by Chris Capps
"And not like us," Felix said. There was something about this Molly, the one that was on the couch, that was very different from anything he had seen the night of the meeting. Maybe it was the fact that she was just laying still, staring at the ceiling. Maybe it was the familiar setting of Rosario's house. Whatever it was, she seemed more human. She was both identical and alien to that thing that had taken the stage in front of them all. This girl laying on the couch was fragile, warm.
"So those people in the masks the night of the meeting," Mike said, "Same person?"
Rosario shrugged,
"That's my guess. Other than Rind, the only people in that strange line that marched down alongside us were the duplicate Mollys."
"Weird," Mike said, moving now to the whiskey and pouring himself another glass, "From moment to moment I change my mind about a lot of stuff. I can't imagine my copies cooperating on much of anything."
"Yeah," Rosario said holding his own glass out to Mike, "Fill this up and I'll tell you why I think it's different with her." Mike started pouring, and the doctor continued, "She's got a system. Something organizes them."
"That's it?" Mike asked, re-corking the bottle.
"That's it," Harry Tanhauser said from his chair, his hands still on his face, "That's all."
"There's something you're not telling us," Mike said.
"Yeah there is," Rosario said with a nod, "And it's going to have to stay that way. By my estimate things aren't going to be good for us pretty soon."
"How so?" Mike asked.
"There are a lot of them," Rosario said, "They're going to be coming back soon. Rind has been killed a few times, over and over. I think the group of Mollys, what did they call it?"
"The Allflesh," Mike said, "That's what Molly called it at the meeting the other night."
"They're going to be back," Rosario said, "And they're going to want this girl. And I don't want them to have her. Tanhauser said the duplicate he ran into was trying to kill this Molly. It was obvious from what she said."
"Yeah," Felix said, "But where do you take her?"
"I'm an old man," Rosario said coughing dramatically into his own hand, "I don't think I'd get very far in that wood beyond the clear cut line. Maybe somebody could follow the tracks to the old logging operation. Camp out there a few days until this business gets cleared up."
"With a psychotic killer," Mike said shaking his head, a gentle chuckle rising in his throat, "Not happening."
"She's not a killer," Rosario said gently through clenched teeth. He rose, sighing loudly and blowing his breath into a long stream. Picking up the bottle of whiskey, he considered it as he swayed a bit, and then set it back down, "It's the other ones out there who don't care about killing. Don't you see what I'm saying? This is Molly Nayfack the way she was when she first arrived on the island. She wasn't turned into a monster out there. She's just a girl. And she's scared and confused as any of us."
"Says you," Mike said, "Until she stabs us or burns us alive. Turn her over to the Sherriff."
"The Sherriff," Rosario said as he picked up his stethoscope and pressed it over Molly's heart, "Is losing his mind. She will suffer for the sins of this Allflesh. The man has a rage in his eyes these days. Once upon a time, I would say she'd be protected by the law and the other cops on the force. But things are changing now. Fast. I don't know what he would do to her. All this, and this Molly hasn't done anything. She just woke up a few days ago, and suddenly it's ten years after she wandered into the woods."
"The girl needs someone to protect her," Tanhauser said still not moving from the strange statuesque position he had taken up. He was avoiding their eyes, pausing as he stared at his shoes, "Someone who isn't scared.”
"Well that ain't me," Mike said slowly backing toward the front door, "And if my brother wants to get himself killed, that's his business. There are two forces at work here that are getting ready to fight one another and of course I'm the one who gets dragged in by people who want to piss off both of them."
"Mike," Felix said, a solemn dryness in his voice, "She didn't do anything wrong." Mike stopped at the door,
"If Rosario's right about all this stuff, lots of which I'd like to say is wild speculation, then bad things are going to happen here. But we don't need to leave town to survive. That girl is the same one that's going around killing people. Even if she hasn't had enough time to stretch her murder legs, we'll be completely on our own."
