by Ike Hamill
Judy took a right and found a car pulled over to the side. It had left fresh tracks through the light snow, and the driver’s door was hanging open. She saw no sign of the driver, save for two footprints on the pavement. Judy swerved wide around the car and took in these details.
She pointed her car up the hill and headed for the heart of the city to look for signs of life.
CHAPTER 5: ROBBY
ROBBY DIDN’T MAKE IT.
Before he reached the emergency exit at the end of the hall. One of the other doors swung open and Lyle lurched through. The man squinted into the light from Robby’s flashlight and banged against the cinderblock wall as the door swung shut behind him.
“I tried to be friends with you and you sprayed me,” Lyle said. “What kind of person does that? We don’t have any doctors here, no medical attention I can seek. We’re the only two people left, and you pepper-sprayed me?”
“I told you,” Robby said, backing away, “we’re not the only two people left. My friends are coming. Now don’t come closer or I’ll spray you again.” He held up his flashlight with one hand and rummaged with the other, trying to find the can of spray in his jacket pocket.
Lyle stumbled forward as Robby retreated.
The can sprayed inside Robby’s pocket when his finger accidentally triggered the nozzle. Robby pulled out the can and held it out, next to the flashlight. With the can and beam of light, he willed Lyle to stay put, but it didn’t work. The man kept coming and Robby kept backing away. Robby’s elbow hit the door handle and he reached back to press down on the lever.
“Keep back,” Robby said. “I said, I’ll spray you again.”
“I don’t know how it could be much worse,” Lyle said. He punctuated his sentence with another fit of hoarse coughing.
“I barely got you last time,” Robby said. “It will be much worse next time.” His own hand, where he’d accidentally sprayed his skin in his pocket, was starting to heat up. Robby opened the door just enough to slip in and fired a warning shot at Lyle as he let the door close behind him. He waited a second with his outstretched arms a few inches from the door. When Lyle pulled the door open, Robby shot another blast of spray his direction. Lyle shut the door fast.
Robby didn’t wait. He turned and sprinted for the front of the kitchen. He remembered the tomato sauce spill, but stepped in it anyway. His stolen shoe slipped and he nearly ran face-first into a pizza oven. When he regained his balance he picked up speed and left the kitchen behind.
Robby felt trapped in the small building, running from one side to the other. This time, he detoured through the gift shop, remembering one of the items on display behind the register. He slipped behind the counter and jumped up, trying to reach the signed Red Sox baseball bat mounted next to the photo of Fenway Park. He grabbed it with his pepper-spray-hand and dragged it down from its mounts. From the direction of the food court, he heard Lyle crash into a table and the sound of chairs toppling.
Robby took the bat and headed back for the main lobby.
Several more corpses had awoken and they formed a cluster over near the glass doors.
Robby put his flashlight—still on—in his pocket. He didn’t need it with the moonlight now streaming through the glass. He picked the smallest pane, the lower half of the door that didn’t have dead people clustered around it, and swung the bat at it. His first blow, one that didn’t have much behind it, just bounced. Robby tightened his grip and swung for the fences. Each blow reverberated through his shoulders as Robby bounced the bat off the pane of glass. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Robby had used a brick to smash out a glass door of a grocery store. That glass had given way immediately.
Robby glanced around for something heavier and harder to hit the window with. His eyes landed on Lyle, who had crept down the hallway and now regarded Robby through squinted eyes.
“I’m all done screwing around with you,” Lyle said. “Put that goddam bat down.”
Robby shifted the bat to his left hand and re-armed his right with the pepper spray. He shook the can twice before he said, “There’s still plenty of spray left in here. I can keep hitting you with it all night.”
“I said I’m all done screwing around,” Lyle said. He pulled his hand from the deep pocket of his long coat and held it straight out towards Robby.
In the cold moonlight, Robby saw the blue rectangular metal of Lyle’s gun.
