We can’t go on. We stare at the television. The hole in the screen is a porthole in a sunken boat. It’s an open mouth ringed in rows of small, asymmetrical, jagged teeth and it once spoke of unimaginable places and things. It’s a wound, one from which the blackest ichor will begin flowing. It’s a telescopic view of the universe before stars, or after.
In the new silence of the cabin, Andrew only hears his own breathing and the quickened metronome of his heartbeat. He imagines bashing the television and frame with the gore-stained hammer until there’s nothing left to bash and until he’s beaten back the icy tendrils of doubt.
Eric stares at the screen as though he is afraid to look elsewhere; the very act of staring is a talisman that already failed to protect us. He has Wen in his arms and he sways in rhythm with the frenzied buzz of flies echoing from inside the hole. Only one of us ever hears and sees these flies just as only one of us saw a figure in light.
Eric silently tells Wen he will not put her down or ask Andrew to hold her until after we leave the cabin, even though his arms are tiring. Then he says, “We should go right now.” Is he only saying this because Sabrina suggests we should leave? He closes his eyes and he sees planes falling like drops of rain from a darkening sky.
Andrew says, “All right. Let’s go. Maybe I should carry Wen.” Andrew hates the defeat and need in his voice.
“No, I have her. I can do it. I can make it.” In his head, Eric prays for the strength to carry Wen until his strength is no longer needed. For a few weeks after her third birthday, Wen went through a phase insisting we carry her on endless jaunts around our condo so she could count the number of laps as a measure of how strong we were. We would both purposefully
complete the same number of laps, which frustrated Wen greatly, and she reacted like we were keeping a secret from her. We would jokingly tell her that our arms were always at the same strength level and we only got tired because she was growing, getting bigger by the second as we held her in our faux-shaky arms.
Andrew says, “I know you can. Just—let me know.” Wen’s body is all but made shapeless by the sheet he wrapped around her. He wants to hold her again, right now, and he wonders if her arms, which he’d carefully positioned at her sides, have shifted or bent, and he wonders what her hands are doing, and her feet, and maybe he should unwrap her and make sure she’s okay underneath, and then kiss her forehead and not look at the lower half of her face.
Eric says, “I will.”
Andrew is weeping. “All right. I’m sorry.” For as long as he lives, Andrew will wonder if Eric partly blames him for Wen’s death because of his unwitting part in the hellish Rube Goldberg device that took over our lives, because he snuck the gun up to the cabin, because the gun was in his hand, because his finger was on the trigger, because he couldn’t stop the trigger from being pulled. The lump of the handgun, the cold machine, is in his back pocket. Andrew’s hands are currently filled with the wooden handle of the cursed weapon O’Bannon made. He wishes to hold Wen instead.
“Why are you sorry?” Eric doesn’t know what to say to him. He wants to tell Andrew that he loves him but is afraid that it would sound final.
Andrew doesn’t explain and says, “I’m sorry,” again. He doesn’t like how Eric stands, wavers, leaning one way and then the other, or how he talks with no inflection. He doesn’t like how inscrutable Eric’s eyes are. It’s more than the concussion and dilated pupils and the shock of everything. Does he look this way because he has given up?
Eric says, “I said we can go now.” “I know. We’re going.”
We say the right words again, but we don’t move. We stand there. Now that Sabrina is the only one of them left and unarmed, we’re more afraid of what we are thinking and of what the other one of us is thinking. We’re afraid for each other and we’re afraid of ourselves. How can we go on? At this shared thought, we turn away from the television screen and away from each other.
Sabrina is behind Leonard with a mask stretched between her hands. She pulls it down over the pulpified, eroded mass of his head. The mesh conforms to his new, unrecognizable physiognomy, and the white immediately reddens. His concealed and misshapen head is grotesquely small, a bump atop the mountain range of his broad shoulders and prairie-wide chest, which strains to be contained within the looped ropes. His grisly, trussed corpse is a garish cartoon, a ludicrous exaggeration of the human form.
Andrew motions at Sabrina. “You and I are going out onto the deck first.”
Sabrina asks, “Why?”
“To check O’Bannon’s pockets for the truck keys.”
“They’re not there. I told you we hid them under a flat rock, and I promise I’ll help you find them.” She looks at Eric and her half smile turns into a wince as though she’s ashamed, guilty to be appealing to him for support.
Andrew says, “There’s no way a wannabe redneck like that would leave behind his truck keys.”
Sabrina doesn’t argue or protest. She walks the line between the kitchen and the common room to the deck and straddles Adriane’s supine body as she fumbles with the screen slider, which stubbornly continues to reject its track.
“Just take it off and chuck it outside.”
Sabrina carries the screen door onto the deck and stashes it between the picnic table and cabin wall. Andrew instructs her to stand next to O’Bannon and with her back against the wooden railing. Once she follows his directions, Andrew joins her on the deck. The air is warm and humid, ready to burst. Wind rattles through the trees and small waves lap at the lakeshore below. The gray sky is a smear, a Neuromancer sky, dead and anachronistic.
Eric walks behind Leonard and in full view of the doorway so he can see what’s happening on the deck. The sun is muzzled, but the sky’s grayness is too bright for him. He doesn’t hear any birds chirping or whistling, only flies gathering on Leonard’s corpse. He tries to drown out the buzzing with silent prayers and entreaties and what do we dos. Planes are falling in his head; one dives into the lake and sinks to the bottom, the water is nothing more than a curtain to be brushed aside.
Andrew says, “Lift the blanket and check his pockets.” He hopes against hope that the keys are with O’Bannon. If they are, then he will have caught Sabrina in a lie and it will be easier to convince Eric she and the others have been lying all along and all this end-of-the-world bargaining insanity is in fact insanity.
