After the Fade

by Ronald Malfi

  Scott cradled Wendy’s sheeted head while I grabbed her by the ankles and lifted. She felt horribly light…and I couldn’t stop thinking about that hole in the back of her head, and how much shit had been sucked out of her by that thing…

  We carried her toward the back of the bar, leaving splotches of blood on the scuffed hardwood floor in our wake.

  “Right along here,” Scott said, crab-walking toward a partially open door that led to his office. I remembered the cramped little room from when I used to play piano here. Even though I was only officially paid in tips and free booze, I had been back in Scott’s office on a few occasions while we shared a few ounces of his marijuana while he counted out the night’s receipts.

  One of Wendy’s hands slipped out from beneath the tablecloth and thumped coldly against the floor. The sound caused me to wince. I’d never felt colder in my life.

  “I think I’m gonna be sick,” I uttered through a constricted throat.

  “No, you won’t,” Scott said. He eased the office door open the rest of the way with the toe of his shoe. The office lights were off; it was pitch-dark as we fed Wendy Pratchett’s corpse through the doorway and into the cramped, tomblike room. I could easily imagine all semblances of beast and critter and creep hiding in that darkness, waiting to spring out at us and drill holes in our heads or drive hooked stingers deep beneath our flesh. What had Victor called them? Thingies. It wasn’t until we set Wendy Pratchett’s body down and hurried back out of the room that I realized I’d been squeezing my eyelids shut.

  “Okay,” Scott said in a huff, shutting the office door. We were both breathing heavily. “Now, if we can just—”

  Someone shouted from the front of the bar. The hairs on the back of my neck suddenly felt like bamboo shoots. Scott’s eyes widened until I feared they might drop right out of his skull and land at his feet. Then we both turned and hurried back toward the front of the bar.

  A semicircle was formed around the brick hearth, everyone staring at it. Before I could even realize what was going on, I heard a strange sound—a sound that instantly brought to my mind the summers spent as a child along the Chesapeake Bay, crabbing and fishing with my friends. The sound I heard now was awfully similar to the sound of a metal pail of bait knocking against the side of an aluminum johnboat.

  I jerked my eyes toward the hearth. It was comprised of ancient red brick and crumbling gray mortar, three-quarters framed with a mantel of weathered brown teak. A cast iron wood-burning stove had been inserted into the hearth. It had been there for as long as I could remember: this smoky black beast with twin iron handles and decorative silver epaulettes along its top and on the two iron doors. One of the doors stood open now, the darkness of its maw as insidious and foreboding as the throat of some wild animal. As I stared into that darkened little rectangle, bits of soot and ash filtered down and out onto the barroom floor. The noise that sounded so much like a pail of summertime bait clanging against the side of a johnboat was in reality the sound of something moving swiftly down the length of the stovepipe.

  “Holy crap,” someone muttered. I thought it was Derrick. “There’s—”

  I launched forward to slam the door shut, but I was too late: something darted out of the opening and zipped across the barroom in a blur. The sound of it as it soared past my head—just mere inches past my head—was like one of those miniature remote controlled helicopters. Unleashing a small squeal, I threw myself against the nearest wall. The back of my head struck brick and fireworks exploded before my eyes. In the sudden spark of commotion, I was only vaguely aware of someone—Scott, I think—rushing forward and slamming closed the stove’s door; the echo it made was like the report of a handgun in the center of my head.

  My vision cleared to a roomful of scattering people. I saw Lauren crouch down against the bar while Charles Bowman shoved his wife up against a wall. For a moment, I couldn’t see the thing at all, and was only aware of its approximate location by watching where everyone else was looking. Then I saw it: the thing had lighted upon an ornamented wall sconce at one side of the bandstand. It rapidly fluttered its wings. Again, I heard the buzz-saw sound that traveled straight through the marrow of my bones. The sound itself was hideously alive.

  As I stared at it, the damn thing piloted itself back into the air. Temporarily, it hung in midair, as if suspended by invisible cables, before it shuddered back toward the bar. Everyone cried out at once. Like a sack of potatoes, I dropped straight to the ground.

