You’d think there wasn’t much positive one could take from such grim imagery, especially imagery so omnipresent, but I tried my best. I told myself life was precious, and that behind those black clouds, distant pinpricks of bright white light continued to burn, and if we kept fighting, we might one day see them again.
I hoped.
I leaned my head back against the wall. My eyelids felt heavy, but I couldn’t fall asleep. Falling asleep now was basically the equivalent to opening my casket and crawling inside. So I slapped my cheek. The leather glove on my right hand made a thwap sound against my flesh.
I must’ve sat there for another hour, thinking, wishing, hoping, before the Sandman started working his magic again. If Stone hadn’t gotten up, I probably would’ve passed out.
He had one crutch at this point, ditching the two-by-four after he found the crutch in a Rite Aid we stopped off at before the school. We always hit drug stores and supermarkets when we could; it was how we managed to stock up on bug spray after nearly running out a while back. Thankfully, most people left the stuff on the shelves for our taking. But this Rite Aid we went to had been ransacked of pretty much all goods, the crutch’s partner included. Stone moved a bit slower with only one, but it was better than not moving at all—or, God forbid, having to ride piggyback like he did when we crossed Prism Lake.
Chewy rose as Stone approached.
“You okay, Grady?” he asked.
“I’m getting a little tired.”
“Well, you look like shit.”
“You’ve always had a way with words.”
He shrugged in a what-can-I-say gesture as Chewy struggled to stand on his hind legs and place his forepaws on my chair. I bent and gave him a little help, careful not to aggravate his healing injuries. I pulled him onto my lap and scratched beneath his chin, where the beard was in dire need of another trimming. Helga and I had bathed and groomed him, but that seemed like a long time ago. The length of his fur, especially noticeable around his paws, told me he was long overdue.
Hell, we all were—the men, at least. My own hair hung well past my ears in an unintentional sixties Paul McCartney ‘do…only I looked less like a Beatle and more like a cockroach. Stone was sporting a wild afro and a nappy beard.
“I miss him too, you know,” Stone said. “I know I don’t act like it, and I’m not bawling my eyes out or anything, but I do miss him. He was like a little brother to me.”
I had only seen Stone cry a handful of times over the course of our long friendship, and most of those times came after the car accident that had killed his parents and messed up his legs.
“I know you do, man. You don’t have to say that.”
He nodded and patted me on the shoulder. “Get up and go get some sleep. You really do look like shit.”
I stood and gently set Chewy on the floor. His little tail whirred like the whisks on a mixer. The abuse Chewy suffered at the hands of Bob Ballard had taken a lot of things from the dog, but it hadn’t taken his ability to wag his tail.
“You coming to bed too, buddy?” I asked him.
He barked softly. Since Mikey had passed, Chewy had taken to snuggling up with me whenever I went down for the count, and he usually stayed with me while I was on watch too. Sometimes, he’d get up and look at the door or the windows, and I thought he did it because a wraith was nearby. As time went on, my thinking about that changed.
What he was really doing was waiting for Mikey to come back. Then I remembered how he reacted upon first seeing the body rolled up in a sheet and how he howled so painfully, and I thought he wasn’t so much expecting Mikey as he was maybe seeing him.
My grandma, the animal lover extraordinaire, had a lot of theories about household pets. One of which was their ability to see things us humans couldn’t. Things such as spirits, and hey, maybe she was right. My grandmother was rarely wrong.
I thanked Stone and gave him my usual spiel about waking me as soon as he so much as yawned. He plopped down, stretched his arms, and said, “I know, I know. Don’t worry, dude. Just get some sleep. You look—”
“Like shit. Yeah, got it.”
He winked.
Outside, the wind groaned and whistled through the cracks in the brick walls. I barely noticed. It had become one of those things that was just…there. A routine thing, part of everyday life. Sure, it’s insane when you first see snow in the middle of the summer, but then you get used to that too. You adjust your life accordingly, and you keep on keeping on.
Because us humans are immensely adaptable.
“Good night, Grady,” Stone said.
“Night.”
I slept, the nightmares invaded my head, and I woke up in a cold sweat, my heart thundering against my ribcage, as if it wanted to get as far away from those terrible images as it could. Ell was asleep beside me, and I scooted closer to her, trying to calm myself down.
Once it worked, I dozed again, and this time I had no dreams. None that I remembered, at least.
The sun stayed hidden for another day, and then it peeked through the darkness for a span of six hours and forty-three minutes—yes, I timed it.
We packed up and continued our quest to the City of Light. Stone had a roadmap, the same one he’d taken from the gas station near Prism Lake and Avery’s Mills, and a