Sabrina peels the blanket up from O’Bannon’s lower half. She coughs and recoils from the release of a rancid, cloying, fecal smell that brutally imperializes the deck. Andrew reels backward. He holds a forearm over his nose and mouth, a gesture as feckless as building a wall of sand to hold back high tide.
Regathering herself, Sabrina is careful to fold the blanket so that O’Bannon’s torso and head remain veiled. The bloodstains on his jeans have dried into a hardened crust. On her knees, she searches inside each front pocket, grimacing and grunting, and then turning them inside out.
Andrew asks, “Nothing in your hands? Did you palm a key?” Sabrina holds up her empty hands.
“Check his back pockets.” He’s so desperate for the keys to be there he repeats himself. “Check his back pockets!”
“There’s nothing there—” “Check them! Now!”
Sabrina lifts O’Bannon onto his side and the smell impossibly becomes more intense, more physical, a thing clawing through membrane and matter. Sabrina’s eyes water and her heavy breaths hiss through clenched teeth. She turns her head away from O’Bannon, gasping for clean air. “There’s nothing in them. I can’t pull these pockets out. You’re going to have to have a look yourself.” She balances the body on one hip.
O’Bannon’s blue jeans have turned inky from an unholy mix of blood and shit. The back pockets appear to be bulgeless and fitting flush against the body, but Andrew can’t know for sure if there isn’t a single key in them. Sabrina drops O’Bannon’s body before Andrew can make up his mind as to whether he was going to stick his hand in either pocket. She twists away from the body and drops to all fours, coughing and dry heaving.
Andrew says, “Maybe he tucked a key inside his socks. Check those, too.”
“The keys aren’t here.” “Just do it.”
She rolls O’Bannon’s pant cuffs over his thick, mottled calves. She sighs and says, “Look. He has those no-show ankle socks on. They don’t even cover his—”
“Take his shoes off. He could’ve stuffed one key in his shoe. It has to be on him somewhere.”
Sabrina shrugs and says, “Seriously?” She’s losing her calm and I-just-want-to-help composure, which is fine by Andrew. She’ll be more likely to slip up in a lie if she’s frazzled and on edge.
Sabrina unties O’Bannon’s shoes and she works them off his club-thick feet. “Andrew, we hid the keys in the woods. I promise. I’m not lying.” She tumbles the clunky black shoes to Andrew. They clatter and flip and come to rest on their sides. No key comes clinking out. “Go ahead, check them. I haven’t lied to you since I’ve been here. Not once.” She stands up and recovers the body’s lower half.
Eric calls out from inside the cabin, “I don’t think she’s lying, Andrew. I really don’t.”
Sabrina says, “I’ll show you where the keys are. It’s possible you can find them without me, but I really don’t think you will. I’m not saying that to taunt you. It’s just the truth. But I’ll find them and then you can leave me there on the side of the road, tied to a tree, or put me in the trunk and take me with you to the police, turn me in. Your choice. Whatever it is you want. I swear.”
What Andrew wants is to have Wen back and to have Eric be his Eric and not this brain-bashed proto-zombie. And if he can’t have that, then he wants to sit down and cry and never move again. He wants to cover himself with the blanket, the one that used to belong to us, used to be ours. He wants to tie Sabrina to the deck railing and leave her behind forever. He wants to know what exactly is going on in Eric’s concussed head. He wants to yell and lash out at Eric for defending anything Sabrina says. He wants to take Wen away from Eric; rip her out of his hands.
Andrew says to Sabrina, “All right. Back in the cabin. Be quick.”
Eric asks, “Aren’t we going? Is she coming with us? I think we need—” “We’re all going!” Andrew yells.
That barking roar spikes through Eric’s head, and he winces and closes his eyes. When he opens them, he looks past Andrew and to the lake, and a thought scurries: Eric could walk into the water with Wen in his arms, and he could walk until the water is over his head. He could walk until his feet
sink into the muck and then weave binding chains from the weeds so he would never surface, never be exposed to the light. Then everything would be over; he would’ve made the required sacrifice and the world would be saved. Aren’t those the rules? The rules some growing, metastasizing part of himself believes to be true? There is still doubt, but it has become easier to believe than not. Has it always been easier to believe? Either way, the lake solution doesn’t feel right, and it wouldn’t be fair of him to take Wen with him, take her away from Andrew. Eric drifts over to the couch and sits down. He spreads his legs wide, balances Wen’s body on his thighs, and pulls his arms out from under her to give them a break. He needs the rest if he is going to carry her for the duration of the walk, however long or short it might be. Flies land on his arms and not Wen’s body this time. He doesn’t shoo them away.
Sabrina steps over Adriane and back into the cabin. Andrew follows. He sidesteps into the kitchen and grabs an eight-inch chef’s knife from the cutting block. He tosses the sledgehammer weapon out the slider doors and it lands on O’Bannon. Andrew says, “Good.” With that nightmare stick back with its dead progenitor, the cherry on the top of that refuse pile, Andrew is invigorated and more able to concentrate on what needs to be done to survive the next minute and hopefully more minutes after that.
Andrew stalks back to the center of the cabin’s common area but slows down when there’s a hiccupping click in his right knee, a warning from his shifting bones to slow down. He navigates more carefully over the blood-slicked floor. Sabrina stands with her back against the front wall, and Eric is on the couch with Wen’s body across his lap. It’s as though the trip to the deck didn’t happen and no one has moved and nothing has changed. And just like that Andrew’s energy dissipates and a near-incapacitating sadness and despair swells at the realization that even after we walk out the front door, part of us will be trapped in the cabin and in these positions forever.
