Lockdown

by Nick Kolakowski

  After dinner, they raided the liquor cabinet for all of Jimmy’s grandfather’s moonshine. Most of the crew went outside and hung off the truck as they swallowed the high-test. Tasha washed up the dishes as Lucas sat on the table playing with the wooden action figures Jimmy had carved for him.

  Tasha heard the floor creak. She turned to see Tucker standing in the doorway to the kitchen, staring at her.

  “You didn’t love him? I could have sworn you loved him the way you talked about him. But you ain’t shed a tear,” Tucker said, moving across the kitchen floor. He ruffled Lucas’s hair as he walked past. The boy flinched.

  “I love him more than you could ever know,” Tasha said.

  “You still using present-tense. We gonna have to work that out of you,” Tucker said. He was less than a foot away from her. His eyes were red, his chest slick with sweat. He and Mara had retired upstairs after dinner.

  “When it’s too late, remember I tried to save you,” Tasha said as she placed a plate in the drain rack to dry.

  “What are you talking about, little sister?”

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  Outside, the dread-head, who was named Loomis, said: “Pass the bottle and twist the cap, motherfucker.” He held his hand out to Caleb, who took another swig from the mason jar before passing it to his friend.

  “This place is nice. I had to get out the city, man. I couldn’t take it no more,” Chuck said. He barely ever spoke, usually after drinking his weight in alcohol.

  “Yeah, yeah, we know,” Diane said. She’d taken off her Hazmat suit and was lying on the hood of the truck, her t-shirt pulled up over her breasts. She was fifteen years older than Loomis, Chuck or Caleb, but they didn’t seem to mind when it was time to get down to it.

  “I think you got a permanent case of claustrophobia.” Caleb said.

  A loud crack pierced the night. The mason jar froze an inch from Loomis’s mouth.

  He asked: “What the fuck was that?”

  “City kid, it’s called a falling branch,” Diane said.

  “Nah, that wasn’t a branch. I don’t know what the fuck it was, but it won’t no branch,” Loomis said. Setting the jar down, he grabbed his rifle. The crickets and katydids had gone silent. The nightbirds ceased singing their songs. A stillness seemed to settle over the whole world.

  “You so fucking paranoid. Why don’t you put that gun down and come handle these guns?” Diane said as she sat up, running her hands over her breasts.

  “D, you got to be the horniest bitch I’ve ever met,” Caleb said as he slipped his shirt over his head.

  Another crack, louder than the last, echoed through the air—accompanied by a wet, fleshy ripping sound. It reminded Diane of the sound that meat made when her father had pulled it off the carcass of a deer.

  “Was that a fucking branch?” Loomis said. He hopped off the tail gate and scanned the darkness. The magnolia trees swayed like a choir caught up in religious ecstasy. Caleb slid out of the driver’s seat of the truck.

  “C, where’s that old boy? Did you move that body?” Loomis asked.

  A series of cracks, pops, and moist tearing sounds bellowed up from under the truck. Diane put her shirt back on and grabbed her shotgun. Just before she hopped down off the hood of the truck, two things happened simultaneously.

  Chuck screamed.

  Loomis’s head went sailing through the air and landed on the hood of the truck, next to Diane. A fine mist of blood splashed her face, warm as fresh piss.

  Inside, Tucker, mumbling that he wasn’t a bad guy, was just about to stroke Tasha’s cheek when he heard Diane’s scream. He stopped and looked toward the front door.

  The scream was joined by loud voices and gunfire. Then another sound drowned out all others.

  When Tucker was a kid, his class had gone to the Brooklyn Zoo. They’d walked by the lion enclosure, which had a thick pane of glass so you could peer at the lions as they did their lion stuff, which Tucker realized mostly consisted of sleeping. Just as bored Tucker was about to yawn, the big male lion had roared, the sound shaking the whole enclosure.

  The sound he heard now was that roar—times a thousand. It was a ferocious living thing that crawled out of the deepest pit in whatever your religion called Hell.

