Mother's Revenge

by Querus Abuttu

  He slipped back down, dove into the water.

  He walked through the trees and tried to lose himself.

  He watched as the sun fell and the night arrived.

  He watched the sun rise, and the clear sky burn bright.

  1 hour, 1 minute.

  Recovering his composure, he showered, changed, and recorded his own video. When he posted it, he saw that he was the first person in almost a day to add anything.

  He hit the playback.

  “On this day, I have made my decision. As you are no doubt aware, humanity has been ravaged by disease. We do not know where it came from, we do not know why, all we could do in the end was die.

  “I have, in the last few weeks, witnessed our final moments, and have even helped launch our legacy into the heavens in the hopes that, one day, someone will find it and understand who we once were.

  “I survived because I was sealed away. In less than an hour, my isolation will cease, and the place I have called home will open unless I stop it.”

  Standing up, Deuce began to march. The video continued to record.

  “I have made my decision.”

  0 minutes, 0 seconds.

  Spreading his arms wide, Deuce smiled as the door cracked. The air rushed by his face as it escaped into the outside world. The naked sun felt wonderful on his face.

  Taking a steadying breath, he stepped out of the dome.

  Stephen Coghlan writes from Ottawa, the oft-frozen capital of Canada. His novel, GENMOS: The Genetically Modified Species is coming soon from Thurston Howl Publications. Feel free to contact him or visit his website.

  Swarms

  by

  James Dorr

  Swarms were everywhere! The swarms of people in Ankara were constantly jostling and pushing, where Ryan passed through airport customs and metal detectors the old fashioned way—through carefully placed bribes. And on the airplane he sat, sweating under the long black coat that he couldn’t take off, itching but not daring to scratch beneath the sixty-pound weight of the kilo bars sewn into its lining as other passengers pressed around him seeking their seats. He tried to lean back and relax by his window, to think of the chocolate-bar-sized strips of solid gold, neatly arrayed in rows within secret pockets separated by a thin white cotton shirt damp against his skin.

  He tried to think of the desert he’d just left, his only human companions Collins and Lebotovski on the long Land Rover drive out of Iraq. But even deserts had swarms of their own.

  Ryan thought, as he finally drifted to sleep somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea, of the twin-tailed lizard he had seen burrowing into the sand the morning they found what they had come for. He thought of pointing it out to Collins, their leader, but Collins was already gesturing elsewhere, east toward the rising sun.

  “Masks on!” Collins shouted to them and Ryan nodded, pulling his gas mask out of his kit. He saw the black cloud too, lowlying, swirling and drifting toward them. Most likely it would just be the flies again, only the flies came with dawn. Tiny wasps, really, as Collins had told them, an Englishman who boasted of his degree from Cambridge; they lived on figs and dates and on the detritus that desert travelers left behind. Still, everyone knew, despite what the news reporters said, that both sides in Desert Storm had resorted to chemical weapons. So the cloud could be gas, filled with lethal residues left from the American missiles that blasted apart the Republican Guard on its long retreat to Baghdad. Or from the column of burned-out tanks and half-tracks itself that he and the Russian and Collins, who’d been with the British forces, had sneaked across from Kuwait to find. Some little “surprise” the Iraqis had run out of time before they could use. It paid to be cautious.

  It paid to be cautious at night as well, as clouds of gray moths swarmed around the partially shielded fires where they cooked their rations. At least one man with his rifle was always at the ready. Collins had told them that the rumors of treasure he’d heard in Riyadh when the war was finished, of gold and jeweled artifacts stolen from the Al Kuwait museum by Saddam’s elite guard but subsequently lost in the allied ambush, might well have been heard by other ears too. And it wouldn’t pay to be caught in their own ambush after they’d found it, before they could cross the Turkish border where Lebotovski had contacts that paid for such treasures in gold of a more disposable sort.

  However, the black tendrils in the sky proved to be just a new swarm of the tiny wasp-flies that had plagued desert crossers since before the conquest of Persia. Then, as Ryan exchanged his full mask for a gauze scarf that only covered his mouth and nostrils, he spied a second lizard burrowing into the sand, moving in haste to escape the rising morning heat. And then he saw something else.