"Yeah," Felix said, "And this changes what exactly? I don't know if you've noticed, Mike, but people aren't exactly going out of their way to help us lately."
"Mom and dad," Mike said, "What about them?"
"They'll get along without us," Felix said, "And if that's the reason you make the decision to stay I'll understand." He pointed down at Molly, her eyes still unmoving, staring at the ceiling in a fugue, "You've asked my intuition for a long time. And I'm telling you I can see something in her. She's not the same as the others. This isn't a killer. I can see that as clearly as I can see you right now."
Mike shook his head, a look of apology on his face. He was terrified, unwilling to be cut loose from the only town the two of them had ever known. Felix must have lost his mind. Live in the void? There was no one else, nowhere else to run if he lost his friends and family in Cairo. And in some ways, Mike knew his only real friend was his own brother. And yet he was shaking his head,
"Not this time."
Felix nodded,
"Then you're not going to tell anyone where I'm going."
"You're damned right I'm not," Mike said balling his fists, "And I'll do what I can to help you out. But this is too much for me. So this is it for us." He closed in on Felix, wrapping his arms around his brother and hugging him tight, finally saying, "For now at least."
"I don't think I'll be able to carry more than three or four days worth of stuff down the train tracks," Felix said over Mike's shoulder, "If things don't clear up before then, leave some stuff on the tracks in four days, will you?"
"Yeah," Mike said, lingering on that uncomfortable hug as if it was the last time they'd ever speak, "Don't get killed."
"Yeah I'm gonna try that," Felix said chuckling. With that, Mike nodded once more and walked to the front door, eyeing Rosario one last time and saying, "You'd better be wrong, doc." And then he descended the stairs out into the foggy night.
Actually, as he was walking away, he did look back.
***
"Babe," Andrea said that night as her husband dialed back and forth on the CB radio, listening to the chatter around town, "I want to tell you something."
"Yeah," he said, headset attached to one of his ears as he glanced over at her. Their house was increasingly becoming consolidated. Everything of Mark's that he needed on an average day was slowly migrating toward his desk and his CB while her things were moving to the bedroom where she slept day after day when she wasn't working. She pulled up a stool, pushing the stack of magazines on it onto the floor. It wasn't a problem. This was how they were starting to live now.
"It's about Willard Nayfack," she said, "I saw him the other night, in the tunnel facility. He was moving some things into a hole in the wall." Mark rolled the dial from end to end once more, sweeping it past the emergency line and hearing nothing. He nodded as she continued, "He was hiding pills. I didn't tell you at first because I didn't want to worry you. But today I filed a report anonymously at the police department."
"What kind of pills?" Mark asked.
"Diazepam. Valiums. Sleeping pills, basically. But also mood pills."
"Sounds like you did the right thing," Mark said, turning back to the CB dial and rolling it back and forth, "Wonder where he got them."
"I think the Sherriff knows," Andrea said, "They moved the paperwork right to him. I know they say it's anonymous, but I mean they saw me there in person. Willard saw me too. He was there."
"Willard isn't a problem," Mark said, "He's never been a problem before. He's an idiot."
A
terse silence followed for a time.
"Anything worth hearing on the CB tonight?" Andrea asked, seating herself on Mark's desk and idly playing with the long cord leading from his ear to the radio set. He didn't respond. He was rolling the dial back and forth along the frequency track, pulling in bits of conversation here and there. The silence swept around them, hollowed out Andrea's heart.
She walked from the room, a weight on her shoulders. She wandered all the way to the front door of the couple's modest bungalow, past the forbidden room where Delia had wasted away, out the front door into the night. Whatever dying sparks of passion had been ignited between them that previous night were now quickly going cold again as Mark chose to lend his ears to the radio waves rather than face his wife for another night. Andrea knew it, and was strangely not that put out tonight. There was a strange sort of soothing wind on the air. And the wild sounds of night were killing the silence inside her.
