Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  Julie listened bright-eyed, and Colleen bent nearer to Caleb as he sang, ever-so-lightly tapping her foot. He stroked Julie’s hair back from her forehead, and by the time he’d finished the song, her eyes had closed and she’d sunk even deeper beneath the covers. There was no way to do a more thorough job of tucking her in, so he patted the spot where he thought it likely her shoulder was.

  “G’night, punkin,” he said.

  “’Night, Grandpa,” she murmured, more asleep than awake.

  He froze, his hand still on the covers. A big bittersweet smile broke out across his face, and he let his hand linger.

  “I’ve never been called that before,” he said softly to Colleen. “She couldn’t know it, but that’s the best present I’ve had in years.”

  * *

  “I guess no matter what, some things never will change. It still feels like a magic night.” Erika tightened her grip on Jason’s arm. “Can’t you feel it?”

  He shrugged lightly. “If I work my imagination overtime.”

  It was late Christmas Eve and they were out for a walk. As with Jason’s running path, the way up to the roof of the garage was the safest. Their footsteps scuffed along the concrete as they walked arm in arm, zipped into parkas and wearing scarves and caps. He’d shaved that day in honor of the occasion, and the wind felt especially crisp on his face.

  “Don’t be such a dork,” Erika said, nudging him with her shoulder. “Everybody else feels it. Even Julie feels it, and Colleen’s had her pretty well confined to quarters since last night. And you see how almost nobody’s gone to bed yet? Everybody’s up laughing, and telling stories, and singing. You can’t tell me that’s coincidence.”

  “I wouldn’t even dare try.” He threw an arm around her shoulders. “Maybe it just doesn’t seem like Christmas until I get to see It’s a Wonderful Life. Sort of Jason tradition.”

  Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. Hard to say. To add to the difficulty of adjusting to their situation, he’d never had to contend with a sight like he’d seen last Thursday afternoon, a week ago. As agreed, he’d given Mick forty-eight hours to talk things over with his people, then had returned, driving by guesswork and hoping he’d remembered the way. He had. And found that entire block of steel poles had been lined with heads. Their heads, this time. The poles were runny with dried gore, the sidewalk beneath spattered with it.

  He couldn’t stop seeing it in flashback, a hundred times a day. But he’d told no one about it, keeping it to himself, his own private nightmare. He had no doubt it wouldn’t have happened had he not met Mick in the first place.

  “I wish we could find a Santa suit for Rich,” Erika said. They were on the seventh level going for the eighth. “My family and I went to a Christmas party Rich and Pam had a few years back. Humongous blowout, with all this great food. Halfway through the night Rich disappears and then comes back with this big red suit on, and a tacky-looking beard hanging off his face. He’s got a burlap bag full of presents for everyone there, and he’s half-bombed and laughing like a letch. He’s carrying mistletoe around and trying to kiss everybody. He came off like some weird cross between Santa Claus and the neighborhood pervert that hangs out by the schoolyard.”

  Even Jason had to laugh at the sight that conjured up.

  “That’s more like it,” Erika said, beaming at him. “Stay just like that through New Year’s and everything’ll be just fine.”

  Easy as that, huh? he thought. Don’t you wish? Don’t I wish?

  They reached the roof, and the sky stretched above like a black velvet canopy, pricked by stars. Clouds glided silently overhead, the moon shining through occasional breaks. The night felt crystalline and pure. Jason found it easier to think of Christmas at a time like this, instead of under the light of the cold sun, showing him just another day of the same old gray buildings and skies, devoid of snow. They walked to the eastern edge of the roof and gazed toward the river, as if facing west was an unspoken taboo.

  “The birthday of the Prince of Peace,” she said. “Maybe it’ll pass, but it makes me feel like maybe there’s some hope for things getting better.”

  Jason kissed her once, twice. “Just keep hoping enough for the both of us. I don’t think I’ll be holding my breath.” And I wish I could tell you what I found a week ago, wish I could lean on you a while over that.

