Every Dark Little Thing

by T. S. Ward

  Soldier touches my back. He slips around me at the top of the stairs, back against the wall as he moves down, cautiously. He motions toward the kitchen, where the door comes in, and I follow close. I dip around to the other archway into the kitchen.

  I stand with my back to the wall, knife ready, and wait for Soldier to make the move. I watch him out of the corner of my eye and listen as the screen door is caught by the wind.

  Soldier nods, and we both charge forward.

  I grab the first human shape I see by the collar, push it back against the kitchen table, and stop the knife just in time. Just as the girl screams and the moonlight hits her face.

  “What the fuck, Jennifer, for fuck’s sake!” I shove her further into the table before letting go, and look over to where Soldier is lowering his gun from Lou, and Lou the same. “Can y’all leave me alone for a fucking minute? Two fucking years and suddenly everyone’s got their nose up my ass!”

  “I do not,” Jenny mutters.

  Lou shakes his head. “Any other time you’d be pissed if no one went looking for you.”

  “And I don’t see any reason for that to be different.”

  “How about this for a reason, Keely? How about I already lost two kids and I almost watched my last one die? You think I’m not going to go looking for you? You think I’m about to let you take off again without at least trying to—”

  He shuts up when I hug him. He hugs me back, a little too tight.

  “Ow, Dad,” I hiss, tapping out.

  “Shit. Sorry.” He stands back and squints at me. “The hell are you doing here?”

  I sigh. “Trying to sleep.”

  We let Jenny take the bedroom we were in, and Lou the other. As it turns out, they were out looking for us for a while, found the house, and figured they’d double back on it if they didn’t find us. They thought to check it out, but chose not to, considering how close to the road it is.

  It makes more sense to just spend the night rather than go back in the dark.

  I sit on the couch after they’ve gone to sleep, this fancy ass sectional thing, tucked into the corner with a blanket. “Door’s shut good, right?”

  “Everything’s good,” Soldier assures me.

  He sits down, turns, and lies back, his head on my lap. I rest one hand on his hair, the other on his chest. I laugh softly.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I say, laughing again. “I mean, it’s not really funny. But you just have such terrible taste in women. I’m responsible for three hundred and thirty-one deaths—”

  “You didn’t kill all of them.”

  “—and that psycho bitch started the apocalypse.”

  He breathes out, closing his eyes. “I want to tell you something. Something she doesn’t know.”

  “I also want to tell you something but I think I’ll snap if I try. So go on, please.”

  He nods and sets his hand over mine. “My mum knew she wasn’t going to live. She didn’t want me to be alone when she… She spent all her time worrying about me and what would happen to me when she died and stopped living for herself. I felt guilty about it. And she’s the reason I met Lana, through this clinical trial she was in. I’m not sure if that happened because I actually cared about her or if it was what I was supposed to do. I mean, I think I did love her, but not the way I was meant to. Not like this.”

  “You’re complicating my thing,” I whisper.

  “I never told my mum I left her,” he continues, “And I was stationed at the hospital just before she died. So I had the chance to tell her what that was like. I had the chance to tell her about the very loud girl swearing at all the nurses and singing to a kid in the middle of the night. She must have known something, because she said that’s the kind of girl you need.”

  I blink away the sudden sting of tears.

  There’s that ache in my chest again—not the ribs, but an ache like I’ve swallowed something that’s gotten stuck right between the lungs and the heart.

  There are some things I really should have written down.

  That’s the point of this thing, after all. Some kind of therapy. But I didn’t, haven’t, might not, and I am holding this boulder on my chest. This immense weight. And it isn’t something I want to put on him, it isn’t something I want him to bear, but he needs to know because the not knowing is weight, too.

  It isn’t something I can keep quiet.

  “You good?”

  Soldier pushes himself up onto an elbow, looking at me with these goddamn eyes that—fuck.

  I shake my head, and he sits up proper.

  “Tell me. What’s going on in there?” He touches a finger to my forehead.

  “I can’t,” I whisper.

