Descent by Jay Bonansinga
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” April paces the living room, chewing her fingernails, while the others sit around the room, watching her. Tara is in the bedroom, at her father’s bedside. “Without medical attention, what chance does he have?”
“Has anything like this ever happened before?”
“He’s had trouble breathing before but nothin’ like this.” April stops pacing. “God, I knew this day was gonna come.” She wipes her eyes, which are moist with tears. “We’re on the last tank of oxygen.”
Philip asks about medication.
“We got his medicine, sure, but that ain’t gonna do him much good now. He needs a doctor. Stubborn old coot blew off his last appointment a month ago.”
“What do we have in the way of medical supplies?” Philip asks her.
“I don’t know, we got some shit from upstairs, antihistamines and shit.” April paces some more. “We got first-aid kits. Big deal. This is serious. I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”
“Let’s stay calm and think this thing through.” Philip wipes his mouth. “He’s resting peacefully now, right? His airways are clear. You never know, something like this … he could bounce back.”
“But what if he doesn’t?” She stops moving and looks at him. “What if he doesn’t bounce back?”
Philip gets up and goes over to her. “Listen. We gotta keep our heads clear.” He pats her shoulder. “We’ll keep a close watch on him, we’ll figure something out. He’s a tough old bird.”
“He’s a tough old bird who’s dying,” April says, a single tear tracking down her face.
“You don’t know that,” Philip says, wiping the tear from her cheek.
She looks at him. “Good try, Philip.”
“Come on.”
“Good try.” She looks away, her crestfallen expression as desolate as a death mask. “Good try.”
* * *
That night, the Chalmers girls sit watch at their father’s bedside, their chairs drawn up on either side of the bed, a battery-powered lantern painting the old man’s pallid face in pale light. The apartment is as cold as a meat locker. April can see Tara’s breath across the room.
The old man lies there for most of the night in stony repose, his hollow cheeks contracting periodically with his labored breathing. The grizzled whiskers of his chin look like metal filings, shifting in a magnetic field, moving occasionally with the tics of his stricken nervous system. Every once in a while his dry, cracked lips will begin to work impotently, trying to form a word. But other than little dry puffs of air, nothing comes out.
At some point in the wee hours, April notices that Tara has dozed off, her head down on the edge of the bed. April grabs a spare blanket and carefully drapes it over her sister. She hears a voice.
“Lil?”
It’s coming from the old man. His eyes are still closed, but his mouth is working furiously, his expression furrowed with anger. Lil is short for Lillian, David’s late wife. April hasn’t heard the nickname in years.
“Daddy, it’s April,” she whispers, touching his cheek. He recoils, his eyes still closed. His mouth is contorted, his voice slurred and drunken with nerve damage on one side of his face.
“Lil, get the dogs in! There’s a storm comin’—a big one—a nor’easter!”
“Daddy, wake up,” April whispers softly. Emotion wells up inside her.
“Lil, where are you?”
“Daddy?”
Silence.
“Daddy?”
At this point, Tara is sitting up, blinking, startled at the sound of her father’s strangled voice. “What’s going on?” she says, rubbing her eyes.
“Daddy?”
The silence continues, the old man’s breaths coming hard and fast now.
“Da—”
The word sticks in April’s throat as she sees something horrible crossing the old man’s face. His eyelids flick open to half-mast, the whites of his eyes showing, and he begins to speak in an alarmingly clear voice: “The devil has plans for us.”
In the gloomy half-light of the lantern, the two sisters exchange mortified glances.
The voice that comes out of David Chalmers is low and gravelly, an engine dieseling: “The day of reckoning is drawing near … the Deceiver walks among us.”
He falls silent, his head lolling to one side of the pillow as if the wires to his brain have been abruptly cut.
Tara checks his pulse.
She looks at her sister.
April looks at her father’s face, his expression now slackened and relaxed into a sanguine, tranquil mask of deep and endless sleep.
* * *
With the morning’s light, Philip stirs in his sleeping bag on the living room floor. He sits up and rubs his sore neck, his joints stiff from the cold. For a moment, he lets his eyes adjust to the gloomy light, and he orients himself to his surroundings. He sees Penny on the sofa, cocooned in blankets, sound asleep. He sees Nick and Brian across the room, also encased in blankets, also asleep. The memory of the previous evening’s deathwatch returns to Philip in stages, the agonizing, hopeless struggle to help the old man and to assuage April’s fears.
He glances across the room. In the shadows of the adjacent hallway, the door to the master bedroom is visible in the gloom, still closed.
Climbing out of his sleeping bag, Philip hurriedly and silently gets dressed. He pulls on his pants and pushes on his boots. He runs fingers through his hair and goes into the kitchen to rinse his mouth out. He hears the murmur of voices behind the walls. He goes over to the bedroom door and listens. He hears Tara’s voice.
She’s praying.
Philip knocks softly.
A moment later, the door clicks open and April is standing there, looking as though someone threw acid in her eyes. They are so bloodshot and wet that they look scourged. “’Morning,” she says in a low whisper.
