A World of Darkness Read online

  The odor came from me, but I was only able to throw up bitter bile, which I spread over the bloodstained roof of the hospital and my shirt. I thought to myself that Shelley never would be able to get that clean again. I swirled around screaming madly and jumped into the helicopter, whose cockpit had already been opened by Demi. While I started the helicopter Demi hid her head crying inside of the crook of my arm. Her body was shaking as if whipped by electric shocks. Snuggling her up to me as firmly as I could I concentrated on the buttons and switches and tried to blind out Alicia’s feast she had made only some meters afar of us. In my mind I heard flesh being torn and the grunting of the girl. But all this was overlaid by an eerie silence that had suddenly crept over me, making my body resemble a bin of pure ice. Perhaps it was the penetrating odor of my own vomit that filled the cockpit. Or perhaps it was the jerking and crying body of my little daughter inside my arm that suddenly made my mind get as calm. I don’t know it any more. Perhaps it was a bit of both. At that moment I in any case had been thankful that they were preventing my mind from getting lost inside the maelstrom out of death, blood and nightmare. With few, learned movements of my hand I got the helicopter started and even before the rotor had properly warmed up lifted off from the hospital top. Neither of us looked back. I stared right into the grey morning sky, trying to blind out all the atrocious and barbarous images of the past minutes while inside my arm Demi was crying and jerking as if she had got a life changing leathering. She leeched on to me as hard that I later found cinch marks and bruises at my arm and my shoulder. But she didn’t speak a word. We both didn’t speak, but flew to the military base to refuel our engine. And after that we had a nonstop flight to come here.”

  Barry collapses back upon himself as if someone exactly at this moment had cut off his power. He resembles hollow and cadaverous; much older than I would ever become.

  As he continues to speak I’m hardly able to understand his whispering.

  “You know, Dad …” He takes his glass and empties it in in few seconds. “I had told you how cool-headed our group at the hospital had handled this new situation; how fast we all had got used to the modified conditions in our lives. All this had really astonished me during the first days and also had made me a bit proud of these people. But this one morning…these few minutes, in which the last leftovers of our civilization had got lost inside a flood out of blood, quite plainly and destructively showed me the status we, as human beings, got in this new world.”

  Barry regards his glass. For a short moment I’m afraid that he would lay all his despair into this glass and toss it against the wall. Perhaps this had done the two of us good.

  “In this world we no longer have a chance, Dad. Boston had been a big city. And we had been only six survivors – seven if I add Alicia to it; six out of some millions.”

  He looks at me. In his eyes are sparkling tears that reflect the candlelight.

  “So what are the odds that we can make it? “

  We hold on looking inside each other’s eyes; just like Barry had held his daughter in the cockpit of the helicopter. Neither of us wants to let loose of the other.

  I look down and regard Demi. Her little shoulder from time to time quivers, as if she was crying. Perhaps she does so in her dreams. Inside her thoughts there never again will be anything else than tears and fears. She saw her mother die and is living in a world that has fallen empty and black. There’s no laughter anymore; no playing with friends; no boys; no proms. All that’s left are dark dreams, tears and pain. Everything she still owns is here inside this small, stuffy and dark room, whose air is filled by the odor of burning candles and whose windows to prevent this new nightmarish world from coming in on her are nailed up with thick planks.

  “Our chance is accept what had happened”, I whisper without taking my eyes off Demi. While still speaking I notice how vain my words are. “The group you had at Boston had managed to get used to the new times, too. Why should we here not have this chance? We’re alive. And I think that this at the moment is all we should be interested in. Everything else – the how and why – we will have to learn anew, like mankind had always used to. In the Middle Ages plague was ravaging. Wars extinguished the population of entire countries. But somehow life always went on.”

  “Do you compare the apocalypse with an epidemic?”

  Barry looks at me as if in an instant wanting to lunge at me. But his body language is contraire to that.

