“All you goDLesS fUckErS DeseRvE this!”
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This happened during the first two months of the lockdown in 2020. No one now wants to admit to some of the bad things that happened when the whole world stopped, and they sure as hell weren’t talking about them back then.
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Our neighborhood was a quiet little corner of the world outside of a small town; a cul-de-sac with eight homes. My mom and I had only been living there since November of 2019; she moved us from New York after we lost my dad.
Once everyone was locked down with nothing to do but brood and stare at the dire warnings of societal collapse playing out on our screens, the rains came into our town and added to the misery.
Girthy drops that drove down, beating the hopelessness even further into our uneasy spirits, and when it wasn’t raining, there was an oppressive fog that sat over everything. The gutters on either side of the street became constant cruddy streams that never seemed to slow, and our world had become a place where the sun never pierced the murk of the clouds.
All of the conditions were perfect for a different kind of sickness to spill out into the world, looking for the perfect host to infect. Our neighbor right across the street, Barney Cayer, was Patient Zero.
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Barney was an end of days religious nut who wore his zeal loud and proud, and the state of his home reflected the state of his mind. The paint was peeling, the lawn was wild, and the front two windows on his porch were boarded up after having been broken by rocks.
Rocks that had been thrown by kids who had been harassed in one way or another by Barney. He would yell at people for no reason at all, and he adored screaming at children.
Our neighbor Dustin had warned us about Barney two days after we had moved into the neighborhood. Even so, we were shocked just a few weeks later when he had put up his Christmas decorations on the lawn.
Most of the homes on the street put up lights and a few of those inflatable things, but Barney really went the extra mile to let you know exactly where he stood when it came to Christmas.
He showed his holiday cheer by putting out a handmade wooden sign which read, “JEsuS is tHe rEASon FOR thE SeAsoN!” Behind the sign was another decoration that stood around ten feet high; a large Santa Claus who was battered and broken and nailed to a cross.
Blood dribbled down Santa’s bushy white beard and his round little belly had been cut open, exposing a tangled coil of guts that hung down past the jolly old elf’s knees. A small sign at the top of the cross said, “DeCeIveR”.
All of the neighbors complained to the cops, but when the police came to the house to follow up, they told the neighbors that nothing could be done. It was on private property.
After the police left, Barney stood in defiance on his lawn and screamed toward the other homes. Clad only in a pair of stained white underwear and work boots, he proudly proclaimed, “This is America! I can do whatever the fuck I want with my front yard!”
He yelled for almost an hour straight. At that point, we should have seen it coming.
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During one of those gloomy days in the very beginning of April, Barney Cayer decided to celebrate the pandemic by decorating his home with a few new handmade signs.
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I was staring at my ceiling just as the sun was coming up. The driving rains decided to rest and let the fog crawl back in. The street lights played off of the fog, giving everything an amber hue. I heard the hammering coming from across the street. I couldn’t see anything from my window upstairs because of the oak tree outside. I walked downstairs.
As I opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch, I remember feeling excited. After three weeks of nothing, being stuck inside with my mom, and nowhere to go, any small change or event was a welcome distraction.
BANG BANG BANG
Barney was decorating his yard with three hastily made wooden signs. His 6’4” solid frame was covered head to toe in a shiny white hazmat suit and a gas mask which covered the entirety of his face. He wore yellow gloves and boots that were speckled in what looked like drops of red paint. There was a red handprint on the back of the suit and something written above it. I squinted my eyes and read the tiny words.
“HaNd of GoD.”
The words on the signs were also written in red paint; sloppy letters that alternated between upper and lower case that formed into drips around the bottom of each one.
“thE tImE to RePeNT HAS pASsed!”
“IT haS BegUN!”
“All you goDLesS fUckErS DeseRvE this!”
After he drove the last sign into the ground, he walked back up to his front door and stripped the glove off of his right hand. He grabbed a utility knife and he dragged the blade across the palm of his right hand. Red ribbons dripped all over the porch and that shiny white suit as he smeared a long streak of blood above his door.
Without any warning, he turned and caught me watching him. He stood motionless, bleeding all over his porch.
The neighborhood was so quiet, I could hear him breathing through the snout of that bug eyed mask from across the street.
After a long moment of silence, I turned and went back inside the house. I walked to my mom’s office window, and I could see that Barney still had not moved. The rain had begun again. We stared at each other for at least a full minute before I finally closed the blinds.
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“I mean for the love of God! Why the hell would the asshole put signs up like that?!”
“I just moved here. You tell me.”
Later that night, my mom had Dustin on speaker. He was Barney’s immediate next door neighbor. He was sitting on a rocking chair on his porch drinking beer, and my mom was doing the same on ours.
Drinking on the porch was becoming a nightly thing for them. As much as I didn’t like my mom getting chummy with some guy less than a year after my dad had passed, I wasn’t going to say anything. It made her smile.
