Gregory Norris - Down with the Fallen - A Post-Apocalyptic Horror Anthology

“What about Mom and Dad?”

“I’m sorry, my darling, but the Quiet Space is for you alone. That’s the way it must be.”

“How do you know, Grandfather? Have you tried to let other people in?”

He snaps at me. He’s done it before, but not often. “Child! Do not question the path that has been prepared for you. Don’t bring insolence to your naivety.”

“I’m sorry, Grandfather. I love Mom and Dad…”

He wipes tears from my face and kisses my cheeks.

The doll is a messenger from Grandfather, I know it. I need him more than ever. Some days I hate him for leaving me alone to deal with this new life. I remember as he lay dying in the hospital, Grandfather told me the Change would come any day. I’d been hearing about the damn Change for so long that at twenty-one years of age, I was surprised he said “days.” It had always been “in the future,” or “when you’re older.”

I’m home from college to see Grandfather because they tell me he won’t be leaving the hospital. Though we talk every week, I’ve seen him less and less since attending school, Bowling Green State University. I think of his hospital room as Antarctica: a bright, frozen white space where a person can’t live for long. His appearance shocks me. He’s no longer the big room who hugged me away in his huge arms and barrel chest. Grandfather is a feeble shell of a man. I’m thinking the real Grandfather is hidden beneath this boney man tangled in tubes and rumpled bedsheets.

When I’m alone with him, he tells me, “I’ll give you a signal when it’s time to escape into the Quiet Space.” He can’t breathe on his own and one eye is open wider than the other. His lips are so dry and cracked they look like dead fruit about to fall from a tree.

“Grandfather, don’t leave me,” I request selfishly.

“Hush, darling,” he manages. “Your whole life you’ve been preparing for this.”

“Grandfather!” My voice is unrestrained, juvenile. I’m shivering, breathing out frost. “Please don’t leave me!”

But he does.

He leaves me in this frozen wasteland, heart iced over with gooseflesh from head to toe. I remember my daddy tells me it’s okay to cry. I tell him, “I won’t because Grandfather will always be with me and he’s prepared me for this.”

I return to college after the funeral but promise Mom and Dad I’d be back next weekend to check on them. That weekend, having early dinner with my parents in our Foursquare on Brine Street, the world cracks. I look down into my tomato soup and see Grandfather’s false teeth float to the surface. Laughing’s the only thing I think to do. “It’s time,” they say. Light outside our windows draws down, an instant sunset.

“What the heck?” Dad says.

Donut, our eight-year-old Lhasa Apso, emerges from under the table in a barking frenzy. I react like a well-trained soldier. I don’t even think to say goodbye to my parents—Dad at the dinner table, Mom carrying a plate—as I bolt from the room.

“Mia!” is the last thing I hear my father say as I stumble up the stairs, to Grandfather’s room, to the void. I’ve opened it many times under his watch, but never by myself. Through the semicircle window, the black sky lights up like a nuclear bomb detonating in heaven. The light flashes through the window and illuminates the attic like a thousand-watt bulb. A moment later, as I’m concentrating to open the void, God-thunder descends, raining down on the world and shaking the house. Before I can witness anything else, I surrender to the safe place prepared for me.

I’m crying in the void. In eternal quiet, serene darkness, I bawl. For days, or weeks, or months, I float in the void. I am disembodied without an environment to define me. I am here, nowhere, until the whispering voice of Grandfather tells me it is time to come out.

Grandfather’s room has an odd stillness—the way it felt when I first returned to it after his funeral. I don’t want to go downstairs but do. Down to the second floor where I sleep, then down to the first. The house smells like sulfur. My parents never left the dining room.

Motionless at the table, Daddy’s head rests sideways on his plate. His eyes and mouth are pits of ash. Thin gray smoke trails up from the pits. Mommy dropped into a sitting position on the floor, a shattered plate between her legs. Her eye sockets are smoldering, bits of ash tumble from her slack mouth. My screams shatter my own ears. I hear only heartbeats throbbing in each canal.

Outside, on Brine Street, the first body I see is Mr. Swiftleg’s. On the other side of the street, directly across from us, he’s slumped over his lawnmower, the handle of the machine jammed up his armpits. His face is tipped down to the mower, but I can tell by the ash spilling on the machine that he’s dead. So is little Carol, his daughter. She’s on the concrete steps of their porch with Barbie dolls at her feet. Locks of her golden-blond hair have blown into her ashy mouth, her tiny head is twisted sideways.

I go next door to the Fowlers. Janice Fowler is stretched out on her sidewalk. I put my hand up to her face and can feel heat from the flames still burning from down within, cooking her insides. And in the road, Kevin has fallen beneath the open door of his polished souped-up Mustang. He loves that car. He’s on the asphalt, the skin exposed by his muscle shirt is bubbled by heat.

I run to the park, not looking directly at the wrecked cars or fallen bags of groceries or kids under their bikes. Gramercy Park is a public morgue. I stand at the crest of the park looking out at a sea of bodies. A kid face down in the sandbox, and another bent up in the monkey bars like a spider’s prey. An old man on a bench, still holding a bag of seeds, has puked up soot. A girl at the swing set is being slow-dragged beneath her swing, her leg tangled in the chain above. I won’t look into the circle of baby strollers whose mothers are in a pile around them.

People laid out on blankets are burned by the sun on their outsides, while bones and organs are baked to ashen powder on their insides.

Everyone, everywhere.

I run flat-out all the way home, back up to Grandfather’s room, open the void and hide away from this new world of charred corpses and cry until I lose consciousness.

“Help me, my darling. Turn the pages while I read.”

Grandfather’s bad hand is in a slack fist. “I will read, you turn the pages.”

He reads me strange stories of ancient days and struggles of good and evil. Some of the things he says and the words he uses don’t make sense. He tells me that in time I will understand the words of this book and of my great purpose in the new world. He has me fetch his cane. He pushes its carved knob handle into his feeble right palm and tries to squeeze.

“Soon, this hand will be lost to me for good,” he sighs.

I replace the cane knob handle in his hand with my own small hand.

“You’ll still have my hands, Grandfather,” I say. He smiles as he kisses me.

I buried Mom and Dad in the backyard garden. They hardly weighed anything. When I accidently dropped Mom, her middle section came apart in a blast of ash. I put them in the dirt and I put that part of my life in there with them. Saved from the flames and born into the new world. The devastation happened months ago, yet bodies smolder long after. Eventually, most bodies dry up, crumble and blow away.

I text: Human dust fills my lungs with the memories of my beloved, my neighbors, and strangers. I press SEND. I keep my smartphone charged by my car charger. I still use it to play games, to look at photos, and as an organizer. And mainly to fire off texts to the farthest reaches of my address book. My messages in a digital bottle sent bobbing in a cyber ocean.