Lockdown

by Nick Kolakowski

  You start by loading up your old clothes into trash bags and hauling them down to the camp where live the Calebites.

  Again, like last time, there is no one at the camp when you arrive. The smell of fire lingers fresh, but there is no flame. Forgotten automobiles ring the perimeter like rusted sentries. A station wagon, half a pickup truck, an old RV, the other half of the pickup…

  The grass reaches to your waist here, and this time of year you must mind for snakes. Never once in all your childhood dares had you made it this far, but you’re not a child anymore. You say it over and over:

  I am not a child.

  Where the woods break, there is an old tobacco barn. There’s been no tobacco out this way since long before the pandemic, but the air still tinges sweet like peppered honey as you near it. Someone is inside. You can hear nothing, but still you know it.

  “I carry with me shoes,” you call out. Your words drop like anchors, so you call them again. “I carry with me shoes.”

  You could turn and run. You should turn and run.

  But you don’t.

  Instead, with a shaky hand, you creak open the door.

  She is naked by firelight. A single candle burning in the corner of the room. There is no furniture—nearly a dozen neatly bundled bed rolls—except for the ornate vanity before which she sits, gazing at her nakedness in a mirror as she brushes slowly her long, blonde hair. She is a perfect human being, of a perfect shape, with skin untouched by time or the elements. She is a vision. You have seen naked women before, but only Heather Tidwell or Candace Swanson or women on TV, no one quite so fetching or dangerous as the one before you. You can tell by her eyes, which cut sideways at you, that she sees things no one has ever known or will ever see.

  You could fall to your knees.

  She gives you hardly a second thought. She returns her attention to the mirror and continues stroking the brush through that long, lustrous hair.

  “They will send one to destroy us,” she says in a sweet murmur. “He will claim to be our friend.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Do you claim to be our friend?”

  You hold the trash bags about hip-high. “I carry with me shoes.”

  She smiles. She half-turns in her high-backed chair. The cushion gives a little squeak, rubbing against the flesh of her buttock. She faces you. You fight to keep your eyes off her breasts, focus instead on her soft-spreading smile. Her eyes, which pool and sparkle.

  “So, you are our friend?”

  I return the smile. “I’m not the enemy, that’s for sure.”

  She tells you: “One time, I heard music. Do you listen much to music? Sure, you do. You probably listen to it all the time. We’re not supposed to enjoy it, not what you call music anyway. The stuff that’s been recorded and mixed and played through speakers. We find music in other places. Have you ever lay down on the grass and turned your face up to the moon and closed your eyes? You should do it sometime. You should do it all the time. The trees creak and sway in a strong breeze. The bullfrogs scream with glee. There will be shrieking in the night and it is both melodious and terrible. The cycles of life happen after dark. There is death and rebirth and consumption. There is reproduction.”

  She stands. Her every curve is a symphony. Her hair drapes behind her shoulders. Her eyes…

  “When I heard it, my entire world stopped turning on its axis. What is this? What is that sound? Why had I not been told of it before? I still hear it—over and over and over—but not half as clear as I did that day in the woods. Listen…”

  Her voice cracks only slightly as she sings the first lines of “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Maybe she is off-key and perhaps she’s remembered the notes wrong; that sound is from another world than you. You never want it to end. You want her to sing for you the rest of your days, even a song as cliché as “When a Man Loves a Woman,” just so long as she never stops.

  Eventually she does. And when she does, she speaks as if something has taken hold in her throat.

  “The human memory is a funny thing,” she says. “I remember the words to the song. I remembered following the music through the forest until I came upon the campsite. Everything else—the two campers and what they were wearing and the bitter taste of the coffee they brewed ‘fore me—I remember it all. What I don’t remember—”

  “I can play you that song.”

  “My father—you can what?”

  “I said, I can play you that song.”

  You can. You reach into your pocket and pull out your cellphone. You thumb the screen alive. The room lights up as if on fire. Her skin takes a florescent tint. Her eyes are alive.

  “You keep a radio in your pocket?”

  “No, no.” You try not to laugh. “This is a phone. A telephone.”

  She cocks her precious head to the side.

  “It does a lot of things,” you tell her. “It can do anything. Watch.”

  You’re all thumbs. You can’t type fast enough. It auto-fills and you select the first video. But first, a fifteen-second advertisement for car insurance.

  “It’s just like I remembered.” She sways to the rollick of the organ. “It’s better than I remember.”

  You can honestly say you’ve never heard this song in such a way, either. It’s been on the radio hundreds of times, or in a movie, elevators, or even commercials, but your entire life it has been only background. You’ve never heard the lyrics in such a way. Standing in that old tobacco barn with that pretty girl rocking naked to the smooth, soulful moans of Percy Sledge, you think perhaps you have become someone new. For the first time, your eyes and ears have opened.

  “And you say you can listen to this anytime you want?”

