Natalie returns to herself and to a now of stillness and eerie quiet. Exposed and vulnerable, she’s overwhelmed by the tumult within her and Paul’s microworld and the comprehensive horrors of the wider world beyond their little home.
Paul mutters his way through swinging the creaking gate halfway open, where it gets jammed, stuck on the gravel [like always]. He shuffles down the short cement walkway. Natalie stays inside the porch and holds open the door until he can prop it open for himself with a shoulder. Neither knows what to say to the other. They are afraid of saying something that will make them more afraid.
Paul waddles through the house into the kitchen and drops the bags on the table. Upon returning to the front room, he overexaggerates his heavy breathing.
Natalie steps into his path, grinning in the dark. “Way to go, Muscles.”
“I can’t see shit. Can’t we open the windows or turn on a light?”
“Radio said bright light could possibly attract infected animals or people.”
“I know, but they mean at night.”
“I’d rather play it safe.”
“I get it, but put it on just until I get all the groceries in.”
Natalie whips out her phone, turns on the flashlight app, and shines it in his face. “Your eyes will adjust.” She means it as a joke. It doesn’t sound like a joke.
“Thanks, yeah, that’s much better.”
He wipes his eyes and Natalie leans in for a gentle hug and a peck on the cheek. Natalie is only a disputed three-quarters of an inch shorter than Paul’s five-nine [though he inaccurately claims five-ten]. Pre-pregnancy, they were within five pounds of each other’s weight, though those numbers are secrets they keep from each other.
Paul doesn’t return the hug with his arms but he presses his prickly cheek against hers.
She asks, “You okay?”
“Not really. It was nuts. The parking lot was full, cars parked on the islands and right up against the closed stores and restaurants. Most people are trying to help each other out, but not all. No one knows what they’re doing or what’s going on. When I was leaving the supermarket, on the other side of the parking lot, there was shouting, and someone shot somebody I think—I didn’t see it, but I heard the shots—and then there were a bunch of soldiers surrounding whoever it was on the ground. Then everyone was yelling, and people started grabbing and pushing, and there were more shots. Scariest thing I’ve ever seen. We’re so—it’s just not good. I think we’re in big trouble.”
Natalie’s face flushes, as his tremulous, muted voice is as horrifying as what he’s saying. Her pale skin turns red easily, a built-in Geiger counter measuring the gamut of emotions and/or [much to the pleasure and amusement of her friends] amount of alcohol consumed. Giving up drinking during the pregnancy isn’t as difficult as she anticipated it would be, but right now she could go for a glass—or a bottle—of white wine.
What he says next is an echo of a conversation from ten days ago: “We should’ve driven to your parents’ place as soon as it started getting bad. We should go now.”
That night Paul stormed into the bathroom without knocking. Natalie was standing in front of the mirror, rubbing lotion on the dry patches of her arms, and for some odd reason she couldn’t help but feel like he caught her doing something she shouldn’t have been doing. He said, “We should go. We really should go. Drive down to your parents’,” and he said it like a child dazed after waking from a nightmare.
That night, she said, “Paul.” She said his name and then she stopped, watched him fidget, and waited for him to calm himself down. When he was properly sheepish, she said, “We’re not driving to Florida. My doctor is here. I talked to her earlier today and she said things were going to be okay. We’re going to have the baby here.”
Now, she says, “Paul. We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“We’re under a federal quarantine. They won’t let us leave.”
“We need to try.”
“So are we going to, what, drive down 95 and into Rhode Island, just like that?” Natalie isn’t arguing with him. She really isn’t. She agrees they are indeed in big trouble and they can’t stay. She doesn’t want to stay and she doesn’t want to go to an emergency shelter or an overburdened [they said overrun] hospital. She’s arguing with Paul in the hope one of them will stumble upon a solution.
“We can’t stay here, Natalie. We have to try something.”
He puts his hands inside hers. She squeezes.
She says, “What if they arrest us? We might get separated. You were just telling me how crazy it was at Star Market. Do you think it’s any better on the highways or at the state borders?”
“We’ll find some open back roads.”
Yes, back roads. Natalie nods, but says, “Maybe we’re at the worst point now—”
“I didn’t even tell you there was a fox staggering in the middle of the Washington Corner intersection like it was drunk—”
“—the quarantine will help get the spread of the illness under control—”
“—and it fucking dove right at my front tire.”
“—everyone will be all right as long as we don’t . . .”
Natalie continues talking even though there’s the unmistakable sound of footsteps on their gravel driveway. Her ears are attuned to it. She’s lived in the house long enough to know the difference between the sustained crunch and mash of car tires, the light, maracalike patter of squirrels and cats, the allegro rush of paws from the neighbor’s dog, a goofy Rhodesian ridgeback the size of a small horse [a shooting star of a thought: Where are her neighbors and Casey the dog? Did they leave before the quarantine?], and the percussive gait of a person.