  But he wouldn’t let himself. It could only do her harm.

  “Speaking of birthdays,” she said, “you can wish me a happy one in just over twenty-four hours.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Yup. Four minutes after midnight, the day after Christmas, twenty-three years ago.” She shook her head. “Four minutes after midnight, do you believe it? I couldn’t even do it right and be a Christmas baby.”

  “So you were a Boxing Day baby. That’s even better.” He pulled her close for a hug, a fumbling one through the parkas. Her cheek and the tip of her nose were smooth spots of cold pressing against his face. “Damn. Now I’ll have to go last-minute shopping again.”

  She spun them around so he faced Brannigan’s, across the street. “Not to worry. Twelve floors and short checkout lines.” Erika laid her head against his shoulder. “I have a present for you,” she finally said.

  “A quickie, on the roof? Excellent idea.”

  She whacked his shoulder. “You’re a bigger perv than Rich.” She bent up to kiss him, hugging him tightly. “No, this is something I’ve been working on, practicing. Just for you.” She lowered her head again, touching it to his chin. “Be patient, okay?”

  “Sure.” He waited under the silent sky. Finally, “Can I ask what it is?”

  She brought her head up, eyes closed, face serene and intent at the same time. “I got to wondering if maybe, if I worked really hard at it, I could make something in my head flow out for a change. Instead of just taking in.” Erika burrowed against him, seeking every available point of contact. “It’s me,” she whispered.

  Jason didn’t understand at first. Her? How much more of her could he have? They loved, they were intimate. But then came the first feathery touch of a mental finger, and he knew.

  Something crept slowly in, warmth, softness, caressing his heart, mind, soul. He closed his eyes and let it fill him. And it was Erika. He saw her as far back as she had memories of herself, experiencing them with her all over again, the good as well as the bad. He saw her as a girl with skinny legs and scabby knees, watched her grow. He saw her family, her friends, people she had thought were friends. He picked up a glimpse of Rich and his Santa suit, playfully grabbing Erika’s behind as she whooped and he roared with red-faced laughter. Jason felt himself sinking at the death of her family, one by one by one. He relived highlights of their first night together, only this time from her perspective, felt overwhelmed by the enfolding surrender of her orgasm.

  It was Erika, and the most intimate of photo albums.

  It was a sharing so total it made even the most in-sync sexual union seem incomplete. And when it was finished, when their eyes reopened and they both stood slightly out of breath, they had no words to fill the void of silence. But what was left to say?

  She kissed him, reached for his arm, and pushed aside the coat sleeve to get to his watch. Four minutes after midnight.

  “Merry Christmas,” she whispered.

  Arm in arm they walked back toward the descending ramp that would take them home again, the chilly wind pushing at their backs. And as they did so, the first flakes of snow drifted from the black depths of the sky. They paused to watch, to feel the icy tickle on their upturned faces.

  It looked like it would be a white Christmas after all.

  12

  Hardcore winter hit the first week in January. A seemingly endless storm roared out of the northwest, dumping twenty inches of snow and dropping temperatures into the single digits. And those were the highs.

  Wit
h the force of a sledgehammer and the edge of a razor, wind buffeted the store, seeking cracks in the building with frigid fingers, gaining unwelcome entry. The kerosene heaters labored night and day, but the inside temperature dropped fifteen degrees, sometimes twenty. A number of people abandoned their rooms and frost-rimmed windows, preferring to sleep closer to the center of the fifth floor, on couches and chairs and mattresses on the floor.

  It grew too cold to sit still, too cold to want to move around. The boredom factor went off the charts—you couldn’t even leave the fifth floor unless it was absolutely necessary. They all wandered the floor like spirits condemned to haunt the place, pacing off seconds and minutes, hours and days.

