The Outside (8 page)

I lit the bristles of the broom with the lighter and thrust it into the darkness before me. The vampires shrieked and hissed, recoiling from the fire. I swept the broom right and left.

I scrambled up on the edge of the truck trailer and plunged inside.

My vision took a moment to adjust to the darkness, and I was blind in the glare of the makeshift torch. I felt a spider web stretch across my face and break, the very sensation of evil, and I couldn’t stifle a shudder.

This was a vampire nest. Thin filaments of something like spider silk streamed from the top of the cavernous trailer. Shadows moved in the guttering torchlight, skittering across the floor and crawling up on the ceiling. I was reminded of a nest of daddy longlegs that my sister and I had disturbed while cleaning out a barn. The vampires gathered on the ceiling, hissing, bobbing, the fire reflected in their cold red eyes.

“Give him back.” I heard my voice issuing the command, and it sounded so much more assured than I felt. I reached into my pocket for the
Himmelsbrief
.

Something snickered above me.

I stared up into the reflective eyes of a vampire. He wore a flannel shirt and a hat with an advertising logo on it. I wondered if he might have been the trucker who owned the vehicle. “Your fire will burn out, girlie. Then you’re ours.”

My eyes slid to the guttering flame at the top of the broom. It was burning fast, the bristles blackening and curling.

I thrust the flaming bristles into his face. The vampire howled at the sparks and batted it away. The broom spiraled away in the darkness, and I lunged for it. I singed my fingers trying to pick it up.

An aggrieved yowl emanated from the far darkness at the front of the trailer.

“Alex!” I shouted.

I grabbed the last of my makeshift torch and advanced toward the writhing shadows, my heart in my mouth.

A pale figure flopped and writhed toward me. I moved to jam my torch in its face, but I saw familiar markings on the flesh. Alex’s tattoos. His jacket and shirt had been torn from his shoulders and he was crawling toward the door, slashing with his knife.

I swept the broom right and left over his head as we backed to the opening, toward daylight.

“It’s not going to be that easy, girlie. We’re too hungry.”

The trucker vampire slammed the door shut behind us, blotting out the sunshine. My heart stopped—I could hear it stop over the clang of the door.

“Get behind me,” Alex muttered.

The light from my broom faded to sparks, and I heard the
thunk-thunk-thunk
of vampires dropping from the ceiling like too-ripe apples on the ground. I could feel the weight of the creatures’ eyes upon us. They seemed almost human, palpable in their need, except for the red glow of the sparks in their eyes. But I knew that they were not like us, that they had left humanity behind a long time ago. I felt the strand of a spider web brush across my face, and I shivered violently enough to shake the last of the sparks from the broom.

“Come here, girlie.” I smelled fetid breath. I knew that this was a vampire’s attempt at glamour, at seducing a victim with its voice. I’d seen it before. Men and women could be lulled into a lassitude, follow the vampires and bare their flesh to them. But the holy letter I held insulated me from it, just as Alex’s tattoos made him resistant to that siren call.

Before, I’d been grateful to God for such a boon. Now, that might serve only to make us painfully aware of a slow, agonizing death. We’d be lucid rather than walking blindly into death in a soft dream state.

I began to pray beneath my breath.

And my prayer was answered in a blinding flash of light.

White-hot brightness flooded the compartment. The door was torn open, and a short silhouette stood in the open void. And that figure held fire in her fist.

“Leave those kids alone,” Ginger’s voice bellowed.

The vampires turned toward her, snarling. She held a bottle in her hand with a flaming rag trickling from the top. I dimly registered it as her prize—the bottle of vodka she’d scavenged from the convenience store cooler.

She hurled the bottle into the trailer. It sailed over our heads and struck the far wall with a sound like a gunshot. It exploded into glass and flame.

I ducked, trying to shield my eyes. Fire blistered from the makeshift bomb, and raced over the wall in a liquid rush of blue and orange flame. I heard howling, smelled burning meat . . .

. . . and there were hands tangled in my apron straps. Alex hauled me through the door of the trailer, into the daylight. I landed on my shoulder on the blacktop, gasping as the wind was knocked out of me.

