Blue World

by Robert R. McCammon

  Toby paused. Then he shrugged and said, “Okay. Sure. Let’s go.”

  “Joe, hold on to Trish’s hand. Then grab my belt. Don’t let go, and for God’s sake don’t let her go either.” She prodded Toby with the knife. “Go on. Open the door.”

  “No!” Winslow protested. “Don’t go out there! You’re crazy, woman!”

  “Open it.”

  Toby slowly turned, and Carla pressed the blade against the pulsing vein in his neck while she grasped his collar with her other hand. He reached out—slowly, very slowly—and turned the doorknob. He pulled the door open, the harsh sunlight blinding Carla for a few seconds. When her vision had returned, she saw a dark, buzzing cloud waiting in the doorway.

  “I can put this in your neck if you try to run,” she warned him. “You remember that.”

  “I don’t have to run. You’re the one they want.” And he walked into the cloud of yellowjackets with Carla and her children right behind him.

  It was like stepping into a black blizzard, and Carla almost screamed, but she knew that if she did they were all lost; she kept one hand closed around Toby’s collar and the knife digging into his neck, but she had to squeeze her eyes shut because the yellowjackets swarmed at her face. She couldn’t find a breath, felt a sting and then another on the side of her face, heard Trish cry out as she was stung too. “Get them away, damn it!” she shouted as two more stung her around the mouth. The pain ripped through her face; she could already feel it swelling, distorting, and at that instant panic almost swept her senses away. “Get them away!” she told him, shaking him by the collar. She heard him laugh, and she wanted to kill him.

  They came out of the vicious cloud. Carla didn’t know how many times she’d been stung, but her eyes were still okay. “You all right?” she called. “Joe? Trish?”

  “I got stung in the face,” Joe said, “but I’m okay. So is Trish.”

  “Hush crying!” she told the little girl. Carla’s right eyelid had been hit, and the eye was starting to swell shut. More yellowjackets kept humming around her head, pulling at her hair like little fingers.

  “Some of ’em don’t like to listen,” Toby said. “They do as they please.”

  “Keep walking. Faster, damn you!”

  Someone screamed. Carla looked over her shoulder, saw Miss Nancy running in the opposite direction with a swarm of several hundred yellowjackets enveloping her. The younger woman flailed madly at them, dancing and jerking. She took three more steps and went down, and Carla quickly looked away because she’d seen that the yellowjackets completely covered Miss Nancy’s face and head. The screams were muffled. In another moment they ceased.

  A figure stumbled toward Carla, clutching at her arm. “Help me…help me,” Emma moaned. The sockets of her eyes were crawling with yellowjackets. She started to fall, and Carla had no choice but to pull away from her. Emma lay twitching on the ground, feebly crying for help.

  “You’ve gone and done it now, woman!” Winslow was standing untouched in the doorway as the thousands of yellowjackets flew in a storm around him. “Damn, you’ve done it!”

  But Carla and the kids were out of the worst of it. Still, whining currents of yellowjackets followed them. Joe dared to look up, and he could no longer see the sun directly overhead.

  They reached the gas station, and Carla said, “Oh, my God!”

  The van was a solid mass of yellowjackets, and the gas station’s sagging old roof was alive with them.

  The pickup truck was still there. Over the whining and humming, Carla heard the sound of the baseball game on TV. “Help us!” she cried. “Please! We need help!”

  Toby laughed again.

  “Call him! Tell him to come out here! Do it now!”

  “Mase is watchin’ the baseball game, lady. He won’t help you.”

  She shoved him toward the screen door. A few yellowjackets were clinging to the screen, but they took off as Toby approached. “Hey, Mase! Lady wants to see you, Mase!”

  “Mom,” Joe said, his lips swollen and turning blue. “Mom…”

  She could see a figure in there, sitting in front of the glowing TV screen. The man wore a cap. “Please help us!” she shouted again.

  “Mom…listen…”

  “HELP US!” she screamed, and she kicked the screen door in. It fell from its hinges to the dusty floor.

  “Mom…when I was in the bathroom…and he talked to somebody in here… I didn’t hear anybody answer him.”

  And then Carla understood why.