  The thing moved with the wicked navigation of a bat. It landed solidly on the bar top, not too far from where its brethren had been squashed by a serving tray, and just a few feet away from where Lauren crouched. Lauren sobbed and dragged a barstool in front of her face. On the bar, the thing’s carapace straightened—it looked to be about five or six inches long—and its furry, bluish antennae probed the air. That gruesome appendage elongated from its head, and even from where I sat across the room, I swore I could see the barbs running along its length and the spearhead at its tip. It reminded me of the wrought iron fence surrounding the grounds of St. Mary’s Parish on Duke of Gloucester Street.

  Somehow I managed to find my voice. “Lauren! Get over here!”

  Someone else yelled at me to be quiet.

  Up on the bar, that repugnant thing crept closer toward Lauren.

  “Come here!” I shouted again. This time, Lauren’s eyes caught mine through the bars of the stool’s legs. I waved her over frantically. Tears in her eyes, she shook her head with such ferocity I feared she’d knock herself unconscious.

  “Be quiet,” Scott said to me. He was splayed out on the floor beside the fireplace, very close to me.

  The thing on the bar raised its two front legs. They pawed mechanically at the air. The silver bulbs of its eyes gleamed beneath the soft lighting above the bar. Then it hopped down onto the lacquered seat of a barstool—just one stool away from the one Lauren was using as a barricade.

  It knows she’s there. Somehow, the goddamn thing knows she’s there.

  Lauren unleashed a blood-curdling scream as the thing began to descend one leg of the barstool and appeared before her field of vision. Her legs bucked out and knocked over the stool she had been hiding behind; it clattered hollowly to the floor. The insect’s wings motored again, flapping so rapidly that they were nothing but a colorless blur, and it lifted off the leg of the chair and hung before Lauren’s face. Its style of flight was less like a bat now and more like a hummingbird. Or perhaps a honeybee.

  It’s got four different wings and it uses each one for a different purpose. For whatever reason, that realization frightened me beyond comprehension.

  The bug’s abdomen curled like a comma, its enormous stinger directed now at Lauren’s face.

  I shoved myself off the wall. Somehow, I managed to snatch up the fallen barstool off the floor and prop it over my head while I ran toward the bar. The incessant zzzzzzz-sound of its wings filled my ears as I appeared above it. Just as it began to arc out of the way, I brought the stool down on it, smashing it to a milky pulp on the floor.

  The silence that followed was almost incriminating. I felt guilty, as if I’d just committed the murder of a human being. Beneath the rim of the stool’s seat, one of the creature’s wings buzzed against the floor. Its legs—all six of them—moved hypnotically through a smear of its own muddy guts. I could actually hear its legs moving—a popping, cracking sound, like arthritic joints.

  Lauren sprung up and cleaved herself to me. I hugged her back, still somewhat dazed from what I had just done. Slowly, heads began to rise up from the floor and look at me. After a moment, Derrick came over and peered down at the squashed thing beneath the stool.

  “It’s still alive,” he said flatly.

  I told him to change that.

  He did—with the heel of his boot. It crunched like broken glass.

  “You okay?” I said into Lauren’s hair.

  “Yes. Thank you.” She pulled away from me, swiping at
her eyes with the heels of her hands.

  “Shit,” Charles said, moving slowly across the barroom toward the fireplace. “It must have come down the goddamned chimney.”

  Scott, who was closest to the wood-burning stove, cocked his head. After a second or two, he said, “Listen. Can you hear it?”

  I could: a not-so-faint thrumming sound coming from within the stove.

  “Wait, wait—they’re right in there?” Tori said, her voice very near hysterical. “Like, in there? In here with us?”

  Scott told her to calm down and she went quiet.

  “That stove is welded iron,” Charles said. He looked disapprovingly at Tori. “Those things can’t get through there.”

  “I don’t like them in here!” she shouted back. “I don’t want them in this bar!”

  “Let’s go sit down,” said the cook in the apron, coming up beside Tori but not touching her. “Come on. Let’s just sit down and relax, okay?”