Andrew says to Sabrina with his best impersonation of his own stern, professorial voice, “Turn around, drop to your knees, and put your hands behind your back.”
Sabrina does as is instructed. Facing the wall, she says, “You don’t have to hurt me. I’m going to help you as much as I can.”
Eric asks, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to tie her hands together and then we’ll all walk to the keys.”
Andrew saws lengths of rope away from Leonard’s bound legs. The size of the chef’s knife makes it unwieldy for the job. He accidentally pokes and jabs Leonard’s body twice. Red beads leak sluggishly from the puncture wounds like sap from a tree. He manages to cut four arm-length pieces of rope loose. He carries them over to Sabrina, who is still on her knees, waiting. He considers threatening her with consequences if she doesn’t comply but instead simply tells her not to move. He squats behind her. His swollen right knee is a bowling ball. Sabrina’s fingers and hands are pink with memories of blood. The back of her shirt is as white as a single puffy cloud in summer.
Andrew doesn’t say anything to her and she doesn’t say anything to him. He does a quick and rough job of tying her hands and wrists together with the first rope length. It will keep her bound long enough for him to take more care with the reinforcement lengths. If any of this process is uncomfortable or painful, Sabrina doesn’t react to it. When he finishes, her hands and wrists are all but swallowed up by a thick dual spindle. He tries to pull her forearms apart and there’s no movement, no give in the rope.
Eric is off the couch and standing behind Andrew. He looks at the door and is as afraid of what’s outside as he is afraid of what’s inside. He says, “We’re doing the right thing.”
Andrew does a double take because he thinks he hears We’re going to do the right thing. He says to Sabrina, “Okay, you can stand up. Do you need help?”
“No, I don’t.” She lifts her right knee until her foot is flush against the floor and she stands smoothly and without much effort. She turns and flashes a friendly, I’m-on-your-side smile that slides into pity, an ugly transformation familiar to us both.
She says, “I’m ready.”
Andrew walks to the front door and swings it open on creaking hinges.
Eric holds his breath and prays, asking for the light and whatever entity might be housed within to not be outside waiting for us. That there hasn’t been another sighting of the shimmery figure only convinces him it will return. The cabin interior brightens by a few shades, enough to wash out color and add more shadow. This light is from a nowhere time, neither before nor after the golden hours of dawn and dusk. Nothing in the cabin moves; even Eric’s flies are stilled.
Andrew stands in the open doorway and glances back inside the cabin. With bent metal pieces of the television frame and wires hanging limply from a splintered, jagged hole in the far wall and the blood on the floor congealing into colossal scabs. The room was thrashed and scored from within by parasites so greedy as to have killed the host.
Andrew waves his knife and says, “Come on.” Sabrina is the first to walk outside, and she does so silently. Eric and Wen are next with Eric walking dutifully and with his head down. Andrew thinks about reaching out to touch his husband’s shoulder as he passes, but he fails to lift his free hand in time. Eric is already down the stairs and to the grass. Andrew is the last to leave and he closes the door behind him, keeping whatever is left inside the cabin from following.
It’s darker outside now than it was only minutes ago, and windier. The cloud cover is charcoal tinted. The cabin and surrounding trees block any attempt at distance viewing. At least from the deck, we could see across the lake to the forest and mountains and more easily imagine the wider world beyond us, beyond what we saw on the television. Without the elevated perspective, the front yard is the bottom of a grasshopper jar.
We walk across the lawn and to the gravel driveway. Our footsteps are loud and grinding. We don’t feel safe. We’re exposed and vulnerable, and we suppress the urge to run back inside the cabin and hide from this world.
Andrew says, “Hold up,” and stops at our SUV. The passenger-side rear door is open, shark-tooth-shaped chunks of glass clinging stubbornly to the frame. The slashed tires have melted into pools of rubber. The vehicle is lopsided, a sunken derelict ship. “We can’t drive it. It’s not going anywhere,” he says as though having to explain or excuse leaving behind anything that belongs to us. He opens the rear hatch, which hisses as it lifts over his head.
The hissing is a shriek in Eric’s ears and it echoes through the woods, stirring up a susurrus similar to but not the same as the mocking chorus of flies in the cabin; it’s a deeper sound, the humming of power lines. Maybe it’s a mistake to be outside, attempting to leave, acting like we can simply go on.
Eric asks, “What are you doing?”
“This will be quick.” Bullets, those shiny brass threats, are seeds spilled and spread over the black-as-potting-soil trunk interior. Andrew ghosts over
the evidence of his earlier struggle with Sabrina and those leavings now read like tea leaves, a forecasting of the events in the cabin that followed.
Andrew pulls the handgun from his back pocket. He studies the snub-nosed barrel from which exploded a bullet that looked no different from the ones lying dormant in the trunk, a bullet that passed through his daughter’s
—
“Stop it,” Andrew whispers. He’s going to reload this gun and bring it with him just in case Sabrina or anyone else has another surprise for us. Andrew says into the vehicle’s interior but loud enough for Eric to hear, “When this is over and when we are safe, I am going to throw this gun into the woods or the lake or preferably a bottomless pit.”
“I’ll help you find one and we’ll throw it in there together,” Eric says. It comes out too eager and sentimental, so it feels like such a damned and obvious lie. Andrew reloading that gun, the gun, and then Eric’s awkward attempt at commiseration is yet another microevent within the greater, grander days of horror and evil that will mark us whether we live another sixty seconds or sixty years, together or apart.
