I couldn’t get an image from earlier today out of my head. Dante and I had been out checking traps. There was a large bent tube, with a width about three feet across, that was installed on a street corner. I had started counting them, and so far had spotted thirty-seven. The gas had been about to go off, and since I didn’t trust it, I backed away from the vent.

  To prove it was ‘totally fine,’ Dante had stood inches away from it as the mauve fumes engulfed him.

  “Do you do that a lot?” I asked.

  “Every once in a while, when I’m bored. You should try it sometime; it’s kinda fun.”

  “Absolutely not.” I sounded like an exasperated mother.

  “Oh come on. It’s all warm and toasty. ‘Feels awesome in the winter.”

  His pupils were dilated, and the whites of his eyes had turned an irritated pink. I wondered if he’d looked at himself in a mirror post-gas, or if these side effects were unknown to him.

  But that was the picture I couldn’t get out of my mind. Him grinning at me with those brown, gnarled teeth, and those dilated, red eyes. He’d acted pretty much the same, not high. It just looked haunting. I also knew though, that the gas was obviously doing something to him.

  I had been right to back away, but I’d probably still inhaled some of it. For all I knew, Dante had been breathing it in for more than five years, since he lost count past that point. I kept reminding myself that he smoked. If he had lung damage, it was the cigarettes. But the itch of worry I got from not knowing the effect of the gas was incredibly strong.

  We’d brought home a rabbit. I watched with a mixture of dread, guilt, and intrigue as he skinned it. He broke down the meat with a cleaver he told me he’d gotten from Bruno’s. Dante had cut the head off and put it to the side. The rabbit’s eyes stayed open, and I couldn’t stop snatching glances at them as Dante tried to explain what he was doing. My mind still couldn’t fully bridge the gap between the fact that the rabbit had been running around and eating grass at one point, and was now in neat, unrecognizable chunks.

  I was very impressed earlier when Dante showed me one of the vegetable gardens he had been maintaining. He told me he had several. That way if the Freak ran through it, or more likely, if wild animals ate it all, he wouldn’t be out of food. He also wanted to have extra food in case other people came into the deadlands.

  He certainly had enough, or I thought so. Carrots, onions, cabbage, garlic, cucumbers, broccoli, spinach, and so many kinds of squash. If there was one thing to applaud Dante on, it was that he made an excellent homesteader. My dad always had a respect for that kind of independence. They would’ve gotten along well, if we were in different circumstances.

  For the past several hours, he’d been patiently simmering a stew over an open fire in front of the city hall building. His eyes were stern with concentration, thankfully no longer dilated or red. Dante stirred the pot with a long ladle, whistling a folksy song I didn’t recognize.

  I was washing clothes nearby. I had one of those spinner mop buckets with detergent and water in it, and beside that a plastic tub with more water. A pile of jeans, boxers, stained once-white shirts, some overalls, and a few flannels were in a pile on the grass. I was, as always since I arrived, very out of my element. However, I wanted to try and contribute since Dante had been doing so much heavy lifting.

  I heard a hiss, and looked up as more gas came out of the vents. Earlier I had asked Dante how often the gas came out, and he had said he couldn’t figure out a pattern. I doubted that was true. He really wanted me to breathe it in, but I couldn’t figure out why. The intent couldn’t be but so malicious, since it wasn’t killing him, at least not quickly.

  I had decided to try and figure out the pattern on my own. There was no electricity here other than the forbidden general store, but something was powering those vents. I wanted to know what. Were they connected to the general store with the supposed demon in it? Why was he so trusting of the gas but not the general store? Was he hiding something in the store?

  My thoughts were interrupted as he announced that the stew was ready. It smelled amazing. He ladled out portions, and we sat on the stairs.

  “We’ll have to wrap everything up pretty soon after this. The stew took longer than I thought. I just want to be inside before the Freak comes out,” Dante said as he got himself more. He’d wolfed down his first bowl in about thirty seconds.

  “Sounds good. You said you’ve never seen it before, right?” I asked.

  “Not yet, I just hear it. Well, I hear it hurting people. The feds haven’t dropped off anyone new for awhile, so it probably won’t make noise tonight,” he replied with food in one cheek.

  #

  I laid under a pile of afghans in what used to be a conference room. Like every room that Dante had bothered to inhabit, it was filled with candles. I’d lit a few, so for the past few minutes I had been staring at the long, mountainous shadows on the wall and floor.

  Dante was out in the pseudo-living room, painting a new landscape of some kind. It still baffled me how many half-finished paintings he had.

