Melanie joined the boy at the kitchen counter. She ruffled Christopher’s hair as he laughed, and Tomas wondered how she and Leila could actually be of the same species. Melanie was a darker version of her mother, but despite all the things she had endured—losing both parents at such a young age and then coming to live in a place where she probably felt unwanted most of the time—she still carried a light within her. Leila had lost her light long ago, except when she looked at Christopher. Tomas usually found himself wondering what he’d done to cause her to fall out of love with him. For so long, they had tiptoed around each other, pretending they still cared, when the only common ground they really had was their son. Neither of them could bear the thought of not living with Christopher and seeing him every day. As far as Tomas was concerned, his son was worth the sacrifice. He wasn’t sure Leila felt the same, however.
***
Strange figures moved past the window. It was only a flash of inky movement, one of those tricks of light and a snatch of something caught in the corner of the eye. The little hairs prickled on the back of Tomas’s arm, but he kept the sighting to himself. Melanie had seen enough already, and Leila might go into some mad anxiety. He could do without both. Besides, there was no reason to incite a panic until he knew for certain he had seen something.
He covered the windows with heavy blankets, nailing them tightly to the frames. When Christopher asked why, Tomas assured him it was only to better keep in what little warmth they had. The response seemed to satisfy the women, as well.
Tomas watched the lawn through a sliver of an opening. Then, there it was—a single loping shape crossing the lawn. His breath caught, and he stood motionless, afraid any movement, no matter how slight, might alert the trespasser. It had started snowing again, but as the lone figure moved closer, Tomas could see the person was dressed only in thin pajama pants, billowing in the breeze, and an undershirt stained with something dark across the front. No shoes. White hair in need of a good trim whipped up and away from a pale face.
Bo must have sensed the presence of the old man because he moved to the front door, his pointed ears perked. He growled low in his throat and pawed at the door.
“Shut up, Bo,” Tomas hissed.
Of course, the blasted animal ignored him. Pawing desperately at the door, the dog began barking. The old man glanced up, his face trained first toward the front door and then to the window where Tomas stood. Tomas jumped back and let the blanket drop over the slit. The man’s eyes had been as white as his fish-belly complexion.
“Get upstairs, all of you. Go to the washroom and lock the door!”
Christopher began to whimper.
“What’s wrong?” Leila asked, standing up, her magazine falling to the floor. She picked up the boy and hugged him.
Melanie yanked her earbuds from her ears. She immediately began tapping the tops of her thighs, and Tomas found he wanted to scream at her to stop that, to just take a damned breath and get a move on, but even in his panic, he managed to bite his tongue.
“Is it them, Tomas? Is it the monsters?” Melanie asked, her voice quivering.
“Yes. Upstairs. Now.”
The dog was going crazy, saliva flying from his muzzle, claws marring the floor and the bottom of the front door. The door handle turned, easy the first time, and then more forcefully.
A voice that sounded caked in rust rose from the other side of the door. “Let an old man in, why don’t you?” The man knocked, five times, ten, and then he began to hammer.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
“Let an old man in, why don’t you? I’m starving!”
Melanie grabbed Leila’s arm and pulled her toward the stairs. “Come.” They fled to the second floor with Christopher.
Tomas sprinted to his office. Frantic, he rummaged through a few boxes on a high shelf in the closet. Papers, books, receipts. “Damn!” Finally, he located the box he needed. He took it down and opened it. Inside was a .44, a gift from Melanie’s father, Harold, many years before the accident that took the man’s life. Tomas had pretended to be thrilled with the gift because he loved the old man, but he loathed guns. He couldn’t have been more thankful for that gift at the moment. Inside his desk drawer, he found the box of bullets Harold had included. He always kept the bullets locked away, separate from the gun. He’d heard too many horror stories of children finding their parents’ loaded guns.
Hands shaking, he fiddled with the heavy piece. At the entrance, the pounding and barking continued, accompanied by an ominous splintering noise, but Tomas finally had the gun loaded.
The old man was just stepping through the door as Tomas rounded the corner into the living room. Bo attacked, tearing into the man’s white arm. Amazingly, the old man simply laughed and threw the dog away from him as if the heavy shepherd were a stuffed animal.
Tomas raised the gun and fired. He missed, and the bullet ripped through the wall a yard from the old man’s head. He fired again, and the old man’s head vanished in a rain of blood and brain. The ragged body fell backward, half in and half out of the front door.
Upstairs, Leila screamed, and Christopher began to wail. Tomas, his knees coming unhinged, fell back against the wall and slid to the floor. The world blurred, and he thought he might be sick. He had just blown off a man’s head.
He breathed deeply and, after a few moments, felt strong enough to stand. “Everything’s all right, Leila. But keep Christopher up there until I tell you it’s okay.” Slowly, he moved to the crumpled body. He stuffed the gun in his waistband and wiped his sweaty palms on the seat of his jeans. Icy air blasted in through the broken door, causing him to shiver. He heard a door open and close overhead. “I thought I told you—”
“It’s only me,” Melanie said. She crept down the stairs, carrying one of those tiny flashlights made to fit inside a purse. She moved next to him and touched his shoulder. “I thought you might need some help.”
