Going Violently into the Night.
Horror short story by Keven Albers
In a post-apocalyptic world blanketed by ash, a man clings to the fragile remnants of family and sanity as he wrestles with the inexplicable return of his daughter, Samantha, who has been profoundly changed. The story delves into his complex relationships, particularly with his emotionally guarded wife, Lana, as the boundaries between love, survival, and morality blur. Themes of loss, guilt, and denial permeate this harrowing tale, exploring how far someone might go to hold onto what remains of humanity in the face of overwhelming despair and horror.
This story would likely take 40-50 minutes for the average reader to complete. The word count is approximately 13,375 words, which is equivalent to a short novella or a long short story.
I kept her locked in the basement, not because she’s a bad girl, but because she’s a good girl. I would’ve chained and securely locked her in the shed if she were bad.
Despite Lana’s sharp words about my little girl, which grated the ear she screamed into as I cleaned the bite wound on my forearm, I insisted, “She is good and will remain in this house!”
Lana’s lips clipped shut, and she fixed me with her piercing stare. Even in this god-forsaken world, that befell an age of decay and destruction, dropping on us out of the blue a few years earlier like an atom bomb. Except it was precisely that—a fucking nuclear conflagration, triggering a chain of fallout mushrooms sprouting a global field of atomic fungi. This apocalypse sent most of us to hell in a handbasket, with the rest of us condemned to hell on earth.
Yes, even in this hellscape, I found myself trembling before her impaling gaze. I always did. Such a hard stare, which she so readily invoked. A stern glare, declaring she was too smart to be hoodwinked by my fabrications and fatuous fables. Her scowl’s prowess cut through me like a torrent of rain through a suit fashioned from toilet paper, leaving me naked and transparent. A chastised child, wilting before his disapproving mother.
My warbling lies were my shield against brutal, marauding truths that threatened to pillage my soul, leaving me hollow in this hostile world. I fortified myself with magical thinking. As if allergic to confronting my inexorable extermination, my throat retched up falsehoods. I clung to myths: “Everything is fine,” “It was them or us,” and, of course, “She is a good girl”. But, before my septic speech could solidify my stance, Lana’s scrutiny silenced me. We locked eyes, a silent battle of wills reminiscent of childhood games that now seemed to govern our adult interactions. My eyes burned with resolve, but then one of us blinked. I can’t be certain, but dollar to donuts, it was me. The excruciating pain in my arm didn’t help. I turned my attention back to the bite, hunching over the sink with my conviction shaken. The wound was inflamed, with black pus oozing from the red teeth indentations. The gravity of the situation was clear; she had been a bad girl.
Lana, perched on the toilet seat beside me, lit another candle as the previous one flickered out.
We both lapsed into a profound silence, the dead air filling with the distant thuds echoing up from the basement. Finding I could no longer bear the relentless blows against the foundation, I muttered, “It’s not her fault.”
Lana either didn’t hear me or chose to ignore my utterance. Either way, fearing her intense gaze, I didn’t dare repeat myself.
She lit another candle to better illuminate the room and leaned in to inspect my wound, positioning the candle flame above the bubbling pus.
“Does it hurt?” She inquired, allowing the wax to drip into the festering bite.
“No,” I answered, “Not anymore.” Stating this, I became aware of just how numb my arm was feeling, or in this case, not feeling.
My heart jolted into high gear, and my forehead percolated beads of sweat despite the room’s icy temperature. “I can’t feel my arm at all,” my words scraping my throat and vibrating with nerves.
Without hesitation, Lana yanked her belt from around her tiny waist and bound it around my bicep, tugging it taut just above the elbow. “We have to saw it off, now,” she affirmed.
Lana’s calm demeanor in crises was often a boon, though it sometimes came off as cold and detached. True to form, she spoke now with the composure of a sociopath, almost eagerly anticipating the grim task at hand. It was an unsettling aspect of her personality I had never quite gotten used to and had been the cause of many unpleasant impasses in our recent past, just before the world went from shit to thoroughly fucked. But, in this new chaotic world, perhaps her demeanor was fitting.
My brother was wrong when he pulled me aside on my wedding day and expressed his reservations.
“Don’t get me wrong, little bro,” he always prefaced his tactless remarks, “but you sure you wanna marry that one? I’ve met some ice-queens in my day, but she takes the ice-queen cake.” he might have said, “Ice-cream cake”? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t care for clarity at the time.
My reply to him was my standard retort when on the subject of my wife: "You don’t see her for who she really is." "She’s misunderstood, is all." Sometimes, I’d shorten it to: "That’s just who she is." But I would always punctuate every response with, “...and I love her”.
I can admit now that I was semi-blind to my wife’s true inner workings, and often, I was the one who misjudged her. Leaving me to ponderously ponder: what was it about her I loved? Despite my many failings in our marriage, my enormous ignorance of her needs, and myriad transgressions against her character, she never budged from my side; she never wavered from the vows she had made so succinctly years ago. And if my brother were still alive today, I’d tell him what I couldn’t back then:
“You have it wrong, David,” I’d say, “it isn’t that she lacks empathy or is coldly indifferent, but rather her innards are a hot bubbling cauldron of passions and feelings. She experiences emotions with such a messy upheaval that if she didn’t keep a lid on it, she’d cease functioning altogether.”
She was an emotional savant, tempered and tampered, tepid by years of discipline and self-control, fashioned by an austere upbringing in an emotionally barren household. She developed a pragmatic, empirical, and intelligent core in the void left by her apathetic parents. That core was my much-needed anchor, my lifeline.
He would’ve eventually seen the true Lana if I hadn’t killed David. Sure, it would have taken the world ending to crack my wife’s husky exterior and break down that packed sediment into sentimental bits, but the real Lana would have been dredged up and revealed to him at last.
Poor David. It was us or them, I recall saying to Lana in a violent whisper, which prompted her stare.
“We have to cut it off before it spreads,” Lana repeated, her voice icy as ever.
I trembled with terror, wanting to vomit. “No.” I croaked, “It’s fine, it’s not infected. The pain is just … going away on its own.”
“It’s infected, and your arm is turning black. If we don’t amputate, you’ll die.”
Her words were true despite my need to see them as lies.
My mouth and mind seemed to have lost their connection, and Lana took my silence as a tacit agreement.
She reappeared from the basement, a glint in her eye and brandishing a sizeable medical saw, its blade jagged and gleaming. I hadn’t even noticed she’d left. She propped my arm on a wooden cutting board at the bathtub’s edge, then used the whole of her ninety-four pounds to pin her bony knee into my limp wrist for leverage. She handed me a wooden spoon as she lined up her sawing tool just below my elbow and against my flesh.
“Bite on this. It’s gonna hurt like a motherfucker,” she said, her tone oddly optimistic.
“How about something for the pain,” I bemoaned.
“Sorry,” she shook her head, “no numbing. The pain means I’m cutting right. You’ll be fine.”
I bit down, tasting splinters and beechwood. After all, her words were always true, and she was always true to her word.
I buzzed in and out of a fugue state, repeatedly jolted back to consciousness by the violent electric shocks of serrated metal teeth shredding flesh and tearing through muscle, tendons, and bone. My ransacked vocal cords reached a pitch that only dogs could hear if they still existed. I became aphasic, my throat stripped raw from the constant trumpeting of pain, that all I could muster towards the end was muted gasps for mercy.
As I blacked out one final time, I heard a quick pop and felt the release of something tugging at the end of my arm that finally twisted and tore free from its joint like someone savagely wrenching a drumstick from a turkey.
Consuming darkness commenced and enveloped my dim world completely. Only the faint sound of flesh smacking and squeaking in a slick slide down the tub diminished in the hollow of my ear like the echos of slapping meat swirling down a drainpipe.
Then, at last, came the perfect sweet-fucking-mother-Jesus of all nothingness.
It was pitch dark, and I wasn’t sure if my eyes were open or closed. But I was awake. I could hear the low drum of a small body slamming against the cement wall two floors below. A cool, damp cloth rested on my forehead, and Lana’s slender fingers stroked my hair.
“You’ll live,” she said, her hot breath fogging up my ear canal, her words percolating my eardrum.
I still wanted to believe she was lying, but I knew better. Her words were always true. I will live.
My arm throbbed with a dull ache, resonating up to the roots of my teeth. I slumped onto my side, reaching to massage my forearm, but I grasped only air. There was a strange dissonance in the wiring in my head. My brain insisted my arm was there, but my futile swipes at the empty space said otherwise.
