Refugees

by Kim Fielding

  “Walter—”

  “I’m going for a walk. We can talk later, okay?”

  With obvious reluctance, Martin nodded.

  Walter strolled slowly past the neat little houses with the colorful gardens. Every one of them was perfect. He supposed that should have been a comfort to him—it was certainly a contrast to the destruction he’d seen so much of during the war and then the squalor he’d lived in this past year. But it discomfited him instead. People weren’t meant to be perfect. Even in his parents’ neighborhood, where the houses were big and the cars new, some of the yards ran to weeds during summer and chalked hopscotch squares were scrawled along the sidewalks.

  Jesus, his brain was all twisted, wasn’t it? Here he was, enjoying a respite in a sweet little town with a sweet, sweet man, and yet his goddamn brain kept telling him something was wrong. It was as if his inner alarm had begun ringing the first day he put on a uniform and he’d never learned how to turn the fucking thing off.

  After he’d mustered out and returned to Chicago, one of the first things he did was lock himself in the second-floor bathroom of his parents’ house for a long, hot bath. His mother had eventually knocked on the door out of concern, and when Walter told her to go away, his brother Charlie pounded next. “Stop jerking off, Wally!”

  But Walter hadn’t been jerking off—his libido had been nonexistent then. He’d simply been soaking in blessed solitude, hoping to finally rid himself of the dust of war. He hadn’t yet realized that the dust had worked its way into his mind and soul and would be with him forever.

  Just past the last house in town, Walter saw someone round a bend in the road, walking his way. He recognized the man when they got closer; it was the same guy he and Martin had run into the previous day. Burt Evans.

  Burt stopped and smiled at him. “Hello.”

  Walter nodded. He wasn’t good at small talk and didn’t know what to say. Something about the weather? It was cool and slightly misty.

  “What’s your name?” Burt asked.

  “Walter Clark.”

  “Waaaalter Claaaark.” Burt drew out both names. “Interesting. Walter is almost water, isn’t it? And Clark—it has all those clicking sounds.”

  “It’s an ordinary name.”

  Burt grinned. “Not where I come from.”

  “Oh. Well, there are probably thousands of Walter Clarks in the United States.”

  “Now, that is one thing I do not understand. How can more than one person have the same name?”

  Wondering if he’d misheard the question, Walter blinked at him. “Uh… it’s just a name. I mean, hell. My dad and my oldest brother are both Robert Newman Clarks. My brother’s got a junior hanging on there and goes by Bob, but it’s still the same name.”

  Burt squinted at him and scratched his balding scalp. “So strange. Where I come from, your name is who you are. It changes as you do, but it’s always unique to you. After all, nobody else is the same as you.”

  If Burt had been smiling, Walter would have thought the guy was pulling his leg. But as far as he could tell, Burt was serious. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Walter said.

  “No, two Robert Newman Clarks—that makes no sense.”

  “Where are you from?”

  Burt waved vaguely behind him. “Far away. You’ve never heard of the place.” Then he just stood there, staring.

  “Well, I was taking a walk, and—”

  “We value Martin.”

  “Uh….”

  “Of course, we value all members of our community. Everyone is important. But Martin, we’ve worried about him. He’s been so sad for so long.”

  Walter glanced around them. Nobody else was in sight, yet he felt surrounded. Threatened. He shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and was both regretful and relieved that he’d left his gun back at the motor court.

  Burt took a step closer, his brow creased with concern and one hand raised. “Oh, no, Mr. Clark! No, no. Nobody here will harm you. I’m sorry. Your… your way of communicating is so clumsy sometimes. I wasn’t clear.”

  Walter had to force himself not to step back. “I don’t—”

  “What I was trying to say, Mr. Clark, is that you make Martin happy, and we are grateful for that.”

  “I’m just renting a cabin from him.”

  Burt snorted. “That is a very poor lie. And unnecessary. I simply wanted to thank you for making Martin happy. And I wanted to ask you to consider staying with us. Everyone in our community is important, Mr. Clark. You would be too.” He patted Walter’s arm twice, then continued on his way, leaving Walter standing there.