CHAPTER 6: JUDY
“THAT’S ALL VERY INCREDIBLE,” Sister Glen said.
“It’s the truth,” Judy said.
“I did catch a glimpse of your car as you pulled up, and I don’t remember a hat on the antenna,” Sister Glen said.
“It fell off on the trip,” Judy said. “The wind is quite strong.”
“Well the phones are out, and the power is out, too,” Sister Glen said. “Let’s go down to the Bayside kitchen and see what we find, yes? We’ll just drive carefully. You made it here, I suppose there’s no reason to think we won’t be perfectly fine going a few blocks?”
“Yes, sure,” Judy said. “I’m just glad to have found another person. I was getting pretty freaked out when it seemed like I was the only one left on Earth.”
“I’m sure that was quite a shock,” Sister Glen said. She smiled and nodded at Judy before slipping down from the big chair and rounding the desk. “Come now.”
Judy let Sister Glen lead her back to the front door. Judy pushed open the door.
“I’ll just lock up and get the van. I’ll pull up right there on Ackley Street. You can follow me down the hill.”
“Thank you, sister.”
The old woman pulled the door shut and left Judy back on the steps. Judy ran down to her car. She turned it around so she would be facing the correct direction when the nun pulled out. Judy checked the clock on her car’s radio compulsively as she waited. It read twelve-thirty-seven when she got in. It seemed stuck on that number. Judy looked in every direction—looking for the nun, or looking for any trouble—and then back to the clock. She repeated this sequence again and again until the clock finally changed to twelve-thirty-eight. Judy was ready to give up on the tiny woman by the time the clock read twelve-forty-one, but then she saw it. A dark gray van pulled up Ackley Street and stopped at the sign. The nun’s little black hat was barely visible over the steering wheel. The van sat at the intersection for several seconds and then the blinker came on.
“Thank God,” Judy said. She turned her wheel and readied herself to pull away from the curb. Reflexively, she checked her rearview mirror for traffic. When she looked back to the van, it was still sitting at the stop sign. The blinker flashed on and off.
Judy noticed that the van’s blinker stopped flashing at the same moment that she noticed her car had died. It hadn’t just stalled, it was completely dark, like the traffic signals. None of the lights on the dash were on and the clock on the radio had shut off as well.
The van moved very slowly. It rolled backwards down the hill, away from the stop sign. Judy put her car in park and tried turning the key off and on several times. It wouldn’t respond. The van was picking up speed. As it rolled away, it revealed the little nun, Sister Glen, kneeling on the pavement in the fresh snow. She must have exited the van just before it started rolling, Judy figured. Judy watched the little woman raise her clenched hands to the sky in prayer and turn her horrified face up to the clouds.
The nun’s arm shot out to her side and her little hand emerged from beneath the cloak. Her finger pointed directly at the front doors of the church. The nun rose slightly and then vanished. Judy had a good look at the disappearance this time, but she still couldn’t make sense of it. The little woman, dressed in her cloak—formal and conservative, yes, but not exactly ‘habit’—had been kneeling in the middle of the street one second, and the next she jerked up and back and vanished.
Judy threw open her car door and ran. She hunched over, afraid to look at the sky, and lunged up the steps to the church doors. She’d heard the heavy doo
rs lock behind her when Sister Glen showed her out, but she reached for the handle anyway. When she tugged, the door swung open easily and Judy plowed through the gap. She pulled the door shut behind her and found the lever to lock it shut. Judy ran the length of the lobby to the window which overlooked the intersection.
The van had veered off the road, rolled across a sidewalk, and crashed into the side of an industrial electrical supply shop.
Judy scanned the lobby, looking for doors that might lead to stairs. She wanted to be lower, to bury herself in the building and get farther away from the sky. Everyone seemed to disappear up into the sky, so she wanted to be underground with the weight of the entire church overhead.