I felt Alex land on top of me. I rolled back, under his arm, seeing shadows seething at the mouth of the trailer through blurred vision. I clutched his arm, struggling to breathe.

Ginger stood before the opening of the trailer. In each hand, she held a bottle of lighter fluid. She twisted open the cap of one bottle and hurled it into the conflagration.

Squeals and screams echoed from inside. I wanted to clap my hands over my ears. It sounded like the screaming of pigs. The neighbors’ barn that had burned when I was a child held two dozen pigs inside. It was not a sound I’d ever forgotten.

“Burn!”

Ginger’s glasses reflected the fire inside the truck. Her face was twisted into something I didn’t recognize. I had always known her to be motherly, passive. She’d faced the end of the world with a soft shock, hesitating and confused.

But now . . . now, she was wrathful.

She hurled the second bottle into the truck. The open neck of it arced into the air. Flame licked from the interior of the trailer, igniting those clear drops. They splashed on the pavement, burning in a puddle.

Ginger turned her back on the truck, her gait stiff as she approached us. She seemed a different woman now, full of the power of anger that sang through her.

“Ginger,” I wheezed. I could barely squeak, so I pointed behind her.

Something was crawling out of the trailer.

She turned, her skirt swirling in the backdraft. A flaming creature clawed beyond the lip of the truck, slipped to the blacktop like a bat startled during daytime. It scuttled right and left, flopping, as fire crackled along its spine.

But it was daylight. And daylight was just as deadly to these creatures as fire.

Ginger stared at it as its blackened jaws opened and closed, as its fingers spasmed and curled in on themselves like burning paper.

“Burn!”

I saw then that her eyes were damp beneath her glasses. Of all of us, Ginger may have lost the most. And I could see that she wanted these creatures of night to suffer.

My eyes fell to the trickle of lighter fluid on the pavement. The burning creature scuttled to the nearest shadow—the underbelly of the next truck.

The one with fire on the placard.

I drew half a breath to scream at her. Alex pulled me to my feet. I saw understanding cross Ginger’s face, and she began to run.

We ran to Horace. The horse had begun to retreat, cantering along the shoulder of the road, away from us. Away from the evil. And away from what he could smell coming.

Thunder roared behind us. I skidded to my knees and covered my head. Gravel rattled along the side of the road. Behind the ringing in my ears, I could hear bits of metal striking the blacktop parking lot.

I turned, gripping my bonnet strings.

The tanker truck was an open shell, burning. The fire soared beyond the roof of the truck stop. I heard a thin, high whistling in the wreckage. I didn’t know if that was the sound of something flammable under pressure or the keening of something dying. For good this time, hopefully.

And more black smoke poured up into the sky, darkening heaven.

***

“I’m all right.”

I reached for Alex, placing my hand on his cheek. I felt stubble growing there and a worrisome smudge of blood on his lip. A bruise was darkening over his right eye, and I could see a piece of metal jutting out from the top of his thigh.

“I’m all right,” he repeated.

We were relatively unscathed. Ginger had cracked her glasses, but no one had been bitten, and there were no broken bones. Ginger plucked the piece of metal out of Alex’s leg without warning him, and he swore at her.

Nonetheless, we truly had God’s favor.

Except the horse was gone, with all our gear. Horace was understandably spooked, and had run off with all our scavenged supplies. I was the fastest runner and took off after him. Alex and Ginger followed, but fell behind. Alex limped along, pressing his hand to his leg.

I chased Horace, a receding white speck in the distance. He raced away from the city, away from the fire and the smoke. I chased him past the road we’d come in on, through a field pocked with drainage ditches, across an empty freeway. My snakebitten hand still throbbed with every step. I whistled and called for him, but he galloped as if the Devil himself was after him. I lost sight of him once or twice, beyond the edge of the horizon that kept falling farther and farther away.

Outside was much larger than I’d ever dreamed. Endless.

I knew that Horace’s panic would drain away, that he would stop at some point. He had to. It happened to all of us. The poor horse was without any logical explanation for what was happening to him, to us. He knew only fear.

