by Laura Bickle
Not just a body. I had seen dead bodies before, at funerals. Those bodies were neatly dressed in their Plain clothes, pale and sunken, usually old. Since we didn’t embalm our dead, we buried them quickly, with little ceremony. Plain dead were peaceful, solemn.
This was . . . not peaceful. A man in a T-shirt and jeans lay on the floor. His head had been torn off, missing. I saw only white vertebrae glistening in that mass of gore that had been his neck.
I jammed my fist in my mouth. I was too terrified to scream, too shocked to do anything but utter a squeak.
And then I heard the clang of the cooler door slam shut behind me.
I scuttled back, tripped on a bucket. I fell down, backwards, on the floor, in the stain. I scrambled to my feet, whimpering in terror. I shoved at the door, but it was locked.
I sobbed, slammed my fist against it. The sound echoed just like my blow on the Coke machine and was just as ineffective. I tried to control my breathing. There had to be an emergency release, some way to get out . . . my shaking fingers worked around the seam of the door, feeling for a lever or a switch.
Something made a scraping sound above me.
Swallowing hard, I looked up.
Behind the fluorescent light, I could make out shadows. I shaded my eyes from the weak light with my hand. I was able to distinguish shapes—shapes of people. They were suspended upside down from the ceiling, curled up in balls or dangling with limbs dragging in spider webs of silk that drizzled down in the darkness, holding the forms there in an ethereal embrace.
My breath disturbed a string of silk that trailed from the shadowed ceiling. It moved as intangibly as smoke. I was reminded of when I was a young girl and had disturbed a nest of corn spiders in the barn. The creatures had crawled everywhere, in my hair, my bonnet, down the neck of my dress . . .
Something up there moved, shifted. And glowing red eyes stared at me.
I saw the figure scuttle across the ceiling in a spider-like fashion, but it was human . . .
“Oh God!” I swore, jerking on the handle to the door. I rattled it, working my hands around the door, trying to find an emergency release I knew had to be there.
The creature on the ceiling approached as silently as those barn spiders, reached toward me.
My shaking hands found a cracked plastic button to the right of the door. I pulled at it, turned it, whimpering, finally slapped it hard . . .
And the door sprang open. I lurched through the doorway, running behind the bar.
I knew that thing was behind me. I ran past the line of washing machines, turned back to see it pawing along the ceiling. I didn’t watch where I was going, stumbled over a box of laundry soap. The powdered soap spewed all over the floor, and I slammed against the wall of dryers.
The glass door of one of the dryers sprang open from the impact, and I found myself face to face with the contents of the machine. At first, I assumed that they were merely clothes, but . . . that smell . . . it was the same as in the cooler.
I could see pale, broken limbs turned in on themselves, a claw of a hand tangled in a sleeve. It was a crumpled, stinking body.
I whirled, only to find the creature from the cooler walking down the wall of dryers, hands behind knees, then dropping upright, on his feet. He was pale and filthy, and he smelled like blood. But what was most unnatural was the way his eyes glowed, like a cat’s in the darkness. Behind him, I could see other shapes gathering on the ceiling.
I didn’t bother to ask him what he wanted. I knew.
He wanted to kill me. Like he and the others had killed the man in the cooler and the man in the washing machine. It didn’t matter why. There was no reasoning. This was the visceral fear of prey in the face of the predator, bitter like bile in my throat. But I was determined to run.
Chapter Nine
I sprinted for the door, breath burning in my throat. I felt the creature snatch the tails of my apron, drag me back from the door. I shrieked and flailed, my feet skidding on the sticky floor.
I heard stitches pop and give way, the sash of my apron shredding in the predator’s grip. I lunged for the door.
I heard a snarl behind me. I knew that I had no hope, that even if I reached to door, he had me. But I was determined to try, to reach that golden threshold of sunshine before I was mauled to death, before my head was torn from my shoulders like that poor man in the cooler or my broken body was stuffed in the dryer like canned meat.