  She nodded and silently followed the cook over to a pair of barstools. They sat there in silence, their heads pressed together like Siamese twins.

  Silently, Scott and Derrick set to work cleaning the dead thing off the floor. One of them carried a wad of paper towels back to the restroom. A moment later, I heard the toilet flush.

  My heart was still in my throat.

  “I can’t get a soul on my cell phone,” Jake said.

  “The phones are out?” Lauren said. Her voice trembled.

  “No. I mean, I don’t think so. The calls seem to be going through—they’re ringing on the other end, anyway—but no one’s answering.”

  I couldn’t tell if that made things worse or not.

  “You get the internet on that thing?” Victor asked Jake.

  “I do, yeah.”

  “See what you can find. What do the kids say? Surf the Web, Jake-o.”

  Jake began pressing buttons on his phone.

  That was when I remembered the television set. It sat bracketed up behind the bar, usually tuned to either CNN or Sports Center, but was currently turned off at the moment. It wasn’t a newer HD flat screen, but one of those old tubed jobs that look like big computer monitors.

  “How about the TV?” I said to Scott. “Go turn it on.”

  Scott looked back at the TV as if he’d forgotten it was there. Maybe he had. Then he went back behind the bar and dug around beside an aluminum sink filled with sudsy water. He came up with a remote control, which he aimed at the television. A second later, the screen made a soft popping sound and I could hear the electricity humming through the circuit board.

  When the picture materialized, it was nothing but static. Scott flipped through the channels with increasing desperation. If they weren’t static, they were those station identification placards they put up when conducting a test of the broadcast system.

  This is only a test, I thought, the phrase tickertaping through my brain with blind stupidity. This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. If this were a real emergency, there would be giant insects on your windows and a dead cheerleader in your office.

  My whole body trembled with what felt like hysteria. I fought hard to keep from braying laughter at the rest of the patrons.

  We’re not patrons. We’re captives. Prisoners.

  I took out my own cell phone and dialed my apartment. I heard the line ring and ring and ring until—

  Static. The ringing stopped and I thought I heard a voice on the other end of the line.

  “Hello? Beans, you there?”

  More static. Yet through it I could make out the distorted utterances of a human being. I held my breath. Derrick, Jake, and Charles Bowman all looked at me.

  Then I heard Billy Beans, my roommate, say, “Help.”

  And then the phone went dead.

  Had I heard it? Had I really?

  “What?” It was Lauren and she was practically shouting at me. “What did you hear? Did you get someone?”

  “Billy,” I said. My voice was small. “My roommate. I thought…I thought I heard him…”

  “Well?” Charles insisted.

  “The line went dead.”

  “Call him back!” Charles shouted. His wife placed a hand on his shoulder but he shrugged her off without looking at her.

  I redialed the phone number. This time I got nothing but a busy signal. I said as much, hanging up the phone.

  “Shit!” Charles yelled, and kicked a barstool.

  “Hey,” Scott said, setting the TV remote on the bar top. “You mind not breaking my shit, buddy?”

  Charles Bowman laughed. “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re worried about a goddamn barstool?”

  “We’re in a spot, all right,” Scott said, his voice admirably calm, “but that don’t mean you gotta go around making things worse.”

  “How in the world am I making things worse? Not for nothing, but have you taken a look outside lately?” He swept one arm toward the plate glass window. I still counted five bugs but that didn’t mean there weren’t more out there. I thought of Beans back at the apartment, and that weak-sounding little help I thought I’d heard. God, I hoped it was just my imagination. We always kept the windows open, even in the winter, so Beans’s pot smoke wouldn’t choke up the place. Fuck.

  “This is still my place,” Scott said, still calmly, “and if you don’t like it, you can just get the hell out.”

  “Well, isn’t that swell?” Charles boomed. His face was beet red and thick chords stood out in his neck. His wife stood behind him, as still and silent as a totem pole. “Isn’t that just fucking humanitarian of you?”

