After the Fade

by Ronald Malfi

  “Could you excuse me for a minute?” I said as I climbed off my stool.

  “Sure,” Lauren said. “You okay?”

  “I want to try calling my parents.”

  “Oh.” She looked sad for me.

  I went to the dark place at the back of the bar, where empty chairs stood around empty tables, and thumbed my parents’ phone number into my cell phone. After I’d moved out of the house, they relocated to Havre de Grace, where their backyard looked out upon a cool, gray river and a small bridge. It was picturesque, just the type of place my folks had always wanted to live. Well into their retirement, I was happy for them when they bought the place. Happier still, they were now a bit too far away for either of them to drop by the apartment unannounced.

  On the other end of the line, the phone rang. And rang and rang and rang. I was just about to kill the call when my mother answered.

  She said, “Tommy?”

  “Mom.” I blinked, amazed that I had gotten her on the line. Was I dreaming it? When I spoke again, it was with more urgency. “Mom!”

  “Tommy, where are you? Are you safe?”

  “I’m safe. I’m home.” It was easier than explaining my current situation, and I didn’t think I’d be able to explain much of anything at the moment, anyway. It was just good to hear her voice.

  “It’s there, too?” she asked. Static rippled over the line, but I had heard her clearly enough.

  “Yeah, Mom. Is Dad okay?”

  “You just st-stay s-s-safe.”

  “Mom,” I said. My throat was impossibly dry. “Make sure they can’t get into the house.”

  “They can’t.”

  “The fireplace.” Was I rambling now? Would she be able to understand me? “You need to block that up, too. Close the flue.”

  “Oh, Tommy…the what?” She was crying.

  “The flue, Mom. It’s…have Dad do it.”

  More crying.

  I swallowed what felt like a jagged chunk of concrete. “Where’s Dad, Mom?”

  “You just…careful…”

  The connection was dying. There was something…fluttering…over the line.

  “Where’s Dad?” I sobbed into the phone.

  “…just you…careful…my…”

  I was losing her.

  “Mom,” I said into the phone. “I love you. Be safe. Be careful.”

  “…you, too, Tommy…”

  And just like that, her voice transitioned into silence. That’s it right there—the fade after the music dies. That mystic nothingness.

  It took the passage of several minutes before I was able to hang up.

  I sensed Lauren behind me before I heard her speak. “You okay?” It was a silly question but I couldn’t harp on it. What else was there for her to say? In a matter of a single day, the world had ceased making sense.

  “Sure,” I said, not facing her. I was staring at the darkened riser where the piano had once been. “I’m fine. Gonna go take a leak. I’ll be right back.”

  In the tiny, piss-smelling bathroom, I urinated then washed my blotchy face at the sink. Havre de Grace was over an hour away. Had things gone bad all over the state? How far-reaching was it?

  Bugs, I thought, the inanity of it threatening to unleash laughter in me once again. Just big fucking bugs. March out there with a can of bug spray and end this insanity.

  Back at the bar, I finished my scotch in silence. Thankfully, Lauren didn’t ask any further questions. I did not feel it necessary to tell the others that I had made contact with my mother. After all, what good would that do? Their families were either okay or they weren’t. I could see no good in letting them know this madness had reached as far as Havre de Grace.

  “What’s that noise?” It was Kathy Bowman, staring up at the ceiling. Unlike the rest of us, who were nearly done with our drinks, she had hardly touched her scotch. She looked around with the bewilderment of a puppy.

  “You mean those fuckers scraping the glass?” Derrick said a few stools down. “They’re probably all over the building.”

  “No,” Kathy said. “It sounds like it’s directly above my head. Like a…a scrabbling noise…”

  I listened but couldn’t hear anything except the bugs against the glass and the ones still moving around inside the wood-burning stove. Yet something Derrick had just said resonated with me. I climbed off my stool and went to the plate glass window.

  “Tommy,” Lauren said, but I ignored her.