  A patch of gray shone where the lizard had dug. Not the khaki-tan color of military, but a blistered civilian blue-gray that proved to be that of an armored truck all but buried beneath the shifting dunes. It was exactly like the kind used by banks and museums.

  High above the Atlantic, he awoke again and reflected on the almost surreal journey west to Ankara. The wasps had disappeared, as they always did just before the searing heat of noon, as he had worked alongside the others, sweat drying on his skin almost as soon it appeared, with his shirt tied around his head in a makeshift kaffiyi. Together they loaded the last of what they had dug out from the armored truck and placed them aboard the Rover, carefully hiding them under a tarp.

  It was then that he saw the first foxes. He picked up his rifle, just in case, as one, curious, came near. But then others joined it, which was odd. Desert foxes, unlike jackals or wolves, always traveled alone.

  Ryan shouted at it, not wasting a bullet, and saw the matted fur of its back as it turned and ran with the others, its tail thin and ratlike instead of bushy. And then for some hours on the journey west they had shared the desert trail with mounted Kurdish tribesmen—some of these half bald, half covered with tangled hair. Others had goiters, and still others had patches of skin that looked pocked and gray instead of brown and wind-burned. Their camels, too, had humps oddly swollen, although he, whose forte was navigation and knowledge of geographical features, well knew that the nearest water was days away from where they’d been riding.

  But none of that counted—in any event they had been soused enough by then from celebrating with Collins’s whiskey. None of them paid attention either to the curses Collins joked about some treasures possessing. All they cared about was gold, and gold alone. Lebotovski’s friends had proved reliable, trading what they brought out for the yellow bars, one third of which weighed heavily now on Ryan’s chest and shoulders. Enough for a lifetime.

  He leaned back again, feeling its lumpiness underneath under his back and shoulders, squirming a little to try to relieve the itch that persisted. He reached the call button to bring the flight attendant.

  Why not? he thought, when the woman arrived, dark-eyed and dark-haired, smiling prettily as she asked, first in Turkish and then English, for his order. He returned the smile and pulled down his seat-back table. Why not live it up some? After all, he could well afford it now.

  “Champagne,” he said.

  Ryan made a point of staying moderately drunk the rest of his journey. It helped quell the sweat and the itching, until their final descent into Miami. More swarms when they landed, not so much of tourists—it was, after all, May, the start of the off-season, which suited him fine—but rather of businessmen from South America, wearing their own dark coats and their suits and ties despite the humid heat outside the terminal. And then one more bribe, to get a quick taxi to Southwest Eighth Street and to an apartment over a Cuban shop where he could finally undress and shower.

  Ryan turned on the TV. Dressing more touristy now in a print shirt and white poplin slacks, he poured out a whiskey over cracked ice and made several phone calls. The following evening he exchanged his gold for untraceable money and celebrated across Biscayne Bay with a high-priced hooker.

  For three weeks he lived that way, drinking and whoring not just in hot
el bars but more and more often sampling the cheap trade in Motel Row. Yet the itch, and now with it a sense of growing oppression, persisted. The heat stole sleep from him, even while he lay naked beneath his apartment’s bedroom air conditioner turned up to its highest. And worse were the crowds—he’d never liked crowds, even when he was growing up on the East Side of New York. But now, with the press of the swarm even on the Beach, even in the posh hotel lobbies where the Latino comerciantes held sway in the summer, still wearing their damn suits even outdoors where the daytime temperatures soared through the nineties, he began to feel almost a physical crawling beneath his skin.

  But he needn’t stay there. He bought a new car, a four-wheel-drive Cherokee. He could afford it. And he had a cabin, a fishing shack, really, but one with a dock where he could enjoy the wind from the ocean, unsullied by people, or go and come in a motor skiff he had waiting for him there.

  And so, the second week in June, he loaded his car with all his possessions and took off not north, but south, stopping once for supplies, down to Key Largo and the Causeway. He drove out toward Key West but turned off before it, on Sugarloaf Key, wheeling left onto what was practically nothing more than an overgrown jungle trail. Navigating through palms and pimentas, around coral outcrops and swamp holes, he finally came out onto a sandy crescent that faced the Atlantic.

