by D. J. Molles
And then today had happened.
“I need to sit,” she said, and simply sank down onto the floor. She let her hair hang in front of her face, using it as a curtain, trying to hide from her husband.
It baffled him when she did this. Sometimes she would let it out in front of him without any shame or reservation. Other times it was like she felt that her emotion was inappropriate and tried to secret it away, though in truth it made no difference to him. He never criticized her for it, but when and where she decided to show her emotions seemed to have no rhyme or reason. Somehow it was acceptable to break down looking at baby clothes, but not here in the middle of a convenience store they’d just broken into because they were on the run and needed a safe place to sleep.
He turned to the aisles, tried to change the subject or cheer her up. “You hungry, babe? What do you want? You want me to find you a Milky Way?” Those were her favorite pregnancy food.
“No,” she said miserably.
“C’mon,” he prodded. “It’ll make you feel better.”
“It’s gonna make me throw up. I just know it.”
He mulled that over. “Okay. Anything that you think you can keep down?”
Something clattered. Like empty tin cans hitting pavement.
Clyde stiffened, shot a look to Haley, whose head was up now. Alert.
“What was that?” she whispered. “Was that outside?”
Clyde barely moved—just raised his hand, the index finger up to indicate silence, and then he waited, frozen like he’d been turned into a stone. The cans rattled again, like something was shuffling them around. The noise bounced around oddly, so that he couldn’t quite tell whether it was coming from inside, or perhaps from the back storeroom.
Maybe it’s just a raccoon, he told himself desperately. Or a possum or something.
“Clyde…”
“Shhh!”
Then came a strange noise. A voice. Just a single, wavering note of displeasure: “Aaaahh…Aah!” Like someone was irritated with themselves for knocking over the cans. The sound continued for a bit, and then dissolved into a slurry of consonants. Like a stumbling-drunk homeless man, muttering to himself in a back alley.
Clyde turned toward Haley, stepped very lightly into the center of the shop. He could feel it in his feet, arcing up into his legs and his back. It was a feeling that he’d only felt a few times in his life. The feeling that something bad was hovering close by, and he hoped that he could avoid it. He’d gotten that feeling when he was walking with Haley to their car one night and that shady-looking guy was following them, and Clyde had just been positive they were about to get carjacked.
“Come on,” he whispered, pulling Haley up off the floor. “Get behind the counter.”
He wasn’t sure if it made sense. Part of him thought it might be a better idea just to run, but that would mean leaving the store, and right now these walls and these windows were the only things keeping him separated from whatever was out there. And if they left the store, then he couldn’t hide. He’d be out in the open again.
“Is it one of those people?” Haley asked.
“I don’t know.” But he was thinking, Yes. It has to be.
They both ducked behind the counter. Haley stayed low, eyes to the floor, but Clyde looked up and over the countertop, through the cups of loose Black & Milds and Fireball candies. The yellow streetlight stared baldly at them from across the street, a dull midnight sun hanging on the horizon. Clyde realized that his breath was coming quickly.
The muttering continued, broken by sudden, sharp barks.
Something’s wrong with this person.
“It’s one of them.” Haley’s voice was just a tense squeak of air. She reached out and clutched at Clyde. “Did you lock the door?”
Clyde looked away from the windows and found his wife’s eyes searching his face. He felt exposed and naked in front of that stare, and he was certain she was searching him for some sign that he knew what the hell he was doing, that he wouldn’t get them killed. Searching for some reason why she should trust him, and not her own instincts.
When he looked back up, there was a man. He stood, slouched at the far corner of the window. Outside, but staring in. His whole body was a silhouette lined in yellow by the streetlight behind him, and his face was a mask of shadows so that Clyde could not see if he were looking at them or not. Beside him, Haley tensed and put a hand over her mouth.
Clyde did not move. With every beat, his heart seemed to be working its way further up his throat, seeming determined to lodge there in his airway and suffocate him. Clyde’s knees ached from kneeling, but he didn’t register the signals of pain. All he could feel was his heart, and the breath going in and out of him.
The man at the window stood for a while, and Clyde could see him swaying on his feet. He held something in his hand. Something long and thin. Perhaps a crowbar or a tire iron. As he swayed, the object swung lazily back and forth, his arms loose and dangling.
Slowly, the man leaned forward so that his nose just lightly touched the window. He opened his mouth, and Clyde could see his tongue snake out, and it seemed abnormally long and viscous. It touched the glass, slid slowly about, leaving a trail on the glass that shimmered darkly, and Clyde thought that it was red like blood.
The man began to walk, or sidestep, very slowly, keeping his tongue in contact with the glass, as though trying to taste all of it. There was something about it that made Clyde’s stomach feel weak, something disturbingly sexual in the way the silhouetted man traced his bloody tongue along behind him.
The man reached the door and he stopped.
Here, from this perspective, Clyde could see his face. It was blank. Devoid of life. Like a meteor-scarred moonscape. And there was more than blood around his mouth. There were bits of things that Clyde could not identify and did not want to imagine.
At the door the man pulled his head back, retracting his tongue. His eyes fell to the jagged hole in the glass and the handle of the door just beside it.
