Strangers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  No, you can hardly play the guiltless card, Jer-Jer. Remember the girl. The pregnant girl.

  He looked down the hall. Partly to make sure no one – say, a madman with a razor sharp knife – was sneaking up on them. Mostly to silence the voice in his mind. There was nothing. No movement in the still-lit corridor.

  Sheri must have caught him looking and gotten spooked, because she drew away from Ann and looked down the hall as well. Still nothing.

  Nothing. But the lights went out again. Darkness, broken only by the flashlight that lay on the floor near Drew. He had been holding it when he was killed. It must have rolled away.

  Jerry reached for it, and his hands trembled. For some reason the fact that he was going to touch the flashlight that his son had been touching felt like conspiring to murder him. Like Drew might not really be dead, if only they didn’t have to take the flashlight that he had been holding.

  Jerry’s hand closed around the flashlight. He turned it down the hallway, suddenly sure that the Killer would be there, would have come in the darkness, come for Sheri or Ann or him. And the panic he felt was wonderful, was delicious, because it freed him from the grief that had threatened to overwhelm him. It blanketed the sorrow, covered and hid it. Later he would feel it. But now, now the fear was almost welcome.

  No one was in the hall. Just an endless well of perfect black, and then the flashlight beam illuminating a thin spear and leaving the rest in darkness that danced and writhed before his eyes.

  The lights came back on. The shadows fled, but who knew for how long? Jerry left the flashlight on, and his grip tightened around the heavy metal cylinder.

  Ann was still crying, still holding Drew. Jerry looked at her, then locked eyes with his daughter. Sheri nodded. She pulled gently at her mother. “Mom,” she said. “Mom, we have to go.”

  Ann didn’t answer.

  “Mom, we can’t just stay here.” Sheri took her mother’s arm and pulled on it gently. Ann wrenched it away, but wiped at her eyes and Jerry could see her visibly trying to pull herself together. She laid Drew down. Looked at him one last, long time. Then let Sheri draw her away, toward Jerry, as though seeking safety in numbers.

  Yeah, right.

  “What now?” asked Sheri.

  “I told you, I don’t know,” said Jerry, and suddenly he was the one struggling to maintain control, struggling not to think of his boy – his dead boy – laying only a few feet away. “I don’t know, I don’t know.” He stopped speaking. Shut his mouth and ground his teeth together hard enough that he thought he heard a molar crack. “Why is this happening?” he finally whispered.

  “The basement,” Ann said.

  The words were so quiet Jerry felt like he might have imagined them. “What?” he said.

  “The basement,” she repeated. “One way in, one way out. Supplies. We barricade ourselves in there. Wait until someone comes for us. Until someone comes to help.”

  As if to answer her plan, a creak sounded from somewhere upstairs. Jerry couldn’t place it, not exactly. Fear and grief had stolen his ability to tell with any certainty.

  “What if no one comes?” asked Sheri. The question that Jerry didn’t want to hear, but the one that he knew everyone – even Ann, who had proposed their only plan of action – was thinking of.

  So connected. Facebook. Twitter. Google Plus. A hundred other ways to stay in touch with a hundred thousand people you’ll never see. But when the lines are cut, when the doors are shut… no one comes. The connections aren’t real. The friends are a lie, the followers fade.

  Almost as clear as if it was recorded in his mind, Jerry heard Drew saying, “Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

  The lights went out. But it was different this time. Where before they had extinguished all at once, the entire house falling instantly into darkness, now the darkness seemed to be moving from one end of the house to the other. Moving toward them in an expanding cylinder of darkness, a stygian serpent swallowing the universe from the inside out.

  Click. The far hall fell dark.

  Click. Upstairs bedrooms that had thrown cones of light into the hall only a moment before now grew cold and dim.

  Click. Offices and media rooms disappeared into void.

  And then Jerry thought he saw something. Just a spot in the darkness, the huge black eye of the serpent. Sheri gasped, and he knew she had seen it as well.

  The Killer.

  The lights flickered on and off, and then the patch was gone. The Killer was hidden. But still there.

  Still coming for them.

  “Dad,” whispered Sheri.

  “Go,” he said. “Go, go.”

  No one moved. He thought Ann and Sheri might actually be petrified by panic. He had to lead.

  He moved. Ran. Trusting that they would follow. Because they had to.

  A moment later, he heard footsteps, running after him as he sprinted for the basement. Hiding, gone to ground and hoping. A pitiful plan, he knew.

  But it was all he had. All any of them had.

  62

  He waits and watches and then he watches and waits. A time for everything, and everything in its time. Taking turns, because to do other would be chaos. Not everything can happen all at once. So he seals them in, then he shuts them down. One at a time, any who won’t play the game properly.