“I gave you a sedative,” Lana’s voice floated somewhere near me, as if inside my head.
The sedative might explain my inability to grasp the unseen and truncated reality. I abandoned the effort and let my groping hand fall limply to my side.
“We need to kill her,” She whispered in the dark. Her hot sigh grazed the hairs on the back of my neck. We were spooning, probably. I was the little spoon.
“Bah, she’s bin ah goo gurl,” I woozily let the words fall from my mouth, feeling her stare, even in the dark. The drugs had dissolved my defenses into a heap of bull dung. I could taste the manure as every shitty, untrue word I pushed through my lips left skid marks on my tongue.
Lana’s fingers paused their gentle raking, resting in my sweaty hair, her hand pressed against the back of my head. Her breath no longer warmed the back of my neck. She was physically near me but mentally slipping away. I feared she’d get lost within that capacious brain of hers again. I needed her here.
“Lawnna?” I mumbled. In this world, volume didn’t matter; every word spoken was crisp and sharp, held pristine in its own bubble, uninhibited by the dead air. I waited for her reply, staring into the darkness.
“I know it’s hard,” she finally said, her warm exhalation rushing back against my neck, “but we need to kill her.”
I held my tongue, twisting and tapping against the back of my loose teeth, tasting the copper of my bleeding gums. I strained my eyes, trying to pierce through the impenetrable veil of darkness to discern what lay beyond. I attuned my ear, probing past the profound silence; even the universe’s ambient noise had ceased its eternal broadcast. What I’d initially mistaken for the sound of my daughter’s body thudding against the basement wall was, in fact, my own heartbeat—slowing, faltering. I was losing my bearings, my sense of where Lana was, where I was in relation to the world, and even my connection to my own existence. Meaning dissolved, like a sugar cube in a glass of absinthe.
“Okay,” I finally said drunkenly, wanting to speak before my tongue passed out. “Les talk abow id inna morn...” I closed my eyes—or perhaps they were already closed—and relinquished all my concerns, especially about killing my little girl. Soon enough, my wish was granted: everything ceased to exist. I was plunged back into the void, put on pause, and placed on ice.
The darkness lightened into an ashen gray sky, and like all good sleep, I remember none of it. I attributed my good sleep to the drugs and significant blood loss from the night before rather than to a clear, clean conscience.
I awoke to my amputated arm’s dull, throbbing pain—a buzzing alarm with no snooze button. Moaning was my only recourse until Lana swept in, syringe in hand, filled with tranquilizers from her stores of veterinarian supplies.
She hauled down my pants and sunk the hypodermic needle into my buttocks, slapping my snooze button. As the plunger depressed, the pain abated, and I slipped back into a numbness. Lana then meticulously cleaned my wound, changed my bandages, and attentively sat with me, fealty to a fault, padding my forehead with a cool, damp cloth and stroking my hair with her bony fingers.
Our communication had devolved into groans, sighs, and monosyllabic utterances for weeks. When we did speak, our words felt like blunt instruments, each banal phrase taking on a hammering affront. Dialogue, it seemed, eroded our mental faculties, leaving us to meander in a malaise, muddying and madding our sense of who we were to each other and ourselves. But last night, our words found meaning again; we felt human and alive. A poignant reminder that feeling alive so heavily relied on living with pain. We reverted to incoherent mumblings this morning, and I was thankful for it. Numbed throaty sounds passed between us, and I silently prayed Lana didn’t hear my slurred, dope-induced surrender to murdering my daughter the night before.
Lana never mentioned my listless consent to killing Samantha. Not that day, nor the next, nor the day after. Just when I nearly convinced myself the idea was safely buried, she abruptly and calmly said, “We should discuss Sam.” I was on the mend, sitting upright in bed, mouth agape, sloppily spooning brown soup with my left arm—the one that wasn’t my “good” arm. I knew she had carefully chosen this moment to broach the subject—did she know I would handle it better on a full stomach? I didn’t know, but what I did know was that, despite everything she’d ever said that felt wholly wrong to me, the simple fact was she knew me better than I knew myself.
Her blue eyes hung on me from an arms-length away, patiently waiting for a verbal confirmation.
I set down the soup spoon and turned my aimless gaze toward the window and the grey world beyond. The sky was perpetual overcast, filled with ceaseless fall of black ash. It led me to wonder if each slowly descending ash flake was as unique as a snowflake— or a human being.
“Do you think we’re the last ones?” I asked. I suspected that what crept down outside, accumulating in soft, low black hills across our farm—and likely the world—was the incinerated remains of eight billion fellow unique snowflakes.
“Maybe,” she replied in her cold, calm manner, then steering the conversation back. “But we still need to do something about Sam. It’s time.”
“Couldn’t we just let her wander out there on her own?”
“No.” She snapped. “We need to end it.”
Her voice cracked, sending a chill down my spine and raising the hairs on the back of my neck. It’d been six months since I last heard that vulnerability, first glimpsed when stress and exhaustion shattered her composure and sent her retreating into the depths of her big brain, leaving her body languishing in a waking coma.
Perhaps the dismemberment of my limb, or nearly losing me, had reopened those existing cracks in her psyche. Once broken, you’re never quite whole again. Right? Or were our mental fractures simply a feature of our humanity, not a bug? We’re all born tenuously held together by a hope and a dream—believing that if we withstand suffering long enough, we’d be rewarded with… what? Happiness?
I turned into her blue watch, confirming my suspicions. The strain, the worry, and the fatigue were all there—iced over but thawing quickly. I’d missed these telltale signs, having made a fervent effort to avoid those powerful and stunning windows into her soul for so long.
There was a time when I never cowered from her spiritous eyes and found solace and wonder within them. Ensnared by her glassy blue contemplation, which had long served as portals to wisdom, love, and acceptance. But that now felt like a distant dream or fairy tale.
“I don’t hear her,” I said.
“I put padding on the walls,” She explained.
How did she put up with Samantha all these years? Sam was not Lana’s child, and she certainly didn’t love her in any motherly sense. She knew it wasn’t her place to end Sam’s life; that had to be me. How was it she put up with me? She loves me. But why?
It walloped me like the atom bomb, consuming my mind: I’m torturing Lana—I’m torturing myself—by keeping Samantha alive. Whatever decrepit life remained in this desiccated world wasn’t worth enduring like this, not for Lana or me. God only knows, but perhaps I was torturing Samantha, too.
“Yes,” I finally said timidly, “I’ll do it.”
Lana kissed my lips, interlocking her arms around my torso. Pressing her jutting ribcage against my bony chest. Her tears trickled down my neck. As we embraced, I felt the rhythm of our hearts rapidly fall in sync. Perhaps it was I adjusting to hers or hers to mine, or maybe both our pitter-patters found a harmonious tempo together.
What followed was quick and compacted with a whirlwind of emotions. Lana kissed me repeatedly as if my lips were sacred food for her starving soul. She then slipped her hand under the covers and reached between my legs while gyrating her skeletal pelvis into a grind atop my lap. Perhaps it was the painkillers, or my fresh concession to killing my little girl, or both, but she found I was in no condition to perform my marital duties— another failure on my part.
She retreated her hand and climbed off me, looking more like a mortified and humiliated teenage girl than my wife. Before she could get too far, I grabbed her wrist with my awkward hand.
“I love you,” I said with a newfound conviction. These three words now seemed imbued with divine truth, resonating with a sonorous weight that could anchor a tower soaring straight to the heavens.
Her lips twitched into a simper, and our collective suffering seemed slightly more tolerable for the moment.
A few days later, I was well enough to prowl the hallways. Eventually, I found my way to my father’s old oak desk, where his gun was stored.
Squatting in the shadowy corner of the basement—far from the reach of daylight’s dim glow—I hunched over like a grotesque figure ashamed of its very being. Feeling the revolver’s weight in my poor hand, my gaze settled on Sam, who was shackled to the concrete wall. Her vacant eyes drifted in every direction but mine.
Her nine-year-old frame was skeletal and brittle but defiant in breaking as she violently twitched and jerked about with no regard for itself. Over the past week, she had tangled herself in her chains, almost strangling herself. No. She did more than that; she had worked the chains into a blunt saw, abrading the flesh on her throat down to frayed cartilage. She moaned with a frothy, guttural gurgle as if something was caught in her throat. There was a strong possibility that something was—my flesh.