“How’s he doing?”
Her lips tremble. “He ain’t.”
“What?”
“He’s gone, Philip.”
Philip stares at her. “Aw God…” He swallows hard. “I’m real sorry, April.”
“Yeah, well.”
She starts to cry. After an awkward moment—a wave of contrary emotions punching through Philip’s gut—he pulls her into an embrace. He holds her, and he strokes the back of her head. She trembles in his arms like a lost child. Philip doesn’t know what to say. Over April’s shoulder, he can see into the room.
Tara Chalmers is kneeling by the deathbed, praying silently, her head down on the tangled linen. One of her hands is lying on the cold, gnarled hand of her late father. For some reason that Philip can’t figure out, he finds it difficult to take his eyes off the sight of the girl’s hand caressing the bloodless fingers of the dead.
* * *
“I can’t get her to come out of there.” April is sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of weak, tepid tea brewed on a Sterno can. Her eyes are clear for the first time since she came out of the death room that morning. “Poor thing … I think she’s trying to pray him back to life.”
“No shame in that,” Philip says. He sits across the table from her, a half-eaten bowl of rice in front of him. He has no appetite.
“Have you thought about what you want to do?” Brian asks from across the kitchen. He stands at the sink where he’s pouring water, which was collected from some of the toilets upstairs, into filter canisters.
The sounds of Nick and Penny playing cards in the other room drift in.
April looks up at Brian. “Do about what?”
“Your father … you know … like, burialwise?”
April sighs. “You’ve been through this before, haven’t you?” she says to Philip.
Philip looks at his uneaten rice. He has no idea if she’s talking about Bobby Marsh or Sarah Blake, both of whose deaths Philip recounted to April the other night. “Yes, ma’am, that’s true.” He looks at her. “Whatever you want to do, we’ll help you do it.”
&
“We’ll do it together,” Philip says. “We’ll do it right and proper.”
April looks down, a tear falling into her tea. “I hate this.”
“We gotta stick together,” Philip says without much conviction. He says it because he doesn’t know what else to say.
April wipes her eyes. “There’s a patch of ground out back under the—”
A sharp noise from the hallway interrupts, and all heads turn.
A muffled thump is followed by a crash, the sound of furniture overturning.
Philip is out of his chair before the others even realize that the noise is coming from behind the closed door of the master bedroom.
THIRTEEN
Philip kicks the door open. Advent candles on the floor. The carpet burning in places. The smoky air vibrating with screams. A blur of movement smears across the darkness and it takes breathless nanoseconds for Philip to realize what he’s looking at in the flickering shadows.
The overturned dresser—the source of the crashing noise—has landed inches away from Tara, who’s on the floor, crawling with animal instinct, trying desperately to pull herself free of the vise grip of dead fingers on her legs.
Dead fingers?
At first, just for an instant, Philip figures something got in through a window, but then he sees the withered form of David Chalmers—completely turned now—on the floor, on top of Tara’s legs, digging yellowed fingernails into her flesh. The old man’s sunken face is livid now, the color of mold, his eyes frosted with glassy-white cataracts. He snarls with a ravenous guttural groan.
Tara manages to extricate herself and struggles to her feet, and then slams sideways into the wall.
Right then, many things happen at once: Philip realizes what’s going on, and that he left his gun in the kitchen, and that he has a limited amount of time to eradicate this threat.
That is the key—the fact that the kindly old mandolin player is long gone—and what this is, this hulking mass of dead tissue rising up and growling a garbled, drooling cry, is a threat. More than the flames licking across the carpet, more than the smoke—already forming a nightmarish haze in the room—this thing that has materialized inside their sanctuary is the biggest threat.
A threat to all of them.
At this same moment, before Philip has a chance to even move, the others arrive, filling the open doorway. April lets out an anguished yelp—not really a scream, more like a shriek of pain, like an animal getting gut shot. She pushes her way into the room, but Brian grabs her and holds her back. April writhes in his arms.
All this happens in the space of an instant as Philip sees the bat.
In all the excitement on the previous night, April had left her Hank Aaron autographed metal baseball bat in the corner by the barred window. Now it sits gleaming in the flickering flames, maybe fifteen feet away from Philip. There is no time to consider the distance or even map out a maneuver in his mind. All he has time to do is make a lunge across the room.
By this point, Nick has whirled around and is racing across the apartment for his gun. Brian tries to pull April out of the room, but she’s strong and she’s frantic and she’s screaming now.
It takes Philip mere seconds to cover the distance between the door and the bat. But in that brief span of time, the thing that was once David Chalmers goes for Tara. Before the large woman can get her bearings and flee the room, the dead man is upon her.
Cold, gray fingers ply themselves awkwardly toward her throat. She slams back against the wall, flailing at it, trying to push it away. Rotting jaws part, rancid breath wafting up in her face. Blackened teeth gape open. The thing goes for the pale, fleshy curve of her jugular.
Tara shrieks, but before the teeth have a chance to make contact, the bat comes down.