I was sitting on the porch swing trying not to listen to the conversation. Every once in a while, I’d look up from my phone and look across the street. Dustin was a pretty loud guy and I couldn’t believe he was talking so loudly about how nuts Barney was just a few yards away from his house.
“I got half a mind to light the things on fire. Probably would if it wasn’t so damn wet outside.” Dustin was ten years older than my mom and a vet from the Gulf War. His Texas accent was just as big as he was.
“I just… when Kaley told me about the way he cut himself…” She trailed off. We both looked over to Barney’s door. His porchlight was on and it was illuminating the red mess perfectly.
“Sue, I’ve heard him in the middle of the night banging around in there for years, but now, it’s constant. Like he never sleeps. Sounds like he’s building something.”
“I guess everybody’s a little nuts right now.”
“I’m telling you, crazy times like this…scares me with people like Barney. It’s that final push that knocks the rest of their marbles out of place. Nobody’s talking about that.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off of his door. I felt like he was in there, watching us. I was about to get up and leave when an ambulance came into the neighborhood. It stopped in front of the Simons’ house.
Everybody in the neighborhood walked out onto their porches and stared at the scene in silence. Before long, Mr. Simon, a wispy man in his late sixties was being wheeled into the ambulance by a stretcher. Even with the oxygen mask over his face, it was clear he was coughing. His whole body was convulsing with each hack.
Mrs. Simon stood on her porch and watched him as he was taken away.
As the ambulance drove out of the neighborhood, I saw Barney watching from just inside his door. He was still wearing that suit.
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“SON OF A BITCH!” Later that night, I sat up straight in my bed. My head was pounding. I swore I heard a scream and there was a low sound coming from somewhere outside. A low rumbling frequency that seemed to get under my skin. And somewhere in that rumble was a low voice that was almost whispering. It was three in the morning.
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The rain was pouring, giving a distorted quality to the sound. My mom and I watched as all the other neighbors, including Dustin, turned on their porch lights, opened their doors, and looked over towards Barney’s house.
There was a pile of old mismatched speakers sitting on Barney’s porch with a tangled tail of brightly colored wires that ran from behind them and disappeared into a hole that had been drilled through one of the boarded up windows.
I concentrated on the noise and focused on the voice underneath it.
It was Barney’s.
He was reading from the book of Revelation.
There was also the sound of an electric saw underneath it all.
All of the neighbors were confused and furious and all of them looked at each other.
All of them with the exception of Mrs. Simon. The light on her porch was out. There was caution tape wrapped around the posts of her porch like a crime scene.
Dustin stormed out of his yard and walked across the dead lawn. My mother yelled at him.
“Dustin, just let it go.”
“No way!”
Dustin rapped on the door and then he took a few steps backwards. The sawing coming from the inside of Barney’s house stopped.
“Hey dickless! Turn this shit off!”
Everybody watched Dustin standing there. None of us knew what to expect next.
Dustin stepped forward to pound on the door again, but Barney opened the door and then stepped onto his porch.
He was still clad in his hazmat suit and his gas mask, and in spite of how big Dustin was, Barney still towered over him.
He held a long stick in front of him that had to be at least six feet long. He pushed it towards Dustin, who took a few steps backwards, just beyond the end of Barney’s stick.
“You want to do us all a favor and turn that shit off?” Dustin’s voice echoed down the street. Barney only stood there, keeping the stick in between them.
Dustin began to shout the question over again, and that’s when I noticed that there were far more splotches of red on Barney’s hazmat suit since I had seen him last and the white had turned to a sullied and crusty light yellow that was covered in sawdust.
A leather carpenter’s belt laden with overstuffed pouches and a framing hammer hung from his hips.
“Get off of my property.” Barney’s voice was low and muffled. It carried on the wind like a whisper from Satan himself.
“What the hell is wrong with you Barney?”
“You come anywhere near my house without wearing the proper gear, I start cutting.”
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I didn’t get any sleep that night.
The next morning, after my mother had made a pot of coffee, she called the police, all the while to the sound of Barney’s muffled voice.
It was raining harder than it had been. The sound of the water rushing through the gutters on the house sounded like a vile chorus of toads that were commenting back to the messages coming from the speakers on Barney’s porch.
The cops didn’t care, they laughed at my mother. They told her that she was being ridiculous and hysterical. To call in for a noise complaint while everything else was going on.
They said that they would be out to talk to Barney about the noise coming from the speakers, but that was it.
They never came out.
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Dustin called my mom that morning. There would be no more getting drunk on the porch for the foreseeable future. Dustin was coughing and running a fever.
My mother had offered to run to the store if he needed anything. He thanked her and told her that he would let her know.
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My mother stayed on the couch the rest of the day watching television. I think she finally had it. We moved away from everything we knew to get away from the memory of my father. When the lockdown happened, she still had Dustin to talk to. Suddenly that was gone as well.