It was just the two of us in the half-sunken basement, under a high, rectangular ceiling lined with a pendulous row of lifeless fluorescent fixtures—long devoid of the electric juice to buzz with artificial light. To my left, an oversized sloping steel double door that opened to the outside, accompanied by a wide ramp engineered for animals of all sizes to clomp, trod, or gallop in and out, up and down, one by one, or two by two. It was here that I had dragged Sam in from the shed before it was swallowed again by the encroaching black snow.
Every surface was gradually being enveloped by dark sleet. Even indoors, it saturated the air, choking it. The dark powder shaded and effaced the boxes of medical supplies, tiled floors, furniture, and stainless steel counters and shelves lining the walls, slowly ghosting everything into a haunting memory of where Lana once practiced veterinarian medicine. Every inch was caked with a thin, filthy film. Even I, unmoving, crouched in the corner, the gun in my hand feeling like a lead brick, could sense the congealing grim collecting on my clothes, hair, and skin. I let it settle, hardening on my flesh, smearing it in ash. This place was no longer a sanctuary for healing; it had become a theater for annihilation. And here, in the quiet, calm aftermath of a dead, scorched world, was my little girl, violently thrashing in revolt against extinction itself.
Something wet trailed down my cheek. I captured a droplet on the gun’s barrel to examine it. I accepted it as my soul leaking—that’s how Sam had once described tears, in her clever and child-like way— erroneous but adorable. At that moment, it struck me that my desiccated daughter was without tears; her eyes were like dry pearls, soulless.
My mind hunted for any reason not to blow a hole in my head, for something to relieve the pressure that was compressing my brain matter into coal. But my mind was already a sieve, drained of all the good memories, clinging only onto the jagged, sharp shards of a dark mirror reflecting a life shattered before all this. Even the glimpses of Sam’s existence in those dark splinters were unpleasant. Had she ever been a good girl?
It was down here that Sam had once waited anxiously for her dog, Bart, to reappear licking and wagging after his surgery. Absorbing her anxiety, like the fatherly sponge I was, I sat and waited beside her. We were both tenuously perched on the floral-pattern chairs in the small waiting area next to the stairs leading up to ground level. No matter how often I swatted her fingers away, Sam kept biting her nails until her fingertips began to bleed.
“Will you stop that?” I snapped, “You’re going to bite them off.”
“But what if he doesn’t make it?” She replied, sticking her gnawed fingernails back in her mouth for eager shearing.
“He’ll be fine. Lana’s a pet doctor. She does this all the time.”
“Yeah, but what if she’s not a good pet doctor?”
“She’s the best. Now, stop biting your nails. Bart will be fine,” I uprooted her hand from her mouth.
Ignoring me, she jumped off her seat and dashed toward the doors leading to where Lana was working. I lunged after her, hooking my arm around her before she could get far. I scooped her up and plopped her back down in her seat.
“Oh no, you don’t. You wait here and let Lana work.”
“But what if Bart doesn’t —”
“He will!”
Lana then emerged, her face drawn and tired.
Sam sprung to her feet, “Can I see him?”
“How did it go?” I asked, standing up.
Lana peered down into Sam’s sparkling eyes, which glittered with concern.
“Why didn’t you tell me Bart was sick instead of hiding him in the shed?” Her voice was tinged with restrained anger.
“Can I see him?” Sam mumbled, her fingers now mangled in her blood-ringed mouth.
“No,” Lana said sternly. “I had to euthanize him.”
“What happened?” I interjected.
Sam stood beside me, swaying in a trance-like stupor, trying to wrap her blood-stained mouth around the word euthanized. “Youth-and-eyes.”
“Bart didn’t make it, Cinnamon,” I told her, slightly shocked by it myself. We had the dog for barely three years.
Sam’s large brown eyes swelled red, her lips quivered, and she burst out in quaking tears. “You’re the worst pet doctor ever,” she screamed at Lana, “I knew you would kill him. I hate you. I hate you!” She flung her back on Lana and stomped off, wailing as she climbed the stairs.
After watching Sam sob and stalk upstairs, I turned back to Lana, bewildered. “What happened?”
Lana glanced up at me, her eyes cold and piercing. “He’d eaten broken shards of glass, along with a candy bar. By the time you found him, it was too late. There was nothing I could do except put him down,” she said in her direct, unnerving tone—often reserved when dispatching bad or good news.
“How could he have eaten broken glass?”
“Ask your daughter,” Lana replied before turning and retreating through the doors she’d stepped out from.
I slumped back into the chair, cradling my chin in my palm, and thought: poor Bart, I loved that dog.
We buried Bart in the backyard by the big oak tree where Sam’s tire swing hung. The funeral was quiet; no one spoke. Sam and Lana watched, an enormous gap between them, as I shoveled dirt onto the dog, forming an earthy mound that I firmed up with a few whacks from the back of the spade. A small white cross was stabbed into one end, with the name ‘BART’ written in glitter-dusted letters. After a bit more of standing silent, heads down, eyes to our feet, Sam took off running inside.
I placed my hand on Lana’s shoulder. “You did everything you could,” I said.
“I know,” she replied, her gaze meeting mine only momentarily.
“I wasn’t implying anything. I’m just… well... I’m just trying to say... I think you’re a great vet.”
“I know I am,” she said, walking inside, leaving me to hang back, foot in mouth.
Lana hated the country. It was a big ask, but she eventually moved to my family’s farm, which I’d taken over more out of duty than desire. My folks had both passed on to greener pastures via a car crash, and David was too engrossed in selling Florida condominiums—with miniature Starbucks in them—to care. So, the burden fell on me. Lana never voiced her discontent, so I took on the role of vocal critic, protesting, detesting, and complaining about everything throughout the month-long transition. Yet, secretly, I cherished the simple, bucolic life that came with inheriting the family land.
In the ensuing months, Lana became a favorite among the local farmers. More for her talents as an animal doctor than her austere bedside manner, better suited for animals than humans anyway. Going into animal medicine, after all, was by design.
The farmers accepted her cold, clinical demeanor, paying their bills promptly, becoming converts and believers in her skills for rescuing their livestock and, in turn, their livelihood. As an added bonus, she looked pretty doing it—a fact that, to her chagrin, caused these jean-clad men to linger about her like a foul odor, prattling on endlessly about their dull lives. Undeterred, Lana rolled up her sleeves and concentrated on the work—healing those lovely creatures whose sole agenda was to exist in blissful ignorance.
It wasn’t lost on me just how much the male gaze unnerved her. It made her skin crawl. She stifled every shudder that coursed from her silky blond head down to her black-painted toes and bit her tongue so often it had practically become a mute nub. Whenever one of these yokels squawked through the doors in rubber boots, a sow leashed at his side and thumbs hooked in his overalls, hurling odious remarks from behind a smirk—“I’d happily grow a pigtail and snout just to have a doctor as pretty as you give me a physical”—she had to hold back her disgust. These men gave pigs a bad name.
I certainly wasn’t blind to her repugnance, yet I remained silent. It seemed her laconic language was communicable. While I wanted to tell her to stop serving these boorish clients, my tongue was weighed down by a heavy shame, leaving the muscle virtually atrophied. I was still buried under a mountain of debt from the relentless medical and funeral bills for Sam’s mother. It seems people become most financially and emotionally taxing when dying and dead. Adding to that, my lack of farming knowledge caused the land to swiftly unravel into chaos. Lana was the breadwinner in her animal practice. And I became more and more dependent on it.
I found myself rising from bed later and later and retiring earlier and earlier, seeing less and less of Lana and Sam and speaking fewer and fewer words. I became a listless phantom, a lamenting ghost, languorously haunting the halls, bedroom, bathroom, and game room. Yet Lana never left me, never quit, never complained. We both settled into our mutual silence, maintaining the status quo.
One sweltering, moonless night, I stumbled into Lana sitting on the toilet lid in her sweat-soaked pajamas. I flicked on the bathroom lights, and she didn’t flinch a muscle. She sat there, her gaze locked onto something far beyond the rubber ducky shower curtain, beyond the tiled walls, extending across the farm and over the horizon into the dark depths of space. Her attention seemed riveted to some dreadful truth I couldn’t fathom, her mind ensnared by cosmic tentacles of Lovecraftian veracity, which drained the color from her features and bleached her stare blank. What veracious insight gripped her, I could not guess. But I knew it wasn’t anything good; truths rarely are.