Clyde could not take his eyes away. He just kept thinking, kept praying, Please go away! Please go away! Please just go away and leave us alone!
He had to forcibly extract his arm from Haley, and then he took the pistol from inside of his waistband, where the slide and sights had been digging uncomfortably into his skin. It was warm with his body heat. Moist from his sweat. It felt like a live thing in his hands, and he was suddenly afraid of it. Like it would decide on its own what happened when Clyde attempted to use it.
The man standing at the door spoke, and his voice sounded like his mouth was full of marbles: “Ah wan’ in.” His hand fell clumsily to the door handle and tugged at it. “Ah wan’ in! Ah wan’ in!” He tugged more furiously. “Ahwanin! Ahwanin!” He reared back and swung hard with the object in his hand—a tire iron, just like Clyde had thought. It struck the glass and the rest of the already weakened window came exploding in.
FIVE
Haley screamed.
It was only a short sound—she choked it off as soon as it left her mouth.
The thing at the door snapped his head toward them, somehow immediately able to triangulate on the sound he had just heard. He stared into the darkness for a moment and Clyde knew that they were no longer hidden.
The thing let out an ungodly noise, incredibly loud in the cramped space of the convenience store. The face, blank and drunken before, was now twisted into wide-eyed rage, and he launched himself at them. The crossbar in the door stayed him, the entire door rattling in its frame.
Haley bolted upright and backpedaled into the wall of cigarettes behind her. Boxes of Marlboros and Newports tumbled down over her shoulders as her hands spastically grabbed about, like she was searching for a doorknob that might open up the wall and allow her to escape.
Clyde tried to speak, but nothing came out of him.
Something in that scream—the primal hunger of it—had ripped every shred of courage out of him. He stood now, panicked and thoug
htless in the path of an imminent attack, his mental condition fading to black as his brain pumped overloads of chemicals into him that his body had no idea how to work through.
Adrenaline and noradrenaline shot through his bloodstream. His veins and capillaries constricted, sending his blood pressure skyrocketing. His heart rate and respiration slammed his chest. His eyes dilated, his corneas warping and causing everything outside of the two degrees directly in front of his face to look speckled black. All high-road thought left him. All complicated notions of courage and protective instincts suddenly evaporated into nothingness. Haley was no longer a concept that he was aware of. The only thing his animal brain could comprehend was his own death and survival.
Clyde sank behind the counter again—perhaps because he wanted to hide, or perhaps because his knees were giving out. He never registered when Haley ran around him, trying to escape by running out the back of the store. His eyes remained affixed on the creature in front of them as he pulled himself through the door, over the crossbar.
Jags of glass were still embedded in the weather stripping. They ripped open the man-thing’s midsection as he heaved himself into the convenience store, and when he landed in the sea of glass inside, things began to flop out of his gaping stomach, coils of his own guts caught on the glass of the crossbar.
But he did not seem to notice that it was tethered to the door by its own entrails. He stumbled to his feet, his hands sparkling with the chunks of glass still poking out of his skin. The pail rope of his gut came loose of the doorframe and plopped down onto the ground. He kept moving to the back of the store, trailing his own intestines. He did not look at Clyde.
Clyde found himself curled up behind the counter, no longer upright enough to see over the top. He closed his eyes. His hands fumbled uselessly with the pistol. He held it awkwardly, and he was not aware that it was even there, let alone what his hands were attempting to accomplish with it.
In the back, Haley screamed.
And finally, some part of him woke up. Some half-dead portion of his consciousness, like a body washed up on the rocks and only revealed when the tide goes out. My family is my responsibility, the man at the school had said. And your family is yours.
It’s Haley.
It’s Haley.
It’s Haley and your fucking baby!
He shook so badly that he nearly dropped the pistol. He stared at it as though he were surprised to find it there, still in his grip.
There was a clatter in the back, and the sound of Haley’s screams changed pitch.
The screeching of the man-thing overpowered her.
“Oh God,” Clyde said. He came to his feet with great effort, his vision blurring with tears. “Oh no. Oh no…”
“Clyde!” Haley screamed for him. “Clyde!”
She was screaming for him.
For him
For him.
He moved, though he felt poisoned by his own fear, his muscles barely breaking loose of paralysis. His body knew what his mind would not concede—that he was not matched for this fight. That he could not win it. And because his body knew this of itself, it seemed determined to avoid the fight altogether, to lie down and hope all of those bad things would pass him by.
You are a coward, he told himself, but when he pictured the words, they were spoken from the mouths of his father-in-law, and his brothers-in-law, and the man in the tan baseball cap from the school whose family trusted him to get them through.
Haley kept screaming for him, and he kept moving, his shoulder sliding along shelving units, causing whatever they held to fall over and crash to the floor behind him. And when he came to the backroom of the store, soiled and drenched in a cold sweat, trembling so badly that he could barely keep his knees locked, he saw them both on the floor. Haley on her back, legs kicking, arms flailing, punching, clawing. The man-thing crouched over her, his mouth agape, reaching his jaws past Haley’s glancing blows, seeking her jugular.