  “My turn,” he says, in a voice so quiet it travels barely past the steady thump-thump-thump of his heart. Which is important. He has to be quiet, has to listen. That’s the important thing about his turn, about this turn.

  Listening. Listening in his small dark space.

  He likes the darkness. He grew up in darkness, grew up in the black, spent enough time in it that he finally learned that it was – and always had been – his friend.

  Sometimes he even closes his eyes when in the light, just to be closer to the dark. Because it is his friend. Because it reminds him of home. Of his life before he came outside, and found the world filled with madness and chaos and secrets and lies.

  He stiffens. Sound. There was the sound of the voices, that had always been there. The three voices that were left, their words rising and falling and falling and rising like a symphony orchestrated by the greatest musical genius the world had ever known. Maybe that wasn’t too far off.

  He frowns. That thought smacks of hubris. He might have to beat himself for that later. Perfection is order, and order can never be achieved when one person steps ahead of another. All must be equal. All must know what their brothers know. No secrets, no differences.

  Yes, a beating. But later.

  Another sound. Footsteps. Running.

  He tenses. This is it. His time. His turn.

  He cracks open the door. Just a bit. Just enough to see the nothing beyond. All is darkness. And that is right. That is what he planned.

  Then a quick ray of brightness chases away his friend the dark, pierces it like a needle, poisons it with flashes of quicksilver and pushes the black away.

  He frowns. He considers taking the flashlight. But then he worries they might simply fall to pieces. It is a delicate line to be walked, trying to teach a lesson without having them tumble into madness.

  The flash passes him, along with the heaviest footsteps. And then another set of footsteps.

  And then he hears the third set. Light, quick. They can only belong to….

  “Sheri,” he breathes in that same sly voice.

  The footsteps hitch, as though maybe their owner hears him, hears the name whispered in dark, or simply senses… something.

  That is when he moves.

  He is fast. He’s always been fast. So fast his father joked he could outrun himself in a footrace. So when he throws open the closet door and grabs Sheri she doesn’t have the chance to make a single sound. Silver needles of light from her still-running parents illuminate her terrified face, darning fear-lines across her beautiful forehead.

  She can’t scream. Can’t even breathe, because he has a hand clasped over her
mouth and her nose so hard he thinks he might have broken something. Her eyes roll back.

  The light fades.

  His friend the darkness comes and hides them both.

  And with it, he disappears, his now-unconscious prize under his arm.

  63

  Jerry hit the kitchen running, and the sound of his feet as they hit the tile floor made him feel like he was a pilgrim entering a promised land. He didn’t realize how much he had pinned his hopes on Ann’s plan to stay in the basement until that moment, but his heart skittered a few beats, then sped up as he ran to the basement door. He could hear Ann at his back. How long had it been since he felt her behind him – figuratively or literally? A long time. A long time, and it felt good to have her here.

  He allowed himself to dare that they might make it. That Drew might be the last one to die.

  And even as he thought it, he realized how dangerous the concept was. Realized that if his life had taught him anything, it was that prosperity brought suffering, that any promised improvement would hide threats and danger. Life was never a garden paradise, and anytime it seemed to be, it was time to walk carefully and check for hidden traps.

  Even so, he reached for the basement door. Even so, he gripped the doorknob. Even so, he looked at Ann.

  Even so, he was for some reason surprised that Sheri was not with them.

  Ann saw it at the same moment. “Where’s Sheri?” she asked. Her voice was low, absolutely no fear, no strain. Passionless to the point of sounding robotic, and Jerry knew she was close to breaking.

  Jerry whipped the flashlight around the kitchen, even though he knew it was a useless gesture. What, did he think she’d run ahead of them somehow, and then chosen the world’s worst moment to play hide-and-seek? Still, he couldn’t help himself. Like a sense of hope wasn’t just mental, it was built into humanity’s bones and muscles, drilled into their DNA. He couldn’t help but hope, no matter how futile it might be, no matter how much it might kill him when the hope turned to hopelessness.

  “Princess?” he said. The shadows made in this room were worse than the rest of the house. The kitchen island seemed made to hide things. Perhaps his girl. Perhaps the Killer. And what about the pantry? The copious spaces under the sink and counters?

  Ann didn’t seem to suffer from the indecision that had suddenly cut off Jerry’s will. She stepped toward the hall. Back where they had come.

  “Sheri!” she shouted. And kept moving.

  Jerry snapped out of the near-coma that held him. He almost jumped to Ann’s side, grabbing her arm and jerking her back into the kitchen.

  “Let go,” Ann said. She batted at his hand. “Let me go!”

  Jerry bore down harder, pulling his wife closer. “What are you going to do?” he demanded.

  “Find her!”

  “How? By running as fast as you can into the dark? Into who knows what kind of trap?”