I straight-armed through the door, landed on my elbows on the pavement as I felt a hand latch around my ankle. I tasted blood in my mouth where I’d bitten my lip, twisted and turned to stare my fate in the face.
And the creature hissed. Abruptly, he released my ankle, his hand smoking in the sunshine.
I scrambled to my feet and ran toward my bike. I could see the shadows seething in the Laundromat, the glowing eyes behind the dark glass, mirroring the light of the seductive Coke machine. Somehow, they were trapped, pinned there by the daylight, I realized.
I struggled onto my bike, pumping the pedals as hard as I could down the street into the shining afternoon.
I could not stop shaking on my ride home. I quaked so hard that it was difficult to keep the bike from trembling under the uneven weight of the dog food and supplies in my basket. I pedaled so hard that it felt like my lungs were going to burst, swerving on the dark ribbon of road away from even the shadows of trees. I was afraid of what may lay in that soft darkness.
I am being punished for my sins. That was my first thought. Clearly, the gates of hell had burst open. Those creatures in the Suds ’n’ Duds were not human. They radiated evil—evil like I had never known or could even have imagined before. When there had been news of a contagion, I had doubted the reality of a medical evil. What I had seen was clearly not the work of medicine. This reeked of spiritual evil, something beyond what could be fathomed by any technology belonging to man.
I licked blood from my lower lip. I knew. I knew what had happened to Seth and Joseph. And the rider on the white horse. They had fallen prey to these monsters. Tears blurred my vision. I longed to tell Elijah, but I didn’t know that I would ever be able to form the words. There would be no kind, gentle way of telling him that his brothers had been torn limb from limb.
I wrestled with whom to tell, what to say. Any tale I could tell began and ended with sins I’d committed and the discovery of the man in the barn. Given the ruthlessness with which the Elders had chosen to leave him Outside, I knew that telling would result in certain death for him.
And perhaps also for me. They might not kill me outright, but if the Elders still believed in a contagion, they would probably throw me outside the gate, to be fed to those monsters. I shuddered. My sense of self-preservation eclipsed my desire to protect my community. I would not sacrifice myself that way, I decided. It was not God’s will that I died. He had allowed me to escape, despite my sins. He had a plan for me and would not allow me to die, I reasoned. Not yet.
I pedaled back to the road where the gate stood. It seemed such a flimsy barrier against those shadow creatures. I heaved my bike over it, mindful not to damage the precious contents of the basket.
I paused here, at the border of our world and Outside. I stared down at my dress, sticky with splotches of the dead man’s blood. I knelt down to the ground, smeared some mud over the stains. I gathered some stalks of yellow mustard at the side of the road, tucked them over my basket to hide the contents and walked my bike home.
At the kennel, I was greeted by Copper and Sunny, who sniffed me vigorously. Copper flattened his ears and whined.
I reached down to rub him. “It’s okay, boy. I’m okay. I’m okay.” It seemed that the more I said it, the more it had to be true.
Sunny licked my filthy cheek, and I broke down. The bit of sympathy that the dogs showed me was enough to cause me to sit on the ground and sob. The terror and adrenaline drained out of me in my tears, shaking through me.
After I reached hiccupping, dry sobs, I scrubb
ed my sleeve across my face. I forced myself to stand and walk my bike into the barn.
The darkness made my skin crawl, but I reminded myself that I was safe here. I was no longer Outside. I unpacked the contents of the basket. The dogs investigated the bag of dog food, noses quivering. I lifted it and the cans up high on a rack, where they couldn’t reach.
“That’s for later,” I told them.
I gathered the antibiotics and headed back to the last paddock.
The young man—Alex—lay sleeping peacefully on the straw. I tore open a carton of the antibiotics, read the instructions twice. I removed three pills from the package, added a couple of ibuprofen. I propped his head up on my knee and forced the pills into his mouth. He gurgled and sputtered when I poured water past his lips.
