by Rob Heinze
If he would hold me, only hold me…
The tears had streaked her face. He had come back to their comforter, and for a long time he had stood looking down at her. Five, ten, maybe even fifteen minutes had passed before he had finally sat down next to her and drew her close to him. His strong, warm hands had squeezed her, and she had thought…crying, she had thought this:
Thank you. Thank you.
Tonight the love (no, sex) hadn’t been that bad, though it was certainly not normal. Afterwards, they had eventually fallen asleep—her first and then John. Now she came awake blearily and wondered where she was. She had been dreaming something wonderful, and it had been so vivid that she had not wanted to awake. She had been on some sort of stone bridge, and at the other end had stood a glowing structure towards which she had to head. It took a while for her to remember where she was, and when she did, she didn’t have time to be mad or sad.
For she saw the bright orange glow painted along the street.
It’s moving, she thought, confused. The glow’s moving.
She sat up and looked over at John, who was lying on his back with his eyes closed. A light snoring sound came from him. She stood up, trying not to wake him, and walked over towards the front of the store slowly.
Eve was not normally someone who responded to emergency situations calmly, and this was no exception, except that it took a long time for what she was seeing to register on her mind. She saw the entire inside of the store ripe with flames. They writhed and churned like the contents of a witch’s caldron. Curling smoke rose high towards the ceiling, trapped inside by the thick glass windows.
Then it hit her. She sprinted back over to John, dropping down and shaking him, panic in her voice.
“John, get up!”
He sat up quickly, eyes wide with terror. “Where are they? They’re not here, are they? Where! Where!”
“John! It’s the store; it’s burning!”
John, blinking, looked at her for a moment as his mind processed that which she said.
“The man…the person inside!”
John remembered; they had camped out in hopes of meeting that person on the morrow. So far as he had known, he and the girl had been the only two in this fucked up place (that’s not true, John, is it? There was someone else but you killed him). But there was someone else, who was now in a store that was apparently burning, and in that person might be some hint on how to get out of here.
He was on his feet and running to the front of the store. Eve followed closely behind. He looked inside with wide eyes, the whites of which now filled with the reflection of the burning store. He glanced to Eve.
“The back entrance! We’ll never get in this way!”
They ran the entire length of the store. The night sky was oddly luminescent tonight. They reached the back of the store and immediately went in search of an entrance. There were metal doors for the truck drop-offs, all closed, and they didn’t think they would be able to get them open.
They spotted a glass door on the far left of the building. They sprinted to it, panting, sweat already pouring from their faces. John grabbed the cool metal handle and gave it a tug. It was locked.
“Get something!” He yelled at Eve.
She stood indecisively for a moment, just looking blankly at him.
“What the fuck is wrong with you! I said get something to break the glass!”
Eve, feeling no better than shit, ran off in search of something. It didn’t take her long; she spotted a cracked patch of asphalt. She went back to John with the large chunk of asphalt she’d gleaned, handing it to him. He didn’t hesitate for a moment; he wound back and threw it hard at the door. It zipped threw the air and hit the glass, leaving only a nick. Cursing, John ran and picked it up. Some of the pieces had crumbled off, but it was still a sizable rock. He wound back and threw again, yelling this time. This time something broke, and it wasn’t the door: the asphalt hunk shattered in a rain of stones, leaving the beginnings of a spider-crack on the glass. The door was still unbroken.
“Fuck!” He yelled. He spun to face Eve. “Go get my knife!”
She nodded and was gone, and he watched her run and thought she ran so goddamn slow and daintily with her arms out at her sides. Time seemed to stretch on, stretch and stretch until his bladder felt like it would burst with his increasing anxiety. He would be dead, the man inside; John knew that. There was no doubt about it. Finally, he saw Eve coming around the corner with the knife. She handed it to him, puffing and huffing.
“Will we make it? Do you think we’ll make it?”
John ignored her and flipped the knife over in his hand. Its grip was reassuring. He walked to the door and aimed the knife’s tip at the center of the spider crack. He wound back and closed his eyes. As he brought the knife in a forward arc, he remembered the look of surprise in his victim’s eyes as the knife had slipped into his stomach.
The knife broke through the glass, and the door shattered into a thousand thick shards.
John bolted into the building, and Eve followed closely behind.
6
It was something that he truly hadn’t thought about, and now it was the only thing on his mind. If you died here, what happened? If this was some pseudo-afterlife, what would happen if you died? Could you die? He thought that you could—and he would. He was trapped, and the muscles in every part of his body burned with lactic acid from his struggles. He would never get out.
He bucked, grunted, and settled back down. The fire was now rising over him, sending tiny burning flecks dancing around him like deranged fireflies. He knew that at any moment one of them might land on him and set him burning. He looked up into the fire, and in the frolicking flames he saw the haunting shapes of Those of the Dark.
His terror mounted, and for a brief moment he went into a furious struggle. It didn’t last long, and soon he was back to being still and panting.
I’ll just close me eyes, he thought, resigning his fate.
