Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 07:59:56 MDT From: Robyn Meta Herrington Subject: SUB: CONTEST: Ya Gotta Believe Another one. Sink thy fangs into this.... Critiques to ME: rmherrin@acs.ucalgary.ca Robyn-------------------------------------------------- Ya Gotta Believe Grace bustled through the kitchen door and stared in sur- prise at the three gathered around the kitchen table. "You _do_ realize that it's nearly sundown, don't you?" She ges- tured toward the early evening light that slanted through the kitchen window. Her question hardly produced a glance of acknowledgment. "I see your quarter, and raise you a quarter." Dix tossed a coin into the small pile in the middle of the table. "Hello? You guys listening?" Grace put her canvas bag on the counter and stepped to the table. She saw that Brian held three aces, and was about to win the hand. "You guys got chores to do, right _now_." She tapped on the table with her fingertips. Sometimes she felt as though she were their mother, although she was only twenty-one, and if the truth were known, Dix was old enough to have fathered all of them. In the old days, before They had taken over, Grace wouldn't have considered speaking to someone who looked like Dix, let alone imagine that she'd have lived in the same house. He was perhaps forty, the deep lines around his eyes and leathery skin suggesting time spent in the elements. He'd found her, scared and half-starved, in the stacks at the Pub- lic Library, just before nightfall, two months earlier. "Kinda late for an unescorted lady to be out alone." Grace had looked up from her seat below the cookbook section into the bluest eyes she'd ever seen. She'd only stared at him, not trusting her voice to speak, or really believing that there was another human being stand- ing in front of her. By that time, she'd been hiding so long, sleeping during the day and hiding at night, that she be- lieved herself to be the only human left in the city. She looked at his outstretched hand as if it might disappear at any second. "My name's Dix. Dix Davis." He smiled, showing perfectly white teeth that, while slightly crooked, were perfectly even. "And you are?" He glanced around the deserted library. "Let me guess. You're the librarian. In charge of returns and keeping the kids quiet in the afternoon." He smiled at her again, and she marveled at the blueness of his eyes. This time when he offered his hand she allowed herself to be pulled up off the gray-carpeted floor. "I'm Grace Randall. I don't work here." Dix stared at her, eyebrows raised, as if expecting her to go on. When she didn't, he'd nodded. "Yeah, well, okay. So what _are_ you doing?" She'd explained that she'd come to the library to look for a cookbook with recipes for the grill, and they'd laughed at the coincidence. He'd come for the same reason. He'd taken her, seated unsteadily on the back of his white, '57 Harley-Davidson panhead, to the house on Casaloma where he showed her the sheets of fiberglass he'd collected, and explained his idea for the crucifixes. "What good will crucifixes do?" she'd asked him. "You gotta believe, man." He grinned and went on. "We'll attach 'em to the fiberglass panels and then put the panels over the windows. They hate cricifixes." She'd slept dreamlessly that night, for the first time in four weeks. Grace rapped the tabletop with her knuckles. "Come on, you guys." "Yeah, in a minute." Lita spoke around the toothpick in her mouth. She scrubbed a hand over her bleached blonde hair. "Hand's almost over." She tossed a quarter into the pot. "Alright, Dix, whatcha got that yer so proud of?" Dix laid his hand on the table, two pair. Kings and queens. He grinned and reached for the pot, but the smile disap- peared when he saw the hand that Brian laid down. "Whaddya, got a shamrock up yer ass?' He scraped his chair away from the table in disgust. "I got shit to do anyway." He stomped into the other room, the chain on his wallet jingling with each step. Grace started to remind him of exactly what he was sup- posed to do, but thought better of it. Instead, she squeezed Brian's shoulder lightly, a gesture not lost on Lita, who rolled her eyes in distaste. Grace turned away from the table and began removing things from the canvas bag she'd left on the kitchen counter. The precious few dented metal cans of fruits and vegetables that she'd been able to find were stored in the cupboard. Provisions were getting harder and harder to come by; there wasn't any fresh meat to be had at all, and the only fresh vegetables were those that they picked from the few wildly overgrown garden plots around the city. Grace didn't think it was because there were so many others like themselves out there. She believed that They were also stockpiling canned and dehydrated foods, as feed for their herd. A small bottle of dish detergent went under the cupboard, and two rolls of toilet tissue, different brands and colors, along with a bottle of roll-on deodorant, were set aside to be taken into the bathroom later. She slipped a small, foil-wrapped object from the bottom of the bag into the front pocket of her jeans, then hung the canvas bag on a nail next to the back door. Lita had left the table, and Grace could hear her talking to Dix as they attached the heavy fiberglass shutters to the living room windows, telling him again how much she admired Grace for going out alone during the day. Grace shook her head in sympathy. The poor thing had been terrified to leave the