Margie looks at the baby fat still visible under the smooth planes of her sister’s face. “It’s nothing,” she says.
Sally rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”
Margie isn’t lying about checking the perimeter, but that only takes an hour and then she finds a thick copse of weeds where she has a clear view of the cabin. Bugs swirl around her, creeping along her neck and tangling in her lashes, but she sits calm and still through dusk and into the late evening.
Through the window she watches her sister fix something to eat and flip through the atlas listlessly before selecting another novel and carrying it up to the loft. The lantern burns inside, beckoning to Margie, but she keeps to the weeds, waiting while stars begin to catch fire overhead.
He comes a few hours after nightfall, just as the moon burns a bright halo on the horizon. He creeps up the steps and eases into the swing, gripping the rusted chain to keep it from creaking. The ax he’d been carrying lies forgotten against the railing as if he’s not afraid of anyone or anything out here.
None of her traps signaled his approach, and Margie wonders just how many times he’s circumvented their defenses. She watches him a moment; it’s been so long since she’s seen a living human being other than her sister that she’s fascinated, even if this guy’s some sort of creeper who’s been in their cabin and touched their things. He hunches over himself so that most of him’s hidden in shadows, and she can’t get a good look at him except to tell that his hair’s tattered and his clothes ragged along the edges.
He jumps up as she steps from the weeds, but he doesn’t move for his ax. His body’s pole-bean thin, but even so she notices coiled muscles twined around his bare arms and knows he’s strong. She figures he’s her age or a little older.
“Just in case you can’t see out here,” she says, even and strong, “I’ve got a shotgun aimed at your gut. I wouldn’t reach for that ax.” Margie walks into the clearing, toes hitting the ground before she rocks onto her heels. She listens for movement just in case the boy isn’t alone, but she hears nothing but the night bugs screaming.
The boy raises his hands. “I’m not planning on doing anything stupid,” he says.
Margie swallows. She feels off balance inside, not really knowing what to do next. “Who are you and what do you want?”
“My name’s Calvin. I’m here because . . .” He looks down at his feet. He wears old yellow boots with knots in the laces holding them together. He shrugs. “I saw the light and I just . . .” He twists his face like it hurts him to say it. Then he looks up like he can see her in the darkness.
“I was lonely, okay?” He sounds defensive, his shoulders hitched forward.
The words cut into Margie—she doesn’t know what to do with them. “Where’d you come from?” she finally asks.
He shrugs. “Around. Here and there.”
Margie watches him, the slow rise and fall of his chest. He doesn’t seem as scared as he should with a gun pointed at him. “You know I don’t trust you, right? And I’m not going to trust you?”
He nods.
“Kick your ax off the porch,” she tells him. “And if you’ve got any other weapons, toss them too.”
Calvin reaches out with his toe and nudges the ax until it slips under the railing into the overgrown bushes. From his pockets he pulls two knives and a bag of bullets but no gun— they’ve become too scarce in the past years.
Margie keeps the shotgun on him as she climbs the steps. For a while they stare at each other, her trying to put the piece of his existence into the puzzle of her life up here.
“What’s it like back down the mountain?” Margie finally asks.
Calvin doesn’t hesitate. “Horrible.” He slumps into the swing. “There aren’t a lot of safe places left, and finding food’s impossible.” He stares at his hands, his elbows propped on his knees. There’s dirt under his nails and filling the cracks of his skin.
They sit like that for a bit, nothing of the world between them that’s the same except for the monsters. Margie thinks about what it was like before the big change, when you could talk about things like movies or television or some funny joke from the internet. She grapples for some sort of bridge she could pull between them so that the gap across the porch wouldn’t seem so big and wide.
“I can’t let you leave,” she finally says. “You know that, right? I don’t want you sneaking around out here and, even if you left, I can’t have you mention to someone out there that we’ve found a safe place.”