“Everything will be all right,” I said after a long moment.
That’s when I encountered her piercing stare for the first time.
It had been easier to lie to Sam’s mother, feeding her comforting clichés like: ‘Everything will be fine.’ or, ‘This was just a hiccup in your biology,’ and ‘You’re too young and strong to let this beat you,’ it was easier because she didn’t want to confront the truth of her mortality any more than I wanted to face her impending death. She consumed my platitudes with a voracious appetite for a time, eager to believe in the illusion of a future. But eventually, my optimistic assurances began to grate on her, becoming hollow sounds, empty offerings to an indifferent universe—nothing more than magical thinking that mocked her waning hope.
And then Sam’s mother was gone. Her departure was so simple, so unceremonious. It seemed a relief for her to just close her eyes and surrender to an endless sleep, sloughing off her mortal responsibilities to retire quietly behind life’s curtain, abandoning everything she was bred to believe she needed to cling to with the faintest of final breaths: Sam, me, and Bart, the puppy I had acquired as a bribe to keep her with us—a distraction from the pain, an empty promise of a future.
In the wake of the uncanny stillness that seized her, I found her hand already icy cold in mine. I peeled back her eyelids to ensure she no longer resided within those grey glass orbs of hers. I found them free of chaos, leading me to believe she was actually okay now, having found a blissful numbness in her finality.
Four months later, I was introduced to Lana. It was a pity date arranged by a mutual friend. Our orchestrated meet-cute adhered to the predictable script of such encounters: polite small talk punctuated by sizable intervals of chewing and swallowing. Over a series of nights, things escalated—from a clumsy grazing of hands to awkward joining of the lips and, eventually, body parts. With Lana, everything felt simple and easy. It all just came together effortlessly and without much anxious forethought. She was kind and attractive, her eyes as luminous and infinite as a starlit night, offering an expansive star-studded horizon upon which to chart a new future.
That year, we married, and the next, we relocated to the country. Bart died under suspicious circumstances six months later, igniting an enduring cold war between Lana and Sam. From then on, they clashed incessantly but never overtly. Their fights were veiled in subterfuge and hushed voices laden with words strategically used for maximum damage, like a sniper’s precision in delivering a kill shot. And I, having abandoned them to navigate their fractured relationship, was useless at negotiating a truce. I had become a living ghost—too scared to live, yet too lazy to die. This realization hadn’t hit me until that moment in the sweltering summer night. The air was thick with sweat and body odor, and I stood in the bathroom, Lana’s relentless scrutiny turning me inside out.
Then the bombs dropped.
Initially, I thought I was lucky. Spared, not just from Lana’s intense glowering but also from the fallout. Yet, what I mistook as good fortune was nothing short of profanity.
Lucky? I scoffed in my brain. If I was lucky, then the devil was the miracle worker.
One bleak morning, not long after the skies blazed with fiery blooms so bright it seared the eyes to look at, David and Megan materialized at our doorstep. Along with them, it seemed, came an odd fog that blanketed the farm in a pale gray shroud. It wasn’t there the previous days and has remained unrelenting since. Shortly after that, the black snow began its unsettling descent. Their presence amid these ominous signs felt like a beacon of hope in those dark times. Megan, bearing the striking likeness to Sam’s mother—as they were twins—made the decision to invite them in all the easier. I insisted they stay. The house, being so large and property abundant, stocked with animals and provisions, beckoned for more occupants. Yet, beneath the surface of this fortuitous reunion, a nagging doubt took root, hinting that their arrival heralded something far more sinister to come.
Upon seeing their pallid faces at the doorstep, I vocalized my optimism, saying, “The more of us, the better against marauders.” But from that point on, we never encountered another living soul.
Sam succumbed to a brutal fever maybe a week or two after that. Her skin bubbled and blistered, breaking open to reveal sores that oozed thick, dark pus. She convulsed with cold shivers, sporadically vomiting bile. Her pallor grew ghastly, slick with an icy, milky sweat, and before long, slipped into a coma.
Lana was always at Sam’s bedside, refusing any kind of rest. Throughout the harrowing two weeks battling the infection, she tended to every one of Sam’s needs, her every waking minute devoted to her care. On the rare times, she drifted off to sleep, it seemed more by pure accident than design. When I’d stumbled upon Lana, collapsed with exhaustion next to Sam, I’d gently carry her to bed, one hand still gripping a damp cloth, the other a bedpan. By morning, without fail, she’d be gone. Instinctively, I’d look to Sam’s side. Sure enough, she was there.
Despite Lana’s skills, grit, and unwavering resolve to restore Sam to full health and wrest her from death’s grasp, she couldn’t.
Megan had a knack for finding me in my places of solitude. So it wasn’t surprising when she approached me in the shed on the eve of Sam’s demise. As we delved into an intimate conversation, I expressed my bewilderment at her continued relationship with my brother.
“It’s better than being alone,” she confessed, hauntingly reminiscent of Sam’s mother. As she spoke, my attention drifted from her words to her face. Entranced, I found myself fixated on the familiar features that echoed those of my departed wife. The soft sheen of her full lips awakened a dormant longing in me, an appetite for things nostalgic.
I was surprised to find Lana already in bed when I climbed in the night of Sam’s passing. It’d been weeks since she’d settled in before me. Nestling my head onto the pillow, my eyes lost in the encompassing darkness, I tuned into the crisp, soft whistle of her breathing.
“Where were you?” her voice quivered, so frail that for a moment, I thought it wasn’t possibly Lana beside me.
“I was saying my goodbyes to Sam,” I replied, my voice barely audible.
“No. Where were you when she was dying? She cried out for you right before she died. I looked for you. Where were you?”
“I…” I couldn’t swallow. I’d forgotten how to. An uncontrollable urge to cough gripped me, sending me into a hacking fit. I turned on my side, propped myself up on my elbow, and let my head hang over the bed’s edge, desperately trying to clear whatever it was that choked me. But nothing gave way, just the painful rawness of dry heaves that eventually faded to a feeble rasp.
“So…” Lana began after my fit subsided, “where were you?”
I opened my mouth to the darkness, but not even my breath made a sound.
“You don’t want to say?”
“Do you already know?” My voice was a mere thread.
Lana went silent for a spell. Then, “I do.”
“Then no. I don’t want to say.”
We lay in a stillness that felt interminable. In the void above, her unblinking eyes appeared as burned images in my vision, emerging as two pricing moons that bore down on me, sinking me deep into the mattress until the metal coils perforated my flesh.
“Are you going to leave me?” The words were forced from lips and fell flat in the dead air.
“No,” she said. “Where is there to go?”
Her floating gaze haunted me throughout the night, burning brightly even behind my closed lids, their terrible scrutiny inescapable.
The following day, I buried Sam next to Bart. Carving her name into the makeshift cross took me hours. Drained of tears, I stood exhausted and looked at my handiwork. To my dismay, I’d crudely etched only three letters into the wood—S A M.
Breakfast was untouched: the eggs broke with black yokes, and spoiled milk curled into a lumping mush. Silence reigned, save for David, who seemed determined to envision a new world for us—the survivors.
“Sure, no more Starbucks,” he exclaimed, “But think of the bigger picture: we’ve inherited the earth. We’re not the meek, hell no, we’re the strong, and It’s all ours.”
No one voiced it, but we all thought it. What did we inherit exactly, cancer?
“Please, David, give it a rest,” Megan interjected, incapable of looking anywhere near his face. “We just buried Samantha yesterday.”
“So you all just want to wallow in self-pity for the rest of your miserable existence?” David retorted.
“David!” Megan shouted, “it’s hasn’t even been a fucking day.”
“I’m sorry,” David turned to me. “Don’t get me wrong, little bro, I’m really sorry. But we’ve gotta move forward. Find the silver lining. Have hope, or we might as well join her.”
“Maybe we should!” I said, pushing back from the kitchen table and storming out to the shed.
Days later, during an evening enshrouded in a mental haze, I caught myself rummaging through my father’s old desk, my fingers wrapping around the cold steel of his old revolver, caressing it for a considerable amount of time. Shaking off the daze, with the weight of the gun in my hand and the murkiness of my intent, unnerved me. Disturbed, I swiftly locked it back in its drawer.
As I turned the key to lock the drawer, Megan walked in. Catching sight of me, she immediately spun on her heels, exiting with a pitiful voice, “I’m sorry.”
