The Fifth Day Read online

  “I’m sorry for the loss of your friend and mentor.”

  “I’ll meet him again in heaven. Life on earth is only temporary.” Suddenly Jeff’s serene expression was replaced by a frown. He was looking over Lissa’s shoulder, toward one of the windows that faced the street. “Who’s outside with a flashlight?”

  “We’re all accounted for. If Z or Margo had gone outside, I’d have seen them come down the stairs.” She stood, went to the window, and pulled aside the drapes.

  Jeff followed, and after a moment, so did Ben, carefully setting his book aside on the coffee table. Gary was still snoozing on the couch, his mouth open, and didn’t stir even when Jeff bumped the pillow his head rested on.

  One glance was all that was necessary to convince Lissa it wasn’t a flashlight. Whatever it was lacked the steadiness and sharp edges of a flashlight beam. This was flickering, like a candle flame, and had a greenish radiance.

  They stood, watching, as it came closer, brightened.

  When it floated into view, Lissa at first thought that it was some kind of trick of the moonlight on the pavement. But then a trailing wisp of cloud covered the moon, which stood just shy of full, and the apparition did not dim.

  It was insubstantial, its form shifting and swaying. There was something hypnotic about its movement. She was drawn to it. It rippled, sending a shimmering nimbus of light upward into the dark sky.

  “What is it?” Ben’s voice was a whisper.

  “A pillar of light,” Jeff breathed.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Angel. Or demon.”

  “Or some natural phenomenon,” Lissa said.

  “Have you ever seen anything like it?” Ben asked.

  “No.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  The thing shuddered again. Its movements had the sinuous, seductive allure of a veiled dancing girl. Streaks of indigo and gold twisted upwards, beautiful and beckoning.

  Then it came toward them.

  All three of them backed away from the window in a terrified jumble. Jeff bumped into the coffee table and nearly fell.

  “Gary,” Lissa said. “Gary, get away from the window!”

  He woke up with a half-snore, half-choke, but sat up reflexively, saying “What the fuck?” in a sleep-slurred voice.

  The light flickered through the wall as if it weren’t there. It brushed Gary’s shoulder, and he flinched away with a yelp. The others dodged this way and that, and it sailed silently past all of them and up the stairs.

  They were frozen for a moment, watching its smooth ascent, and then Ben sprinted after it, yelling, “Margo! Z! Wake up! Wake up!”

  Lissa said, “Ben!” and ran up the stairs after him. She got to the top of the stairs in time to see the light disappear through the bedroom door, and seconds later, Ben grabbed the handle and flung it open, saying, “Watch out!” in a voice that was mostly a sob.

  Lissa saw through the open door a dazzling wash of colors, and then everything went dark. Ben stood staring into the blackness. She could hear his breath whistling in his throat. Gary and Jeff came up behind them, and she heard Gary’s voice saying, “What the fuck was that?”

  Then light, a glaring fluorescent, came up behind them, its intensity blinding for a moment. Zolzaya stood in the hallway, holding the electric lantern aloft, blinking groggily.

  “What is wrong with all of you?” she said in an irritated voice.

  “You didn’t see it?” Ben said.

  “See what?”

  “The light thing.”

  “The only light thing I see is this.” Z held the lantern higher.

  “Margo, did you see anything?”

  There was no answer from the other bed.

  “Margo?” Lissa entered the room and walked toward Ben’s sister’s bed, where Margo was lying, a thin blanket pulled up to her shoulders. Zolzaya followed, held the lantern high over the older woman’s face.

  Margo Nishikawa wasn’t asleep. Her eyes, unencumbered by her thick glasses, stared upwards with a blissful expression. Her face was completely relaxed. Both hands were folded across her belly.

  Ben buried his face in Zolzaya’s shirt, and began to cry. Gary put one hand on Ben’s shoulder, squeezed, held on.

  “Is she dead?” Lissa asked.

  5

  SO THE BEASTS were once human? one asked, and her voice sounded heavy with disbelief.

