Suckers (39 page)

When he went back to his seat in the bedroom, he set the broomstick across his lap and listened to Ray’s slow, wheezy breaths in the darkness.

This couldn’t go on like this. What if Ray was wrong? What if the things fucking killed him? He rummaged in a kitchen drawer for a knife with a sharp edge. On his way into the bedroom, he turned on the overhead light—the last thing he needed was to accidentally cut an artery in the dark and bleed out just five feet from Ray.

Ray looked like shit, his hair matted, circles like bruises under his eyes.

The knife’s wooden handle was worn soft, its blade heavy, a good six inches long. He pressed the edge against his palm and took another step.

Ray didn’t move. Maybe there was a point where the things got too weak to spaz him out—maybe he’d reached that point. The blade made his hand itch. He took another step. They could go to Vermont after this. Get out of this stale, dark box. Ride with the windows open, the Fury’s engine roaring up I-89.

Ray’s eyelids creased. His fingers twitched.

Holding his breath, Dan waited.

When Ray was still again, Dan set a knee on the edge of the bed. He looked down so he could watch the blade make a dent in his palm. He clenched his teeth and pressed harder.

The bats batted the windows with their fat bodies. More tonight than last night. More last night than the night before. More tomorrow probably than tonight. Gestation cycle speeding up, especially in the re-infected. Suckers were sneaking of out hospitals, driven by the things to hatch in private. One hospital had been quietly putting the infected to sleep, and when word got out, people were torn over whether that was the right thing to do—for the rest of us—or the wrong thing to do because they could be fed and cured…only to hide in the dark with everyone else, waiting for food to run out, for the next bat or sucker to get them. On the street it was every man for himself as suckers who’d escaped and suckers who hadn’t gone in to begin with went after blood.

Dan’s arm dropped like a lead weight.

And the shit that was in Ray woke up. It woke up and snapped and bit, twisting and straining Ray’s body. His limbs yanked the electrical cords. Snarls and growls came husky from Ray’s throat. His eyes were black as marbles. Moving. Swirling. The things still small, unfed. Fucking starving, Dan hoped.

Wood cracked.

Dan pedaled backward, holding the knife in front of him.

Ray’s ankle came free. He twisted his body, trying to crawl across the bed, his other limbs still attached to it. The broken post his ankle was tied to bumped along the blankets as he dug his foot into the mattress, trying to get to Dan.

Dan strode around the bed and out the bedroom door. Through the kitchen. Into the living room, clutching his hands into fists, clutching the knife in his fist. It took fucking forever for the bed in the other room to stop creaking.

He sat on the couch, the knife still in his hand, his other hand dented from the edge of the blade. He clutched the hilt against his forehead, squeezed his eyes shut. After a long minute where he couldn’t move at all, his hand finally opened and let the knife clatter to the floor.

Dan tugged at the shade. It flew up with a rattle. He squinted in the brightness of the morning sun. The room needed airing out. With Ray tied to the bed for days, the room was in a state worse than stale. He flipped the latches and worked the old wood frames up. One of them needed a book lodged underneath to keep it open.

Brisk air swept in. That was an improvement too, though he couldn’t let it go on too long. Ray was a bundle of sticks, his wrists just thin bones. He’d be able to slip free of the cords if this went on much longer. But would he have the energy to do anything once he was free? The bottle of water was untouched. He hadn’t had food. His chest went long seconds without moving. Dan hadn’t even bothered retying his leg. He didn’t want to set another fit off, use up what energy Ray still had.

Come on, come on.

He edged toward the bed. Ray made a better vampire than he ever had—dark hair, skin gone so pale the thin blue veins underneath showed, lips a dusky purple. His breathing was faint and hitching.

Beat those fuckers already.

As Dan picked up a blanket and spread it over him, Ray’s fingers twitched. His jaws moved weakly. A noise came from his throat. But he didn’t wake up.

Dan pulled the chair close and sat watching him, elbows digging into his knees, chin braced in his hands. Ray’d only been sick once since he’d known him—colds yeah, tour crud yeah, but not
sick
sick, except that time he’d had food poisoning and couldn’t even get out of bed. Telling him he’d go to the doctor once he felt better.
Then
Dan hadn’t been worried, because Sarah, with her nursing efficiency, hadn’t been worried. If Sarah could see him now…

“Hey, Ray?” he said.

Ray’s chest went up a little, then sank.

Dan bent his head and pulled at his hair.

† † †

Lunch was Rice-A-Roni that stuck in his throat until he gave up spooning it into his mouth. The TV was full of riot gear. In real life, gunshots echoed somewhere to the north.

Dan closed the windows and pulled the shades.

Yelling came from the street. The clang of metal hitting metal. He went into the bathroom, shut the door, and sat on the floor, his back against the wall, his face in his hands.

† † †

It was dark again. Ray stirred without waking. A keening came from his throat, ending as quickly as it started.

The things batted the windows.

He scooped a shirt off the floor and lobbed it at the shade. It didn’t do any good, but it made him feel better. He wanted to throw bigger things, heavier things. He wanted to destroy everything.

Ray moaned—sudden and sharp. In the flickering light of the TV, Dan went to the bedside.

Ray shivered under the blanket.