Andrew gathers the loose bullets quickly, before he can change his mind. They are small chilled things in his fingers and he loads the five chambers of the handgun. He returns the gun to his back pocket. He places the knife in the trunk next to the gun safe, leaving an offering for a bloodthirsty, violent god, were there any other kind.
Andrew faces Eric and is desperate to say something, anything besides
the gun is loaded so we can go.
Eric adjusts Wen’s body in his arms and walks down the driveway, toward Sabrina, who is as still as a photographic image.
Andrew leaves the SUV trunk open, hurrying to catch up to Eric. His right knee audibly grinds and clicks, and he catches himself as the knee buckles and gives out, leg quivering like a loose spring. “Shit!”
From the mouth of the driveway and standing next to Sabrina, Eric asks, “What’s wrong?”
She sneaks glances at Eric as though she wants to tell him something that’s meant only for him. Maybe she wants to tell Eric this is his last opportunity to save the world: leave Andrew behind while he and Sabrina continue down the road and along the way Eric can make the sacrifice, a self-sacrifice, without Andrew having to suffer through witnessing his suicide, without Andrew being there to stop him, and once it’s done then
Andrew will live. It will be hard but Andrew will live. And everyone else will live.
Eric says, “Maybe you should—” He pauses long enough, and purposefully, to let Andrew interrupt and to keep Eric from finishing his statement. Maybe you should stay here.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m, um, rebooting the leg.” Andrew regrets not taking one of the weapons with him as he could’ve used one as a cane. He walks more cautiously and with a pronounced, sputtering limp, only putting as much weight on his right leg as is absolutely necessary before skipping back onto his left. He scans the woods along the edge of the driveway for a walking stick and finds one that’s long enough but might be too skinny to hold his full weight. It’s a gnarled, arthritic finger and the bark is black, knotty, and dotted with green and white blossoms of lichen. It’ll have to do. He says, “All set,” and hobbles forward.
Sabrina calls out to Andrew in an overly cheery, high-pitched voice. “It’s not that far. You can do it.” And did he see a flash of a smartass smirk, the we’re-on-to-you kind his better students give him when he’s playfully obtuse in a group discussion? Sabrina holds Andrew with a look that pins him, and he now reads it as I can sprint away at any time and you can’t catch me and you won’t shoot me. Andrew quickens his pace, putting all his weight on his inadequate and warbly stick, desperate to prove he can achieve a brisk, healthy-legged walking speed. He should’ve gathered more rope and tethered a line between himself and Sabrina. What was he thinking? But it’s too late now. There’s no going back inside the cabin for more rope. There’s no going back for anything.
We make a right turn at the end of the driveway. It’s darker on the dirt road, which is narrower than we remember, only wide enough for one lane, and it might be our imaginations, but the road appears to be thinning, winnowing as we progress. The trees crowd our procession, wanting to be closer, to hold us, to stop us. They are our jurors and their whispered deliberations occur above in the canopy. The treetops sway and peer down for a better look, or a final one before they hold their thumbs down. Above the conspiratorial trees, the clouds have lost their individuality, pressed tightly into thick layers of ash. It’s darker ahead, the road leading to a point beyond where we can see, to a point we may never reach.
After a few hundred paces of silent walking, the little red cabin is no longer visible. Sabrina is a few steps ahead of us. She walks evenly and
with a confidence neither of us feels. We stagger behind, side by side, glancing nervously at each other.
Eric looks down at Wen and another panicked thought slithers in: later (however long or brief his later might be), when he remembers what it felt like to hold Wen in his arms, will he only and forever remember this death march? It doesn’t feel like it’s her that he’s carrying. This isn’t what he wants to remember, and her body is suddenly as heavy as a wooden cross. Eric recalls his Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Amstutz, a middle-aged woman who always wore blue print dresses, black patent shoes with silver buckles, and tan pantyhose that made her legs look wooden. She didn’t smile and a tight-lipped pucker of disapproval was permanently etched onto her ruddy face. Eric’s mother didn’t like her very much. Mom never said so outright, but he could tell by how she referred to Mrs. Amstutz as “your teacher” and never by name. Mrs. Amstutz once spent an entire class harping on how heavy the cross was that Jesus was made to carry. She wasn’t speaking metaphorically, either. She asked each of the children in the class to give a weight comparison. The other children enthusiastically compared its weight to cars, boulders, elephants, an offensive lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Jabba the Hutt, and someone’s overweight uncle; the kids did not take the question anywhere near as seriously as she intended. When it was Eric’s turn, he was near tears and his heartbeat was a drumroll. In a regular classroom setting, Eric was composed, confident, and according to all his teachers, mature beyond his years. Sunday school was different. It wasn’t the teacher that had him rattled and afraid. This was God’s class. God was watching, listening, keeping track of what Eric said and did, and what he thought. Mrs. Amstutz asked Eric three times how much he thought the cross weighed. He thinks of the question every time he goes to church and sees the cross hanging over the altar, and every time, he remembers his answer: the ten-year-old Eric squeaked out that he couldn’t imagine anything being that heavy.
Andrew says, “Talk to me. How are you doing, Eric? Need me to carry her for a bit?”
Eric shakes his head not as an answer but at the uncanny timing of Andrew’s inquiries. He needs to tell Andrew what he believes might need to be done. The might is still there within him, like a crumb of conscience in an unrepentantly guilty person, but it is shrinking. He says, “I know I’m injured. Concussed. Not thinking straight. But—”
“But what?”
We continue to walk together. Our feet grind into the road at different rhythms, leaving two separate paths of footprints in the dirt.
Eric says, “This might be real. I think it’s happening.”