  “After the plague there had been people, who had each other, supported each other and were able to build up mankind again. After wars it had been the same. People had to agree, more than they had done before, leaning on each other and rebuilding their cities. But what about here? In Boston we had been six, and here? How many people might still be alive in Devon? And how many might there be throughout the hillside?”

  Barry shakes his head.

  “There’s no chance. If you had been in Boston you would know that, too. I even didn’t know whether you and mom were still alive. We flew here on the off chance.”

  He falls silent, slumping down even further. It resembles me as if I could see each trace life getting sucked out of him; as if one was letting a balloon deflate. This sight hurts me as hard that I feel a stabbing pain inside my chest. I close my eyes and allow myself to douse into the silence in the house. The need to cry out all my fears and a roaring anger is overwhelming. At the same time I feel how over Barry’s story my stomach is turning into a cold, heavy stone. But I simply stay sitting there with my eyes closed and my hands crossed, trying to abandon myself to a silence that for nearly two weeks had been filling up my mind and that up till now had been my chance to survive in this new calculation of times.

  There is nothing but a deathlike silence.

  No thoughts about chances, wars and the plague.

  No fears.

  Only a deathlike silence …

  Then something with brute force breaks into the gracious, deceiving calmness of my thoughts and lets me wince. Images of things I neither want to see nor understand and that I had been trying to avoid go to the bottom of their swampy pond.

  As I open my eyes Barry is standing in front of the sofa with Demi sitting beside him, her little hand inside of his, looking around drowsily.

  Her hair is tousled by Barry’s caressing and over her slim face run red imprints that come from Barry’s trousers.

  “Did you hear that?” Barry asks. His glance sweeps between me and the rest of the room.

  “Someone shouted”, Demi whispers.

  I look at her. To hear her voice makes me feel a stabbing pain inside my chest. But I immediately get pulled out of my thoughts as Barry rushes out into the corridor.

  “Wait”, I shout after him.

  We then both pause in our movement when the dump silence inside the house is interrupted by a voice. I give Barry and Demi a sign, creep past my son out into the corridor and grab my gun, which is leaning at the wall next to the entrance to the kitchen.

  The weight of the weapon and the fact that Barry stands only few meters behind me calm me down, leading my thoughts back to the strange, cold silence that I’m so badly longing for. Then I hear the voice again and wonder how much I still could confide in my brains.

  I’m assailed by the urgent need to lift my weapon and fire through the closed porch door. At the same time I want to rip the planks off the windows and run out into the bright afternoon. All these conflicting feelings are provoked by this voice in front of the house. I must have been standing motionless at the entrance to the kitchen for quite a while, before I suddenly feel Barry’s hand on my shoulder, which pulls me out of my absurd maelstrom of thoughts and feelings.

  “Who’s that?” asks Barry in a whisper.

  “That … that is …”

  “Harv, I know you’re home.”

  “That’s Murphy”, I shout out so loud that the echoes of my own voice make me wince.

  “… My goddamn neighbor Murphy. This mad old …”
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br />   Without finishing the sentence I run through the kitchen towards the porch door, unlock it and step out into the bright light of a dull autumn afternoon.

  Murphy is standing beside my Pick-up, his legs rooted to the soil, dressed in his blue bib, which he had used to wear whenever he had to mend something at his house or in the shop. His hands form a cone around his mouth. But when he catches sight of me he lets them droop faintly to his sides. He now remembers me of a little boy waiting for Santa to hand him his long awaited presents.

  “Why do you cry so loud, you old fool?”

  When I see the old man in his far too big trousers standing beside my nearly just as old car I can’t refrain from laughing.

  “I saw the helicopter”, Murphy answers, pointing at the meadow behind the fence, over which towers the black silhouette of the rescue helicopter.

  “I thought that someone of the government might have finally noticed that up here there are a few people; who are still alive.”

  “Then I’ll have to disappoint you, Murphy”, I respond, pointing with my thumb over my shoulder, where Barry and Demi together appear in the door case.

  “The engine belongs to Barry and my granddaughter. You remember Barry, do you?”