Dan sank to his knees and put a hand on Ray’s stomach, his chin on the blankets. The things inside Ray spazzed—they were still there, still winning. Ray’s lips pulled back, showing pale gums. His teeth snapped without any ferocity. His eyes rolled back. What had started as an urge to attack became a convulsion, Ray’s body shuddering, teeth clattering, bedposts banging the wall.

Dan held him with that one hand, head bent.
We can do this. We’ll get through this
.

Thinking of those campfires in the woods behind his mom’s, firelight flickering across Ray’s face—Ray smiling, saying yeah, that’s what we’ll call ourselves.
I like that
.

He watched the silent TV, his cheek on the blankets. The epidemic flashing soundlessly on the screen. A mother running with a child on her hip and another pulled along by her hand. Smoke billowing behind them. The inside of a school gym, row upon row of blankets—people’s lives reduced to the size of coffins laid out across a basketball court. The camera panned over two dark bodies on the floor of the emptied gym, like footage from a war in the Middle East, only the caption said East Orange.

He thought about the others. They’d be where they were going by now, unless they’d run into roadblocks. Unless they’d run into trouble. He passed a hand over his face, not wanting to imagine that. He just wanted to think of them stepping cautiously out of their cars. Wondering if what they’d heard was true. And then a door would open, people would come out, asking how many of them there were, if anyone was infected, if anyone needed care. If they needed food, a place to stay.

He wanted to remember it
that
way.

Ray’s body shook under his hand. His teeth rattled.

The TV cut to the White House, footage from earlier in the day, sun in the windows. No one was out at night anymore, except the suckers, who could go anywhere anytime while the rest of them huddled behind drawn curtains, planks of wood, and whatever weapons they had.

A movement to the left caught Dan’s attention, dragging it to the shadows beyond the half-open door of Ray’s closet. His chest tightened. He blinked, hard, adjusting his eyes from staring at the lit-up television screen. While his eyes were closed, he could see it. That fucking
cat
.

But when he opened them, there was nothing there.

Under his hand, Ray went still.

† † †

Dan was alone.

A white coat was on the television, the creases in her face saying what Dan didn’t need words to hear.

Hot tears washed his eyes.

He hauled the TV off the dresser, its screen hot against his chest. He turned to the window, hefted it up, and threw it at the window.

The shade fell off its bracket with a clatter. Glass exploded. Cold air whipped in—welcome. Real. Smelling of January, bringing wet flakes of snow with it. The papery flutter of wings sounded. A heavy body landed on the sill. He crawled up the bed, over the top of the blankets, Ray’s leg unmoving under him, Ray’s chest still beneath his palm. More wings, more creatures gathering on the sill, watching. He wrapped an arm around Ray and buried his face in Ray’s neck, smelling sweat, smelling the faintest trace of cigarette. A sour laugh rose like bile in his throat:
Hey, you kicked those finally. I’ve only been after you about it for years.

At the edge of his vision, the light rippled with shadows. Parasites careened into walls, their wings dry and beating fast, whispers like pages riffling. One of the fat bodies thudded into the lamp.

A crash, a shatter of glass, and the room was plunged into darkness.

I remember Faye’s house in the woods. I remember the woods. The boarded-up windows, the short days and the endless nights without stars. I remember Dan and Uncle Ray and their guitars.

“Are you going to make us do the spider song again?”

We left without them. The trip was a blur of color—pines rushing by the truck’s windows, abandoned gas stations, a tricycle on its side. I don’t remember Dan arriving, though you’d think I would. The memory I have is one I could only have formed later, when I had a better understanding. In this memory, it’s a ghost that arrives. Someone hollow and half gone, which is how I think of him still. I can conjure him, in that chair on the porch at the end of the day, watching the shadows grow like tendrils across the grass. Sometimes Uncle Ray was in his eyes. Other times I could see the road there, stretching to someplace in the past.

By then it had ended, like a fever breaking, and there was no reason to fear the shadow, though it took years before I stopped.

When Faye was gone, I remember Dan getting on a motorcycle while the dug-into dishes of macaroni and cheese and plates of cake sat in the chapel. I remember him sliding his sunglasses on, cranking the throttle. The bike’s engine cut through the quiet. He looked at me, and the late-afternoon sun shot off his lenses. That was when I was seventeen. I remember because that was my birthday cake in there, laid out with the funeral food.

I remember his scars from the cruor worms. He wasn’t alone; near the end, the cruors crawled over people like maggots, overloading them with larvae, causing far more damage than the first attacks had. In the boarded-up dorms at Northlands—in the basements, with rows of shower stalls and washing machines and the earth’s cold fingers reaching through the concrete floor—we were mostly protected, but you still see some survivors now with their bodies marked by circles that stayed pale even in the summer. Dan had one in particular, I remember, at the corner of his lip. So many more when he worked in the summer sun with his shirt draped over a fencepost.

There are so few of us.

I often wonder how far he had to ride to find anyone else, or if he ever even bothered to stop.

“Can we sing the spider song?” my son asks, his fist clutching my skirt. I take the beat-up acoustic that belonged to his great-uncle off the shelf, with the neck that Dan glued back on when I was ten, and I lead him into the sunshine, where we can sing while his father chops wood for the winter that will be here again all too soon.

—Jane Ford Cole

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