Before I could explain my own jittery behavior, she disappeared.
Poor Megan. Did she deserve such a fate? The anguish of her sister’s untimely death, the inherent pitfalls of her marriage to David, the guilt of carrying the stench of my sweat on her flesh, or her own unfortunate demise?
We, two brothers, had wed twin sisters. At that time, we felt luckier than leprechauns winning the lottery. While our union blossomed, giving life to a delicate, cherubic child, David and Megan’s relationship engendered abounding resentment and hopelessness. Talk of divorce heated their conversation the eve before the bombs decimated the world.
A thought gnawed at the back of my mind: was David responsible for Sam’s illness? Had he ushered death into our sanctuary? Would he bring more death? I tried to push the notion away, but increasingly, I’d catch myself glaring at my brother, getting lost in a haze, only to snap out of it, trembling with rage.
In the weeks that followed, I sought solace in work. Idleness was no longer an option; I yearned to busy myself with something, anything. Tangible endeavors that bit into my flesh and left my hands raw and tender.
Determined, I erected a fence around the farm, clearing the black ashfall from the land as I went. The oppressive fallout seemed to efface the world around us, blotting out everything in its shadowy sleet, and I toiled tirelessly to reclaim our small patch of land from its grip.
At the first hint of daylight, I was out the door, carving back our lot from obscurity. As the days passed, daylight waned ever shorter and shorter, with the fallout becoming ever more overwhelming. Each night brought its own chaotic entropy, undoing the day’s hard-won efforts, making my task Sisyphean. Compelled by the need to salvage, I spent longer durations outdoors, often deep into the night, striving to maintain some semblance of order. On my return to the house, I’d repeatedly stumble over Sam’s gravestone, an ever-present and haunting reminder of my profound grief. Once inside, I ambled up to the bedroom, falling immediately to pieces, burying my face deep into the pillow, stifling my sobs so as not to disturb the household—especially Lana. Yet, Lana remained ever awake, now having to tend to another pathetic creature, such as myself. She placed a comforting hand on my back while her other gently ran slender fingers through my dank and knotted hair.
“I’m sorry,” I breathed into my pillow.
“Don’t be,” she whispered back.
“I want to die,” I pressed my face deeper into the pillow, seeking oblivion.
She said nothing.
The eventual calm and stillness of the night would overtake us, punctuated by the rhyme of our breaths. This became our nightly ritual. Tears, whispered regrets, shared breathing—repeat night after night.
I was dead to the world through some slumbering grace until Lana suddenly jolted upright, her frame quaking to the bone. Her fingers, sharp and cold, dug into my arm, and then I heard it too, and sat up. Straining my eyes in the darkness yielded no clarity. My mind raced: Intruders. Marauders.
Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I gently touched Lana’s hip. “Stay here,” I instructed, fumbling for matches and a candle on the nightstand. Once lit, its gentle glow guided me into the hallway where David, equally alert, awaited.
“What do you think it is?” he probed, clutching a baseball bat. His candle flickered only when his words disrupted the air around it.
“I don’t know,” I responded, discreetly wiping away lingering tears from my cheek. “Could be a farm animal that got loose.”
“Do you have dad’s gun?” David inquired, obviously skeptical that it was a loose animal.
“It’s locked in his office.”
Together, we moved swiftly down the stairs. The unsettling noise grew louder as we reached the main floor. Each thud sounded as if something—or someone—was thumping persistently against the back door.
I hastily unlocked the drawer, retrieving the revolver.
As David and I crept toward the back of the house, the relentless thudding resounded with intensifying determination.
“Don’t get me wrong, little bro,” David began in a low voice, “but maybe I should have the gun. Your aim sucks.”
I handed David the gun in exchange for the bat. For the most part, I was relieved. A gun in my grip always triggered my nerves, making my hands shake, which probably accounted for my dismal aim.
We edged cautiously toward the back door, ready to battle whatever was on the other side. Standing shoulder to shoulder, we leaned in, attempting to peek through the small square windowpane. With every violent shudder and jarring rattle of the door, our hearts raced a bit faster. I used my free hand to draw back the tiny curtain, ensuring a clear view outside. Beyond the glass, I could only see the top of someone’s head as the diminutive body it was attached to slammed repeatedly against the door, creating the now-familiar thud.
The flickering light from David’s candle painted his face with wavering, sharp shadows, emphasizing the hollow look in his eyes. In a hushed tone, he pressed, “What is it? What are you waiting for? Open it.”
I turned the thumb knob, retracting the deadbolt’s metal tongue with a resonant CLACK. We both winced, aware that the sound surely gave away our presence. In reaction, we stood frozen, doubling down on our quietness to offset our loud blunder. Yet, the door’s thunderous thudding persisted, knocking the body against the door with indifference.
After exchanging a determined nod with David, I readied my bat, lifting it silently above my head. Signaling my readiness, David focused on the door, slowly turning the handle.
Poised with the bat held high, sweat drenched my body as my heart matched the insistent rhythm of the knocks on the door.
With a swift pull, David flung the door open. A small body caught mid-thrust lost its balance without the door to pound against, tumbling face-first onto the floor, hard. The sharp sound of its forehead cracking against the tiles echoed throughout the room.
I dropped to one knee, trying to decipher the tangled mess of dark hair sprawled before me.
David, gun cocked, pointed it at the back of the little figure’s head. I instinctively swatted the barrel away. Despite the filth covering the writhing creature’s nightgown, a familiar pattern peeked out from beneath the grim—the neon bunny print was unmistakable.
“Samantha?” The name burst from my lips, sharp and piercing, like needles plunging adrenaline straight into my brain. Turning her over, her face confirmed my deepest hopes. Pulling her into a tight embrace, I felt her bony frame wiggling and squirming under me. Close to my ear, the muted gnashing of her teeth was prominent yet eerily void of breath.
At that moment, all I could see was my little girl. However, as time went on and the world’s decay stood ever more pronounced, I came to understand that it was merely animated flesh that had returned to me—an empty carcass piloted by the cruel and profane. A grotesque debauchery to holy cherubs.
“How’s this even possible?” David spat.
Several long moments passed before I registered that David was seeking my answer. But by then, I thought, what was the point in responding? The mechanics of ‘how’ didn’t concern me. All I cared about was that she was alive once again in my arms.
I guided her to her room, laying her gently on her bed. Yet, she resisted my attempts to make her comfortable, flittering to her feet almost immediately to stand in the dim corner of the room. “Baby, come lie down. You need some rest,” I urged, my voice tweaked by fatherly elation.
But she remained rooted in the shadowy corner, ignoring my pleas. I pondered that maybe she was exhausted from escaping her grave. But if so, why wouldn’t she rest? “Maybe she had enough sleep,” I murmured aloud in David’s direction, but not necessarily to him.
David lingered near the entrance, leaning against the doorframe, his upper half concealed by the darkness. Only the glint of his eyes was visible by the candle’s flame. “What?” he asked with a distant voice, clearly lost in his own musings.
I turned my attention back to Sam, feeling it was pointless to repeat myself.
When I returned to bed that night, Lana was exactly where I had left her in the darkness, now joined by Megan huddled close beside her. I paused, taking in the scene of the two of them.
“What was it?” Lana inquired.
Struggling to find the words for the inexplicable events surrounding Sam, I simply stared at Lana and Megan, overwhelmed and drained. Sensing the tension, Megan rose and darted past me, exiting the room.
“What happened?” Lana asked again.
“I’ll show you in the morning,” I said, crawling into bed and extinguishing the candle. “It’ll make more sense then.” I leaned across the bed and bumped my face into her various body parts until my lips finally managed to peck at her own, dry and unmoving.
“What is it?” she persisted.
“In the morning,” I insisted, rolling onto my side.
Lana’s right arm enveloped my torso as she nestled against my back. I sensed her rigid nipples prick my shoulder blades, her fingers weaving through the untamed strands of my shaggy hair. Waves of her body heat radiated through me, punctuated by tiny vibrations—the tapping echos of her quickening heartbeat resonating through her bones. We lay there in the quiet stillness, our breathing imbued with a newfound vitality. Amid the stagnant air that filled the dying world in which we took our repose, I detected her tiny, sweet-smelling currents drifting rhythmically over my neck and filling my nostrils.