house, even during broad day- light, since she'd joined them in the little house a week earlier. She spent most days drowsing in the small bedroom that she shared with Grace, earphones from a small Walkman clamped to her head. Brian remained at the table, studying his cards. Grace sat in the chair that Lita had vacated. "You all right?" Grace tried to look into Brian's eyes, but he wouldn't meet her gaze. She touched his hand. "What's wrong?" Brian snatched his hand away, startling Grace, and looked at her distractedly. The look in his eyes made her uneasy, it was as though he didn't recognize her. He looked about to speak, but suddenly pushed away from the table and walked swiftly from the room, leaving Grace to stare after him, a bewildered look on her face. He'd been so withdrawn over the past few days, so different than when they'd met. And he'd started disappearing during the day, often for hours at a time. She often wondered where he went, and wished he'd ask her to go along. Grace knew immediately what had drawn her to Brian, that day almost two months ago. She and Dix had been out, combing the city for provisions. They'd been on Main Street, searching the looted and ransacked stores for any- thing that might be of use. The basement of the little ranch on Casaloma was beginning to look like a department store stockroom. Dix had touched her forearm, then nodded si- lently to the storefront window of the drugstore, which they had just been about to enter. "Let's go look in there." He'd spoken just a bit louder than was necessary, as if for the benefit of an unseen audience. They walked into the small gift shop next to the drugstore. Grace's eyes silently quizzed Dix as he ushered her quickly into the store, but he kept glancing behind them. "What is it? Is someone out there? It's daylight...Dix!" She'd jerked her arm out of his grasp. "What is _wrong_ with you?" He'd guided her to the rear of the little gift shop, stepping over the shards of broken ceramic figurines and shredded straw wreathes. When they reached the door of the small room marked "Employee's Restroom", he pushed her inside and closed the door behind them. She'd opened her mouth to ask again what the hell was wrong with him, and was surprised when he'd laid his callused fingers across her lips. He drew a pistol from beneath his leather jacket, motioned her into the corner behind the door, then, in one motion, flung it open and grasped the pistol in both hands, aiming it into the main room of the little shop. Time was suspended for a few moments, then Dix backped- aled a few steps and collapsed on the toilet, laughing uncon- trollably, the pistol hanging between his knees. She stared at him, perplexed, then peeked around the corner of the open door to see a man, spread-eagled on the floor in front of the small bathroom. He lay there, not speaking, his body trembling. Grace threw the plastic bag full of towels that she'd been carrying at Dix's head. "You asshole," she spat, as she rushed to kneel next to the prone figure. "You scared the hell out of him." Dix gestured to the puddle that was spreading around the other man's body. "More like I scared the piss outta him." He roared with laughter, then slammed the door shut. "Christ, I'm gonna piss m'_self_." Grace turned her atten- tion to the man who hadn't voluntarily moved a muscle since the door had opened, and tried not to listen as Dix re- lieved himself behind the closed door. Grace had laid her fingers on the other man's shoulder and he'd jerked away from her touch. "Are you alright?" Her voice was compassionate. He slowly turned his head and Grace found herself staring into the face of her dead husband. She gasped and sat down with a thud on the carpet covered floor. Tears splashed out of her eyes, and she reached one hand toward the stranger's face. He flinched away and sat up. His handsome face reddened with embarrassment as he looked at the ammonia-scented puddle that he sat in. "It's okay," Grace said gently. "We're all afraid." She nod- ded toward the blackish puddle. Getting a better look at the man, she realized that he didn't so much look like Craig as she'd first thought. In fact, except for the color of his hair and the shape of his jaw, there wasn't much of a resem- blance, at all. Dix opened the door and walked out of the small bathroom to stand between them. He extended his hand to help the other man up. "Hey, I'm sorry, man," he said, as the other stood. "I was just as scared as you were." When the other man was on his feet, Dix shook his hand. "Name's Dix Davis." He grinned. "Take yer best shot, man. I got it comin'." The other man stared at Dix for a moment, his eyes unread- able, then smiled. "Nah. I'm just glad you didn't shoot." He dropped Dix's hand and stepped over to Grace. "I'm okay." His voice was soft, his hand on her cheek softer. "_It's_ okay...really." He stepped back and spoke to them both. "My name is Brian Fairfax. Are there any more of you-- us?" After the evening chores were done, the windows covered and bolted, their meager supper eaten and the dishes washed, the four of them, a more dissimilar group couldn't have been imagined, gathered around the table. They weren't interacting, but were immersed in their individual interests. Grace worked a bit of cross-stitch she'd started a few weeks earlier, a copy of the Lord's Prayer in pale blue floss. Lita, her nose buried in a paperback, hummed tune- lessly along with the CD that played in the battery-operated boombox, and