  “That’s alright,” he says, slipping an arm around my shoulders, shifting closer. “Tell me something else instead. Something else that’s bothering you.”

  It takes me a while to even think of anything else, let alone say it. This thing is such an intrusion in my head that it’s difficult to see around it.

  “The camp we found,” I start, “With the kids. In the tent. I think about it all the time. And Sadie—I keep seeing her, the way she died, and I have nightmares that it’s you or my dad or… And Vanessa’s kid with that horde coming at her, I couldn’t let that happen again—it’s kids, it’s always kids, Ben, I…”

  He pulls me into him, against his chest, and holds me tight. He lets me cry. And we stay like that, until we fall asleep again.

  —

  But I dream about it, what I couldn’t tell him, and I wake up screaming.

  I wake up in a cold sweat, freezing and damp, on my feet, standing in the fog in the woods. Alone. Disoriented. Hands frantically searching for my knife.

  I don’t know what the fuck is going on and I’ve got no fucking boots, no coat, no knife, and I feel practically naked without any of that. I don’t even know which way it is to get back to that damn honey house.

  I’m curious. Do you feel sick? Do you feel different?

  I stand there forever, turning and turning, panicked fingers dragging through my hair. I can’t breathe. Can’t think. Can’t focus. I might be hyperventilating, or I might just be dead on my feet. I can’t tell.

  A biter stumbles out of the trees and I freeze, panic in my veins.

  It lingers, jaw working, fingers twitching, and its tongue a little too large for its mouth. The thing is a disgusting colour. Yellow and green and hard, like it’s been sitting out in the sun for years, but it’s still moving. Its muscles haven’t betrayed it yet. It’ll still eat with deadly force.

  And yet.

  I’m standing there, and it’s looking at me. Or, rather, staring unseeing, trying to sense me. Nose searching the air, jaw slack. It takes a few steps toward me and sniffs around, and it’s so close. It smells so atrocious I nearly vomit.

  Its tongue rolls out over cracked lips, like some fat slug of a snake covered in pustules, tasting the air.

  But I don’t exist to it.

  I watch it turn, watch it walk away with this horrible pit opening up in my stomach and the feeling that these trees are closing in on me. A pervasive thought inside my head says that maybe I am dead. Maybe I am just one of those things wandering around like nothing’s different, imagining a life that doesn’t exist.

  That thought makes me shake more than the cold. More than the mud on my bare feet and the fog dampening my skin.

  “Ghost!”

  Soldier’s voice snaps me back into that damn dream, and then I’m shaking for a different reason, still out of it, still confused, and it’s just—that image in my head, that feeling under the bones of my hands.

  An arrow sticks the biter to a tree for a half second before its weight pulls it down, collapsing to the earth, like I’m about to. I flinch when something touches my shoulder, but it’s just Lou turning me around to look at me, and Soldier putting his coat around my shoulders.

  “What the hell are you doing, punk?” Lou says. He pluck
s a leaf out of my hair. “We heard a scream. That you?”

  Soldier slips an arm around my waist. “We need to get you warmed up.”

  My legs won’t respond to me.

  I think about taking a step forward, want to take a step forward, but nothing happens. Maybe you’re fucking paralyzed, idiot! I wouldn’t be standing if that was the case, though. I wouldn’t be on my feet still. I’d be on the ground, waiting and waiting and waiting, colder than hell, just waiting on a homeless man in an alley. A literal goddamn angel the cops never found again.

  “Ghost.” Soldier nudges me.

  Lou waves a hand in front of my face. “Kid?”

  I barely blink, because I’m looking at something else. I’m looking at that damn barn hearing the roar of the horde beneath the thin boards under me, feeling fingernails digging into my ankle. And I see Ben.

  Soldier picks me up, cradles me tight against his chest, and it reminds me of the first time I got bit. It reminds me of him carrying me to that farmhouse we spent a few days in all the way back at the beginning of this.

  “Kid. Keely.” Lou keeps trying, and I hear the sound of an arrow connecting with meat and bone.

