Them #2
He ripped himself away from the awful memory and turned back to the farmhouse to perform his usual ritual, setting his backpack down on the porch so the goods within wouldn’t rattle around. A pistol slipped out from his waistband as the other hand reached for the door. It was unlocked.
He entered and swept the first floor, though with little caution. Next time, more likely than not, the man wouldn’t bother leaving his pack outside. There was never anyone to hear him anyway.
He found what he expected: dust and rubble disturbed only by his own footprints.
He retrieved his pack and ventured out to the backyard, where he located a well-water pump.
The spigot required a rusted reminder that not everyone who needed it was gone, but the man had learned how to jog the ancient contraptions awake.
Without a word, he refilled his canteens.
Yet his mind wandered. How much ground had he covered during the night? How many miles in the last month? Since he first got up and walked away from the flattened ruins that used to be a small Florida college town? He wasn’t at all sure.
“Enough that I,” he muttered to himself with slow, indecisive words, “have almost forgotten how to speak.” Like a frail pup incapable of balancing its own immense weight, the sentence limped away into the night. No echo returned.
The sound of his own voice surprised the man.
The fact that anything beyond coughs and yawns came out at all surprised him, but he didn’t want to admit that to himself.
It was too cliché. Of course, he thought, of course I don’t talk when I’ve no one to talk with.
He didn’t want to become a trope, a character clinging to a tattered paperback yarn.
Next to the pump was an overturned bucket. The letters and logos had long since faded, but the faded orange color suggested it might have been a Home Depot original once upon a time. He kicked it away for seemingly no reason.
He didn’t know when he’d find the next working pump. He could talk to wells, yes, but he wasn’t very good at it. Rust is a romantic, deaf to all suitors but time.
He returned to the house and checked for whatever supplies remained.
When the man first began his nightly walks, he’d been shocked to find that canned goods were not a scarcity.
He didn’t have to grapple with harriers or get into shoot-outs with other desperate scavengers.
He simply walked in, took what he needed, and slept until nightfall.
He was never a bother or a burden because there was never anybody home.
As was most often the case, this house’s pantries were replete with a decent bounty.
After news from Bangor broke, people hoarded everything imaginable, waiting for…
what was it? All this shit to blow over?
Some luck they’d had with that. Most didn’t last long enough to dig into their treasure troves.
What came for humanity was too fast. Too exponential.
As had become his routine, he stored what he could fit inside his pack and left the rest to tick away toward their inevitable expiration.
His haul came out at three cans of spinach, two cans of tomatoes, and a large tin of honey-roasted peanuts.
Wasn’t much, but it was enough. He never sacrificed space occupied by water for food.
Besides, there would be more along the way. There always was.
The house was the sum of wooden planks woven together long ago. The man imagined that once upon a time it had looked neat and well made, but the passage of years and weather had warped the walls. Curdled them into the arched spines of ghosts in the crawl space.
The wind whipped between the boards, yet the house itself stood still and steady. The man, however, was perfectly aware that nothing could stand still. Everything was always turning. Earth always rolling.
Daylight drew closer.
And daylight was death.
That was the one rule above all others. The beasts, in all their obsidian splendor, seemed to fear the dark; they never ventured out from their nests once the sun had fallen. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t care. The man knew only that he was more afraid of them.
From his backpack he produced a small crimson multi-tool.
He used its miniature hammerhead to strip loose nails from the flimsy living room floorboards.
The man collected a few of the fragile planks, then stacked them, four in total, atop one another.
He took a fifth board and leaned it against the wood pile.
In a practiced motion, the man hopped onto the middle of the leaning board, snapping it in two.
He repeated this process until he had ten half pieces.
There was a flashlight in his pack, but the batteries could have been dead, for all the man knew.
He had a suspicion that all batteries might be dying soon, their shelf lives far from infinite.
Not that it much mattered. He’d become a nocturnal thing now, and the stars and the moon lent him more than enough light on clear nights.
