Josh Malerman - Bird Box

“Come on,” Tom says. “Let’s show you the house. You can use the bedroom at the top of the stairs. I’ll sleep down here.”

“No,” Malorie says. “I couldn’t take a room from any of you.”

“I insist,” Tom says. “Cheryl sleeps at the end of the hall up there. Felix is in the room next to the one that will be yours. You’re pregnant, after all. We’ll help you with it the best we can.”

They are walking through a hall. They pass a bedroom on the left. Then a bathroom. Malorie catches her reflection in the mirror and quickly looks away. On the left, she sees a kitchen. On the counter are large buckets.

“This,” Tom says, “is the living room. We hang out a lot in here.”

Malorie turns to see his hand is gesturing toward the larger room. There is a couch. An end table with a telephone on it. Lamps. An easy chair. Carpet. A calendar is drawn in what looks like marker on the wall between framed paintings. The windows are covered by hanging black blankets.

Malorie looks up as a dog suddenly trots into the room. It’s a border collie. The dog looks at her curiously before stepping to her feet and waiting for her to pet him.

“This is Victor,” Jules says. “He’s six years old now. I got him as a puppy.”

Malorie pets the dog. She thinks Shannon would have liked him. Then Jules leaves the room, carrying her suitcase up a flight of carpeted stairs. Along the walls, pictures hang. Some are photos, some are art. At the top, she sees him enter a bedroom. Even from down here she can see a blanket covers the window.

Cheryl walks her to the couch. There, Malorie sits, exhausted from sadness and shock. Cheryl and Don say they will prepare some food.

“Canned goods,” Felix says. “We went on a run the day I arrived. This was just before the first incident was reported in the Upper Peninsula. The man at the store thought we were crazy. We’ve got enough to last us about three months still.”

“A little less than that now,” Don says, vanishing into the kitchen. Malorie wonders if he meant there were more mouths to feed because of her arrival.

Then, sitting beside her on the couch, Tom asks what things she saw on the drive over. He is curious about everything. Tom is the kind of man who would use any information she gives him, and she feels like the insignificant details she remembers are no help at all. She tells him about the dead dog. The mail truck. The empty storefronts and streets, and the abandoned car with the jacket.

“There are some things I’ll need to tell you,” Tom says. “First off, this house doesn’t belong to anybody here. The owner died. I’ll explain that to you later. There’s no Internet. It’s been down since we got here. We’re pretty sure the people who run the cell towers have stopped going to work. Or they’re dead. No mail comes anymore, and no newspapers. Have you checked your cell phone lately? Ours quit working about three weeks ago. But there is a landline, if you can believe the luck of that, although I don’t know who we’ll call.”

Cheryl enters the room, carrying a plate with carrots and peas. A small glass of water, too.

“The landline still works,” Tom says, “for the same reason the lights are still on. The local power plant runs on hydroelectricity. I can’t tell you if it will stop working, too, one day, but if the men working the power left the gates open in just the right way, the power could go on indefinitely. That means the river powers this house. Did you know there’s a river behind us? Barring disaster, as long as it flows, we may be in luck. We might survive. Is that asking for too much? Probably. But when you go to the well out back to get some water, and it’s the water we use for everything, you’ll be able to hear the river flowing about eighty yards behind us. There’s no running water here. It gave out shortly after I arrived. To go to the bathroom, we use buckets and take turns carrying the slop buckets to the latrines. Those are just ditches we’ve dug in the woods. Of course, all of this has to be done blindfolded.”

Jules comes downstairs. Victor, the dog, follows behind him.

“You’re all set,” he says, nodding at Malorie.

“Thank you,” she says quietly.

Tom points to a cardboard box on a small table against the wall.

“The blindfolds are in there. You can use any of them, whenever you want to.”

They are all looking at her. Cheryl is sitting on the arm of the easy chair. Don is standing in the entrance to the kitchen. Jules kneels by Victor at the stairs. Felix is standing by one of the blanketed windows.

They’ve each grieved , Malorie thinks. These people have experienced terrible things, like me .

Malorie, drinking from the glass Cheryl has given her, turns to Tom. She cannot rid her mind of Shannon. But she tries, speaking to Tom wearily.

“What was the stuff I saw you wearing when I arrived?”

“The armor?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure yet,” Tom says, smiling. “I’m trying to build a suit. Something to protect more than just our eyes. We don’t know what’ll happen if one of those things touches us.”

Malorie looks to the other housemates. Then back at Tom.

“You guys believe that there are creatures out there?”

“Yes,” Tom says. “George, the man who owned this house, he saw one. Just before he died.”

Malorie doesn’t know what to say. She instinctively brings a hand to her belly.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” Tom says. “And I’ll tell you George’s story soon. But the radio has been saying the same thing. I think it’s a consensus now. Something living is doing this to us. And it only takes seeing one for a second, maybe less.”

Everything in the room seems to get darker for Malorie. She feels dizzy, light-headed.

“Whatever they are,” Tom says, “our minds can’t understand them. They’re like infinity, it seems. Something too complex for us to comprehend. Do you see?”

Tom’s words are getting lost somehow for Malorie. Victor pants heavily at Jules’s feet. Cheryl is asking if she is okay. Tom is still speaking.

Creatures… infinity… our minds have ceilings, Malorie… these things… they are beyond it… higher than it… out of reach… out of—

But here, Malorie faints.

Malorie wakes in her new bedroom. It is dark. For one blessed moment, the last one she experiences, Malorie wakes with the idea that all of this news about creatures and madness was only some nightmare. Foggily, she remembers Riverbridge, Tom, Victor, the drive, but none of it becomes clear until, staring at the ceiling, she realizes that she’s never woken in this room before.

And Shannon is still dead.

Sitting up in bed slowly, she looks to the room’s one window. A black blanket is nailed into the wall, keeping her safe from the outside world. Beyond her feet, there is an old vanity. Its pink color is faded but the mirror looks clean. In it, she is paler than usual. Because of this, her black hair looks even blacker. At the base of the mirror are extra nails, screws, a hammer, and a wrench. Except for her bed, this is the extent of the furnishings.

Rising, she swings her feet over the mattress’s edge and sees, on the gray-carpeted floor, a second black blanket, folded neatly. It’s a spare, she thinks. Beside it is a small stack of books.

Facing the bedroom’s door, Malorie hears voices coming from downstairs. She does not know these people yet, and she can’t place who is speaking unless it’s Cheryl, the only woman, or Tom, whose voice will guide her for years.

When she stands up, the carpet is coarse and old beneath her feet. She crosses the bedroom and peers into the hall. She feels okay. Rested. She’s not dizzy anymore. Wearing the same clothes she passed out in the night before, Malorie makes her way down the stairs to the living room.