  Murphy looks past me, putting on a face as if he had just seen a ghost. But the next moment his cranky face gets lit up by a bright smile.

  “Barry. Sure I remember Barry.”

  He spreads his arms as if from his position wanting to embrace my son. “Damn. And I thought, us two old fools were the only survivors on this damned planet.”

  Murphy’s face remembers me of the rouged mask of a clown I once, as a child, had seen in a circus. My father had taken me with him to the small tent that the performers had built up on our market place and that served them as arena. The clown in his far too big trousers and his even bigger shoes had come very close to me, wetting me with a streak of warm water out of his flower. When he did so I had smelled the man’s sweat coming from beneath the too big clothes and the many colors.

  I can’t remember how old I had been then. But I still know exactly that this clown for some nights had brought me about nightmares. I at least in my childlike phantasy had been sure about that.

  Murphy is wearing the same featherbrained grin like the clown had then. And who could tell me if my longtime friend and neighbor hadn’t also just put on a mask, for I only too well remember the morning in front of his shop two days ago.

  “You wanted to shoot me only some days ago”, I shout at him, repenting my words as I see Murphy’s broad grin within a minute turn into an earnest, guilty face.

  “Don’t be miffed about that, Harv”, Murphy’s answers. His voice sounds strangely hollow, as if the world was lacking all its echoes. “I really had thought you were one of these sick creatures that by night are creeping around my house.”

  “I didn’t know that I was looking as terrible. My looks had never disturbed you when we had some beer or something together?”

  “Come on, Harv.”

  Murphy helplessly spreads his arms. But that moment Barry appears beside me and lays his arm around my shoulder.

  “Stop arguing”, he laughs, holding his other hand welcomingly out to my friend. “Come on, Murphy. We shouldn’t be standing out here for too long.”

  He covertly looks around to all directions. “Dad has prepared a meal. There surely is something left.”

  Murphy glances from me to Barry. In his glance I can recognize a hope that I had thought to be lost. But I can also see fear that is carved into my friend’s face.

  “Come on into the house now, you old fool”, I shout at him.

  I’m not surprised to see him grab his gun, which he had leaned against one of Sarah’s bushes. As we are back in the house again and the new world has disappeared beyond the porch door Murphy lays his gun onto the kitchen table. Then we embrace each other. It’s not this amicable, intense hug we had used to give us before when we had met each other with our wives or later were having a beer out on the porch of Murphy’s shop. It is rather a scanning of each other – checking if the other really exists; for somehow the good news this day won’t come to an end.

  First it had been Barry and my granddaughter.

  Now it’s Murphy.

  I have become cautious and simply want to feel if who is standing here in front of me really is my old fellow himself.

  In the last time fate hadn’t been too good to me.

  But then we are holding us tight; like we had used to before.

  And none of us speaks a word.

  IV

  I enjoy seeing my old fellow eat that fast and much. He doesn’t seem to have got something proper to chow for days. Knowing that on the shelves of his shop he stores countless cans and dried meat, I wonder about that. Sarah had often called Murphy’s shop ‘the labor room for gastric ulcers’, what then had used to make me laugh. I never told my friend how my Sarah used to call the small, rustic part of his cabin that was meant for the selling purpose. But whenever this new word Sarah had created came to my mind while we in the evenings had been sitting on the porch and drinking cold beer, I had always been amused about it.

  Perhaps Murphy knows himself, which unhealthy goods he is storing on his shelves and this is why he keeps his hands off them. But don’t they say on the other hand that beggars can’t be choosers? And for about two weeks we have all been beggars now.

  Murphy empties two plates and then asks in a low voice whether he, if no one of the others objected, might also get the rest out of the pot, too.

  I fill up his plate a third time and while he is eating regard him with a mixture of fascination, joy and antipathy, one of these being due to my fellow’s eating habits. He resembles me more of a famished animal. I begin to get a suspicion relating to his shop. But I don’t say something.