  And the voice responded: Even so. But are you so very far from beasts yourselves, even now? Look at yourselves, whining and sweating and pissing yourselves in your fear. Would it not be easier to stop your struggle, stay in the forest forever, leave behind your goals and your desires and your needs?

  And now the voice sounded neither mocking nor dangerous, but beguiling, like the breath of a lover, like the brush of warm wind on a cloudless day. And some there sighed, and thought, Yes, it would. We wish that.

  But then one spoke, and at first his voice seemed ugly and unseemly, verily the croaking of a raven as compared to the delicate music that the voice of the Unseen Speaker had played upon the souls of the listeners. And he said: Do not listen. It is lying. It wishes us to kneel down and give over our quest to pass through the forest. It lies, because it knows that the only way to defeat us is to convince us to defeat ourselves.

  There was silence for a moment; and the men and women and children listening wondered that one of their own had dared to speak up against the voice in the woods.

  But then the voice laughed, and said, You think so? There are far worse dangers than losing yourself in the forest. Go, then, frail ones, if you think you can pass through unmarked and unscathed. And when the first of you is torn to bits by the teeth and claws of a beast he did not see until it was upon him, then let him remember the words of him that thought that giving up is the only way to be defeated.

  —

  WHEN ZOLZAYA WAS awakened from a sound sleep by Ben’s shout, her first thought was of the tree monster, and the old hag she’d seen earlier that day. She sat up, rubbed a hand over her face, and listened. There was a murmur of hushed voices, but not the outcries you’d expect if there was an intruder. After a moment, in which she debated lying back down and letting the others deal with whatever it was, she sighed, and swung her legs out of bed, grabbing the electric lantern from where she’d left it when she retired.

  She opened the door, and peered out. There was a knot of people standing at the door of Margo’s bedroom. Bad dream, perhaps?

  When she came up to them, she realized that this was something different, some strange new twist this bizarrely changed world was throwing at them. But why were they standing there, staring into the room, as if in shock? Even Lissa looked stunned.

  That was when she saw Margo, lying in bed, her eyes open and staring at the ceiling, a little smile playing about her lips, as if she had died having a good dream. Lissa went forward into the room, moving like a sleepwalker. Z followed, and Ben suddenly gave a choked sob and turned to her, as if he couldn’t bear what he was seeing.

  She touched Ben’s face, and said, “Ben, I need—I need to check….” He nodded, sobs still catching in his throat, and stepped away. Gary pulled the boy next to him, and they stood watching as she sat on the bed next to Margo’s prone form. She hesitantly placed two fingers under the older woman’s jawline. She felt a pulse—slow, but strong, regular. The others were waiting for her to speak, to confirm or deny their fear, but she found she couldn’t form any words. The sound caught in her throat, trapped, as the moment spun upwards and away. The long shadows in the room clustered around them. Zolzaya suddenly felt surrounded by the disembodied souls of the vanished ones, leaning inwards, watching the survivors with cold and greedy eyes.

  “Tell us.” Even Lissa’s calm composure seemed at its breaking point.

  She swallowed, and something in her loosened. “She’s alive. Margo’s alive.” The words came out in a tumble.

  “Praise the Lord,” Jeff said.

  “But why—
” Ben stopped. “Why are her eyes open like that?”

  “I don’t know.” She gently shook Margo’s shoulder, and said, “Margo. Margo, wake up.”

  Margo didn’t move.

  She held the lantern closer to the older woman’s face. Its cool white light smoothed away the lines in her face, made her look almost angelic.

  “Look,” Lissa said. “Her pupils don’t contract.” She took the lantern, moved the light away, then back toward Margo’s open, staring eyes. “When I move the lantern, her pupils should change size. It’s a reflex.”

  “Do you think she had a stroke?” Zolzaya asked. “Doesn’t that screw up your reflexes?”

  “Yes. I’m no doctor, but this doesn’t look like a stroke. You don’t quietly have a stroke and then lie there with your eyes open like that. At least not that I’ve ever heard.”