  Tucker rushed out the door with his backup .357 cocked. As soon as he stepped onto the porch, he realized he’d made a horrible mistake—most likely the last one he’d ever make.

  His crew was dead. That was painfully obvious. They hadn’t been killed by some deadly Special Ops guy or some crazed hillbilly with improvised traps. They’d been ripped apart. Limbs and viscera littered the front yard. His truck, Big Red, had a fresh new coat of paint, courtesy of the gallons of blood splashed across its rusting exterior.

  Standing in the middle of this abattoir was something his mind told him couldn’t exist, even as his heart told him it was terrifyingly real: A beast, with what was left of Caleb in its massive jaws. Its shaggy black pelt soaked red. Its nostrils opened and closed spasmodically.

  It smells me. Oh my God, it smells me, Tucker thought.

  The Beast opened its maw, dropping Caleb’s torso to the ground. Shimmering green eyes like emeralds glowed from deep in its enormous skull. The triangular ears atop its head twitched indecently.

  Tucker knew he had a gun in his hand. High-velocity hollow points stolen from a gun shop in Philadelphia. He knew the .357 could drop a bison. He knew all this, but he couldn’t seem to find the will to raise the pistol.

  The Beast dropped to all fours and charged at him. It was his deepest childhood fears brought to life. He fired the .357, all six shots hitting their mark. Tucker was an excellent shot.

  It did no good.

  Should have had silver, he thought as the Beast sliced open his belly with one swipe of its powerful claw. Tucker felt his guts unspool from his abdomen. It was like the hollow feeling you experienced at the top of a rollercoaster, multiplied by a million.

  The Beast gripped Tucker by the throat. It hoisted him off the ground with little effort. Tucker saw the rows of curved teeth inside its gaping maw. Its breath was carrion and corruption. Its howl made the fragile places in his mind shatter like glass.

  Tasha had taken Lucas to the basement. It was their backup plan if Jimmy ever got out of the shed.

  His grandparents, who had installed a heavy metal door to the basement in event of tornadoes, had welcomed them with open arms when they had arrived from D.C. The first few weeks had been idyllic. After months in their apartment while the world was reduced to putrescence, the fresh air of the Virginia mountains had come as a welcome respite.

  Then Jimmy had returned from a night-fishing expedition mangled from head to toe. He survived but seemed… different. Only they didn’t realize how different until the next full moon.

  After Jimmy went through that first transformation, his grandparents were nothing more than memories and a grease spot on the floor. After that, they fixed up the shed, and Jimmy would go in there during the full moon; for the rest of the month, he was fine.

  Tasha heard a woman’s high-pitched squeal over the roar of splintering wood and shattering glass. She rocked Lucas back and forth. He was a quiet boy who learned quickly.

  “We just gotta wait until Daddy is back. Everything will be okay when Daddy comes back,” Tasha said. She figured it was around eleven: Six hours until sunrise. That was fine.

  She had a lot of practice when it came to waiting. A lockdown did that to you.

  By Jen Conley

  When I hear the gunshot, I sit up in bed. It’s three in the morning. The shot comes from the next block, somewhere on Hemlock Road, so it’s okay. Still, my heart bangs and my breath is short. For a moment, I have to talk myself down: You’re okay, you can breathe, you’re not sick, you don’t have the virus.

  Then there is another shot. In the old days, I would’ve assumed it was firecrackers. That would be normal, especially if it were summer. But it’s not summer. It’s ear
ly April, more than a year from when the first wave of the virus hit and killed thousands of people. And it’s not last August, when two months after the “re-opening,” the second wave of the virus emerged and went on to kill millions. So many dead now, it’s unfathomable.

  My bedroom door opens, and I switch on my light. My niece, Mandy, nineteen, stands in the doorway. “Who do you think it was?” she asks. Her voice rattles.

  I shut my eyes. “I don’t know… maybe Dan Kolbert over on the next block.”

  Mandy shakes her head. Her brown hair is long and messy because she won’t let me cut it. But it’s clean. We ration our shampoo and only wash our hair twice a week. She washed hers yesterday.