“It. Tell me what it is that’s happening.” Andrew wants Eric to quit obliquely referring to the others’ proposal of choice and apocalyptic consequence. If Eric can be made to spell it out in detail and stop with the midwestern, polite vagueness—like how people discuss but not-discuss a serious illness in the family—then Eric might understand how irrational it all is. Andrew, too, would benefit from having the illogic of what the others are proffering reinforced. In these dimming, implausible hours, he is not immune to doubt.
Eric feels like he’s being made to answer his Sunday school teacher’s how heavy question all over again. He cannot explain how heavy this is. Andrew should know; he’s supposed to know.
Eric has too much he wants to say at once and is unable to organize it all. What’s happening to us is this big unwieldy thing in his head, changing form and shape with each passing second. There’s no beginning at the beginning, so he says, “Those planes all crashing and crashing when they did, at the same time. Leonard said they would fall from the sky.”
“No. He didn’t say that.” “Yes, he did.”
“He never said anything about planes. Did he ever say the word
planes?”
“No, but—”
“Leonard said the sky would fall into pieces. He didn’t say planes. Like a scam psychic, he made a general statement, one culturally associated with end-of-the-world stories, essentially saying the sky is falling, and he let you fill in the details. What if we’d turned on the news and saw a skyscraper collapsing? That means the sky is falling into pieces, right? Or how about a monsoon or a nasty hailstorm; one could argue either of those would be closer to a literal interpretation of the sky is falling. Or it could’ve been a mass die-off of birds, or chunks of falling satellite or, I don’t know, space stations, goddamn Skylab 2.0 plummeting to Earth . . . whatever. Metaphorically, you can retrofit almost anything to—”
“Come on, Andrew, it’s not much of a metaphorical leap from sky to planes. The planes literally fell out of the sky and in pieces. He said
‘pieces.’”
“Frankly, so what?” Andrew pauses and flashes on the images of the wrecked planes, and he remembers the fear coursing through his nerves like a rabies virus, and then his giving in to the impulse to destroy the television so he wouldn’t see them anymore. With as much of the voice of reason as he can muster, he adds, “Planes crash all the time.”
“All the time? Yes, they just drop like leaves in the fall. We’re always having to look up and take cover and—”
“All right, an exaggeration, but only a slight one. Crashes do happen frequently. It’s a numbers game: there are thousands and thousands of planes all over the world in the air at any given time. The day before we drove up here that little pond hopper crashed into a house in Duxbury.”
“Yes, fine, but this is different than a little two-seater going down. These were commercial airplanes all crashing at the same time. You smashed the TV, but it sounded like there were more planes, maybe even all the ones in the air, and crashing right after Leonard was killed.”
“You know, it’s only occurring to me now that that’s not true, either.” “What’s not true?”
“The planes crashing after Leonard was killed. Think about the timeline here: the planes had to have crashed before Leonard died, probably at least twenty minutes or so before.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If the planes had crashed at the exact moment Leonard died, the news wouldn’t have had enough time to gather and air the footage we saw.”
“Video is practically instant now. Everyone has a camera.”
“They weren’t broadcasting phone videos, certainly not the fly-over footage of wreckage, that plane in the ocean especially. Those crashes had to have happened before Sabrina killed Leonard.”
“I guess so, maybe, but that’s not the point. I mean, are you quibbling over the timing?”
“The timing is pretty important, don’t you think?”
“Yes, of course, because everything Leonard said would happen did happen, and it happened each time after one of them was killed. You really think everything we’ve seen, everything we’ve been through has been a coincidence?”
Andrew says, “I do,” as more of an affirmation to himself. “They knew about the Alaskan earthquake before they came to the cabin and then, yes,
that second quake and tsunami hit was coincidental. But then they knew the preprogrammed, scheduled bird flu show would be on the next morning and had it timed to the minute with their watches, and then—”
“And then all those planes just happened to crash when Leonard died.” “They didn’t crash when—”
“Andrew!”
“Yes, fine, a coincidence, but not an outlandish one. Maybe the planes were a preplanned part of their narrative, too. It’s possible the others were aware of reports, government warnings about terrorists or—what did they say?—cyberattacks on planes and we didn’t hear anything because we were up here and hadn’t watched TV or been on the internet for days. Even if that isn’t the case, all they had to do was make us watch cable news where it’s bad news all the time. Turn it on and within minutes you’re bombarded with breaking news of wars, suicide bombings, mass shootings, trains-planes-and-automobiles crashes . . .”
“It doesn’t work that way. They can’t get that lucky with guesses and maybes and turn on the TV and hope for something random to fit. Not like this.”
“Think about the psychological stress and state they put us in. They break in, terrorize us, tie us up, and you seriously injure your head. Then they tell us pseudo-Christian-biblical-end-of-times vagaries knowing that at any moment they can turn on the news and in our fried and frazzled brains something will very likely stick.”
“So I believe them because I’m Catholic, right? That’s so unfair and—” “No, Eric, no, I’m not saying that, not trying to make you feel bad, I’m
trying—”
“And they aren’t vagaries—drowned cities, plague, sky falling into pieces. Those things happened. I know you want me to hear how preposterous it all sounds, but you should listen to yourself. You’re bending yourself into a pretzel rationalizing the impossibilities.”
“That’s just it. I’m telling you it’s not—” Andrew cuts himself off and starts over. “Eric, I’m going to ask you straight out: Do you think one of us has to be killed by the other to keep the world from ending?”
“Why would those four make it all up and make us go through this?” “You didn’t answer my—”
“Answer mine.”