  “I’m just asking you to not kick another barstool. That’s all.”

  “Yeah?” Charles froze, his eyebrows cocked, his mouth unhinged. I thought I could smell his perspiration, could feel his heartbeat reverberating throughout the floorboards. Then he reared one leg back and sent another barstool flying.

  His wife, Kathy, sobbed.

  “I asked you nicely,” Scott said. “Now I’m telling you. Get out.”

  “Fuck you,” Charles spat.

  Somehow, I saw the shotgun come up from behind the bar a second before it actually did, as if there was some Tom Holland a second or so in the future lending me his eyes to all that was about to go on around me. Scott racked the shotgun and leveled it at Charles.

  A cool wave, nearly tangible in its solidness, seemed to pass through the barroom. Even the thumping behind the twin doors of the wood-burning stove seemed unimportant at that moment. I felt the cool wave strike me and wash over me. I wondered if this was a premonitory sensation, feeling the shotgun’s shockwave before it ever went off: perhaps another gift from my future self to me.

  Charles Bowman froze. Almost comically, his eyes zeroed in on the muzzle of the shotgun to the point where they looked crossed. His legs began to quiver in his pleated slacks. Immediately, I looked toward his crotch, anticipating a dark stain to materialize, but it never did. The whole place stank of testosterone.

  Old Victor Peebles went to the bar, cutting between Scott and Charles. He dragged a stool up under his backside and eased himself down on it with a grunt. Sighing, he removed his ball cap and set it on the bar. The hair beneath was wiry and gray and looked like the cheap carpeting my parents used to have in our basement when I was a kid.

  My parents, I thought distantly.

  “Let’s put the gun away,” Victor said through his toothless mouth. “I say we all take up a stool and have a drink. Not ice water with lemon slices, but a real goddamn drink. Somethin’ that’ll get us to where we all need to go.”

  “And where’s that?” Scott asked quietly.

  “Someplace calmer,” said Victor. “Don’t you agree?”

  The shotgun shook in Scott’s hands. Then he lowered it, a tight expression on his face. Across the bar, Charles Bowman’s legs continued to quake.

  “Say,” Victor said, turning around on his barstool to face me. “What was that scotch you was drinking earlier, Tom?”

>   My mind was blank. I felt my mouth drop open but no words came out.

  “Dewar’s.” It was Tori, seated on her own barstool beside the cook in the filthy apron. She seemed invigorated, sitting up and beaming strangely at the rest of us. I thought she might even smile. “It was Dewar’s.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was.”

  “That sounds good to me,” Victor said. “One Dewar’s on the rocks, please, Scott. In fact, make it a double.”

  “I’ll have a double, too,” I said.

  “Doubles all around,” Derrick said. He and Jake moved toward the bar and collected their own stools.

  I kissed the side of Lauren’s face. “Drink some scotch with me?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever drank scotch in my life.”

  “You gotta start sometime,” I told her.

  Even Kathy Bowman claimed a stool and ordered a scotch. Charles stood behind her, still looking like he was turning the events of what had just transpired over and over in his head, and I prayed silently to myself that he wouldn’t start shit up again. Victor had given both Charles and Scott an out, and I hoped like hell Charles was smart enough to take it.

  Scott poured the drinks then set them up in front of everyone. The Fulcrum had perfect rocks glasses—short, squat, wide at the top and narrower at the stem. Mine was chocked with ice and filled nearly to the top. By the time Scott got to Tori and the cook, the bottle was nearly empty.

  “Charles?” Scott said, holding up a glass of scotch. “Join us?”

  His face stoic, Charles came to the bar and sat beside his wife. Scott placed the rocks glass in front of him and Charles stared down at it as if it had just appeared there out of thin air. When he finally picked it up and took a sip, I relaxed a bit.

  Wincing at the scotch, Lauren set the glass down on the bar and looked at the front window. “There’s more now.”

  I looked, too. There were now eight of the bugs stuck to the glass. The collective sound of their feet on the glass was like someone gently tapping. At least the strumming from inside the wood-burning stove had quieted some.