The Cabin at the End of the World(58)

Six


Eric


“You don’t have to worry about me doing anything. I’m not leaving this chair until it’s all over. Andrew—hey, you should check on Eric. Eric, are you okay? Listen, Andrew, we need to talk. I—I don’t know if this is over yet. We have to check. Andrew? Andrew?”

Leonard prattles on. His voice is a burring rumble, looping inside Eric’s skull while there’s certainly no room for Leonard in there at all. Eric feels worse than he did yesterday in the initial agonizing hours after he bounced his head off the floor. This second round of concussion symptoms is more intense. While breathing and seeing are bearable acts now, the pressure and pain before this most recent blackout was near blinding. His throat stings and his mouth tastes like puke. He doesn’t remember vomiting. He doesn’t remember sitting against the front door.

He remembers his hands holding and manipulating rope but not feeling it. He remembers walking and then crawling through a miasmic haze. He remembers the open doorway and the light as an amorphous, malicious entity, so bright it was impossible they all weren’t burned to cinders. He remembers being afraid it was coming to take Wen away if he didn’t shut the door. He remembers Wen sitting on her knees next to him as he untied his legs. He remembers a bang, and Wen falling away from him. He remembers seeing her face and knowing she was gone. He remembers praying in his head please, God, no over and over, and maybe he was screaming it, too.

Leonard is still talking, as fuzzy as an old recording. “Eric? You should take it slow, Eric.”

Outside the sky has turned cloudy, overcast, as gray as November rain. Eric sits with his back against the front door, barricading the cabin, preventing the terror of the light from reentry.

A few steps away Leonard is tied to a chair. A thin trickle of blood leaks down the left side of his face. There is more blood on the cabin floor, dark swollen ponds of it. One tributary leads away from the middle of the floor to Adriane’s body, which lies perpendicular to the screen slider. A gaggle of flies, as black as crows, flitter on and off her body; some flies linger on her neck and others spiral over her white mask and bounce madly off the screen door and kitchen windows. To Eric’s left and on the floor in front of Wen’s bedroom is a spread-out comforter. Thick and puffy, its light green has gone darker in the spots where it absorbs Wen’s blood. Andrew is sitting on the couch, his head is down, and his hair hangs in front of his face like the leaves and branches of a weeping willow. His arms vine underneath Wen’s body draped across his lap. She is swathed tightly in their flannel bedsheet. Queen-sized, there is enough material to transform her body into an oblong, formless cocoon, a chrysalis from which she will not emerge. The sheet is white and decorated with clusters of small blue flowers; they brought the flannel set from home in case it got cold in the cabin.

Eric says, “Andrew. Andrew?” He flashes to another time, lost but not forgotten, when Andrew was sitting like this and he smiled, held a finger to lips, and mouthed shh, she’s asleep.

Eric says, “Let’s get in the SUV and go.”

“They slashed the tires.”

“Drive on the flat tires then. It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s not going to make it.”

“We can try.”

Andrew speaks in sentences made of broken glass. “The SUV won’t get far. We can try, but it won’t make it all the way out to the main road. Might not even make it out of the driveway. Maybe we can find their car, which has to be parked somewhere on the road, right? Leonard doesn’t have keys on him, neither does Adriane. I checked. Even if we find keys, we’re still going to have to walk the dirt road. Some. All of it.”

“Then we’ll walk.” When Eric talks, the volume of the flies’ buzzing increases, a dangerous, collective thrumming, a warning so loud he wonders if a bee’s nest isn’t stirred up somewhere. Two flies, as plump as thumb heads, land on Leonard’s face. Leonard doesn’t so much as twitch as the flies explore his skin.

“Eric?”

“Huh? Okay. Yeah. I’m here.” Eric sits up straighter, catching himself from slouching and sliding away into the black-hole center of the cabin.

Andrew says, “We’ll go when you are ready.”

“I’m ready now.”

“Sabrina is still out there somewhere, and she has her weapon. I’m out of bullets. There’re more in the trunk. One of us has to carry Wen.”

“We’re not leaving her here.”

“Never. She’s coming with us. Wherever we go.”

Eric says, “Okay, come on, I’m ready.” Eric presses his body against the door and grinds himself into an upright position.

Leonard says, “Wait, please, wait! Before you go, you have to turn on the TV. Listen: Adriane’s dead so we have to turn on the TV and see what’s happening. See if there’s anything happening. Like we did yesterday, after Redmond. He died and we turned on the TV and we saw the cities drowning like I said we would. So we have to turn on the TV now. We have to see if—” Leonard pauses with his mouth open, like he cannot believe what came out of his mouth. Then repeats, “We have to see if—” and stops again.

Neither Andrew nor Eric asks for further explanation. Andrew’s head is down again, making a hermit’s cave out of himself.