I held back from telling Lana about Sam that night, fearing how she might react to such a miraculous turn of events. I optimistically thought that all Sam needed was a good night’s sleep before rejoining our little family. This time, we’d do it right. But as I lay there, every fiber of my being twitched; Lana’s warmth couldn’t fend off the shivers or the cold sweat that soaked me.
Upon waking, I found Lana’s side of the bed empty. I groaned, rubbing my face with my palms before launching to my feet and shuffling out the bedroom door.
As David saw me coming down the hall, his reedy voice piped up, “This ain’t right.”
Upon entering Sam’s room, I found them fanned out in a semi-circle around Sam, maintaining a cautious distance. Lana seemed unable to lift her gaze from the floor, nervously gnawing on her thumb, while Megan’s wide eyes stayed fixed on Sam, her hand clamped over her gaping mouth.
Oblivious to us, Sam was busy ramming herself into the room’s corners.
“Bro, she’s been buried for two weeks,” David moaned,” I mean, no offense, but this is some unholy, end-of-the-world zombie type of shit.”
“Zombie? Fuck you, David! Zombie? She’s not a zombie.”
“Well, she’s not exactly normal either, bashing against the wall like a… like a broken robotic doll.”
“Maybe she traumatized, David, but she’s not a zombie.” I retorted, waving my hand to usher them out of the room. “Just… just go do something else. I’ll take care of her.”
After they left, I closed the door and sat on her bed, watching my little girl. She was facing the corner, her shoulder jolting against the walls. At first, I thought she needed time to adjust and become herself again. But the longer I sat there, the more intense her sporadic movements became. She started ramming her face into the walls with alarming force.
“Sam!” I yelled, springing to my feet and rushing to retrain her. “Baby, what are you doing? Please stop.” She twisted in my grip as I dragged her back to her bed, holding her down. Brushing aside a tangle of black hair, I assessed the damage to her face. Her skin had a grey, slick appearance of spoiled poultry. A fresh wound marred her forehead, alongside the one she’d acquired last night. In the daylight, I saw how disturbingly deep the gashes were. They reeked of rotten eggs, yet neither bled.
She wouldn’t stop squirming, so I rolled her in the blankets, pulling them taut to pin her down. Still, she pitched forward wildly. Straddling her, I twisted extra bedsheets into makeshift ropes and looped them around the bed frame. I secured one around her chest, another around her waist, and a third at her ankles. Finally satisfied she was restrained, I slumped, breathless, beside her sweet face.
“I don’t want to do this, but it’s for your own good, Cinnamon.”
Her eyes rolled back into her head, and her jaw began grinding side to side as if she were trying to unhinge it. “Stop that!” I pressed her chin up, forcing her teeth to crunch together. The moment I let go, her mouth stretched unnaturally wide, the corners of her flesh starting to tear. I quickly wrapped another sheet around her head to keep her jaw shut.
Once I was sure she couldn’t harm herself further, I left the room, closing the door behind me. Standing in the hall, I massaged my aching jaw, only now realizing how tightly I clenched my teeth. Away from Sam, the tension finally eased.
Lana materialized at the end of the hallway. Perhaps she was always there, lurking just beyond my peripheral. Her sudden appearance jolted me, causing a nervous shimmy and re-tightening my jaw.
“Geeze.” I hissed.
“I don’t know what that is,” Lana said, “but that’s not Sam.”
Ignoring her, I brushed past her, heading down the stairs toward the basement. “Do you got anything that’ll help her sleep?” I asked. Lana didn’t answer. “How about some straps, anything downstairs?” Her silence persisted, but I was already distancing myself, bounding down the next flight of stairs.
Tranquilizers dulled the ferocity of Sam’s persistent thrashing, making her movements lopsided and clumsy, yet she never slept, never ceased her restless motion. At night, I’d strap her down; in the daylight, I’d let her roam her room for a few hours, usually finding her in her favorite corner, rocking against it. I padded the walls, less to protect her—she seemed indifferent to the impacts—and more to muffle the incessant noise. Eventually, her movements became less violent compared to that first day of her return.
Her vocalization never graduated beyond guttural moans, gargles, growls, and hisses. With time, I learned to interpret these sounds, decoding her various states and moods—it was a form of communication, I supposed, as you might with a diseased pet. Lana insisted it was wishful thinking on my part, arguing that Sam was an abomination, a mindless entity capable only of inspiring horror.
Everyone kept their distance but me. I was the one who wanted her there. Not even Lana’s innate compassion could bring her to engage with Sam. Lana began withdrawing, retreating to our room and sinking deep beneath the covers earlier each night. That left me to solely care for Sam, a burden I willingly accepted. In a twisted way, I was spending more quality time with her now than I ever did while she was alive. Sam never acknowledged my presence. I yearned for just one moment of eye contact, for her little black holes—constricted to tiny dots in milky white orbs—to meet mine. But the moment remained elusive. Still, I spoke to her as any father would his daughter.
She never drank, ate, or defecated. Never wanted for anything other than to self-harm. I forced-fed her occasionally, frustrated by her gauntness, but she would regurgitate whatever I offered, turning canned beans into a sludgy mess tinged with black rancid bile. Her gray skin began to peel, sloughing off in clumps that I found myself collecting in plastic sandwich bags. And the stench that started to emanate from her became increasingly unbearable.
The odor tormented Megan the most. “I can’t get away from it,” she’d cry. “I can’t stop smelling her putridness.”
“It’s not her,” Lana would say.
“She’s still sick,” I’d counter. “But it’s her.”
Sam never improved; she remained a hollow vessel, vacant of a soul or mind. A sack of twitching flesh and bone flinging itself against walls and doors any chance she got. There was an incessant mental tic, a twisting knot in my stomach and heart that acted like corrosive acid, steadily eroding my conviction that my wondrous, loving, lively girl had returned to me.
My nightly weeping grew worse; the frequency with which I had to switch out my drenched pillowcases for fresh ones increased. Lana, unable to take my restless nights filled with flailing limbs and haunting screams, relocated to the couch downstairs to sleep.
“I think it’s some involuntary, primal response—maybe brain damage.” I confided intensely to Megan one night after cornering her in my father’s office. She looked so much like her mother that it always felt easy to unburden my thoughts onto her.
“I don’t know if being in here alone—together is such a good idea,” Megan said, her voice uneasy.
Ignoring Megan’s concerns, I continued, “Lack of oxygen to the brain can be very bad for its functions. Because, I mean, if all this… with her hurting herself, was something she was intentionally doing?” My hands tightened around Megan’s shoulders, my eyes boring down into hers, grateful they met mine. “That would be absurd. I… I can’t believe she would do that on purpose.”
“I told David,” Megan blurted out, her voice rising.
“You told him what?” My gaze dropped from her watering eyes to her dry lips.
“About us. About what happened the day… the day Sam died.”
“Why the fuck did you do that!” I shook her, sending tears cascading from her eyes. She tried to escape my grip, but I stayed on top of her. “Why did you tell him? You didn’t have to tell him,” I snarled, inches from her face.
“I don’t know!” she wailed, “I don’t know—I had to. Especially after Sam came back. What if what we did was so unholy, and this is our punishment? God, I can’t stand her rotting smell.”
“Unholy?” I scoffed, “Jesus, C’mon Meg, you, religious?”
“How can you not see, with everything that’s been happening, these are our Judgment Days? This is our hell.”
“What we did was regretful, and out of weakness—”
“Your weakness,” she cut me off with a glare.
“Neither of us knew she would… as we… well, she didn’t die, did she?”
Megan shoved me back, cleaving a gap between us with her arms. Wiping her eyes with her threadbare sleeve, she said, “What does it even matter, now? We’re already in hell.” She looked up at me. “I told him because he deserved it.” She moved towards the door, pausing just before she opened it. “It finally broke him, you know? He deserved it. And it made me feel good.”
And then she was gone. The sadness etched into her face then was like nothing I’d seen before. Not even when her twin sister resigned to the cold stillness of death was a sadness so profoundly set in such a similar face.
The following day, Megan entered Sam’s room wielding a kitchen knife. As she lay dying from a festering bite wound on her neck—a wound that bubbled and gargled with infection—I asked her why she did it. She told us she couldn’t take the smell any longer. It’s seeping into my mind and consuming me from the inside, she wheezed. With a final spray of blood, as she exhaled, she managed to say, “She’s the living deeee...” before trailing off into oblivion, her eyes wide open in horror but unnervingly still and lifeless.
