perfect battering ram.

  We broke Tom’s door down.

  It splintered, the thin paneling disintegrating under our assault, and the chest of drawers that he had dragged in front of it fell backward, crashing to the floor. We kept going, forcing the door open just wide enough that we could push our way in, and…

  We found Tom on his bed, oblivious to our dramatic entrance.

  He sat cross-legged, turning the diamond over and over between his fingers, letting the light from his window catch and play with the stone, and his eyes were so wide, his pupils so massive, that he looked drugged. He breathed in shallow, short bursts, sweat pouring down his face, which was drenched in a red shade of ecstasy. As he rocked back and forth, he made a high-pitched keening noise in the back of his throat, like the drone of a mosquito, only more intense.

  He didn’t call out or protest once as we held him down against the sheets and strangled the life out of him.

  As the diamond fell from Tom’s lifeless fingers, Chris went for it. He tumbled off the edge of Tom’s bed and lay there on his back, legs still up over the side of the mattress, cradling the diamond to his chest, sobbing.

  Lou climbed off Tom’s body, crossed his room, and picked up a 20kg kettlebell that Tom kept by the bed so he could train between gym sessions. She lifted it as if it weighed no more than a marble, walked to where Chris lay crooning over the diamond in victory, and dropped it on his head.

  With a heavy crunch, the weight smashed downwards and settled. What remained of Chris’s head spread outwards, misshapen and messy, like an empty eggshell smashed flat by the palm of a hand.

  The diamond found its way to Lou.

  Trembling, her mouth pulled wide with delight, she backed up toward the room’s old sash window. Holding the red diamond to the sunlight, she gazed at the little flaws within, her eyes brimming with tears.

  And I knew then, as I looked at her, a beam of sunshine playing with strands of her chestnut hair, hair I had loved to pull, just a little, never enough to hurt, but just enough to tease and excite, I knew then, as the years we had shared flashed past in a blur of love and pain, that I would have to kill her. I reasoned with myself that it wasn’t really Lou I would kill. She had changed, like I had. Anything that was once Old Lou had been replaced by the diamond, and she was now hard and cold and bloody and filled with little flaws, just like it was.

  She said something, but I hardly heard the words.

  All I could think about was the diamond. It filled my brain like a rising tide.

  I took a step forward.

  The street outside my house is almost empty. The hour is late, and people no longer fill the city with their drunken revels at night. People stay at home, as they have been told to do, and for this I am glad.

  Because I cannot kill everyone in this city, no matter how much I want to.

  The body of a woman lies in the driveway of the house, arms and legs spread wide as if she is floating on her back in a pond. She is surrounded by splinters and shards of glass, glass from a sash window. I loved the woman once, but now she is dead, because I pushed her through that window, using her split second of surprise to wrest the red diamond from her grip before she fell. She looks almost peaceful, now, if you ignore the brain matter smeared on the gravel and her shattered limbs bent at awkward
angles.

  In my hand, a perfect, blood-red stone digs into my palm, drawing blood. It sings to me, and I stumble along the road, going where I do not know, but the whys and wherefores no longer matter, do they? Not in a world redesigned from the ground-up by sickness. Not in a world where we have all become ghosts, floating along like smoke on a breeze.

  None of it matters anymore.

  There is only red.

  By Ann Dávila Cardinal

  “How do you think Anna feels about all this work-from-home stuff?” Katie and I just finished our daily video check-in, and this is something that’s been on my mind for days. Truth be told, I’ve been doing way too much thinking of late, since there isn’t much else to do when the workday ends.

  “Anna? You mean the ghost?” Katie raises her eyebrows, but she clearly isn’t surprised by my question. With her electric blue hair and encyclopedic knowledge of horror films, she just… gets me.

  “Yeah. I mean, do you think she’s happy we’re gone? Relieved to have College Hall all to herself?”

  She snorts. “Wouldn’t you be? I mean, she’s always been kinda cranky about sharing the space with us.”