  Your mouth hangs open, and the weight of your jaw bears heavy. “I can listen to anything, anytime I want.”

  “Oh, that must be wonderful.”

  “You are very beautiful.”

  “How many songs are there?”

  “More than the stars,” you tell her. “There are all the songs you could ever wish for.”

  “How do you choose which ones to hear?”

  You’ve never thought about that before. You don’t know how to answer, so instead, you take a step closer to her. Then another.

  She asks, “How do you know when it’s time to make it stop?”

  You take her face with both hands and bring it to yours. The smell from her mouth shocks you at first, but soon you’ve covered it with your own and your tongue is inside her. She does not struggle, and in fact, for a moment, she does not move. Not her hands, not her mouth, not her tongue. But only for a moment, for soon she is alive and the two of you are lips and hands and hips grinding into hips. Your mouth moves with the beat of the song. You can’t get enough of her into your arms. This is not her first kiss, not by any means, but that is not your concern. Nothing, for that matter, is your concern, until finally she pulls her mouth free of yours and, amid mad gasps for air, pants:

  “My father…”

  “He won’t find out,” you say. “I’ll never breathe a word.”

  “No,” she tells you. “My father…”

  She’s no longer looking at you. She looks behind you. You turn and see, only in a flash, the little man leaping across the darkness. The scream by which he fills the air. The glint of the knife from the candlelight.

  He’s spry. You’ve just enough time to shield your face with one hand and strike out with the other. You don’t care where your fist lands, so long as it lands at all. If you can find something to hit, your plan is to hit it again.

  Then again.

  And again, so many times that hopefully somebody will tell you when it’s time to stop. But that first parry does not strike gold or, for all you know, anywhere near it. Your blow flies wild, which furthers the advantage for your attacker.

  Your face meets the hay-strewn floor of the tobacco barn. You suck motes into your lungs. Mites. Fistfuls of dirt.

  You wait for the black.
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br />   “Daddy! Please!”

  It’s her. You’d recognize that voice anywhere, even without the sing-song joy of your previous and only interaction. Even behind the curtains of fear and outrage and—

  It comes: The black.

  You come to, you think, in a cave. At one end is light, but that end is far, far from where you are. The sounds you collect: water that drips…drips…driiiiips. A mourning dove when it is light; the hoot of an owl in the black. The throbbing in your bandaged head.

  Your hands: also bandaged. Someone changes them. You never remember it happening, but you are in a constant state of finding yourself with fresh dressings.

  The feel of the rough and splintered wood that forms the bars all around you.

  The ever-present smell of a recent campfire and… sulfur?

  And as always, the return to the black.

  “I am not like my sister.”

  He speaks in silhouette against the bright of the faraway day that ends the tunnel of black. It takes time for you to make sense of his words. Your head is thick.

  Thick.

  “I used to live among you,” he says. “Like my father, I am immune to it. We are no longer carriers. Not like her. Not like the others.”

  His silhouette bends into the black. You hear the sound of tin scraping against the smooth cave floor. It stops at your feet. Your nostrils fill with the unctuous smells of meat and dairy.

  “Back when I lived amongst you, people would forever say that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Do you agree with that?”

  You fight the urge to fall upon that smell and devour it.

  The shadow asks, “Do you agree with that?”

  Your mouth is too dry to answer.

  “I don’t,” he says. “I think that’s another thing your people got wrong. Do you know which meal we believe should be the most important?”

  He gives you time to answer. When you don’t, he kicks the plate. You hear it rattle against the far wall.

  “The next one.”

  Later that night, you hear her sing again. How long have you waited? Did you think it would ever again happen?

  It’s the same song—“When a Man Loves a Woman”—but this time it sounds like it’s being sung underwater.

  It takes time for your words to form in the canyon that is your throat. “Where are you?” you ask the darkness.

  The singing does not stop.

  “How long have I been here?”

  Still, there is no answer. Instead, the cave is filled with the off-key warbling of the Percy Sledge classic. It does not take long for you to become grateful. You close your eyes and tell yourself that if the rest of your days are spent with that voice in your ears and the memory of her vision in your brain, then—

  “Stop that racket!”

  The voice comes from the black. It’s gruff and deeper than the one who brought food. This voice carries weight and when he commands the music to stop, it comes as no surprise that only silence would follow.

  As does the flame.

  Your eyes take time to adjust to the low light of the fire. It’s lit in what appears to be the center of the cave. As suspected, you are trapped inside a wooden cage. Across the room is another one, similar to your own.

  Between them stands a man.

  “Where is she?” you ask him. You squint deeper into the shadows but still come up empty.

  “The child has been quarantined,” comes the answer, “just like you.”

  The man is smaller than his voice might suggest. Even in darkness you can feel the rage behind his eyes.

  “Your people had a choice,” he says. “You could have made a difference, but instead you chose to make a dollar.”