  Every night, he made sure every exit door was locked, and blocked with furniture. I pointed out the risk of this being a fire hazard, but bizarrely, he seemed confident in his ability to push aside an oak desk at break-neck speed. Not only that, but there wasn’t much ventilation for the lit candles with all the windows being boarded up. He had insisted that it was alright, but I didn’t see how it possibly could be. Dante had argued that he had been living this way for over five years, so it would do for now.

  He hadn’t seemed in the mood to argue any further, and I was afraid of pushing it. Especially not when we were stuck in here together again.

  #

  I had a dream that I was late for my own trial. Once I woke up, I kept thinking about how I had been on my own. The officers weren’t around to escort me to places. I was just expected to show up on my own, dressed and showered for once. The judge had given me a dirty look because I was twenty minutes late.

  I lay in the dim room, surprised to see one lone candle that hadn’t gone out yet. I heard soft noises coming from the other room. Dante was still up? It had to have been several hours right?

  A quiet noise, the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor met my ears. My heart started to beat fast. Then I realized he was going outside. Hadn’t he warned me about the Freak? Even if he brought some kind of weapon, what could be so important that it couldn’t wait until morning? I couldn’t imagine what would be worth that kind of risk.

  Unless it wasn’t Dante. It was possible that someone else had come in. Would it be worse to go and see if he was still in the living room or to stay in here since the door was locked? I decided to stay in the room, trying to distract myself by counting the number of squares on each of the afghans.

  #

  I really had to pee. I’d been falling in and out of sleep. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard knocking.

  “Rat? You good?” Dante asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied, relieved.

  “Are you going to come out?” He asked, trying to cover the desperation in his voice.

  “Yeah, I’m coming, I’m coming.” I threw the heavy pile of afghans off of me and got up. I unlocked the door and noticed that Dante had changed clothes. He had a different shirt and different jeans, in equal disrepair as the others, same leather duster. The fleeting thought that came to mind as I followed him outside was the question of why he kept wearing rough clothes when he could get better ones from the many abandoned stores and houses.

  “Did you hear anything weird last night?” I asked as he handed me a kettle with coffee in it.

  “Not really. I did move stuff around for painting though; that’s probably what you heard,” he replied nonchalantly.

  “I’m gonna go pee,” I said, putting the kettle down. He gave me a look, and I gave him one right back.

  I walked off to go find somewhere out of his line of sight, fuming. There was no way he’d move something so heavy for that, and the entire setup for the painting had already been put together before I went to bed. I turned to see if he was following me. He stayed put, tending the fire, but his wary eyes caught mine. I maintained my scowl and went toward a patch of woods.

  As I relieved myself, I wondered if I should leave now. I didn’t have any supplies on me, but I’d learned from Dante that each house still had all the belongings in it, as though the previous occupants had dissolved into thin air. If we got in a fight, he’d probably overpower me, or at least I thought so because of his height. That, and he’d survived here for at least five years, so he was probably pretty fit.

  If I stayed, how long did I have? I knew he’d given me food and shelter, and that he’d panicked when I’d left to go on a walk since he’d lost so many others. However, I had a growing list of reasons to be paranoid. I decided it’d be wisest to sneak some supplies first, and then run when I felt it was time. Every time I had this conversation with myself, it just seemed like I was procrastinating an inevitable game of cat and mouse.

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  I walked with a bit of dread in my step back to the yard in front of the city hall building. It took some straining, but I tried to go back to the role of being a new friend.

  “So, where do you think we’ll go first? Like, what’s the most interesting place here?” I asked, pouring myself some coffee.

  “The most interesting place is probably the testing center, but I don’t really like going in there. And I’ll probably take you to the library first. I have a list of stuff I gotta see if they have. If you see anything you want to read in there, take it.” Dante pulled a pencil out of his coat and gnawed on it.

  He didn’t eat breakfast, drink coffee, or take a drag before we left for the library. Hopefully that wasn’t some part of his killing routine if he had one, like punishing himself in advance for what he was about to do. I did manage to find a pocket knife on the ground in front of city hall. He had lots of items haphazardly strewn around the places he inhabited, so thankfully it’d be easy to swipe things I might need. Well, when I could get time alone.

  We began the long walk toward Saint Mary’s Public Library. As we reached the front, Dante paused.

  “I like to do this just in case something’s in there,” he explained as he proceeded to rap on the doors several times. Dante waited for a while, and then did it again. After his second pause, he signaled that it was okay to go in.

  Following him tentatively, I took in the sight of the long-neglected building. Like most of the buildings I had seen so far, the inside was caked in dust. The old wooden tables, the front desk, the public computers, and every shelf had a layer of dust the thickness of my pinkie finger.