  It felt as if it took several minutes for Walter to get himself moving, but it must have been less. Eventually his legs worked again, taking him away from Kiteeshaa and into the woods. He thought he might be heading for the same path as yesterday, the one that led to the clearing where he’d met Martin. But no, he didn’t turn there today. He just kept going, and less than a mile later, the road simply stopped.

  Walter stopped too, just at the edge of the blacktop, and stared into a nearly impenetrable thicket of trees and bushes and ferns. It didn’t make any sense. Sure, sometimes a road dead-ended, but there was no reason for this one to halt where it did. The town itself was nearly two miles away, and nothing lay past it, so why did the road continue on, as if the builders had intended it to lead somewhere but then had suddenly given up?

  Nothing here made sense. For the first time, Walter seriously questioned his own sanity. He hadn’t been right since the war, he knew that, but he hadn’t…. Oh, Christ! What if he’d lost his tether to reality? He’d seen that during the war too—fellows cracking under the fear and stress, babbling back at voices nobody else heard.

  The idea terrified him so much that he stumbled on wobbly legs to the side of the pavement and collapsed onto a fallen log. He leaned his elbows on his knees, buried his face in his hands, and tried to get his lungs and heart to work properly. Maybe none of this was real. Maybe he was locked up in a loony bin back in Chicago or somewhere else between Illinois and Oregon, hallucinating about a perfect town and a perfect lover. Fuck, maybe he’d never even left Europe. What if the war hadn’t ended, people were still being blown to pieces, and he’d never gone home?

  Walter vomited, narrowly missing his shoes.

  When he finished retching, his throat hurt, his mouth tasted terrible, and he was lightheaded and shaky. His father and brothers would yell at him if they saw him so weak. For a long moment, he seriously considered walking past the end of the road—pushing his way through the thorns and underbrush until the forest swallowed him for good.

  Instead, he slowly made his way back to town.

  When Walter returned to the inn, there was no sign of Martin. Perhaps he was in the office, but Walter didn’t check. He didn’t want to have that discussion Martin was insisting on—not ever, but certainly not now, when he was weary and confused. He entered unit three, shut the door, and chained it.

  The bed was freshly made, and a vase of new flowers graced the little table. All roses this time—delicate pink ones. Next to them, a cloth-covered plate held several sugar cookies, a handful of walnut meats, and some deep-red berries he didn’t recognize. Beside the plate, a slip of paper contained a note in neat handwriting: Milk in the fridge. See you soon.—M

  Sure enough, the little refrigerator held a quart of milk. Walter drank straight from the glass container, washing away the sour taste of vomit. The milk helped settle his stomach but not his mind.

  He removed his shoes and jacket and, with the rest of his clothing still on, climbed into bed. He hoped he could find that simplest escape from his problems—untroubled sleep—and that the usual nightmares wouldn’t torment him. But he also removed his pistol from the drawer and set it atop the bedside table, a talisman against danger. With the curtains drawn and all the lights off but one, the cabin was nearly as dark as night. Walter closed his eyes, burrowed into the bedding that smelled faintly like lemons and
violets, and fell asleep.

  5

  He didn’t know what awakened him from a dream about flying, but he sat up suddenly in bed, looking frantically around. The lamp gave enough light to prove that no one else was there. He couldn’t hear anything but the thump of his heart and the rasp of his breathing.

  No. That wasn’t true. He heard something else. Well, almost heard it. Like catching movement from the corner of your eye, only this was a sound he couldn’t quite capture. An echo, perhaps, of a noise from when he was asleep. Except the echo—the sound that wasn’t quite there—went on and on. It made his nerves thrum.

  Walter got out of bed and tucked the pistol into the back of his trousers. He put on his shoes and jacket and went outside.