  He unpacked his gear, checked the boat in its boathouse, and grabbed the extra gas he’d brought for it. He tested the motor and, as the sun retreated west giving way to a blood-colored tropical twilight, he filled the tank of the cabin generator. He left the lights off, though, turning the generator on only for the freezer and refrigerator, and took out a steak he’d brought packed in dry ice and let it thaw while he built a fire on the beach to cook it. He went for a swim just after he’d eaten—to hell with mothers’ advice about waiting an hour after dinner—then checked the icebox to see if the beer was cold enough to drink.

  He slept on the beach that night. The nearest human company he had were in the cars on the Causeway clear on the other side of the island. He dreamed of the moths that flew out from the jungle to swarm in spirals around what remained of his dying campfire.

  Ryan woke with the dawn, its blood and coral pink splashing his face as he got to his feet, went to the ocean, and washed with salt water. He pulled on his jeans and then walked into the jungle. He didn’t know why—he walked and he searched until he discovered a wild banana tree, scraggly and bug-pocked, but he didn’t care. He ripped fruit from its branches, wolfing it down—he who normally didn’t eat breakfast—and then went back in his cabin. A quick scan inside the freezer revealed a can of orange juice concentrate, which he mixed and drank, not even bothering to boil the cistern water that came from the kitchen tap.

  He shook his head then—the itch still persisted, but not the oppression. He felt alive yet sleepy, like a lion that had hunted and eaten its fill. A picture of the desert foxes with their naked tails filled his mind. He thought about them and about hyenas. Creatures that stole kills while lions were sleeping. Stretching, scratching, he put on a loose shirt to guard against sunburn and wandered back out on the beach for a long nap.

  He didn’t fish, though he’d brought along tackle. He didn’t swim either—he’d brought trunks, not that he’d need them alone on his stretch of beach, but after that first morning’s washing he found that the salt irritated his skin.

  Then one day, it must have been almost July, he saw the first tiny wasp. He’d just woken up from one of his naps and he saw it on his arm that lay outstretched in front of him on the sand. He watched as the wasp crawled, neither adding nor taking away from the itch he was used to by then—and then it disappeared. Just like the two-tailed lizard in Iraq. He got up, hungry, but rather than go to the jungle as he usually did to search for fruit, he went into the cabin.

  He turned on a light and inspected his skin, noticing for perhaps the first time the network of dry, gray scales that had formed over parts of his flesh. He prodded them on his arm—felt something moving. But nothing to be seen.

  Examining the scales closer, he discovered, just below the crook of his elbow, a tiny hole.

  Ryan went to Key West twice, in the boat both times, the first time wearing a jacket and suit slacks over his skin as if he, too, were a comerciante. Both times he loaded the skiff with bananas and grapefruit and oranges, mangoes and figs and dates and dried prunes, even though he was paying Key West prices. The second time, wearing his long black coat with its lining pockets, he went to the public library as well and took out books about wasps.

  He knew, somehow, he had been infested. He knew from what Collins had said on their trip across the desert that some wasps were parasites. Ichneumon wasps, for instance, laid their eggs in the entrails of fruit moth larvae, piercing their skin with their ovipositors like other wasps stung prey. But the wasp larvae in turn killed their hosts, while he, if anything, felt more alive than ever before!

  His sense of smell, especially, guided him in the jungle, finding new fruit trees to augment the fruit he’d brought in on his boat. But his hearing also, as well as his vision, seemed keener and more defined, while, despite the gray, lacelike protrusions that now covered most of his body, his sense of touch was augmented equally.

  Sometimes he would wake screaming from his noon naps, having dreamed of Miami and its swarms of people—knowing that he couldn’t ever go back there. He couldn’t even go back to Key West now, even though, as July became August, he knew the town would be nearly deserted except for the Conchs—the ones who lived there year-round. He felt, rather, that there was a perimeter somehow outside of him, around his skin, that couldn’t be violated without causing what nearly amounted to physical pain.