He closed his eyes, and almost immediately a picture of Sarah came into his mind. She was marrying someone else, lost without him, and that someone treated her like shit, but she did not know the difference and couldn’t leave him because Charley was no longer around, had never been—
“Hello!”
Charley opened his eyes. He looked around in confusion.
Did I hear a voice? He wondered. No, I couldn’t have heard a voice.
He was about to close his eyes again when the voice clearly articulated itself.
“HELLOOOOOOO!”
This time he wasn’t mistaken. His eyes popped open and his heart began to beat. There was someone in here! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
He breathed deep and gathered energy from somewhere inside of himself. Then he opened his lungs and yelled: “Here! I’m over here!”
There was no response, and for a moment he again thought that his mind had only imagined the calls and shouts. The hot fire crept closer behind him, and any minute more debris could tumble on top of him.
He saw the man and the woman appear at the end of the aisle. They looked around the store, and then at each other for a while. They didn’t see him underneath the rumble. Grunting, he forced his hand up through the pile, waving it frantically. The man’s head was rotating, and Charley watched as it stopped on where he lay.
He’s seen me! Charley thought. Thank you, God!
The man came running to Charley, sweat on his face. He hunkered down next to him.
“Are you okay?”
He was thick-bodied and thick-voiced. He looked like he might be able to carry Charley out of the store like a sack-of-potatoes.
“I’m stuck,” Charley replied.
The man immediately went to work lifted things off of him. The girl stood smiling down at Charley. She was very pretty with flowing blond hair that was starting to show brown at the roots.
“Help me!” The man yelled back at her.
She went to work hoisting things off Charley.
There was a loud crackle and pop above them, and a shower of burning ambers came floating down around them like confetti. The girl screamed and brushed them off her frantically. The man was coughing now and Charley wondered why the smoke hadn’t gotten to him yet.
“Are you hurt?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Can you feel your legs?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“We don’t have time to clear everything off. I’m going to pull you out.”
Charley nodded. The girl was standing in back of the big-shouldered man. Her face was harried, and there was no longer a smile there. She was afraid they wouldn’t be able to get him out; Charley could tell that. The big man reached down and grabbed Charley underneath his arms. He took a handful of Charley’s clothes in each hand and bent his knees. He pulled, the cords and veins in his neck standing out. Charley felt the positive pressure of the junk around him, trying to hold him trapped, while this big man used his big strength. With a loud grunt, the man jerked hard and Charley felt the give somewhere around his waist: it was the give of the pile. He was free.
He looked down at his legs and saw that they were not convoluted to some odd angle.
“Can you stand?” The man asked.
“I think,” Charley said.
They both helped him to his feet. His legs were numb, and as the blood flooded back into the deprived muscles, he felt those agitating pins and needles jabbing at him. The two helped him limp down the aisle. They led him to the back of the store, into the warehouse section where cold dark boxes stood glowing faintly in the not-distant fire, as if sweating in anticipation of their approaching doom.
Now they were down a small corridor. A dark office was on their right with a receptionist’s window carved into the wall. Charley could feel the cool nip of the night’s wind as it coalesced into the hallway; safety was almost with them. They helped him through the door, careful not to cut him on any of the glass shards. By the time that they got around to the front of the building, Charley’s circulation had redistributed blood to his legs and he could walk without help. He stood across the wide, empty street by himself as the two who had saved him ran back to gather stuff that they had left by the building. Charley wondered how they had known that he was inside.
They came back, the girl smiling at him. The man didn’t smile, but he looked once to Charley and nodded minutely. Then they stood and watched the fire consume the giant Sport’s Authority store, the flames shortly blowing out the windows and creeping up the front façade. Thick black smoke billowed out like the body of some huge alien worm squirming into the air. Had the electricity been working, Charley was sure that the sprinkler system would have come on and started to fight the fire.
Instead, the fire burned unchecked.
7
By the morning, the whole block was burning. The wind had taken embers and coasted them over to the next building, then the next (which happened to be a whole block of connected apartments). Charley stood goggling at it from the top of the Turnpike and wondered if it would ever stop. If not, he might be responsible for laying waste to an entire city.
It’s like that Chicago fire that started in a barn, he thought.
There was no humor in that thought.
What does it matter? There’s no one here.
They had left the city and gone back to the Turnpike, and they had been walking for a long time. They had put a good distance between themselves and the fire. Blue dawn was seeping into the dark sky now, and they all felt drained. Charley had taken his bike from the front of the store but had not ridden it. John saw the bike and wondered why he had never thought of getting a bike. Sometimes the simplest ideas were the best and most often overlooked.
John spoke little. Charley thanked him profusely, and John responded minimally. Eve did not stop talking. She went on about how she had gotten here.
I think I was in a car crash, she had said, and then she had lain out all of the reasons why she thought so. Her memories—and I have a good memory, Charley—her feelings—you can’t argue with feelings, you know?—and everything else to defend why she thought that.
Charley felt good to have someone with whom he could speak. On her prompting, he told her about himself, about how he’d awoken in that empty house. He also told her and John about Ray. When John heard this, he glanced over at Charley.