The Sherriff's car was rolling down the street, away from KOIF toward some unknown crisis elsewhere in town. She watched the headlights of the squealing vehicle turn to red tail lights in the darkened fog where she stood, and watched those tail lights grow dim and finally vanish a block away. It wasn't as dense a night as they sometimes got, as far as the fog went, but it was enough to completely envelope the lights of a car fairly close by. Not that there were many cars out driving.
She wandered, finding herself taken along that unspoken midnight track she always followed late into the night, just to walk past the tunnel facility. She wasn't going to go inside. She just wanted to be near it, near the source she once knew would lead her home. Whether it was out of a desire to relive happier times, or simply check on the status of that concrete wall pouring sand, she didn't know. And yet her feet took her as they often did, left then right, toward the massive concrete structure. She walked with the sound of crickets dying in the distance.
On the way she would pass by the church and the rectory. And when she saw the rectory building, she would stop for a moment as she caught a shadow walking behind the window. Pastor Ritzer was walking past it, carrying something, judging from his outline, in his arms. Maybe she would wander up, knock on the door in this midnight hour, and find someone to talk to. Before she could justify another visit to herself, she felt her knuckles rapping against the door.
The pastor answered, his jaw pushed forward as he held a cigarette firmly in his mouth. She didn't say anything at first, instead waiting for him to respond.
"Andrea?" he finally said, but didn't move more than that.
"Steven," she said, holding her body close to the door as if he meant to close her out, "I need to talk to you."
Awkwardly, the pastor moved something, some piece of machinery into his right hand. He held it aloft as he opened the door, curling his arm to proudly showcase what might have been a new invention. Andrea didn't know, because she had never learned anything about engines.
"Finally got it running," he said, "Fuel line kept corroding on me. Now it runs on alcohol and it purrs like a kitten."
He had a chainsaw in his hand, the whole of the blade removed from it, holding it as light as if it were a feather. She smiled, clapping quietly to herself in congratulations,
"Impressive," she said, unsure of whether it was impressive or not.
"Took weeks of trying to work around it, but this is going to make things a lot easier for us in the long run. We can grow alcohol, but the commissary isn't quite generous with its fuel supply anymore. I guess I should have become Sherriff. Then I'd get to waste gas all day."
"I thought his car might run on hot air," Andrea said grinning, her fingers gingerly wrapping around the door handle, "You gonna let me in?"
"Get in here," the pastor chuckled, "Let me get the tea brewing."
She sat at the kitchen table, her fingers massaging her throbbing temples, staring at the table's checkered pattern as Ritzer busied away in the kitchen.
"You've been making a habit of coming over here lately," the pastor said as he filled the tea kettle and set it on the stove top, "But never this late. Everything okay at home?"
"I guess you know what's wrong at home," Andrea said dryly, "And I don't need to talk about it. With everything that's happening here, I just need to be around someone that I can trust."
"Well you've got that much with me, Andrea," Ritzer said, "You can trust me, even if I'm not sure I'll be able to tell you much. In some ways, with the stuff going on lately, I'm in the same boat right there with you."
"You said you believed in God the other day," she said, "When I asked you. And you said you weren't sure he had followed us here."
"Yeah I remember that," Ritzer said returning to the rectory's living room. He sat across from her at the small table, "I regret that I may have given you the wrong impression. It wasn't the right thing for me to say."
"But that's something that bothers you," Andrea said, reaching across the table and taking his calloused oil stained hand in her own, and staring into it, "So you said it. That's honesty. That's what I need right now."
He closed his hand around hers, feeling the warmth, the weight of it, the delicate knuckles against his thumb. His chest was thumping, more than it would have if he wasn't afraid of honesty in this moment. As he felt her hand he could see a thin grime wearing off of him onto her, staining that gentle skin.
"If you want honesty," he said, "Then here it goes. I like that you came over here."