  A corpse sat before the TV. The man was long dead—many months, at least—and he was nothing but a red clay husk with a grinning, eyeless face.

  “GET ’em, MASE!” the boy wailed, and he tore away from Carla’s grip. She struck with the blade, caught him across the throat, but not enough to stop him. He shrieked and jumped like a top gone crazy.

  Yellowjackets began streaming from the corpse’s eye sockets, the cavity where the nose had been, and the straining, terrible mouth. Carla realized with soul-numbing horror that the yellowjackets had burrowed a nest inside the dead man, and now they were pouring out of him by the thousands. They swarmed toward Carla and her children with relentless fury.

  She whirled around, picked up Trish under one arm, and shouted, “Come on!” to Joe. She raced toward the van, where thousands more yellowjackets were stirring, starting to fly up and merge into a yellow-and-black-striped wall.

  Carla had no choice but to thrust her hand into the midst of them, digging for the door handle.

  They covered her hand in an instant, plunged their stingers deep, as if directed by a single malevolent intelligence. Howling with pain, Carla searched frantically for the handle. The sea of yellowjackets flowed up her forearm, up over her elbow, and toward her shoulder, stinging all the way.

  Her fingers closed around the handle. She got the door open as yellowjackets attacked her neck, cheeks, and forehead. Both Trish and Joe were sobbing with pain, but all she could do was to throw them bodily into the van. She grabbed up handfuls of yellowjackets and crushed them between her fingers, then struggled in and slammed the door.

  Still, there were dozens of them inside. Enraged, Joe started swatting them with his comic book, took off one sneaker and used that as a weapon too. His face was covered with stings, both eyes badly swollen.

  Carla started the engine. Used the windshield wipers to brush a crawling mat of the insects aside. And through the windshield she saw the boy, his arms uplifted, his flame-colored hair now turned yellow and black with the yellowjackets that clung to his skull, his shirt covered with them, and blood leaking from the gash on the side of his neck.

  Carla heard herself roar like a beast. She sank her foot to the floorboard.

  The Voyager leapt forward, through the storm of yellowjackets.

  Toby saw, and tried to jump aside. But his twisted, hideous face told Carla that he knew he was a step too late.

  The van hit him, knocking him flat. Carla twisted the wheel violently to the right and felt a tire wobble as it crunched over Toby’s body. Then she was away from the pumps and speeding through Capshaw with Joe hammering at yellowjackets inside the van.

  “We made it!” she shouted, though the voice from her mangled lips did not sound human anymore. “We made it!”

  The van streaked on, throwing up plumes of dust behind its tires. The treads of the right-front tire were matted with scarlet.

  The odometer rolled off the miles, and through the slit of her left eye Carla kept watching the gas gauge’s needle as it vibrated over the E. But she did not let up on the accelerator, taking the van around the sudden curves so fast it threatened to fly off the road into the woods. Joe killed the last of the yellowjackets, and then he sat numbly in the back, holding Trish close.

  Finally, pavement returned to the road and they came out of the Georgia pines at a three-way intersection. A sign said HALLIDAY…9. Carla sobbed with relief and shot the van through the intersection at seventy miles an hour.


  One mile passed. A second, a third, and a fourth. The Voyager started up a hill—and Carla felt the engine kick.

  “Oh… God,” she whispered. Her hands, clamped to the steering wheel, were inflamed and horribly swollen. “No…no…”

  The engine stuttered, and the van’s forward progress began to slow.

  “No!” she screamed, throwing herself against the wheel in an effort to keep the van going. But the speedometer’s needle was falling fast, and then the stuttering engine went silent.

  The van had enough steam left to make the top of the hill, and it rolled to a halt about fifteen feet from the declining side. “Wait here!” Carla said. “Don’t move!” She got out, staggered on swollen legs to the rear of the van, and put her weight against it, trying to shove it over the hill. The van resisted her. “Please…please,” she whispered, and kept pushing.

  Slowly, inch by inch, the Voyager started rolling forward.

  She heard a distant droning noise, and she dared to look back.

  About four or five miles away, the sky had turned dark. What resembled a massive yellow-and-black-streaked thundercloud was rolling over the woods, bending the pine trees before it.