  At the window, I paused to glance at the hideous monsters that scaled the other side of the glass, their segmented carapaces thumping wetly, their legs like chopsticks in their woodenness. Colorful antennae lay like pads against the glass, silky and aquamarine in hue. Leaning closer to the glass, I looked out onto the sidewalk and across the street.

  The lampposts still hadn’t come on, and the world beyond the sidewalk was awash in infinite darkness. I waited while my vision grew accustomed to the dark. It was then that I noticed the bugs on the buildings at the opposite side of the street. I sucked in harsh breath and actually felt my heart skip a beat in my rib cage.

  “Jesus,” I muttered.

  “What?” Derrick said. He had come up behind me. So had Jake and Lauren. “What is it?”

  I nodded toward the glass. “Look at them all.”

  There were dozens…dozens upon dozens…perhaps as many as a hundred of the creatures clambering across the facades of the darkened buildings across Main Street. They were stuck to the windows and clinging to the cloth awnings; they were scaling the chimneys and squeezing themselves into the mail slots on some of the doors. The collective din of their wings sounded like a hundred electric fans churning out there in the desolate black.

  “No,” Jake said in a creaky voice that sounded very unlike him. “No, no, no…”

  “Oh fuck,” Derrick groaned.

  Lauren said, “What?”

  “Bodies. At least two of them. Fuck. Look.” He pressed an index finger against the glass.

  He was right. There were two dead bodies lying in the gutter, their limbs as useless as the appendages of a scarecrow. I saw a face staring back at me, the eyes empty black pockets, the mouth agape and frozen in a rigor of horror. Bugs crawled over the corpses.

  “Oh,” said Lauren. Her voice sounded even worse than Derrick’s. “Oh. Oh no. Oh fuck.”

  “Go sit down,” I told her.

  “Fuck,” she repeated but didn’t move.

  “Seriously, Lauren. Go sit down.”

  “I don’t want to sit down.” She was still staring at the bodies in the street and not looking at me. “I don’t want to do anything, Tom.”

  We were all cracking up. Slowly…slowly…

  I saw my car across the street. Giant bugs crawled all over it, moving with the malaise of crabs. I thought I could see some of them inside the car.

  In my head, I thought I heard Billy Beans say, Help.

  I thought I heard my mother say, You, too, Tommy…then fade away.

  “I still hear it,” Kathy said back at the bar. She was still staring up at the acoustical tiles in the ceiling. “It’s like there’s something moving around just on the other side of those ceiling tiles.”

  “That’s impossible,” Scott said.

  “I hear it, too,” Victor said. Now he was looking up, too.

  Scott shook his head. He stared at the ceiling but apparently couldn’t hear anything.

  I grabbed Lauren’s hand and led her back to our barstools. She came willingly enough. Derrick and Jake remained at the window, staring out into that hideous darkness. There wasn’t even a moon.

  “Okay, yeah,” said Tori. She was looking up at the ceiling now, too. “I hear it. It’s…it’s like there’s something up there, all right.”

  I listened…and I thought I could hear it, too, and just as Kathy Bowman had described it: a soft scrabbling sound, vaguely metallic, and very near the surface of the ceiling. There was nothing up over our heads but a tarred concrete roof, two-by-fours,
joists and struts, insulation, acoustical tiling…

  Yet I’d worked one summer doing construction—my father had thought it would be good for me—and I knew there was something else up there, too.

  “Ducts,” I said.

  Victor lowered his head.

  “No,” I corrected, pointing toward the ceiling. “Ductwork. The ventilation system.”

  “Oh,” said Scott. And then the reality of what I’d just said struck him. “Oh fuck.”

  It took me only a couple of seconds to identify one of the vents high up the wall near the ceiling: a flimsy metal grate. There were a number of them along the wall and up in the ceiling, too. You would never notice them if you hadn’t been looking for them, but now it seemed like they were lit up like marquees outside a theater. Everywhere I looked I saw another one.

  “Okay, okay,” Scott said. “Stay calm. It’s cool. We can handle this. Not a big deal.” He disappeared back down behind the bar and, for one split second, I expected him to rise up holding the shotgun again. Instead, he came up holding a spool of silver duct tape. “We just tape up the vents.”