But even fear gave way to exhaustion.

I found him, at last, in a soybean field. The yellow leaves curled against each other like closed fists. I could see his white figure standing beneath a hickory tree at the edge of the field. His pack was askew, and there were leaves tangled in his mane and tail.

I approached him slowly, well within his sight. He was breathing hard, his nostrils flaring as he watched me.

I sat down on a grassy spot beneath the hickory tree, opposite the horse. I pressed my back against the trunk. Shade made me nervous, but the early November wind had stripped almost all the orange leaves from the tree.

I picked up a hickory nut and thumbed the ridges of its shell, found the sweet spot that would release the meat when struck. I took off my shoe and crushed the nut against a root.

Horace flinched, but his ears pressed forward.

I tossed him a piece of the nut meat. He lipped it up from the ground, blew out his breath. I threw another piece, closer this time.

I continued to crack the nuts, feeding him the pieces. I took a few too. When a raven fluttered down from the naked tree, I tossed it a piece as well.

I regarded the raven as it grasped the piece of nut and wolfed it down. The ravens had been the first to sense something was wrong, to flee the apocalypse. They had left in great masses, blotting out the light in the sky one morning. My father had told me that the correct term for a group of ravens was
an unkindness
. It sounded strange to me, imputing an impure motive to an animal.

But this one seemed all alone. A straggler. When I looked closer, I saw why he had not fled—the feathers of his left wing were bent back. He was injured and could not fly far.

I tossed him more food. He was one of God’s creatures, after all. And I knew that for all his intelligence, he was unable to crack hickory nuts. I had seen some very clever ones back home who would drop nuts on the stone lid of our well at great heights to break them open. But I saw no such stones here.

Dragging his reins on the ground, Horace approached me. He stood over me for a moment, looking down his long nose with his sad brown eyes.

With a sigh, he came to his knees. When a horse does so, it’s a sign of exhaustion and surrender. I had rarely seen one do so outside of foaling or illness.

Horace laid his nose on my knee. I stroked his broad forehead, watched the raven bob and weave among the spiky grass to find the last bits of hickory nut.

The sun was warm on my face. I closed my eyes, relishing this small moment of solitude and peace.

I just listened to the thin breeze in the branches. I wondered how God’s creatures interpreted all that had happened—was happening—to them. I thought of all the cats and dogs in houses in the city. And I began to miss my dogs. Back home, I bred golden retrievers. Sunny had just given birth to puppies. I hoped that my little sister was caring for them as I’d showed her.

I missed my family. I missed my mother, with her gentle work-callused hands, and my father, with his calmness and equanimity. I missed Sarah. I missed sleeping in my own bed, and eating hot mashed potatoes. I missed clean clothes and fresh water and the sense of ordinariness that my old routine brought. I didn’t appreciate it enough then.

But now, now that I had been shunned and cast out into the Outside world . . . now I knew an inkling of the value of such things. Even though they had been spoiled when I left by the incursion of the vampires and the stranglehold of denial the Elders were beginning to exert on the community, I missed what had once been.

And I wondered if it would survive, ever to be again.

***

When I dreamed, I knew that I was dreaming.

I dreamed of blue sky with the tatters of white clouds, of sun on my face. I dreamed that I was in my backyard, doing laundry with my mother and sister. I was scrubbing clothes in a basin with a washboard and lye soap. I handed a dress to Sarah, who rinsed the garment and handed it off to my mother. It was my favorite dress—a dark blue the color of gathering night. My mother wrung the dress dry and fastened it to the clothesline with wooden pins. She was a future version of myself, with the same straight, light brown hair, gray eyes clear and smiling. The apples of her cheeks glowed with contentment. She and Sarah were singing as we worked.

My mother commented, “
Ja
, we should make you a new dress before winter.”

Sarah clapped her hands. She was just learning to sew. “Can I help?”

“Of course you can!” I told her. I was perfectly capable of making my own dresses, but it went so much faster with my mother’s help. And Sarah took the cutting so very seriously that her eyes crossed.