  Sobbing, Carla looked down the long hill that descended in front of the van. At its bottom was a wide S-curve, and off in the green forest were the roofs of houses and buildings.

  The droning noise was approaching, and twilight was falling fast.

  She heard the muscles of her shoulder crack as she strained against the van. A shadow fell upon her.

  The van rolled closer to the decline; then it started rolling on its own, and Carla hobbled after it, grabbed the open door, and swung herself up into the seat just as it picked up real speed. She gripped the wheel, and she told her children to hang on.

  What sounded like hail started pelting the roof.

  The van hurtled down the hill as the sun went dark in the middle of yellowjacket summer.

  Makeup

  STEALING THE THING WAS so easy. Calvin Doss had visited the Hollywood Museum of Memories on Beverly Boulevard at three A.M., admitting himself through a side door with a hooked sliver of metal he took from the black leather pouch he kept under his jacket, close to the heart.

  He’d roamed the long halls—past the chariots used in Ben-Hur, past the tent set from The Sheik, past the Frankenstein lab mock-up—but he knew exactly where he was going. He’d come there the day before, with the paying tourists. And so in ten minutes after he’d slipped into the place he was standing in the Memorabilia Room, foil stars glittering from the wallpaper wherever the beam of his pencil flashlight touched. Before him were locked glass display cases: one of them was full of wigs on faceless mannequin heads; the next held bottles of perfume used as props in a dozen movies by Lana Turner, Loretta Young, Hedy Lamarr, in the next case there were shelves of paste jewelry, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds blazing like Rodeo Drive merchandise.

  And then there was the display case Calvin sought, its shelves holding wooden boxes in a variety of sizes and colors. He moved the flashlight’s beam to a lower shelf, and there was the large black box he’d come to take. The lid was open, and within it Calvin could see the trays of tubes, little numbered jars, and what looked like crayons wrapped up in waxed paper. Beside the box there was a small white card with a couple of lines of type: Makeup case once belonging to Jean Harlow. Purchased from the Harlow estate.

  All right! Calvin thought. That’s the ticket. He zipped open his metal pouch, stepped around behind the display case to the lock, and worked for a few minutes to find the proper lock-picker from his ample supply.

  Easy.

  And now it was almost dawn, and Calvin Doss sat in his small kitchenette apartment off Sunset Boulevard, smoking a joint to relax with and staring at the black box that sat before him on a card table. There was nothing to it, really, Calvin thought. Just a bunch of jars and tubes and crayons, and most of those seemed to be so dry they were crumbling to pieces. Even the box itself wasn’t attractive. Junk, as far as Calvin was concerned. How Mr. Marco thought he could push the thing to some LA. collector was beyond him; now, those fake jewels and wigs he could understand, but this…? No way!

  The box was chipped and scarred, showing the bare wood beneath the black lacquer at three of the corners. But the lock was unusual: it was a silver claw, a human hand with long sharp fingernails. It was tarnished with age but seemed to work okay. Mr. Marco would appreciate that, Calvin thought. The makeups themselves looked all dried out, but when Calvin unscrewed some of the numbered jars he caught faint whiffs of strange odors: from one a cold, clammy smell, like graveyard dirt; from another the smell of candle wax and metal; from a third an odor like a swamp teeming with reptilian life. None of the makeups carried brand names or any evidence where they’d been bought or manufactured. Some of the crayons crumbled into pieces when he picked them out of their tray, and he flushed the bits down the toilet so Mr. Marco wouldn’t find out he’d been tinkering with them.

  Gradually the joint overpowered him. He closed the case’s lid, snapped down the silver claw, and went to sleep on his sofabed thinking of Deenie.

  He awakened with a start. The harsh afternoon sun was streaming through the dusty blinds. He fumbled for his wristwatch. Oh, God! he thought. Two-forty! He’d been told to call Mr. Marco at nine if the job went okay; panic flared within him as he went out to the pay phone at the end of the hall.

  Mr. Marco’s secretary answered at the antique shop on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. “Who may I say is calling, please?”

  “Tell him Cal. Cal Smith.”

  “Just a moment, please.”

  Another phone was picked up. “Marco here.”