  “Tape?” said Lauren. “You think tape is going to stop them?”

  “We may not even need the tape,” I said. “They may not even be able to get through the vents. It’s just a precaution.”

  “I don’t like it.” She looked down at the bar. “I don’t like any of it.”

  She was no longer talking like herself. But given the situation, I felt that should be expected, or at least accepted. I said nothing to her. Instead, I dragged a stool over to the nearest vent in the wall and climbed up toward it. Scott appeared at my back and handed me the spool of duct tape.

  I tore a length of tape off the roll. Listening, I could hear the faint buzzing of wings traveling down the tin ducts at me. I even thought I could feel the breeze created by their dual sets of wings.

  It’s in my head. Just do it.

  I taped up the vent. Then I went to the next vent and taped that one up, too. I didn’t hit a hitch until midway around the perimeter of the barroom: I was about to place a length of tape over a vent when one of those spindly bonelike legs shot out between the vents and flailed grotesquely in the air. I cried out and would have lost my balance on the stool had Scott and the cook in the apron not been there to prop me back up.

  “I can’t,” I uttered, my throat sticking.

  “Do it,” Scott said.

  I took a deep breath and placed the length of tape over the flailing leg, pinning it down. It thumped and pulsed beneath the tape. It had tremendous strength. Quickly, I taped up the rest of the vents then went into the bathroom where I vomited up a stringy rope of greenish foam.

  Momentarily, I was at a petting zoo in White Marsh with my parents. I was ten years old and bored with the animals…but then an old bluegrass band took the stage. One fellow plugged in a cigar box guitar which he played with a slide and I stood in front of the bandstand, enraptured. The barred strings were so full and dirty and fuzzy I could taste them at the back of my throat like battery acid. Each downbeat on the base drum resonated in my chest; every note plucked on the upright bass was like a small explosion going off at the center of my soul.

  When I reopened my eyes, I was staring at my vomit swirling in the toilet. Shaking, I opened the bathroom door to find Tori, Kathy, and Derrick standing there.

  “You’re holding up the works, Holland,” Derrick moaned from the back of the line.

  Back up front, I found Scott had poured me another scotch. I wondered just how wise it was to get blitzed when our very survival was at stake…but then I thought, Ah, fuck it. If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die drunk.

  Victor had dragged a stool in front of the plate glass window. He sat there now, staring out at the bugs and at the infinite blackness beyond. I came up beside him and resisted the urge to place a hand on the old man’s shoulder.

  “They’re not just down here,” he said. “They’re up there, too. Every once in a while, the clouds part and I can see the moon. But the moon is…it’s pocked with these little black specks…”

  “Bugs,” I said.

  “They ain’t bugs.”

  “No? What are they?”

  “They’re the storm, Tommy. They’re what I’ve been hearing in the storm. Remember when I was telling you? That distant fluttery sound? It’s been them all along? Up in the air, just beyond the coastline. Waiting.”

  Vaguely, I could remember what he was talking about…but I remembered it in that stupid, unreliable way we remember certain parts of dreams.

  “What do we do about them?” I asked. It was a serious question.

  Victor just laughed. “The question is, my good boy, what do they do about us?”

  I didn’t like that response. I told him so.

  “Well,” he said, “I don’t think it matters anymore what any of us think.” He looked at me. His eyes were bleary and red; they looked about ready to leak out of his head. “You ever read the Bible?”

  “No.”

  “Fair enough. But are you familiar with Revelations?”

  “The end of the world?” I said. “Boiling seas and plagues? And…what’s that line from Ghostbusters? ‘Dogs and cats living together,’ that sort of thing?”

  “I’ve never been a religious man,” Victor said, “but I’ve always believed in God. Does that make sense?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I’ve always believed that we’re being judged by a higher being and that we must live like we’re being judged. I’ve always done good in that regard, Tommy. See, some people think it’s naïve or a crutch to believe in a higher being, but I don’t see what’s so bad about it. I don’t need no crutch. Hell, look at me—I ain’t had a crutch in my life. But to think that there’s someone or something out there that’s watching us and judging our actions? Well, hell, I like that. For whatever reason, I like that. It’s not about comfort. It’s about making me feel my actions are worthwhile.”