“Antibiotics,” I said, curtly. “Take them.”
He did as he was told, swallowing the pills. His glazed eyes followed me as I sat back against the wall of the barn, a shaft of sunshine warming my back.
“There are enough for you to take for the next three weeks. Don’t lose any. There aren’t any more.”
“Thank you,” he whispered. His eyelids began to drift shut.
“No.” I shook him, hard. Anger burned brightly in my voice. I wanted answers. My Amish reticence faded in the darkness of what I’d seen, the urgency of needing to know: “Wake up. You need to tell me what happened Outside.”
His eyes opened, and he took in my disheveled appearance. “You saw?”
“I saw. Now, tell me.”
* * *
“At first, I didn’t realize there was anything wrong. I don’t think that anyone did.”
I loosened my grip on the young man’s collar. His head thudded back to the straw, and his gaze landed somewhere on the ceiling. He blinked hard, and I thought for a moment that he was going to try to lose consciousness again. My hand balled up. I wouldn’t let him. I wouldn’t let him slip away that easily, leaving me without answers.
But then I realized that he was blinking back tears.
“You’re not from around here,” I prompted, my voice softer.
“No. I’m from Canada.” That explained the slight rounding of his vowels.
“Why are you here?”
“I was looking at graduate schools.” His mouth twitched. “I wanted to get my PhD.”
“To be a doctor?” Plain folk didn't go to college. Children were educated through the eighth grade, most often in one-room schoolhouses like the kind I had gone to. I remembered my mother telling stories of forced busing to public schools back in the seventies, but the Amish had eventually won a Supreme Court case that allowed them to educate their children as they saw fit in the name of religious freedom.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Before, I’d resented it, wanting more than my teacher, the fifteen-year-old sister of a friend, could give me. I had to sneak away to the library and pester the librarians to answer questions that she could not. But right about now, thinking about Mrs. Parsall’s children, I didn’t resent it so much.
“Not a medical doctor. Not any kind of useful doctor. My undergraduate degree is in anthropology.” His gaze flicked to me. It seemed that he was weighing me, deciding how much I would understand about Outside. Trying to figure out how naive I really was.
“I know what anthropology is,” I said quietly. “You study people. Other cultures.”
“Yeah.”
“I have a library card,” I said. What I wanted to say was I’m not an idiot.
“I didn’t mean to imply that you were . . . that you didn’t understand.” It came out a bit haughty. “Sorry.”
I nodded and waited for him to continue.
Eventually, he licked his lips and went on: “I came to the U.S. a week ago. I told my family that I was looking at schools.”
My sharp ears detected the slight change in his story. “Why were you here, really?”
A smile crossed his lips. “Well, that wasn’t the only reason. There was a girl.”
I didn’t prod him. There wasn’t a girl now.
The smile faded. “I visited two schools. The first one was just . . . meh. They’d offered me a partial scholarship, but their program wasn’t very good. Snotty private school. Even with the scholarship, I’d be paying off the tuition until I was sixty. Not worth it for a professor’s salary.”
“You want to teach?”
“Yeah. Folklore.” He gave a small shrug. “The second school was better. The head of the department had published a lot, was a nice guy. Public school, cheaper tuition.”
“And . . . the girl?”
“Cassia.” His eyes softened when he said her name, and his eyes crinkled. I had never seen Elijah’s eyes do that when he said my name. “She was there. Studying biology.”
“How did you know her, if you were in Canada?” I was suspicious, looking to pick apart the threads of his story.
“We met on the Internet, fragging enemy soldiers.”
I looked at him blankly. He didn’t look like a soldier to me.
“Playing video games,” he amended.
It was unfathomable to me to know someone who lived hundreds of miles distant. “You met playing video games?”
“Yeah. My parents thought it was pretty outrageous too, but”—he gave another of his small shrugs—“two of my friends met their girlfriends on online dating sites. I figured that it was just as legitimate as that. We talked every day for about six months.”