  “Who?” she asks.

  “Dan Kolbert,” I say again. “He had his own construction business. He and his wife lost their daughter in the second wave. I think I told you.”

  Maybe I didn’t.

  Mandy winces. “How old was their daughter?”

  “Sixteen. She had asthma, so that made it worse.”

  I look at the window. The shades are drawn. I wait. The Kolberts have a son. He’s nine, so a third shot should be next.

  Then it comes. The final, self-inflected shot. I don’t know who did the killing. It could’ve been Dan or his wife, Erin.

  Mandy shivers.

  “The Guard will get the bodies,” I say. “Eventually.”

  “I know,” she says.

  The bodies will be left for days until the suicide is called in.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  Mandy says she’s going to watch Friends on her iPad. We downloaded a bunch of shows and movies before everything went super-bad. We get three hours of extra electricity twice a week to charge our devices. Otherwise, the electricity must be saved for essentials: refrigerator, lights, cleaning purposes, laundry use. The Guard monitors how we use our energy allotments.

  “Don’t fall asleep and waste your battery,” I say.

  She says she won’t.

  I lie down and put my hand on my stomach. I’m six months pregnant. My husband is dead.

  In the morning, I take a walk to the water, like I always do. It’s Sunday. The day is bright but chilly, and I can feel a cold breeze coming from the river. My neighborhood consists of mostly small houses, and in the old days, there would be kids on bikes, people outside doing yardwork, the usual. But today there is no one outside. There are people inside their homes, and I can feel them watching me through the windows as I walk, but most of the houses are abandoned. The signs are easy to spot: dead leaves bunched up by front doors, yards unattended, vehicles sitting in driveways with flattened tires—not that it matters. They don’t let us drive anywhere. Driving is forbidden. Some abandoned houses are still decorated for Halloween—ghosts hanging from trees that are covered in pink blossoms, witches’ feet popping up from the lawn near the spring tulips, fake bloody hands stuck to a glass storm door. Sometimes a fake pumpkin will roll around the street, as do random soccer balls and basketballs. The virus nearly wiped out our neighborhood in late October and early November.

  The second wave was a death sentence. I was lucky. I had been sick during the first wave, last April. Mandy had it last March. From that, we gained immunity to fight off the second wave, but my husband didn’t. He caught the virus in November and died within a week.

  The river is brackish and very wide because it spills into the bay, which eventually connects to the Atlantic. Every so often you see a body floating by, on its way to the ocean, where the fish and sharks will eat it. It used to bother me, but I don’t think about it now. I only think about the water, how I can smell the salt and that it’s good to breathe it in, makes me feel healthy. The baby isn’t moving because it likes me to walk—the motion is soothing. When I stop, it sometimes swirls around, bangs against my insides, like it’s throwing a fit.

  I walk down a pathway next to an abandoned two-story house. One of the windows is open and curtains sway in and out with the breeze. I follow the path until it opens up to a small sandy beach. I make my way down a slight incline to the water’s edge and watch two white swans float by. The water laps gently against the shore and I know in the summer there will be crabs and jellyfish.

  After my husband died, the Guard moved in quickly and quarantined neighborhoods. In December, they counted who was alive and tested us for immunity. Those without immunity were taken away—to where, I don’t know. Word got out that they were rounding up the unimmune, and some choose to run and hide and then run again—they are called “transients.”

  The government tells us the unimmune put us in danger: scientists believe the virus can mutate into a third wave, and those of us with immunity now might not be immune to a newer mutation. Still, people protect their own. Every so often, the Guard rolls in: A half-dozen officers holding weapons and covered in protective gear leap out of a truck and march down our roads, doing property checks. They rummage through abandoned houses in search of transients. They stomp into occupied houses, looking for the “hidden” cowering in attics and basements, their families and friends banking on what they know from history: All terrible things end. There will be a vaccine.