And that was as far as he got. The rest of the words died in his throat. He wanted to say more, about how he liked her being here but she needed to go back to her husband. He wanted her to understand that he knew what had brought her here, that he had no interest in rejecting her, but felt compelled by a deep sense of duty he felt for his congregation. And there was more. He wanted to tell her about the previous day he had spent, all day thinking about her. At the funeral thinking about her. At the meeting with Molly, he had wanted to seek her out, to find her and protect her. To share what he had just witnessed.
He wanted to share so many things with her.
Her hand wasn't moving away as he held it. Instead it was moving toward him, her fingertips tracing up the inside of his wrist. It would be too modest of the pastor to deny what she found attractive about him. He had spent long years laboring in the shade of fog, working the land, furrowing earth that had been left behind until sickly farmers regained their health. He had even worked in the early days on the lumber expeditions, chopping trees when additional help was needed, and then being drafted to chop the lesser trees into kindling. This long arduous work had fashioned him with time. And Andrea, someone he had grown to trust, had noticed. And he had noticed her as well. After all, Ritzer was more man than pastor anymore.
Though she wasn't strictly his type, being more thin than he was accustomed to in his younger days, the days when he used to go dating, he found it easy to admit to himself that she was difficult to resist. And to him, a man that had gone day after day for ten years without knowing the touch of a woman, even the way her eyes tried to evade him, tried to look at the wall behind him set fires up the back of his neck.
He took Andrea's hand in his own, clasping his fingers around hers. And when he looked into her eyes, the tragedy of the moment struck him. He remembered the long tense moments of prayer, waiting for Delia to wake up in her final hours. He remembered the wet shoulders they had shared between them as Mark abandoned his family for drink. He had cried too after their struggle. In a way, Delia's death had been a loss the two of them shared most of all. And then Mark drank away the time, letting himself and Andrea drift apart even as the honest relationship the pastor shared with her began to grow into this ultimate sign of rebellion they now shared. Fingers touching, but so much more.
Both could walk away from this. It was gentle hand in gentle hand. Nothing more. He looked up, searching her face for a sign. And he saw it. Her eyes were on him already, also searching. And he knew he could never hurt her. Not like this. Her deep red
lips were trembling, and he could tell she was feeling the same uncertainty he was.
"What's happening?" Andrea asked. Her eyes weren't dry, they were dewed with emotion, the way Ritzer had always known them.
Tick. Tick.
The clock continued to tick, but time had stopped.
"Let's leave this place right now and go somewhere safe," Ritzer said. It was the last thing he said before Andrea had leaned across their small table and grabbed him around the neck, pulling him in, kissing him.
Well fuck.
Chapter 12
There was a hot wind rolling across the plain that cool morning as the sun crept over an unseen and completely white horizon. On the southeast side of town, in a wide field of wheat to be set aside for Daffy's cattle, hands surrounded by the stench of gasoline worked slowly, carefully to pull a match from a thin unlabeled paper booklet. The hands paused, followed by the sound of whispering, before finally igniting the match, sending a flickering cascade up around it. The match fell onto a small wet mound of sawdust running between the dry stalks into the fog. A line of flame raced away into the tall grass, crumpling the stalks as black smoke poured up. Feet pounded through the brush away from the field, quickly out of town, back to the safety of the woods. And in the wake of the running figure a gentle glow rose, with the smell of burned grass.
That morning as the field burned a quarter mile away, the young and pretty waitress Tabitha held her purse tightly as she made the trek through dark and foggy streets toward Scratchy's. With the morning rush there would be a need for coffee and flapjacks. And while Scratchy himself would be making a stack of the latter, it was up to her to find a way to make a variety of teas and spices taste like coffee. Of course she had been doing it for years, but every now and again someone would complain. There was always more coffee in the warehouse, but their requisitions were being ignored or lost more and more these days. That made Tabitha nervous. Nearly as nervous as a subtle smell on the air this morning.