“And you . . . fell in love when you saw her?” I knew about the concept of online dating sites from my peeks at magazines, but I had never actually used the Internet, so it was hard to understand exactly how they worked.
“No. I fell in love way before that. Love without first sight.” He gave a grim chuckle. “I killed three batteries on my cell phone talking with her in those months.”
I couldn’t wrap my mind around falling in love with someone from afar. I was accustomed to seeing Elijah every day, felt affection out of sheer force of familiarity, force of habit. For me, that was love. Tangible. Love was what was in front of me, not a distant fantasy.
He blinked and looked away. “Anyway, I got to campus the day that the news reports started to come in. The reporters said that something had happened in DC. Some kind of dirty bomb. A biological weapon had been detonated in a bus station, supposedly.”
“Supposedly? They didn’t know for sure?”
“It was certain that something blew up. There were photographs of the destruction. Half a city block cratered. But there were other reports, unofficial reports on the Internet, that something had happened at the CDC.”
“CDC?”
“Centers for Disease Control. They study infectious diseases, in Atlanta. Just rumors . . . there were all kinds of rumors. Rumors that aliens had landed, rumors that something climbed out of the Sarcophagus at Chernobyl.”
I hated to admit my ignorance, but I needed to know what was happening more than I needed to protect my pride. “What’s Chernobyl? And why do they have a sarcophagus?”
He explained to me patiently, without condescension. I could see some of what might make him a good teacher. “Chernobyl was the site of a nuclear disaster in the Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated and relocated, and thousands of deaths were attributed to the radiation, depending on who you talk to. The ground is still contaminated with radiation. They covered the reactor with a lead structure they nicknamed the Sarcophagus. It’s been degrading for years.”
I nodded. It sounded like the plot of one of the movies from the newspaper, but I accepted it. “Go on.”
“There was even a story that some bored Satanists got drunk at a science fiction convention and managed to summon some supernatural evil that took over the whole convention center.”
My frame of reference was already stretched to its limit. I had no idea where to begin with questions about that statement.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I don’t know what was actually true. What I do
know is that the news started showing videos of rioting. And not just in DC—it cropped up everywhere. I guess I thought it was some reaction to the terrorism, but it defied all logic. It wasn’t just a religious or political site that was burnt. It was schools, libraries. When I saw an Internet report of a tour bus of senior citizens turned over and . . . and eviscerated . . . I knew that it was much worse.”
“How did . . . how did it spread?”
“Cassia thought it was a result of transportation—airplanes, cars. It had spread within hours. And the contagion seems to have an absurdly short incubation period . . . less than two days.”
“Cassia sounds like a smart woman.”
“Yeah.” The corner of his mouth turned upward. “She’s freaking brilliant. That’s what I love about her. Biology fellow at the university. Gonna be a scientist.”
“Hmm.”
His gaze met mine. “What?”
“That’s just . . . the first time I’ve heard a man say he loved a woman for her brilliance.” I was used to hearing about men who loved women for their eyes, for their smiles, for their ability to work hard, for their gentleness and kindness. Not for their brilliance.
“Yeah, well. Women are different out there.” He let out a snort of derisive laughter.
“I don’t mean to sound insensitive about your dating life.” I lifted my chin in defiance. “But I want to know more about ‘out there.’ Why, with all those brilliant people, is there no more ‘out there’?”
He flinched. I felt a momentary sting of satisfaction at taking him down a peg. We Amish did not suffer pride well. Normally, I’d have accepted his condescension with a thin smile, but not today. Not after the world had ended. No one was observing the rules anymore.
“It’s not as if we weren’t working on it. I went with Cassia to the biology lab, slept in the hallway while all these people in their plastic suits stared into microscopes.”
“You went to protect her?” That was a feeling I could understand. Though I knew very little about his world and the things he spoke of, I understood human emotion.