Judy pushed through the heavy swinging doors into the nave. A bowl of holy water stood in the center of the entry. Judy moved around it and started between the rows of pews. The ceiling drew her eyes upward to the heights of the arches. At the far side of the room, on the right side of the transept, Judy saw an exit sign and headed for it.
She didn’t make it.
As she jogged up the center aisle, movement above drew her gaze and she saw them. The shadows were roaming. Judy stopped, thinking that perhaps she was somehow casting a shadow up there. A shadow jumped—it moved from a nook between two arches and slid down the arch into a deep corner. Judy fell to her knees and waited for it to swoop down and take her. She knew it must have been one of these shadows that took the nun and her neighbors from the street.
Judy prayed.
As a teen, Judy had rejected her mother’s religion, but it came back to her in less than a second. She prayed first for protection—some prayer her mom had recited—but those lines seemed to merely beseech God for strength and wisdom in the face of adversity. Judy wanted more than that. She wanted God to reach out and protect her with his power.
A noise, like whistling wind, echoed through the arches above her and Judy crouched lower, touching her interlaced fingers to her knees and forehead.
A prayer by St. Augustine popped into her head.
“Watch, O Lord, with those who wake, or watch, or weep tonight, and give Your Angels and Saints charge over those who sleep.”
She shook her head, but kept whispering the lines to herself. It was wrong—the prayer was meant to protect those who were sleeping or weak—but it was the closest she could come up with. A cold wind brushed the back of Judy’s neck and she imagined the black shadows swooping down to carry her off like the others.
Judy finished the prayer, “Shield Your joyous ones. And all for Your love’s sake. Amen.”
Another brush of wind was accompanied by that whistling sound. Judy stifled a scream and made her body into a tiny crouching ball on the cold floor of the church.
This time, Judy prayed with her own words—“I know I haven’t always been a good person, but please don’t let them take me away like the others. I promise I will be better. I promise my devotion to you and to…”
Judy gasped as something plucked at the back of her jacket.
“Please, just tell me what you want. I don’t know what you want,” Judy said. Her voice cracked as she sobbed into her hands.
Something grabbed the back of her jacket, and Judy felt herself sliding forward. She screamed when she opened her eyes and saw the tiles flying by under her knees.
Her body slid across the cold floor as her thoughts slipped backwards, into the past.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
Judy fought to stay in the present, but her mind wouldn’t obey. She dropped into a memory from the month before. In it, Judy was sitting on her couch, her legs starting to sweat under a thick quilt, watching the muted newscast on TV. She had her phone pressed up against her ear a little too tight. Her ear ached from the pressure.
Judy threw off the quilt, crossed the room, slid open the window near her kitchen table and stepped through to the small porch there. It was just big enough to stand on—just a way to get to the ladder which satisfied the fire code. Judy kept an ashtray out on the railing.
“I got a note from Crusty. He said he already knows which one we’ll pick,” Maureen said over the phone.
Judy lit her lighter behind her back and then brought it up to the cigarette clamped between her lips. She took a very slow drag as she lit it and then exhaled through the corner of her mouth.
“Are you smoking?” Maureen asked.
“No, Mom,” Judy said. “Of course not.”
She held the cigarette down at her waist, as if her mom would see it over the phone.
“How many people are coming this weekend?” Judy asked. She was trying to move the conversation away from the Christmas tree. Each year since Judy’s sophomore year in high school, they’d cut down their own Christmas tree from Eastman’s Evergreen Meadows—a lot about twenty minutes west of their Connecticut home. Hugh Eastman ran the lot, but Judy’s family called him Crusty because they’d called his father Crusty before he died. Everyone claimed ignorance as to the origin of the name Crusty, but Judy knew. Her older brothers Jon and Wes, the twins, had invented the name. They invented all the nicknames in the family, regardless of anyone else’s opinion. Because of Jon and Wes, Judy had an Uncle Scribble and a Grandma Wooly.