  He’d somehow managed to sleep away a good part of the day, and now the late-afternoon sun shone weakly through thin clouds. The lights inside the Kitee Café looked bright through the windows, but when Walter moved closer, he saw that the restaurant was empty. No sign even of Dorothy. The village was never a hive of activity, but now it was quieter than ever. The door to the mechanic’s bay at the gas station was closed, and nobody lounged in front. He hurried over to the grocer’s and the clothing store. In both cases, the doors were unlocked but the shops empty. The plant nursery was abandoned. Panicked, he finally entered the motor court office. He even barged into the private space of Martin’s apartment—which Walter hadn’t seen before—but Martin wasn’t there.

  As far as he could tell, he was the only person left in town.

  The blood rushed in his skull, making clear thinking difficult. He couldn’t come up with a single scenario that would result in the disappearance of a town’s entire population yet leave the buildings and their contents untouched. No signs of panic, no indication that anyone had left in haste. Their cars were still there, parked peacefully in driveways and beside the road.

  He considered getting in his own car and driving straight to the highway. He could contact the police in Newport. Only… what would he tell them? He’d taken a nap and somehow misplaced 178 people? Besides, that hint of a sound continued to tickle at his eardrums. It drew him slowly down the road—not to his car, not toward the highway, but inland. In the direction of the dead end.

  He knocked on a couple of doors as he went. Nobody answered.

  The farther he walked, the faster he went. By the time he reached the final bend, he was running. Then the road ended—and nobody was there. He couldn’t even hear birds chirping.

  His lungs burned as he stood on the pavement and wondered what to do next. The sound was still there. No louder, no quieter. Still scraping along his nerves, as if he were a cat having his fur petted the wrong way.

  And then the answer—which should have been obvious—came to him. The clearing, of course.

  He backtracked to the path. The daylight was failing, and if he returned, it would be difficult in the dark. That problem didn’t especially concern him right now, though, and he trotted alongside the little stream. The sound grew louder as he turned to scale the hill. Well, maybe louder wasn’t the right word. Hell, sound wasn’t the right word either. It was a vibration that reminded him of the way the ground shook under the tread of tanks. He felt it in his bones, and now it seemed as if the thrumming had a pattern, like a tune he couldn’t quite identify.

  When he neared the crest of the hill, he at first assumed that there was a break in the clouds catching the last long rays of the sun, because the hilltop glowed. But he quickly realized that the color of the light was wrong—too green for sunset. Besides, the glow pulsed to the same beat as the thrumming.

  When he got within view of the clearing, he froze.

  Dozens of figures stood in the open space under the trees. His first thought on seeing them was fireflies, but that was absurd. These things were taller than he was, roughly human-shaped though more slender. But it was impossible to discern their features because they were lit from within by an emerald radiance that ebbed and brightened rhythmically.

  The hairs on Walter’s nape stood erect, and the air smelled of ozone.

  He wanted to convince himself that he was looking at… statues of some kind. A bizarre art installation someone had managed to stick in the middle of nowhere, inside the space of twenty-four hours. But he knew that wasn’t true. The figures didn’t just pulse and hum. They moved. Slowly, yes, but definitely. One of them would begin to burn more brightly, and the others would turn to face it. A moment later, another would take a turn.

  Walter wanted to run but couldn’t. The scene terrified him, yet it was also the most heartbreakingly beautiful thing he’d ever experienced. He could tell that these creatures cared for one another, respected one another. Often two of them would touch, and both would momentarily flare with a softer hue of green. That sense of peace Walter had noticed since he first arrived was almost palpable here, but it didn’t calm him.

  Perhaps he made a sound, or perhaps one of the creatures happened to glance his way. In any case, they all turned to look at him, their lights glaring so brightly he could barely see.

  And then one of them was moving toward him. Running. Its long legs covered the ground quickly and its color turned bright red before fading and then dying completely.

  Walter yanked the gun from the back of his waistband. His hand shook as he held the weapon in front of him. He wanted to see what was running toward him—it seemed to him that it was changing, becoming shorter and more solid—but it was too strongly backlit by the creatures behind it.

  The creature moved even faster, and Walter was suddenly certain that it was actually a Wehrmacht soldier. The soldier wore a rounded helmet, a gray-green uniform with a silver eagle on the chest, a black belt cinched high.

  Walter pulled the trigger.

