The Cabin at the End of the World(16)

Andrew ducks into the kitchen and closes and latches the window above the sink. Are all the other windows closed? The ones in the bedrooms are big enough for someone to climb through. He opens drawers looking for knives, the biggest ones they have. They’ll need knives, right? They’ll need something. He says, “Make sure the bedroom windows are closed and covered.”

“Oh, shit, hey—”

“What?”

“The basement stairs. What do we do about those?” That open rectangular hole in the floor and its stairs that circle and drain down below . . .

Leonard shouts from somewhere outside, no longer at the front door, but toward the bathroom/kitchen side. “Come on, guys, you can open the doors! Please don’t do this! We’re not trying to scare you! We’re not here to harm you!”

“Cops are on the way, and if you set one foot in here, I’ll shoot!” Andrew leaves the kitchen without taking anything with him. Eric stands in the middle of the room transfixed by the basement stairs.

Andrew jogs over and grabs Eric’s arm. He whispers, “Is the basement door locked?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. Wen and I opened the door earlier, and we both went outside, and I—I don’t remember if we locked it after. I don’t think we did. The door might even be wide open.”

“Should we go down and check?”

They gravitate to the emptied center of the common room. They listen. There might be the sound of someone walking lightly in the basement and there might not.

“Maybe.” Eric looks around the cabin. “Or maybe we clog up the top, so even if they come in through the basement they can’t come all the way up the stairs.”

They carry the love seat over and Andrew already knows it’s too light to be any kind of barrier. Maybe it’s enough to slow a couple of them down if they were to come up through the basement and it would give him, Eric, and Wen enough time to flee the cabin through the front door and get to the SUV. They could fight off one or two of them on the way, too, he thinks, but not all four. The closer Andrew gets to the mouth of the stairs, the more anxiety hot-wires his system and he envisions hands shooting up out of the darkness and clutching their ankles to pull them down, down, down.

Eric says, “Here, tilt it toward me a little. We can wedge the feet inside the railing and the fence.”

Andrew fears the love seat is too small and will tumble down the stairs, but it jams up against the railing a foot or so below the plane of the main room floor like Eric said it would. It’s in there tight, too. Andrew runs back and grabs the kitchen table to add to the stopped-up staircase. Of course now he’s thinking maybe they shouldn’t block off a possible escape route. Plus there’s all kinds of stuff in the basement they could use as weapons or barricades and now they can’t get to any of it. Up here there isn’t much with which to defend themselves, certainly not anything with the reach and menace of what the strangers are carrying.

Andrew places the table on top of the love seat. Two of the legs fit in the empty space between the wall, floor, and wrought-iron rail, and the other two legs are propped awkwardly on the love seat. He pushes down on the table hard enough that the middle of the table cracks and bends inward.

Eric goes to the hearth and the woodburning stove and plucks the pewter metal poker and tongs from the basket. He says, “Take this,” and gives Andrew the poker.

The metal is cold and, instead of emboldening, it feels as useless as a handful of sand. He looks around the room for something, anything else but sees only the brittle museum-piece skis and poles and other useless kitsch on the walls.

Eric retrieves the tin mesh basket of fire logs and drops it next to the staircase.

“What are you doing with those?”

“We can—I don’t know—hit them with the logs?” He points at the bin like the log defense is self-explanatory. He mimes throwing logs down the stairs and then tries to hide a dawning sheepish smile.

“Right. Hell yeah, we’re gonna hit ’em with logs.”

Andrew and Eric fall into bright, quick bursts of we-shouldn’t-be-laughing laughter. Tears ring Andrew’s eyes as fear and the numbness of this irreality momentarily give way to absurdity.

Eric wipes his face and composes himself quicker than Andrew does. “Hey, Wen. Come on over with us, okay, honey?”

She doesn’t ask what is so funny and she walks mechanically across the room, her eyes focused on the furniture-topped basement stairs.

Andrew pulls Eric close and whispers so that Wen won’t hear him. “If they really try to come in here, I say we make a run for the SUV. Right out the front door. I’ll go out first and hold them up so you and Wen can make it. If I don’t get to the SUV with you, you two leave anyway and get help.” Andrew reaches in his pocket for the keys.

Eric says, “No. Stop it. Don’t give those to me. If we leave, we all leave together.”

Wen tugs on Eric’s arm and asks, “Daddy, can I have something to hold, too?”

The back deck reverberates with footsteps. One of the four is walking loudly, purposefully.

“Daddy, can I have something, please?”

“Yes. Yes, you can.” Andrew quickly goes to the woodburning stove and returns with the minishovel.

Wen holds it like a softball bat and takes a practice swing. She spins around on her back heel and Andrew has to sidestep to dodge being inadvertently hit in the knee. Neither Andrew nor Eric tells her to be careful.