* * *
Up until this moment—especially for Philip—the act of vanquishing a moving corpse had become an almost perfunctory deed, as mechanical and obligatory as stunning a pig for the slaughter. But this feels different. It takes only three sharp blows.
The first one—a hard crack to the back temporal region of David Chalmers’s skull—stiffens the zombie and arrests its progress toward Tara’s neck. She slips to the floor in a paroxysm of tears and snot.
The second blow strikes the side of the skull as the thing is involuntarily turning toward its attacker, the tempered steel of the bat caving in the parietal bone and part of the nasal cavity, sending threads of pink matter into the air.
The third and final whack totals the entire left hemisphere of its skull as the thing is falling—the sound like a head of cabbage smashed in a drill press. The monster that was David Chalmers lands in a wet heap on one of the spilled candles, the ribbons of drool, blood, and gluey gray tissue hitting the flames and sizzling across the floor.
Philip stands over the body, out of breath, his hands still welded to the bat. Almost as punctuation to the horror, a high-pitched beeping noise begins to shrill. Battery-operated fire alarms across the first floor are loudly chirping, and it takes Philip a second to identify the sounds in his ringing ears. He drops the bloody bat.
And that is when he notices the difference. This time, after this extermination, nobody moves. April stares from the doorway. Brian releases his grip on her, and he too gapes. Even Tara, sitting up against the wall across the room, gripped in tears of revulsion and agony, settles into an almost catatonic stare.
The strangest thing is, rather than staring at the bloody heap on the floor, they are all staring at Philip.
* * *
In due course, they put out all the fires, and they clean the place up. They wrap the body and move it out into the corridor where it will be safe until burial.
Luckily, Penny witnessed very little of the debacle in the room. She heard enough of it, though, to make her withdraw back into her mute, invisible shell.
In fact, for quite a long time, nobody else has much to say, either, and the edgy silence continues throughout the rest of that day.
The sisters seem to be in some kind of shocked stupor, just going through the motions of the cleanup, not even talking to each other. They have each cried their eyes dry. But they keep staring at Philip; he can feel it like cold fingers on the back of his neck. What the hell did they expect? What did they want him to do? Let the monster feed on Tara? Did they want Philip to try and negotiate with the thing?
* * *
At noon the following day, they hold a makeshift memorial service in a section of the courtyard surrounded by a security fence. Philip insists on digging the grave himself, refusing assistance from even Nick. It takes hours. The Georgia clay is stubborn in this portion of the state. But by mid-afternoon, Philip is drenched in sweat and ready.
The sisters sing David’s favorite song—“Will the Circle Be Unbroken”—at his graveside. This reduces both Nick and Brian to tears. The sound of it is heartrending, especially as it carries up into the high blue sky and mingles with the omnipresent choir of groaning noises coming from outside the fence.
Later, they all sit around the living room, sharing the liquor that they had recovered from one of the apartments (and were saving for God knows what). The Chalmers sisters tell stories of their old man, his childhood, his early days in the Barstow Bluegrass Boys Band, and his time as a deejay on WBLR out of Macon. They speak of his temper, and his generosity, and his womanizing, and his devotion to Jesus.
Philip lets them talk and just listens. It’s good to finally hear their voices again, and the tension of the past day seems to be easing a little bit. Maybe it’s all part of their process of letting go, or maybe they just need to let it set in.
Later that night, Philip is in the kitchen, alone, refilling his glass with the last couple of fingers of sour mash whiskey, when April comes in.
“Look … I wanted to talk to you … about what happened and stuff.??
“Forget it,” Philip says, looking down into the caramel liquid in his glass.
“No, I should have … I should have said something sooner, I guess I was in shock.”
He looks at her. “I’m sorry it went down like it did, I truly am. I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“You did what you had to do.”
“And I thank you for saying that.” Philip pats her shoulder. “I took an instant liking to your daddy, he was a great piece of work. Lived a long good life.”
She chews the inside of her cheek, and Philip can tell she’s fighting the urge to cry. “I thought I was prepared for losing him.”
“Nobody’s ever prepared.”
“Yeah, but like this … I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it.”
Philip nods. “Hell of a thing.”
“I mean … a person doesn’t … you just don’t have any reference point for this kinda shit.”
“I know what you mean.”
She looks at her hands, which are shaking. Maybe the memory of Philip bashing her father’s skull in is still lingering. “I guess all I wanted to say is … I ain’t blaming you for what you done.”
“Appreciate that.”
She looks at his drink. “We got any more of that cheap wine left?”
He finds a little bit left in one of the bottles and pours it for her. They drink in silence for a long while. Philip finally says, “What about your sis?”
“What about her?”
“She doesn’t seem to be…” His voice trails off, the proper words escaping him.
April nods. “In a forgiving kind of mood?”
“Something like that.”
April gives him a bitter smile. “She still blames me for stealing her lunch money back at Clark’s Hill Elementary.”
* * *
Over the next few days, the new blended family solidifies as the Chalmers sisters go through their grieving process, sometimes arguing over nothing, sometimes giving everybody else the silent treatment, sometimes holing up in their rooms for extended periods of crying or brooding.