  “Walter!” The man staggered, then fell back onto the ground. And dear God, of course he wasn’t a German soldier at all but Martin, his sweet Martin. Naked and spurting blood from his torso.

  With an anguished cry, Walter dropped the gun and ran to Martin’s side, then collapsed next to him. Blood was everywhere, everywhere, and Walter was a goddamn medic, but he didn’t have his kit. No bandages or plasters or sutures or morphine. Nothing but his hands and his own shirt, which he frantically wadded up and pressed to the wound.

  Martin stared up at him, eyes wide. “I wanted to tell you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.” He reached for Walter with a red-smeared hand.

  Walter couldn’t say anything but desperate clots of Latin, the mostly forgotten phrases from the Sunday services his babcia dragged him to when he was a boy. He was still trying to stop the bleeding when arms grabbed him and pulled him away.

  He fought. “No! No! He’s hemorrhaging!” But there were many of them, and they were strong, and they kept him from pushing back to Martin. He couldn’t even see what was happening to Martin, not through the confusing press of glowing thin bodies and pale, nude skin.

  Still restrained, Walter collapsed to his knees and wailed. “No more dying, please! No more! Not him, God.” He dropped his voice and mumbled more of his incoherent prayers. He’d heard so many of these pleading words from wounded men, dying men, each of them crying out for his god or his mother or someone. The words slightly different, the accents varying, but the meaning always the same. No death. No death for me today.

  Eventually Walter’s strength gave out completely and he grew silent. His hands were sticky with Martin’s blood, but he still couldn’t see Martin due to the crowd of townspeople and the gathering night. Then someone knelt in front of him—a naked woman with a long, dark braid.

  “Are you hurt, Walter?” Dorothy asked.

  “I shot him. I didn’t mean to hurt him and I…. Four years in the Army and I never killed anyone. I was a medic. But now I’ve shot Martin. Oh God.” He shuddered. And then, although it hardly mattered anymore, he looked at her plaintively. “Who are you?”

  “Refugees from far away. We came here to escape war, but a bit of it found us anyway.” She
seemed sad rather than angry.

  “Wh-what did Martin want from me?”

  “Companionship. Sex. Love. He was lonely and a little lost, Walter. Just like you.”

  “I killed him.”

  Dorothy shook her head and stood. Then she spoke to some of the people nearby—these people were wearing clothes—but Walter didn’t try to understand what she said. It didn’t matter. He was pulled upright and led away from the clearing, the hands guiding him gently but firmly.

  Somehow he stumbled down the path to the road, his silent companions leading him unerringly in the darkness. When they came to the motor court, the townspeople tugged him into unit three. “Stay here,” said a young man he didn’t recognize. “Clean up and rest. Do you want something to eat?”

  Walter shook his head in confusion. “I killed him. Why aren’t you… you….” He didn’t know how these people meted out punishment, but surely they had some method of exacting retribution on those who deserved it.

  “You’re too distraught to make sense of anything now. Please. Get some sleep. If you need anything, we’ll be just outside.”

  He didn’t want to sleep; in fact, he felt like he could never sleep again. But he couldn’t find the words to argue, so he nodded. The young man and the other people exited the cabin, shutting the door behind them.

  Walter didn’t bother to lock it.

  For an eternity, he sat on one of the wooden chairs and stared at the blood on his hands. It looked like ordinary human blood, no different from the stuff that had stained his skin so often during the war. Smelled like it too, rich and metallic. And when Walter stuck out his tongue for a small lick… yes. Iron and salt.

  But Martin wasn’t human, was he? None of the residents of Kiteeshaa were. They were…. Walter’s mind stalled, refusing to provide alternatives. Refugees, they said. Maybe that was all that mattered.

  Walter didn’t sleep. He instead spent the night either pacing the little cabin or sitting and staring at the wall. By dawn he’d showered, sluicing away the blood, and put on fresh clothing. He drank some milk and ate the cookies, nuts, and fruit from the plate Martin had left for him. Martin’s note was still there too. Walter folded it and put it into his wallet.