  “I’m taking her to Charlotte. Follow the river back.”

  I press my ear against his chest and listen to his heartbeat. It’s fast, thundering, and I want it to move steady and easy, the way it did when we fell asleep before Lou and Jenny showed up. Calm. Relaxed. But he’s far from it now, hurrying through the woods, leaving Lou behind.

  “Why?” He breathes out, looking at me with this pained expression. It’s all he says.

  And I just stay put and rest my eyes.

  I try to think about what it would be like to just say I love you straight up. To not box around it and just say it, to make sure he knows as straightforward as I can get. Even though he knows. Even though everyone who knows his name knows—I’m a fucking fool for this man. I love him. I love him, but this goddamn shit in my head won’t go away, won’t disappear, and my hands are shaking and I can’t figure out how to hold them that won’t make it feel like—

  Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  Soldier holds me tighter, tucks his head down, and kisses my forehead. “You’re scaring the shit out of me, Keely. You’re really… I don’t know what this is, but I’m fucking terrified, and you need to start answering me. You need to look at me. Something. Please.”

  It feels like ages before we break out of the trees, before there’s blue sky and barely any clouds. Just wisps. Just dots around the edges.

  I’ve memorized the plaid of his shirt collar, the shape of a loose thread on a button and the way it folds. I’ve memorized the shape of his throat and collar bone and the sound of his voice inside his chest.

  “Charlotte!” He shouts, pushing past Viking as he opens the door for us. “Where’s Charlotte?”

  “Asleep upstairs,” he answers. “I’ll go get her.”

  “What happened?” Vanessa asks, leading him into the living room.

  He sets me down on the couch, kneels in front of me, and tucks my hair behind my ear. I can see Noah over his shoulder. This tiny child sitting in a chair in the corner with a toy and a little cup with handles. Innocent as all hell. Just like—no, no, no, no, no, no.

  “No idea,” Soldier tells Vanessa. “Woke up and she was gone. Found her in the woods, just… still.”

  Charlotte’s there, kneeling next to Soldier. She takes my wrist, presses a finger to it, quiet as she counts for a minute. “And before that? What was going on?”

  He’s got his hand on my head, thumb brushing the little hairs against my forehead back. “I don’t know, I was asleep, I don’t know—”

  “Sam, take a breath for me,” she says. “You were gone for quite a while. She’s just gone through a near death experience. Did she say anything to you? Did you talk about anything that’s happened to her recently?”

  He drops his head down, squeezing my hand. “She was trying to tell me something that was bothering her but she didn’t. Why? What’s…?”

  Charlotte disappears for a minute, and when she comes back, she has a blanket that she tucks around me. “She’s in shock, Sam. I can’t think of anything physically wrong, but… she’s gone through some kind of trauma.”

  “She’s—she was fine, before.”

  “That’s the thing about you, isn’t it, Ghostie?” Viking leans over the back of the couch. “You talk so much and never say what you should. But we’re all listening. We’re all here for these things.”

  “That’s what the journal’s for,” Soldier mutters, and then he looks up at me. “Did you write about it?”

  “What journal?” Fox asks. “You’re not going to snoop through her shit while she’s like this. How do you even know that?”

  He pulls the blanket back, pulls my journal out of the inner pocket of his coat, and then tucks it back around me.

  “I thought that was yours,” Viking says.

  “Yeah, you’ve had that longer than you’ve been with…” Fox trails off, laughing lightly. “Soldier.”

  “You know Soldier?”

  “He is Soldier, idiot.”

  Charlotte stands up and starts ushering people away. “Okay, all of you, get out. She needs to rest and relax and you aren’t helping. You, too, Sam. Vanessa, come get Noah.”

  Soldier doesn’t move. He holds my hand tight in his.

  “Sam.”

  “That’s not my goddamn name,” he snaps, and then he takes a breath. “Sorry. It’s not my name. It’s Ben.”

  “Okay. Ben. What’s going to help her is letting her rest. Please. We’ll go put the kettle on, have some tea. Sound good? You can come back soon enough.”