I looked at Lana, my mouth opening to speak. I wondered if Megan’s final word might have been ‘dead’ or ‘devil.’ But then I thought better of asking for Lana’s interpretation, and I closed my mouth again.
David buried Megan out back, close to where Bart lay, repurposing the very hole that Sam had clawed her way out of. For two days, he sat vigil by her fresh grave, dutifully sweeping away the constant fall of dark ash. I figured he was waiting, hoping she would return.
In Sam’s room, I still found myself wondering about Megan’s final word: was it dead or devil? The restraints I had fashioned for Sam lay torn and limp on her bed. She stood eerily still in her usual corner, facing the wall for the first time since her return. Her feet seemed anchored in place. Her chest rose and fell with a steady measure, despite the absence of breath, and along with it moved the kitchen knife—its handle jutting outward, the blade still lodged in her sternum, right where Megan had driven it in.
Then something even more extraordinary happened. As I stood by the door, my gaze affixed onto the knife protruding from Sam’s chest, she swiveled her head toward me. Her eyes, now slightly clouded, met mine. She titled her head, reminiscent of a dog catching a whiff of a familiar scent. This was progress, and the nausea churning in the pit of my stomach could only mean one thing: there was hope.
I rushed over to her, falling to my knees and scooping her in my arms, carefully avoiding the knife handle. I hugged her tightly, feeling her bones threatening to collapse into dust. She did nothing but stand there, allowing me to hold her. Felt like a heaven-sent moment.
After some time, I looked into her darling blank face—its translucent greenish-gray hue marked by a network of black squiggly lines just beneath her skin. My eyes drifted down to the knife embedded in her chest. “Megan deserved what happened to her,” I muttered.
Taking a deep breath of stale air, I stood and gripped the knife handle. “I’m sorry, baby,” I whispered, my eyes meeting Sam’s unresponsive gaze. Her head remained cocked to the side as if frozen in perplexity. With a firm yank, I dislodged the blade from her chest bone; it made a soft clicking sound as it came free. She did not respond, only the slow seep of a thick, black substance from the wound. I pulled a cloth from my pocket, dabbing at the ooze in a futile attempt to staunch it. Instead, it smeared, dark, and sticky against her skin.
Puzzled, I stared at the dark slick ooze, cocking my own head. A shiver snaked down my spine as I sensed a shadow fall over me, its weight heavy and judgmental. Turning, I found Lana at the doorway; her unyielding gaze berated me into lumps that lodged themselves in my throat, heart, stomach, and head. Judgment was upon us—or rather, her judgment was upon me.
David charged at Sam, axe in hand, frothing at the mouth and yelling at Lana to move aside because it was time for him to “right the wrongs.” I couldn’t fathom why Lana stood in Sam’s defense, a human shield, separating David’s wielding axe from Sam’s erratic movements. Sam seemed to dart in and out of Lana’s cover, almost as if taunting David.
Fed up, David lunged forward, his axe hoisted high and poised for a decisive cleave to sever Sam from my life again. Summoning an unexpected sturdiness, I squeezed the trigger. David froze, caught in the flash of the gun’s muzzle. Slowly, he lowered the axe to his side and turned to face me. For a moment, our eyes locked, and we both blinked, dumbfounded. His expression then twisted in anguish, as if desperate to make a final declaration but choked by heartburn and gas instead. Releasing a strangled groan, he crumbled to the floor as if his bones had suddenly vanished, leaving nothing but a helpless fleshy sack capitulating to gravity’s pull.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” I stammered. “I have bad aim,” I explained. Lana sank to a sitting position, eyeing David’s collapsed body, perhaps hoping he was joking, just playing dead. But David was terrible at practical jokes and not a very good actor. The only movement from him was a trickle of blood oozing from the back of his head.
“It was them or us,” I rambled.
Lana had lost the will to glare at me, but her absent stare felt even more damning; it felt like something razor-sharp, slicing into my heart with the precision to split atoms, detonating a catastrophic power of destruction in my chest and obliterating my soul.
“Why?” I asked, desperate, “Why were you protecting her?”
Lana rose to her feet again. “I wasn’t protecting her,” she said softly, not quite looking at me. “I was trying to protect him.” She then walked past me and out of the room, leaving me with my dead brother.
I started to bury David next to Megan, but daylight, now only lasting a few hours, succumbed to the darkness before I could finish. I left him there, unmarked and covered only by the ever-falling dark ash. By morning, any trace of his grave had vanished under the ashy sleet. I could have sifted through the mounds to find him and complete the burial, but I decided to go back inside instead.
It was just Lana, Sam, and me now. Though it might as well have been only me, and I wouldn’t have known the difference. Sam returned to her habit of endlessly pacing and knocking against the walls. While Lana stopped speaking, stopped eating, and stopped looking at me altogether.
We both wept in the dark, our sobs mercifully drowning out the monotonous thuds of Sam hammering the walls with her petite frame. As the dark hours stretched on and my eyes eventually ran dry, I would place my hand on Lana’s back and stroked her hair, finding solace in our shared sorrow as her tears continued to flow.
I awoke one deathly morning with the phrase: “She’s getting into my head and eating me from within,” settled over my frontal lobe like a dense fog. These words eclipsed all else—my name, my whereabouts, my very being, all shrouded in the mental mist, all but those crisp, haunting words. When the haze finally lifted, surreal clarity was in its place. I chuckled—a twisted, unfamiliar sound—as the memories of my life gradually unfolded as if part of some dark comedy.
“Lana?” I called out, feeling the cold emptiness beside me on the bed. “Lana?” I repeated, loader.
Compelled by habit or perhaps instinct, I made my way down the hall toward Sam’s room, continuing to call Lana’s name. As I approached Sam’s slightly ajar door, a sudden cacophony erupted as though someone had just unmuted a blaring TV.
Inside the room, Sam’s bed lay overturned, and Lana was pinned on her back beneath the mattress, which served as an improvised shield between her and Sam. Perched atop, Sam’s small teeth snapped ferociously just inches from Lana’s face while her tiny hands slashed at the mattress’s underbelly, shredding her palms on its metal coils as she tried to tunnel through. Lana’s screams filled the room with all the force her lungs could muster. I pounced on Sam, gripped her shoulders, and flung her against the wall; she rebounded and hit the wooden floor with a resounding thud. I flipped the mattress off Lana and helped her to her feet. Sam, already back on her feet, darted toward us, dead straight for Lana. Quickly, I grabbed the mattress and used it to push Sam back, pinning her against the wall.
“Go,” I shouted, leaning my full weight against Sam’s violently twisting body to keep her contained. “Get out of here!”
Lana ran from the room. Once she was clear, I backed away from Sam, lugging the mattress with me until I got to the door. Discarding the mattress, I slipped out and slammed the door shut behind me. Almost immediately came the jarring thwack of a small body plowing into the solid wood door.
I found Lana back in bed, curled in a fetal position, her eyes a glaze of distant fixation. They seemed locked onto that same cosmic hole that had seized her attention all those months—or maybe years?—ago. Time had blurred into irrelevance ever since the night the bombs fell, and all clocks froze at 3:13 a.m. Leaving in its wake the eternal season of ash-fall, where the air hung still, neither balmy nor blistery nor hot or cold. And daylight, a feeble glow, an impotent and vague source of light in the sky, appearing for fleeting moments between long spells of total blackness. For all I knew, It could have been centuries since those hot, sticky nights in the ensuite bathroom when Lana had first worn that dark, vacant expression—almost as if she’d had a premonition of these dead days that now stretched out before us and only now grappling with its grim reality.
Taking advantage of her indifference toward me, I thoroughly inspected her body, scanning every inch of her chalky flesh for bite marks. Satisfied upon finding none, I sat beside her and gently stroked her forehead, tracing the contours of her sharp features with my index finger. Her eyes, devoid of hope, wandered aimlessly. I remained there for what felt like hours. Eventually, I picked up a book—The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of her favorites—and began reading aloud. She always complimented the timbre of my reading voice. Those rare times when I’d read to Sam evoked memories for Lana of her childhood when her father would read her stories. She’d confided in me that It was only through those narrated tales that she could glimpse any emotional depth from her otherwise stoic father. His warmth, conveyed through the cadence and tone of fictional characters, made him seem momentarily human—soft, flesh and blood, just like her.