  “True.” But I still wonder.

  All of us who work in College Hall have had experiences with Anna: doors locking from the inside, pictures flying off walls, window shades just rolling up. But it took an intern to discover the true story behind the haunting. Rather fascinating, really: 1800s love triangle, Anna shot on the college grounds by a woman she’d known her whole life. Shockingly scandalous in those days. In any days, really. But since the lockdown I’ve found myself thinking: What do ghosts do if there’s no one to haunt?

  We log off and I attempt to go back to working on the incoming applications. But it really is a crime that the flagship building of Vermont College of Fine Arts is sitting empty since the pandemic. I mean, sure, I’m grateful that my admissions job is something I can do from home, but I love my office: the plants, my books, the massive clown painting Matt gave me. I miss going somewhere every day, especially since I’m living alone out here in the middle of nowhere. I glance out the window at the raindrops peppering the surface of Lake Elmore, the clouds hanging around the mountain like a shroud. The seasonal residents of the houses around me are weeks away from arriving, and it’s just too… quiet. I start to get the out-of-body feeling that precedes an anxiety attack and consider downing an Ativan.

  But I have five phone calls to make, students aren’t going to recruit themselves, so I throw myself into the work, anxiety attack averted with the talk of writing, life, and graduate school. As I hang up from the last call, I realize that the weekly all-staff meeting is starting. I rush to put on my headphones and log on to the video meeting platform. I smile as the faces of my friends and colleagues appear on screen. God, I miss them. Ten years I’ve worked on that campus. These people are more like family than co-workers.

  As Leslie, our president, begins to speak, her face takes center screen and the others scroll in and out along the sidebar. She talks of her faith that we will weather this crisis, and she’s so damn convincing, I want to believe her. But I’m a glass-is-half-empty-and-we’re-all going-to-die-of-thirst kind of gal. When I see my friend Matt, our academic dean, I can’t help it: I wave like a five-year-old. As an extrovert, these last five weeks have been an eternity for me, only seeing other people in pixelated versions on my ancient laptop, hearing their tinny voices with background noises of partners and children and, well… life.

  At first, I enjoyed this insight into my colleagues through the settings of their homes, but now it just leaves me melancholy.

  As the president is wrapping up her updates about moving the summer residencies online, I notice a new face appear in the sidebar among the familiar ones. A young woman, couldn’t be more than twenty, with her hair up in a formal chignon. Who is that? We’re a small college, how could I not know someone? As the meeting continues, I find myself staring at her whenever she comes up in the rotation, then looking for her to appear again onscreen.

  The meeting wraps up, and each person says goodbye as their pictures wink out. I scroll through them, trying to see her one last time, but no luck. I’m just about to click out when I hear:

  “Looks like it’s just you and me, Ann! How you holdin’ up?” Matt asks in his slight North Carolina drawl.

  I smile. “Oh, you know. Hanging in there.” Okay, so I lie to my friends, but it’s not like he could do anything about it. “This is some weird-ass shit, no?”

  He chuckled. “You can say that again.” His wife Tammy walks by behind him and stops when she realizes it’s me on the screen.

  She smiles, her neat blonde bob swinging as she speaks. “Hi, honey! Hope we can bike again sometime soon!”

  Tammy is about the fittest human I know and is so patient with me and my asthmatic lungs. “I sure as hell hope so!”

  Tammy waves and moves off-screen, and Matt and I are saying our goodbyes when I remember. “Wait! Matt, did we hire someone new?”

  He tilts his head to the side. “Someone new?”

  “Yeah, a young woman. Blondish, updo...”

  He gives me that teasing big brother smile, his thick, black designer-style glasses rising with his cheeks. “Are you seeing things, amiga?”

  “No! Seriously, there was a woman in the meeting I’ve never seen before.”

  His expression turns slightly serious, perhaps even the dreaded ‘concerned’ look I hate so much. He forces a small smile. “Not that I know of.” Then his phone starts to ring. “I have to get this; Leslie wants to check in.”