  “I know you don’t trust me, but I need you to stay close. This place is huge, and sometimes stuff comes in here. Like the opossums and racoons are fine, birds, whatever - but one time I came in here and there was a pretty angry dog. It was huge; a Great Dane. He was missing an eye - ‘face was pretty banged up.”

  Dante perused the shelves, holding a list of scribbled items. I followed him, attempting to read his mangled handwriting. The only thing I could make out so far was “CIA” since it was in all-caps. It certainly didn’t make me feel better.

  We reached a section for political science, and Dante started to flip through books, hoping to find something to put in the duffle bag he’d brought.

  “I’m not gonna lie, I haven’t read a book in years,” I said as I watched.

  “Sad. Books are little goldmines,” Dante remarked as he put a few promising volumes in his bag.

  “You sound like a teacher.”

  “I could’ve been one, if everything didn’t go down the toilet,” he sighed as he slung the bag back over his shoulder and went back to reading through the signs on each shelf.

  As I followed him, something caught my eye. A bright glint from the other side of the room. As the glint of light moved, I realized it was a large wing, and it was attached to a man. My breathing stopped.

  A man with blonde curly hair looked at me. He held his finger to his lips. I nodded, heart pounding as he slipped back out of view.

  I’d seen an angel. I wanted to ask him to save me, but he clearly didn’t want Dante to know he was here. I hoped to see him again. I chanted in my head pleas for him to come back, begging, as I trailed behind Dante.

  We’d reached the doors to go back toward city hall when I saw that bright light again in the corner of my eye. I was careful not to move my head, and only my eyes. The man held his finger to his lips again. This time I saw that he wasn’t wearing clothing, and seemed to have an ideal body, like a guy from one of those renaissance paintings.

  Again, I acted as though he wasn’t there, walking outside. Dante had started to walk quickly, so I matched his speed.

  “Did that dog hurt you?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he pushed up a loose leather sleeve. His arm had a series of holes and jagged slashes, the scars whitened with time.

  “Geez.”

  “There’s more where that came from,” he added, lighting a cigarette, much to my relief.

  So that was something he was telling the truth about, and it was another thing to watch for, when or if I left.

  The thought of the man with wings, the angel, had started to compete with that image of Dante with dilated pupils. It was a welcome change of pace, and I was glad to have something to hang onto. Well, I did wonder if he was real. The other thought encircling my mind was the possibility that I was already starting to lose touch with reality.

  On the walk home, I remembered that Dante had mentioned the testing center. What happened to him there, or at least why he was avoiding it intrigued me. He didn’t like the general store or the testing center, and he had been moving pretty quickly through the library. The Freak apparently only came out at night, but he’d gone out at night anyway - if that had been Dante. So either the Freak wasn’t as scary as he was saying, or - I realized, he could’ve made it up. Maybe the Freak was really just that dog that had bit him.

  “Hey Dante.”

  “Yeah?” He blew out a snake of smoke, glowing ash falling off his cigarette.

  “Would you be bothered if I tried to paint something?”

  “You can use whatever, as long as you don’t mess with the ones I already started,” he answered. “I gotta figure out where I’m gonna take you tomorrow,” he paused. “Oh, and I’m gonna show you how to chop wood.”

  “Sounds good.” I had to make up something to paint while I tested my theory. Maybe a bird? That might be too on the nose. It’d be less suspicious to do a still life of random stuff I found in the building to keep on theme with pretending to be supremely bored. Which, if I wasn’t so tense, wasn’t far from the truth.

  Other than the possibility of Dante or something else here wanting to kill me, and the possibility of going crazy, it was way too quiet for my liking. I really wanted to hear music again. The last song I heard was when Dante had been whistling while cooking.

  It was so quiet that even though the whistling had creeped me out a little, I wanted to hear it again. I couldn’t remember the words to many songs, so out of sheer boredom, I began to sing the Happy Birthday song. Dante raised his eyebrows. I launched into Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, and then I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad. He joined me for that one, smushing his cigarette on the ground as we walked.

  It made me feel a little better. It reminded me of when I was a teenager, goofing around with my friends while we walked home from school. In my mind, I started to make a list of things that I liked. I liked singing, no matter how stupid it looked or sounded. I liked the angel man, and I liked when Dante was in a good mood. This bored, good-natured side of him was the best part. It was tiring being so wary of him, and I’m sure he was tired of being so wary of me. It felt much lighter, singing mildly off-key and pretending that we weren't afraid, that we would just chop wood and read and paint.