  “I don’t know what you’re tal—”

  “We have no idea what you brought with you.”

  “I brought with me shoes.”

  The little man picks up something black and bulky. You recognize it as the garbage bag you slogged to the camp of the Calebites. It is quickly thrown into the fire.

  “Why?” you ask. “Why all this?”

  The man narrows the distance between you. He twists both hands around the wooden slats that form the bars of your cage. He brings his face close enough for you to smell the rot in his breath.

  He growls, “We do it for survival.”

  “Survival? From what?”

  Overhead, the sound of helicopters. This means it would be six o’clock, time for the evening disinfectant. The noise of it whips to a crescendo, then—just as quick as it started—dissolves behind a curtain of cicadas.

  The small man twists his lips into a grin.

  “We will talk again in the morning.”

  It is sometime in the night when next you call out to her. At first, she does not answer. However, upon the second calling…

  “Daddy won’t let me talk to you.”

  You inhale deeply, as if you might possibly savor the scent of her voice. Instead, all you can taste is the burnt rubber of the shoes.

  “Why not?”

  You are greeted only with silence.

  “What happened to those campers?” you ask.

  “We better go to sleep,” she murmurs. “We’ve caused enough trouble.”

  Those words echo off the cave walls. You try to suss out something to say that might restore the connection you possibly imagined earlier. Had you, in fact, imagined it? This moment did indeed exist, didn’t it?

  “How long is the quarantine?” you finally manage to ask.

  “Forty days.”

  “What happens at the end of forty days?”

  “If we have not caught the sickness, then we shall be released.”

  “What sickness?”

  The only answer is the faraway dripping of water to the puddle in the cave floor. You think about the tickle forming at the back of your throat and suppress the urge to cough.

  “What happens if we get it? The sickness?”

  She takes a breath. “They will do anything to stop it from spreading among us.”

  “How?”

  The remnants of the earlier fire pop and crackle.

  You ask again. “How will they stop it from spreading?”

  “It’s time to go to sleep.”

  You have no idea if she does or not. All you know is that she says not another word until morning.

  That night you don’t sleep so much as you drop into depths upon depths of the black until you lay broken at the bottom of it. You can’t find a single use for your senses, nor any of your limbs, nor a simple thought in your head. You are empty, yet at the same time you are awake and aware of every whisper of wind that filters through that cave, every drop of blood that oozes through your bloodstream. None of it matters. Nothing matters. Nothing save the solitary thought that, somewhere at the end of this darkness, she lies in a cage much as you.

  You are not alone.

  Your memory of your small town is but a tiny pinhole, a light only as large as the afternoon sky at the long end of the tunnel of black. You are no longer formed by the opinions and morals of your father, your mother, your priest, those around you, but instead by your solitary mission in life which is that young woman in the cave with you. To show her how much bigger is the world, which you’d previously believed to be so small. There should be a claxon to signal this realization, this transformation, but there is not. Instead, there is a thin veil of frost that dusts the limits of this confident serenity.

  No sooner had this fragility touched your bones than it sank into the marrow of it. The pain in your head. The dry misery scratching your throat. The damp sauna in your lungs. The raging of fire through your veins, the thick scent of the burning shoes. You’d brought them. This was your fault. This was all your doing.

  You’d crash your own head against the bars, but for the energy it would require for self-loathing.

  The next time they approach you, they protect themselves. They wear masks that cover their nose and face. Plastic shields their
heads like halos. Rubber gloves. Her brother and the little man are joined by another. Their every set of eyes is a bastion of curiosity.

  “It’s remarkable,” says the third man.

  “It is hardly remarkable,” says the smaller one from before. “It’s a mutation.”

  “Regardless.”

  You open your mouth to speak, but all you can manage is to choke on your own phlegm.

  The smaller man lowers himself to his knees. His eyes swim with an emotion you don’t recognize. If you had anything resembling energy, you might reach out to touch him, for fear you might never touch another living thing.

  When finally he speaks, he says, “I hate your people.”

  “Daddy, please.”

  It’s her. Still, she speaks from the distance, only this time it sounds as if she—

  “I hate what your people have done.” The small man runs his gloved hand along the smooth cave floor. “This planet is strong, and it was healing. It had erased centuries of harm caused by your people. But you had other priorities.”

  “I didn’t—” Your tongue is thick inside your mouth. You can hardly speak around it.

  The little man rises to his feet. He shuffles to the cage door and opens it.

  “It’s your world out there,” he says, as he steps aside. “It is where you belong.”

  “I’m taking her with me.”

  You’re surprised. Not only by the authority in your voice, but the fact that you were able to speak at all. You’ve never felt like this. You feel like you are still falling. You feel as though there is no bottom to which you might sink.

  Still, you say it again:

  “I’m taking her with me.”

  The little man considers this. He turns to the others. They shrug their shoulders.

  “She has served her purpose,” he tells you. “Now she may serve another.”