“There was someone else here?”
“Yeah. He was in New York.”
“What did he say about…about this place. About why he might be here?”
“His theory,” Charley said, walking his bike.
It was morning now. Walking was easy.
“His theory was that we are in a coma.”
John seemed to consider that. He looked off at the industrial buildings and wastelands along each side of the Jersey Turnpike.
Eve, interested, said: “If we’re in a coma, what happens when we wake? You know what, maybe it’s just like going to sleep? Maybe we go to sleep here and wake up there and everything is normal.”
Neither Charley nor John had a response to that.
They walked for the rest of the day, the sun rising high to warm their way. Charley knew that it had been March before he’d awoken here (he could remember the chill in that abandoned house), and so maybe this was April trying to sneak its way into the month. He didn’t know; this whole place was odd, but he did know it was warm.
There was nowhere to halt along the sides of the road—for miles they could see nothing but gagging and choking wetlands. To the left, New York City stood in the canting sunlight like a magical kingdom in a fairy tale. They halted. They needed a rest, even if there was no place really conducive to resting. Eve went busily to work laying down the comforter first so that they wouldn’t be sitting on pebbles and broken glass. They took there lunch in the presence of the wastelands of Jersey, the breeze thankfully pulling the stench of methane off towards the city.
For a long time, they simply ate in silence and said nothing. John was looking at Charley between bites of his cereal bar, which was the best that they could come up with. Charley had noticed the knife that adorned John’s waist, and he found himself glancing at it from time to time. He had noticed John’s hands straying to the knife often, as if for reassurance.
“Have you had the dream yet?” John asked suddenly, startling Charley.
Charley looked up from the man’s knife and nodded. “The one with the bridge?”
John nodded.
“Any idea what it means?”
Charley shook his head. “No. I know that Ray…the other guy—he had it too.”
“We all have it,” Eve whispered. “How could we all have the same dream?”
No one knew. Charley remembered all too well the black shapes as they descended upon him in that dream. He shivered. He glanced off into the distance and saw the ancient, abandoned city of New York caught in the graceful daylight.
Charley looked over at John, who appeared lost in his own thoughts. His fingers had gone to his knife. He touched it lightly, lovingly. Eve saw it too, and she looked towards Charley. She blushed and looked away from him, and Charley thought there was something like fear in her eyes. He wasn’t completely sure, though.
They were odd, John and Eve—their body languages were hard for Charley to read. Sometimes it looked as if Eve were trying too hard. Mostly John ignored her. There were other times when John would respond to her; his hand might reach out and touch her waist as they walked. Maybe they just needed each other, but didn’t really want to need each other. Hadn’t he known a few people like that in life?
“What were you planning to do?” John asked, glancing up from his knife.
Charley shrugged. “I was heading home. Thought there might be…might be something there.”
John and Eve both remained silent. They had gone back to their homes before. They had both found nothing but emptiness. Still, they didn’t want to shatter Charley’s hope.
“We’ll go with
you, if you want,” Eve said suddenly. She glanced hopefully at John.
John didn’t say anything. There was a brief flicker of what looked like doubt on his face. He glanced at Charley, nodded, and then went back to staring at his knife.
“Have you seen Those of the Light?” Charley asked, wondering if they would be surprised by the phrase. They weren’t.
“We’ve seen them,” John said, looking back to Charley.
“I saw them once in New York City. They led me up to this roof, and they left me a message there. Beware of Be,,that was the message. And then they just vanished.”
“Beware of bee?” Eve said thoughtfully. “Of a bee, like a bumblebee?”
“I don’t know,” Charley said, shaking his head. “It makes no sense to me.”
“Have you seen the others?”
Charley looked to John. The man’s face was grave, graver than normal. He glanced to Eve, who was suddenly looking off into the distance as if checking their solitude. John didn’t remove his eyes from Charley.
“Those of the Dark. I’ve never seen them, except in that dream.”
“Those of the Light and Dark,” Eve whispered, and John glanced at her resentfully.
What’s with him? Charley found himself wondering.
He told them about that message he had seen long ago on 495.
“We never saw any messages like that,” Eve said. Her tone of voice was confused. “But we’ve seen them.”
John did not reply, either to affirm or negate what Eve had said. He simply looked at his knife, his finger moving along the tip slowly and methodically. Charley didn’t want to hear about Those of the Dark, not really, for hearing about it would just make the situation that much more frightening. In fact, he suddenly lost all desire to communicate. He wasn’t the only one.
They sat in silence for a long time, a silence that was so utterly complete that Charley thought he could feel each of their hearts beating.
8
They figured that they could walk about four miles per hour. That meant in eight hours, they could cover 32 miles. Streamwater, Charley’s home, was just over 20 miles from where they had taken their lunch. They hoped to make it there before nightfall. If they had bikes, they could have cut that time down in half. Charley had not taken his. He had known he couldn’t ride without them, and he thought that walking it would be too much of a hassle.