  “No worries! I’ll talk to you later.”

  His image blinks off, and I close my laptop for the day. But all through dinner, my bath, even as I lie in bed trying to fall asleep, I can’t get the image of the mystery woman out of my mind.

  I make the mistake of starting the next day by watching the news. I prefer to watch it rather than read it online, as the voices keep a sort of company, but Lord it’s depressing. Everything is shuttered pretty much worldwide; only essential services are allowed to keep operating in the hopes of stopping the spread of the viral pandemic. When I hear the statistic that someone is dying of the virus in New York City every five minutes, I realize I no longer have any interest in the oatmeal in front of me. I dump it, grab my coffee and phone, and head upstairs to my home office. It’s a dark and rainy morning, but that seems apt, somehow.

  At the last minute I grab a baseball cap from my bedroom since I haven’t been bothering with the excessive grooming routine I used to do when I went into an actual office, and I tuck my unruly mop of hair underneath. No makeup, barely bathed, leggings, and slippers. The latest in pandemic office fashion.

  I check my schedule. A nine o’clock marketing meeting. Oh good, it’s always nice to see Alastair. Our marketing director is a British charmer who used to work in publishing, and we share a taste for speculative lit and a similarly bizarre sense of humor. I put on my headset and log on to Google Hangouts. One by one, my three colleagues enter, their images shifting like Tetris blocks as the next one joins.

  Alastair begins the meeting. Even boring inquiry numbers sound interesting in his accent, and the hour flies by.

  As the meeting winds down, I can’t let Alastair get away without some teasing. “Alastair, did you dress to match your walls today?”

  “Oh, do I match?” He pulls his shirt away from his chest to look at it, and snorts. “Totally an accident, I’m afraid. What with the schools being closed, I’m lucky I’m even dressed!” To punctuate his point, his daughter lets out a blood-curdling shriek from the other room.

  The rest of us laugh, and Katie and Karen log off to join other meetings. Just as I’m about to do the same, I see a figure appear behind Alastair. It looks like a person, but featureless, like a shadow.

  “Alastair, who’s tha—”

  At the same time Alastair says, “Well, I better get downstairs, my wife has had a lot to deal with—”

/>   The figure looms over him, spreading over his face and shoulders like black oil, running in his eyes, into his nose, then I hear the beginnings of a scream… petrified, I peer closer, putting my face right up to the screen… was that a woman’s face? She looks familiar…

  Then his screen goes dark, replaced by an ominous red circle with an “A” in the center.

  What the hell just happened?

  I grab my phone and call Katie.

  She answers on the first ring. “Miss me already?”

  “Katie, someone was in Alastair’s room at the end of that meeting, and I heard him scream!”

  “I’m sure it was his daughter. You heard her yelling.”

  “No! It wasn’t a child,” I add before she can say it, “And it wasn’t his wife!” I feel a chill on the back of my neck. “Katie, I’m worried about him.” I hate that my voice breaks, but I feel anxiety tightening around my throat.

  “Well, why don’t you call him? I’m sure it’s fine. With the kids home, everyone’s house is a bit of a circus.”

  I sigh. “You’re probably right,” I offer, though I don’t really believe it. I can’t shake this dark feeling, like the oily shadow from behind Alastair has leaked through the screen and onto me.

  “Call him if it will make you feel better.”

  I thank her, hang up, and dial Alastair’s cell. I get his voicemail.

  I can’t seem to concentrate on my enrollment reports, and I dial him every five minutes, to no avail.

  At five o’clock, I decide Katie’s right, I’m probably getting worked up over nothing. I head downstairs, imagining a weekend of excessive and nurturing carbohydrates and a streaming binge of a season of Lucifer.

  As I head upstairs after breakfast on Monday morning, I wonder how it’s come to this. How the transitions of my days are marked only by the walking up and down of these same stairs, of only seeing other humans in boxes on a screen. Of the daily dread of the crushing silence that comes at night.