Robert Duperre - The Gate 2 - 13 Tales of Isolation and Despair

The mother ceased her howling and her dotted black pupils turned Abigail’s way. The female opened her arms, and the young one burst from her grasp, its malformed penis dangling. It barreled into Abigail, and for a moment she feared the thing would rip out her throat. It didn’t. Instead it nuzzled its huge, bald cranium into her neck. Hesitantly, she brought up her hand and stroked its head.

The mother, apparently satisfied with the result, wrapped her arms around her remaining child and resumed her primal song.

Abigail sat there in amazement, holding the strange little life form. All around her she noticed it was the same scene, over and over again—female monstrosities with their young ones, weeping at the sky. She looked straight ahead, saw her farm in the distance, nothing but a speck, and gazed at the thing in her arms.

The child cooed, and then placed his crooked palm on her chest. That hand rose up and bony fingers wrapped around her jaw, moving it up and down.

In that moment Abigail understood the purpose behind the strange chorus. She mimicked the rest of the clan, gazing at the ugly yet precious thing in her arms while she sang.

The mutated child’s eyes began to close, and a smile stretched across Abigail’s face. After years of searching, she’d finally found a place to belong. She was home.

Chorus , a story inspired by the illustration by Jesse David Young that accompanies it in this collection, originally appeared in Dark Tomorrows: Second Edition , a collection of short stories by J.L. Bryan .

Ash covered the landscape like cold, dead snow. Small lumps scattered throughout the yard, buried in the piles of blowing dust. They might have been objects forgotten during the rush to beat the easterly wind, the old feed buckets, or perhaps the remains of the chickens those buckets used to nourish. A cold wind blew, revealing a blackened joint. It might have been the elbow or knee of some poor soul who’d come in search of help; help they obviously no longer needed.

Guido grunted and turned away. Nothing he hadn’t seen before. He continued around the old farmhouse, back creaking, lungs wheezing. Placing a hand on the back porch’s stoop, he rested a moment. His eyes looked skyward. Dark clouds still loomed ominous overhead. They billowed deep and low, yet seemed to stretch for miles into the atmosphere. Water fell on the shield of his gas mask. He whisked the drops away with a wipe of his gloved hand, leaving trails of black soot. Another gust of wind caught him unawares, and he shivered at its biting cold.

Turning back to the task at hand, Guido circled his house until he found what he was looking for—a thick, curved metal construction that jutted from the foundation. He dipped beneath its lip, knelt in the mounds of wet, gray powder, and took a large brush from his belt. Originally used to clean the horses’ hides, it had gained a new purpose, much like everything else since the eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera. He swept the bristles from side to side against the grate beneath the steel casing, clearing ash from the gaps in the filter. It was tough work, and his back ached with each stroke, but Guido Malfi was nothing if not a diligent man. Before long, he’d cleared the filter as best he was able. In another three days he’d have to come out again, but that was still three days he could spend inside, warmed under the cover of many blankets. Three days that he could spend with Her.

Guido slid the lock through its catch after he closed the bunker’s overhead door. The sound of metal scratching against metal echoed through the small entryway, like fingernails over a chalkboard. He winced, waiting for the reverberations to cease. When they did, he moved to the second door and slid it open.

She was waiting for him. She sat on the couch, still wearing the Bratz pajamas she’d had on when she first arrived. Her brown hair was clumped and ratty, but to him, in the dim yellow light, it looked silky and beautiful. Her eyes lifted. She recoiled for a split second and then smiled. Her teeth were crooked, in bad need of braces she would never get.

He slid the gas mask from his head and took a deep breath. His lungs rattled, but that was okay. He’d lived with worse than that before.

The room was small, barely ten feet by ten, entombed by concrete walls four feet deep. This was Guido’s pride and joy—a bomb shelter he’d constructed over the last twenty years, a bomb shelter folks assured him he’d never need. He chuckled. So much for them.

He’d stocked the cubby beneath the shelter with enough canned goods and water to last two years, though the girl had thrown off his initial estimations. Grabbing a flashlight, he lifted the hatch and looked inside. The gas generator that powered the lights and the air filter chugged along below the earth, its exhaust piped out to the surrounding woods. He smiled upon hearing its guttural purr. Snatching a couple cans of peaches from a shelf, he shut the hatchway and turned.

“Do you want some food, Alyssa?” he asked.

The little girl nodded.

“Yes please, Mr. Malfi,” she replied.

They sat down to eat.

“Tell me one of your stories,” said Alyssa. She picked up a syrupy peach with her bare hand and plunked it in her mouth.

Guido stroked his white beard. “Hm. Let’s see. I told you about the Kennedy assassination, right?”

She nodded.

“How about G.W. and his plan to dominate the world economy by crashing planes into a couple buildings?”

Again, she nodded.

“How about the moon? Have I talked about that?”

“No,” she said with a shake of the head. “Tell me that one.”

“Okay. Well, it happened a long time ago, when I was a young’n in college. We and the Ruskies were always at each other’s throats, trying to beat each other at everything, as if that would help distract us from knowing one side or the other would soon lose patience and launch the first nuke. One of the meanest competitions was this ‘race to space’ thing. Whoever landed on the moon would get some sort of bragging rights, take first place in this pissing contest we had going. So one day, we did it. We landed on the moon. The whole world stood up and cheered for us, as if we’d accomplished something. But here’s the thing, Alyssa. We never did reach the moon. It was all a ruse. You know what a film studio is?”

She listened intently as he spoke, her chin resting on her fists. She stared at him with those wide eyes of hers, and he felt his heart melting. This little girl was everything to him, had been since the day she came running into his yard screaming while sirens blared in the background. The announcement had just come over the airways, and everyone was in a panic. Vandals tore through every corner of Mercy Hills, Connecticut, his hometown. The little girl had looked so scared, so on edge, when she arrived at the doorstep of his farmhouse while he was outside sealing the shelter from the rain of ash soon to come. At first he thought to ignore her, to turn her away like he had the Letts family when they came calling. He hesitated, though, and when he looked in those large, innocent eyes, he remembered the dreams of his youth, the love of his family. The family she’d most certainly lost in the chaos of a crumbling society.