Suspended In Dusk (18 page)

They were not happy to see him. The face of the one nearest was set in a soundless scream.

“Forgive me,” Patrick said, his chest hollow, “you must understand. It’s necessary. This is
His
will.”

She shook her head, radiating a sadness that shredded his heart, then pointed behind him. The spectres watched as he swung around.

The boy, Charlie, stood in the parking lot across the road, peering at him. He disappeared into the Hotel.

Patrick took a deep breath and the words spilled out. “Forgive these women their sins and receive them into Your Heavenly Kingdom. Allow the survivors a chance at living.”

As he stumbled over the last words Patrick threw himself down the stairs. He tripped over the uneven ground, aiming for the derelict house Constance was stabled in. His blood thundered in his ears and his lungs burned as he neared the gutted shack. The forlorn apparitions trailed after him, fading as the daylight dimmed.

Patrick flung open the door to carnage. Blood streaked the walls, and Constance—a whimper strangled his throat. He bent and stroked her soft muzzle. “I’m sorry,” he said as the tears flowed. He heaved the panniers over his shoulders and walked to the doorway, weighed down by sorrow and fear.

“You won’t take them from us again.”

Bailey hefted an axe, flanked by the rest of the townsmen. The transparent women stood in a line in front of them. One by one they raised their hands, and each blew a kiss to the men. Then the sun slipped below the horizon, dragging the unwilling ghosts down with the last rays of light.

“It’s too late,” Patrick said, sobbing. “They’re gone.”

“What have you done?” Bailey’s face paled as he turned. Cries of despair rang out from the throng of men behind him.

“They’re gone!”

“Veronica! Ronnie!”

“Bring them back!”

Ice snaked down Patrick’s spine. He sniffed but snot leaked from his nose.

“I sent them to our Heavenly Father, to receive his judgement. You all need to move on with your lives.”

“You should have left well enough alone.”

“I was only trying to help!”

Bailey’s eyes narrowed. “I told you there was nothing you could do for us, God-man.” The husbands and fathers and sons and brothers who’d watched their womenfolk die fanned out on either side of Bailey as he lifted the weapon.

“Why did you have to kill the horse?” Patrick could barely see through the watery haze.

Bailey swung around, glared at Morgan. “We could have used a horse,” he said, teeth gritted. Morgan scowled.

Charlie ran to Bailey’s elbow. “Make the bad man go away, Papa,” the boy said.

“With pleasure,” Bailey replied. The men of Miriam Vale surrounded Patrick. His voice quivered as he prayed loudly, breath coming in gasps. He’d done as the Lord instructed, hadn’t he? The Lord would save him. He would.
I don’t want to die
.

The decrepit buildings of the town were tombs in the purple light of dusk, and Patrick realised that the shades of their memories were all these men had of the women they’d loved, twice taken.

Patrick heard the wailing lament of the women of Miriam Vale in the whistling passage of the axe.

Reasons to Kill

J.C. Michael

No one paid much attention to the stranger when he moved to town. What a costly mistake that was.

We couldn’t even say for sure when he moved in. Of course, a group of us went to welcome him once we noticed someone started to clear and tend the garden, but when he saw us coming he shot inside and declined to answer the door. We only bothered once more, at Christmas, but again he decided he didn’t want to respond to our knocking. We left him a gift all the same. Some of the townsfolk felt uneasy, but the majority of our small community said live and let live. The town was ample, big enough for all of us, and there was no reason to impose ourselves upon the man. But that was before spring came. Before the Watson kids went missing. With those three unaccounted for, the youngest of them only seven, our feelings toward the stranger in our midst developed from a mild curiosity, to a worrying concern.

* * *

“We’ve searched everywhere,” said Peter Harrison, for what seemed like the hundredth time.

“You can’t have, otherwise you’d have found them.”

It was a fair point—and you could expect nothing less from the children’s mother—but all the same, Harrison had done all he could to try and find her two sons and daughter. We all had.

“We all know we haven’t searched everywhere so let’s quit gabbing and go knock the bastard up out of bed. And if he doesn’t answer I’m busting the fucking door down.”

I took another drink. God how I missed proper beer. It was Paul Robertshaw who’d spoken, and his sentiments were no doubt shared by the majority of those present. It was virtually a full gathering of the town, thirty out of the thirty-six of us. Other than the three missing children, and the stranger, only old Clifford and his daughter were missing; him housebound, her laid up with flu.

“We know nothing about the man,” said Harrison. “What if he’s armed and doesn’t take too kindly to us breaking into his home in the dead of night?”

Paul stood, and I knew what was coming. Harrison may have organised us into the self-sufficient community we had become, and by doing so become our un-official leader, but Paul had known his own mind ever since primary school. If he’d decided to do something, no-one was going to stop him.

“Then I’ll take my own gun and give him fair warning. He answers the door and lets us check it out, or he’ll let me in—at gunpoint.”

“And if he answers the door with a gun of his own? What then?”

Paul looked at the young woman who’d spoken and shrugged. He and Sarah had never seen eye-to-eye over much.

“Fuck knows, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

* * *

Ten minutes later we were walking across town, both of us armed, both of us nervous, neither of us willing to show it.

“You know as well as I do we’ve been lucky this past year,” said Paul as we walked through the deserted streets. The quiet was sinister, like those first few weeks. It was a feeling whose return was unwelcome.

“I know.”