He went out back again and returned with scraps of dead leaves and twigs, and then once more, this time to collect a mound of loose dirt with the bucket he’d kicked.
The man spread the dirt into a pair of tidy piles on the tile floor and fashioned two small log cabins atop the soil, stuffing them full of kindling.
The man found two pots—every house had pots—and filled them with water from the spigot out back.
One last trip from the backyard and he set the pots down atop the cookers. From his backpack’s zipper pocket, the man retrieved a Bic lighter, one of many he’d grabbed from a derelict 7-Eleven just over the Georgia line.
The man held the translucent red object in his right hand. He flicked it on and off. On and off. The flame jumped to life each time. He studied it for a moment, watched the shadows in the room begin to swim and waver in tune with the lighter’s miniature blaze.
He felt like hugging the warmth. Dancing with it.
The motion and the heat and the rhythm. The flickering flame made him feel like there might actually be someone else in the room with him.
A ridiculous thought, but the man allowed himself the occasional ration of irrationality.
After all, a bit of insanity a day keeps the past away, but today the gaseous woman with all her warm and welcoming curves that lived inside his lighter wasn’t enough to distract him.
Especially from the memory of that 7-Eleven.
The storefront’s window-paneled front, once covered by glossy adverts for Slurpees and taquitos and ninety-nine-cent Big Gulps, had not been shattered, but torn through.
And by something so big that it hadn’t been able to fit inside the wide glass display without ripping out a chunk of the roof along with it.
The corner store had stared at him with a single broken mouth, a rictus grin of sharp metallic teeth. He didn’t know what to think. It had to have been a truck, but there was no wreckage in sight. Not even tire marks. Just shattered glass.
That was before he had seen one of them, seen one of those polished monstrosities with his own eyes, instead of on an iPhone screen or in a newspaper. That was before he knew how tall they were. That was before he understood.
The man knelt, lit the fire, and stowed his lighter. He set the pots to boil, stood, and strode throughout the first floor of the house, only to soon find himself staring at the refrigerator.
Beneath a magnet like Captain America’s shield was a folded note written in marker:
Dear Mr. G., thank you for being a great teacher. It made me very happy when you stayed inside for recess to help me with my math. I’ll miss you, Annie.
The handwriting was crude and jagged, authored by a young child.
The man took the piece of paper and unfolded it. Inside was a watercolor painting. There was a bright yellow sun, a big blue sky, fluffy white tufts of clouds, and little rows of idyllic trees and brush. Whoever Annie was, she’d taken pride in her work.
It would have been the kind of thing a kid normally made in school—that is, if it wasn’t for the three black scythes rising out of the trees, each one twice as tall as the pines themselves.
If it wasn’t for the long, ragged, jagged skull and the bulbous, bright blue eyes peering out from above the wood.
Without those additions, it would have been a very nice painting indeed.
With a shrug, the man tossed the watercolor into the fire. Annie’s feelings would not be hurt. Neither would Mr. G.’s.
After a surprisingly filling dinner of mashed potatoes and boiled vegetables, along with a painless deposit in a toilet that had seen neither running water nor an occupant’s backside in at least three or four years, the man gathered his belongings and trudged upstairs to find a place to sleep.
Dawn was gaining on him, the sun creeping ever closer.
The man fumbled for the bedroom door in the dim hallway and creaked it open…
Something was wrong. The room appeared to be located in outer space.
There was a great shining blackness where there ought to have been a layer of moldy paint.
The wallpaper was made of stars, and the spiders on the wall were instead trawling comets, distressed satellites wondering where their masters had gone.
The man rubbed his eyes, then opened them again.
He was still on solid ground, still far, far away from the old reaches of infinity.
The cosmic vision was instead a gaping hole in the roof and wall of the house.
It hovered across the far end of the bedroom, on the other side of the king-sized bed, above two toppled stationary bikes: a gash taller than the man and as wide as his wingspan.