by Billy Farmer
Everything happened in slow motion besides the trigger pull. I remember the flash of the muzzle and the smell of cordite. I fucking shot Titouan in the face.
“Goddamn you, William!”
I didn’t kill him, or it didn’t appear that I had. Dead people didn’t run, but their eyes weren’t supposed to blink either. He took off towards the living room, holding the right side of his face.
“Shit.” I couldn’t believe I shot him.
“Fucking bastard shot me,” I heard him say from the living room.
I heard Sam tell Titouan, “It’s a damn scratch. You ain’t goin ta die.”
I was relieved by that. He was a dick, but I didn’t want to kill him. Somebody else would probably end up doing it, but I didn’t want that person to me.
I felt a tug. Of all people, Avery was the one who took the rifle away from me. Seriously, he was the sensible one? I was bad off.
“Are you okay?” Avery asked.
“Did you see her?”
Avery looked confused. “Her?”
“The woman sitting at the damn table!”
Avery raised his lamp to get a better look. “I do not see anything.”
Since my headlamp’s battery was fading, I took Avery’s lamp from him. She wasn’t seated at that table like she had been just a couple moments ago. “She was sitting at that table, dammit. Right there!” I said pointing at the table.
“You are not well. Maybe you are suffering from delirium brought on by our current--”
“Shut up – please, just shut up for a minute.” I walked around to the back of the table. She was lying on the floor, obscured by the table and the dim light from Avery’s also battery-drained lamp. “I told you there was a woman sitting at the table. I’m not fucking crazy.” I said I wasn’t crazy, but I’m not sure I believed it.
The impact I felt when I wheeled the gun around was me bashing the side of her skull with the barrel of the rifle. I hit her so hard that I knocked her out of the chair and into the floor. The problem was she was lying in the same position she was while sitting in the chair. I grabbed her hand, but it rubber-banded back into the same pronated position it was when I first saw her.
“She is dead, William.”
“Unless I killed her when I hit her with the barrel, I don’t believe that to be true.”
“That is impossible.” He nudged her arm with the barrel of the gun, but as soon as the barrel was removed, her arm bounced back into position. “She smells dead. She has rigor mortis. She is dead.”
I’m not sure why I did what I did next. I spun her around on the floor until she faced me. I then bent over and grabbed her, but she slipped out of my grasp three different times. Determined, I wiped the slippery film covering her exposed skin on my pants and grasped her around her waist. Avery whispered a prayer, as I struggled to put her back into the chair. Sucking breaths and dizzy from my manic episode, I nearly knocked the lamp off the table as I placed it near her. Tears had formed in her eyes and watery trails ran down her cheeks.
I sniffed my mucous covered hands. It smelled like bad fruit. Not exactly terrible, but you wouldn’t want to wear it on your first date. There were some disinfectant wipes on the counter. I grabbed a ton of them and began violently wiping at my hands and coat, trying remove every drop of the slimy substance.
“Dead people cannot cry, William,” Avery said, snapping his fingers.
She began to whimper. “They don’t do that either,” I reiterated.
Avery dreamed of moments like we were experiencing: an authentic unexplainable incident, and what does he do? He tucks tale and full-on runs into the living room, uttering more prayers to God and all his saints. I followed him, hoping some of the prayers would be answered. I was desperate.
"Now what in the world is wrong with him? Hell, ya both look like you’ve done seen a ghost,” Sam said, as he finished cleaning up Titouan’s face.
“Try to kill him, too?” Titouan snarled.
“Not fucking now,” I told him.
“Son, what’s ‘at noise in ‘ere?” Sam asked.
“The dead woman,” Avery blurted, as he rocked back and forth on the couch.
Sam walked over to where Avery sat and grabbed the rifle. “Neither of you’ins gets to hold ‘is for a while. Stop being crazy, and I’ll give y’all ‘nother chance,” he said, eyeing both me and Avery. “Now, let’s see what the hell is goin on in the kitchen.”
Avery began to pray: first barely audible then growing louder and louder.
“What the hell are you doing, Avery?” Titouan asked.
“Currently, I am invocating my Lord God through his Son, God Dammit.”
I led Sam and Tish into the kitchen. Avery and Titouan stayed in the living room. One nursed his cut and burned face, while the other one, well, he apparently was busy talking to God through Jesus. Whatever kept them out of our hair while we figured what the hell was going on was fine by me.
“Oh my God,” Tish said, as the woman continued whimpering.
Tish moved closer to her, cupping her mouth with a bloody hand. She placed two fingers on the woman’s neck to check for a pulse. She shook her head, seemingly frustrated, before trying again. Finally, she wiped her fingers on her pants, and said, “Besides the mucous, the smell, and the catatonic state, she’s normal,” Tish said.
I gave her a long look. There had to me more.
Apparently sensing my apprehension, she said, “Her pulse is a little slow but normal enough.”
For whatever reason, I needed to let Tish know what I did. “I hit her with the rifle barrel before I shot Titouan.”
She gave me a quick once over, and then turned her attention back to the woman.
The woman blinked. This time, it was the other eye.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to control my breaths. I was hyperventilating.