Dix worked a crossword puzzle, his pen fly- ing across the page, his tongue caught between his teeth in the classic hard-thinking pose. Only Brian, staring into space again, had nothing to keep his hands, and his mind, busy. Grace opened her mouth to suggest that maybe the two of them could play a game of cribbage, but the memory of the way he'd looked at her earlier in the day changed her mind. He stood, giving her a start and started to speak, his words directed at no one in particular. "We may as well just give up, you know. They're gonna get us all anyway. They've gotten almost everyone else. We'd probably be better off just letting them in." His voice was dead, as dead as the rest of their lives, as dead as the people they'd once known, the lives they'd once led. Dix looked up from his crossword puzzle. "What the hell is wrong with you?" He regarded Brian as if he'd grown an extra ear. "Are you nuts? You wanna live like them?" He shook his disgustedly and went on. "Sleepin' all day, suckin' the life outta people...uh-uh, that ain't for me." He tossed his puzzle book on the table and stalked out of the only lit room in the house. The little ranch was situated in the middle of what had once been a newer development in Normal, Illinois. Normal, what a joke that was. Nothing had been normal, had been right, in Normal, or anywhere else, for far too long. Grace went back to her needlework, but her mind wasn't on the small, intricate stitches. Images from the past skittered around in her head, like acts from a badly directed play. She saw herself with the stake in her hand, though it turned out that wooden stakes didn't really kill them, just held them immobile until their heads could be removed. That was the only way to truly destroy them. She saw the rusty hacksaw, then saw Craig's head in a puddle of black, brackish blood. She saw the head, that had once rested on the shoulders of her handsome young husband, implode upon itself, leaving nothing but a set of teeth laying on the pillow of their bed. "I wonder what it's like?" Lita's voice was soft, pondering. "Do you think it hurts?" Her book, a Danielle Steel novel, lay face down on the table in front of her. It wasn't exactly the type of book Grace would have expected the punkish looking girl to enjoy. Lita, seventeen, had come to them one evening the week be- fore. She'd screamed and cried outside the iron shuttered windows until, against their better judgment, they'd let her in. She was tall, thin to the point of gauntness, with pale white skin, and her short spiky hair, less than an inch long all over her head, had been bleached to the consistency and color of a ninety year old woman's hair. Ten surgical steel studs ran up the curve of her left ear; a lightweight silver chain was connected between the silver hoop in the opposite ear to a matching hoop in her right nostril. She'd stared at them, the fear and terror radiating off her body in waves, as they stared back, weapons in hand. "So...what?" Her voice, though trembling, had been thick with attempted sarcasm and bravado. "You gonna try to kill me too?" "Smile." Dix's voice was hard. He held a small McCullough chain saw lightly in one hand, dangling at his side. Lita's voice was puzzled, the look on her face confused. "What?" Her had eyes skittered from Dix's face to Grace's, then Brian's, looking for an answer. "What!?" "Smile, bitch, or your head is gonna roll." Dix made small gesture with the Mac. She'd bared her teeth in a death-faced rictus. The were small, white...and even. Her incisors were as flat edged as a ruler. Dix had apologized then, as Grace took her arm and led her to the table. They discovered she'd been running from Them for four nights, that They'd been chasing her like hounds to the fox, since discovering her hiding place in the local K-Mart. She'd been drawn to the little ranch house on Casaloma by the crucifix-encrusted shutters. The crucifixes had been Dix's idea. Brian, Dix, and Grace had spent one whole day, shortly after they'd found each other, combing the seemingly deserted town searching for the religious symbols. It was that day that they'd realized there were few, if any, humans left in Normal, Illinois. A scratching noise brought Grace out of her reverie. It was the crucifixes, scraping back and forth across the fiberglass shutters, although there hadn't been a hint of a breeze that evening. She glanced at Dix, not daring to move, then at Lita, who was staring at the window over the kitchen sink, eyes wide. Brian jumped up and rushed to the sink. He leaned over, listening. "Let them in, they need help." His voice was qui- etly eager. He turned to look at the others, gathered around the Formica tabletop. His eyes were wide, wild. "It's one of us, you know. Let them _in_." He turned back toward the window, and Dix was at his back, moving quicker than Grace thought possible. "If you touch that window, I'll gut ya like a deer." Dix spoke quietly, almost conversationally, but the grim look on his face illustrated the truth in his words. He grasped Brian's arm, just above the elbow, and steered him away from the window. He's lost his mind, Grace realized with a shock, as she watched Dix lead Brian back to the table, and seat him as if he were a child. The consideration in Dix's touch wasn't lost on her, and she realized what she must've known all along. She'd been attracted to Brian only because of his re- semblance, however marginal, to Craig. She'd overlooked his increasingly strange