Haley saw her husband standing there, and the look that broke through the panic on her face was one that destroyed everything Clyde had ever believed about himself. One microsecond of an expression, and he knew the truth about himself. Because she was looking at him, and in that instant she was confused. She was wondering why her husband was standing there, doing nothing, when another man was attempting to hurt her. She was wondering why the man who was supposed to love her, to protect her, the man whose baby sat curled in her womb, could only stand there and weep.
“Do something!” she screamed.
Almost reflexively, Clyde fired the pistol. He fired it five times. He pulled the trigger as quickly as he could, and he flinched as the gunshots detonated in the small area. He used every round that was in that pistol, and he did it without aiming. One of the rounds hit the man-thing in the lower back, another punched through his shoulder, and the next managed by sheer chance to strike his head, ending his movements abruptly. The other two rounds were high and wildly off target.
The man-thing was suddenly silent as he collapsed onto Haley. She struggled underneath his weight and Clyde stared, shocked and ashamed. He felt sick to his stomach, standing there with this man’s guts coiled on the floor at his feet, blood and bile and shit mixing on the linoleum. He wanted to pull the body off of Haley, but when he reached down, the thought of touching it suddenly revolted him so badly that he stopped and heaved. Nothing came up.
“Clyde…”
He reached forward, dropping the pistol in the mess at his feet, and he pulled the dead thing from atop his wife, from atop her pregnant belly. Freed of the burden, Haley didn’t get up. Her hands flopped around like birds with broken wings. Her chest rose and fell rapidly. Her head was tilted back, eyes on the ceiling, her mouth gaping. Like she was trying to catch her breath.
“Baby?” Clyde’s voice was a whimper.
Tears spilled over her face. “It hurts,” she said, choking on the words. “It hurts.”
Clyde felt his own tears running. Snot ran over his upper lip. “What’s hurting? What’s hurting, baby?” He bent over her, on a single knee, his own hands panning over her body, hovering like a diviner, trying to sense where her injury was. As he got closer to her, he could see everything. The deep bite marks in her arms that oozed blackness. The way the skin along her forearm had been avulsed and now hung white like a fish’s belly, while the flesh and muscle below gushed.
And the one little hole. Just below her right collarbone.
Haley wheezed, “I can’t breathe.” Every time she tried to breathe in, it would issue a terrifying sucking noise. And when she tried to speak or breathe out, it would bubble and spit at him. He stared at it, shaking his head as though he could argue with it. As though he could convince it to seal itself up.
“Oh, no no no,” he said. “What do I do, Haley? What do I do?”
Haley leaned forward with some effort, her eyes skipping past Clyde and going to her stomach. She tried to speak, but coughed instead and blood stained her lips and teeth. “Is my baby okay? He didn’t hurt my baby?”
Clyde looked at the tightly stretched belly. He couldn’t see any injury to it. Some of the man-thing’s blood had stained Haley’s shirt, but there were no tears, and nothing seemed out of place. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think the baby’s okay, Haley. I think the baby’s okay.”
She didn’t relax. Her eyes shifted to her husband. She said something that he couldn’t hear.
“What?”
She struggled against pain for a moment, her eyes closed. She kept trying to get that breath, but it simply wouldn’t come for her. Like she was being constricted. When she opened her eyes again, her mouth moved, but her voice did not come. There was not enough air behind it. Clyde wept, a scared, childlike sound, but he shut himself up when he saw her trying to speak, and it was only through the movement of her mouth that he could hear what she was saying. And he knew the words that were coming from her, but he kept shaking his head, because he did not want to comprehend them. He did
not want them to be the last truth of his life with Haley. He did not want them to be the final test, because in doing or in failing, he knew that he would be ruined.
“Save my baby.”
* * *
He would tell his daughter this one day.
Sometimes people do things they don’t want to do, so that they can survive. And I loved you so much, even before I knew you, that I did something I really didn’t want to do, so that you could live. Because I needed you to live. Do you understand that? I needed you because I knew, right at the moment that I had to do that horrible thing, that you were the only thing I had left in the world.
He would tell her these things.
Someday when all of this was over.
SIX
They found him walking along Highway 55, just outside of New Bern. To the two men watching from behind their truck, he seemed to shimmer like a ghost that had not yet taken full form, the heat coming off the road distorting his figure as he moved down the long strip of asphalt, coming toward them. The two men were young and old, one with scars on his face, the other with curiosity and a bit of apprehension.
The older one lifted up a scoped rifle and leaned against the bed of the pickup truck. The younger hovered close, wondering what they would find. The older looked through the riflescope for a time, his brow furrowing. Then he lowered it and pursed his lips.
“Sicky?” the younger one asked.
“Can’t tell.” The older wiped sweat from his forehead. “He was holdin’ somethin’, though.”
“What was it?”
The older man just shrugged.
They waited for the figure to draw closer. Their pickup truck was on the side of the road, amid several others. For the most part, they were concealed. All around them there were pine forests and farmland. The forests were strange, all the pine trees standing perfectly erect, all of them grown to a uniform height and in perfect rows and columns. The farmland was mostly a sea of wheat stubble, harvested, but the second crop not yet planted.