“Jesus, Eric, the fucking guy who hate-crimed me broke into our cabin. O’Bannon and the others came here with a plan to terrorize the queers. There’s your why.”
“If it was him.” “Eric—”
“I know, I’m sorry, but I’m not as sure as you are that it’s the same guy. He—he looks different to me, but even if it is him, is that enough of a why? I mean, why go through everything else? If it was only about us, they wouldn’t have been killing each other, would they?”
“They’re cultists. That’s what they are. Homophobic, doomsday cultists. They take meaning, identity, and purpose from believing they know the end is coming. Not only that, these pious soldiers of their god believe they have the power to stop the apocalypse if they can manipulate the gays into hurting each other. If that fails, then they get to start the end of the world themselves. They’re broken and delusional and everything they’ve done and everything they do serves to keep their delusion intact, to keep it alive. Think about it, it’s a no-lose for them, as far as their delusion goes. If one of us kills the other and then the world doesn’t end—because it’s not ending, not right now, anyway—then they were right, yeah? And if they all kill themselves instead, it doesn’t matter that the apocalypse won’t then happen, because they won’t be around to see the world going on without them.”
“I know but—that makes sense, and it sounds right. But it isn’t. Maybe all the stuff we saw and if Redmond is really O’Bannon, it’s all proof God is really testing—”
“Are you going to answer my question?” “What question?”
“The one you haven’t answered. Do you think one of us has to kill the other in order to—?”
“Not yet.”
Andrew isn’t sure what Eric means by that two-word answer. Does the “not yet” mean he’s not ready to answer the question, or does it mean we do have to make the sacrifice, just not now, not yet?
We are finally on pause. Our manic, rapid-fire quid pro quo leaves us breathing heavily and as skittish as rabbits in an open field. Our minds replay everything we said and didn’t say. We don’t look at each other. Sabrina remains silent, a few paces ahead of us, plodding along with her head down. We keep our eyes on the road veined with ruts, pitted with
sunken holes and loose stones, and flanked by a forest that will one day reclaim it. We can no longer imagine the road’s end. Our eyes float upward trying to escape.
Andrew sees darker, threatening storm clouds. He tastes and smells rain in the air. His ears pop with the decreasing atmospheric pressure and temperature. The low rumble of thunder announces itself in the distance.
Eric sees an alien sky gone more purple than black, like a bruise. Its color changes the longer he watches; the sky becomes more gray than purple, and then more black than gray, and another change to more purple than both colors, then a color he’s never seen before and could only describe as being more purple than purple. The sky is so low and looks like a painted ceiling. The thunder rolling into the valley isn’t thunder; it’s the sound of the avalanching sky. Eric’s head throbs, sending hot stinging waves to the backs of his believing eyes.
We walk and we watch and we wait for Sabrina to tell us we are where they hid the truck keys. Rain falls tentatively. We hear the light patter of raindrops on the leaves before we feel it on our skin.
Andrew clears his throat and says, “Eric.” He clears his throat again, more loudly and protracted. “What about Wen?” His voice cracks and spills open on the rocks of her name.
“What do you mean?”
“On top of everything else, they expect us to believe Wen’s death isn’t
—”
Sabrina shouts, “No! No!” and dashes into a graceless sprint, her
twisting torso a poor substitute for free-swinging arms.
Andrew yells at her to stop where she is. He pulls out the handgun from his back pocket with his left hand and holds it out in front of him, as far away from his body as he can reach. She doesn’t stop or slow down. He doesn’t shoot, and he limps after her.
Sabrina’s and Andrew’s shouts, grunts, and their grinding, leaden footfalls are an overture to the end, their spastic movements an asymmetric ballet to the chaotic, atonal fuss. Eric doesn’t run or walk faster to keep up with them. He feels like a fool, a hopeless, helpless fool for ever believing we could survive this.
The rope tied around Sabrina’s hands and wrists does not unwind or unspool or turn slack and spaghettify and become an elongating white tail. Seemingly without effort on her part, as though the act of her running
simply triggers release, the ball of rope slides off completely intact, keeping its shape and splatting onto the road like a wad of putty.
Sabrina alternates pumping her arms and covering her ears with her freed hands, yelling what might be, “I’m helping them!”
Andrew considers a warning shot in the air to keep her from growing the distance between them. Before he swaps hands with the gun and walking stick—he has never shot with his left—Sabrina veers into the woods. Only three or four steps away from the road, she drops to her knees in front of the broad knotted trunk of a pine tree. Grunting, she flips up a sizable flat stone and rotates it away to her left. She then roots around in the undergrowth with her hands.
Andrew staggers to the road’s edge. Eric is not far behind and quickly catches up. With Andrew on his left, Eric steps off the road and into the greenery. Sabrina, in profile, is crying and talking to herself. Eric is close enough to see her dirt-and-mud-smeared hands appearing and disappearing. Andrew tucks the walking stick under his armpit and points the gun at Sabrina’s back. “What the fuck was that? You should’ve told us we’re here. You didn’t need”—he glances back at the plop of rope in the road—“you could’ve just shown us where the keys are. What are you doing? Are you digging? You didn’t say anything about digging. I want you to stand up and
show me your hands.”
Sabrina stands and turns to face us. In her right hand she dangles car keys on a red keychain. She underhand-tosses them. The keys fly a brief arcing trajectory, passing between us, and they land with a muted jingle in the middle of the road. Her left arm up to the elbow has disappeared inside a dark blue vinyl drawstring bag.
Andrew shouts, “What’s that?” He raises the gun, but he hasn’t been able to bring himself to slide his finger over the trigger. He doesn’t want to feel it, doesn’t want to remember how it felt when it was last pulled. His finger is instead curled over the front of the guard. “Drop it, Sabrina. Hey, you said you were going to help us. Remember? This isn’t helping . . .”