“You shouldn’t see this. Go back up.”
“No.”
In the orange firelight, Tomas could see that she had a determined set to her jaw. That was one of those little quirks he had liked about her from the time she was a small girl. After getting to know her, Tomas had learned that when he saw that look, nothing was going to change her mind. He nodded. “Okay.”
Melanie sighed. “Something tells me we’re going to see a lot more of this.”
***
Melanie helped Tomas clean up the body and the mess, then Tomas removed the door of his office and nailed it across the shattered front entrance. It wouldn’t hold if anything really wanted in, and after seeing the chaos on the train, Melanie knew it was only a matter of time before something else would try.
While Tomas finished the makeshift repair job, Melanie went upstairs to get Leila and Christopher. They all moved into the warmer living room.
“We all need to know how to use this thing,” Tomas said, holding the gun out to Leila.
“I’m not interested in learning how to fire a gun, Tom,” Leila said.
“You need to know. Something might happen to me, and you’ll need to protect him.”
“Something’s going to happen to all of us,” Leila replied.
Melanie glanced over to where Christopher slept on a pallet in front of the fireplace. A little boy didn’t need to hear such things from his mother.
Leila stalked over to the sofa and plopped down. “The only thing we need that gun for is to finish us off.” She picked up her glass and sipped the last of the wine. “Who wants to go first? Melanie, how about you?”
“That’s enough,” Tomas snapped.
Another of Leila’s moods. When things weren’t just so, she took it out on everyone, and things definitely weren’t right. Worry creased Tomas’s brow. They would have to leave the house soon for food and warmth, he’d told Melanie, but Leila was going to be a tough one. She wouldn’t leave her home without a fight. Since killing the old man yesterday, they’d seen others like him milling around along the road
out front. Luckily, Bo had kept quiet, and the windows were covered enough to hide the fire’s glow. Apparently, the… things didn’t have enough awareness to notice the smoke billowing from the chimney.
Leila laughed bitterly. “Why don’t you just open the doors and invite those creatures inside? Let’s be done with it. For all we know, we’re the only ones left, anyway. Eventually, they’ll come. I don’t want to watch them kill my child. We need four bullets, Tomas. Four.”
Her words chilled Melanie to the bone, but she knew better than to confront Leila. Besides, Tomas would take care of things.
Tomas kneeled beside Christopher. “You’re talking about killing our son, Leila.”
“I know what I’m talking about.”
“No. I’ll never allow that to happen.”
Melanie had heard stories of how polar night and polar twilight affected the people of the villages much further north, and everyone was experiencing polar night, without a promise of it ending.
Tomas had mentioned being worried that depression would hit them due to the lack of sunlight. Christopher. He and Christopher had spent so much time outside in the sunshine, no matter about the cold. Christopher was a real child of the sun, but perhaps children could adjust easier than adults.
Christopher had once asked Melanie how long the night was going to last. She had no answer, and Christopher had not asked again. Instead, he played with his men or flipped through picture books in front of the warm fire.
“I would like to learn to use it,” Melanie whispered.
“Little lapdog,” Leila muttered. “Haven’t you gotten past that silly schoolgirl infatuation yet?”
“Shut up, Leila,” Melanie said, moving away from Tomas, as if she had been caught doing something wrong. Her cheeks grew red.
“Enough, Leila,” Tomas said flatly. “We’re all we have left.”
“That’s not very much, is it?”
“I think it’s more than enough.” Tomas stroked his son’s hair. The expression on his face made Melanie’s heart ache.
Chapter 11
London, England
Stu dreamt of home, the beaches of Wrightsville Beach and Maddy running along the gorgeous unspoiled sand, small feet leaving perfect prints, her laughter like a bell. The salty, puckering scent of the ocean deepened into something rotten, decayed. The sweet scene dissolved as the warm sun vanished from the sky, and the world became night. No, something murkier than night. Maddy screamed. Stu reached for her hand, but she continued up the beach, growing smaller and smaller in the gloom. He tried to run after her. His legs felt leaden and didn’t work right. She quickly left him far behind, her hair spilling out behind her in the wind. The icy Atlantic washed up against his feet and legs, and he looked down and realized the tide had risen. He couldn’t get out of the water. He cried out for Maddy, but she didn’t even look back. In a moment, the water was up to his waist. Then it touched his chest, and he flailed, trying to swim toward shore.
Stu jumped awake, his daughter’s name on his lips.
Tana touched his forehead. “You were having a nightmare.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Stu sat up and struggled out of his sleeping bag.
“Not so much, lately. I keep seeing Aidan’s face—what it had become. I lay awake, wondering…”
Candles burned around their makeshift campsite. Tana had strung a small pup tent between two aisle shelves, and Davis slept soundly inside, wrapped in a sleeping bag emblazoned with the Star Wars logo. Only the top of his curly head was visible.
Tana took a drag on her cigarette and let the smoke seep out between her full lips. “I shouldn’t be smoking. I’d stopped, you know. Almost a year.”
