Nightwalker #72034, AR

My Hawaiian friend told me about Nightwalkers once. They have an army of ghost warriors in Hawaii that march through certain forests in the night, and those who see the army with their own eyes die. How typical: to die for witnessing something… forbidden. Damned. Mysterious.

But I won’t be telling you the story of the Nightwalkers. This is the story of just one nightwalker. Me.

It’s early morning in Conway, Arkansas. The summer sun is baking everything alive that dares to step out of comfortably air-conditioned houses and cars. It’s baking me alive. I dare to step out in the sun, because I have to. I’m a door-to-door salesperson. I’m the bloody solicitor that all of you hate. Except, I’m a white Europian girl in her early twenties, quite cute and my accent is hilarious. I’m dressed in shorts and polo T-shirt, carriyng a huge and heavy backpack with few samples. They’re books, stuffed with knowledge that makes them super-sized and terribly heavy.

I’m walking away from the spot where my luckier friend and fellow solicitor just dropped me out of his old, smelly car. I say he is lucky, because he can move much faster and his vehicle provides him with a delightful portion of shadow, something that I won’t be seeing until evening. And I work thirteen hours a day, six days a week. Feel free to imagine how my sanity is slowly getting burned out of my brain with blazing sunbeams. The white cap I’m wearing isn’t much of a help. Oh, and how sweaty I must be. A disgusting person that you wouldn’t let cross your doorstep. Ever.

Walking makes me suspicious. Everyone here is using cars to get… basically everywhere. I’ve seen a few people on bikes, and in my first weeks I was using one of these, too. I can’t ride the bike anymore, I’m out of turf. I’ve been to all of the houses in my landlord’s neighbourhood, and the neighbour neighbourhood, and all of the neighbour’s neighbour neighbourhoods, too. The neighbourhood I’m working on now is too far to bike. So I turned into the walker. Every morning, I step out of the trashy vehicle that is covered in duct tape. Neighbourhood watch must find this really, really suspicious. They called the police on me once. You bet I was shocked! The policemen were armed and wouldn’t even let me show them my permit. As soon as I tried opening my backpack, they told me to freeze and took the paper out of there themselves. Like I had a bag full of explosives or something. Jeez, I’m 6’5’’ feet tall, a pale sweaty creature, selling stupid encyclopaedias that no one needs or wants, how could I possibly hurt someone? (Unless you think that having these characteristics must make me willing to hurt people.)

I keep knocking at the doors, introducing myself and getting to the point of the so-called “sales-talk”, which is – to get into the house. You can sell to people much easier when they’re in the house, for some reason. Some of them are tough cases, though. They let you cool off for a bit, even offer you some beverage and an apple, listen to you carefully, ask promising questions… but when it comes to signing something – hell no, get out of here. But I’ve seen too many poor homes, with residents whose pets cry because they haven’t been fed for days, to be angry with locals. Every time somebody invites me in (I’m not supposed to enter the house when a male opens the door, unless I make sure there’s also some woman inside. It’s for my own safety, men are animals, apparently.) I can’t help but wonder, whether these people have money or not. Sometimes you can tell from the interior design, but even that can be deceiving. You don’t know when they got all this stuff; it might have been very long time ago, before they lost their job. And since things are not very expensive here, other quite-well-off-looking people can easily be poor and you won’t be able to tell.

I wouldn’t trust me either to be completely honest with you. That’s probably the main reason why I haven’t sold anything. Not in my previous weeks, not today - and it’s afternoon already. I had to take my panties off just a moment ago. Their lining was hurting my skin that was irritated enough by the sweat already. This nice old African-American lady let me use her bathroom. I’d die if she didn’t. I’m wearing my shorts on the naked skin now. Bit of a relief, but I won’t be going home for another few hours. We’re prohibited from working after the sunset, that’s what our permit says. But the managers keep saying the opposite. Don’t worry about the permit, nor the blue lights, nor the angry locals. Bring us some cash. Make yourself useful. As the sun starts dissapearing in the ocean of red and purple coloring the dark blue horizon, I continue walking. People are home now, but busy with their dinner, kids, TV shows… I walk past sprinklers watering the green grass. I give a friendly wave to the Virgin Mary, whose statue is praying in one of the gardens. There’s a red hog in there, too, holding a huge red letter A above its head, grinning wildly. And a dragonfly – how beautiful, its rainbow colours, its fragile, glass-like wings - is sitting on the top of the A. I move closely to it and watch the little insect helicopter with pure joy, until it decides there’s been enough staring and flies away. I sigh and raise my head. In a few minutes, sun sets and that moment comes, finally. I turn into a nightwalker.

The thing about us nightwalkers is not that we are dangerous or malicious or even evil, it is that we exist. That we dare to walk on our own in the darkness at the side of the road. There are no pavements around here. What for?

Nightwalkers are rare. But when they appear, you can easily die when spotting one. Die from fear, I mean.

Imagine this – you’re driving your car,  heading home finally after hours of exhausting work. You stop at the supermarket before to buy some frozen burgers and corn. You’re looking forward to the dinner, your partner, your kids. Your pet, maybe. And then, without any warning, you see IT. It’s walking slowly past you at the side of the road. My gosh, what an ugly being this is! Hunched up, with oily hair framing its pale, expressionless face. It walks forward, but how! Zombies show more life-enthusiasm than this creepy thing! It gets momentarily blinded by your carlights, blinks maybe stops for a moment, rubbing its eyes with its fingers. And that’s it – you passed the nightwalker. You breath heavily, not sure you can believe your own eyes. There might even be a small heart-attack. But it’s over, you’ll be safe soon. The nightwalker wishes it could say the same thing.

I sit on the sewer’s lid, forcing myself to chew an apple. I wonder if my panties are somewhere below me, floating. I flushed them into the toilet. The night air cooled off a bit, I can breath easily and I’m happy that another workday is over. I check my watch, just to find out that it stopped. Shit. Looks like the sweat somehow got inside its inner mechanisms. I should have listened to the heat warnings. I’m screwed now. How am I supposed to get a new one? My workday finishes at 10:30 pm, for Christ sake! I’m getting tired of this whole solicitor thing. So tired. I wish I was able to sell something, like my friend the car owner, but I am not. This has to stop. Oh, good. I can see two small lightballs hurrying through the dark in my direction. Another scared local, that’s all I need. Preferably the one that stops the car to ask if I’m ok. Of course I am. I’m the nightwalker. I fear no man, for when the lay their eyes upon me, they shalt all die. Or something like that.

“Anna?”

I look up towards my friend’s face. He’s grinning at me happily from the open window.

“Oh, hi.” I stand up with difficulty and get into the car next to him.

“Guess what?” says Slava happily.

“What.”

“The blue lights! Today, twice. Can you imagine that?”

“Ridiculous. We should put an end to this.”

“Hardly. They’ve got guns.”

I glance out of the window, into the perfect darkness of sleeping neighbourhood.

“In a way,” I say slowly. “We are armed, too.”

He looks at me, puzzled. How could he understand? He’s driving. He turned into one of them. I’m too tired to explain anything to him.

“My watch just died, by the way.”