  He dreamed about violence. Like Collins, he had once been a soldier, although in peacetime. But he had trained for war. Now, in his dreams, he practiced killing. He wanted to kill—he didn’t know what might happen in fall when the weather got cooler and he’d feel the Causeway traffic increasing, even though it was miles from his beach house.

  He didn’t want to know.

  Rather, he read his books in the mornings while the cool breeze came in over the ocean onto his cabin porch. He read about hornets and bees and domestic wasps, wasps that made their nests out of paper. And he knew that was what was happening to him as he felt the chewing beneath his skin—not hurting, just tickling—as the tiny wasps, flying in and out openly now, converted subcutaneous fat into paper, building it out, cell by cell, on his body.

  He couldn’t wear clothes now. The skin-architecture, the paper palace that was his skin now, had become too extensive. This wasn’t spherical—or sphero-conical—like the wasps’ nests that hung from northern trees. In his books, he had pictures of those to look at. But, rather, his flesh was pinnacled, arched, with towers and peaked roofs and crenellations, and fantasy-castles, more like the coral reef beyond his island where wind and water had carved and shaped it. And, like the fish of the reef, his skin-castles had guardians as well. Soldiers and workers buzzed about him, flying in mini-swarms out of his body at morning and twilight, red with the blood-rose of dying sunlight, the purple-red-orange explosions of dawn.

  He scarcely could walk now. He shambled to the jungle, to the beach for his naps in the hot sun, long since protected from any sunburn, to the cabin and refrigerator, the latter no longer working, where his associates—he thought of them that way, his friends and companions, more partners than parasites—still allowed him an occasional beer.

  The liquor, he wouldn’t touch. Once, when he’d opened a bottle of cognac, he felt a pain in his cheek—his architecture had grown higher until by now it covered his head too, allowing tunnels and transparent micalike, lenslike structures to breathe and see through. A friend disapproving. Meat, though, rotten now, he might still sample.

  In fact, it was gradual, but something was changing. He started to crave meat, carrion meat, and his flying associates would sometimes lead him along jungle trails to where, days
in the past, they had stung the life from a lizard or a small mammal.

  And always his hatred grew—for his own past. For the swarms of the people he had left behind him.

  Then one night the rains came.

  It must have been August, or nearly September as he made it. Ryan had a sense for the sun’s risings and settings that told him that fall wasn’t far away, something he felt without needing a calendar.

  He went in the cabin and battened the windows, knowing the weather would cool soon, and then it would be tourist season. Soon people would come and fill the Causeway, some even driving off, perhaps, to picnic or to fish on his island. To explore its beaches. Perhaps find his own beach.

  He found a marker, and tore apart cardboard cartons with puffed fist-like hands. He made crudely lettered signs: NO TRESPASSING! DANGER! He even managed to chuckle with what his throat had become now, when he made one that said CAUTION! UNEXPLODED MINE FIELD. Using gore from the remains of animals he had eaten, he painted skulls and crossbones on weathered boards ripped from his cabin, and posted these and the others around the island.

  And yet these would not work. Eventually people, being what people are, would ignore them. Some he might kill—he was daily famished for meat now as well as fruit—but, eventually, tourist deaths would bring police also.

  He searched through the cabin to find his guns, a pistol, a shotgun, which he had brought with him, but found his fingers were too large to fit around their triggers.

  Yet something was happening within his body. As the first storms passed, he felt a new tickling. An anticipation among his hosts—he had begun to think of them as hosts now. Joyous, not fearful.

  And then he realized what it was he must do.

  He used the days of sunshine that followed to inspect his boat, caulking leaks where he found them. He cut a tarp to fit snugly over its open cockpit, and oiled its engine as best he was able, taking it out on short trips from his island from time to time to test its handling in wind and surf.

  And then the second wave of storms came, and he hauled the skiff back into its boathouse—this, he knew, was more than a squall. But also he knew it would hit to the north of him—he had a sense now for wind and weather—its eye perhaps striking land north of Daytona Beach. Possibly even as far north as Georgia.