  That last sentence resonated with me. I looked across the bar to where Lauren sat, playing cards with Jake and Scott. I felt my left eyelid twitch.

  Then there came a deep rumble from somewhere behind me. At first I thought it was internal—that I was hearing my bones shake apart and rattle like dice within the limp wetsuit of my flesh—but when Victor leaned forward on his stool and pressed his face closer to the window, I knew he could hear it, too.

  I turned back around and stared out onto Main Street…and could see a cone of whitish light quickly eating up the darkness in the middle of the street. The roaring sound grew louder until I was able to recognize it without question: a car driving in low gear. But not just driving…

  Speeding.

  “Great mother,” Victor whispered.

  The car came racing up Main Street, its headlights cleaving the darkness, and even at the speed it was going I could see the blur of things—of bugs—rebounding off its windshield and hood and shattering in mucky smears across the headlamps. The car swerved and, just as it passed in front of The Fulcrum, it hopped the curb at the opposite side of the street and slammed into a lamppost.

  There was a sound like nearby thunder, only augmented with the tinkling of broken glass and bits of metal, and the car just stopped. The stop was so sudden it seemed physically impossible, yet there it was. Instantly, one of the headlights winked out. The lamppost vibrated like a tuning fork before tipping over and coming down at a right angle onto the hood of the car. The car itself was small, a compact, and I couldn’t see how many people were inside it. Steam issued out from beneath the crumpled hood.

  A moment later, everyone else was at the window, looking out.

  “It just came out of nowhere,” Victor told the others. He was talking fast and excitedly. “Raced right up the street, jumped the curb, and crashed. Look at that!”

  Everyone was looking. I thought I saw movement inside the car but couldn’t be sure. In the glow of the single remaining headlight, dark things flitted by like dir
t thrown into a fan. It felt like there was grit in my eyes but I realized it was only the darkness, pressing itself hard against the plate glass window. I was having a difficult time breathing.

  “No way,” Jake said, peering out the glass. “That didn’t just happen.”

  Steam still billowed out from beneath the crumpled hood of the car. It looked like a Ford Focus. Dark blue or black. It held up surprisingly well considering the impact, though. The lamppost had landed on the hood but hadn’t smashed it, and those lampposts along Main Street—throughout all downtown Annapolis, in fact—were those heavy, solid-body ones.

  “Someone’s moving around inside,” Lauren said. She spoke very close to my face and I could smell her breath—a mixture of scotch and Dentyne gum. Despite all that was going on around us at that moment, I felt my pants grow tight in the crotch. Human nature at its finest.

  I peered through the dark and thought I could make out movement inside the car as well. It was hard to tell, since there were other things moving across the car now, and the darkness itself seemed to pulse with a sort of living respiration, but I thought Lauren was right.

  “What do we do?” Tori said.

  “What can we do?” Derrick offered.

  “If they’re alive and they’re hurt,” Tori began, but couldn’t finish her thought.

  “I’m sure there are a lot of people alive and hurt,” Charles said. He had come up to join us all at the window, too. “That doesn’t mean we do something stupid.”

  “He’s right,” I said. Lauren looked at me. I looked away. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  The car’s interior light came on as the driver’s door opened about an inch or two.

  “No!” a couple of people shouted simultaneously at my back.

  Close the door. I was trying to send the driver thoughts telepathically. Close the door and stay inside, you idiot.

  But the person was dazed and unaware. The door shoved open even more, spilling dull yellow light onto the cobblestones. There was one person inside that I could see—a woman. One of her hands came up and swiped blindly against the car’s windshield. A bare foot slid out and planted onto the cobblestone street. She pushed herself halfway out the door, enabling me to make out a nest of frizzy dark hair and a face as pale and emotionless as that of a wooden dummy.