“Yeah, well. We all need something right now.” Stu reached for a bottle of water, wanting something stronger. The store was freezing. He could see his breath rise in front of his face. The propane that ran the emergency generator was low, and they needed to conserve as much as possible, which meant few lights and only a few hours of heat during the day to cut the chill. Their voices sounded very loud in the silence. Everyone else was sleeping. Funny, he thought, how they seemed to keep somewhat normal waking and sleeping hours, although it was impossible to tell if it was day or night.
“I suppose so,” Tana agreed.
Stu offered her the water, and she laughed, holding up a half-empty bottle of Riesling. He placed the water aside and took the wine. He pulled a long drink, liking the little sting it left in the back of his throat.
“I dreamed about my daughter,” he said. “I dreamed I was trapped in a rip current and couldn’t get to her.”
“Kinda like how it really is,” Tana said.
Stu took another long drink and placed the bottle on the floor beside him. “I wonder if it’s possible to drown in darkness rather than water.”
Tana squeezed his arm, then reached across him for the wine bottle. Her nearness made his breath catch for a moment. Several times, he had found himself wondering what she would look like in sunlight. The candlelight and the occasional glow from a flashlight didn’t do her proper justice and only deepened the hollows beneath her eyes.
“I hate the dark.” She stood and started toward the front entrance of the store.
Stu followed, wincing at the stiffness in the small of his back. Sleeping on a cement floor wasn’t agreeable to him at all, and he had found he needed to get up and moving for a while before the aches worked themselves out.
Tana spent too much time peering through the front windows, as if waiting for her younger son to reappear, to return to her as he was before he fled into the darkness, covered in a dead man’s blood. Stu had given up looking already. Figures darted past the window, unrecognizable, inky silhouettes against the backdrop of swirling night sky.
A few nights earlier, Stu had discussed the sudden appearance of the Northern Lights with George Edwards, the older fellow who had been an employee of the market. Fires had popped to life in several spots, the largest surrounding the downed airliner. It must have crashed several days ago. Stu thought he saw stumbling figures emerge from the wreckage. He’d been drinking, but he wasn’t that drunk. One loping shape appeared to be missing a leg. The figure hopped a few yards, then down he went. Stu didn’t mention it to anyone, not even George.
The enormous tail section had pointed to the sky amidst a sea of boiling orange flame. Later, explosions rocked the building, driving Davis and Stu’s four remaining students into fits of loud weeping. On the verge of exasperation, Stu reminded himself that they were only children—big, petulant, manipulative children—and he was determined to keep them safe until they made it back to the shores of home. The ear-shattering noise had even brought the dock workers, or “Dockers” as George called them, from the warehouse.
Everyone had forgotten about the three holdouts but George, who insisted it was best for everyone that they remained locked away. Nevertheless, everyone finally had access to the employee locker room showers, extra stores of canned food, bottled water, and most importantly, the crates of wine and ale.
Shaking the memories off, Stu mentioned again how unsafe it was to stand near the glass, but Tana only shrugged, drank her wine, and smoked. He was about to say something else when a rather broad man materialized from the shadows and ran headlong into the glass. The man bounced backward several feet and landed on the pavement. A spiderweb appeared where the man had hit, then began to blossom wider and wider until it consumed that entire framed section.
“Holy hell!” Stu grabbed Tana’s arm and yanked her away from the entrance.
Stunned, he watched the man get up and make another run. His wrecked face smashed against the window, and the pane bowed inward. Blood painted the glass and seeped into the cracks like macabre etchings. Another blow and the window would give way.
George rushed by, a cricket bat in his fist. He fished a set of keys from his trouser pocket, jammed it into the lock and opened the front door just enough to squeeze out.
Stu mad
e a step to follow the old man, but Tana held him back. “No, you don’t!”
George made quick work of the crazed, would-be intruder. After three blows, the big man’s head vanished in a pulp of gore and crushed bone. George stood over the body a moment, breathing heard, bat poised for another go, but the man lay still.
George then tossed the bat to the pavement and nodded to Stu, who shoved the door open to let him back inside. Stu glanced back at the mess that had been a human head only moments ago. A scatter of bloodstained teeth glinted wetly from the icy ground. For some reason, those teeth seemed enormous.
December 27-29
Chapter 12
Trollhättan, Sweden
The snow flew at the windows, and Tomas was reminded of those old science fiction flicks, featuring ships traveling at light speed through space with the stars a near miss. He’d started packing the things he wanted to take and had instructed Leila to do the same. She refused to cooperate, as usual, instead complaining over leaving her home.
“There’s no food here, Leila. We’re running out of things to burn.” Reasoning with her wasn’t a simple thing to do. “We have to consider our son.”
“I’ve considered him, Tom. And I’ve told you what I think should happen.”
“You were drunk when you said that.”
“I’m not drunk now.” She shoved some sweaters into a small case. “This is so pointless.”
“What?” He was suddenly angry, fighting to bite it back. She was afraid, and arguing was her way of coping, he told himself. But he also thought she was just a spoiled bitch and always had been. Maybe his love had blinded him for most of the years of their marriage, but it was true. He grabbed her arms. “What’s pointless? Trying to survive? Trying to keep Christopher safe?”
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