  It wouldn’t be so bad to indulge in myself while I let my theory run its course and actually enjoy painting the still life. So I did. I chose the most colorful or unique objects in the room: a yellow weather radio that didn’t work anymore, a fire extinguisher, a shiny emergency blanket, and a traffic cone. I put the items in a pile and wrapped the crinkly blanket around them in a semi-circle.

  Dante had every color of paint imaginable, sourced presumably from all over town. He had a pile of palettes, so all I had to do was pick one and get to work. I started on the traffic cone since it seemed the easiest, and quickly found that I was wrong. Oh well, it could be wonky.

  While I painted, Dante sat on the other side of the room, copying what he wanted out of his books. He had taken a few cookbooks, and was writing down recipes. I tried not to think about the CIA ones, and how it wasn’t surprising if he didn’t want me to see him analyzing those.

  Several hours passed. I had gone outside to relieve myself, and came back to find Dante still planted at his desk. I kept painting, struggling through the myriad of buttons on the weather radio. The emergency blanket would hopefully look cool when it was done, but I was currently avoiding it. Mixing all the colors and doing big blocks of one hue at a time were my favorite parts so far.

  The hours stretched on, and the sun went down. I lit a few candles, and pretended that Dante was a medieval scholar, and that I was a painter’s apprentice. That reminded me of the angel man. I was half-tempted to paint him, but I thought better of it. Dante had gone out a few times to use the bathroom, always quick.

  I kept my eyes on the painting, being careful not to turn my head to my left, toward Dante. I had put the items for the still life on the floor to my right, so that I would only want to look forward at my canvas or to my right at my reference. The task of painting had gotten much harder since the lighting situation was totally different. But I pressed forward, doing my best to depict every divet and crease. My art teacher in high school had told us not to do that, but I needed this to take as long as possible.

  Even though it was tempting, I didn’t look to my left. Eventually, I heard the slow, careful sound of Dante getting up.

  “Going out again, and then we gotta close everything up,” he said, yawning.

  “Sounds good,” I answered, not looking at him. I held my arm to steady it as I worked on the label on the fire extinguisher.

  He went out, and I waited. After a minute, I quickly got up and went to the drawer of the desk, opening it and taking out three matches from a box in the drawer. He’d miss the whole box. I shut the drawer and quickly tried to read his notes. Surprisingly, he did start writing notes from the CIA books. It was hard to make out, but it seemed like he’d been studying how to endure torture. He had a barely-legible list of mental techniques on a yellow legal pad, written in blue ink, peppered with smudge marks.

  I quickly went back to my post, resuming the overly-complicated still life. It dawned on me after a while that he’d been gone for quite some time. I occasionally broke my engrossed character to look behind me, just in case.

  “Dante?” No answer.

  “I guess I’ll wait a little longer and then go out to check on him,” I said quietly to a silent room.

  It was about twenty minutes, or it felt that way. I still hadn’t gotten around to asking him about finding a watch, and hadn’t seen any clocks yet, strangely. It seemed odd for a city hall not to have something like that.

  “Sorry I was gone for so long. ‘Was having a rough time,” he chuckled, finally walking in.

  “You did have a lot of cabbage,” I grinned, keeping my eyes on the painting. The possibility of diarrhea versus him sneaking off again was honestly a fifty-fifty shot. It had been a literal mountain of boiled cabbage, and then another. His stomach was like a bottomless pit.

  #

  We pushed the furniture against all the doorways again. I tried to make a mental catalogue of what each piece sounded like and where each one had been moved to. I blew out the candles around my painting station, and told Dante I was going to bed. On the first night, he’d given me a jar to pee in so I didn’t have to go outside if I had to take a leak in the middle of the night. It hadn’t been used yet. I tried to semi-successfully, and settled into the pile of afghans once more.

  Again, hours passed. To stay awake, I thought about Dante killing me. It was the easiest way to freak me out. I imagined him coming in and strangling me, or suffocating me with the pillow my head was resting on. I imagined what it’d be like to suffocate, and tried to picture how much it would hurt, if at all. The notion of having my air taken away from me made my heart beat fast and my breathing heavy. I was trying to take in as much air as I could, even though I was alone.

  My breathing got even more shallow as I heard very soft footsteps. I heard the handle begin to move. I had forgotten to lock the door. By instinct, I shut my eyes and did my best to look exhausted from my many hours of walking through town, chopping wood, painting, and moving furniture. I kept my body still as the door slowly swung open. He stepped forward, and then stepped back, closing the door behind him.

  Only a few minutes later, I heard the familiar sound of a heavy wooden piece of furniture, probably a desk, being slid. I opened my eyes, and stared at the door until frustratingly, I fell asleep.