Before Judy’s sophomore year, when they’d switched to a cut-your-own lot, the family used to spend hours and hours shopping for a Christmas tree. They’d open with the same question at each lot—“Do you have any binary trees?” Nobody ever had any idea what they meant by a binary tree. You’d think that over the years the people who ran the lots would eventually clue into the request, but they never did. Perhaps they had too much turnover to offer perennial continuity on such questions.
What Judy’s family sought was a tree with two tops. Judy wondered how they ever succeeded in finding one, but they did every year. One would think that the Christmas tree growers wouldn’t bother to cut and ship a binary tree, but somewhere, usually in the back of the twentieth place they visited, Jon or Wes would shout, “Got it!” They’d strap the freakish tree, regardless of how sparse or misshapen, to the roof of the wagon and head home with their binary tree.
“I haven’t heard from that many people. No more than twenty or thirty,” Maureen said. Judy’s mom always threw a Thanksgiving party two weekends before the big day to leave the holiday just for family. “I wish you could come.”
“I just can’t get away with work and all,” Judy said. “And I don’t know if my car could make it.”
“I wish you’d just get rid of that thing,” Maureen said.
Judy rolled her eyes and took a long drag. Where did her mom think the money would come from? She’d spent everything on the first and last month, and security deposit. Leaving Shane had sapped her savings, but it had been totally worth every penny.
“Thanksgiving?” her mom asked, after a pause.
“No. I can’t make that either.”
“So you’re just going to sit in your apartment up in Maine, all alone? You’ll be able to come for Christmas though, right?" Maureen asked. It didn’t sound like a plea, or even a request. Somehow it sounded like a complaint or censure.
“Sure, mom,” Judy said.
Whenever someone new came to the house between Thanksgiving and New Years, they wouldn’t even have to ask about the binary tree. Before they could spot the pictures of the twins, dressed in their identical football uniforms—their numbers had been 17a and 17b—or their identical sweaters, Maureen would volunteer information about the tree. “Of course the tree is not in reference to the twins,” Maureen would say. “We’ve just always had a tradition of getting a binary tree.”
“He’ll be in town, you know,” Maureen said.
“I’m sorry?” Judy said. She wasn’t being difficult. She’d legitimately lost track of the context of the comment.
“He… will be… in town,” Maureen said. Whenever asked for an explanation of a statement, Judy’s mom would always just repeat herself very slowly.
Judy figured it out the second time—her mo
m was referring to her ex-boyfriend, Shane. His family lived about a block and a half from Maureen and Owen, Judy’s parents.
“That’s not enticing to me,” Judy said.
“I understand that things didn’t work out this time, honey, but you don’t have to be so hard on him,” Maureen said.
“Thanks, Mom. I appreciate it,” Judy said. “I appreciate you taking my side for once,” she didn’t say.
“I’ll let you go then," Maureen said. “You must be busy.”
“Thanks. I’ll talk to you soon,” Judy said.
“Goodbye.”
“Bye.”
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
She opened her eyes and blinked several times. She was laying on the floor of the church, her face was pressed against the first step of the chancel. At the top of those steps, Judy would find herself in the sanctuary. She used to daydream during services of a desperate man bursting through the doors and running up the aisle chased by the police. He would fly up the stairs and demand immunity from prosecution while pleading his innocence to the congregation.
But this wasn’t the church from Judy’s memory. This was Maine, and Judy had grown up in Connecticut—miles away and a lifetime ago, back before the world had started to fall apart. And the top of these stairs looked like danger, not sanctuary.
Just above the altar—from her angle, Judy couldn’t see if it rested on the altar or hovered just above it—a black shape punched a hole in the air.
Her breath caught in her throat.
Judy closed her eyes and opened them again, thinking that there was no way the shape would still be there.
It was.
At the other side of the church, the doors banged open and hit the wall. She jerked her head around in time to see them begin to shut again. Judy clenched her teeth and moved her eyes back to the altar. The black shape was gone.