Sam grabbed her hand and lifted it. It fell exactly back into place where it rested on the table. "I'll take her out back and put her out of her damn misery. ‘Is ain't right, son.”
Her mouth was still clamped shut, but the whimpers were getting louder and louder, apparently to the point of being heard in the living room. Titouan stood in the kitchen doorway. “Shut that thing up. Jesus!”
Sam, seeing that Titouan was going to cause more problems, firmly led him back into the living room. “Just shut the hell up and stay in here. ‘Ey dealin with it.”
“What do you think, Tish?” I asked.
Tish, no longer able to look at the woman sitting at the table, walked over to the kitchen window. I didn’t tell her, but one of the woman’s eyes seemed to track her as she walked past.
Wiping her eyes, Tish said after a few moments, “I don’t know.”
“We can’t just leave her in here like this,” I said.
“None of this makes any sense. This shouldn’t be happening like this,” Tish said, still looking out the window.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
Tish quickly turned her head towards me. “What?”
“What do you mean by not happening like this?”
“I don’t know. I’m just talking out of my head.” Tish began to sob. “It’s just…” She nodded towards the woman. “Her.”
“Maybe we should take the conversation in there,” I said, not knowing if the woman was lucid enough to know what we were saying. Maybe she would stop making the noises if we left, I thought. I really wanted her to stop.
“I need to check on Tom, anyway,” she said, wiping the wet traces from her face.
Once we were in the living room, I asked Tish how Tom was doing.
“I stopped the bleeding. I hope, anyway. It wasn’t nearly as bad as we thought. I was so relieved when I saw that it wasn’t the carotid,” Tish said.
“I wasn’t thinking. I should’ve told you something.”
“What?” she asked.
Tom was on a blood thinner. I knew this because he had the heart attack while we were eating supper back in Ea
st Texas. Some of the guys and me were the only people who went to see him at the hospital. We never talked about it, but I knew he had family back in Florida. For whatever reason, none of them cared enough to come or even call during his stay and recovery. He never seemed too sad about it, and like I said, I didn’t ask.
“He’s on blood thinner.”
“That would’ve been nice to know.”
***
We had been at the house for several hours. The adrenaline had long waned, leaving me with ragged nerves and exhausted beyond anything I personally had ever experienced. We needed to sleep, even if it was freezing in the house. Sam told us how his parents used to hang blankets over most of the doorways because the wood stove in the living room was never enough to heat the entire house. Once we did that, the living room became nice and toasty.
The blankets covering the doorway had a secondary benefit. They helped mute the woman’s constant whimpering. That was until she began trying to sound out actual words. She kept repeating the letter t. “Ttttttttt,” followed by more whimpering. Tish spent several moments in the kitchen checking on her. When she had finished, the woman wasn’t making any more sound. We were so relieved she had quit, no one asked what she had done to make her quiet.
We did agree that if she did begin to regain more of her movement, we would do everything in our power to help. I’m not sure if we actually meant it or not. If I’m being honest, we made that pact to make ourselves feel better about trying to ignore another human’s suffering. And look, it was pretty obvious by that point that she was suffering.
We also decided, since Tom’s attacker was still at large, someone would need stay awake and keep lookout while the rest of us slept, not to mention keeping an eye on Tom and the woman in the kitchen. Sam decided that he would go first because he didn't trust anyone else at that point to hold the rifle. We didn’t argue. Tish checked over Tom one more time, tucked him in, and we hunkered down for a few hours nap.
***
I opened my heavy eyes. I had hoped all of this was a nightmare, but my aching back and sore knees were a testament to how real things were. Sam gave me a perplexed look as I came to a sitting position on the floor. “How long did I sleep?”
“Accordin to ‘at damn grandfather clock over yonder, ya was asleep ‘bout three hours. I ain’t sure how you slept past the damn ringin of ‘em chimes.”
He told me that at one point he had nearly fallen asleep when the "damn thang went off and almost caused me to pee my pants.” I told him that I was good. I would take over for him, and surprisingly he took my offer. "Don't shoot any of us in our sleep, ya crazy bastard." He slapped me on my uninjured shoulder and took occupancy of the pallet that I had just gotten up from. “You better not have farted under ‘ese blankets.”
“Way to keep it classy, Sam.”
I sat in the chair by the small window. Enough cold radiated off the window pane to give a chill, but as exhausted as I was, it helped me stay awake. The snow had almost completely stopped by that point, and even though twilight had been replaced with complete darkness, the full moon shined brightly enough that there was enough natural light outside I could clearly see all the way to street in front of the house.
There was a car sitting in the front yard, but the fact that it was missing two wheels and up on blocks, told me it wasn’t quite in working order. Because everything in Barrow was so damn expensive, people rarely threw anything away. That was why junk lay around everywhere. Not surprisingly, that included cars.
I couldn't help myself from wishing the car was running. I would've liked to have jump in and driven as far away as possible. That wouldn’t have been that far. There were no roads out of Barrow. Still, anywhere was better than that shitty little house.