  He goes reluctantly, letting go with one last squeeze of my hand, and then hesitates, making sure the blanket is tucked tight and the fire is going well. And then he’s gone.

  That kid is still sitting in that chair in the corner. Still staring at me. She’s nibbling on some snack from a plate on the cushion beside her. Vanessa doesn’t come get her and Charlotte doesn’t come back for her. They just leave her, and she’s staring me down, staring with these big eyes.

  I can’t even work up the strength to blink or look away or close my eyes, and I feel horrible. I feel like I’m rotting from the inside out.

  She slips off the chair, yawns, and patters over to me. She sets her hand against my cheek. “Goes sleep?”

  I don’t answer, but the girl puts a knee over the edge of the couch, grips my arm under the blanket, and pulls herself up. She lies down wedged between the couch and my back. She pulls the blanket over herself, too, and drapes her arm over my neck.

  Her whole hand wraps around one of my fingers.

  I want to move. I want to get as far away as I can, but I can’t, and there are tears flowing freely, soaking my cheeks and this little throw pillow. Quietly, and never-ending.

  Her breath is warm against the back of my neck.

  I can’t fucking breathe.

  I can’t breathe.

  I can’t—

  “Noah? Mum, where’s Noah?” Vanessa walks halfway into the room and then leaves again.

  I listen to her footsteps, listen to them all walking around on the creaking hardwood, the door cracking open, and someone shouting that Lou and Jenny are back.

  Lou comes into the living room a few seconds later, looks at me, and turns around again. “She’s in here, Vanessa. Sleeping.”

  “Oh, Jesus—Noah, leave Ghost alone.”

  “Hey, just let her sleep,” he says. “I’m sure she doesn’t mind. She loves kids.”

  “You sure, Mr. Finch? Mum wanted everyone to leave her alone.”

  He nods, sighing. “Her sister used to sleep on her like that.”

  And then they’re gone. And the house is quiet. And after a while, the tears dry up, and after another while, Soldier walks into the room. He puts another log in the woodstove before he comes to sit down in front of the couch.

  He sets a mug of
chamomile tea on the ground where the smell rises right up into my nose, and holds my hand where it hangs loose over the edge of the couch.

  “Hey,” he says quietly. He holds up my new journal. Old, really, considering I haven’t touched it for a long time. “Found this in your bag. I want to know how to help you. Do you mind if I read it? You don’t have to say anything, just squeeze my hand, or…”

  I do. I squeeze his hand. Even though it won’t tell him anything. The most it’ll tell him is how Sadie died, and all the shit I did, and how I know Fox and Viking.

  He spends a long time leafing through it, sipping his tea occasionally, closing it on a finger at times to lean his head back and take a drawn in a breath. I can see it over his shoulder, each part he’s at, and relive it in my head. He swears when he sees what happened with Sadie and stops to kiss my knuckles.

  When it’s done, he searches through the blank pages, like he’s going to find something. Except—there is one line, scribbled down hastily in the back.

  “He looks so much like you,” he whispers out loud. “What’s that mean?”

  He puts the journal down and turns to me, taking my hand. And I feel like I can move now, feel like I could lift my head or my arm or something, but I don’t. I don’t want to. Because as soon as I do I’ll have to tell him, and I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want him to know. I don’t want him to know how or why—just that he existed.

  “Keely,” he whispers, kissing my hand again. “What is that about? Is that why you’re like this?”

  I squeeze his hand and close my eyes.

  He starts to say something, but Noah stirs, tries to sit up, and he stands to pick her up. He leaves the room with her and comes back without her. He comes back and kneels on the ground in front of me again.

  “Is that what you wanted to tell me about?”

  I nod.

  “Are you scared to tell me?”

  I nod again.

  “You don’t have to. But I’m listening. Whatever it is, I’m not going anywhere, alright?” He doesn’t say anything else, but he looks me in the eye and waits. He tucks my hair behind my ear. And it takes so long to even try to say anything.