The steps are hurried, quickly approaching the house, yet the rhythm is all wrong. The rhythm is broken. There’s a grinding lunge, a lurch, two heavy steps, then a hitching correction, and a stagger, and a drag. Someone or something crashes into the propped open gate and bellows out three loud barks.
After the initial shock, Natalie all but melts with relief, believing [or wanting to believe] what she hears is in fact Casey the dog. Shock turns to worry. She wonders why Casey would be out on her own. The guy on the radio said unvaccinated family pets could be insidious vectors of the suspected virus.
Natalie turns and she cranes her head and looks out the front door and through the porch. A large, upright blur passes by the small row of screened windows. The barks return and they are more like expectorating coughs, ones that sound painful. There is a man standing less than ten feet away from her. He opens the screen door, and says in a dry, scratchy, but clear baritone, “Fall came and it began to rain. Left out in the cold and rain.” Then he grunts, “Eh-eh-eh,” a vocalization that is all diaphragm and back of the throat.
Natalie and Paul yell at the man to go away. They shout questions and directions to each other.
The white man is large, over six feet tall and closer to three hundred pounds than he is to two hundred. He wears dirty jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt advertising a local brewery. He steps through the door and fills their porch. With each coughing bark he bends and contorts, and then his body snaps back into an unnatural rigidity. He points and reaches toward Natalie and Paul. Natalie can only see the shape and contour of the man’s face as he’s silhouetted by the dim daylight behind him.
“Eh-eh-eh.”
Despite her all-consuming fear, there’s a nagging recognition of those primitive monosyllables buried in Natalie’s ancestral memory. Hearing him is enough to know, without the aid of visual cues and without the context of the ongoing outbreak, that the man is sick. He is terribly and irreparably ill.
Natalie’s fear morphs into a self-preservation shade of rage. Her fists clench and she steps forward and yells, “Get the fuck off our porch!”
Paul moves more nimbly and darts in front of Natalie. He swings the front door shut with enough force to rattle the frame and wall. His hand momentarily loses contact with the doorknob and he is
not able to get the door locked before the man is already forcing it back open.
“Natalie?” Paul shouts her name as though it is a question, a question that is not rhetorical yet has no answer.
The door swings open, forcing Paul back into the house. The bottoms of his sneakers squeak as they slide over the wooden floor. Paul bends his legs, lowers a shoulder, attempting to gain purchase, to find the leverage he has lost forever. His feet stop sliding and they tangle, tripping him up. Paul falls onto his knees and the fiberglass door sweeps him away.
The man pushes the door fully open and presses Paul against the wall. He doesn’t stop pushing. The man almost fully eclipses the white door. He is the dark side of the moon.
The man shouts, “I only want to speak! Let me in! Not by!” He yanks the door back toward him and then he smashes it into Paul. The man and the door become a simple machine, then a high revving piston. The impacts of the door into her husband and her husband into the wall make thudding, sickening, hollow sounds. Paul’s screams are muffled. The walls and floors shake; the big bad wolf is blowing their little house down.
Natalie dashes the short distance into the kitchen. She knocks over a large blue cup half filled with the water she should’ve been drinking earlier, and she backhands the smart speaker out of her way while grabbing the chef’s knife from the cutting block.
The front door slams closed. The volume of the men’s shouting increases.
Natalie yells, “Go away!” and “Leave him alone!” and she runs back into the front room, knife held in front of her like a torch. Her eyes have adjusted to the dark of the house.
Paul is sitting on the floor and scrabbling to get his feet under him. Blood runs down his forehead and leaks from a wound near his right elbow. The man crouches over Paul, looms over him, an object of undeniable gravity. His great hands are clamped on Paul’s shoulders and pull him into a bear hug. Paul’s left arm is pinned to his side. With his free hand Paul punches and tries to push the man’s face away from his. The man shouts indecipherable, plosive-heavy gibberish, and stops abruptly as though suddenly empty of the mad new language, as though he’d correctly recited an arcane ritual, and he bites Paul repeatedly. The bites are not sustained and are not flesh rippers. They are quick like a snake’s strike. The man’s mouth doesn’t stay latched onto any one spot. In a matter of seconds he bites Paul’s arm and he bites Paul’s chest and he bites Paul’s neck and he bites Paul’s face.
“Let me in not by!”
The man’s shirt is torn and stained red above his left shoulder, near his neck. Tremors wrack his arms and body. He retches and shouts a moaning variant of no. He shakes his head and turns away, appearing to be doing so at the sight of the blood, as though it upsets him, or angers him, but he doesn’t stop biting.
Natalie charges across the room with the knife raised.
Paul gains his feet and both men stand and straighten. The man still has Paul’s torso constricted within his arms. Paul lashes out one last time with his right hand, connecting with the man’s eye. The man shrieks and barks and takes two steps forward, lifting and carrying Paul to the corner of the front room. The man drives his weight forward and down, mashing the back of Paul’s head and neck into the thick oak seat of Natalie’s mother’s antique rocking chair. Upon contact there’s a wet, pulpy pop and a sharp snap.