  “It’s me, Mr. Marco. Cal Doss. I’ve got the makeup case, and the whole job went like a dream…”

  “A dream?” the voice asked softly. There was a quiet murmur of laughter, like water running over dangerous rocks. “Is that what you’d call it, Calvin? If that’s the case, your sleep must be terribly uneasy. Have you seen this morning’s Times?”

  “No, sir.” Calvin’s heart was beating faster. Something had gone wrong; something had been screwed up royally. The noise of his heartbeat seemed to fill the telephone receiver.

  “I’m surprised the police haven’t visited you already, Calvin. It seems you touched off a concealed alarm when you broke into the display case. Ah. Here’s the story, page seven, section two.” There was the noise of paper unfolding. “A silent alarm, of course. The police think they arrived at the scene just as you were leaving; one of the officers even thinks he saw your car. A gray Volkswagen with a dented left-rear fender? Does that ring a bell, Calvin?”

  “My… Volkswagen’s light green,” Cal said, his throat tightening. “I…got the banged fender in the Club Zoom’s parking lot…”

  “Indeed? I suggest you begin packing, my boy. Mexico might be nice at this time of year. If you’ll excuse me now, I have other business to attend to. Have a nice trip…”

  “Wait! Mr. Marco! Please!”

  “Yes?” The voice was as cold and hard as a glacier now.

  “So I screwed up the job. So what? Anybody can have a bad night, Mr. Marco. I’ve got the makeup case! I can bring it over to you, you can give me the three G’s, and then I can pick up my girl and head down to Mexico for…What is it?”

  Mr. Marco had started chuckling again, that cold mirthless laughter that always sent a chill skittering up Calvin’s spine. Calvin could envision him in his black leather chair, the armrests carved into faces of growling lions. His broad, moonlike face would be almost expressionless: the eyes dull and deadly, as black as the business end of a double-barreled shotgun, the mouth slightly crooked to one side, parted lips as red as slices of raw liver. “I’m afraid you don’t understand, Calvin,” he finally said. “I owe you nothing. It seems that you stole the wrong makeup case…”

  “What?” Calvin said hoarsely.

  “It’s all in the Times, dear boy. Oh, don’t blame yourself. I don’t
. It was a mistake made by some hopeless idiot at the museum. Jean Harlow’s makeup case was switched with one from the Chamber of Horrors. Her case is ebony with diamonds stitched into a red silk lining, supposedly to signify her love affairs. The one you took belonged to a horror-film actor named Orion Kronsteen, who was quite famous in the late thirties and forties for his monster makeups. He was murdered…oh, ten or eleven years ago, in a Hungarian castle he had rebuilt in the Hollywood hills. Poor devil: I recall his headless body was found dangling from a chandelier. So. Mistakes will happen, won’t they? Now, if you’ll forgive me…”

  “Please!” Cal said, desperation almost choking him. “Maybe…maybe you can sell this horror guy’s makeup case?”

  “A possibility. Some of his better films—Dracula Rises, Revenge of the Wolf, London Screams—are still dredged up for late-night television. But it would take time to find a collector, Calvin, and that makeup case is very hot indeed. You’re hot, Calvin, and I suspect you will be cooling off shortly up at the Chino prison.”

  “I… I need that three thousand dollars, Mr. Marco! I’ve got plans!”

  “Do you? As I say, I owe you nothing. But take a word of warning, Calvin: go far away, and keep your lips sealed about my…uh…activities. I’m sure you’re familiar with Mr. Crawley’s methods?”

  “Yeah,” Calvin said. “Yes, sir.” His heart and head were pounding in unison. Mr. Crawley was Marco’s “enforcer,” a six-foot-five skeleton of a man whose eyes blazed with bloodlust whenever he saw Calvin. “But…what am I going to do?”

  “I’m afraid you’re a little man, dear boy, and what little men do is not, my concern. I’ll tell you instead what you aren’t going to do. You aren’t going to call this office again. You aren’t going to come here again. You aren’t ever going to mention my name as long as you live…which, if it were up to Mr. Crawley, who is standing just outside my door at this moment, would be less than the time it takes for you to hang up the phone. Which is precisely what I am about to do.” There was a last chuckle of cold laughter and the phone went dead.