  “My grandpa had a stroke,” Gary said. “One side of his body went paralyzed. It didn’t look like this.”

  “Except that her eyes are open, she looks asleep.” Ben had mastered himself now, and was looking at Margo, his face a mixture of fear, sympathy, and curiosity.

  “It was the demon we saw that did this,” Jeff said. “It’s what caused this to happen. ‘For Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light….’”

  “It burned the shit out of my shoulder when it touched me.” Gary turned his left side toward the lantern light, and there was a scorch mark on the cloth covering his upper arm.

  “Are you badly hurt?” Lissa asked.

  “Nah. I’ll survive.” He unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, and pulled the collar downward over his shoulder. There was a reddened patch of skin on his upper arm, inflamed and blistered.

  “You should put some antibiotic salve on that,” Lissa said. “No doctors around. In our situation, an infection would be no laughing matter.”

  “We’ve got Neosporin in the bathroom.” Ben trotted off down the darkened hall.

  Lissa shook her head in wonder. “Brave boy.”

  “What can we do for Margo?” Zolzaya asked.

  “Pray.” Not exactly a surprising answer out of Jeff.

  “Okay, but besides that.”

  “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do,” Zolzaya said. “She may simply wake up at some point. If she doesn’t, the main issue is going to be getting water and food into her, but right now, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.” She looked over at Lissa. “What did you see? You said it was a light.”

  Lissa described the apparition they’d seen, and how it had gone up the stairs and through the closed bedroom door, then vanished before they could warn the two women sleeping there.

  “But I’m not buying that it was some kind of demon,” Lissa said.

  Gary rolled his eyes. “You’re not going to go all skeptical scientist on us again, are you?”

  Ben came back with a tube of salve, and gave it to Gary.

  “Thanks, little bro.” Gary ruffled the boy’s hair. He squeezed some out onto his finger, rubbed it on the burn, and winced.

  “I’m holding on to my options at the moment,” Lissa said. “But I can’t doubt its existence. All four of us saw this thing. I saw it go through the door into the bedroom.”

  “Where did it come from?” Zolzaya asked.

  “It came through the window downstairs,” Ben said. “It was outside. Jeff saw it first. Then we all saw it, out in the yard, kind of floating. Then it came in, really fast, right through the window without breaking it. It touched Gary and burned him, then went up the stairs.”

  “Like it had singled Margo out, for some reason,” Zolzaya said.

  “It ignored Ben and me completely.” Lissa’s voice was light. “Maybe we got lucky.”

  “Margo didn’t get burned, did she?” Ben asked.

  “The bedcovers aren’t scorched.” Zolzaya lifted Margo’s arms and gently pulled back the blanket. Underneath, her night clothes—an old t-shirt and flannel pants she’d undoubtedly scavenged from Ben’s parents’ clothes—were undamaged. “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Then whatever that light thing was, it hurt Gary to get him out of the way, but it wanted something else from Margo,” Jeff said. “It wanted her soul.”

  Zolzaya tried to think of some dismissive response to what Jeff had said, but didn’t have a better explanation.

  Pretty soon, she’d be on her knees praying along with him. At the moment, it didn’t seem like such a bad option. “We shouldn’t leave her alone. Someone should stay up with her, in case there’s a change in her condition.”

  “Agreed,” Lissa said. “I’m wide awake at this point. I don’t mind taking the first shift.”

  “We can’t set an alarm. The power’s out.” Leave it to Gary to point out the obvious.

  “I’ll come and get one of you when I can’t stay awake any longer. I’ll wake one of you up.”

  Zolzaya nodded. “I don’t mind taking the next shift. Don’t push yourself to stay up longer than you should. You can take the bed I’m in when I relieve you. You need to sleep. We’ve all been under a lot of stress.”

  “And that part’s not going to get better any time soon,” Gary said.