There was no option but to agree. The world had come to a standstill, yet we’d buried our dead, and carried on. The movies would have you believe that there’d be post-apocalypse anarchy, the countryside awash with murderous gangs pillaging what was left. It wasn’t like that at all, as far as we knew. In some ways, now was better than before. Less people. Less stress. Less noise.

I guess I was lucky, having no family to lose when the outbreak hit. Still, it wasn’t a bad life for the survivors, even those who’d lost their nearest and dearest. Growing your own food was hard work, yet rewarding, and the sense of community was something which had been absent in the modern world. Harrison, who’d studied history before going into ‘retail management’ and running the local newsagent’s, reckoned it had been exactly the same after the Black Death. The same natural resources, but far less people. I’d no idea if he was right, but either way, life wasn’t that bad. To be frank, I preferred growing my own food and trading with my neighbours, rarely leaving town for anything more than a walk through the countryside, compared to the forty mile daily commute I’d once endured just to sit in an office staring at a computer screen.

* * *

When we reached the house we could see the light from a candle flickering in one of the downstairs rooms. We stopped at the garden gate.

“How you want to do this?” asked Paul.

“Buggered if I know. It was your idea.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” he said.

“First time for everything,” I couldn’t help but reply.

“There’s no point stirring things up too much. Why don’t we just shout from here? Tell him there’s some missing kids and the town needs to know he isn’t involved. We want a quick look round, and then we’ll be on our way.”

“And if he doesn’t respond?”

Paul looked at me, fear and resolve in his grey eyes. “Then I’m going to shoot out one of his upstairs windows so he knows we mean business.”

As it was, it didn’t come to that. Paul shouted out that we were looking for some lost children and, after a twitch of the curtains, the front door opened. We looked around the house, upstairs and down, attic and basement, garage and garden shed, and saw nothing out of the ordinary beyond the stranger himself. He was far from ordinary. The desiccated and cracked skin covered in yellow scabs gave us a whole new topic to worry about
—
the stranger was infected.

* * *

Everyone was still at The Boar’s Head when we got back. None of them took the news well.

“How the hell can he be infected?”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Can we catch it?”

“Oh God!”

“Is it a new strain?”

“We need to get rid of him!”

“Why is he still alive?”

There was a whole raft of questions and statements, but no answers or suggestions. The outbreak, to our knowledge, had lasted seven weeks. People fell ill by the thousands, their skin drying out and cracking before oozing with a mixture of blood and pus which scabbed over like miniature mountain ranges across the skin. From the formation of the first yellow scab death came within seventy-two hours. The whole process didn’t appear to be that painful, physically, although the mental anguish was undoubtedly torturous. The infected just got drowsier until they fell asleep and their heartbeat slowed to a stop. Nobody got better. Isolation made no difference, nor did excessive contact. The theory was that the infection had spread weeks, months—maybe years—previously, and simply taken a long time to incubate before showing any of the symptoms which heralded Death’s imminent arrival. That was why neither quarantining the victims, nor locking yourself away, did any good. If you had it, you had it, and you’d had it—simple as that. Infected before you even knew it existed.

Why did some of us survive? Was it genetics? Luck? Or even divine intervention? No one knew. Maybe we’d just missed the infection when it had first spread. We all had ideas, but with the vast majority of the world’s scientists and doctors suffering the same fate as everyone else, there were no definitive answers.

I drank another beer, and excused myself to resume my personal search for the Wilsons in the nearby woods. It would be another twenty hours before I finally succumbed to exhaustion, the kids still missing.

* * *

It may have been a glorious spring that year but, figuratively speaking, a cloud hung over the town. It had been two weeks since Adrian, Jason, and Cassidy vanished. We’d carried on searching but our sustainable style of existence prevented us from putting the day-to-day tasks entirely to one side. Some felt that, in the absence of any bodies, the only explanation was that the three of them had run away. I admit, I was starting to think that way myself. As for the stranger, he was still alive and still tending his garden. We’d kept a close eye on him and, besides the fact he should have been dead, nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. It was a situation which was about to change dramatically.

* * *

Paul and I were in The Boars Head playing darts when Harrison came in and called us over.

“I need to speak to you two. Now.”

His tone indicated something serious, as did the fact he immediately headed upstairs.

We exchanged a quick glance, put down our darts, and followed him. He’d headed into one of the smaller guest rooms at the back. The pub had been run as a hotel when people tended to travel a bit more. We’d had people visit town over the past months, we were by no means completely cut off from the rest of the world, but the couple of rooms at the front had been sufficient for that trade, plus the odd occasion someone drank too much of the homebrew and didn’t feel like the walk home.

The room smelled musty from lack of use, and I’d have preferred it if Harrison hadn’t shut the door behind us as soon as we walked in, but it was comfortable enough. I took the armchair, Paul the stool by the dresser, and Harrison perched on the end of the bed.

“I’m concerned by our infected friend,” Harrison said.

Neither of us said anything, giving him the floor for whatever he had to say.

“I’ve been going through the town archives, partly as a hobby, more recently in case we’d missed anything that could help find the Watsons.” From out of his pocket he took a sheet of paper and began unfolding it. “And before either of you even think it, I know damn well most folks have given up, but that doesn’t mean I have too. People have become desensitised after all we’ve been through, but those kids could still be out there, suffering. Their mother needs to know one way or the other.”

His speech over, he paused, as if daring us to contradict him or tell him he was wasting his time. When he was satisfied we were waiting for him to proceed, he continued.