I had finished a chapter and set the book aside to light a candle; the room had sunk into darkness. Lana’s hand gripped my arm just as I reached for the matches. I turned, her faint breath carrying a whiff of acidity toward me. “Please, kill her,” I pictured her thin lips quivering as she whispered. Then her grip had loosened; had it even been there to begin with? I listened to her form retreat farther into the dark, distancing itself from me. I returned to the edge of the bed, placing the book on some indiscernible surface, and curled up on my side, partially hanging off the mattress, my knees and forearms dangling limply over the edge. I abandoned lighting the candle, letting the darkness suffocate me.
I lacked the nerve to kill her. Bereft of resolve, will, or guts. “Why?” I cried, craven before my daughter’s feet. “Why is this universe so goddamn hell-bent on destroying my little girl?” I stood and shook my fist at the ceiling in proper histrionic fashion. “Unleash your worst Hell Angels if you must, but know this: my little girl is a survivor! Doesn’t that count for something good?!” I pointed a trembling finger skyward. “Only one other person was ever resurrected, and he was the goddamn savior of the world!” I screamed this last part with every fiber of my being, my voice breaking as I sank into a squat on her bed. I expelled my righteous anger in a long, shuddering sigh and let my head hang low beneath my shoulder line, my chin quivering against my chest.
Shit.
Had Megan’s religious fervor infected me? Was I now a believer? Reborn? Saved? Loved at last? I looked at Sam. She spun in circles idly, swaying from one foot to the other, her eyes tracing invisible patterns on the ceiling as if searching for the unseen entity I’d been yelling at. Seizing her shoulders, I pulled her close to me. Perched on the bed, my eyes were level with her, though she stubbornly looked in every direction but mine. Unperturbed, I locked my eyes on her cherub face with laser intensity and asked, “Cinnamon, are you Jesus?”
I decided to relocate her to the shed out back, chaining her to a cot I found in our old camping gear. Sam convulsed and twitched as if eager to dislocate her own limbs to free herself from the chains. Knowing I had to secure her from escaping, I boarded up the sole window in the 10x8 foot structure, and I installed three deadbolt locks on the shed door. Her growls, sneers, and moans punctuated the air as I worked. I paused three times to sit and observe her, which seemed to temper her agitation. However, each time I resumed my hammering and drilling, she relapsed into a frenzy of hisses, cries, and barks.
Later, I spoke to Lana—though, more accurately, I spoke to a lump on the bed encased in a dusty, floral-pattern duvet—admitting that my resolve to return Sam to her grave was milquetoast at best. Although Lana remained silent, hidden under the covers, ignoring acknowledgment of my failures, I sensed, by the growing tang of fecal matter lining my tongue, that her penetrating gaze was returning. Slicing through the fabric like X-rays, radiating the free radicals of my biology into a frenzy of chaos. And yet, I welcomed that chaos. It was better than the alternative: the vast, underlying void that I knew pervaded all things, the emptiness on which we precariously staked our claims, built our lives, and cuddled up to in our beds.
I spent most of my hours next to Lana’s inert figure. Each night, I continued the ritual of reading aloud to her. It seemed to ease her sobbing or at least distract her from it. I found joy in lending my voice to the gamut of human emotions, flexing my vocal cords, and strumming my larynx like a well-crafted instrument. Words took flight, singing and dancing in my ears as I vocalized life back into the dead air. This made my reading so important; it pushed back against the oppressive silence that resonated within our walls and beyond them, a silence more palpable in its absence than ever. The void waited patiently, secure in knowing that eventually, whether we went willingly or were dragged kicking and screaming, we would arrive at its terminus. But that day would not be this day. Not yet.
From time to time, the distant rattling from the shed would break our solitude, as if Sam sensed she was on the brink of being forgotten and would not allow it. She would thrash in a fit of madness, making herself ever-present in my mind. Eventually, I also began reading to her, carving a path from the house to the shed through waist-high mounds of ash. Inside, I arranged a cozy chair in a corner near her cot and established another ritual of reading until my throat grew raspy. Then I’d return to the house, take a seat next to Lana, and read aloud until my throat croaked.
Every page in the house had been read, every inked word scraped across my tongue—even Lana’s medical books. So, I began reading them all anew.
Halfway through ‘Frankenstein,’ Lana broke free of her bed-cocoon, her spindly legs readjusted to the act of walking. As I verbally ran through Dickens, Kafka, and Stephen King, she progressed from a tentative snicker to half-hearted chortles and finally full-throated laughter at the voices I conjured for various passages. We exchanged smiles; her round eyes opened to me again, regarding me with fresh curiosity. It was as if we were discovering each other anew through the words and worlds others had penned. Lana even took turns reading chapters to me, and I found serenity in her sonorous tones, not realizing how much I’d yearned for her tender voice once again.
I was reading to Sam out in the shed, my voice pitched high to compete with her writhing and hisses, when my tongue stumbled and tripped over a word. An apparently unpronounceable word. Restarting from the beginning of the sentence didn’t help; the word continued to trip me up, garbling my thoughts. No matter how I approached it—letter by letter, from the star of the sentence or even paragraph—it stymied me. Skimming past, it caused all subsequent words to unravel into nonsensical gibberish. Frustrated, I hurled the book against the wall and screamed. At that moment, Sam went still. Her blank gaze raked over me, taking on an almost focused quality. I leaned over her, listening intently to the guttural sounds emanating from her throat, like the steady reeving of an engine. Eeeht, eeeht, eeeht, eeeht. Eeeht, eeeht, eeeht. I pressed my ear to her chest as she intoned: Eeeht, eeht, eeht, deeaadt, dad. Had I heard correctly? Had she just said, Dad? It might have been dead, but that was inconsequential—she had spoken her first word since reawakening.
“Sam spoke,” I eagerly told Lana, who looked at me worried. “She actually said a word.”
“Audio pareidolia,” Lana finally uttered. “You’re hearing something that’s not there.”
“She did speak,” I insisted.
Lana returned to the bed and pulled the covers over herself. “You’re hearing what you want to hear.”
I returned to the shed, straining my ears to catch any further utterances from Sam, but she remained wordless that day. Undeterred, I came back the next day and each day after. Eventually, I began to enunciate simple words like ‘cat’ and ‘red,’ repeating them in a chant-like mantra, hoping she might mimic them. Sometimes, I repeated a word so many times that it gummed up my brain, rendering it meaningless for a brief period. Although she never articulated any other words—if she’d truly spoken at all—my focused efforts seemed to calm her. She stopped thrashing, allowing me to gently cradle her in my arms. She was behaving like a good girl, deserving to return home.
At the present, my phantom limb tingled as I gripped the revolver tightly with my good hand––the hand that used to be my ‘bad’ one but was now my only one. Sam’s movements rang out in a din of rattling chains, growling and howling intonations of madness. It was all I could hear now.
I’d waited long enough. Steadying my breathing, I rose to my feet and straightened my posture. I lifted my arm and, in extension, the gun, leveling my aim, holding a dead-straight bead on her thrashing little head. I exhaled. My finger gently squeezed the trigger until it jerked violently in my hand, and my ears rang with the sting of a hundred striking bells.
The pop and snap of Sam’s head reeling back caught me by surprise. A small splatter of dark liquid speckled the padded wall behind her. I’d expected more—some explosion, a cinematic end of my little Cinnamon. The lack of carnage unnerved me. Her lifeless body simply went limp, head plunged forward, dangling at the end of her neck. The rest of her drooped, hanging like a discarded marionette snagged in its own strings.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lana on the stairs. She had been waiting. The ringing in my ear persisted, bile surfacing in my throat. Collapsing to my knees, I felt Lana’s slender fingers wrap around my shoulders, her arms pulling me close. No words were necessary. She was right—she’s always right. It had to be done. We held each other in quiet mourning; the only sounds that remained were our breathing, our thumping pulses, our sniffling, and the snorting of mucus, accompanied by the gushing of other bodily fluids within us.
Then, slicing through the muted air like a chainsaw, came the rattle of chains. We looked up. Sam was rising. A low rumble emerged from the depths of her throat. One eye—pearly white—fixed on us; her other, the mutilated one clouded with blood, sank into the fresh bullet hole in her skull. But the functional eye lined up dead straight with me.
Eeeeeht, eeeeht, eeeeht, eeeeht. She taunted, Eeeeht, eedeead, deeead, dead, dad—words we both unmistakably heard.