He nods his head. “I was hoping maybe if I promised not to tell anyone . . .” He looks at her and sees that she’s not the kind to offer false hopes to strangers. His face falls. “I understand.”
“I can tie you up on the porch or inside—I’ll give you that option.”
He looks through the window at the lantern spilling over the atlas and guidebooks. “Why West Virginia?” he finally asks.
Margie rubs her fingers along the stock of the shotgun, tracing the edge of the trigger. She still has the safety on, but he doesn’t know that. “My sister gets to choose where we go and she remembered some show about West Virginia.”
“It’s a nice place,” he says. “Prettier than you’d think.”
“You’ve been?”
“Yeah. Before. My family used to go camping up on the Cacapon in the spring.” He no longer looks at his hands but at her. She’s tucked into the darkness, but still there’s something about the way he sees her that makes her feel a sort of intimacy.
“I’ll get the rope,” she says, because she doesn’t want to talk about families or vacations or the time before.
“There’s a guy tied to the porch swing,” Sally says when Margie comes down from the loft in the morning. Margie watches as Calvin slowly rocks outside, his wrists still lashed to the chains.
“You know you’re terrible at knots, right?” Sally says, flipping through one of the guidebooks spread around her. “He could have gotten out easy if he’d wanted.”
She traces an interstate across the mountains on the map, cross-referencing a set of directions in her notebook. “Don’t know why he wouldn’t just escape if he had the chance,” she mumbles without looking up at her older sister.
Margie stares at Calvin. “Me neither.”
Margie pats him down to make sure there aren’t any more weapons tucked in his clothes, and then all three of them go to pick berries. Sally pesters Calvin about where he’s been and what the mountains out West are like compared to those in the East. Calvin’s patient and kind and always aware of the fact that Margie has a gun and is willing to blow some part of his body off at the slightest provocation.
Days pass one after the other: gardening and taking care of the cabin in the day, Calvin tied up at night, time rolling after time as the great clock unwinds.
“She knows the trip is a lie,” Calvin finally says one night as Margie wraps rope around his arm and the swing.
She hesitates.
“She knows more than you think. About the world. About what your chances of survival are.” He pauses. Her face isn’t far from his, and she smells the berry sweetness of his breath.
“Our chances of survival,” he says softly.
Margie lets the rope trail from her fingers and stumbles to the other end of the porch until the railing bites her hips.
“What do I have to do to prove my loyalty to you, Marg?” Calvin asks. “How many nights do I have to sit out here tied up when we both know your knots are crap and I could escape anytime? What will it take for you to trust me?”
Margie slumps, sliding down until she sits on the edge of the porch. Fireflies flash in the gardens, bright reminders that for some creatures the world hasn’t changed.
“I’m the one who had to kill my mother,” Margie confesses. Her chin trembles, her whole body shaking. A breeze trips up the mountain, cool and crisp like fall. “After the change we got out of the city and we found a place and for a while it was safe, but then we were ambushed. My f
ather yelled but no one could hear. They took my mother, and my father resisted, and I didn’t know what to do but grab Sally and run into the woods. I watched what they did to my mother, and when my father tried to fight, they killed him and tossed his body aside. I could smell the death and hear the moans and then they just left my mother on the ground while they ransacked inside. I told Sally to stay and I found my mother and there were bite marks all over her and she said nothing when I held the gun against her.”
She inhales as if she’s never known air before. “We had somewhere safe, and they took it.”
Calvin strips the ropes from his arms and pulls her against him. More than anything else in the world Margie wants to sob and grab hold. Just to know that there’s someone out there to help her survive so that she doesn’t have to carry it all.
He holds her so tight she feels like she might snap, and she pushes against him because she needs to hear his heart and feel every inhalation. “Sally doesn’t know,” she says against his shoulder. “She doesn’t know what it takes to survive.”
He presses his lips against the crown of her head and whispers, “Hush,” into her ear with his hot breath. Around them night peepers scream to each other, tree frogs wailing for the darkness.