  Ann twisted and yanked at the same time, pulling herself away from him. He felt his nails scratch her skin and knew she was probably bleeding, but she didn’t seem to notice or care.

  “Coward.” She practically spat the word at him.

  Jerry shook his head. “Thinking before doing something stupid doesn’t make me a coward.”

  Jerry flashed his light over Ann’s shoulder, checking the hall to make sure no one was sneaking up on them. But he still saw her face, saw the rage and revulsion that now fought for exclusive control of her expression. “And saying you’re ‘thinking’ is also a nice excuse, isn’t it? An excuse to do nothing, see nothing, feel nothing.” She paused, then seemed to shrink in on herself. Her hands went over her stomach, as though feeling for something that was gone. “No matter how many children you lose,” she said, and she was looking over his shoulder now.

  He knew what she was looking at. What picture, what face she stared at. And he suddenly wanted to hit something. Now this was about Brian? With all that was going on, she wanted to rub dirt in that old wound?

  He raised the flashlight. She flinched, and that just made him angrier. He’d never hit her, so why did she get off –

  “Come on in here, sexy.”

  63

  Jerry froze. So did Ann. In fact, she looked positively stricken.

  Jerry was confused. “That was….”

  He turned around. There was a TV in this room, as in every room: a small eighteen-inch LED screen on the counter nearby. As he turned he heard a sound he knew well, even though he hadn’t heard it in a long time: a low, throaty giggle. Ann. Laughing the way she did when they were….

  The TV showed grainy video feed, the same way it had before, showing Drew shooting up. This time, though, it showed a recording of Jerry’s own room. He felt something dark writhe inside him, something hidden and sleeping. Something he had known was there, but had ignored for a long time.

  Now, it was moving. Awakening.

  Onscreen, Ann appeared. She was dressed in the lingerie she had gotten dressed in for him last night – or rather, the night before they were drugged and all this started.

  But what if she didn’t get dressed in it for you? What if she was wearing it the whole time?

  In the kitchen, Ann tried to pull him away. He shrugged her off.

  And as if watching a synchronized twin, the Ann on the television also pulled at something. A hand. An arm.

  The dark thing in Jerry rolled. Roiled.

  Jerry felt his knees go weak. He recognized that arm. And the shoulder. He recognized everything on the man she was leading forward but the face, because that face had been pulled off the skull. But the body, the hair, the clothes… it was the man under the bed. The corpse that had held the cell phone in its teeth.

  Onscreen, the man handed Ann a letter, wrapped in ribbon. She read it, then bent over seductively and dropped it in an open mahogany box. The box she had brought out from the closet.

  Jerry was horrified, both at the sight of the box actually being used and at the view his wife – his wife – was presenting to some stranger.

  Apparently the stranger didn’t share Jerry’s feelings. He attacked Ann, grabbing her and flinging her on the bed –

  (on my bed)

  – their passionate kisses muffled. Grabbing, groping.

  Jerry felt the thing inside him roaring. But he was reeling. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t look at this anymore, but he couldn’t look away, either. Because if he did, he might see Ann – the real Ann, the here Ann – and that would be far, far worse.

  New sounds came out of the TV. Socrates. The family dog, still hale and energetic, barking at something. Ann jerked off her lover, sitting upright. “He’s home,” she said.

  Her lover leapt to his feet, pulling his clothes back on. “I’ll go out back.”

  Ann shook her head. “Sometimes he comes in that way.”

  “Where do I go?” said the man. Jerry could see him clearly. He wasn’t particularly handsome. Just a man. A normal person. A normal person who was screwing his wife.

  Onscreen, Ann pushed her lover –

  (good to admit it, Jer-Jer, good to say it, her lover, the man she chose over you)

  – under the bed. “Stay here for a minute,” she said.

  He resisted. “What? I’ve got to get out of here.”

  The onscreen Ann looked over her shoulder, as though afraid Jerry might burst in on them at any second. “We have a minute,” she said. “I jammed the gate shut.”

  And now the black thing in Jerry was Jerry as he remembered; as he realized. The rake that had been rammed in the gate’s mechanism. No accident. A stall. An escape tactic.

  Onscreen, Ann kissed her lover, and a chill skittered up the darkness at Jerry’s center as he realized that she was pushing the man under the bed in the exact position where the Killer later placed him. As though the Killer were avenging the infidelity. And Jerry wondered suddenly if he should be thanking their captor, at least for that.

  The TV. Ann speaking: “When you hear me hollering,
it’ll be safe to go down the front stairs, out the front door. We’ll be in the kitchen.”

  Another moment of black realization. Of dark memory. Ann screaming: “Bitch was stealing from us.” Just part of the ruse. Jerry wondered if Rosa had even been stealing at all. Probably not. Nothing was true. Everything was a lie, so why not that?