  The cough that Julie had come down with just before Christmas had worsened, and although no one was learned enough to make a qualified diagnosis, they thought it likely she had pneumonia. She had good days and bad days, days when she would eat and days when she wouldn’t. They straggled out for antibiotics from the Walgreen’s Pharmacy that had supplied the Percodan that Jason had taken for his back, and they sometimes seemed to help. Colleen and Caleb and Diane took turns nursing her, sitting up with her, reading to her. Caleb made poultices for her chest, potions for her to drink.

  But she died on the twenty-fifth of January, a Monday. And they couldn’t even bury her. Too much cold, too much snow, too much frozen ground. The best they could do was wrap her in a couple of blankets with her stuffed Paddington Bear, and rest her in an out-of-the-way spot in the garage. And pray for spring.

  * *

  The place was lit up like a cavern, fires burning in three dozen barrels. Soot streaked the walls, blackened the girders across the roof, clotted the windows with filthy condensation. Even though it was cold enough to see your breath, nobody seemed to mind. They watched the two men down on the scarred and stained gym floor, and were transported.

  They cheered like a Super Bowl crowd when the bald giant clamped his steel-jawed club onto the other man’s cheek and ripped away part of his face. A blazing eye set within muscles brimming with blood watched the club come back for more.

  High in the bleacher seats, huddled within a parka and his face obscured by the oversized, fur-rimmed hood, Jason watched…numb, expressionless, scarcely even blinking. The twentieth century? No way. They’d managed within a few months to regress a thousand years or more.

  The bitter cold had broken earlier in the day, and the thermometer had climbed to all of twenty-five. The night hovered around twenty. And, going stir-crazy, Jason had slipped out, driving away in a Jeep that Rich and Jack had taken from an AMC dealership just before the cold had hit. Four-wheel drive was the only thing he’d trust to travel on the snow-packed streets now. No more city maintenance workers with plows and salt.

  The ring, the arena—now it made sense, what he’d heard them talking about that day in Union Station. Mick had told him of this place during the afternoon they’d forged an alliance. Every Tuesday night, he’d said.

  Jason decided he must have had a guardian angel on the day Billy Strickland had betrayed him, something that had kept him from ending up as the center of attention in this place of death. And yet, deep inside, where the darkest secrets hide and refuse to die, he wondered. Would they have matched him against the one they called Pit Bull? Would he have had even the slimmest of chances? What would they have given him to fight with, and how quickly would he have adapted to using it?

  No answers, but he was in no hurry. And so he watched. And wondered.

  * *

  It was late when he got home. Jason could’ve made it back sooner, but he took the Jeep along the streets where no car had yet traveled, skimming around corners, leaving a wake of churning snow behind him, wasting precious gasoline. Tempting fate.

  The fifth floor was lit up low and dim when he came in from across the bridge, past the guards, and up the dead escalator. Blankets had been hung across doorways that led to the offices, flimsy barricades against the patient and relentless cold. People rested in silent mounds beneath piles of more blankets and quilts. Often they slept in twos and threes for no other reason than to share body warmth. Somebody in the shadows was snoring like a chainsaw. Somebody else was mumbling in his sleep. And somebody else was crying.

  Erika was waiting up for him, reading by candlelight on a love seat. Jason walked wordlessly past her, thrusting aside the blankets to get to the hallway and then to his room. He shucked his parka and heavy gloves, rubbed his hands together, and blew into them. He grabbed a quilt from the bed and draped it over his shoulders, where it hung like a huge cape.

  He pushed his hair behind his ears; it needed washing. Five days of beard grew on his face and his eyes burned from the earlier smoke. His body crawled, itchy and oily. He saw no limits to what he wouldn’t do for a hot shower from the world before. The room itself smelled of him, and of Erika.

  He wanted to cry, but he feared that if he started it would drag him down into a black hole for days and nights to come. Tonight he realized he’d been looking for a future that simply did not exist in this city. There was no future, only an interminable and hostile present.

  “Where did you go tonight?” Erika asked from the doorway.