Margie doesn’t tie Calvin up but instead lets him help her inside, where they lie on the couch and she thinks that maybe there is such a thing as survival in this world.
When the two men charge into the cabin, Calvin’s the first to reach for the gun. Margie falls from the couch to her knees and wants to scream for Sally but presses her lips tight, hoping that maybe the strangers won’t know there’s someone else inside.
Calvin flips off the safety and raises the gun to his shoulder. The strangers are tall and broad, one of them with a tangled beard and the other with black hair slicked back behind his ears. It’s almost too easy to see the family resemblance to Calvin, and Margie goes numb as she notices.
“How quaint,” the bearded man says. He strolls inside as if there isn’t a shotgun pointed to his chest. He glances around— at the map on the table, at Margie’s face that’s still rubbed a little raw from Calvin’s unshaven cheeks.
He turns to face Calvin while the slick-headed man leans against the door frame. “Nicely done, little brother,” he says. “You checked there’s food enough for winter and the other guns are secured?”
Calvin nods, eyes downcast.
Margie chokes. Her body flames a deep burning red as shame churns inside. It feels like the moment her family was ambushed on the road, when time seemed to slow down and she noticed the most pointless details. Now she feels the grit of the hardwood floor biting into her knees and realizes how badly she needs to pee.
Slick Hair moves toward the loft. “Where’s the other one?”
Margie tries to block his way and she’s shoved to the ground, her head hitting the corner of a chair as she falls. She paws at the man, hooking her fingers in his clothes, but he bats her away, crushing her hand until she feels something pop and give.
“Sally!” she screams, loud and raw and filled with rage. The bearded one grabs her, lifting and twisting until her arm’s behind her back, his knife against her throat. She struggles, not caring at the bite of the blade into her skin.
“Margie,” Calvin says. It’s his voice that stops her. He’s still holding the gun. Her gun. She wants to close her eyes, but she doesn’t because she deserves this. To see what she’s brought down on her sister.
Her lips still vibrate from when Calvin kissed her, and she spits at him, hating the taste of him still in her mouth. He blanches and sidesteps her attempt at outrage, and his two brothers laugh, Slick Head reaching out and slapping his shoulder hard enough to make him stumble. Calvin’s cheeks flare a bright embarrassed pink, and his eyes leap to Margie’s and then away again, a shuttered mortification flashing through them.
“Tell her to drop the ladder,” Beard says into Margie’s ear.
She shakes her head. Already she can feel the sobs coming, and they taste like failure. She swallows and chokes trying to get the words out: “Don’t do it, Sally. You stay where you are!”
“Drop the ladder or I start carving your sister!” Beard shouts up toward the loft. He slides the blade along her collarbone and then digs it into Margie’s shoulder. Even though she bites her lips, she can’t stop the scream. The pain’s nothing like she’s ever known before, an explosion of fire as her body realizes how deeply the knife has sunk.
Margie’s knees give out, her legs limp and useless. As she slides toward the floor she looks to Calvin for help, but he just stands there, his hands tight around her gun and his eyes on the blood curling down from the gash in her shoulder.
He kissed that exact spot the night before. Traced his lips over that stretch of skin as she gasped and pulled him closer with a type of need he’d said he’d never been a part of before. Now the flesh is torn, the edges ragged from the unsharpened knife, and he looks like he can’t stop trying to figure out how something once so whole and perfect can become that broken so easily.
Margie braces her uninjured arm against the floor, fingers splayed to hold her weight before she collapses. She’s wheezing— loud and gagging from the pain. Beard grabs her hair and drags her out into the middle of the room to make sure Sally can see what he’s doing.
He pushes Margie to her knees, yanks her head back until her spine arches. Presses the knife against her throat, sweat glistening along the ridges of her tendons. “I don’t like asking twice,” he growls up at Sally, who huddles behind the banister, eyes wide and hands pressed over her mouth as her shoulders shake.
