“Nora?” Addis whispers.
She sees a wisp of smoke pass through his beam and glances around in the dark.
“These skeletons…how come their skulls aren’t open like the ones in the street?”
Nora freezes. She follows her brother’s flashlight beam to where it rests on the father’s cranium. And she notices:
No cracks. No bullet holes. No gaping lobotomy. Inside that skull is an intact brain.
This is when she hears a noise, but not from upstairs. From the kitchen. A dry scraping, then the metallic squeak of an oven door opening.
Nora turns around. A skeleton is straightening up from behind the oven, holding a smoking baking pan in its bare bone hands. The pan’s Teflon peels off the sides in smoldering flakes. Neither Nora or her brother react as the skeleton carries the pan into the dining room and sets it on the table, where it sizzles on the cherrywood, adding more bitter smoke to the already acrid air. The skeleton is wearing an apron. Bits of long hair cling to its thin film of a scalp. The baking pan is empty.
The father rises from its easy chair in a noisy clatter of bones. The two children follow. They all sit at the dining table and begin dipping forks into the empty pan, serving nothing onto their white china plates, shoveling nothing into their mouths, teeth scraping and grinding on the steel tines. Then in mid-bite, as if surprised by a dinnertime doorbell, they all pause in unison and turn their heads to look at Nora.
Addis is the first to scream. Nora grabs his hand, ignoring the stabbing pain in her finger stump, and rushes to the front door. She is reaching for the latch when she sees two decomposing faces peering through the door’s arch window. She whirls around to head for the back door but the skeletal family is lined up at the end of the hall, staring with those grotesquely cheerful grins. The front door rattles violently. The big man is trying to force his way in. Nora has a flash of irrational hope, imagining for a moment that he is coming to save her, but then his fist smashes through the door’s window and she sees the look on his face, no longer pain but pure, mindless hunger. Whatever she sahatmomew in him before is rapidly departing.
The man and his partner are at the front door and the family is planted at the end of the hall, claw-like fingers twitching and pinching the air. There is no exit.
Nora pulls Addis into the hallway half-bathroom, a tiny box containing only a sink, a toilet, and a narrow window looking into the side yard. The room is barely wide enough for two people abreast. A good enough place for a last stand.
“Stay behind me,” she whispers. “If they get me…” She doesn’t finish. There is nothing else to say.
She holds her breath and listens. Louder than anything she hears her heart pummeling her breastbone. Throbbing in her temples and roaring in her ears. The tiny howls of her finger nerves, reaching out into open space and grasping around for their cut endings.
The big man has stopped pounding the door. There is silence in the hall. Then footsteps. Slow, one at a time, bone feet tapping the hardwood like dog claws or stiletto heels. The click of a latch. Squeak of a door. More footsteps, much heavier, but softened by shoes. Then silence.
Nora tenses. She grips the hatchet in both hands despite the growing numbness in her right. Addis is huddled behind her on the toilet seat, breathing hard but too terrified to cry. Her wide stance fills the room’s width, shielding him. She indulges in one selfish thought: if he dies, at least she won’t be here to see it. She is his older sister. She gets to go first.
She glances back to tell him she loves him. A shriveled face is grinning in the window. A spear of bone punches through the glass and through Addis. The spear lifts him, a hand grabs him, and he disappears through the window hole.
Nora is alone in the bathroom, staring into a dark yard of neat grass and trimmed shrubberies, just her and the soft chirp of crickets.
Her face contorts and trembles in a soundless shriek. She kicks open the bathroom door. The hall is empty. She runs through the wide-open front door and dashes around the house, waving her flashlight in wild arcs. She sees the back door swinging open and staggers back inside.
Everyone has gathered in the living room. The big man and the woman are kneeling on the floor in front of the coffee table. Addis lies on its ornate oak slab, his blood pooling in the engraved flowers and paisleys. The man and the woman gaze down on him and the skeletons lean in eagerly, angels in a satanic nativity.
Addis looks at Nora. He coughs wetly and his lips redden; he says something but it’s too faint. The big man scoops him up in his powerful arms and rises to his feet. The man looks at Nora. The spark of awareness is still there, weakened and faded, but there, and so is the pain. Then the creature stands up and touches his arm. Its sharp fingers press until they break his skin. Nora hears that warbling hum rising in the room, vibrating from within the creature and all the skeletons too, a thick and dissonant chord like a hundred cracked wineglasses singing in unison.
Over the top of this noise, the creature speaks. Its jaw opens and a dry, rasping caw emerges, shrill and cruel, full of wordless rage bubbling up and blaring like a dictator’s megaphone into the man’s ear.
The man’s eyes change. His brows and lips go slack. His pain and longing and uncertainty go away.
“No,” Nora croaks. “No!”
The man bites into Addis’s shoulder. Addis begins to shake.
Nora clamps her eyes shut so hard it hurts. She runs backward, she bumps into a chair then a wall then stumbles out onto the lawn. All she sees is blackness and sparks but nd s bacin her mind the house is crumbling, brick disintegrating, walls toppling in on themselves and then a black cloud of dust that chokes the air and hides everything, erases everything, makes everything gone.