  Jason drew the quilt tighter around him. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He shouldered past her and went back out to the main floor, sinking down near a heater in the same love seat she’d been reading in. When she sat beside him, he shifted his shoulders so that his back was to her. He waited for her to say something…and waited. He was about to give up on it and submerge into the darkest shadows he could find.

  “Do you love me?” she finally asked.

  He nodded, still not facing her.

  “Then don’t shut me out like this. You know how that makes me feel?”

  He pushed himself around so they could look at one another. “Okay. Just remember, you asked for this.” At last he was able to dip into the poisoned well of the recent past, telling her of Mick and his people and their sudden demise, telling her of the arena. “I watched people beat each other to death tonight. I watched a couple guys hack each other up with machetes. I could sit in the bleachers and tell who wanted to be down there and who didn’t. There’s a lot of people still in this city, you know that? More than I would’ve guessed. Hell, we’ve still got civilization. Only it’s all twisted around now. There’s a whole new order to things.”

  Jason watched her sit there watching him. The only way he knew she’d heard him was by the reappearance of that little crease between her eyes.

  “We can’t beat them,” he said. “Travis Lane, all the rest. They’ll eat us alive if we try. And maybe they’ll eat us alive if we don’t do anything more than sit here minding our own business.”

  He let his head drop back onto the love seat, staring into the ceiling. Monstrous shadows flickered there, thrown by candlelight and a dimly burning lantern.

  “I used to think maybe we had a good thing going here,” he said toward the ceiling. “Everybody was getting along. Well, there was Billy, but let’s forget about him. There’s one in every crowd. And then yesterday comes along, and Julie dies. It was like…like she was the future. Not literally, but she represented it in a way. I bet a little piece of every one of us went with her, because that showed us all how little hope there really is. We can’t last here. Everything in this city will be used up sooner or later. And if I was betting money on who’d make it last longer, I wouldn’t bet on us. I’d bet on the guys in Union Station. Because that’s just how they are. They’ll grab it all first, and they’ll squeeze everything out of this city until there’s nothing left.”

  “So what would you rather do?” Erika said. “Be one of us here, or sink to their level?”

  Jason rolled his head to the side so he could see her again. “I just want to live.”

  He wished she’d touch him, but then again, didn’t want her to. He’d been with them, and hi
s need for a shower went beyond the sweat, the oil, the grime. He’d been contaminated. The last thing he wanted was to spread that to Erika.

  “I think I narrowly missed out on being one of the arena’s stars when they took me to Union Station. I heard them talking, but didn’t know exactly what they were talking about until tonight. And when I was sitting there on the bleachers, I wasn’t nearly as scared or as grateful as I should’ve been. I think a part of me wanted to be down there. Just to know if I could’ve walked back out again.” His throat constricted. “I don’t know what’s happening inside me anymore.”

  Erika didn’t say anything, and that was even worse than any doomed attempt she might make to cheer him up. Even empty words would’ve been better than silent acquiescence. She doesn’t know either.

  Jason pulled the quilt tightly around him, hunched over with his elbows on his knees and hugging his shoulders. “I’ll tell you this much, if we make it out of this winter alive, we can’t stay here. When I first came, Rich and Jack said this place wasn’t supposed to be a permanent solution. Well, I bet they don’t have any more ideas what to do next now than they did then. They were talking a good game, but they were still caught up in trying just to get through to tomorrow. But if we stay here too much longer, I can see us all waking up one day, and something happens to make it obvious we should’ve cleared out already, only it’s too late.”

  He was wracked with a chill, and trembled. He clutched the quilt so hard his knuckles were white. He didn’t think he’d ever be warm again.

  “We’ve got to find someplace where we’ll really be living again,” he said. “At least I do. If I stay here, I know this place is gonna drag me right down with it. And I hope you’ll want to come with me.”

  “That’s not even an issue.” Erika reached out with both hands to hold his arm, and he was glad she’d done so after all. “But where would we go, Jay? Where?”