behavior, blamed it on the stress that they'd all been under. In all likelihood he'd been on his way to derangement long before they'd met. She touched the bulge of the foil-wrapped condom in the front pocket of her jeans, and silently mourned the loss of what might have been. She realized Lita was staring at her, the look on her face unreadable, and her own face burned with embarrassment. "Whatever was out there is gone. For now." Dix stood in front of the sink, head bowed, eyes closed in concentration. Grace marveled at the length of his eyelashes, resting on the curve of his cheek, then felt her face flame anew. She glanced at Lita, relieved to see that she was also looking at Dix and hadn't seen the desperation, the absolute need for some type of human contact that Grace was feeling inside. When she could trust herself to speak, Grace asked, "What do you think it was?" "I think they're playin' with us." Dix lit a Marlboro ciga- rette and tucked the red cardboard box back into the pocket of the denim shirt he wore beneath his black leather vest. "They know we're in here, probably pretty sure there ain't many of us." He glanced at Brian, who gazed at the shut- tered window in utter fascination. "They might even be able to tell what we're feelin' or what we're thinkin." He pulled a chair away from the table, flipped it around to face him, and straddled it. "I remember reading one time, right after the government finally admitted that They were real, about how They could _smell_ human emotion." He glanced at Lita, then Grace. "You know, like fear, or anger. Maybe They can smell it when somebody gives up, too." Dix took a deep drag off his cigarette, and stared pensively at Brian. "I remember readin' something else." He stroked the two-day growth of beard on his chin. "I read that there might be humans helpin' 'Em. That article said that maybe there were humans out there that didn't give a shit about other humans. Humans that _admired_ Them." Grace's eyes had been riveted to Brian's face as Dix spoke. If they hadn't been, she would've missed the almost imper- ceptible catch of his breath, the widening of his pupils. Dix hadn't missed them either. He leapt across the table and grabbed a fistful of Brian's hair with one hand, jerking Brian's head back so that he gazed, upside down, into Dix's eyes. In his right hand, Dix held his hunting knife. Grace realized his earlier consideration toward Brian hadn't been thoughtful, it had been cautious. "How 'bout it, Sparky?" Dix forced the words between his clenched teeth. "Wanna go for a walk?" Dix spoke calmly as he held Brian's right arm at an impos- sible angle behind his back, and aimed him toward the back door, the knife still at his throat. "I been following Sparky here, for the past week or so." He spoke into Brian's ear, as if he were telling him a secret. "Wanna know where he goes, ladies? _I_ know where he goes. Over to the bank on Seymour Street. Yeah, the First National Bank of Them." Brian's eyes were bulging in ter- ror, but he didn't speak, didn't try to defend himself. Dix went on. "I couldn't figure out who he was meeting, but it didn't take me long to figure out that it was other humans. There's regular meetings there, ain't there, Sparky?" He jerked Brian's head back. "_Their_ humans, the one's that hunt the rest of us down during the day. See, we were getting too smart for 'Em. We had brains enough to hole up for the night, protect ourselves. And They couldn't get to us during the day. Could they?" Dix mashed Brian's face against the back door. "So They had other humans," he spat the words, like they tasted bad, "find us. Then one way or the other, they fed us to Them. Our own fucking kind...you piece of shit." He slammed Brian into the door again. "Well, you're outta here." Brian spoke then. "You may as well give up." He tried to smile, but it was more of a grimace. "They're smarter than you. They'll get you all eventually." He rolled his eyes in their sockets, looking like a snake-shy horse. "And I'll be there with them." Dix motioned to Lita to open the door and stand behind it. "Go on, Grace, you, too." Grace stood beside Lita and gripped the other girl's hand tightly when she slid it into her own. "You'll be with 'Em, alright," Dix muttered as he drew the blade of the hunting knife across Brian's throat and simulta- neously shoved him out onto the back stoop. He slammed the door shut and screamed in rage and hor- ror. Lita knelt on the floor, Grace sprawled across her lap, two small holes near her carotid artery. Lita's eyes glittered blackly as she laughed. "You fucking fool...it's a bank. A blood bank. He was bringing me food." Dix gestured at the crucifix around Grace's neck. "But...but--" The words wouldn't come, were stuck in his throat. Lita glanced down at the little gold cross. It was attached to a gold chain that was now covered in thick red blood. "This?" She grabbed the necklace and yanked it savagely from Grace's throat. "Ya gotta believe, man." She cackled wildly, the blood glistening on her newly descended inscisors, then her face grew serious. "And I don't." =================================================================== -------+++++++-------+++++++ +++++++-------+++++++------- Robyn Herrington Operations Manager, Microforms Services University of Calgary, MacKimmie Library Ph: (403)220-6903 http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rmherrin rmherrin@acs.ucalgary.ca -------+++++++-------+++++++--------------+++++++-------+++++++-------