Since I couldn’t escape in the broken down beater in the front yard, I’d settle for a different kind of escape. I had brought snack with me. I took the candy bar out of my pocket and began eating it. The sugar instantly made me feel better. I was finishing the last bite when I heard Tom say something in a raspy but understandable voice. “Did you save me some, you fat bastard?”
“If I’d known you weren’t dead, I would’ve,” I replied with a big grin. Damn, I was glad to hear his voice.
“You think I can get a drink of water?”
“Sure.”
As quietly as I could, I rummaged through our bags looking for a bottle of water. Apparently, we had drunk it all. Damn.
“I’ll be back in second. I’ll grab some from the kitchen.”
I hoped there would be water in the kitchen. I pulled aside the blankets that hung in the doorway and entered. I couldn’t stop myself from looking at the woman at the table. For the first time since everything started, I felt like we were quickly losing our way. Seeing that woman sitting there at the table with masking tape wrapped around her mouth caused a huge lump to form in my throat. I couldn’t believe Tish had done that. I didn’t take it off.
Luckily, there was a pitcher of water in the fridge. I grabbed a cup that was in the drainer, and I proceeded to fill it with water, cursing the Gods for every extra second I spent in there.
Tom sat up. He took several long drafts of the water I gave him before lying back down. He fiddled with the bandage on the side of his neck.
“Hurts like hell,” he said.
Tish said whoever cut him had used a really dull knife. The wound was not a straight, quick cut. It was more a tear than anything. If the person had used a sharp knife, he would’ve almost certainly killed him. He didn’t need to know the details. “I bet.”
“What the hell happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Obviously, some asshole cut me, but I don’t remember much after that.”
“We don’t know what happened either. Whoever did it ran away. Didn’t even steal anything from you.”
“Didn’t have much to steal.” Tom looked around the room, and then at me; befuddled, he asked, “Where the hell are we?”
“Good question. We’re currently in someone’s house who we don’t know from Adam.”
“Keeps getting better.”
He lay back down for a while because he said he felt like he was going to throw up. After his queasiness had passed, he proceeded to tell me some of what he was beginning to remember. He said he had fallen behind a bit, after crossing over the sea wall, because he had noticed a house with its front door open. Out of curiosity, he walked over to check things out. “Who leaves the door open in the arctic in December?” He asked. “Something wasn’t right about it.”
Shaking his head, he said, “I heard thumping inside, and a lot of it. It sounded like there were people wrestling.” Against his better judgement, he said he was going to call inside to see if everything was okay, but before he could do so, he heard sniffing just inside the open door. “First thing that came to my mind was dogs – big ones. I don’t know what was going on in there, but I do know you don’t go messing with dogs like that.”
He began to cough. I thought he had awoken Tish with the last bout of coughing, but she settled back into a light snore. He lowered his voice. “You think I can get some more water? My throat is fucked.”
Damn. I walked quickly by her without venturing even the slightest glimpse. I refilled the glass and hauled ass back to Tom. I handed him the glass, and he gulped it down. He coughed a few more times, shook his head, and told me that he didn’t feel well.
“Maybe it’s time to get some more rest,” I told him.
He shook his head letting me know that he wanted to continue. “I had begun to catch up with you guys when I heard something behind me. I raised my lamp, but didn’t see anything. As I turned back around, though, I saw a guy charging me from down the street. I dropped the lamp…”
Tom got quiet for a few moments. He put his hand on his face, and he lay back resting on his elbow. "I'm dizzy as hell, man."
“We’ll talk about this crap later. You need rest.”
Still resting o
n his elbow, he said, “I got a good look at him before he attacked me.” He shook his head, and then swallowed deeply. “Yeah, I don't feel good, William. I'm going to take a breather.”
Tom never complained. “Yeah, you do that. Need anything else?”
“No.”
He tossed and turned a couple times before going completely quiet. He didn’t even snore, which was odd because he was notorious for his snoring. So much so that he was the only person at the nest who didn’t have to share a room. Everyone to a man refused to be his bunkmate. Sam said, “The bastard had ta be fakin ‘em noises, cause no human can make ‘em on accident. Bastard wanted his own room. ‘At’s all it was.”
I was sore all over, but my legs especially were killing me. I stood up for a moment to stretch. After deciding the pain of stretching my legs was greater than not stretching them, I sat back down hard in the uncomfortable chair and tried in vain to rub the pain out.
It might seem weird, but we had been in that house for hours, and it was in that moment, as I kneaded my sore muscles, that I took the time to look around. I was struck by just how barren the living room was. The place looked like it wasn’t lived in. It was weirdly clean and devoid of anything that made a house a home. There were no pictures or knickknacks or anything you might expect. There was a small television, the grandfather clock, a small love seat, and two beaten, uncomfortable chairs. One of which I sat in and wasn’t exactly doing my back any favors.
Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw movement outside. Out by the broken down car was a man. “What the hell?” He sat on his hunches, his nose pointed towards the moonlit sky. He was shirtless. He might not have been wearing shoes, either, but it was hard to tell because of the snow.
My first inclination was that the poor guy had to be freezing to death. I began to stand and move towards the door, but that was also when he turned his face towards the window, and when I took a hard look at Avery’s jerry-rigged door, and prayed to the Gods it would hold.
