“We’ll find some open back roads.”
Yes, back roads. Natalie nods, but says, “Maybe we’re at the worst point now—”
“I didn’t even tell you there was a fox staggering in the middle of the Washington Corner intersection like it was drunk—”
“—the quarantine will help get the spread of the illness under control—”
“—and it fucking dove right at my front tire.”
“—everyone will be all right as long as we don’t . . .”
Natalie continues talking even though there’s the unmistakable sound of footsteps on their gravel driveway. Her ears are attuned to it. She’s lived in the house long enough to know the difference between the sustained crunch and mash of car tires, the light, maracalike patter of squirrels and cats, the allegro rush of paws from the neighbor’s dog, a goofy Rhodesian ridgeback the size of a small horse [a shooting star of a thought: Where are her neighbors and Casey the dog? Did they leave before the quarantine?], and the percussive gait of a person.
The steps are hurried, quickly approaching the house, yet the rhythm is all wrong. The rhythm is broken. There’s a grinding lunge, a lurch, two heavy steps, then a hitching correction, and a stagger, and a drag. Someone or something crashes into the propped open gate and bellows out three loud barks.
After the initial shock, Natalie all but melts with relief, believing [or wanting to believe] what she hears is in fact Casey the dog. Shock turns to worry. She wonders why Casey would be out on her own. The guy on the radio said unvaccinated family pets could be insidious vectors of the suspected virus.
Natalie turns and she cranes her head and looks out the front door and through the porch. A large, upright blur passes by the small row of screened windows. The barks return and they are more like expectorating coughs, ones that sound painful. There is a man standing less than ten feet away from her. He opens the screen door, and says in a dry, scratchy, but clear baritone, “Fall came and it began to rain. Left out in the cold and rain.” Then he grunts, “Eh-eh-eh,” a vocalization that is all diaphragm and back of the throat.
Natalie and Paul yell at the man to go away. They shout questions and directions to each other.
The white man is large, over six feet tall and closer to three hundred pounds than he is to two hundred. He wears dirty jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt advertising a local brewery. He steps through the door and fills their porch. With each coughing bark he bends and contorts, and then his body snaps back into an unnatural rigidity. He points and reaches toward Natalie and Paul. Natalie can only see the shape and contour of the man’s face as he’s silhouetted by the dim daylight behind him.
“Eh-eh-eh.”
Despite her all-consuming fear, there’s a nagging recognition of those primitive monosyllables buried in Natalie’s ancestral memory. Hearing him is enough to know, without the aid of visual cues and without the context of the ongoing outbreak, that the man is sick. He is terribly and irreparably ill.
Natalie’s fear morphs into a self-preservation shade of rage. Her fists clench and she steps forward and yells, “Get the fuck off our porch!”
Paul moves more nimbly and darts in front of Natalie. He swings the front door shut with enough force to rattle the frame and wall. His hand momentarily loses contact with the doorknob and he is not able to get the door locked before the man is already forcing it back open.
“Natalie?” Paul shouts her name as though it is a question, a question that is not rhetorical yet has no answer.
The door swings open, forcing Paul back into the house. The bottoms of his sneakers squeak as they slide over the wooden floor. Paul bends his legs, lowers a shoulder, attempting to gain purchase, to find the leverage he has lost forever. His feet stop sliding and they tangle, tripping him up. Paul falls onto his knees and the fiberglass door sweeps him away.
The man pushes the door fully open and presses Paul against the wall. He doesn’t stop pushing. The man almost fully eclipses the white door. He is the dark side of the moon.
The man shouts, “I only want to speak! Let me in! Not by!” He yanks the door back toward him and then he smashes it into Paul. The man and the door become a simple machine, then a high revving piston. The impacts of the door into her husband and her husband into the wall make thudding, sickening, hollow sounds. Paul’s screams are muffled. The walls and floors shake; the big bad wolf is blowing their little house down.
Natalie dashes the short distance into the kitchen. She knocks over a large blue cup half filled with the water she should’ve been drinking earlier, and she backhands the smart speaker out of her way while grabbing the chef’s knife from the cutting block.
The front door slams closed. The volume of the men’s shouting increases.
Natalie yells, “Go away!” and “Leave him alone!” and she runs back into the front room, knife held in front of her like a torch. Her eyes have adjusted to the dark of the house.
Paul is sitting on the floor and scrabbling to get his feet under him. Blood runs down his forehead and leaks from a wound near his right elbow. The man crouches over Paul, looms over him, an object of undeniable gravity. His great hands are clamped on Paul’s shoulders and pull him into a bear hug. Paul’s left arm is pinned to his side. With his free hand Paul punches and tries to push the man’s face away from his. The man shouts indecipherable, plosive-heavy gibberish, and stops abruptly as though suddenly empty of the mad new language, as though he’d correctly recited an arcane ritual, and he bites Paul repeatedly. The bites are not sustained and are not flesh rippers. They are quick like a snake’s strike. The man’s mouth doesn’t stay latched onto any one spot. In a matter of seconds he bites Paul’s arm and he bites Paul’s chest and he bites Paul’s neck and he bites Paul’s face.
“Let me in not by!”
The man’s shirt is torn and stained red above his left shoulder, near his neck. Tremors wrack his arms and body. He retches and shouts a moaning variant of no. He shakes his head and turns away, appearing to be doing so at the sight of the blood, as though it upsets him, or angers him, but he doesn’t stop biting.
Natalie charges across the room with the knife raised.
Paul gains his feet and both men stand and straighten. The man still has Paul’s torso constricted within his arms. Paul lashes out one last time with his right hand, connecting with the man’s eye. The man shrieks and barks and takes two steps forward, lifting and carrying Paul to the corner of the front room. The man drives his weight forward and down, mashing the back of Paul’s head and neck into the thick oak seat of Natalie’s mother’s antique rocking chair. Upon contact there’s a wet, pulpy pop and a sharp snap.
Natalie brings the knife down, aiming for the center of the man’s back, but he turns, knocking her arm off its trajectory. The knife drags across his left shoulder blade, carving a parabolic arc through his shirt and skin.