She says, “The truck is only another mile or so down the road. Take the keys. You can make it.” Her rhythm and inflection is off, like she’s reading a statement presented to her without punctuation or proper form.
Eric wishes Sabrina would look at him instead of Andrew, though she’s not really looking at Andrew, either; her eyes are unfocused, somewhere
beyond us. Eric needs to see the terrible light’s reflection in her eyes, and then he’ll be sure of what he has to do.
Sabrina pulls the bag away and drops it to the ground, revealing a handgun bigger than Andrew’s. The black brick of polymer filling her left hand appears to be a semiautomatic Glock. She says, “I didn’t know Redmond left this here. I swear to you both. It had to have been Redmond. Oh my God . . .”
“Come on, Sabrina. Open your hand and let it fall,” Andrew says.
“How did I not see him leave this here? I watched him hide the keys under the rock and that’s where they were and now this bag is here, too, buried underneath. I never saw the bag and I never saw the gun—”
“Put the gun down, now, Sabrina.”
“I would’ve seen Redmond carrying the bag here. I walked next to him the whole time down the road. Unless it was Leonard. Maybe Leonard buried it here first, before we got here. When we parked the truck, Leonard took off, running ahead of us so he could be the first one at the cabin. Like he was supposed to, right? Like he was supposed to . . .”
The gun being here makes perfect sense to Andrew. If everything went wrong at the cabin, the others would still have this hidden weapon, their trump card. Andrew slides his finger through the guard and over the trigger of his gun. He doesn’t know if he can do this. Any of this.
Sabrina finding the gun makes perfect sense to Eric, too. As she is the last of the four, this gun is her chance to make the final sacrifice if we don’t choose.
Sabrina’s gun is down by her hip, pointed at the ground. She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a white mesh mask. She roughly pulls it over the top of her head with one hand. It goes on askew, tilted, and it only covers the top half of her head and face. An unfinished concession to ritual, her mouth and the tip of her nose remain uncovered.
The rain is falling heavier now, turning the red clay of the road to dark brown. The blood on Sabrina’s shirt runs, becoming pink.
She says, “You have the keys. You should go, please. Just go. Drive, away from here, and then you’ll—” She pauses to allow herself to cry, openmouthed and silent. She presses the back of her hand over her mouth and then says, “I’m so sorry. I wanted to help you. I tried to help you, help you more than this.”
Andrew says, “Put down the gun and you can still help by coming with us to the police and telling them everything that happened. We need you to do that for us.”
Sabrina shakes her half-obscured head. “I want to, believe me. But I can’t. I won’t be allowed to.”
Eric bends and reverently lays Wen’s body on a bed of fernlike plants. He kneels next to her, and fat raindrops darken her shroud. The bandage on the back of his head finally gives way and slides off.
Sabrina swings the gun up in a smooth and precise motion. Her left arm is animatronic. The arm moves like it is not of her. She presses the muzzle against her temple. Her right arm waves and flutters, a confused mash-up of go away and please help me gestures. She is still crying with her mouth open, now wide enough to fit a scream.
Andrew points the gun at her left shoulder and cocks the hammer back. “Put it down, Sabrina! Don’t do this!”
Eric stands up too rapidly, and his vision fills with stars that turn into oozing inkblots of light. He closes his eyes and takes three deep breaths. When he opens them again, Sabrina is turned toward him and whispering, in an almost comically open manner. “You still have time to save everyone. Eric. You still have a chance. Even after. But you have to do it quick.” Sabrina shakes her head no, disagreeing with what she just said. Then she says, “You are—” and her gun goes off. The bullet plows through her head and exits with a ribbon of blood. Her body collapses against the fir tree and lands with her torso partially propped up. Her head lolls to her right, conveniently allowing its contents to empty through the exit wound.
Andrew shouts, “Fuck!” and spins away. He screams the curse repeatedly and bends over, his hands on his knees. Rain beats down on his head and back. He delicately uncocks the hammer of his gun.
Eric walks through the brush to Sabrina’s body, and he takes the gun from her hand, which is open. The gun is lighter than he anticipated. The forest darkens; there’s no end to how dark it can get. Flies swarm Sabrina’s body, crawling over her mask and in and out of her uncovered and open mouth. Their buzzing adds an undercurrent to the thunder, which he realizes isn’t thunder, not anymore. He’s hearing ancient gears grinding and clicking into place, and perhaps irrevocably turning.
Andrew remains bent over and facing away from Eric. Should Eric do it before Andrew turns around? It would be easier that way. He prays silently,
fills his broad chest with air, and says, “She said I could still save everyone.”
Andrew straightens and finds Eric in the woods and standing in front of Sabrina’s body. He has her gun in his right hand and his arm is angled across his chest.
“Eric . . .”
“She said I have to do it quick.” Andrew asks, “Where is Wen?”
“She’s right there. Close by. I wouldn’t leave her. I didn’t want to put her down, but I had to.”
Seeing her on the ground alone is like seeing her on the cabin floor all over again. “Maybe I should carry her now.”
“I think you might have to. Sabrina said the truck isn’t far.”
Andrew doesn’t move. He’s afraid to move. “Hey, I didn’t get to finish what I was going to say about Wen because Sabrina took off running and then—” He stops talking and points at Sabrina’s body.
“What were you going to say about Wen?” Eric understands what the others were experiencing when they kept telling us that time was running out. It’s a physical sensation; he can feel it splashing in his blood.