I stared at Barney’s house all day. I was peering through the blinds of the office window.
He drove out of the neighborhood three times in his truck. Everytime, he had a bunch of wood in the back, and when he came back, it was empty.
Just as it was getting dark, I watched Barney come outside one last time.
He walked over to Dustin’s house. He had a couple of pieces of wood tucked under his arm. He stopped just shy of the porch and threw them down on the lawn. He grabbed a roll of yellow caution tape out of his tool belt and started wrapping it around the posts. When he was finished, he walked back to the wood he dropped, and picked it up.
I realized it was another sign. He pounded it into Dustin’s lawn.
“InFEcteD!!! BeWARe!”
I called out to my mother, but she didn’t answer. She was passed out on the couch.
Barney turned and stared straight at our house. I told myself that there was no way he could see me. I had the lights off and I was barely holding up one of the blinds, but he just stood there. After a moment, he walked back over to his house and disappeared inside.
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I took a walk in the fog. I needed to get out of the house. I needed to feel like there was life outside of this nightmare.
I walked down the street, away from the houses. I walked down the hill that led into our neighborhood. As I turned the corner that emptied out onto the street that went back towards town, I froze.
Under the street lamps, I could see the crude barricade that had been built across our street. It was made up of floor boards, random scraps of wood, and lots of old wires. It stood about four feet high.
No cars would be able to get through without tearing it down, and Barney had even stretched barbed wire from either end of it to posts driven into the hillsides on either side of the street.
I found a small spot where I could climb through the barbed wire.
When I got to the other side of the fence, I saw a sign written in fluorescent spray paint.
“NO TREspAssing!”
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I ran back home to my mom to wake her up, but I stopped when I saw her face being lit up by the tv. She was sweating and coughing in her sleep. I touched her forehead. She was burning up.
That’s when I felt it. I was being watched. I don’t know how to explain it, but I knew.
All the blinds were drawn. The light from the television was the only light in the room. I muted the television and stood there.
After a second, I heard something. A soft mechanical whine. It only happened for a second and then it was gone.
It was coming from the vent behind me.
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I had sat back at the office window, but this time, I was holding my dad’s metal baseball bat. I waited.
The rain started. It was coming down hard.
After about an hour of waiting, Barney was back outside. He had another bundle of wood under his arm. He walked down toward the end of the street.
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I took a chair from our table and stood on it while I unscrewed the vent. I found a video camera inside. I went to another vent and found another.
It turned my stomach, but I stood on the toilet and checked our downstairs bathroom. There was a camera in there as well.
I called 911. I told them what I found. I told them about the barricade on our street. I warned them that Barney was crazy.
They kept me on the phone.
I looked back out the window. Barney had just finished putting up a new sign at the end of the street and now he was walking back.
I kept pleading with the operator, telling her they needed to get to us faster.
Barney turned. He was walking towards our house.
I heard his heavy boots climb the steps and then cross our porch.
I heard something scratching against the door knob.
I put the phone down and gripped the bat with both hands.
The front door slowly started to open.
That’s when I heard the explosion.
Barney turned and ran back inside of his house.
I found out later that Barney had rigged the barricade with homemade explosives. The police had seen it and triggered it without anyone getting hurt.
Within minutes, police were swarming the outside of his house.
They had it surrounded for hours. They brought in a remote controlled robot and sent it inside to look around.
There were explosives rigged to every one of his doors. Finally, the cops went in.
Barney was gone.
-
When the cops went in, they were horrified. Most of the floor boards had been ripped up with only thin walkways left over the dirt below; some of the walls were intact, but most had gaping holes. Every window was boarded over from the inside and there were rifles next to every one of them.
There were air purifiers running next to every plug, and extension cords and bundled wires were snaking their way through the house.
Barney had written all over what was left of his walls. Apocalyptic messages. Messages about being the only one to live through it all and cleaning out the infected.
There was only one room left in the back of the house that was intact. Inside, the walls were covered in rows of screens. Above each row were the addresses of every home on the street.
Barney had somehow managed to put cameras in every room of every house. The police said it looked like he had been watching all the houses for a few years.
He had been through every house in the neighborhood but ours. Everyone had been murdered, Dustin included. He had a diary next to all the monitors. He believed the Simons had brought the virus to our neighborhood, and it was spreading. The last entry said that he had observed my mother becoming ill and that I may be a problem.
As far as I know, they never found Barney Cayer.
There was a tunnel underneath his house that stretched almost half a mile away.
I never saw anything on the news about it. I only heard it from the police who were there. My mother and I were the only people who made it out.
Several people were killed in their sleep with a framing hammer and no one has ever talked about it until now.
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My mom and I moved away. A second new start. I checked every vent in our house when we moved in just to be safe.