“Stop it!” Sally shouts. “Okay, I’m coming down. Just stop hurting her!”
She unfurls the ladder as Margie begs, “No, Sally, stay up there,” but Sally ignores her.
She’s halfway down, her bare toes wrapping over the wooden rungs, when Slick Head grabs her around the waist with a thick arm. Sally’s already anticipated the move because she pushes herself back, twisting the rope of the ladder around his neck and hauling his feet from the ground.
He kicks out, the rope tightening, and his mouth wrenches open—a black, choking maw ringed by yellowed teeth.
“Jeffrey!” Beard shouts as his brother starts to scratch wildly at his throat, his face flaring red.
“The knife!” Slick Head wheezes out, and Beard throws Margie to the ground. He jumps toward his brother, but Margie kicks at his feet, throwing him off balance so that he trips and falls, the knife skittering from his hand as his fists slam against the hardwood floor.
Sally’s there in the middle of it, swooping in for the knife as it slides past her. Everything stills as the pieces of the moment reorder and shift back together again: Margie struggling to her knees, Slick Head choking and pawing madly at the noose, Beard pushing himself up with his hands out in front of him as Sally crouches, knife held steady.
Calvin’s still in the corner by the door, shotgun clutched in his fingers.
“Shoot her,” Beard orders him, never taking his eyes off Sally or her knife.
Calvin jumps toward Margie, lowering the gun. She’s kneeling on the floor, one arm useless. She looks up at Calvin standing over her, the shotgun pressed against her temple in the same spot he kissed the night before. She doesn’t close her eyes. She won’t make it easy.
“You said you understood what it takes to survive,” Calvin says to Margie. “How hard it is to find somewhere safe.” He’s sweating, his lips pale. “You’ve got Sally to take care of like I have my brothers.”
Margie just stares at him. He knows what she’s done for her sister. What she would do if their situations were reversed. Behind them, Slick Head’s chokes become high-pitched wheezes.
Margie winces, and Calvin’s finger jumps on the trigger before slipping away. “Cut him down,” Calvin orders Sally without taking his eyes off Margie.
“You have to understand this.” He speaks like he needs Margie’s absolution.
Sh
e feels the perfect roundness of the barrel of the shotgun pressed hard enough against her skin to leave an indentation. One flick of his finger and she’s done worrying. Done planning and patrolling and constantly fighting against the incessant fear.
She’s failed Sally. She always knew that she would. In the same way her father failed her and she failed her mother. In the world with the dead, her failure was always inevitable.
Slick Head’s gags become desperate—wet, smacking sounds that fill the cabin as streaks of blood tear along his neck from his nails scratching for air.
Sally’s breathing hard and fast as she steps toward Slick Head, his face puffy, with busted blood vessels in his eyes turning them red. She draws the hand holding the knife over her shoulder as if preparing to hack at the rope. He claws at her, trying to get his fingers around the blade, but she just swings her arm hard, knuckles cracking against his jaw but the hilt of the knife keeping her fist solid like a brick.
Blood dribbles from his mouth and she pulls back to strike again as the hanging man chokes on broken teeth.
Beard roars and leaps for her, but he’s too late. She’s already sliced the knife across Slick Hair’s throat, a ragged gurgling gash of frothing blood that drips from his neck as his mouth gapes open and closed, open and closed.
Sally spins toward Beard, holding the bloody blade between them, but that doesn’t stop him. He crashes into her, dragging her to the ground. His fingers rake at her, claw at her face, and pummel her throat.
She tries to hold him off but she’s a young girl and he’s a massive man—it’s like a fawn beating back a bear, and Beard howls and spits with his rage as blood from his brother’s neck twines down his arms and drips to the floor.
Margie’s eyes flare and she drags her broken body across the room to her sister’s defense, not caring that the barrel of the shotgun traces her movement. “Stop it!” she screams, reaching for her sister’s tiny hands, trying to drag her away from the mauling monster.