‘What happened?’ I blurt out and Casey winces. I get to my feet through the thickness in my head and I wander past Casey into the living room, to the large picture window.
‘What is happening?’
Several people are gathered in the front yard, a few make an effort at the door. Fumbling at the knob with numb hands. I check the lock on the door.
‘Casey, step away from there.’
Almost all of the people in the road direct their attention towards the house, turning because others are turning, turning because others are turning. Watching them move fills me with revulsion, as though I had caught scurrying in a room I previously thought clear. My face twitches with disgust. I only stare for so long before I tear my eyes away and shiver, fully shiver, the feeling out.
The sound of gunfire draws my attention. The people in front of the house turn at the sound. A few cast their half-closed eyes towards the conflagration down the road.
The fire bursts and burns brightly, consuming all of the other light in the street. A family pours out of a nearby house. Fluid silhouettes, moving against the sensuous draft of flames, running towards the Jeep parked upon the curb. Two of them shoulder guns. The firework prat of the rifle’s single shot is offset by the calamitous thunderclap of the shotgun. The man levels his shotgun at the approaching people and fires indiscriminately. Calmly. He draws back the pump deliberately, careful lest a shell jam. He tears the right arm from a girl approaching; with his next shot he disembowels her. He turns and fires again.
His wife hurries their children towards the street. The eldest daughter fires her rifle wildly, contorting her body each time she brings another shell into the breach. The bullets dissolve in the approaching mass and soon she is forced to bring the rifle from her shoulder and use it to batter those close enough. I hear her voice. Sudden and filled with terror. Dad, she screams.
Her father turns towards his family, and when he fires again his thunderous refrain, the scatter of buckshot hits both his family and the crowd of people closing in. Silhouettes from both groups fall. He stiffens and drops the gun to his waist. The sound of his horror is clear even from here.
The family fall back. Dread grows within me. The shotgun goes off three times, quickly, before the man yells and smacks the gun. He spins, looks around. I cannot name the expression on his face.
The same thing happens to all of them. There is no difference. The father shouts to his daughter. She is pinned to the ground and thrashing against the people bent over her. Tearing at her with their mouths. The mother throws herself against the mass, pushing them away from her cowering children. But she is overcome. Those children. Overcome too, heads on each other’s shoulders. Swallowed by the mass of bodies. I lose the notion of difference as the crowds of people bite and tear at their exposed flesh. Tear them apart with uncanny strength. There is no difference. The family falls, the father last, swinging his gun and booming his voice, screaming at people who do not heed his blows and only advance. I look away as arterial blood fountains, I close my eyes for a moment.
‘What is he doing?’ Casey says suddenly and the sound of her voice startles me.
‘Who? What is who doing?’
She points out the window. I raise my hands in the air, wave them weakly. ‘No no Casey, don’t look at that, don’t let that get in.’
‘I don’t think he wants in.’
‘What?’
‘Him,’ she says, points again. ‘I don’t think he wants to get in.’
I take a step back from the window. My legs, the sweeping lurch of my stomach, decide on the motion. I recoil from the person approaching the other side of the glass. He is somewhat recognizable as the clerk from the nearby gas station. His throat is missing, along with most of the gashed skin on his face. His left arm looks recently burned. The remnants of casual home-wear hang from his tattered frame. The recognition sends a shock through me and all I can do is speculate that he lived somewhere in the area. He approaches the glass slowly, not having the swiftness of some of the others, and this handicap makes me feel less fear, more pity.
‘He doesn’t want in.’
‘You’re right,’ I say. He is deliberate in the way he draws up to the glass. Careful in reaching out his shaking hand. His eyes widen. I bend down, peer into his face. ‘His reflection. I think he’s looking at his reflection.’
I’m wrong. There is nothing in his eyes, no question of life. A milky swivel and no more. He is incapable of contemplation. He approached the glass to chase a movement. This is not a man before me. Nothing of life remains.
These are dead things. A shiver nearly unsettles me. I stare at the dead man and I cannot even begin to name what it is which stands him up and stares out from his eyes.
When I look back, Casey isn’t standing near the door. I turn, turn again. I hear the sound of my voice. The sound of a question. I look about the empty room. For the first time I notice the sense of disarray,