Andrew says, “Forget O’Bannon, Redmond, and all the coincidences and the rules and everything else. Focus on this: they expect us to believe that Wen’s death isn’t a good-enough sacrifice for their god. So you know what? Fuck them and their god. Fuck them all.” He says it all in one breath and then gives in to full-on sobbing. Tears and rain mix and wash down his face, blurring Eric and the forest.
Before today, Eric has only seen Andrew cry once. It was when Andrew returned to their apartment after the two-day hospital stay, post–bar attack. Eric sat next to Andrew on the edge of the bed and wrapped his arms around him. No one spoke. Andrew cried and he cried, and when it was over he said, “That’s enough of that.”
Eric says, “You’re right. You are. And I know you can give a reason for everything that happened, that’s happening, but—” He waits and gives Andrew a chance to say the right thing, the impossible right thing that would make this all go away and take us and Wen back home safe.
Andrew doesn’t know what it is Eric needs him to say, so he’ll just keep talking until he lands on it. “I’m really sorry about the Christian crack
earlier.” He sputters a half cry, half laugh and Eric only blinks at him. “But you—”
“I saw something in the cabin you didn’t see, Andrew. I think I was supposed to see it. And I felt it, too. I experienced it. It was real and it was made of light and it was there when they killed Redmond, when they were pushed to kill him. And then it was—it was all light the next time and I closed the door to keep it out.”
“I have no doubt you saw and felt something, just as I have no doubt they were concussion induced—”
“Stop saying that.”
“I won’t, because I love you and I won’t let you do this.”
“I—I know. I love you, too, more than you know. But I’m sorry; one of us must.”
“Is the light thing here now?”
“No.” Eric wishes it was here. He hopes it will show up and take him over like the others were taken over and lead him by the hand. But it’s not here. He feels its lack of presence. There’s only woods, darkness, rain, thunder, and us.
Andrew drops his gun to the wet road. He limps into the woods without his walking stick and stops within arm’s reach of Eric. “So which one of us is it going to be, then?”
We stare at each other’s beat-up, red-eyed, blood-streaked, beard-stubbled, still-beautiful faces waiting for an answer, waiting for the answer.
“Please don’t try to take the gun away from me.” Eric pivots and lifts his forearm so that the gun is pointed under his chin.
“I won’t touch the gun. I promise I won’t.” Andrew inches closer. “Look at me, okay? Maybe you won’t see anything you don’t want to see if you look at me.”
“Stay away, please.” Eric steps back and his heels bump into Sabrina’s legs.
“That I can’t do. It’s all right. I’m not taking the gun. I’m taking your other hand. That’s all. That’s okay, right?” Andrew reaches out and his fingertips make tentative first contact. The back of Eric’s hand is cool and damp. Eric’s fingers clench into a fist as Andrew’s touch springs them shut. “Are you going to leave me all alone then?”
Eric unclenches his fist. Andrew closes his hand around Eric’s.
“You’re too close. You should back up. I don’t want you to get hurt,” Eric says.
“Would you shoot me instead? I’d rather not be here alone, without you.
Not for one second.”
Eric gazes into Andrew’s face, an ever-evolving landscape more familiar than his own. He doesn’t pray, not to the light or to God. He whispers, “I don’t want you to be alone,” and then he gasps as Andrew gently places a hand on his wrist just below the gun.
“It’s all right. I’m not taking the gun from you. I said I wouldn’t.” Andrew pulls the gun out from under Eric’s chin. He leads Eric’s arm until the gun is turned on Andrew, the muzzle pinned against his chest. “Shooting me would be your ultimate sacrifice, wouldn’t it? Because then you’d be the one stuck here alone.”
“Unless I shoot you and then myself. I don’t think that’s against the rules.”
Andrew doesn’t say anything. He drops his hand away from Eric’s wrist. The gun remains pointed, adhered to his sternum.
Eric says, “I don’t know what to do.”
“Yes, you do. You’ll throw the gun away, Eric. It’ll be hard, but we’ll pick up the truck keys and we’ll walk down the road.”
Our faces are only inches apart. We breathe each other’s breaths, blink each other’s blinks. We squeeze our hands together. The rain traces the lines of our expressions, those characters of the most complex language.
Eric asks, “What if it’s all real?” “But it’s not, I—”
“Andrew!” Eric yells and Andrew jerks his head in surprise. Eric wants to pull the gun away from Andrew’s chest and nestle it back under his own chin. But the gun stays where it is, and Eric implores, repeating his question. “What if it’s all real?”
Andrew inhales, and his defiant answer is in the exhale. “If it is. Then it is. We’re still not going to hurt each other.”
“What will we do? We can’t go on.” “We’ll go on.”
We stare, and we watch the rain and we watch our faces, and we don’t say anything, and we say everything.
Eric pulls the gun off Andrew’s chest, lowers his arm, and drops the gun to the forest floor. He leans into Andrew. Andrew leans into Eric.
We lean into each other and our heads are side by side, cheek to cheek. Our arms hang at our sides like lowered flags, but our fingers find each other’s fingers, and we hold on.
The sky is a depthless black, impossible to not attribute malignancy and malice to it as strobing flashes of lightning split it open. Wind and thunder rattle through the forest, sounding like the earth dying screaming. The storm swirls directly over us. But we’ve been through countless other storms. Maybe this one is different. Maybe it isn’t.
We will pick the truck keys out of the mud. We will lift Wen into our arms and we will carry her and we will remember her and we will love her as we will love ourselves. We will walk down the road even if it is flooded by raging waters or blocked by fallen trees or if greedy fissures open beneath our feet. And we will walk the perilous roads after that one.
We will go on.