  —

  ZOLZAYA AWOKE IN the deepest part of the night to Lissa gently shaking her shoulder.

  “Z, I’m sorry to wake you. I can’t prop my eyelids up.”

  She yawned. “No, that’s all right. You get some rest. Stay here. I’ll go sit with Margo.”

  “How is she doing?”

  “No change. I closed her eyelids. I didn’t want them to dry out. She wasn’t blinking.”

  “Smart. But you need to sleep. I’ll take over.”

  “Before I do, though, there’s something you should see.” Lissa went out into the hall, where she’d left the electric lantern, and led her to the room where Margo was lying. But before she went through the door, she switched the lantern off, and the hallway was plunged into darkness.

  But the bedroom wasn’t. Dancing over Margo’s face and body and hands was a faint, flickering glow, an unearthly blue phosphorescence that came from within her. It flowed and rippled like the aurora.

  “What’s that?” Zolzaya asked, in a hushed voice.

  “I have no idea.”

  “I thought you might know. Does it look like what you saw earlier?”

  “A little. Much fainter. The thing we saw had more substance. It was like a colored candle flame.”

  She looked at Lissa curiously. “You don’t have an explanation?”

  “No. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I’ve seen objects glowing from a buildup of static electricity, but it’s not like this. This isn’t an electric charge imbalance. I touched her hand while holding the metal bed frame. If this was electromagnetic in nature, the static charge would have run to ground through me, like a big carpet shock.”

  “That was brave.”

  Lissa smiled. “Not really. You touched her earlier without harm, when you took her pulse. I was making sure.”

  “She hasn’t moved, then?”

  “No. Still breathing, slow and regular. But otherwise, not a twitch.”

  “I’ll take over. You go get some rest.”

  “Thanks.” Lissa padded barefoot from the room, and a moment later there was the sound of a door opening and closing. Then silence.

  Zolzaya sat down in a chair near the window, and looked at Margo’s prone body, only visible because of the ghostly aura.

  Whatever was going on here, Lissa had the right approach. Testing, probing, experimenting. There was a real, identifiable pattern to what was going on here. It wasn’t random. Something was behind all this, and when they found out what it was, maybe they could stop anything else horrible from happening.

  And they had better find it soon. Because, if they were pushed much harder, some of them were going to crack.

  —

  ABOUT TWO HOURS later, she rose from the chair, her back creaking stiffly as she stood, and went to seek
out Gary. He was back in his spot on the sofa, his long legs angled out awkwardly and one arm over his eyes.

  “Gary.” Zolzaya shook his arm. “Can you watch Margo for a while? I can’t stay awake any longer.”

  His breath snorted in his throat, and his mouth closed. He moved his arm away from his face. “Um,” he said, in a sleep-slurred voice, “yeah. Sure. No problem.” He sat up, then stood and stretched. “I need to go outside and take a piss first.”

  “There’s a bathroom off the hallway to the kitchen.”

  “No running water, remember? We’re gonna have to get used to camping-style, or this house is going to start smelling like a bus station parking lot.”

  He went out through the front door, and returned a minute later. “Okay.” He gave her a mock salute. “Gary Suarez, reporting for guard duty.”

  “No monsters outside?” Zolzaya walked with him up the stairs, holding the electric lantern high. Already it was showing signs of the battery running low. It wasn’t as bright as it had been earlier in the evening. Batteries would have to be on the agenda for tomorrow.

  “No monsters. Course, I didn’t give ’em much of a chance to get me. I pissed off the front porch.”

  Z laughed and gave him the lantern. “Call me if you need anything.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Lissa was asleep in Ben’s parents’ room, so Z made her way downstairs, one hand trailing on the wall, her bare feet moving slowly and silently on the cool hardwood floor. She settled down on the couch Gary had vacated, her mind already starting to drift away as soon as her head touched the pillow.

  But then she had a curious thought. Gary acted like she was the leader. He hadn’t sounded like he was joking when he called her captain.

  But if she was the leader, what was she leading them into?

  —