  The baby moves again. I turn around and leave the river, heading back home. It is dangerous to walk alone, out in the open, this I know. A transient can get in, can be waiting in the shadows, ready to grab me to take me hostage… I don’t know. Sometimes my mind goes a little squirrely. But transients do get in. They can come along the river by kayak or small craft, quietly moving onshore at night, taking shelter in an abandoned house, hoping there will be something to eat. But those chances are slim. Last fall, when someone would die, the Guard would come, take the dead away, and then send a decontamination crew into a home before they’d let the living return. Anything edible was confiscated and burned in the big pit with the bodies. I never understood the reasoning for this—if we’re immune, there is no reason to take our food. And I don’t know where the pit is, exactly, but I heard it was an old soccer field across town.

  Now the deaths in our neighborhood are just suicides, people who have lost hope. Before the Guard is notified, those of us who are left will go into the suicide house and grab what we can. A transient, driven by hunger, might also risk going into a suicide house, but that would be stupid. Most neighbors are not compassionate. To harbor or abet a transient is to risk being relocated. This is the only crime the Guard cares about. Transients. Anything else is fair game—abuse, theft, rape, murder. I think it’s because the Guard doesn’t have the manpower to deal with other crimes. They don’t have as many officers as they’d like us to think, so they’ve taken a Darwinian approach, which is why they don’t take our guns. Whoever survives will one day be given a vaccination. Whoever doesn’t survive, they weren’t meant to.

  I keep walking, noticing more tulips and daffodils popping up through the grasses of abandoned homes than I did the day before. It makes me think of my mother, who died of cancer years before the virus. She loved to garden, and her flowers were her pride and joy. “Look at these,” she’d say to me, pointing to a patch of purple crocus, “aren’t they sweet?”

  I try not to think of my mother because it makes me sad, and I can’t be sad. I only keep walking, suddenly noticing a skeleton with a missing leg hanging from a large tree covered with white blossoms. It makes me shudder. I should keep a gun on me when I walk, but I don’t. I leave it hidden in the house. I do not want Mandy knowing I have a gun. She’s been depressed.

  Until lately.

  Maybe I shouldn’t walk at all. But this treat I allow myself is the highlight of my day. It keeps me from going insane. It calms me, and that is healthier for the baby.

  “We’re out of eggs,” Mandy says when I return. “Can you add it to the list?”

  I nod. We eat sausage links and toast.

  Mandy taps her foot on the floor, as if she’s nervous or excited. She wants to go outside. She will tell me she’s going for a walk, but I suspect she has a particular destinat
ion. I suspect there’s a reason her depression has faded away. Mandy is my older brother’s daughter. Last spring, when the first wave hit, like millions of other college kids, she was sent home to finish the semester online. But she came to my house instead. My brother and his wife lived up north, near the city, where the population was dense, and the number of infected was the highest in the nation. They felt it was safer for her to stay with my husband and me. Then she got sick but recovered easily.

  When I got sick, my husband took me to the hospital. My fever was dangerously high, my cough nasty and persistent, and I was unable to breathe. Looking back, it was terrifying, and at the time, especially at the worst point, death seemed inevitable. I would drift in and out of consciousness, alone in a white room because my husband wasn’t allowed to visit me. I was contagious. At one point, in a painful delirium, I saw my dead mother. “I miss you,” I said to her. “I’m sorry for being a terrible daughter.” She only smiled, and said I was just young. Seeing her made me want to go, to leave the pain and move onto another world.

  But I didn’t die. I recovered and went home. My husband, for some reason, did not test positive for the virus, and although that seemed mysterious to us, we were happy. Still, he wasn’t satisfied. “It will be back,” he warned.

  After the reopening in June, when the government announced that the virus was almost eradicated—that’s the phrase they used, “almost eradicated”—Mandy went home for the summer and then returned to college at the end of August. But then, as my husband predicted, the second wave arrived, brutal and ruthless, and it killed my brother and his wife. And then my husband died. The horror was barely manageable, yet being newly pregnant made it a little better for me. I had something to live for. I had hope.