Natalie brings the knife down, aiming for the center of the man’s back, but he turns, knocking her arm off its trajectory. The knife drags across his left shoulder blade, carving a parabolic arc through his shirt and skin.
The man pivots and is face-to-face with Natalie. He’s middle-aged, balding, familiar in an everyman, nondescript way. He might be from the neighborhood and he might not. His face is contorted into dumb, inchoate rage and fear. His mouth is ringed in foamy saliva and blood. He shouts and Natalie can’t hear what he is saying because she is shouting too.
She re-raises the knife and jabs at his thick neck. The man blocks the knife with his hands, clumsily pawing at the blade, earning deep slices on his palms and the pads of his fingers. He cries out but doesn’t retreat. He grabs her wrist. His hands are hot and blood-slicked, and he pulls her into him, against him. She can feel the appalling heat of his fever through the tights covering her belly.
The man coughs in her face and his breath is radioactive. His cracked lips quiver and spasm, strobing out flashes of smiles and snarls. His tongue is an agitated eel darting between the oval of thick, viscous froth.
He is all mouth. His mouth opens.
Natalie leans away and simultaneously she knees his groin but without her weight under her, there’s no leverage and there isn’t much force behind the blow.
The man pulls her right arm above her head. He quickly latches his mouth to the underside of her forearm and he bites. Her thin sweatshirt offers no protection. She screams and drops the knife. She wants to shake and yank her arm away but she is also instinctually afraid to move and leave a chunk of herself behind. The crushing pressure combined with a sharp stinging burn at the broken skin, a pain unlike anything she’s felt before, runs up her arm even after he lets her go and she stumbles backward and falls into a sitting position on the couch.
The man opens and closes his bleeding hands and he briefly but loudly sobs as though in recognition of what’s broken in him and what he has broken. Then that bark. That fucking bark.
The man pivots and returns his attentions to Paul, who hasn’t moved, who isn’t moving. Paul is splayed on his back. His head is between the wide runners of the rocking chair and rotated toward the wall. The amount of rotation isn’t natural, isn’t possible. There’s a bulge in his neck, the skin taut over a knotty protrusion, a catastrophic physiological and topographical error.
Natalie clambers off the couch, and despite the wildfire pain in her arm and the warning stitch in her lower left side she bends to the floor and picks up the knife. Her bite wound throbs, the pain expanding, radiating with each pulse.
The man lifts Paul and resumes biting and thrashing him about as though rushing through a menial task that must be completed. He bounces Paul’s body off the door, the wall, and the rocking chair.
Paul issues no cries of pain. There is no voluntary motion.
Natalie sees a horrifying glimpse of the back of Paul’s caved-in, deflated skull. The boneless slack with which his head lolls and dangles demonstrates beyond doubt that his neck doesn’t work anymore, will never work again.
Natalie brings the knife down with both hands and half-buries the blade between the man’s shoulder blades. She lets go and the knife stays buried.
The man groans and drops Paul between the rocking chair and wall. Some part of Paul’s body gongs off the metal panel of the baseboard heater.
Natalie shuffles backward to the open front door. Her left hand digs in the sweatshirt pocket for her car keys. They are still there.
The man spins around unsteadily, reaching behind his back for the out-of-reach knife. He is a wobbling top nearing the end of his rotations. He is out of breath and the man’s eh-eh-ehs are weakening huffs and puffs. His revolutions morph into a slow orbital path away from Natalie and the front door. He plods into the kitchen leaving a trail of red handprints on the wall to his right. His heavy, ponderous steps clapping on the hardwood floor become a shuffle and slide, as though his feet have transformed into sandpaper.
Natalie imagines nestling next to Paul’s body in the corner of the room while he is still warm, and then closing her eyes and wishing, praying, willing the house to collapse upon them so that she never has to open her eyes again.
Natalie doesn’t stay with her dead husband. Instead, she steps onto the porch on shaking legs. She holds her wounded arm away from her belly. She stifles the urge to cry out to Paul, to tell him sorry and goodbye. A cool breeze chills the sweat on her face.
As the sputtering big bad wolf disappears somewhere deeper into their little house, Natalie quietly shuts the front door behind her.
* * *
/> This is not a fairy tale. This is a song.
I.
They Both Went Down
Rams
Dr. Ramola Sherman has been a pediatrician at Norwood Pediatrics for three years. Of the five physicians on staff, Ramola earns the most new-patient requests. Locally, her reputation has gotten out: Dr. Sherman is thorough, energetic, kind, and imperturbable while exuding the reassuring confidence of medical authority all parents, particularly new ones, crave. The children are fascinated by her English accent, which she is not above exaggerating to pluck a smile from a sick or pained face. She allows her youngest patients to touch the red streak running the length of her long, jet-black hair if they ask properly.
Survivor Song Page 2
