Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (Wicked Lovely 5.50)

“What’s it like back down the mountain?” Margie finally asks.

Calvin doesn’t hesitate. “Horrible.” He slumps into the swing. “There aren’t a lot of safe places left, and finding food’s impossible.” He stares at his hands, his elbows propped on his knees. There’s dirt under his nails and filling the cracks of his skin.

They sit like that for a bit, nothing of the world between them that’s the same except for the monsters. Margie thinks about what it was like before the big change, when you could talk about things like movies or television or some funny joke from the internet. She grapples for some sort of bridge she could pull between them so that the gap across the porch wouldn’t seem so big and wide.

“I can’t let you leave,” she finally says. “You know that, right? I don’t want you sneaking around out here and, even if you left, I can’t have you mention to someone out there that we’ve found a safe place.”

He nods his head. “I was hoping maybe if I promised not to tell anyone . . .” He looks at her and sees that she’s not the kind to offer false hopes to strangers. His face falls. “I understand.”

“I can tie you up on the porch or inside—I’ll give you that option.”

He looks through the window at the lantern spilling over the atlas and guidebooks. “Why West Virginia?” he finally asks.

Margie rubs her fingers along the stock of the shotgun, tracing the edge of the trigger. She still has the safety on, but he doesn’t know that. “My sister gets to choose where we go and she remembered some show about West Virginia.”

“It’s a nice place,” he says. “Prettier than you’d think.”

“You’ve been?”

“Yeah. Before. My family used to go camping up on the Cacapon in the spring.” He no longer looks at his hands but at her. She’s tucked into the darkness, but still there’s something about the way he sees her that makes her feel a sort of intimacy.

“I’ll get the rope,” she says, because she doesn’t want to talk about families or vacations or the time before.

“There’s a guy tied to the porch swing,” Sally says when Margie comes down from the loft in the morning. Margie watches as Calvin slowly rocks outside, his wrists still lashed to the chains.

“You know you’re terrible at knots, right?” Sally says, flipping through one of the guidebooks spread around her. “He could have gotten out easy if he’d wanted.”

She traces an interstate across the mountains on the map, cross-referencing a set of directions in her notebook. “Don’t know why he wouldn’t just escape if he had the chance,” she mumbles without looking up at her older sister.

Margie stares at Calvin. “Me neither.”

Margie pats him down to make sure there aren’t any more weapons tucked in his clothes, and then all three of them go to pick berries. Sally pesters Calvin about where he’s been and what the mountains out West are like compared to those in the East. Calvin’s patient and kind and always aware of the fact that Margie has a gun and is willing to blow some part of his body off at the slightest provocation.

Days pass one after the other: gardening and taking care of the cabin in the day, Calvin tied up at night, time rolling after time as the great clock unwinds.

“She knows the trip is a lie,” Calvin finally says one night as Margie wraps rope around his arm and the swing.

She hesitates.

“She knows more than you think. About the world. About what your chances of survival are.” He pauses. Her face isn’t far from his, and she smells the berry sweetness of his breath.

“Our chances of survival,” he says softly.

Margie lets the rope trail from her fingers and stumbles to the other end of the porch until the railing bites her hips.

“What do I have to do to prove my loyalty to you, Marg?” Calvin asks. “How many nights do I have to sit out here tied up when we both know your knots are crap and I could escape anytime? What will it take for you to trust me?”

Margie slumps, sliding down until she sits on the edge of the porch. Fireflies flash in the gardens, bright reminders that for some creatures the world hasn’t changed.

“I’m the one who had to kill my mother,” Margie confesses. Her chin trembles, her whole body shaking. A breeze trips up the mountain, cool and crisp like fall. “After the change we got out of the city and we found a place and for a while it was safe, but then we were ambushed. My f

ather yelled but no one could hear. They took my mother, and my father resisted, and I didn’t know what to do but grab Sally and run into the woods. I watched what they did to my mother, and when my father tried to fight, they killed him and tossed his body aside. I could smell the death and hear the moans and then they just left my mother on the ground while they ransacked inside. I told Sally to stay and I found my mother and there were bite marks all over her and she said nothing when I held the gun against her.”

She inhales as if she’s never known air before. “We had somewhere safe, and they took it.”

Calvin strips the ropes from his arms and pulls her against him. More than anything else in the world Margie wants to sob and grab hold. Just to know that there’s someone out there to help her survive so that she doesn’t have to carry it all.

He holds her so tight she feels like she might snap, and she pushes against him because she needs to hear his heart and feel every inhalation. “Sally doesn’t know,” she says against his shoulder. “She doesn’t know what it takes to survive.”